PotF Anthology

[Lord Thesaurian]

PotF #20

Winning Post - Common Soldier

Was China really that far ahead of everyone else in the past?

Absolutely,in some aspects; I completely agree. But the point made is the Social Development, Ian Morris' social scores ( based on four traits- energy capture, organization/urbanization, war-making and information technology).It's a useful way to compare the east and the west. Before judging, read the fine PDF. It's very detailed, complex, and obviously, with margins of error.See how they are calculated. It is that where I don't think the facts support the claim the East was ahead until the 19th or 18th century. Take a look at Morris 4 social criteria scores: Energy capture: * By the 16th century, European use of watermills was at least as extensive as the East, and their use of windmills more so. The horizontal axis windmills used in the West were more powerful than the vertical axis windmills used in the East, and so could be used for a broader range of industrial applications, and the Europeans were taking advantage of the tides using tidemills since the middle ages, while I am unaware of any * The use of coal in the West was comparable to that in the East by at least the 16th century. While during the Song dynasty, coal usage was greater, being used for iron production, by the Northern Song China had reverted back to using wood, and Britain had active coal industry going back to the middle ages. Organization'Urbanization: * Although a matter of debate, in is questionable whether the East urbanization was significantly higher than in the West. The urbanization ration of China seems to have been around 10% to 12% from the 14th to the 17th century (see table 11 http://www.cgeh.nl/sites/default/fil...nVanZanden.pdf ), not that much different from the range of 9.5% to 12.5% range Bairoch estimated for Europe from the 14th to 17th century. (see table 1 http://www.paolomalanima.it/default_...Y1300-1600.pdf ) Starting in the 18th century, European urbanization became significantly higher. When you compare of the spread of the Black Death in Europe and China in the 14th century, an interesting pattern emerges. The spread of the Black Death seems to follow the route of the Grand Canal, and outside the area of it, while in Europe the Black Death spread pretty much everywhere according to the interactive chart except some isolated regions in the center of Europe. The spread shown by the interactive map seems to indicate that Europe was a more integrated than contemporary China, since the indication is that the Black Death followed trade routes. See the map showing the spread of the Black Death and other plagues. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTn6YIwybwM * European governments like England, where Parliament shared a significant role in governance, I would say as advance or more so than the autocratic form of government based on the complete rule by a semi-divine figure who had, in theory, no checks on their authority that you found in the East. war-making * I think the European war making ability was comparable to the Far East, and the West ability to project naval power over far longer distances was far greater. European rulers ability to borrow money to support their war making abilities were far greater than the east, and starting in the 17th century, European rulers had the ability to borrow long term loans through the use of bonds and other financial mechanisms that the East last. Loans and bonds that didn't have to be paid back for decades were something you didn't find in the East. In war making social development, the East was behind, and far behind by the 18th century. information technology * By the 16th century, not only did the West have printing, but its printing had advanced beyond the East. In addition to the printing press, there were the intaglio printing methods of etching and copper plate engraving, which were better suited to reproduced maps and images than the letter press methods. European book production had overtaken the East by the 16th century So using Ian Morris own 4 social criteria, I don't think you can say the Far East was ahead of the West in Social Development. In fact, in some areas it lagged. Pre modern China never went to a fully monetarized economy. Silver played an important role in the economy, but only has silver bullion, not as minted money. Part of the reason the Chinese went to paper money was to relieve the burden of having to mint vast quantities of copper coins. The Chinese in the Song through to late Qing did not mint precious metal coins, which meant all the purchases had to be done using copper coins. A single silver coin could serve in place of a dozen copper coins, and there were a number of ordinary purchases, such a cow, horse, or even a day's wage, where a silver coin (or gold) would work. China suffered several times from copper shortages for minting coins, which is why tried paper money, which by and large was a failure. In fact, one scholar proposed that it was paper money that led to the Mongol conquest of the Song, by enabling the Song government's bad practice. While even metal coin money can be debased and abused, as the Romans showed, it is even easier to overprint paper money. In conclusion, then, the two most-cited explanations for the fall of the Song, itsmilitary weakness and hyperinflation, can be traced as mere symptoms of an underlyingsubstitution of paper money for tax revenue, a process that allowed the empire tobecome independent of private-sector performance in the short term, thus permitting itto become more parasitic than symbiotic http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/t..._09_stonge.pdf (Another factor to the Chinese earlier use of paper money ultimately failing, is that the letter press printing method used by the Chinese couldn't reproduce the finer detail than intaglio engraved plates could use, which would make them easier to counterfeit. When the Europeans reintroduced paper money, intaglio engraved printing can produced finder details, and even today, the very fine details on paper money is one of the major counterfeit features. The examples of Song and Ming paper money I have seen lack the kind of details you find on modern paper money, which makes modern paper money harder to counterfeit in my opinion). "Notwithstanding", what do you mean? That although the Portuguese were leaders in the Age of Exploration, Portugal was never one of the more advanced parts of European, and in social factors lagged the more advance parts of Europe like the northwest areas. The World Economic System in Asia before European Hegemony The World Economic System in Asia before European Hegemony Do you have access to the full paper? I quote, excerpts, No, I don't have access to the full paper

Runner Up Post - Sar1n

President Trump's funny insults

No I don't, unless it was an exercise in twisting someone else's statement against him born out of a lack of own ideas. It certainly was a lazy one liner. That's exactly what it was. But it is better than offended response, at least in the eyes of the average American. My vote will not go to the one that deems it necessary to insult his opponent to get his point across. How is he going to get across things that actually matter and not play to the stereotypes to mask his inabilities? And you are putting the cart before the horse: Donald's "jokes" (a misnomer if ever saw one) are made because of the latching point that this his voters for some really base reason find appealing. But then they have already surrendered their brain to their supreme leader and only require 'panem et circenses' - and his righteous voice obviously. Never seen a more disgusting and disheartening spectacle then the crowd cheering a American president while he insults and derogates every American tom, dick, harry and senator that doesn't kiss his ring. See, that's the problem, you're fighting on the wrong front. There's a significant polarization in US society. But Trump is not aiming at those. There is a longstanding trend in modern democracy. As politics grow more complex and information sources become more abundant and sometimes contradictory, the politics become too opaque for many people, and they withdraw from active role in democratic process. You can see that in a gradual trend in voter turnout decrease, which is noticeable in many countries, not just US. Those people are disillusioned, generally see politicians as corrupt and detached from their world, and have an anti-authoritative tendencies, in part due to that. They're not interested in politicians debating the big things, because they see that as empty words. Trump managed to appeal to and mobilize small part of those, because he's not a politician, but businessman. Instead of telling people that they should change, let go of their little prejudices (that often trigger SJWs who see it as casual racism), that they should be more ecological while the politicians keep using private planes, he embraces those quirks and flaws of personality, rides the fear of change and appeals to those people by giving a finger to established political figures. It's pure marketing. Instead of telling potential customers that they should change and buy their things (or ideas in this case), he takes the target audience as it is, finds the unexploited niche, and only after he uses it to get them in his grasp he starts twisting them to his purpose.

[Lord Thesaurian]

PotF #21

Winning Post - Dick Cheney

Who was Alcibiades?

“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts” - -William Shakespeare “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” - -Thomas Carlyle "Not the Son of Achilles, but Achilles himself." -Plutarch on Alcibiades. Alcibiades (450–404 BC) He has been called an Alexander in the wrong place at the wrong time [1][2]. To more serious-minded historians, he was a traitor, a demagogue, and a scoundrel. In his own time however, he may have been known as the greatest Athenian of his generation, while also an archnemesis to Athenian religion and democracy. Born with a huge assortment of many positive traits, including personality, charm, good looks, physical prowess, perseverance, and above average intelligence, along with a privileged background that connected him with the likes of Pericles, Socrates, and members of the Athenian elite, there can be no doubt that Alcibiades fits Thomas Carlyle’s depiction of a great man. However, given the many variations of Alcibiades, including representations by Plutarch, Thucydides, and Plato, along with one of the more bizarre roles ever played in the Peloponnesian War, we are still left to wonder, who was Alcibiades? Did he influence events or did events influence him? Was he all that important? And why, this most colorful figure of all of antiquity, did he fail? Alcibiades biography of course, is as dense and as complicated as the Peloponnesian War, and historians like us will never be satisfied with less than complicated answers. Some discussion points: Love of Preeminence or Self-Indulgence? Any serious discussion on Alcibiades must begin with his love of preeminence, his most important trait. However, it’s not clear if Alcibiades was a megalomaniac hellbent on ruling the Athenian Empire or just a typical aristocrat predisposed towards fame and self-indulgence. In his youth of course, he stood apart from others, hogging the limelight at every opportunity. Whether it was hosting extravagant dinner parties, racing chariots at the Olympics, accepting bribes and gifts, outsmarting teachers, wrestling with other boys, or punching politicians on a dare (then marrying that politician’s daughter), and making spectacular donations before the assembly, it’s quite clear Alcibiades had all the fame and confidence he would need to be a leading man in Athens. His tutor, Socrates, even famously asked a young Alcibiades if he wished to conqueror the world, to which he replied yes. While the exact nature of Alcibiades relationship to Socrates is still somewhat debatable (and may have been a bromance), the character contrast -to the modest but virtuous philosopher- is clear; Alcibiades was a man of notable ambition (along with many passions) and may have seen himself as an anointed successor to Pericles. Scoundrel or Loyal Athenian? The most interesting parts of Alcibiades biography are the many roles he played in the Peloponnesian War, where he effectively served on all sides. In fact, we can even say there were four sides to the Peloponnesian War; Athens, Sparta, Persia, and Alcibiades. While his mercenary roles in Athens, Sparta, and the Ionia are all too lengthy to describe here (along with the many accusations of treason), the most notable event in Alcibiades’s life is arguably the Peace of Nicas. Here a debate begins, was Alcibiades a scoundrel or a loyal Athenian? The Peace of Nicas was supposed to mark a 50 year ceasefire between Athens and Sparta, yet Alcibiades (according to Plutarch) seized an opportunity to trick the Spartan delegation into saying things that would offend the Athenian assembly. While the result of Alcibiades treachery was a restoration of hostilities that eventually accumulated into the Battle of Mantinea, it did also push Argos, Mantinea, and the Eleans into Athens’s sphere of influence, a remarkable alliance at the time. Alcibiades, for his part, was also appointed general, and his rival, Nicas, was soundly trashed and humiliated before the assembly. While it is clear that Alcibiades had always planned to benefit politically at Nicas expense, a case can be made that Athens had benefited too. The alliance with Argos was arguably the closest Athens came to directly winning the Peloponnesian War, and it had gained a powerful land army inside the Peloponnese. And if Athens would have won the Battle of Mantinea against Sparta, who knows what would have happened. Alcibiades might have gone down as one of the greatest conquerors of all time. Instead, we’re left to wonder, was Alcibiades really trying to benefit Athens, or was he always planning to benefit himself? Its a question that reoccurs constantly throughout Alcibiades career, along with his many shifting loyalties and power grabs. Risk taker or Opportunist? Another way to begin deciphering Alcibiades’s character is to argue whether he was an opportunist or a risk-taker. The difference is subtle but can be helpful for choosing how we choose to interpret Alcibiades. An obvious risk-taker, like Alexander for instance, engages in reckless behavior in hopes of generating a positive outcome. Complicated maneuvers, set piece battles, and suicidal cavalry charges of course, only serve to generate a chance of going either right or wrong. The exact odds that come with risk taking, very importantly, are also, more or less unknowable; which is why gambling can never be considered completely brilliant. Opportunists on the other hand, is more closely related to genius (and less so to courage) because it is about spotting and seizing advantages that arise through circumstances. Rather than rolling the dice, opportunists find more dice to roll, which deterministically increases the odds of success. An example of opportunism is Leonidas choosing to hold a narrow pass at Thermopylae, which offered a clear advantage when defending against a larger force. When these definitions are applied to Alcibiades, the best case study is the Sicilian Expedition, of which Alcibiades is the principle author. The Sicilian Expedition of course, has a legacy that is comparable to Gallipoli and the Schlieffen Plan; brilliant conceptionally, but flawed in its logistical assumptions. An opportunity for sure at the strategic level, that played to Athens’s naval strength, but a gamble in that it required a huge investment, along with plenty of manpower and an aggressive timetable. Had it succeeded though, Athens would have been the first trans-Mediterranean Empire in history, and probably would have lasted against Macedonia and maybe against Rome. Instead, because of either poor execution, or just ridiculous planning, we’re left to wonder if the whole thing was a blunder. Tyrant or Demagogue? Its interesting that Alcibiades never tried to take the state, especially when he was more than once accused of crimes while heading an army. Despite this fact, we do know that Alcibiades represented a rebellious and imperialist faction that constantly struggled for more power in Athens. Prior to returning Athens, Alcibiades did help orchestrate a coup that put wealthy Athenian oligarchs in power. Given more time, would Alcibiades have made himself first citizen in Athens? Would he have completely done away with the last elements of democracy to the benefit of his supporters? Or, despite his ambition, would he have been okay to share power with the same citizenry who had once accused him of impiety and high crimes against the state. Its not clear what Alcibiades would have done with more power. Competent or Mediocre General? Alcibiades made himself useful for each side he fought for. He had a strategic mind and could conceptualize long-term strategies. On the tactical level, he distinguished himself as a naval commander. He was personally brave in battle, yet never reckless. Given the opportunity, he would use deceit and deception to outsmart his opponents. The naval battle of Cyzicus, along with his activities in the Hellespont, show some evidence of military genius. Though he was clearly an imaginative commander, the question is whether he always had the right ideas. Would the Sicilian Expedition had worked had he personally led it? It’s the ultimate stain on an otherwise decent military record, along with the fact that he never quite achieved unity of command. Significance to History Its hard to say what Alcibiades true legacy is. His skill and acumen in the political area is obviously complicated by a record that was absolutely terrible for Athens. More than once he steered the assembly into war, often for his own personal gain. Having said that, Alcibiades was a survivalist and showed he could reinvent himself and his city after failure, even when limited by a system that did not favor a single leader. Many historians think, in the long run, Alcibiades faults simply outweighed his positives. A point that is backed by his habit for making enemies. Yet, in the end, it was perhaps Alcibiades failure to control events that were too big for any one person to control. A rivalry between Athens and Sparta would have continued with or without Alcibiades. But without Alcibiades, there might not have been a Sicilian Expedition, and Athens might never have lost so much of its navy. For one person, capable of so much, and then so little, perhaps Alcibiades ultimate legacy is to show us how the virtues and vices of great people can and cannot influence history. ------------------------------------------------ Comparison to Alexander [1] Edmund F. Bloedow 'AN ALEXANDER IN THE WRONG PLACE' ALCIBIADES 'THE ABLEST OF ALL THE SONS OF ATHENS'? https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/241...108cbdb9548d42 [2] Adolf Holm. The History of Greece from Its Commencement to the Close of the Independence of the Greek Nation (1893). http://www.historydiscussion.net/his...to-sicily/5756 That Alcibiades was a man more sinned against than sinning goes without saying. His ambition was unbounded no doubt, but in ability and intellect, in generalship and statesmanship he was unrivalled. He anticipated matters which came to be realised later in time. He was an Alexander in the wrong, place as Athens was premature Macedonia. Henderson and other writers of his opinion feel that if Alcibiades had been left in his command the expedition to Sicily, he would have indubitably captured Syracuse. As to the question whether the Sicilian expedition was justified from Athenian interests, it must be said that it was a policy of Alcibiades’ willful ambitions. It had no shadow of moral justification. After all, Alcibiades sought to rule more than Athens. – Adolf Holm (1893)

Runner Up Post - sumskilz

Iraqi protesters storm U.S. embassy in Baghdad

Ep1c_fail’s post quoted for context: If you don't think that groups like Hamas and Hezbollah - which demand the thorough destruction of Israel, believe its very existence is an insult to Islam and reject any compromise to the contrary (a view shared by Iran) - don't count as "Islamist" then there really isn't anything left to discuss. The Israeli side isn't any better in that regard. The main problem is US committing to unconditionally support Israel at the expense of its own population. Israel has used proxies to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program and keep Iranian proxies at a distance from its borders, but it isn’t really Israel that is driving conflict between the two states. Even after the 1979 revolution, Israel tried to maintain its alliance with Iran by supporting Iran in the Iran–Iraq War. The last thing Israel wanted was another enemy in the region. Ultimately though, Israel’s foreign policy is constrained by the need to maintain a good relationship with the US, and Iran saw greater benefit in providing support to Israel’s nearby enemies than to maintaining a relationship with a county allied to the Great Satan. There is very little benefit for Israel to be had in its conflict with Iran compared to a great deal of risk, with the exception that Israel has become closer to some of its other neighbors due to having a common enemy. This latter fact arose long after Iran had initiated conflict with Israel, and was largely mediated by the US. Hezbollah is the enemy with the best chances of overwhelming Israel’s missile defense system precisely because of Iran’s assistance. There is likewise little for Israel to gain in maintaining its conflict with Hezbollah. The Israelis feel trapped in a conflict with Iran and its proxies because they feel they can’t risk preventing a buildup of forces intent on their destruction. Even with current disparity in military strength, Israelis (rightly to some degree) see themselves as vulnerable. They have learned not to assume that threats amount to nothing more than rhetoric, so they maintain an aggressive stance in degrading their enemies’ capabilities. While the pro-Israeli lobby does have a fair amount of influence, it's a myth that US has aligned its foreign policy to Israel's interests. In fact, Israel has largely adapted its foreign policy to maintaining good relations with the US, by building relationships with US regional allies. When there is friction between the US and Israel, it's largely due to Israel seeing a particular threat as of greater importance than the US does, because to Israel it is. Although this is not always the case, for example, the Israeli defense establishment was (behind closed doors) opposed to the US invasion of Iraq.

[Lord Thesaurian]

PotF #22

Winning Post - Lord Oda Nobunaga

How plausible was a Nazi-Commintern Allaicen?

It was actually a lot more plausible than people seem to think. For starters Germany had been drawn closer to the Soviets due to the Versailles Treaty and the Russian Civil War. Both were seen as rogue states by the Western Powers/League of Nations. The key geopolitical issue was the question of Poland, as an example. There was also quite a bit of German-Soviet cooperation after WW1 which lasted even into Hitler's earlier terms of office. A German-Soviet alliance was favored by the Foreign Office and the Wehrmacht. So the Conservative elements in Germany were openly calling for an alliance with Stalin. Anything from exchange of officers, material support, weapons, doctrines, were ongoing even after Hitler took power. It is not really accurate to say that because the Nazis took power using middle class shop owners and upper class magnates that this necessarily determined whether there could be a Soviet-German relationship. After all their opposition to Communism was first and foremost internal and so long as Stalin did not violate that they were not opposed to an alliance of pragmatism. Keep in mind that after the Battle of Warsaw the Soviets were seen as being exceedingly weak and impotent. Regardless of whether the Red Army was a joke, everyone in Europe regarded it as such. For example during the 1930's the OKH claimed that it could fend off a Soviet invasion with only half as many divisions as that which the Soviets would field. As a reference that would be about 30 to 50 German Divisions, which is frankly an absurd claim on their part. But the point is Stalin was not expected to be able to overrun Poland or threaten Europe any time soon. Which made an alliance of convenience between Germany and the Soviet Union quite plausible at that time as well. The other part which no one takes into account in these discussions is the radical element within Nazism. The most notable being Ernst Roehm but which also included Goebbels and the Strasser brothers. These individuals and their vast columns of support had all advocated a formal alliance with the Soviet Union in order to defeat France and Poland. Indeed the idea of Germany being a natural Russian ally goes back to Bismarck (Three Emperors League) and Kaiser Wilhelm II (Russo-Japanese War as an example). This didn't really change at all under the Weimar Republic. But in the case of Roehm, Goebbels and the Strasserites, this was largely due to their radical position that the USSR and Bolshevism were the correct response to Capitalism and undoing the European status quo which had been imposed by France and Britain. They also saw a national revolution (as Stalin had claimed that he was only interested in revolution in Russia) as a good way of purging the Wehrmacht and German society of Liberalism and Monarchism/Conservatism. This may well have led Germany down the path of Civil War, if it were attempted, but either way it ended abruptly when Hitler purged the SA (including many of the Strasserites and many other potential factions within the NSDAP). So what was the key issue? When Hitler took power in 1933 he immediately changed course. He made a non-aggression pact with Poland, which he intended eventually to form an alliance with Poland. This ran contrary to the desires of the Conservatives who controlled the Foreign Office and the Wehrmacht. To be fair much of the populace was also very strongly anti-Polish. Hitler's key position was that the threat posed by Bolshevism was the top priority, and it made more sense to reclaim the Brest-Litovsk boundaries than to pursue a pointless war against France and Britain, which he believed saw the USSR as a primary threat anyway. To this end he signed the British Naval Treaty and concluded pacts with France and Poland, as well as making alliances with Italy and Japan, aimed first and foremost to waging war against the Soviet Union by the year 1938. All three states hoped that this alliance would expand to include Poland, Hungary and Romania. With France and Britain basically giving them free reign, ideologically at least it made sense since the British and French regimes at the time were wary of Communist expansion (although for France it was really more an internal issue about radicals I guess). In addition to this Hitler also opened up to the Western Powers, this was interpreted by the Soviets as his having become a puppet of the West. While not really true that Hitler was controlled, it is a fact that Chamberlain hoped to use Nazi Germany as part of a greater chess piece in his game against the Soviet Union. It was largely due to Conservative/Tory ideological reasons that Britain resisted so long to collaborate with the USSR (as seen in 1938 and 1939). This refusal was in large part what led to the Molotov-Ribbentrop and a huge strategic victory for Stalin (in which he gobbled up the Baltic, Poland, Bessarabia, and pretty much made Hitler his satrap with barely a shot being fired). It is therefore ironic that Hitler removed Neurath in favor of Ribbentrop (and many others, as he removed internal threats, the SA et all, and external threats, Conservatives/Monarchists), in order to steer the Foreign Office away from talks of Soviet alliance and invasion of Poland, only to have Ribbentrop negotiate that very pact. I suppose the alternative was simply to wait for the USSR to collapse. This was something that many Conservatives and Liberals were claiming would happen as they did not believe the Soviet Union to be economically viable. This sentiment was also influenced by the "White Emigrés" which had fled the USSR. Surely if there were so many famines then the Soviet Regime would be overthrown. This went hand in hand with the claims that the Red Army had been completely degraded after 1920, after all their only state opponents in Poland defeated them, and most of their enemies had been mutineers, anarchist farmers and the hollowed out remains of the White Army. It is very much the case that the Soviet Union was seen as being very weak, while various state actors across the world regarded them as a geopolitical threat, but a very impotent one (it was more the threat of Revolution). However the results of the Spanish Civil War did not appear to convince anyone that this was not the case. Hitler and the Nazis were somewhat of a Black Sheep in calling for the USSR to be considered a priority. As other than Germany the USSR had very few serious rivals with the other one being the British Empire, and this ultimately boils down to the Great Game, the Tory/Chamberlain position, and then the Cold War. Still the possibility of a Soviet-German rapprochement during the war is seldom considered, even though it was still possible. It was clear that in 1939 and 1940 Hitler's policy of Western appeasement had collapsed (and that is to say also German attempts to appease the West). Not even the victory in 1940 was enough to bring Britain to the negotiating table, even the defeated France was apprehensive about German alliance (the French didn't even make peace technically). Britain was then cast as the main enemy with the inevitability of American intervention. The British naval blockade strangled continental Europe and made it inevitable for the Germans to lose a war that turned out longer than they bargained for. As an aside this is really why it made no sense for the Germans to wait, since they had been ahead in their rearmament program by 1939 and had a cutting advantage over Poland. Where as Britain and France were still mobilizing even into 1940. Obviously, the Soviet Union had no chance that it wouldcollapse, as we know it lasted until 1991. Although this possibility was still entertained by the German staff, military intelligence did not seem able to discover the real strength of the Red Army and its ability to mobilize huge armies. Hence we have the rotten house of cards quote. But even before Barbarossa and after, the Germans were willing to formalize their alliance with the USSR. The problem in the former case is that Hitler would just be acting as a sort of satrap for Stalin. Stalin's conduct during that time made the Soviets appear untrustworthy, for instance he put the Germans on the spot multiple times and renegotiated the Molotov-Ribbentrop to give the USSR more concessions. Every time the offers became more absurd with Stalin asking for more territory. This together with German dependency on Soviet oil and materials, as well as the threat of being caught on the receiving end of a Soviet invasion, made Barbarossa all the more likely. But in spite of that the Germans and Soviets still negotiated secretly from 1941 until 1943, though neither was willing to concede any territory, a key part of these negotiations involved Stalin joining the Axis and abiding by certain conditions. However this was not to the liking of Germany's other allies who had also signed the anti-Comintern Pact and so for all these reasons the decision made in 1939 was reversed back to Hitler's anti-Soviet policies of the 1930's. Although it seems that as the war went on it was less to do with ideological differences rather than geopolitical differences. One thing that doesn't seem to be explored what so ever, is the evolution of the ideological concerns between Germany and the Soviets. Key factors in understanding this would have to be Hitler and Stalin's respective stances towards the West, as well as the pro-Soviet stances within the Nazi party. For instance what was Stalin's reaction and ideological justification to the Night of the Long Knives and that whole purge? Here we have Hitler purging quasi-Bolshevists who wanted an alliance with the USSR. Seeing this how did Stalin deal with it ideologically and why would he think that the Germans would not invade the USSR? The only other explanation is that Stalin didn't care because he always saw it as sheer pragmatism and probably was planning to go to war against Germany eventually. He certainly was willing to in 1938, in alliance with the Czechs, French and British, and made overtures to Poland, Britain and France in 1939, all of which were rejected.

Runner Up Post - sumskilz

USA Democratic party 2020 candidates and primaries thread

I noticed they sold 18% of the state owned Danish Oil and Natural Gas company to Goldman Sachs.

[Lord Thesaurian]

PotF #23

Winning Post-Love Mountain

Dominic Cummings and the Civil Service: How much Creedence should we give Social Sciences?

I can certainly see why many would find it offensive. There's nothing wrong with such criticism per se, but academic writing should strive to be impersonal and data-driven. Or in cases of political science, philosophy, and literary criticism, concise and logically constructed. Resorting to phrases like "disaster of postmodernism" isn't going to win you any points with either the mainstream academia nor with the conservative leaning academics who have their own reputations to protect. If one wants an example of how to behave and how not to behave in this regard, I would draw attention to the difference between Mankiw and Summers. Krugman is also a good example of how to polarize. All three are, obviously, excellent economists. In regards to the topic of the thread. Ideally, policy should be designed and carried out at the high level, by data-driven people who had a multi-disciplinary education in economics, history, law, and politics, as well as their chosen field of expertise. By its nature, almost all American degrees are fairly well-rounded, softer hard sciences like Biochem, and Math will inevitably have space for electives. Far more than an Engineering or Physics majors. Softer sciences like Economics even more so. I would argue, that American bureaucracy, for the most part, achieves this goal. High level positions either demand years of experience "in the field" or a graduate degree. For the most part, I find most graduate students to be rather thoughtful, malleable, and capable of expressing opinions outside of their political overton window. That said, I also live in Seattle which, surprisingly, has a very good mix of progressives and conservatives. The issue isn't so much at the policy level but mostly in managerial roles. Directors managers, and HR and such are picked generally due to experience and qualification, rather than well-rounded expertise. So if I were to make a suggestion on how to improve government. I'd argue for trimming down on middle management and being more selective with who gets in those positions. Many government departments in my state already do that, but seniority and unions make it difficult to rejuvenate an organization from bottom-up.

Runner Up Post - Genava

Andrew Sabisky Race and Eugenics Controversy

Race is based on phenotype, not directly on the genes. This is an important point I think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenotype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genoty...pe_distinction If the mean black American IQ is (best estimate based on a century’s worth of data) around 85, as compared to a mean white American IQ of 100, then if IQ is normally distributed (which it is), you will see a far greater percentage of blacks than whites in the range of IQs 75 or below, at which point we are close to the typical boundary for mild mental retardation. Typically criminals with IQs below 70 cannot be executed in the USA, I believe. That parsimoniously explains the greater diagnostic rates for blacks when it comes to “Intellectual disability”. It simply a consequence of the normal distribution of cognitive ability, because there are significant differences in the group means. Precisely about this quote, there are several issues. First of all, the mean American IQ for the 1900s was estimated around 70. Were they in average mentally disabled? No. Over the past 100 years, Americans' mean IQ has been on a slow but steady climb. Between 1900 and 2012, it rose nearly 30 points, which means that the average person of 2012 had a higher IQ than 95 percent of the population had in 1900. [...] If you mean, on the other hand, something like: Were people just as adapted to their circumstances in 1900 as they are today? Well, of course they were. They were able to do factory work, to hunt. They could cope with the world as it existed then. They had an average IQ of 70, but they weren't all mentally retarded. So in that respect there's been no gain in intelligence. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/03/smarter Secondly, the time when the mean American IQ crossed 85 was around the 1940s. Were they inferior in some way? No. The Flynn Effect should upend some of the smugness among those who have historically done well in global I.Q. standings. For example, while there is still a race gap, black Americans are catching up — and now do significantly better than white Americans of the "greatest generation" did in the 1940s… https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/o...art-world.html Thirdly, the gap can be explained by other factors than simply genetics: This finding has been reinforced by the changes in average IQ scores observed in some populations. The most rapid has been among Kenyan children – a rise of 26.3 points in the 14 years between 1984 and 1998, according to one study. The reason has nothing to do with genes. Instead, researchers found that, in the course of half a generation, nutrition, health and parental literacy had improved. So, what about the Ashkenazis? Since the 2005 University of Utah paper was published, DNA research by other scientists has shown that Ashkenazi Jews are far less genetically isolated than the paper argued. On the claims that Ashkenazi diseases were caused by rapid natural selection, further research has shown that they were caused by a random mutation. And there is no evidence that those carrying the gene variants for these diseases are any more or less intelligent than the rest of the community. But it was on IQ that the paper’s case really floundered. Tests conducted in the first two decades of the 20th century routinely showed Ashkenazi Jewish Americans scoring below average. For example, the IQ tests conducted on American soldiers during the first world war found Nordics scoring well above Jews. Carl Brigham, the Princeton professor who analysed the exam data, wrote: “Our figures … would rather tend to disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent”. And yet, by the second world war, Jewish IQ scores were above average. A similar pattern could be seen from studies of two generations of Mizrahi Jewish children in Israel: the older generation had a mean IQ of 92.8, the younger of 101.3. And it wasn’t just a Jewish thing. Chinese Americans recorded average IQ scores of 97 in 1948, and 108.6 in 1990. And the gap between African Americans and white Americans narrowed by 5.5 points between 1972 and 2002. No one could reasonably claim that there had been genetic changes in the Jewish, Chinese American or African American populations in a generation or two. After reading the University of Utah paper, Harry Ostrer, who headed New York University’s human genetics programme, took the opposite view to Steven Pinker: “It’s bad science – not because it’s provocative, but because it’s bad genetics and bad epidemiology.” In fact IQ is a great example of a trait that is highly heritable but not genetically determined. Recall that what makes toe number genetically determined is that having five toes is coded in and caused by the genes so as to develop in any normal environment. By contrast, IQ is enormously affected by normal environmental variation, and in ways that are not well understood. As Herrnstein and Murray concede, children from very low socio-economic status backgrounds who are adopted into high socio-economic status backgrounds have IQs dramatically higher than their parents. The point is underscored by what Herrnstein and Murray call the “Flynn Effect”: IQ has been rising about 3 points every 10 years worldwide. Since World War II, IQ in many countries has gone up 15 points, about the same as the gap separating Blacks and Whites in this country. And in some countries, the rise has been even more dramatic. For example, average IQ in Holland rose 21 points between 1952 and 1982.

[Lord Thesaurian]

PotF #24

Winning Post - Abdülmecid I

Afghanistan Peace Talks

So, the Americans and the Taliban have signed a ceasefire agreement in Doha. According to the terms of the deal, the number of American troops stationed in the country will gradually decrease, until the last soldier leaves Afghanistan, perhaps sometime in spring 2021. In exchange, the Taliban promise to severe ties with al-Qaeda (not a particularly important clause, to be honest) and to negotiate with the government in Kabul, which they had so far refused to recognize as legitimate. It is interesting to note that the talks in Qatar included only the Taliban and the United States, as the government of Afghanistan was not invited to participate. In my opinion, although it is true that both sides made concessions, the biggest winner, at least in the long term, are the Taliban. They will be obliged to respect and follow the demands of the agreement (as confirmed by the overall reduction of violence during the latest months), as American units remain present in Afghanistan, but when the current government loses its most crucial military advantage, there would be no incentive not to violate the terms, as the balance of forces will have been dramatically changed, to the detriment of their adversaries. The United States will also probably benefit, as there will be more resources, human and material, to spend in other geopolitical fronts than the quagmire of Afghanistan, but the prospects of their allied regime there are not particularly bright.

Runner Up Post - Cookiegod

Police probe into 'transphobic' tweets of Miller unlawful

Akar the fact that you're trying to argue as if we were anti-gender dysphoria shows that you do not understand our view point. As far as I can see, only one here is arguing against it. Setting aside the main issue of the OP, which I just hope is a no brainer that everyone can agree with, which is that is is absolutely a bad idea and antithetical to a free society if the police shows up at people's workplace and intimidate them over having issued their political opinions, no matter what side you take on that issue - it does not follow from gender dysphoria that sex change operations are a good idea. We could also argue why the hell you'd be a second amendment guy if the whole point of the second amendment is to protect the people against the tyranny of the state (spoiler alert: Even if all the left- and right wing militias in the US banded together, they'd still have zero chance against the US armed forces), but simultaneously want the state to have control over how children are to be raised. That's a cognitive dissonance if I ever saw one. Now on to the article. Unless you believe in some weird form of a soul, EVERY PART of your identity is also reflected in your hardware. Depression, for example, is absolutely also something that can be measured in ones brain. It does not follow from that, that depressed girls and women should be encouraged or even assisted in cutting their wrists, even if that gives them short term relief. The fact that this is physically represented also says absolutely nothing about how it can or should be treated and what it means with regards to its status as a sickness or what not. E.g. getting back to the depression example I listed earlier: It absolutely is a disease, one that manifests itself physically, but you have much better chances at winning over it if the patient thinks of it as a bad habit. Because brains aren't static, but malleable. Your article has absolutely nothing adressing those points and even implies the opposite. But that's even setting aside that it's is clearly and openly arguing in bad faith: I only clicked on those two links because I wanted to see the sample size. I couldn't, because it's not mentioned in the abstract (which is not completely unusual but somewhat weird), and the articles are paywalled. But there's one thing you can see from those article: Yep, they were made by the same people. Why does it matter? Because one scientific study means practically nothing. It needs to be reproduced by different people. The writer of your article clearly knows this and therefore deliberately lies as she writes about two teams. I can almost guarantee you that the sample size will have been very small and would not be surprised at all if the data from the first study was reused. And then again, building on what I stated earlier, but also touching on what sumskilz said earlier: The human mind is NOT independent of of its body. Denial of evolution was mentioned several times in this discussion here, so let's bring that in: If you or anyone else here thinks that the approximate 150 million years our mammal ancestors have been around did pass without specialisation of males and females taking place, then you'd be completely dillusional. As you can read in sumskilz's link, the differences between the male and female brains are significant and go far beyond what minor commonalities anyone with an agenda can nitpick. Your mind is also very much under the control of your hormonal levels, which again are very much gender specific. The whole point of sex changes, both the intake of hormones and especially when operations are concerned, is that the patient is being helped in waging a war against his own body. One it can never win. Hence why they can never stop taking those hormones, and the body will revert as much as possible to its natural state as soon as treatment stops. Depressions are also absolutely genetic, which also has no impact whatsoever on it being classified as an illness. The only thing that matters is what impact this has on your life. Unlike transvestites, who are comfortable in their body, those suffering of gender dysphoria absolutely do have their lives significantly impacted even if all the social stigma is disregarded. There is, by the way, nothing whatsoever to support the popular claim that all the suicides are solely or even mainly the result of bullying. I absolutely agree with you that as far as adult people are concerned, who are well informed and of a clear mind, then they should be free to do what they want with their own money. This is hardly always the case, as this article from yesterday perfectly illustrates: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51676020

Runner Up Post - Kritias

Turkey opens its borders for refugees to go to Europe.

People here focused so much on the tree and lossed sight of the forest. For decades now, political and economic centres were trying to convince us that people coming from a muslim country were dangerous for our prosperity, our culture, our very lives. And for years now those centres held up individual cases for our inspection, trying to convince us that there's a correlation between the actions of an individual to an entire group, an entire community, an entire nation, an entire religion. For decades it spread from the fringes until it became mainstream with the economic crisis in 2008. We've even seen it here on TWC; how many hundreds of threads were opened just for this cause? Well, you can kiss this time good-bye. What Erdogan did, in fact, was that he provided those centres with the example they were desparately looking for. When EU officials stand meters away from the refugees and call Greece the "shield" of Europe, when the government announces that the mass movement of people to Europe is an organized invasion, when the army and the riot police are deployed to fight those "invaders" back, the narrative of the so-called Replacement Theorists has just been leveled up from popular to politically legitimate. A quick look-see using the hastags #GreeceUnderAttack and #IstandwithGreece will inform even the deafest/blindest person about the hatred stired against peoples from muslim countries. There's no need to explain the ramifications of this development. In the near to not-so-near future the lives of millions of muslims living inside Europe and the Americas will be affected by what happens in the next few months. And if the situation goes sour, as I think it will, you can bet the treatment of these people is about to get much, much worse. For those of you doubting the involvement of the Turkish authorities in moving these people to the border under false promises that the borders have been opened, or that Turkish authorities goad and assist the refugees to storm the borders -- a quick look in the international media will convince you otherwise. I am checking DW, Reuters, TRT, Anadolu, Al Jazeera and other major stations around the globe and only a handful of journalists support that the Turkish authorities are not involved in the movement and goading of refugees to attempt to cross the borders (only the Turkish news sites refute it, which is to be expected). Several members have shown such videos circulating the news media; if you don't accept the evidence, that's your problem.- For those of you doubting that Greek forces are putting people's lives in danger in land or at sea by using (excessive) force, I would direct you to review the Greek police against the people's uprising in Syntagma during 2010. If they used excessive force on their fellow citizens, do you really believe that they would not be even more violent when they are being goaded by the government and the EU to let none pass? Or is your memory so impaired that you forgot that just two weeks ago the riot police disembarked in Chios and Lesbos in the dead of night to convince the islanders to accept even more refugees by beating them up? For those of you saying that these people are not Syrian in their majority but Afghani and Iraqi etc let me remind you that both these countries (as many others) are still very volatile regions with a lot of fighting going on. Saying that only Syrians are legitimate refugees when Afghanistan hasn't been at peace for nearly 20 years is dishonest at least. I don't know whether or not this is Erdogan strong-arming the EU into doing what he wants. Most analysts seem to believe so. I cannot decipher what he wants to do. I can only tell you that he's playing right into the game of the extreme right propagandists who, now that they can point to the Greek border, will be able to justify any amount of restriction and any cruelty on muslim people who did nothing wrong themselves. I am also concerned by the growing support of Greece's treatment of refugees by the worst elements of our and EU society. It's not an accident that just last week extreme right groups from Austria and Germany arrived on a Greek island to support the fight against the "invaders", in a perverse Spanish civil war volunteer hype. In sort: good-night, humanity.

Runner Up Post - basics

How true is the Bible?

Akar, Since science attracts you so much why not have a look in youtube and see what John McArthur has to say on the Bible and science. I can't imagine you unable to do anything unless you have a scientific reason for doing so or how you manage an everyday type of conversation with anyone since everything has to be scientifically OK'd in your head. I mean what happens when you see a pretty girl? How do you react if she doesn't see you the same way? Yes, you have disparaged me where you might as well have called me a liar and all because I have experienced something wonderful that you haven't. You say you don't care but that is nonsense as you greatly do care because it's something you despise because you haven't experienced it. I recall quite clearly the case of little Fiona, the daughter of a Christian lady, whose eyes were so crossed that doctors said that there was nothing they could do for her anymore than what they had already tried. Her mother arranged a laying on of hands by members of the RAF fellowship which I attended and to my shame I declined being skeptical. The next morning her father stuck his head round the door of out business asking if we had heard about Fiona. She was outside in her pram and so I told Neil her father to bring her in and explain. He lifted her out of her pram and handed her to me and the first thing i saw was that her eyes were as straight as a die. Neil said that he'd just come up from the doctors where both doctors and nurses had gathered round to see what had happened. They were flabbergasted, unable to take in that a prayer to Jesus that night had corrected what they couldn't. Neil being sent down to the Falklands some time later had a marvelous conversion. Of course you'll say that is not science but I respond by saying the One Who holds science in the palm of His hand sorted it out and that evidence is now a fine young lass.

[Lord Thesaurian]

PotF #25

Winning Post - Cyclops

Do knowledgeable ex-atheists exist?

Optical illusions exist so some caution can be prescribed. However, since it is not an absolute mistrust, you must believe something and not nothing? You must for example, believe that you're not talking to yourself as you type on your keyboard and then press the Post button. Yes even self belief is an act of faith, and the dark hole of solipsist doubt is a repugnant place for me. I do have faith that I know things, even though I don't know how I know them. I agree with CommodusIV's skepticism about knowledge and appearances but it doesn't erode faith necessarily. I use the (admitted flawed) analogy of Cyclops Jnr's experience. He can't remember learning to talk but talk he does. He doesn't understand how me leaving for work leads more or less directly to chocolate cake for him but he's sensing a relationship and accepts that explanation from me. he sometimes ventures little explanations, often repeating some homily of mine before launching into absurd fantasy like "Scientists say dinosaurs lived one hundred million thousand ago, but now there are birds, because the meteor was cold". He's getting there, by which i mean to a place where he can debate the ideas in his sentence with me. Like Jnr I plaster half understood explanations over my ignorance, and the rest I make up. There's instinct and some sort of groupthink thing that happens with humans on top of "reason" as an individual might exercise it. Some people "know" there's a god or God or gods or whatever, with great certainty. Given the uncertainty and faith base of my own reasoning, who am I to deny them theirs? There's also the arena of reason as a (more or less) shared discipline. Taking on faith that we somewhat understand one another because we evolved that way (or God created us that way, or both) then I'm happy to argue the toss of Biblical phraseology, text analysis, history and archaeology. I think the "feeling of rightness" that might lead an atheist to openly mock the sanity of a person of faith is the same "feeling of rightness" that might get a witch tied to a stake so there are real political implications to our epistemological approaches. If you say "the Bible is true" and by that you mean "this version, glossed this way, with this praxis applied" then the implications range from a tolerant benevolent society to a living Hell. In precisely the same way the statement "the Bible is false" does too.

Runner Up Post - Akar

Do knowledgeable ex-atheists exist?

The Bible does provide objective moral standards; the problem is that we interpret those standards both subjectively and imperfectly. Is it subjective and imperfect to consider genocide to be morally wrong? At what point does god stop getting a free pass for doing stuff just because he's more perfect? This is why scripture is always subject to more perfect explanation. Also just happens to make it easier to always change the interpretation to match whatever the argument requires. A genetically distinct human life is created at the point of conception. Yeah, just like when a chicken lays an egg. But you're not a militant vegan or anything. "genetically distinct human life" is a meaningless phrase and benchmark. There is nothing "disingenuous" about equating the destruction of individual humans at the very beginning of their development (a phase common to all human life) with the destruction of individual humans at a later stage of their development. There absolutely is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_t...n_of_pregnancy "There is no sharp limit of development, age, or weight at which a human becomes viable.[15] A 2015 study found that even with active treatment, no infants born at less than 22 weeks survived, at 23 weeks survival without severe impairment is less than 2%, and at 25 weeks, up to 30% might survive without severe impairment.[16][17] According to studies between 2003 and 2005, 20 to 35 percent of babies born at 24 weeks of gestation survived," There's nothing "individually human" about them. They have no personality or emotion, no sentience. They are aware of nothing and are nothing more than a tumor or growth. You're aborting something that is at that point essentially a parasite, with the active infanticide of an entire nation's babies. I don't think it's a stretch at all to call it disingenuous. It's a woman's right to choose what happens to her body. It is not god's right to commit genocide, no matter how badly he wants Canaan for his Jews. And since 2d. and 3d. trimester abortions can often involve the fetus having its limbs ripped off and its skull crushed, I don't see that it is much different from being "dashed against the rocks". I would show you a video, but since even drawn interpretations are deleted for "gore", I can't. Just because abortion can look messy doesn't make it morally or medically wrong. A vast majority of medical procedures look pretty "gorey" to the outside observer. Ever seen someone get a steel rod put into their leg? They literally use a giant hammer. Claiming that abortions are messy is a classic move by those against a women's right to choose, but it's a totally moot and irrelevant point. It's like comparing a surgeon amputating a limb with a murderer cutting your leg off while you're still alive. The action is technically the same, but aside from that the two things are unrelated. If you want to compare videos I think there's a few of the genocide in Rwanda laying around that show genocide and infanticide are a bit more serious than a controversial medical procedure.

Runner Up Post - sumskilz

Coronavirus outbreak - From China to the World.

For context: The idiot ing President of America is killing Americans by mis-prescribing hydroxychloroqine; i may have some differences with americans on this site but not enough to want any of them to die. DO NOT TAKE ANY MEDICATIONS UNLESS PRESCRIBED BY A MEDICAL PRACTITIONER!!! An actual prescription is needed to buy hydroxychloroquine. yes, and your point is? https://twitter.com/Rx_Ed/status/1241391332280672256 You can't legally acquire either drug without a prescription from a medical practitioner. Hydroxychloroquine is already being prescribed for COVID-19 based on preliminary research. The FDA has approved it for compassionate use. This study found hydroxychloroquine to be effective against COVID-19 and even more so in combination with azithromycin. The sample size was small and the control group wasn't randomized. That said, more research is well warranted. I couldn't find out whether or not the FDA has approved the combination for compassionate use, but there certainly are some experts arguing in favor of them doing so. This is what Trump tweeted: HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine. The FDA has moved mountains - Thank You! Hopefully they will BOTH (H works better with A, International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents)..... ....be put in use IMMEDIATELY. PEOPLE ARE DYING, MOVE FAST, and GOD BLESS EVERYONE! His praise is apparently a reference to his earlier tweet about the FDA having approved hydroxychloroquine for compassionate use cases. I suppose it could be misunderstood if someone doesn't know the context, but I suspect most who are just looking for something else to be indignant about are deliberately misunderstanding it. We're meant to believe that Trump's tweet is responsible for two Nigerians in Lagos overdosing on chloroquine. Which is a reasonable assumption knowing that Trump's tweets are widely regarded as a legitimate source of medical advice around the world. You may want to stay put in Israel for the time being, but Israel is roughly 2 weeks behind Italy at this point as is Australia and the US. I'm from Seattle. I wouldn't want to be there right now. I expect it will get a lot worse. Israel banned flights from East Asia in mid-February, and no one who had been to an infected country within the last 14 days could enter without being quarantined. Soon after, only residents and citizens could enter the country going straight into quarantine. At the beginning of March, all schools and universities were closed. We've been in almost complete lockdown for roughly the last two weeks. Most of the newly identified cases were already in quarantine. The High Court has granted the government permission to use counterterrrosim techniques to track the spread. With the assumption that most people carry their phones with them everywhere, anytime anyone tests positive, everyone whose phone has been in close enough proximity to the infected person's phone is put in quarantine. Even so, it's still not completely contained. I'm in a pretty decent place to wait this thing out. Eleven floors up, and along the Mediterranean, so the air is pretty fresh. It's not even like being stuck indoors, because an entire wall of my living room is sliding glass doors that open to a deck.

[Aexodus]

PotF# 26

Winning Post

Coronavirus outbreak - From China to the World.

The history books will remember it as starting in China, but will mostly focus on how incompetent the West was in containing the disease. If the CCP puts a lid on infections (as their official data suggests), but the West loses control of it and has hundreds of thousands of dead, then every historian will use coronavirus as an example when a democracy was more incompetent than a dictatorship. Competence is relative. By the time the CCP’s coverup had been foiled by the rapid spread of the virus, the disease had already gone global, as the timeline shows. Competence was not going to spare the west from the disease through effective containment at that point. Korea, for example, has been able to substantially limit the surge there, by adopting a strategy similar to what was additionally proven more effective than the CCP’s during the H1N1 outbreak, as I referenced earlier: Rather than seek to contain the spread of the virus, the US government and health authorities focused their energy and resources on strengthening surge capacity to treat the increasing number of cases and diminish the virus spread. According to a report of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), there were four critical pillars to the mitigation effort: vaccines antivirals medical care and non-medical interventions. Particular attention was focused on ‘decisions that could reduce instances of severe disease and death by accelerating the delivery and use of vaccines; developing integrated plans to protect especially vulnerable populations; and ensuring access to intensive care facilities. What can we learn from these two countries’ responses to the H1N1 pandemic? A comparison of the effectiveness of the two strategies clearly points to the inferiority of the containment strategy in handling the H1N1 pandemic. The containment approach is costly, unsustainable, inflexible and impractical. When adopted at the very beginning of the outbreak, it may help slow down the transmission of the virus. But, against the backdrop of globalisation, it is impossible to institute barriers against such spread. Moreover, it may complicate efforts of surge capacity building when a shift to mitigation becomes necessary. Interestingly, China looked to a centuries-old approach to contain the rapid spread of the H1N1 flu pandemic, even though both scientific data and historical evidence suggested the limits of this approach. https://www.cfr.org › contentPDFWeb resultsComparing the H1N1 Crises and Responses in the US and China - Council on Foreign Relations The CCP’s authoritarian coverup and political theater is responsible for this pandemic, regardless of the reaction of the rest of the world being delayed by the CCP coverup, or the reaction time of other governments.

Runner Up Post

Theistic evolution makes no sense

As a mining engineer, allow me to say that your interpretation of those sources is very wrong. - Coal contains some elements that you can find in oil. Not many and not in high percentage. - when George R. Hill talks about rapid heating aiding the creation of high rank coal, he means "just" a few hundred centuries in their 300 million years of history, not minutes. Yes, 5000 years is a short period in 300 million years. If you go above the correct temperature (like being close to a geothermal event), the hydrocarbons and carbon chains start cracking. You need a lab to do what Dr Hill did and it may well not work if you don't do it well. - Using cracking on organic garbage to create oil is not possible in nature. - IF what you say about the article in Organic Geochemistry Vol. 6:463-471, 1984 is correct... these guys are wrong, you can't create coal by burying wood in anaerobic conditions for 36 weeks. Well, not what we call mineral coal, i.e. neither lignite, bitumen coals or anthracite. IF things go well, you will get something like charcoal but not that good. HOWEVER, I found that article and I didn't see them suggesting that you can bury wood and get coal in 36 weeks. I saw nice stuff about the creation and oxidization of coal and how it would take millions of years, so they had to do it in the lab accelerating the process. Here's the article. You can see how they sped the process using the lab. And the reason you need the lab is that if you go above the right mix of temperature & pressure, the fuel is ruined. As such, it would be impossible in nature to do the right combinations for the right time. Simply put, the high temperatures from a volcano etc would have cracked the organic components and ruined the coal. Long story short: Yes, the formation of coal is like cooking a pie. And you can make pies in your furnace but good luck baking pies by burying the dough in random places in nature, hoping for the right conditions. It will take you millions of years to get them. Meanwhile, in the lab you can cook lignite if you follow the recipe. Because science works. And yes, of course oil is being produced by Earth as we speak, with well understood procedures. But that compressed crust of dead bacteria, plankton and organic matter requires millions of years to turn to oil/natural gas. As such you can tell the age of the reservoir. That's how well this is understood. There are "immature" fields that will perhaps (small chance, it's always a small chance) become proper oil in millions of years. As such they are "finite" in the form that we remove billions of barrels of oil per year, while earth needs millions of years to recreate what we burn in a month. Of course, if oil price is above 70-100$ then cracking lignite to create oil becomes a possible, viable alternative. When the oil prices were in the 100-120$, I met a German guy that was working in Nikaia, outside Constantinople, investigating whether the Turkish lignite could be turned to natural gas. We can create liquid hydrocarbons. And not just from coal. That wine your uncle is drinking? With enough money you can turn it to oil. The problem is that it is too expensive (compared to oil prices) to do that, especially with wine.4 The hot wet mud layers that existed after the Flood of Noah would have provided the perfect locations and conditions for rapid coal, oil and gas formation. Nope, because if we take the most probable explanation, that the Flood of Noah was the ice age or something similar, It was too recent for "rapid" coal, oil and gas to form. Not to mention that coal was already done by that time. And I tell you that as a scientist that has studied mineral resources engineering more recently than the 70s and is an academic. You need more than 60,000 years for all those to form, even in optimal conditions. Simply put, "baking that pie" in earth takes much longer. But, let me ask this: The wet mud layers after the Flood, if we take the Old Testament literal... how long do you think they will take to dry? Have you seen the earth after a few months of heavy rain? It dries quite fast. It doesn't take years. Before you say that it was a lot of water, I would remind you that to make oil, you need a waterproof sedimentary cap like limestone else the oil would not form (because the organic components will escape to the surface). You need to trap the organic components under the correct formations, else they will migrate and not transform. Thus, no, the Flood could not have accelerated the formation. The "wet mud layers" would not have done anything for the organic components you mention.

[Lord Thesaurian]

PotF# 27

Winning Post

Sex differences in attaining the rank of professor in Sweden

Good God. It’s depressing that journals are rejecting research just because it doesn’t fit their political worldview. Likewise, the two anonymous scholars and two anonymous reviewers is quite chilling. I imagine Swedish academia is worse for this sort of orthodoxy, but it exists in the wider Western academic field too. I have to say progressive articles make for much for aggrandising reading. I’m a part of the elite white patriarchy? Why that sounds much nicer than what I read in the Newsletter today. Anyway, when societies cancel out the social differences, the innate natural ones are allowed to manifest themselves as people make individual career choices. This is called the gender Equality paradox, but really it’s nothing of the sort. Equal freedom is equality is equality, no matter the outcome of people’s choices. https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/03/14...r-science/amp/ https://www.universityworldnews.com/...61212121515275 The report, Education and Scientific Development in Organisation of Islamic Cooperation Countries 2016, was published by the Turkey-based Statistical, Economic and Social Research and Training Centre for Islamic Countries or SESRIC. It was presented at the8th Islamic Conference of Ministers of Higher Education and Scientific Researchheld under the theme “Higher Education: Quality and suitability” in Mali’s capital Bamako from 14-15 November. Women’s participation The report indicates that women researchers represent around 36.5% of the total number of researchers in six countries located in North Africa including Tunisia (47%), Egypt (42.3%), Sudan (40%), Algeria (34.8%), Morocco (30.2%) and Libya (24.8%). This means that the share of women researchers in the North Africa region is above the world average of 22.5 %, the European average of 33% and the developed country average of 26%. With more than 40% of women researchers, Tunisia, Egypt and Sudan are close to achieving gender parity. With 47% female participation, Tunisia also tops the Arab list. The SESRIC report is in line with UNESCO's Engineering: Issues, challenges and opportunities for development, which shows that the percentage of women engineers in Arab countries such as Tunisia and Egypt ranges from 24% to 50% – substantially higher than the global average, the United States figure of around 15% to 20% and the United Kingdom’s 8%. The impact of increased female participation. He said quick analysis showed that the impacts of the scientific outcomes of North African women were weak. The list of the 100 most powerful Arab women in 2016 boasted just eight scientists at universities including only three from North Africa. And what are the potential reasons for higher female representation? “Overall, these countries may promote collectivism over individualism, gender label STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] fields as ‘masculine’ less-so than other countries, and their developing economies may shape choice.” And for some reason they want to still want to increase the amount of female researchers in MENA countries? “Research suggests that by providing social networks and peer support, we can increase the number of women participating as professionals in the science and medical fields.” This, Dajani said, would create a new generation of women scholars and promote multidisciplinary and multi-cultural research that combines all fields of science.

Runner Up Post

Moral Panic Next Door: The new "Internet radicalization" boogeyman for the simple-minded

I think you're going too far in identifying difference. I'm pretty sure conservative right wing religious crazies are about as sure of their moral correctness as any sociopathic socialist... The thing they all share is the belief that they, and only they, are correct, and they have a complete inability to empathise. The rest is semantics. The alt-right (what we're discussing) is enthnonationalistic and fascistic, not religiously conservative. It tends to view Christianity as a servile "Jewish" religion while cynically treating it as useful vehicle for uniting certain European ethnic groups (since it is a point of cultural contact). The Church's historic practices are used as a justification for homophobia, misogyny and anti-Semitism, but Christ's messages of love, forgiveness and universalism are openly denounced. In terms of their own religious views, followers of the alt-right tend either to be atheists or "Pagans" (they're really just appropriating paganism for nationalist reasons). To this extent the movement mirrors the attitude of the NSDAP.

[Love Mountain]

PotF# 28

Winning Post

Love Mountain - Charges dropped against General Flynn

The Mueller report - salient portions of which I cited - concluded that there was no evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Legally and constitutionally, that is the only relevant finding. Legally, the Mueller Report explicitly did not make a prosecutorial recommendation because it was constitutionally impossible. 'The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) has issued an opinion finding that “the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would impermissibly undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions” in violation of “the constitutional separation of powers.”1 Given the role of the Special Counsel as an attorney in the Department of Justice and the framework of the Special Counsel regulations, see 28 U.S.C. § 515; 28 C.F.R. § 600.7(a), this Office accepted OLC’s legal conclusion for the purpose of exercising prosecutorial jurisdiction." In other words, even if President Trump was guilty of a crime, Mueller is simply unable to make that call. [No one paid attention to it (or frankly cared) for any other reason. Your insistence that the report really proves the opposite of what it claims is mindless gainsaying; it exposes the fact that you still aren't ready to accept that you were sold a conspiracy theory by a liberal establishment clawing in the dark for excuses. I didn't bring up the report, you did. And a report that ends on, "Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him." Nor does it do the President any favors when the man in charge of the report replies Yes as to whether the report establishes sufficient basis for further investigation. I don't need the liberal establishment to tell me anything, the facts are rather self-evident. Multiple members of the Trump Campaign indicted, under investigation, or worse. The President himself not declared innocent by a length investigation into the matter. The WH already had a judgement against it in the subpoena dispute from a federal court. It is highly unlikely that the administration would have been able to "obstruct" a Supreme Court ruling for a year after the initiation of impeachment proceedings. For a comparison, it took the court less than half that time to insist the Nixon comply with House subpoenas in his impeachment hearings. The House Dems chose to prioritize their own timetable over the proper process and they lost. It's time to move on. The Watergate scandal took months to resolve. Suggesting that the same should be done with Trump's White House is a bad joke. The White House ignored virtually all subpoenas, using a variety of legal arguments to stonewall Congress. The fact that Trump is still in office is because impeachment is ultimately a political matter. As I've said before, the Senate protected Trump out of partisanship, not because of a sound legal defense. Transcripts of more than 50 previously classified closed-doors interviews relating to the Russia investigation have been released. To the surprise of no one, non of the interviewees, including former Obama era staff (James Clapper, Susan Rice, Loretta Lynch etc.) were able to produce any evidence of a conspiracy between Trump and/or the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Clapper, a former director of national intelligence and staunch opponent of the president, claimed in 2017 that “I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election whilst Lynch, a former AG, claimed she "could not say" if there was any proof to support the conspiracy allegations. Rice noted that "to the best of my knowledge there wasn't anything smoking...I don't recall intelligence that I would consider evidence to that effect that I saw prior -- of conspiracy prior to my departure". Despite knowing this, figures like Schiff (who was then the Dems' ranking member on the House Intel Committee) spread misinformation about the probe, repeatedly and falsely claiming that there was clear or "significant" evidence of collusion between Russia and Trump, a narrative which was amplified by his allies in the press. Lol, okay. DR. WENSTRUP: Was Pnesident Putin successful in his effont to undermine the credibility of the electoral pnocess, in your opinion? MR. CLAPPER: I believe -- I believe he absolutely was. I believe that they were successful beyond thein expectations in terms of sowing doubt and discord about the veracity or sanctity of our election pnoces. . . . MS. SEWELL: Since the dissemination of the assessment and the inauguration, more information about the Russian meddling has emerged. Most necently, you were quoted ln the medla saylng that you don't believe that the emails associated with the meeting that DonaLd Tnump, ln. had took with the Russian Government lawyers ane the only evidence of collusion between Dona1d Tnump and the Russians. To the contrary, you explained - - and I think this was in Ciphen Bnief . To the contrany, you explained that the Russian offer to provide the Tnump campaign with negative matenials about their competitons centainly comports with traditional Russian tradecraft to give leverage and influence any way that they could. In this classified venue, why do you believe that mone evldence of collusion will emergel MR. CLAPPER: WeII, I don't knowthat it wi1l, but I find it hand to believe that the entire boundary of evidence here is just bound up tn those -- in that emall exchange in early lune of 2Ot6. I just find that hand to believe that that was it. That was a one-time anecdote, and nothing else happened. I find that hand to accept. Yeah. Those transcripts are just completely in favor of Trump.

Lord Oda Nobunaga - French Command in the Franco-Prussian War

It goes back to the French Revolution. Officers were promoted on their merits obtained during field command, but they had no structure for training an officer corps. This was also an observation which Napoléon made (the real one I mean, not the adopted Louis pretender). Prussia on the other hand was using the methods developed from Clausewitz, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst. For this reason although Moltke had to rely on some rather hot headed field commanders, he could more than make up for it with his excellent staff officers and coordination of his armies in the field. The French on the other hand had no such advantages and had to rely on sub-par planners and some very élan minded field commanders. Which no doubt would have performed well in the Napoleonic Wars but lacked the abilities to command entire armies in the field. This was also a problem which Napoléon experienced, although his own contributions mitigated that issue. The French in 1870 had no such leadership that was comparable to Napoléon or Helmuth von Moltke. But that is only one part of the problem, there are so many others that I'm not sure where to begin.

Runner Up Post

Hanny - The Disobedient Roman Soldier

I cited Ardant du Picq, not because I believe his model for Roman tactics is the most accurate (I think that aspect is rather dated and too heavily influenced by his 19th century military experience), but because I think du Picq's insights on the importance and dominating influences of morale and fear are very important. I did not cite du Picq on Roman tactics, I cited du Picq on the impact of fear in battle, because on that topic I think du Picq's writings are very accurate. Talking about incompetence, Picqs view on Roman discipline is exactly the opposite of yours, his is the view that the un brave Roman was compelled to fight from fear of punishment. Then you shoud have used Roman sources not a source from a millennia past the events, only your ignorance of both Roman warfare and Picq, can excuse you, especially since what Picq wrote is "The Roman was not essentially brave. He did not produce any warrior of the type of Alexander.""The discipline of the Greeks was secured by exercises and rewards; the discipline of the Romans was secured also by the fear of death. They put to death with the club; they decimated their cowardly or traitorous units.""In order to conquer enemies that terrified his men, a Roman general heightened their morale, not by enthusiasm but by anger. He made the life of his soldiers miserable by excessive work and privations"" Roman training and Roman discipline produced a fantastic army, discipline cannot be secured or created in a day, it is an institution."""The soldier is unknown often to his closest companions. He loses them in the disorienting smoke and confusion of a battle which he is fighting, so to speak, on his own" Here Picq is using his knowledge of French harsh military views of discipline, conscription of people unknown to each other who then served together, and what it produces in his time, and *thinking* this applied to a different culture in a different time. Btw his thinking is what led to French mass slaughter by charging into high volume rifle fire with bayonet charges, in the Franco Prussian war, roughly equal numbers committed to campaign, and French casualties were 5 times that of Prussia. Picq views were formed in his century, and the mechanics and nature of combat had radically changed, ergo his views were totally different from a Romans views on morale and fear. To a Roman citizen of the Republican period, his service was an not only a duty, it was an act of devotio, he put himself at risk for body politic, wounds received were proof of this for all to see. Livy describes how a first centurion was picked, by giving us his speech as to why he should be preferred. Marcus Servilius"I have a body distinguished by honest scars,every one of which was received on the front of my body."Servilius was presenting a common discourse about warrior values in the ancient world. A soldier should only have wounds on the front of his body, since wounds on the back were a shameful sign that he had run away. Another centurion when arguing for promotion, pointed out his awards for killing 23 enemies in combat and 7 wounds to his front. Caeser lament the loss of a centurion "Q. Lucanius, of the same rank, fighting most valiantly, is slain while he assists his son when surrounded by the enemy", father dies to save son, unlike saving that man next to you who you dont know,,and relates chief centurion of the legion P. Sextius Baculus, a very valiant man, who was so exhausted by many and severe wounds, that he was already unable to support himself. The Roman manipular standard has an open hand on its top, on taking the military oath, the citizen becomes a soldier, he raises his open hand and gives his fides to serve, to a Roman his fides was more than important than his life, to break it was to become less than Roman and to offend the gods. Only those of high dignitas advanced in rank in military service, those who surrendered, performed badly by routing etc, exiled on poor rations to serve in sicily for the duration of the war, freed slaves were preferred over them for military action and service. With his fides intact he could achieve viritus, 'acting like a brave man in military matters'. virtus was to be found in the context of 'outstanding deeds' (egregia facinora), and brave deeds were the accomplishments which brought gloria ('a reputation'). This gloria was attached to two ideas: fama ( fame) ('what people think of you') and dignitas ('one's standing in the community'). The struggle for viritus at Rome was above all a struggle for public office (honos), since it was through high office, to which one was elected by the People, that a man could best show his manliness which led to military achievement, which would lead in turn to a reputation and votes. c25% of all citizens were in service during the Republican period, and c9% lost there lives there. The Treatment of War Wounds in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Treatment-G.../dp/9004114793) Salazar points out that the ancient sources used "wounding as a metaphor for heroism." To be wounded and continue to fight was heroic; to stop fighting after suffering a wound was cowardly. Titus Quinctius, the son of Cincinnatus, continued to fight despite having an "arm cut off." I would also dispute any characterization of the evolution of Roman military methods based upon some idea that they meant to create a "superior military machine" such that "superior methods" could make up for "inferior numbers". So, they must have abandoned the use of a phalanx for the Legion to create an inferior method of fighting then, acording to you. Greeks gave up the pike phalanx it up to imitate the Roman legion, because it was so inferior. Half of Roman field forces were allies in the period, as Roman citizens were to few on their own, and Rome required Allies to serve the Roman Military machine, because the Roman state that had a small citizen body, and they all ended up using Roman equipment and methods, because they were inferior. They gave up having 2/3 of the legion with spears, to 1/3 and finally to no spears because pila were inferior then, they gave up using greek straight swords for gladius during the 2nd PW because it was an inferior weapon. It is known that an army suffers far heavier casualties when it is routing and running away without fighting, than when it is standing and fighting. Known only to the innumerate it appears. I just, pointed out what you know is contradicted by the evidence the opponents of Sparta, with 2 and 3 to 1 odds in their favour, incurred 8% when defeateing Sparta at odds of 3:1, and twice that when defeated by Spaerta when at odds of 2:1, ie they will take 8% anyways, so another 8% from losing, is not how you described it, and is exactly why Sparta with inferior numbers but superior training and discipline was able to defeat superior numbers, when all were using the same weapons. This data set again points out the cost in lives lost in close combat was far higher than that of missile based engagements for a millennia and beyond. They could always put and support sizable armies into the field, and while they may not always have outnumbered the enemy tactically in a given battle, they usually had armies of comparable size to any opponent and they never seemed to have suffered from any anxiety about their manpower. Appointment made by Caeser from Allesia/ Bibracte, who wants a word with you about how to count, 15 mins later, you have an appointment with Marius who wants a word about Aquae Sextiae/Vercellae, 15 mins later Paulinus is coming back from watling street to have a word, oh, he is double/treble booked with Lucullus on his way back from Armenia and Scipio from Magnesia. Meanwhile, the Senate wants to know why they were outnumbered in the 2nd PW till 202, and when can they have a word. Mobolized forces 2nd PW 218 Rome 70k Carthage 140k. 217 Rome 70k Carthage 85k 215/214 Rome 100k Carthage 165k 204 Rome 110k Carthage 128k 202 Rome 150k Carthage 50k Carthage as 150% 120% 165% 115% 50% % of Rome Only if you ignore Roman history and the search for the bloodless battle that Romes generals looked for. Military defeats, casualties of war and the success of Rome https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/concern/dissertations/gm80hv44c

EricD - The Disobedient Roman Soldier

Firstly, providing quotes from authors and citing their works is not plagiarism. Plagiarism would be if I were to claim their works as my own. I do not. I am saying that Sabin et al's works on this subject have influenced my own views. That is not plagiarism. Kindly cease to accuse me of such. Actually: How would you summarize my views on the Roman Army, in your own words? Because the arguments that I am making and the arguments that you keep saying I am making appear to be two different things. Talking about incompetence, Picqs view on Roman discipline is exactly the opposite of yours, his is the view that the un brave Roman was compelled to fight from fear of punishment. Yes, and? Again: I did not cite du Picq for his view on Roman tactics, because I believe they are dated and no longer accurate. I cited du Picq for his views on the effect of fear and the importance of morale on the mechanics of battle, where I think he has important insights. Again: I think Sabin, Zhmodikov, and Quesada-Sanz's papers have the most correct model for Roman tactics and the "face of battle" in Roman times. Du Picq's work Battle Studies is an important work on understanding the impacts of morale and fear in combat, but I don't agree with every aspect of his characterization of Roman or Greek armies. So stop saying that du Picq disagrees with my characterization of the Roman army, I already know that and it's not particularly relevant. So, they must have abandoned the use of a phalanx for the Legion to create an inferior method of fighting then, acording to you. Greeks gave up the pike phalanx it up to imitate the Roman legion, because it was so inferior. Half of Roman field forces were allies in the period, as Roman citizens were to few on their own, and Rome required Allies to serve the Roman Military machine, because the Roman state that had a small citizen body, and they all ended up using Roman equipment and methods, because they were inferior. They gave up having 2/3 of the legion with spears, to 1/3 and finally to no spears because pila were inferior then, they gave up using greek straight swords for gladius during the 2nd PW because it was an inferior weapon. This is a misrepresentation of my views, and I have not said any of these things. The Roman state, and the Roman military method, had many advantages in war or battle. I can list many of them: The training and equipping necessary for a legion is simpler and easier than the very specialised level of drill needed to handle a sarissa in a phalanx, allowing for more manpower to be mobilized more quickly. The widely distributed system of centurions assigned to conveniently sized sub-units provided a generally very reliable level of local leadership at the sharp edge of battle. The pilum is a very effective weapon, and the scutum's size and strength both physically protects the soldier and provides a psychological feeling of safety to support him as he moves into combat. The gladius is an effective sword for both cut and thrust, and the act of charging with swords drawn would terrify many lesser opponents into flight outright. The intervals between the maniples let the Romans vary the frontage of a legion for whatever the circumstances required by varying the size of intervals, but still keep reserve lines disposed in depth. Those reserve line leant a very great degree of resilience to frontal pressure upon the legion, as a repulsed attack or a retreat of a few maniples does not turn into a rout of the whole army. Even in battles with phalanxes like at Cynoscephalae and Pydna, the Romans were able to both match frontage with the phalanx and have reserve lines in depth at the same time. This is a very great advantage, keeping reserves well back from the stress of combat, being able to bring up reinforcements wherever a maniple is hard pressed, and at the same time not sacrificing frontage so that the enemy cannot overlap your line. The Roman battle line could bend without breaking, but also had great resilience because of the depth of the triplex acies. Their light troops and skirmishers had similar aggression to the line infantry, and performed well. Their cavalry particularly is often underestimated but was a very dangerous and important force. The Romans taught their young men to be brave, and glorified in aggression in battle. They had a great degree of grit and elan, which often let them keep up the pressure until an opponent's will was cracked, or let them keep in the fight even when being driven back until the battle could be won elsewhere on the field (Cynoscephalae and Pydna spring to mind). Their centurions were experienced men of proven courage who could inspire the normal soldier to fight more bravely by leading from the forefront of battle. The social glory that accompanied single combat, and the loose array of the maniple which enabled aggressive individuals to move forward, and at the same time the mass of the century or maniple offered group support to those individuals who lead the charge. Their distributed system of leadership and the organization of numerous sub-units let the Roman army be very responsive and exploit opportunities swiftly and ruthlessly as they occurred on the battlefield. This is perhaps best shown by the tribune of Cynoscephalae. For my money the most incredible example of it was Claudius Nero's actions at the Battle of the Metaurus, outflanking the Carthaginians by shifting maniples from one end of the Roman battle line to the other, behind the rest of the embattled army. They were very skilled campaigners, who were diligent about fortifications, watches, and picquets, and this set of skills transfers well over to siege warfare, where they excelled many of their contemporaries. Siege warfare is really the decisive act of ancient warfare, as only by taking the fortified places of an enemy can you truly conquer their lands. In sieges, the Romans did well in the Republic and only became better with more practice later on. So no, the Romans didn't win out of inferiority. That is a ridiculous statement, and a misrepresentation of my arguments. Why did the Romans win their Empire? I would argue that the most salient factors include high strategic reserves of manpower, a culture of constant military expansion leading to a high level of experience of warfare present in the society for the legions to draw upon in recruitment, and a lot of aggression of both individual soldiers and of commanding generals combined with enough self-discipline to keep their aggressive behaviour generally (Although not always) within the parameters of militarily useful actions. I don't believe that they had perfect, unbreakable discipline, or better close order drill, or that they needed superior methods to cover up for less manpower. I believe they had a greater cultural system for bringing out the courage of their men, enough discipline to keep said aggression under control, a better system for mobilizing the manpower of their territories, a simpler, but very resilient array for battle, and superior campaigning and siege skills. They had morale, numbers, organization, and leadership, and these are considerable advantages. There are trade offs in that their armies were at times disobedient in their aggression, but overall they had more advantages than disadvantages. Appointment made by Caeser from Allesia/ Bibracte, who wants a word with you about how to count, 15 mins later, you have an appointment with Marius who wants a word about Aquae Sextiae/Vercellae, 15 mins later Paulinus is coming back from watling street to have a word, oh, he is double/treble booked with Lucullus on his way back from Armenia and Scipio from Magnesia. Why, yes, the Romans could be outnumbered in a given battle. Now the exact numbers claimed in ancient sources are a matter of controversy, because often they strain credibility (Herodotus claiming that Xerxes invaded Greece with a million men, for perhaps the most classic example), so we don't precisely know what was the level of outnumbered an army could be in a single battle. But we have a pretty good idea that, say, the Seleucids outnumbered the Romans at Magnesia. The Romans had the same logistical challenges and limits as anyone else, so yeah they could be outnumbered in a given battle. But just as often, they had armies of comparable size to their enemies. You cite Alesia, Bibracte, Aquae Sextiae, Vercellae, Watling Street, and Magnesia as incidences when the Romans were outnumbered. I could cite Asculum, Bagradas, Adys, Trebia, Dertosa, the Metaurus, Zama, Cynoscephalae, and Pydna as incidences when the Roman army is estimated to have been similarly sized to their opponents. I could also cite Heraclea, Cannae, the Siege of Carthage, or the Battle of Corinth as incidences where the Romans outnumbered their enemies. So whether the Romans outnumbered their enemies or were themselves outnumbered was always a matter of the fortunes of war, the skill of the general, the logistical challenges of the campaign, but the Romans were just as capable of meeting these challenges as anyone else, and had similar resources to their opponents, and so they usually seem to have deployed armies of comparable size to their enemies. Above the tactical level, however, the Romans always had similar or superior strategic resources in manpower to their opponents. A defeat like Cannae could have shattered other polities, much less four crushing defeats in a row like Trebia, Trasimene, Cannae, and Silva Litana. Fear and panic and sorrow certainly affected the Romans after slaughters like these in the Second Punic War, yet they raised new legions and carried on until Carthage was defeated. "For the conquest of Italy, the system perpetuated itself, as the more Rome expanded, the larger its collective army became. Some states even joined the alliance system voluntarily, recognizing its benefits. Newly conquered areas were also made safe by series of colonies that Rome planted throughout Italy, many of which went on to become large cities in their own right and provided Rome with even more troops. The confederacy provided immense resources of manpower which go a long way towards explaining Rome’s military success during the mid-Republic. The system allowed Rome both to conquer large parts of the Mediterranean and to defend Italy from incursions by the Gauls and by Pyrrhus and Hannibal. They could now fight wars on multiple fronts and survive bitter and costly defeats, as the human capital of Italy gave them enough resources virtually to guarantee eventual success" Cambridge History of Greek & Roman Warfare, Volume 1, 2007, Pg 486 "Just as gainful military campaigns account to a degree for the lack of internal stasis in mid-Republican Rome, this type of warfare was also necessary for Rome’s relationship with its Italian allies, as the latter were taxed not in money or kind but in men for the communal army. This alliance system served as indirect financing for the Roman state at war, as the costs of combat for Rome itself were greatly reduced due to the large presence of the allies, who met their own expenses. The system accounts for much of Rome’s success on the battlefield, as the vast reserves of Italian manpower saw the Republic through many long and bitter conflicts. Furthermore, many of the allies did not serve by compulsion, as they saw for themselves the economic benefits brought about by plundering others." Ibid, Pg. 495 "Rome of the mid- Republic went to war nearly every year. The Roman people voted wars in assembly – the comitia centuriata, itself a body with military origins – and no case is known of its refusing a war the Senate wanted. Individuals might have resisted the call to arms with impunity, since the Roman state was quite incapable of compelling the unwilling to serve in the army, but Roman men did not (Polyb. 6.26.4). When there was widespread resistance to the callup in 151 Polybius reports that this was new to Roman experience. And comparison of the size of Roman armies to census numbers reveals that the Romans were able to mobilize a remarkably large proportion of their men for war. From 200 to 168, when the Republic faced nothing we would accept as a threat to its security, nearly one out of six adult male citizens was in the field every year. During the crisis of the Second Punic War (218–201) the proportion had been higher – more than a quarter." Ibid, Pg. 511-512 "On a practical level the societal urge to demonstrate virtus produced brave armies (Polyb. 1.64.6), large armies, and armies that could be reconstituted year after year even in the wake of bloody defeats, as during the Second Punic War. Roman manpower poured forth like a fountain (a Greek might observe); fighting the Romans was like fighting the hydra, cut one head off, and others sprung forth in its place" Ibid, Pg. 514-515 Manpower and mobilization was a major strategic Roman advantage, not a disadvantage that they needed to cover up.

[Love Mountain]

PotF# 29

Winning Post

Lord Oda Nobunaga - Spanish Flu, 1918, which killed 50 million people around the globe

We are forgetting the 1889-1890 Flu pandemic. It started somewhere in Siberia or Central Asia and spread across Europe and to major North America ports and cities. The end result was about 1 million deaths. What is more surprising is that this flu didn't spread to Asia or South America. Taking a look at major Flu outbreaks: 1889-1890 Asian Flu - 1 million death toll 1918 Flu/Spanish Flu - probably over 20 million 1957-1958 Asian Flu - probably 4 million deaths 1968-1969 Hong Kong Flu - probably 4 million killed 2002-2004 SARS outbreak - more than 774 deaths, a couple random cases being discovered every once in a while 2009 Swine Flu outbreak - something like 500,000 deaths 2012 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (aka MERS or Camel Flu) - 866 deaths, to date no vaccine and is still ongoing 2019-???? COVID pandemic (aka SARS2 electric boogaloo) - to date probably more than 300,000 deaths, no vaccine If anything this shows the resilience of the Corona virus and its ability to adapt in order to spread rapidly and take on multiple hosts. A few of these the virus was able to use snakes, bats, birds, camels and pigs as hosts, mutate and then spread to Humans (it mutated to acquire these hosts as well). In the really destructive cases the virus was able to spread very rapidly and mutate to become more deadly. Those cases with really high death tolls are mostly the result of improper containment methods and poor hygiene. SARS for example was contained and eliminated very rapidly, and for some reason it did not spread as quickly to other parts of the world (probably the virus is slower than the others), and did not kill as many people because the death rate was low. Generally these things have a death rate of maximum 1%, with the Spanish Flu being the exception at a potential 2% or 4% (since they couldn't really keep track of this on a global or even regional scale, some suggest a number as high as 10% death rate among the infected). The one advantage that COVID19 has is that it spreads and mutates extremely quickly. Containment was also handled very poorly in most countries. Despite taking a huge hit, many Asian countries were prepared because they had learned from the SARS outbreak. But the ability of COVID19 to spread far outclasses that of SARS. The 100 year time span from Spanish Flu to COVID19 I think is largely coincidental. But it shows us how these Corona viruses can spread and mutate, and keep coming back in waves. The issue both in 1919 and 2019 was just that the powers at be did an extremely poor job of containing the virus. Granted in 1919 this concept was somewhat new and what with WW1... I don't know what their excuse is in 2019. Complacency I guess, too long since there was a major outbreak or crisis of any kind. I should have included the number of infections above, but anyway this gets the basic point across. Though it is somewhat strange that the deadliest strains tend to come from Asia, even the Spanish Flu has been suggested to have started in Manchuria. It could be a matter of bad hygiene but I don't know. The reason why Corona viruses do not tend to devastate hotter regions like the Middle East is because they struggle to survive in hotter climates, while generally thriving in drier cold climates, they also struggle in a wet atmosphere like South America or South East Asia. Perhaps the MERS outbreak shows that these viruses are capable of adapting to these desert climates, and then potentially other circumstances as well. Or perhaps... they are sentient, they are evolving, and they are coming for us.

Runner Up Post

Cope - Death of George Floyd and Subsequent Riots.

A prima facie viewing of George Floyd's death justified Chauvin's arrest. I had speculated that the cause of death was asphyxiation caused by the pressure being exerted on the victim's neck, though the preliminary results of the initial autopsy suggests that this was not the case. Nevertheless, as it is doubtlessly the case that the medical specifics will be hotly contested moving forward (the family have already sought an independent examination), these first findings should be viewed with all due scepticism. As far as the protests are concerned, I fully support the right of all people to exercise their 1A rights - particularly regarding instances of state tyranny. Violence and the destruction of innocent people's property, however, are neither acceptable nor helpful. The US's enemies are already circling, hoping to exploit Floyd's death to encourage further instability.

[Lord Thesaurian]

PotF# 30

Winning Post - sumskilz

The Potential Lab Origin of COVID-19

In the main Mudpit coronavirus thread, I started a conversation about the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, beginning with this post. The scientific aspects are complex, as is the circumstantial evidence, therefore I figured it needed a proper thread with a proper OP that can easily be referenced without having to wade though an 87 page thread. Looking into the issue further, I came across this recently published article: The Case Is Building That COVID-19 Had a Lab Origin. One of authors has a PhD in Virology and the other has a PhD in Molecular Biology and Genetics and the article is well-referenced. They're writing about a lot of the same issue I have been, and have also brought up some that I was unaware of. For that reason, I'll be using titles and excerpts from their article to lay out the facts. Historical lab releases In the past, there have been several cases in which pathogens have escaped from labs, including several cases in China, at least one is responsible for a global pandemic. The reason you probably don't already know about this, is because people whose entire careers are based around working with dangerous pathogens in labs, don't really want the general public worrying about dangerous pathogens escaping from labs. An accidental lab release is not merely a theoretical possibility. In 1977 a laboratory in Russia (or possibly China), most likely while developing a flu vaccine, accidentally released the extinct H1N1 influenza virus (Nakajima et al., 1978). H1N1 went on to become a global pandemic virus. A large proportion of the global population became infected. In this case, deaths were few because the population aged over 20 yrs old had historic immunity to the virus. This episode is not widely known because only recently has this conclusion been formally acknowledged in the scientific literature and the virology community has been reluctant to discuss such incidents (Zimmer and Burke, 2009; Wertheim, 2010). Still, laboratory pathogen escapes leading to human and animal deaths (e.g. smallpox in Britain; equine encephalitis in South America) are common enough that they ought to be much better known (summarised in Furmanski, 2014). Only rarely have these broken out into actual pandemics on the scale of H1N1, which, incidentally, broke out again in 2009/2010 as “Swine flu” causing deaths estimated variously at 3,000 to 200,000 on that occasion (Duggal et al., 2016; Simonsen et al. 2013). Many scientists have warned that experiments with PPPs, like the smallpox and Ebola and influenza viruses, are inherently dangerous and should be subject to strict limits and oversight (Lipsitch and Galvani, 2014; Klotz and Sylvester, 2014). Even in the limited case of SARS-like coronaviruses, since the quelling of the original SARS outbreak in 2003, there have been six documented SARS disease outbreaks originating from research laboratories, including four in China. These outbreaks caused 13 individual infections and one death (Furmanski, 2014). In response to such concerns the US banned certain classes of experiments, called gain of function (GOF) experiments, with PPPs in 2014, but the ban (actually a funding moratorium) was lifted in 2017. I note here that it was Fauci who lifted the funding moratorium. Maybe it's already obvious based on context, but if you're wondering, PPPs means potential pandemic pathogens. The COVID-19 Wuhan lab escape thesis The essence of the lab escape theory is that Wuhan is the site of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), China’s first and only Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) facility. (BSL-4 is the highest pathogen security level). The WIV, which added a BSL-4 lab only in 2018, has been collecting large numbers of coronaviruses from bat samples ever since the original SARS outbreak of 2002-2003; including collecting more in 2016 (Hu, et al., 2017; Zhou et al., 2018). Led by researcher Zheng-Li Shi, WIV scientists have also published experiments in which live bat coronaviruses were introduced into human cells (Hu et al., 2017). Moreover, according to an April 14 article in the Washington Post, US Embassy staff visited the WIV in 2018 and “had grave safety concerns” about biosecurity there. The WIV is just eight miles from the Huanan live animal market that was initially thought to be the site of origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. Wuhan is also home to a lab called the Wuhan Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (WCDPC). It is a BSL-2 lab that is just 250 metres away from the Huanan market. Bat coronaviruses have in the past been kept at the Wuhan WCDPC lab. Thus the lab escape theory is that researchers from one or both of these labs may have picked up a Sars-CoV-2-like bat coronavirus on one of their many collecting (aka ‘”virus surveillance”) trips. Or, alternatively, a virus they were studying, passaging, engineering, or otherwise manipulating, escaped. Scientific assessments of the lab escape theory You're all aware of the criticism, I contrast that against the fact that there seems to be little criticism of the animal intermediary hypothesis, for which there is zero evidence. On April 17 the Australian Science Media Centre asked four Australian virologists: “Did COVID-19 come from a lab in Wuhan?“ Three (Edward Holmes, Nigel McMillan and Hassan Vally) dismissed the lab escape suggestion and Vally simply labeled it, without elaboration, a “conspiracy”. The fourth virologist interviewed was Nikolai Petrovsky of Flinders University. Petrovsky first addressed the question of whether the natural zoonosis pathway was viable. He told the Media Centre: “no natural virus matching to COVID-19 has been found in nature despite an intensive search to find its origins.” That is to say, the idea of an animal intermediate is speculation. Indeed, no credible viral or animal host intermediaries, either in the form of a confirmed animal host or a plausible virus intermediate, has to-date emerged to explain the natural zoonotic transfer of Sars-CoV-2 to humans (e.g. Zhan et al., 2020). In addition to Petrovsky’s point, there are two further difficulties with the natural zoonotic transfer thesis (apart from the weak epidemiological association between early cases and the Huanan “wet” market). The first is that researchers from the Wuhan lab travelled to caves in Yunnan (1,500 Km away) to find horseshoe bats containing SARS-like coronaviruses. To-date, the closest living relative of Sars-CoV-2 yet found comes from Yunnan (Ge et al., 2016). Why would an outbreak of a bat virus therefore occur in Wuhan? Moreover, China has a population of 1.3 billion. If spillover from the wildlife trade was the explanation, then, other things being equal, the probability of a pandemic starting in Wuhan (pop. 11 million) is less than 1%. Zheng-Li Shi, the head of bat coronavirus research at WIV, told Scientific American as much: “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?” Wuhan, in short, is a rather unlikely epicentre for a natural zoonotic transfer. In contrast, to suspect that Sars-CoV-2 might have come from the WIV is both reasonable and obvious. Most of the harshest naysayers have obvious conflicts of interest that go beyond the usual, see this article on Edward Holmes for example. Was Sars-CoV-2 created in a lab? In his statement, Petrovsky goes on to describe the kind of experiment that, in principle, if done in a lab, would obtain the same result as the hypothesised natural zoonotic transfer–rapid adaptation of a bat coronavirus to a human host. “Take a bat coronavirus that is not infectious to humans, and force its selection by culturing it with cells that express human ACE2 receptor, such cells having been created many years ago to culture SARS coronaviruses and you can force the bat virus to adapt to infect human cells via mutations in its spike protein, which would have the effect of increasing the strength of its binding to human ACE2, and inevitably reducing the strength of its binding to bat ACE2. Viruses in prolonged culture will also develop other random mutations that do not affect its function. The result of these experiments is a virus that is highly virulent in humans but is sufficiently different that it no longer resembles the original bat virus. Because the mutations are acquired randomly by selection there is no signature of a human gene jockey, but this is clearly a virus still created by human intervention.” In other words, Petrovsky believes that current experimental methods could have led to an altered virus that escaped. Some additional expert opinions already posted in the other thread: Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  Leading immunologists and geneticists have told The Daily Telegraph there are two unusual aspects of COVID-19 that raise the possibility it was man-made rather than a naturally-occurring virus. The first is that the virus binds to human ACE2 receptor cells more strongly than it does to any other animal, including bats. The second is that it has a “furin cleavage site” that its closest genetic bat-coronavirus relative, RaTG-13, does not have. This site makes it significantly more infectious. Israeli geneticist, Dr Ronen Shemesh, who is working on treatment for COVID-19, said in his opinion the virus was more likely created in a laboratory than evolved naturally in nature. “There are many reasons to believe that the COVID-19 generating SARS-CoV-2 was generated in a lab. Most probably by methods of genetic engineering,” he said. “I believe that this is the only way an insertion like the FURIN protease cleavage site could have been introduced directly at the right place and become effective.” Dr Shemesh points to the insertion of a Furin site as the most unusual aspect of COVID-19. “I believe that the most important issue about the differences between ALL coronavirus types is the insertion of a Fufin protease cleavage site at the Spike protein of SARS-CoV-2,” he said. “Such an insertion is very rare in evolution, the addition of such 4 Amino acids alone in the course of only 20 years is very unlikely.” Dr Shemesh, who has a PhD in Genetics and Molecular Biology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and over 21 years of experience in the field of drug discovery and development, said it is even “more unlikely” that this insertion happened in exactly the right place of the cleavage site of the spike protein - which is where it would need to occur to make the virus more infectious. “What makes it even more suspicious is that fact that this insertion not only occurred on the right place and in the right time, but also turned the cleavage site from an Serine protease cleavage site to a FURIN cleavage site,” he said. “This protein cleaving protein is highly promiscuous, it’s found in many human tissues and cell types and is involved in many OTHER virus types activation and infection mechanisms (it is involved in HIV, Herpes, Ebola and Dengue virus mechanisms). “If I was trying to engineer a virus strain with a higher affinity and infective potential to humans, I would do exactly that: I would add a Furin Cleavage site directly at the original less effective and more cell specific cleavage site.” La Trobe University Chemistry and Physics Professor David Winkler says there are several possibilities for the source of COVID-19 and you cannot rule out the laboratory as one option. “On the basis of the calculations we’ve done, you can’t exclude that it’s been processed through human cells in a biosecurity lab - but it’s certainly not the only explanation,” he said. Flinders University Professor Nikolai Petrovsky says COVID-19 is “exquisitely adapted to infect humans”. “I’m certainly very much in favour of a scientific investigation. Its only objective should be to get to the bottom of how did this pandemic happen and how do we prevent a future pandemic.” Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and University of British Columbia biologist, Alina Chan, said there was little evidence to definitively say where COVID-19 originated. Dr Chan said there is no current evidence to show that the coronavirus originated in the Wuhan wet market. “If intermediate animal hosts were present at the market, no evidence remains in the genetic samples available,” she said. Leading immunologists and geneticists have told The Daily Telegraph there are two unusual aspects of COVID-19 that raise the possibility it was man-made rather than a naturally-occurring virus. “There is no publicly available genetic evidence of cross-species transmission at the Huanan seafood market. But at the same time we cannot rule out the Huanan seafood market because we have not been able to analyse other data, eg, animal samples, from the market.” She said human adaptation in nature and in a laboratory is possible. “Did SARS-CoV-2 transmit across species into humans and circulate undetected for months prior to late 2019 while accumulating adaptive mutations?” she said. “Or was SARS-CoV-2 already well adapted for humans while in bats or an intermediate species? “More importantly, does this pool of human-adapted progenitor viruses still exist in animal populations? Even the possibility that a non-genetically-engineered precursor could have adapted to humans while being studied in a laboratory should be considered, regardless of how likely or unlikely.” Scientists say COVID-19 may have been cooked up in lab Passaging, GOF research, and lab escapes GOF is gain of function research (explained in the quote). Terminology varies, passaging can also be considered a subset of GOF. The experiment mentioned by Petrovsky represents a class of experiments called passaging. Passaging is the placing of a live virus into an animal or cell culture to which it is not adapted and then, before the virus dies out, transferring it to another animal or cell of the same type. Passaging is often done iteratively. The theory is that the virus will rapidly evolve (since viruses have high mutation rates) and become adapted to the new animal or cell type. Passaging a virus, by allowing it to become adapted to its new situation, creates a new pathogen. The most famous such experiment was conducted in the lab of Dutch researcher Ron Fouchier. Fouchier took an avian influenza virus (H5N1) that did not infect ferrets (or other mammals) and serially passaged it in ferrets. The intention of the experiment was specifically to evolve a PPP. After ten passages the researchers found that the virus had indeed evolved, to not only infect ferrets but to transmit to others in neighbouring cages (Herfst et al., 2012). They had created an airborne ferret virus, a Potential Pandemic Pathogen, and a storm in the international scientific community. The second class of experiments that have frequently been the recipients of criticism are GOF experiments. In GOF research, a novel virus is deliberately created, either by in vitro mutation or by cutting and pasting together two (or more) viruses. The intention of such reconfigurations is to make viruses more infectious by adding new functions such as increased infectivity or pathogenicity. These novel viruses are then experimented on, either in cell cultures or in whole animals. These are the class of experiments banned in the US from 2014 to 2017. Some researchers have even combined GOF and passaging experiments by using recombinant viruses in passaging experiments (e.g. Sheahan et al., 2008). Such experiments all require recombinant DNA techniques and animal or cell culture experiments. But the very simplest hypothesis of how Sars-CoV-2 might have been caused by research is simply to suppose that a researcher from the WIV or the WCDCP became infected during a collecting expedition and passed their bat virus on to their colleagues or family. The natural virus then evolved, in these early cases, into Sars-CoV-2. For this reason, even collecting trips have their critics. Epidemiologist Richard Ebright called them “the definition of insanity“. Handling animals and samples exposes collectors to multiple pathogens and returning to their labs then brings those pathogens back to densely crowded locations. SARS-CoV-2 looks like a recombinant virus that has been passaged. The trouble is there is no way to prove it was done in a lab just looking at the RNA. However, I find this a more parsimonious explanation than the far-fetched natural explanations for how this could have happened which involve species that would never meet in the wild trading viruses, being infected by two at the same time, and then travelling vast distances from their natural habitat in order to infect people coincidentally next the only lab in the world that contains those viruses' closest relatives. The wet market hypothesis was an attempt to account for these absurdities, but that's not actually where the earliest cases were from. Was the WIV doing experiments that might release PPPs? The short answer is yes, rather a lot really. Since 2004, shortly after the original SARS outbreak, researchers from the WIV have been collecting bat coronaviruses in an intensive search for SARS-like pathogens (Li et al., 2005). Since the original collecting trip, many more have been conducted (Ge et al., 2013; Ge et al., 2016; Hu et al., 2017; Zhou et al., 2018). Petrovsky does not mention it but Zheng-Li Shi’s group at the WIV has already performed experiments very similar to those he describes, using those collected viruses. In 2013 the Shi lab reported isolating an infectious clone of a bat coronavirus that they called WIV-1 (Ge et al., 2013). WIV-1 was obtained by introducing a bat coronavirus into monkey cells, passaging it, and then testing its infectivity in human (HeLa) cell lines engineered to express the human ACE2 receptor (Ge et al., 2013). In 2014, just before the US GOF research ban went into effect, Zheng-Li Shi of WIV co-authored a paper with the lab of Ralph Baric in North Carolina that performed GOF research on bat coronaviruses (Menachery et al., 2015). In this particular set of experiments the researchers combined “the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone” into a single engineered live virus. The spike was supplied by the Shi lab. They put this bat/human/mouse virus into cultured human airway cells and also into live mice. The researchers observed “notable pathogenesis” in the infected mice (Menachery et al. 2015). The mouse-adapted part of this virus comes from a 2007 experiment in which the Baric lab created a virus called rMA15 through passaging (Roberts et al., 2007). This rMA15 was “highly virulent and lethal” to the mice. According to this paper, mice succumbed to “overwhelming viral infection”. In 2017, again with the intent of identifying bat viruses with ACE2 binding capabilities, the Shi lab at WIV reported successfully infecting human (HeLa) cell lines engineered to express the human ACE2 receptor with four different bat coronaviruses. Two of these were lab-made recombinant (chimaeric) bat viruses. Both the wild and the recombinant viruses were briefly passaged in monkey cells (Hu et al., 2017). Together, what these papers show is that: 1) The Shi lab collected numerous bat samples with an emphasis on collecting SARS-like coronavirus strains, 2) they cultured live viruses and conducted passaging experiments on them, 3) members of Zheng-Li Shi’s laboratory participated in GOF experiments carried out in North Carolina on bat coronaviruses, 4) the Shi laboratory produced recombinant bat coronaviruses and placed these in human cells and monkey cells. All these experiments were conducted in cells containing human or monkey ACE2 receptors. The overarching purpose of such work was to see whether an enhanced pathogen could emerge from the wild by creating one in the lab. (For a very informative technical summary of WIV research into bat coronaviruses and that of their collaborators we recommend this post, written by biotech entrepreneur Yuri Deigin). It also seems that the Shi lab at WIV intended to do more of such research. In 2013 and again in 2017 Zheng-Li Shi (with the assistance of a non-profit called the EcoHealth Alliance) obtained a grant from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). The most recent such grant proposed that: “host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice” (NIH project #5R01Al110964-04). It is hard to overemphasize that the central logic of this grant was to test the pandemic potential of SARS-related bat coronaviruses by making ones with pandemic potential, either through genetic engineering or passaging, or both. Apart from descriptions in their publications we do not yet know exactly which viruses the WIV was experimenting with but it is certainly intriguing that numerous publications since Sars-CoV-2 first appeared have puzzled over the fact that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein binds with exceptionally high affinity to the human ACE2 receptor “at least ten times more tightly” than the original SARS (Zhou et al., 2020; Wrapp et al., 2020; Wan et al., 2020; Walls et al., 2020; Letko et al., 2020). This affinity is all the more remarkable because of the relative lack of fit in modelling studies of the SARS-CoV-2 spike to other species, including the postulated intermediates like snakes, civets and pangolins (Piplani et al., 2020). In this preprint these modellers concluded “This indicates that SARS-CoV-2 is a highly adapted human pathogen”. Given the research and collection history of the Shi lab at WIV it is therefore entirely plausible that a bat SARS-like cornavirus ancestor of Sars-CoV-2 was trained up on the human ACE2 receptor by passaging it in cells expressing that receptor. [On June 4 an excellent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists went further. Pointing out what we had overlooked, that the Shi lab also amplified spike proteins of collected coronaviruses, which would make them available for GOF experimentation (Ge et al., 2016).] The safety record of the WIV The short answer again, not very good. The final important data point is the biosafety history of the WIV. The WIV was built in 2015 and became a commissioned BSL-4 lab in 2018. According to Josh Rogin of the Washington Post, US embassy officials visited the WIV in 2018. They subsequently warned their superiors in Washington of a “serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory”. And according to VOA News, a year before the outbreak, “a security review conducted by a Chinese national team found the lab did not meet national standards in five categories.” Credible reports from within China also question lab biosafety and its management. In 2019, Yuan Zhiming, biosecurity specialist at the WIV, cited the “challenges” of biosafety in China. According to Yuan: “several high-level BSLs have insufficient operational funds for routine yet vital processes” and “Currently, most laboratories lack specialized biosafety managers and engineers.” He recommends that “We should promptly revise the existing regulations, guidelines, norms, and standards of biosafety and biosecurity”. Nevertheless, he also notes that China intends to build “5-7” more BSL-4 laboratories (Yuan, 2019). And in February 2020, Scientific American interviewed Zheng-Li Shi. Accompanying the interview was a photograph of her releasing a captured bat. In the photo she is wearing a casual pink unzipped top layer, thin gloves, and no face mask or other protection. Yet this is the same researcher whose talks give “chilling” warnings about the dire risks of human contact with bats. All of which tends to confirm the original State Department assessment. As one anonymous “senior administration official” told Rogin: “The idea that it was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it leaked from a lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on the other side.” The leading hypothesis is a lab outbreak This also addresses why you've been hearing something different in the media, a major conflict of interest for the media's star expert witness. For all these reasons, a lab escape is by far the leading hypothesis to explain the origins of Sars-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic. The sheer proximity of the WIV and WCDCP labs to the outbreak and the nature of their work represents evidence that can hardly be ignored. The long international history of lab escapes and the biosafety concerns from all directions about the labs in Wuhan greatly strengthen the case. Especially since evidence for the alternative hypothesis, in the form of a link to wild animal exposure or the wildlife trade, remains extremely weak, being based primarily on analogy with SARS one (Bell et al,. 2004; Andersen et al., 2020). Nevertheless, on April 16th Peter Daszak, who is the President of the EcoHealth Alliance, told Democracy Now! in a lengthy interview that the lab escape thesis was “Pure baloney”. He told listeners: “There was no viral isolate in the lab. There was no cultured virus that’s anything related to SARS coronavirus 2. So it’s just not possible.” Daszak made very similar claims on CNN’s Sixty Minutes: “There is zero evidence that this virus came out of a lab in China.” Instead, Daszak encouraged viewers to blame “hunting and eating wildlife”. Daszak’s certainty is highly problematic on several counts. The closest related known coronaviruses to Sars-CoV-2 are to be found at the WIV so a lot depends on what he means by “related to”. But it is also dishonest in the sense that Daszak must know that culturing in the lab is not the only way that WIV researchers could have caused an outbreak. Third, and this is not Daszak’s fault, the media are asking the right question to the wrong person. As alluded to above, Daszak is the named principal investigator on multiple US grants that went to the Shi lab at WIV. He is also a co-author on numerous papers with Zheng-Li Shi, including the 2013 Nature paper announcing the isolation of coronavirus WIV-1 through passaging (Ge et al., 2013). One of his co-authorships is on the collecting paper in which his WIV colleagues placed the four fully functional bat coronaviruses into human cells containing the ACE2 receptor (Hu et al. 2017). That is, Daszak and Shi together are collaborators and co-responsible for most of the published high-risk collecting and experimentation at the WIV. I wrote about the same issue in the other thread: Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  There is a conflict of interest here. Experts on gain of function research are inevitably involved in gain of function research, therefore if the public becomes aware that such research may have inadvertently led to a global pandemic, these experts' careers are in jeopardy. Another example, here is a Vox article entitled "Why these scientists still doubt the coronavirus leaked from a Chinese lab". The expert witness being interviewed is "Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance and a disease ecologist who has studied emerging infectious diseases with colleagues in China". The following is from a transcript of an email written by the National Institutes of Health to Daszak: EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. is the recipient, as grantee, of an NIH grant entitled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” It is our understanding that one of the sub-recipients on this grant is the Wuhan Institute of Virology (“WIV”). It is our understanding that Wuhan Institute of Virology studies the interaction between corona viruses and bats. The scientific community believes that the coronavirus causing COVID-19 jumped from bats to humans likely in Wuhan where the COVID-19 pandemic began. There are now allegations that the current crisis was precipitated by the release from Wuhan Institute of Virology of the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19. Given these concerns, we are pursuing suspension of Wuhan Institute of Virology from participation in federal programs. While we review these allegations during the period of suspension, you are instructed to cease providing any funds to Wuhan Institute of Virology. This temporary action is authorized by 45 C.F.R. §75.371(d) (“Initiate suspension or debarment proceedings as authorized under 2 C.F.R. part 180”). The incorporated OMB provision provides that the funding agency may, through suspension, immediately and temporarily exclude from Federal programs persons who are not presently responsible where “immediate action is necessary to protect the public interest.” 2 C.F.R. § 180.700(c). It is in the public interest that NIH ensure that a sub-recipient has taken all appropriate precautions to prevent the release of pathogens that it is studying. This suspension of the sub-recipient does not affect the remainder of your grant assuming that no grant funds are provided to WIV following receipt of this email during the period of suspension. Daszak was involved in gain of function research in collaboration with WIV. The Vox article goes on: Some have speculated that perhaps the new coronavirus is derived from RaTG13. Yet virologists say it’s very unlikely: A 4 percent difference in genome is actually huge in evolutionary terms. “The level of genome sequence divergence between SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 is equivalent to an average of 50 years (and at least 20 years) of evolutionary change,” said Edward Holmes, a professor at the University of Sydney who has published six academic papers this year on the genome and origin of SARS-CoV-2, in a statement. “Hence, SARS-CoV-2 was not derived from RaTG13.” Another questionable assumption is that the mere existence of a related virus in the lab signals the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was also there. Daszak, who collaborates with the Wuhan bat coronavirus researchers and has co-authored papers with them, says this is false. Except speeding up evolution is exactly what gain of function researchers are doing, so that argument doesn't really make any sense. Edward Holmes was also one of the coauthors of the correspondence I addressed in my last post. You can read about his research in this article about how China’s People’s Liberation Army have been kindly providing him data. You will see the same handful of of expert witnesses in every article supposedly debunking the "conspiracy theory", but you can see in the article I posted that expert witnesses with nothing to lose are remarkably more open minded, some are suspicious, and for good reason. And Fauci's conflict of interest as well: Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  One place it probably didn't originate from is a lab in China. As Dr. Fauci and others have pointed out the idea falls apart on any reasonable examination. Fauci has reasons to downplay the likelihood of this possibility. The lab in Wuhan was involved in gain of function research on bat coronaviruses. That is they were deliberately manipulating bat coronavirues in order to make them more transmissible, for the purpose of predicting what might occur naturally in order to prepare for it. This is controversial because of the potential of actually causing a pandemic if the pathogen accidentally gets out. This is from an article Fauci wrote on the topic in 2012: Scientists working in this field might say—as indeed I have said—that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky. However, we must respect that there are genuine and legitimate concerns about this type of research, both domestically and globally. We cannot expect those who have these concerns to simply take us, the scientific community, at our word that the benefits of this work outweigh the risks, nor can we ignore their calls for greater transparency, their concerns about conflicts of interest, and their efforts to engage in a dialog about whether these experiments should have been performed in the first place. Those of us in the scientific community who believe in the merits of this work have the responsibility to address these concerns thoughtfully and respectfully. Nevertheless, the organization Fauci heads happened to fund this project which just so happened to involve gain of function research on bat coronaviruses in collaboration with a certain Chinese lab in Wuhan. To be clear, I'm open to natural origin explanations as well. I just haven't seen any particularly plausible hypothesis that fits with all the circumstantial evidence. Certainly there is no clear evidence of natural origin. You see, that runs both ways, once you realize just how plausible lab origin is.

Runner Up Post - Abdülmecid I

Friday/Saturday/Sunday morning preaching.

Not sure about the value of Holland's Dominion book, but the cited examples are very unfortunate. Polygamy was not at all widespread in the Antiquity and, in the rare cases it was reported, it was limited to the ruling dynasties (not the Roman ones, though). It was a purely political measure, adopted by monarchs, whose throne relied on foreign alliances and the approval of the local aristocracy, so moral views about marriage, women and sex were largely irrelevant. The argument about infanticide is even more bogus, while the reference to Sparta is rather absurd, since that practice had already stopped being enforced (if it ever was, at least on a widespread scale) for several centuries. Fun fact: Sparta's most celebrated king, Agesilaus II, was lame from birth, but fortunately for Xenophon, nobody thought of disposing of the royal baby. Indirect infanticide was and still is, despite our impeccable Christian principles, the result of poverty and inability to feed our offspring in a satisfying manner. Polybius, in fact, quite a few decades before Joseph was conceived, presents the abandonment of newborns, in a very critical manner, as the tragic consequence of the impoverishment of mainland Greece. The final paragraph about charity is also very misleading, as the author analyses the ''pagan'' and ''Christian'' motivation, based on double standards. On the one hand, he claims that pagans contributed to the society for selfish reasons, a very reasonable hypothesis, not however explicitly mentioned by the epigraphical testimony, and on the other hand, he takes the ''official'' interpretation as a Gospel. The irony is that the inscriptions confirm (based on a careful study of onomastics) that wealthy Christians copied the behaviour of their pagan colleagues, although, in the end, the rise of Christianity coincides with a decline of public infrastructure, because the urban elites were more reluctant to spend their money for the public good (to clarify, I doubt that the two trends are related to each other). Don't get me wrong, I also dislike the way some hard-line atheists condemn Christianity as the root of all evils, but the aforementioned revisionism commits the same sin, only with paganism as its victim. Tom Holland would have probably been less disgusted at the cruelty of the ancients, if he recognized dramatic hyperbole and the fact that these egregious affairs are mentioned, precisely because the goal of the author is to derogate someone (usually, filthy barbarians), whom he views as the complete opposite to his personal values. Generally speaking, the notion that Stoicism, Christianity or Aristotelian philosophy are the most determining factor of human behaviour is rather naive. It's always interesting to read how the Three Holy Hierarchs are desperately trying to convince their otherwise very pious flock not to visit the bloody amphitheaters, but to no avail. Gladiators eventually lost the war, but due to causes irrelevant to Christian bishops, who after all didn't greatly appreciate their successors, miming and Chariot racing. Cool video. He grossly overestimates the importance of religion in modern conflicts, as he fails to recognize that religious principles are usually used as convenient pretexts, in order to solidify the public approval of your otherwise controversial overseas endeavours. Bush Jr. may have boasted about his direct contact with the Almighty, but I doubt he invaded Iraq, because he tried to imitate the Crusades.

Runner Up Post - Prodromos

USA elections 2020

Trump is popular with a small minority of Americans (15-20%) precisely because he is not a Washington insider, dynastic candidate and/or career politician. That congressional Republicans jumped on his electoral bandwagon when it suited them* is evidence only that they see the presidency as a means to an end. The unprecedented attacks against his administration from the press, academia, the intelligence community, the civil service, the Democratic Party and sour GOP grandees should make it clear that Trump is a threat to, not an agent of, the liberal/neocon consensus that has existed since the end of the Cold War. *The claim that Trump has the "unquestioning" support of congressional Republicans is a liberal myth. It is plainly disproved by their response to his Syria withdrawal which included voting for a bill to censure the president. I was talking about the Republican Party. In June 2020, Trump and his supporters are indisputably the Republican establishment, not underdog outsiders. In no sense does Jeb Bush have more influence over the party, or even over the country, than President Trump or Senate Majority Leader McConnell. We know most major party figures don't like Trump, but that doesn't make him an outsider. Stalin wasn't that well-liked either. Three years into his presidency and with his party firmly behind him and in control of the Senate and increasingly the judiciary, it's beyond silly to portray Trump as a helpless outsider. It's really just a way of shifting responsibility for his failings on to some kind of scapegoat (I see you helpfully provided a list of the usual suspects), which is ironic given that Trump's whole persona revolves around 'toughness' and endless 'winning'. Two quotes, a month apart, neatly capture the essence of Donald Trump's presidency: "No, I don't take responsibility at all." — March 13 "When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that's the way it's got to be. It's total." — April 13 There is something quintessentially Trumpian about the claim of total authority and zero responsibility. He alone can save us, he insists, but don't blame him if he doesn't.

Runner Up Post - Pontifex Maximus

Microsoft to replace industry standard terms like whitelist, blacklist and master on GitHub with politically correct "race neutral" words.

This whitewashing of the language is no doubt a black mark in this post-modernist society. I think the people at Microsoft have gone yellow-bellied. There's no need to get red in the face about a few terms that might be construed as racist by some bored people in the peanut gallery. The rule of thumb should be whether or not a statement is facially racist, not some sort of eenie meenie miney moe choice vector by which the liberals attempt to just control what is alright to say one day and not alright to say the next. We're being sold down the river by people who pretend to have good intentions. Who in the US is actually shouting "hip hip hooray" about racism? Such hooligans wouldn't be tolerated by polite society, no more than an eskimo would tolerate a Brazilian summer. Such offenders in some Canadian provinces are actually carted off in the paddy wagon for such uppity behavior. I've had my fill of such political correctness, I'm in a veritable food coma I'm so fed up with it. I have postprandial somnolence. When bored race baiters try to export their standards on regular people, it comes across as tone deaf and cringey. They're not engaging in an intellectual exercise, they're finding new ways to whine about something. When it's done for profit or virtue points, well, the mask slips. What was the reason for picking the black color? Is modern usage of the term traced back to that instance or its just that that's the earliest recorded use of the term? This desperate attempt to re-read some modicum of logic into a decision that was taken with no discernible amount of consideration other than choosing to view the world only through a racial lens is hilarious.

[Lord Thesaurian]

PotF# 31

Winning Post - Legio_Italica

The latest anti-liberal rant thread (get your daily dose here)

All nations are founded on a mixture of legend, luck and fact. American culture, American morals, American heritage, is vested in the self evident truth of “the inalienable rights endowed by our Creator,” and the journey to carry that mission statement to fruition. To dismiss this as naive or fanciful is a fairly generic critique of patriotism or the creation of nation states at a conceptual level. It also fundamentally invalidates the argument posed by those who attack American patriotism or naturalism on the basis of it being unjust, discriminatory or consequently unlawful, because like the abolition of slavery, female suffrage or other social progress, America’s journey to create “a more perfect Union” is predicated on the collective, codified affirmation of these God-given rights, and whom those rights apply to. America is not an ethnic nation, but a new nation in a new world, conceived in Liberty by the consent of the governed. As such, American identity is not passed in the bloodstream. We are a nation of laws, not men. If it is not cherished and affirmed today, it will cease to exist tomorrow. That is what is under attack and at stake. Thus, as summarized in the opinion piece, you can throw the baby out with the bathwater, but you cannot get rid of the bathtub, much as one might try. And so we are left with a “Revolution” that is a perverse, putrid slop of racial and ethnic tribalism, fueled by grievance narratives and recycled Soviet propaganda tactics. As such it is organized warfare upon the Republic itself, designed to divide and conquer Americans against one another and redefine our national identity as a massive fraud perpetrated by a vast, nebulous conspiracy of oppression. Not only is such a “Revolution” openly counterfactual and revisionist, the Politburo of yesteryear could only dream of such success. A people filled with introspective doubt, distrust and self loathing in place of national values, utterly demoralized by the endlessly shifting goalposts, manufactured conflict, vengeance narratives, puritanical inquisitions and revisionism cannot possibly unite to express our collective will, nor defend our national interests, let alone project power externally with any longevity or consistency. That is the endgame begun long before the opportunistic acceleration presented by the historic domestic crises in our midst; one seized upon by the foreign authoritarian antagonists of today. It has spread across the western world as the elites parrot political actors prodded by ideological activists. It is a crisis of leadership which believes in nothing in particular, as much as a crisis of a culture being purged of itself. It is the nation itself, often those among us who are the poorest and most vulnerable to instability and strife, who will pay the price for the Revolutionaries’ campaign of destruction for destruction’s sake, the harbingers of the state of our decline.

[Lord Thesaurian]

PotF# 32

Winning Post - Cope

Smithsonian Group Museum Engages in... White... Supremacy?

I still don't see how challenging a dominant culture and putting forward the idea that it may not be a universal truth/optimum, but just one amongst many amounts to a call to reject every aspect of, or even "purge" the dominant culture. Even if you have encountered people who say exactly that, surely that's no excuse to just stop considering whether parts of what they're saying make sense. That whole discussion seems to be continuously derailed by people who seem hell bent on not questioning their own preconceptions. And note that I say 'question' not 'abandon'. I'm not personally convinced the BLM theorists are on the right ideological track, but I'm not so cowardly as to jump on every opportunity to twist and distort their ideas. You aren't challenging the "dominant culture". You're part of it. There's a reason why BLM's narrative is regurgitated ad nauseam by corporate America, the cosmopolitan press, the entertainment industry and academia. The Washington elite literally kneel for it. Debating the criminal justice system, police reform or the leading causes of African American mortality was never the objective. The priority for the liberal establishment and their activists has been to launch irrational, hyper-critical attacks against "whiteness" (itself a term typically used as a racial pejorative), American icons and various western institutions. So instead of discussing the substantive issues and consensus building (which might actually threaten the status quo) we've been dragged into another one of the left's poisonous culture wars, complete with riots, looting, vandalism and other forms of violence.

[Love Mountain]

PotF# 33

Winning Post - PointOfViewGun

The Fight for Mediterranean: Turkey, Greece, France, Libya, Egypt ...

A conflict have been brewing in the eastern Mediterranean sea for a while now. Currently, we have Greek, Turkish and French warships in the region. First the timeline: Back in July Turkey started talks about sending Oruç Reis to eastern Mediterranean to conduct research for natural resources. The area in question is to the south of Turkish coast of Antalya: Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  After what was speculated to be a phone conversation between Erdoğan and Merkel, Turkey opted from sending the ship to the location above. Then something strange happened and Greece signed an EEZ boundary agreement with Egypt. What especially made it strange was the fact that the agreement did not cover the entire line Greece normally claims. In the below map, while the bold green line marks the agreement between Greece and Egypt the bold white line is missing as Greece claims it as well. Did Greece seriously forfeited from its claim? Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  Anyhow, Turkey saw this as a provocation and opted to send Oruç Reis research ship to the previous area anyways. As Greece turned to EU for help, France ran to its aid and decided to send two fighter jets and a frigate to the area. At the time 5 Turkey ships were accompanying the research vessel: Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  As the area gets crowded a Turkish and Greek warship suffered a mini-collision as a the Greek Limnos tried to cut off Turkish Kemal Reis from escorting the research vessel. The two countries, perhaps as well as the French, never came this close to having a major incident since 1996s of Kardak crisis. What Greece likely fails to grasp is that EU support is not because of EU brotherhood but mostly because EU sees the natural resources as its own, rather than sovereign property of Greece. Macron, on the other hand, seems to be making a bad situation worse due to his vendetta from his conflict with Turkey over Libya. There is real chance that this conflict can turn bad really quickly. There is a lot of sides to this conflict. First and foremost, there is the issue of legality between Greece and Turkey. Who owns which area? Who has the drilling rights? What's the right path to resolving the conflict? Then there is the issue of French involvement. Let's ignore the specifics of the Libyan conflict and who supports who and how with respect to Libya. Is Macron simply trying to create a presence for him? Does his position have merit? Discuss.

Runner Up Post - Cope

Death of George Floyd and Subsequent Riots.

We do not know if he passed the counterfeit bill accidently or deliberately. He could have gotten the counferfeit bill from someone else and innocently passed it along. It is also possible (and I think more likely) that the cashier noticed that the bill was counterfeit during the exchange (it is typical to check notes immediately before putting them in the till) and requested that Floyd return the cigarettes. That would explain why the police were called. If we hear the 911 call during the trial we may get some more information. Fentanyl is used as a pain medicine and athlete's often develope aches and pains, especially ex football players, so perhaps he was self medicating. Metamphetamine he was abusing, and the drugs might or.might not have contributed to his dearh, but he would not have died that day without a knee on his neck. Why Floyd was using drugs is irrelevant. What matters is the way that they affected his behaviour and the extent to which they compromised him physiologically. Floyd has to take responsibility for abusing illicit substances whilst suffering from serious cardiopulmonary conditions. He also has to take responsibility for compelling the police to subdue him on the street. There is a strong possibility that these facts alone will create a reasonable doubt that the police are criminally culpable for Floyd's death, particularly with regard to the murder charge. Even if Floyd died.from a heart attack that just happened to happen at the time arrest, the cops would have been guilty of negligence waiting 9 minites before calling for medical help during an heart attack is unacceptable. Floyd died of a cardiac arrest, not a heart attack. The police did not wait 9 minutes until calling for medical assistance. Floyd's deafh is all on the cops - Floyd was in obvious distress, and the cops.callously did nothing. The use of the neck hold seemed unnecessary, Floyd waa handcuffed, and did not seem to be strugling. Neck holds have know to be lethal. I don't thinl the cops intended to kill Floyd, but a drunk driver does not intend to kill his victims either. While.a trial might reveal evidence that would show the copa were not quite as bad as it appears. maybe they could see he was intoxicated and were he might turn suddenly violemt, I don't see avoiding the conclusion they were criminally neglegent Floyd's distress does not prove that the police used unreasonable force during the arrest. The officers - particularly Chauvin - are likely guilty of gross negligence for keeping Floyd pinned down after his heart had stopped (they should have performed CPR immediately) but that doesn't mean that they are culpable for his death. Agree 100%, but I was responding specifically to Heathen's facetious "Or that he was high on fentanyl. If you get behind the wheel while high as a kite you deserve to be dragged out of car and handcuffed." with an equally facetious response. Heathen seemed to be seeking to re-frame the conversation away from Chauvin's accountability. As you say, none of that suggests Floyd deserved to die. Every time we refocus the conversation to Floyd's habits or behaviour, we risk justifying Chauvin's overreach. That's why I will continue to ask anybody who insinuates that Floyd's drug habits or background put him at fault for his death, whether they think he deserved to die. I agree that it shouldn't be a case of premeditated murder, but everything I've seen suggests that there are definitely grounds for a lesser homicide charge - the results of which will be decided by a jury with greater access to the details of the case, not us. Chauvin isn't being charged with premeditated murder. He's being charged with Murder in the Second Degree (ie. felony murder).

[Love Mountain]

PotF# 34

Winning Post - Legio_Italica

Theistic evolution makes no sense

That part only states that the humble one went straight to paradise. It does not say that the other one went to eternal torment without any possibility of repentance and redemption. The Church is pretty clear about what happens to unrepentant sinners: 1033 We cannot be united with God unless we freely choose to love him. But we cannot love God if we sin gravely against him, against our neighbor or against ourselves: "He who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him."610 Our Lord warns us that we shall be separated from him if we fail to meet the serious needs of the poor and the little ones who are his brethren.611 To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God's merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called "hell." 1034 Jesus often speaks of "Gehenna" of "the unquenchable fire" reserved for those who to the end of their lives refuse to believe and be converted, where both soul and body can be lost.612 Jesus solemnly proclaims that he "will send his angels, and they will gather . . . all evil doers, and throw them into the furnace of fire,"613 and that he will pronounce the condemnation: "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire!"614 1035 The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity. Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, "eternal fire."615 The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs. 1036 The affirmations of Sacred Scripture and the teachings of the Church on the subject of hell are a call to the responsibility incumbent upon man to make use of his freedom in view of his eternal destiny. They are at the same time an urgent call to conversion: "Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few."616 Since we know neither the day nor the hour, we should follow the advice of the Lord and watch constantly so that, when the single course of our earthly life is completed, we may merit to enter with him into the marriage feast and be numbered among the blessed, and not, like the wicked and slothful servants, be ordered to depart into the eternal fire, into the outer darkness where "men will weep and gnash their teeth."617 1037 God predestines no one to go to hell;618 for this, a willful turning away from God (a mortal sin) is necessary, and persistence in it until the end. In the Eucharistic liturgy and in the daily prayers of her faithful, the Church implores the mercy of God, who does not want "any to perish, but all to come to repentance":619 https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_P2O.HTM But for those who subscribe to the final authority of scripture, what does the Bible say about hell? What is Hell? There are numerous references to “hell” in the Bible, centered on the following words: https://www.blueletterbible.org/sear...V#s=s_lexiconc ‎שְׁאוֹל, Sheol This is the Hebrew word translated as “hell” or “grave,” used throughout the Old Testament. It is literal in the sense that both “good” and “bad” people are referenced in this context; i.e. it is not a plane of punishment a priori, but a reference to the finality of death and separation from God. Examples: The first recorded use of the word is in the context of Jacob discovering that his son Joseph had been sold into slavery by his own brothers because they considered it more profitable than killing him. Here Jacob, as a devastated father, proclaims he will follow his son to the grave for grief. And Jacob rent his clothes, and put sackcloth upon his loins, and mourned for his son many days. 35 And all his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted; and he said, For I will go down into the grave (שְׁאוֹל) unto my son mourning. Thus his father wept for him. 36 And the Midianites sold him into Egypt unto Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh's, and captain of the guard. ‎ שְׁאוֹל is first used in the context of divine judgement in the book of Numbers. And Moses said, Hereby ye shall know that the Lord hath sent me to do all these works; for I have not done them of mine own mind. 29 If these men die the common death of all men, or if they be visited after the visitation of all men; then the Lord hath not sent me. 30 But if the Lord make a new thing, and the earth open her mouth, and swallow them up, with all that appertain unto them, and they go down quick into the pit (שְׁאוֹל); then ye shall understand that these men have provoked the Lord. 31 And it came to pass, as he had made an end of speaking all these words, that the ground clave asunder that was under them: 32 And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods. 33 They, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into the pit (שְׁאוֹל), and the earth closed upon them: and they perished from among the congregation. 34 And all Israel that were round about them fled at the cry of them: for they said, Lest the earth swallow us up also. And there came out a fire from the LORD, and consumed the two hundred and fifty men that offered incense. In Deuteronomy, God’s wrath is said to burn “from the lowest hell (שְׁאוֹל)” in response to wickedness. Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and hast forgotten God that formed thee. 19 And when the Lord saw it, he abhorred them, because of the provoking of his sons, and of his daughters. 20 And he said, I will hide my face from them, I will see what their end shall be: for they are a very froward generation, children in whom is no faith. 21 They have moved me to jealousy with that which is not God; they have provoked me to anger with their vanities: and I will move them to jealousy with those which are not a people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation. 22 For a fire is kindled in mine anger, and shall burn unto the lowest hell (שְׁאוֹל), and shall consume the earth with her increase, and set on fire the foundations of the mountains. 23 I will heap mischiefs upon them; I will spend mine arrows upon them. 24 They shall be burnt with hunger, and devoured with burning heat, and with bitter destruction: I will also send the teeth of beasts upon them, with the poison of serpents of the dust. ‎ שְׁאוֹל is first used in the context of salvation through God in Psalms I will extol thee, O Lord; for thou hast lifted me up, and hast not made my foes to rejoice over me. 2 O Lord my God, I cried unto thee, and thou hast healed me. 3 O Lord, thou hast brought up my soul from the grave (שְׁאוֹל) thou hast kept me alive, that I should not go down to the pit. A note on the word “soul.” Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  The word “soul” in the Bible comes primarily from the Hebrew נֶפֶשׁ and Greek ψυχή. It is used to describe the vital force within all living creatures, first seen in Genesis. And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. 21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. The use of the Greek ψυχή is also consistent in the New Testament, again referring to the state of being alive. Jesus confirms this: No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. 25 Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life (ψυχή) what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life (ψυχή) more than meat, and the body than raiment? 26 Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? 27 Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? 28 And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: 29 And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? 31 Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? 32 (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. 33 But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. The Greek terms whence “hell” is derived further affirm the context of hell/the grave. γέεννα, from the Hebrew בֶּן־הִנֹּם גֵּיא, Gehenna γέεννα is a direct reference to an actual place in the Bible: This then was the lot of the tribe of the children of Judah by their families; even to the border of Edom the wilderness of Zin southward was the uttermost part of the south coast. [....] And the border went up by the valley of the son of Hinnom unto the south side of the Jebusite; the same is Jerusalem: and the border went up to the top of the mountain that lieth before the valley of Hinnom (γέεννα ) westward, which is at the end of the valley of the giants northward: And the king sent, and they gathered unto him all the elders of Judah and of Jerusalem. 2 And the king went up into the house of the Lord, and all the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem with him, and the priests, and the prophets, and all the people, both small and great: and he read in their ears all the words of the book of the covenant which was found in the house of the Lord. 3 And the king stood by a pillar, and made a covenant before the Lord, to walk after the Lord, and to keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes with all their heart and all their soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book. And all the people stood to the covenant. [....] And he brought all the priests out of the cities of Judah, and defiled the high places where the priests had burned incense, from Geba to Beersheba, and brake down the high places of the gates that were in the entering in of the gate of Joshua the governor of the city, which were on a man's left hand at the gate of the city. 9 Nevertheless the priests of the high places came not up to the altar of the Lord in Jerusalem, but they did eat of the unleavened bread among their brethren. 10 And he defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the children of Hinnom (γέεννα ), that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire to Molech. Ahaz was twenty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem: but he did not that which was right in the sight of the Lord, like David his father: 2 For he walked in the ways of the kings of Israel, and made also molten images for Baalim. 3 Moreover he burnt incense in the valley of the son of Hinnom (γέεννα ), and burnt his children in the fire, after the abominations of the heathen whom the Lord had cast out before the children of Israel. γέεννα is a place of pagan sacrifice; death and physical destruction by fire, unholy, profane, utterly separated from God. This context is important to keep in mind as the word is used in the New Testament, beginning in Matthew, Chapter 5 And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him: And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying, [....] Ye have heard that it was said of them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment: 22 But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell (γέεννα) fire. [....] And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. (γέεννα) 30 And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. (γέεννα) Here, Jesus references total separation from God in the context of γέεννα, a reference his Jewish audience would well understand. Mark’s interpretation is even more specific: And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: 44 Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. What is this place of total separation from God; this place of unquenchable fire? The other keyword used for hell provides additional context. ᾅδης, Hades Paul writes to the Corinthians: 50 Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption. 51 Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, 52 In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. 53 For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. 54 So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. 55 O death, where is thy sting? O grave (ᾅδης) where is thy victory? 56 The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. 57 But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. 58 Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord. Jesus claims victory over hell, the grave, through his second coming. This is consistent with what the Bible says about the fate of hell (ᾅδης) in Revelation: And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever. 11 And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. 12 And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. 13 And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works. 14 And death and hell (ᾅδης) were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. 15 And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire. As part of God’s final judgement of mankind, the dead are brought forth from hell, the grave, to be judged, whereupon the wicked and hell itself, the grave, are consumed by fire in the everlasting finality of the second death. According to the Bible, hell is the fate of unrepentant sinners Jesus warned about, Sheol, Hades, Gehenna; the final and total separation from God that awaits Satan, his angels and the wicked. It is this hell, grave, from which the wicked are not redeemed, and therefore are destroyed by the fire of divine judgement that is the second death, a death which is eternal and final. Much of the traditional Christian concept of an otherworldly plane of individual, amorphous spirits in eternal, fiery torment comes from Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Greco-Roman traditions and beliefs about the afterlife. That said, there is a firm Biblical basis for a hell that is the grave, and for the wicked, that grave is their ultimate fate. Jesus was clear: 1Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. 2In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. 3And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. 4And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know. 5Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way? 6Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. 7If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him. 8Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us. 9Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father? 10Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? the words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works. 11Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or else believe me for the very works' sake. 12Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father. 13And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it. Jesus is God and he is the only salvation from the fate of death in an eternal grave. Paul affirms this as well: And the multitude rose up together against them: and the magistrates rent off their clothes, and commanded to beat them. 23 And when they had laid many stripes upon them, they cast them into prison, charging the jailor to keep them safely: 24 Who, having received such a charge, thrust them into the inner prison, and made their feet fast in the stocks. 25 And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang praises unto God: and the prisoners heard them. 26 And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken: and immediately all the doors were opened, and every one's bands were loosed. 27 And the keeper of the prison awaking out of his sleep, and seeing the prison doors open, he drew out his sword, and would have killed himself, supposing that the prisoners had been fled. 28 But Paul cried with a loud voice, saying, Do thyself no harm: for we are all here. 29 Then he called for a light, and sprang in, and came trembling, and fell down before Paul and Silas, 30 And brought them out, and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved? 31 And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house. 32 And they spake unto him the word of the Lord, and to all that were in his house. 33 And he took them the same hour of the night, and washed their stripes; and was baptized, he and all his, straightway. 34 And when he had brought them into his house, he set meat before them, and rejoiced, believing in God with all his house. 35 And when it was day, the magistrates sent the serjeants, saying, Let those men go.

Runner Up Post - Iskar

Theistic evolution makes no sense

That presumes that judgement is a point in time, with a distinctive "before" and "after". But since judgement, reckoning, parousia, second coming (call it what you will) is an act of God, who is above time and space, I think confining it such is extrapolating human limitations of thought in an inadmissible way. (Even the word "act of God" is somewhat inadequate, as "act" implies being bound by the passage of time.) If I had to approach it with human means, I'd rather seek the analogy from relativity: Just as the Big Bang is not the beginning of time, as beginning implies a relation to a preexisting timescale, the parousia would not be the end of time, but a point where all of time is concentrated. The Scripture was written by humans shaped by their particular experience of life and knowledge and understanding available to them and we must burn away the slag of that historical context to approach the divine truths they were inspired with to write down. Maybe people in 70AD Judea could not conceive of time being actually part of curvable spacetime, concepts of supratemporality etc., but we are, and we were given brains by God for a reason, to ever better understand his creation and ever closer approach the truths contained in Scripture, as buried as they may be below historical ballast and personal bias of the human writers.

Runner Up Post - EricD

Hannibal Barca: Leadership, not Tactics

The name "Hannibal" is famous in the annals of military history. Hannibal Barca was one of the greatest commanders of Mediterranean Antiquity. His three crushing victories over the Romans at Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae are rightly renowned as some of the most tactically brilliant victories ever fought. Even in the long stalemate after Cannae, when Hannibal wandered with his army through southern Italy like wayward homeless bandits, the fact that he survived the overwhelming Roman resources and still managed to score crushing victories against the consular armies which still challenged him are testaments to his skill. Just holding his army together for such a long and hard campaign against such a formidable opponent as the Roman Republic and their Italian confederates is a testament to his strength of will and ability as a leader. It has often perplexed me how incapable Hannibal seems to have been at prosecuting sieges though. In comparison to his stellar record of victories in pitched field battles, his record for sieges was quite miserable. I don't think a lack of ability or education in sieges can explain this difficulty Hannibal had in Italy, given that he was successful against Saguntum at the beginning of the war, and appears to have been well-educated in military matters by his father Hamilcar and perhaps (We can guess) by the study of Hellenistic military history and texts. So why did Hannibal, the great genius Carthaginian general, have such difficulty in laying siege? His lack of success at sieges was really a critical failure in Hannibal's campaigns in Italy. Sieges were in many ways the truly decisive operation of ancient war. Being able to successful lay siege upon and take an opposing power's fortified places was the critical final step to truly subduing an opponent to your will. If you cannot win the siege, often the best you can do is lay waste to the enemy's lands and farms, loot and pillage, and hope to bring them to the negotiating table by winning in the field. If, on the other hand, this fails as it did against the Romans in Italy, then ultimately all your victories in the field will be irrelevant if you cannot in the final measure go against the opponent's fortified places and take them. Hannibal was often curiously inactive after his victories, taking long periods of time to recover after hard-fought battles like Cannae. So why was this? I think part of the answer to that question lies in the social nature of Hannibal's army, and more broadly in the social nature of armies in Antiquity in general. What motivates an army to fight? An army is after all nothing but a collection of hundreds or thousands of individuals, with their own agency, making their own choices to fight or not. There might be many causes which motivate a man to go to war in Antiquity. To defend your home or loved ones, to serve a leader you admire, to advance yourself socially and gain honour and glory, to pillage and plunder the lands of others and enrich yourself. There are many motivations, some noble and others less so. In all cases, one of the most powerful reasons why men remain in battle or on campaign is their horizontal social links: The links of comradeship between soldiers. Now, you may be motivated to go to war, but that does not necessarily mean you will accept the command of another. Obedience in the armies of the pre-modern world was not an automatic assumption as it has become in modern armies. This has several key impacts to how a commander like Hannibal must handle his troops. Why does a modern soldier obey their commanders? Many reasons. In many militaries they are volunteers who have chosen this as their vocation. A good officer or NCO is often highly respected by their troops. However, the troops are also inculcated with a habit of obedience and discipline throughout their training, before they are ever placed in an actual battle or on an actual campaign. A modern military, as in Canada or the United States, is in many ways close to a total institution, which in a regular unit can administer and order almost every aspect of its soldiers' lives. The military has an institutional identity within society, to which its members learn a culture of obedience. It is not just "the army" but "The Army". The modern military has many legal powers over its members, which its chains of command are empowered to enforce to ensure the discipline and good order of the military. Additionally: Desertion, though not unknown in modern times, is much more difficult to get away with now. Modern militaries have extensive military police branches, and the reach and capability of civilian police branches (Indeed their very existence) is a critical difference from the context of Antiquity. If you desert or go AWOL as a modern soldier, there's a very good chance you will be brought back to the military and be punished. Soldiers of a modern military force would seem miraculously well-behaved and well-disciplined in comparison to the armies of Antiquity. They also have very strong unit morale, very strong social bonds between service members. The situation in Antiquity was quite different. Many armies lacked the cultural or legal powers to punish disobedience at all, and many of the cultures of the Mediterranean region had no tradition of physical punishment for disobedience, or very limited versions of it. The militaries of Antiquity were, in most cases, not standing forces which were maintained as near-total institutions in the modern way. In most cases they were seasonal forces, raised for a given campaign, and generally maintained existing civilian social bonds. Time available for training was often very limited, and so maintaining peacetime social bonds meant essentially "instant" unit morale for a force in war without the necessity of long training periods to bond strangers together. This also meant that the elites of peacetime life, the nobles and aristocrats and big men of a community, often became the leaders in wartime of their own local communal unit. The companies of the Athenian army were based on the tribes of Athens, for example. These officers were also often (at least in the Greek armies) elected by their men, giving them an authority dependent upon their troops's acceptance of them and independent of their chain of command to the overall commander of an army. Other armies from more aristocratic or monarchical societies, like Thessaly or Makedon pre-Philip II, were based on the retinues of landowning noblemen, and the lesser aristocrats who served them. The overall army of a King would thus be a "retinue of retinues" (Your retinue of nobles, and their retinues, and so forth). Each leader within your army thus has his own independent power base, and at the same time is in his own way beholden to the men. Men who don't want to continue campaigning, because your discipline is too harsh or your leadership does not inspire confidence, can desert. They can pick up in the night and take off, and you have little to stop them from doing so and little means of bringing them back if they do. This is quite a different dynamic than how command works in modern armies. The ancient commander needs to rely even more on their own charisma, their oratory, and leadership by persuasion and example, because they lack the institutional supports to their authority which the modern commander has. A key point to understand here is the concept of "Leadership Capital". That can be defined as: Your ability to extract or enforce obedience to your command from individuals whom may not want to be doing the thing that you need them to do. Leadership capital is a renewable but finite resource. When you, the leader, are doing anything which builds your follower's trust or respect in you, you are building your leadership capital. When you demand that your followers do something which they really don't want to do, which in war means it is dangerous or unpleasant or may result in their likely injury or death, you are spending leadership capital. Fail to build enough of it, and spend it too much and too freely, and your followers' patience with and obedience to you will run out. This can cripple a commander. A modern military officer or NCO is invested with a certain amount of inherent leadership capital by dint of their position and rank within the modern institution, which they can then further build up with their personal ability, charisma, and prowess. However, in Antiquity, often leadership capital had to be entirely built by the individual commander, and any cultural or institutional leadership capital was much more comparatively limited in availability. I posted a piece before on TWC, The Disobedient Roman Soldier, which touched on some of the social aspects of an army in Antiquity through the lens of incidents of military disobedience in the Roman armies. Discipline in the Roman armies was seen as uncommonly harsh for the time, the Romans put people to death for desertion. Yet all the same Roman military history is full of anecdotes and incidences of Roman soldiers being disobedient and headstrong, disobeying the orders of the leaders they had sworn sacred oaths to obey. If the uncommonly harsh discipline of the Romans could not fully control their soldiers, how much more willful and headstrong would the armies of others with less harsh customs have been? It is often said of Alexander the Great that he achieved as much as he did because of the army his father built and bequeathed to him. Alexander was one of the great captains of military history to be sure, but he had the privilege of commanding perhaps the most professional army in the world at the time, and of commanding that army with the cultural and institutional expectation of obedience and deference which was due to him as the King of Makedon. As the King, he had a certain degree of leadership capital by dint of that. But even Alexander had to build his leadership capital, continually proving himself and his prowess to his Macedonians, riding and fighting in the forefront and thick of battle. But Alexander had the necessary leadership capital, both by his personal prowess and as the King of Makedon, to order an army to sit down and lay a siege and get them to do it successfully. This is a considerable feat of leadership. That brings us back to Hannibal the Barcid. What was the nature of his army? The Romans stood as the hegemon of a Italian confederation which Rome had led successfully in war for many decades, and the Roman consuls were legally vested with the imperium, the legal and religious right to demand obedience, which meant a certain degree of positional leadership capital. The Macedonians were the feudal subjects of their King, bound to him by ancient tradition and custom. Hannibal, on the other hand, was leading a very ad hoc and cobbled together multi-national force. He had Liby-Phoenicians from the Carthaginian homeland, he had Numidian cavalry, he had Iberians from the tribes and peoples his father Hamilcar had subdued during his campaigns in Iberia, he had Celts from his Gallic allies, he had men of the Balearic Isles, his troops were from many nations and peoples. In many ways it may have resembled a feudal "retinue of retinues", as Hannibal's Iberians, Gauls, and Numidians seem to have been led by their own chieftains and princes, whom Hannibal had swayed to his cause. His contingents spoke different languages, they had different customs, they worshipped different gods. Many of the contingents would have hailed from tribes which in other times had warred with each other. Those contingents may have had unit morale within themselves, but building those critical horizontal bonds of solidarity to hold the entire army together in battle would have been extremely difficult. Each contingent and company would have had its own leaders, its own officers, and like those men were prideful and self-aggrandizing elites. All of them had been welded together into Hannibal's army by different purposes and promises. Hannibal would have had to manage a massive amount of egos and personality and cultural conflicts within his army. Against this challenge he did not have the positional leadership capital which was granted to a King of Macedon or a Roman consul. He only had his personal authority, stemming from his own charisma, his ability to inspire, his intelligence, and his prowess, perhaps somewhat aided also by being the son of the famous Hamilcar Barca. Earning the respect and loyalty of such an army, managing its many inherent conflicts, and commanding it successfully (Indeed convincing it to follow commands at all, let alone complex battle plans), must have been an immense challenge to Hannibal, and it is a testament to his great ability as a leader that he was as successful as he was with such a force. So why was Hannibal unable to successfully lay sieges in Italy? Why could he not assault Rome? I would argue that a part of the reason lay in the social nature and the challenges of leadership in such a divided and socially cumbersome army. So long as he could keep his army moving, so long as there were Italian lands to plunder and a Roman consular army ahead of them to fight (An immediate threat, in other words), Hannibal could keep his army together. But asking an army to sit down, stationary, for the long and wearisome struggle of a siege? That is a different challenge entirely. It took Hannibal 8 months to take even the comparatively small city of Saguntum, how much worse could a siege of Rome have been? A siege is months or years of enforced inactivity, of long, boring, dreary waiting, and cruel and often attritional assaults and raids. Often in an ancient siege, the besiegers starve just as much as the besieged, as an army will exhaust the food resources of the local landscape. Hannibal may have had the leadership capital to make his men follow him all over Italy, fighting Roman army after Roman army, but he judged perhaps that the morale and obedience of his force was too fragile to risk against in a great siege of Rome or the other principle cities of the Italian confederation. This might have been especially the case as he was reliant on his Iberians and Gauls, who may have lacked a tradition or experience of prolonged sieges in their own cultures at that time. I think Hannibal was mindful of the limits of his leadership capital, and his often prolonged periods of inactivity after major and fierce battles would likely have been spent rebuilding his army's trust in him, and tending to their fragile morale. We remember Hannibal for his brilliant victories over the Romans, for the genius of his tactics. I think we should remember, however, that for the commander in a pre-modern army, command was more leadership than tactics, more art than science. Keeping an army together, keeping them on the campaign, managing the conflicts of proud and willful leaders, not having them all desert, making men obey orders when you don't have the institutional or cultural enforcement of obedience, these are considerable leadership challenges. That Hannibal was able to achieve what he did, with the handicaps he had in the social nature of his army, indicates his enormous ability and strength of character and I suspect that that was as much, or more, the cause of his successes than his genius for tactics. When you seek to understand the actions of ancient armies or ancient generals, you have to keep in mind the social context in which they lived and operated. Armchair commanders will often say "Well, obviously this loser would have won this battle if he had merely done this instead of that", and that's easy to say from an armchair. But remember this: Your troops, your followers, your subordinates (In any form of social organization with hierarchical leadership, not just an army) are not robots, they are not computer programs, they are human beings with minds of their own. Only by understanding this can you understand history.

[Love Mountain]

PotF# 35

Winning Post - Abdülmecid I

Islamophobia in the West

Islam has never been expulsed from the European continent, though, but, on the contrary, it can boast an uninterrupted presence there since the 7th century AD. That's significantly more than the most recently Christianised regions of the same continent in the extreme north and east, like the Baltics and Scandinavia. I suppose you are referring to the Reconquista achieved by the Iberian kingdoms, but Muslims continued to have presence in several parts of Europe, like Bosnia, Thrace and Crimea. By that logic, someone could argue that the Jews were also removed from Europe, because the degrees of the Catholic monarchs of Portugal and Spain targeted not only Muslims, but Jews as well. However, both these persecuted religious groups successfully found refuge in more tolerant lands, where Jewish and Muslim communities already existed and prospered. As a result, Muslims existed in Europe well into the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries and, at a certain degree, participated in a few of its major historical events. When it comes to Muslims in European wars, for example, we usually think of French colonial regiments, which defended France's territorial integrity in 1871 and to which Bismarck explicitly ordered the Prussian soldiers to give no quarter. However, Muslim soldiers, indigenuous to Europe, fought in both World Wars for the interests of all four different sides, the Central Powers and the Entente, the Axis and the Allies. Not that, in my opinion, a hypothetical complete ethnic cleansing would legitimise any current harsh treatment of a religious group, solely based on their creed. Western Europe is supposedly proud of its humanitarian principles, according to which, secularism and religious tolerance are endorsed, while sectarianism and collective guilt are rejected. Unfortunately, our debate here is not theoretical, because the hateful fruits of Islamophobia have already matured in post-Soviet Europe. Terrorist attacks have claimed the lives of tens of innocent victims in Norway, Germany and elsewhere, in the name of religious purity, while the most recent massacre, almost unanimously recognized as a genocide, on European soil targeted one of the oldest Muslim communities in Europe, which had been left largely intact, despite the violence, discrimination and population exchanges that had so dramatically altered the demographic composition of the Balkans during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Therefore, I can rationalise Islamophobia and, generally speaking, the oppression of Muslims under the guise of European identity, only from a Christian fundamentalist or nationalist western European perspective, according to which, only certain parts of the continent and only certain aspects of the cultures that have influenced Europe, are entitled to define the so-called European civilization. That methodological approach usually focus on the "Latin" and "Germanic" parts of Europe, but, as previously illustrated, that strategy is dangerously inconsistent and can lead to a couple of embarassing self-contradictions, which further weaken the already fragile logical foundations of the Islamophobic narrative.

Runner Up Post - sumskilz

Jewish professor pretended to be black - and now apologizes.

"My heart goes out to any Black person who invited Jessica Krug into their sacred space under the assumption that she was Black too." lol The only real crime here is that this woman is being bullied into cancelling herself by a mob of anti-trans bigots. If she identifies as black, she should double down. I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at here tho. Are you pulling some sort of dog whistle about black privilege? I hope you are. There was a half black guy in one of my graduate level anthropology courses who successfully argued that he shouldn't be required to write the term paper that was the basis for the grade in the course because "African peoples were not historically literate". Instead he (and he alone) was able to turn in an art project, which consisted of images from the internet printed on a color printer and glued to poster board, digital printing and glue sticks evidently being technologies more traditionally associated with "blackness". Same guy used to douse himself with watermelon scented spray before going into any faculty member's office to make one of his unreasonable demands, with the idea that the faculty member would be so unnerved by his/her own racist thoughts that he/she would agree to almost anything just to end the uncomfortable situation. Which is obviously not fair to the other students, yet I still managed to find it hilarious. As far as the other dog whistle, it's not coming from alhoon. You see, it's very important to some people that Ashkenazi Jews be considered white, for essentially the same reason that this guy must be a white Hispanic: White people are bad... On the other hand, if you're someone who thinks being white is exceptionally good and that being non-white is bad, then it is important that Ashkenazi Jews be considered non-white.

[Love Mountain]

PotF# 36

Winning Post - Cope

Death of George Floyd and Subsequent Riots.

The fact they applied for a warrant that doesn't require that you identify yourself as police is all the evidence i really need. The lawsuit the city settled for and the dropped charges against the boyfriend also support that. I'm referring to the officers' criminal culpability (since the conclusion of the grand jury is what reignited interest in this case). Local authorities will typically be liable civilly if one of their officers wounds or kills an innocent bystander irrespective of whether any criminal negligence is involved. On the point about the warrant, the officers cannot be held accountable for executing a legal writ (or a writ they reasonably believed to be legal) unless they had fabricated evidence in order to attain it. In that sense, whether they announced themselves or not is irrelevant. Nevertheless, why the jurisdiction allowed officers without specialist training, equipment and planning to carry out a no-knock warrant is beyond me. They couldn't convict him at all. He's protected under Kentucky's stand your ground law. This law can't be applied against the police but in this case Walker was unaware they were police and the police likely didn't announce themselves. He could easily win a case on that. They simply had no case to convict him. Then we agree that most of the evidence points to Walker being unaware that the domicile was being raided by the police when he discharged his weapon.

Runner Up Post - PointOfViewGun

Islamophobia in the West

This is a lie... Sahih al-Bukhari 6922 states, and I quote ..."according to the statement of Allah's Messenger, 'Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.'" As this is a part of the Islamic source material - its a part of Islam. For us dirty unbelievers that essentially translates into *Mohammed said - anyone who leaves Islam, kill them*. So that settles that, I think. Quran doesn't prescribe any worldly punishment for apostasy. Hadith, the human creation, that differs in use from region to region, can not dictate what Islam is. Female Circumcision (FGM/C) between the Incorrect Use of Science and the Misunderstood Doctrine n 1998, scholars from over 35 Islamic Countries came together at Al-Azhar University, Cairo to discuss FGM/C alongside other issues related to reproductive health. They came to the conclusion that FGM/C is a habit that is non-obligatory in Islam, given that it has never been mentioned in the Holy Qur'an, and there are no citations in Prophet Muhammad's Hadith containing any evidence of authentic isnad (chain of narration) that could justify a Sharia provision on so important an issue for human life as FGM/C. Further, Muslim jurists have not reached unanimous consent on FGM/C. Egypt mufti says female circumcision forbidden CAIRO, June 24 (Reuters) - Egypt's state-appointed Grand Mufti said on Sunday that female genital cutting was forbidden by Islam after an 11-year-old girl died while undergoing the procedure at a private medical clinic in southern Egypt. I am hardly an expert on FGM-matters but I am pretty sure that this "99%-claim" is a fabrication. I can not find anything that actually support or confirm that in the Prevalence of female genital mutilation wiki-page or in the Religious views on female genital mutilation wiki-page. Neither can confirm or provide basis for that impressive 99% claim. However, I certainly can find plenty that contradicts it and suggest otherwise. UNICEF lists the top 5 countries with the highest levels of support for FGM - Mali, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Egypt - and all 5 just happens to be Islam-majority countries. ...What a coincidence... And yet, supposedly 99% of all FGM is still somehow magically committed by non-Muslims almost exclusively - according to the claim. It does not add up very well, now does it? The "99%-claim" also provides us with a bunch of other unexplained paradoxes for us to consider as well. I will just forward a few here... That's not what I was claiming. I was pointing out that Mithradates' claim "99% of FGM committed by Muslims" was false. ..."It's a region specific practice, not religion specific." Folks, I'm pretty sure this claim is a fabrication as well... After all, that quite some "region" we are talking about there - it is spanning from the coast of west Africa all the way to Egypt and horn of Africa, and then it continues from the Arabic peninsula to parts of the middle east then parts of Iran and Pakistan - and then again in Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei. Curiously, it also happens to match up rather well with many (if not most) Islamic territories along the way somehow - what strange coincidence, isn't it? Furthermore, multiple Islamic councils all over the world have de facto offered their theological opinions and conclusions on FGM - that would be utterly redundant if FGM was not somehow relevant or important to Islam somehow - as is claimed. Obviously that is not true and thus we have yet another fabrication, on that note... FGM is mainly an African problem. It predates both Islam and Christianity where neither have any basis for doing it. Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: A statistical overview and exploration of the dynamics of change NIGER55% of Christian girls and women have undergone FGM/C, compared to 2% of Muslim girls and women If its such a creation of Islam why do Christians practice it? Meanwhile: Study finds 'huge' fall in FGM rates among African girls Using data from 29 countries and going back to 1990, the report's authors found that the biggest fall in cutting was in East Africa. The prevalence rate there dropped from 71% of girls under 14 in 1995, to 8% in 2016, the study said. Some countries with lower rates - including Kenya and Tanzania, where 3-10% of girls endure FGM - helped drive down the overall figure. In North Africa, the rate fell from almost 60% in 1990 to 14% in 2015. West Africa also saw a significant drop, from 74% of girls in 1996, to 25% in 2017. ..."Vast majority of Muslims don't practice it." Its hard to tell for sure folks... It is clear is that at least half of all Islamic countries in the world do practice FGM to various extents - and that circumstance alone suggests that many, if not a majority of Muslims do practice it somehow. As many Muslims do live in such Islamic countries we can be rather certain that it is not a nominal minority we talking about here (Pakistan and Iran might be exceptions here). However without the hard data one can only speculate on this, but it is clear it is nowhere close to a small insignificant minority - as we are led to believe by the claim - and in that sense, the claim is obviously untrue and blatantly dishonest. As is so often the case with various pro-Islamic activism. If in doubt, Youtube have plenty of clips of such stuff... This is where bigotry kicks in hard. You base your claims on data that you now claim to be misleading just so that you can expand your viligication. Likely less than 20% of the Muslim world practices FGM and the numbers are falling. There are even Muslim majority countries where it virtually doesn't exist. The fact is only a fraction of Muslims practice FGM and these are concentrated in a number of states mainly in Africa. So, yes, vast majority of Muslims do not practice it.

[Love Mountain]

PotF# 37

Winning Post - Cookiegod

Discussion and Debate Community Thread

As much as I dislike the general policy of the United States on the world stage, keep in mind the alternative is probably China. I'm not saying that U.S. can't get any better, but we should be careful what we wish for. What is it with people and that dichotomy that China would take over if the US started to behave. No one's saying that the US can't have alliances, that it can't have foreign influence. If your argument is that your system only works if it constantly regime changes, invades, bombs, destroys countries, then maybe, just maybe, that's not a good system. Nota bene: Not my claim, but that of "patriots". Can somebody tell Russia to stop saving the day in Syria? I don't think they can take much more of it. Sure. Trading slaves and antique relics is tight. Spoiler for Quope:  The disinformation in this post needs to be addressed: 1. There is significant disagreement among Americans (both scholars and laypersons) about whether the use of atomic weaponry against Japan was either necessary or justifiable. What is clear, however, is that no one who has considered the topic seriously treats the bombings in a celebratory fashion or as source of national pride. The orthodox view is that the A-Bomb shortened the war and saved lives, not that the death of civilians is to be commended for its own sake. 2. The insinuation that any view other than the revisionist position is anti-intellectual, ahistorical, immoral or indicative of the "lackluster state of the American education system" is itself ignorant of the historical record and valid alternative viewpoints. This is especially the case when such insinuations are largely predicated on counter-factual history. 3. Unlike in the Soviet Union, disagreement over historical truth is tolerated in the US; discussion of sensitive and/or contentious topics is facilitated; and criticism of the gov't is allowed. 4. The claims you make about the terms of the Japanese surrender are heavily contested, if not false. Here is an accurate summary: Some analysts have argued that maintenance of the imperial system was the only issue blocking a Japanese surrender in late July or early August (before the A-bomb), and that the American leaders knew this or should have known it.’ Such an interpretation of the Japanese position is ill-founded. The Japanese government was badly split both on how and whether to end the war, and even the Japanese “peace” forces were unsure, unsteady, and uncertain… A careful reading of the available Japanese sources (especially the cables between Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo in Tokyo and Ambassador Naote Sato in Moscow) for late July and early August reveals that the Japanese Foreign Office did not believe that maintenance of the imperial system was the only sticking point. In fact, in the weeks before Hiroshima, the Japanese foreign minister was unprepared even to specify peace terms to his own ambassador in Moscow, despite the fact that Sato was directed to approach the Soviets to serve as intermediaries in peace negotiations... The Japanese army, by withdrawing its representative from the cabinet, could have destroyed any move toward surrender. The militarists wanted honor, which meant far more than just a guarantee of the imperial system. “I was unable to keep the military from insisting,” Togo recalled, “that they were not beaten, that they could fight another battle, and that they did not want to end the war until they had staged one last campaign.” Even after Soviet entry into the war and the first atomic bombing, as Togo later reported, the army leaders still wanted one more campaign. When Togo “asked whether or not they believed they could ward off an invasion of the homeland, . . . the army chief of staff [General Yoshijiro Umezu] replied that, if we were lucky, we could repulse the invaders before they landed, but that all he could say with assurance was that we could destroy the major part of the invading army.” Given the power of the militarists and their desire, it is quite unlikely-but not impossible-that an American guarantee of the imperial system would have produced a Japanese surrender before I November on terms acceptable to the United States. Understanding the Atomic Bomb and the Japanese Surrender: Missed Opportunities, Little-Known Near Disasters, and Modern Memory, Diplomatic History, B. J. Bernstein, 1995 pp. 227-273. I like how your approach to historical debate is citing one book and calling dissent disinformation. Thing is that's not how it works. As to how accurate your summary is, we'll discuss that next. Let's clarify first though that I did not claim that "disagreement over historical truth is not tolerated in the US" and that it was in the Soviet Union as insinuated by you. You're pulling that straight out of your arse. I'm saying very little of it is taking place, as is evidenced by the still over 50% of the public endorsing those crimes. Next: 1) Pay attention to the fact that to justify this you cannot point to failed negotiations, for the simple reason that the US never reciprocated and engaged in any. Instead you're left with claiming that those were "unlikely" to succeed anyway. 2) Pay attention to the fact that for one, you do not provide quotes of the Japanese cables, that the attempts to make peace were made through Switzerland, not Moscow, and that in any administration there's a huge amount of paper work, and thus it's always possible to nitpick what ones narrative is, even if it's inaccurate. Not saying that this has to be the case here, since the only factually based conclusion Bernstein is drawing in your quotes is that the military faction and the honour were strong in ww2 Japan. Not that surprising tbh; jumping from those quotes to the conclusion that "a peace was unlikely" is quite a leap, but also factually wrong since the nukes did not force Japan's surrender, the Soviets did. And 3) it's completely irrelevant what the Japanese were discussing in those cables, as they did not factor into the US decision making in the slightest. The only thing that matters, is the decision taken by Truman and on which basis he made this decision. In his 1966 book The Secret Surrender, Dulles recalled that "On July 20, 1945, under instructions from Washington, I went to the Potsdam Conference and reported there to Secretary [of War] Stimson on what I had learned from Tokyo — they desired to surrender if they could retain the Emperor and their constitution as a basis for maintaining discipline and order in Japan after the devastating news of surrender became known to the Japanese people." Having to rely on the Japanese cables to their ambassador in Moscow is in itself already telling. The US did not even attempt this route and thus the only thing that the justifiers can do is denounce the success likelihood as unlikely. The Japanese peace feelers went out to the US primarily through Switzerland, which OSS Chief William Donovan reported to Truman in May and June of 1945. "These suggested, even at this point, that the U.S. demand for unconditional surrender might well be the only serious obstacle to peace." [from the same book]. Alperovitz in his book pretty much went through the list, pointing out with documentary proof that every top presidential civilian and military advisor, with the exception of James Byrnes, along with Prime Minister Churchill and his top British military leadership, urged Truman to revise the unconditional surrender policy so as to allow the Japanese to surrender and keep their emperor. This advice was given to the president prior to the Potsdam Proclamation, where the "Unconditional surrender - or else!" - proclamation would be made. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William Leahy is quoted as having said that he "thought the business of recognizing the continuation of the Emperor was a detail which should have been solved easily." He was one of many strongly imploring Trump not to use the bombs, and instead revising the peace making process. The commander in chief of the US Fleet and chief of naval operations, Ernest J. King, stated that the naval blockade and prior bombing of Japan in March of 1945 had rendered the Japanese helpless and that the use of the atomic bomb was both unnecessary and immoral. Then there's also Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, quoted in a press conference on September 22, 1945 as: The Admiral took the opportunity of adding his voice to those insisting that Japan had been defeated before the atomic bombing and Russia's entry into the war. And in a subsequent speech at the Washington Monument on October 5, 1945: The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into the war. Or Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the Third Fleet, who was publicly quoted as stating on September 9, 1945, that the atomic bomb was used because they had a "toy and they wanted to try it out" and stating the following: The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment […]. It was a mistake to ever drop it. We can hop over to the army, and we'll see that on or around July 20, 1945, General Eisenhower urged Truman in a personal visit not to use the atomic bomb and stating that it wasn't necessary for Truman to "succumb" to Byrnes, whom I'll talk about next. It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing […].[T]o use the atomic bomb, to kill and terrorize civilians, without even attempting [negotiations], was a double crime. The fact that the negotiations weren't even attempted, isn't even disputed by your own source, cope. However, the one guy who Trumpan listened to happened to be his close friend James Byrnes, whom he made the secretary of state right about that time. Byrnes was also the guy convincing Truman to postpone the Potsdam conference so that they'd know for certain if the tests would be successful. Truman then advised Stalin during Potsdam that a new massively destructive weapon was now available to America, which Byrnes hoped would make Stalin back off from any excessive demands or activity in the postwar period. The secret order to drop the nukes was issued by Truman on July 25th, the Potsdam ultimatum only happened a day later, with the unconditional surrender demand which both Truman and Byrnes were convinced Japan would not accept. The bulk of the evidence, as pointed out by Alperovitz, unmistakably points to Byrnes and Truman dropping the bombs to show off to the Soviets abroad and to the congress at home. Next: Every administration produces a huge amount of paperwork, and it's always easy to nitpick stuff to support ones claim, even if it's inaccurate. One cannot judge the success prospects from the cables to an ambassador who was largely out of the peace making attempts. That the military faction in Japan was strong, as is the honour culture, is widely known. But it didn't bodge because of the nukes anyway. It surrendered because of the Soviets: The United States bombed 68 cities in the summer of 1945. If you graph the number of people killed in all 68 of those attacks, you imagine that Hiroshima is off the charts, because that’s the way it’s usually presented. In fact, Hiroshima is second. Tokyo, a conventional attack, is first in the number killed. If you graph the number of square miles destroyed, Hiroshima is sixth. If you graph the percentage of the city destroyed, Hiroshima is 17th. It is for the same reason that it didn't force the Japanese to surrender also very much a stretch to claim that the US leadership expected these bombs to convince them. And despite of all this, to this day over 50% of Americans still feel the use of nukes is justified, and enough of them are gung ho about them that you regularly have high ranking politicians calling for their offensive use even today. As contested as it this topic has become in the United States by the apologists today, it was not back then amongst those who were actually involved: A great majority of scientists were opposed to the sudden employment of the atom bomb. In Einstein's judgment, the dropping of the bomb was a political-diplomatic decision rather than a military or scientific decision. The "Hiroshima saved lives" myth is the real disinformation campaign, and it's pretty well documented how it spread out, starting from James Bryant Conant, chairman of the National Defense Research Committee during the war, and also the developer of poison gasses during ww1 and president of Harvard University, who rightfully had to fear about his future scientific career. His tale was then also endorsed by Truman, for similar obvious reasons. The numbers of American military casualties saved by the nukes were inflated as the years went on. I'll end with a quote again from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as quoted by his secretary Dorothy Ringquist: Dorothy, we will regret this day. The United States will suffer, for war is not to be waged on women and children. A shame that people in his country don't seem to get it even today.

Runner Up Post - sumskilz

Immortality of the Soul in the Bible

In 1 Kings 19:4 and Jonah 4:8 there is this expression: wayyišʾal ʾeṯ- nap̄šōw lāmūṯ (וַיִּשְׁאַ֤ל אֶת־ נַפְשׁוֹ֙ לָמ֔וּת). Which is "and he asked for his nephesh to die". I don't think you will find anything explicit in the OT/Hebrew Bible. Judaism is ambiguous about the existence of an afterlife. Various Jewish movements have differed on the possibility precisely because there is no clear scriptural answer. If you consider the Greek version of Sirach canonical, there is an explicit answer, but a lot of Christian denominations don't consider it canonical, and there is good reason to believe it has been modified. The Hebrew original was written between 200 and 175 BCE most likely in or near Jerusalem. According to the prologue of the Greek version, it was translated from Hebrew in Egypt sometime between 133 BCE and about 110 BCE. The prologue, written by Ben Sira’s grandson, likewise states “Not only this book, but even the Law itself, the Prophecies, and the rest of the books differ not a little when read in the original.” Hebrew versions of Sirach have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, at Masada, and in the Cairo Geniza. The oldest extant copy in Hebrew is from the First Century BCE, the oldest extent copy of the Greek version is contained within the Codex Vatinicus from the Fourth Century CE. There are several differences concerning afterlife between the Hebrew and Greek versions: Hebrew 2.9 - You who fear the lord, hope for good things, for lasting joy and mercy. Greek 2.9 - You who fear the lord, hope for good things, for lasting joy and mercy, for his reward is an everlasting gift with joy. Hebrew 7.17 - The expectation of mortals is worms. Greek 7.17 - The punishment of the ungodly is fire and worms. Hebrew 19.19 - [no such text exists] Greek 19.19 – Those who do what is pleasing in him enjoy the fruit of the tree of immortality.

[Lord Thesaurian]

PotF# 38

Winning Post - Cope

Discussion and Debate Community Thread

Spoiler for Cookie#1:  Your interlocutor is somewhat manipulative and not in good faith. >Quoting "Why America Dropped the Bomb, Donald Kagan, 1995" strongly implied either a book or a paywalled scientific article (he even said directly to me in discord that it was a "peer reviewed article"). It is neither. Since you already had the site open, why did you not provide the link to it? >Donald Kagan, like his children, is a politically very active person agitating for regime change wars. He has skin in the game. That Alperovitz would get such a response from the hawks was not surprising. >For the most part his rebuttal of Alperovitz was a value judgement, including the passage quoted by cope. There is again, no reason whatsoever to take Kagan's claims on good faith. >Secondary and tertiary sources usually get beaten by primary sources. I smacked out pretty much all the most important people in the US military, and civilians who were involved in the project, and their view on the project. (1) Hitertho, I have cited three authors, Kagan, Bernstein and Sadao. All of them are scholars. All of them disagree with your views (despite your insinuation that no credible academic would do so). Kagan's extensive credentials are available on Yale's website, here. (2) I concede that I mistakenly characterized Kagan's article as peer-reviewed off-site; that mistake bears no relevance to the veracity of Kagain's analysis (which you have yet to challenge beyond gainsaying and appealing to his alleged partisanship). The reason I did not provide a link is because I had downloaded the article as a PDF. (3) All views on whether the use of atomic weaponry was appropriate, including Alperovitz's (whose views are challenged by modern revisionists), are inherently value judgements. (4) Secondary sources are predicated on, and include references to, primary material. That is evidenced by the sources I have presented here. Spoiler for Cookie#2:  If someone after this wants to refute my argument, a good place to start is to tell me why and how Nimitz, Eisenhower, Leahy, etc. were wrong. It's not being done, for obvious reasons. On the basis that speculation and moral judgements cannot be disproven, Nimitz, Eisenhower and Leahy weren't "wrong". Notwithstanding, the following points need to be taken into consideration: (1) No one has speculated that Japan wouldn't have been defeated sans atomic weaponry. It has instead been argued that there is significant evidence indicating that use of the a-bomb shortened the war and overcame the need for the US to invade Japan. (2) It is is not surprising that conventional military leaders like Eisenhower, Leahy and Nimitz were deeply sceptical of the a-bomb, given the extent to which it revolutionized human conflict (and therefore challenged the military orthodoxy). Even so, and to the best of my knowledge, all three men were advocates of the bombing campaigns and constrictive blockades which, by your own admission, caused more civilian suffering than the atomic attacks. (3) The comments of these men do not indicate that Japan agreed to the Potsdam terms solely because of the Soviet intervention (which is your main thesis). Nor do they prove that alignment with orthodox position is anti-intellectual or ahistorical. They serve only to represent the view that the use of atomic weaponry was not necessary to end the war (a point which, as mentioned above, is largely undisputed). Spoiler for Cookie#3:  >Conversely, the last thing in the world I'd ever take on a first basis, would be a politicians speech. The Jewel Voice Broadcast, which btw. doesn't even mention the word surrender, did not have the task of explaining the process of decision making at the chrysanthemum throne. It had the task of getting people to chill down, and also not admit that the military had already been beaten, so indirectly threatening them with a Wunderwaffe was convenient. My interlocutor appeared to claim that the Imperial Rescript on Surrender specifically mentioned the Soviet entry into the war as the reason for the surrender. I posted the transcript of the speech to show that this was false. Spoiler for Cookie#4:  >The Supreme Council of Japan didn't meet on August 6th after Hiroshima to discuss surrender, it did so on August 9th. It didn't meet on that day because of Nagasaki - Nagasaki happened when the meeting was already long ongoing. If Hiroshima had scared them into submission, they would not have waited 74 hours. Instead their meeting happened at the earliest time possible after the Soviet invasion commenced. The reasons for the delay were as follows: (1) Leading gov't figures were not immediately sure, either of the extent of the damage or whether atomic weapons had actually been used (Togo confirmed that atomic weaponry had been used through American broadcasts on the 7th and called a meeting of senior cabinet minsters the same day). (2) The militarists, in typically defiant fashion, sought to minimize the impact of the bomb and obstructed the meeting of the Principals out of a zealous and delusional opposition to surrender (which they knew was the purpose of summoning the council). Notwithstanding, even if the leadership did not meet until the 9th, the decision to convene the Supreme Council came on the 8th, a day before the Soviet declaration of war. This disproves the theory that the Principals were unmoved by the bombings and only hurriedly met after the Russian intervention. Spoiler for Source:  Gaimusho (Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs) ed. Sh?sen Shiroku (The Historical Records of the End of the War), annotations by Jun Etc?), volume 4, pp. 57-60 Spoiler for Cookie#5:  >Finally, again: The Japanese had suffered from 66 conventional large scale bombing runs in addition to the two nuclear ones. The damage from the nukes wasn't worse. From the Japanese perspective, there was not much of a game changer. The US had had, and used the ability to level entire cities long before Hiroshima. Neither Donald Kagan, nor anyone in this thread so far, has provided any compelling argument or even evidence as to why these nukes should have had that effect, never mind presented any counterargument to the many arguments and primary sources presented by me. No one has argued that the damage caused by the atomic bombings was more extensive than the entirety of the conventional allied bombing campaign. The obvious distinction between atomic weaponry and conventional weaponry (which the Japanese leadership recognized) was the magnitude of the destruction which the former could cause in a single strike. It rendered the hold-out strategy insisted upon by the military obsolete, and, as the sources show, clearly influenced the emperor in his decision to break the deadlock between the factions. Setting that aside, the point you make here is self-contradictory: on the one hand you want us to believe that the atomic bombings were so uniquely evil in their destructivity that they violated a criminal threshold; on the other you try to pass them off as being routine, as being so indistinct in their effect from conventional carpet bombing that the Japanese leadership was neither shocked nor moved by them.

Runner Up Post - alhoon

USA elections 2020

Some serious Analysis of Election probabilities Elector (and winning) results based on 50000 simulations. I got the poll aggregates from 538 at 28th of October 2020. I made a number of "voter blocks" equal to 350 + electors x50. I.e. Pennsylvania (20 electors) has 1350 "voter blocks" while Alaska (3 electors) has 500 "voter blocks". I assigned to each "voter block" a chance to vote for Trump, Biden or independent based on the aggregate state polls of 538. I adjusted based on a few assumptions. Whomever wins the state, wins the electors. For Nebraska and Maine, each district gives one elector and the state winner gets the state's 2 electors. Then, I tallied the electors for each candidate. No state was won by independents. Sorry West, Sorry Libertarians, Sorry Greens. Better luck next time. Assumptions: 1% "hidden" Trump vote (I.e. voters that said they will vote for Biden but will vote for Trump) slightly higher enthusiasm for Republicans and ability to "bring out" their voters. I.e. slightly more Republican leaning voters would actually vote than Democrat leaning ones. About 2% of the mailed votes will be considered invalid or arrive to late to count. Of these, 60% will be for Biden and 40% for Trump. The Republicans will not stop the counting of mailed votes, at least in states that matter. NOTE: I consider as a "tie" everything below 273 electors. I.e. if the "winner" ends up with 269-272 electors, it will be the rogue electors of the electoral college that will call the election. As you can see, in the 2020 USA elections there's a 13% chance that the rogue electors will be the ones deciding the election.

[Lord Thesaurian]

PotF# 39

Winning Post - sumskilz

New study confirms that the Sky Disc of Nebra is from the Bronze Age, not Iron Age

So in your opinion do you think the disk can be comfortably dated to the Bronze Age, or is everything in the OP basically on shaky ground and worth disputing? I think it's fair to say nothing has been confirmed. Pernicka et al’s argument is that the totality of the evidence taken together all points to a Bronze age date, but the totality of the evidence is a number of plausible assumptions made by them (disputed by others) which are unsupported by even a single scientific fact. For example, they argue that the Sky Disk and the other artifacts all had soil residue on them consistent with the find site according to the looters. Others disagree, but okay, even if it’s true, that doesn’t tell us anything about the date. It also doesn’t even necessarily mean all the artifacts came from the same site, just that they got soil on them at some point consistent with the site. The gold residue in the ground is better evidence that the disk came from that site, but then we don’t know what other artifacts the looters may have found there that they got away with, and again, it tells us nothing about the date. They write: This overview was triggered by a recently published claim that it is more likely that the Sky Disc was not part of the Nebra hoard and, based on stylistic arguments, should be dated to the Iron Age. And they really were triggered judging by how much they discussed their feelings about it. For example: What is more irritating is the fact that Gebhard and Krause modified the original figure without mentioning this modification in their figure caption. And… It rankles that Gebhard and Krause do not discuss the Pleiades at all because they are present on the sword blade of Allach, according to Peter Kurzmann’s statement. Other than the alleged association with other artifacts, this is all they have to rely on for dating the disk: Although the composition of metal artefacts cannot be used for precise dating, there are nevertheless certain recognisable trends, like the tendency from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age of increasingly adding lead to bronze. I would amend that to “For the most part, the composition of metal artefacts cannot be used to date their manufacture”. This is a rather unique artifact, how does its composition compare to other artifacts of its type? Yeah, I wouldn’t know either. And in any case, it’s not uncommon to find items of the same type in the exact same stratum within a meter of each other, each composed of a somewhat different alloy. Even typological dating of artifacts is uncertain without stratigraphic anchors. For example, there is a type of Achaemenid Period arrowhead that was very common all over the Persian Empire, but then it fell out of use about a century into the Hellenistic Period. And yet, it somehow reappeared in a stratigraphically very well-dated stockpile of weapons from the Bar Kochba revolt. We can assume that maybe the rebels found old weapons to reuse, or maybe they made molds of the old weapons and copied them, but what we can’t assume is that the other artifacts in the stratum date to the Achaemenid Period. In any case, I found Gebhard and Krause’s arguments equally uncompelling, in that they are fine, just that after reading both papers, I don’t have any strong opinion as to when the Sky Disk dates to. Anyway, here is a PDF of that paper if anyone is interested. Although, trigger warning: it has been known to rankle and irritate.

Runner Up Post - antaeus

USA elections 2020

It's not permanent. All it takes is a few major ups to see just how stupid nominations based on anything but merit and competence really are. The private sector is already starting to recoil from the whole women quota thing. Same will happen with racial appointsments. It will get worse for a few years and then it will get better. I almost feel like there's an element of society having to go through this period of discovering a new societal equilibrium. New norms have to be tested and pushed to breaking point to find the appropriate societal balance. Society was once heavily biased, both legally and culturally against non-white-male identity groups. In order for society to change from this paradigm, a new balance that is acceptable to the broadest coalition of identities has to be found. Changing laws addresses the legal aspect of historic biases, but it doesn't directly address the cultural aspect. Feelings of righteous dominance, or of victimisation don't just go away because a piece of paper is signed. They stay with people for life. This can only be addressed over a longer time periods as new members of the broad coalition of formerly-biased-against identities grows up to feel included, and those who grew and developed in a dominant demographic adjust their cognitive world view towards equality. My father still jokes about women in a way that isn't funny to anyone that isn't a white man even though he has started taking on formerly female roles within the household. Cultural change takes time. Because we're talking about emotional states and feelings of individual acceptance in individual circumstances, the end point of this process can not be arbitrarily assigned or prescribed - and certainly it cant be by people who fit the formerly dominant identity group - it has to be tested again and again over generations as the formerly dominant identity group comes to accept their equality, and as the long term consequences of former biases are chipped away at. For us, we are so close in time from a period when non-white-males were both legally and culturally biased against, testing cultural norms is an ongoing process. As the saying goes... You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette, and you have to break a few egos to reshape culture. From the perspective of those people in formerly-biased-against identity groups, that bias has meant in the past that they were unable to reach the potential level of competence that is required to compete equally in a workplace, again, not just legally, but culturally. Addressing the cultural part of this bias takes a long time and as those formerly-biased-against groups gain competence, they're going to become increasingly aware of their systemic handicap. So ironically, the closer we get to equilibrium, the more acute the historic biases will seem, even as they are actually falling away. This does mean that people who used to belong to a dominant demographic will also feel increasing relative victimhood, as they perceive those who they used to have subconscious privilege over put more and more pressure on them. As formerly-biased-against identity groups get closer and closer in competence to the former dominants, in some few cases that sense of new victimhood will be justified, and some who would have succeeded in life through privilege, will now no longer be relatively competent enough to succeed, and will fail. But a new equilibrium will eventually establish.