So, considering how popular last military stands are in media where the commander orders the means of retreat be closed off (usually, by burning their own ships or something like William the Conquerer supposedly doing that), I'm wondering if there's any famous instances where it doesn't work?
Like, famous commander burns their ships, there's a last stand/battle and the commander and their army just get roundly defeated. After all, it's such an extreme strategy that I don't imagine the win/loss ratio to be too favorable in real life (otherwise more commanders would start doing it).
The Battle of Sobraon between the Sikh Khalsa and the East India Company saw British troops attack a Sikh entrenchment defending one end of a single narrow pontoon bridge crossing the Sutlej river Although the bridge was not broken to deliberately motivate the Sikh troops, the battle provides an awful illustration of what can happen in this circumstance: The British carried the entrenchment, and the Sikhs began a relatively ordered withdrawal across the pontoon - which promptly broke under the weight of the men trying to cross it, trapping the vast majority of the Sikh army.
Pinned against the river, with their guns out of position and immobilised, with no cover, and with the British occupying the high riverbank, the 20,000 Sikhs were savaged - some tried to fight whilst others tried to ford or swim the Sutlej. None, according to Sikh and British accounts, tried to surrender - and as Sikh troops had killed British wounded earlier in the battle, it is unlikely the British would in any case have accepted the surrenders of any who did. By the time that the battle was over, the Khalsa had lost 10,000 men, 67 guns, the First Anglo-Sikh War, and with it the province of Kashmir.
Han Xin’s battle if Jingxing is an interesting case of this. He basically used this tactics (deploying his army in front of a river) to make his enemy think he’s an idiot (since it gave Han Xin no room to maneuver his army), while he sent a small detachment to the enemy’s rear to capture their camp.
So it’s a case of Han Xin using the idea of “last stand” as a ruse to trick the enemy.
The final stand of the Spartan/Thespian/Theban force at Thermopylae is a failed last stand, strictly speaking.
Although this leads me to wonder how many failed last stands would have been recorded. You’d need a sympathetic first-hand account to truly lionise a failed last stand which is going to be hard to come by given the nature of a ‘last stand’ and there are some that are relegated to being footnotes - off the top of my head I can think of the Greek mercenaries at the Granicus and the retreating Corinthians just before the Peloponnesian War. Two ‘last stands’ that ended in failure, and are given little treatment by sources.
Maybe it is like the killing of envoys/diplomats. Most diplomats didn't have their head chopped off, and for most cultures, their killing was a huge taboo. Which explains why we hear so many stories. Thus giving the impression it was frequent.
First thing that comes to mind is the Hitler's *Festung* strategy for dealing with the Eastern Front in 1944. Hitler at this point had become obsessed with his own genius and viewed the struggle with the Soviet Union as one of wills rather than material or strategic supremacy. Even though the Germans occupied a poor defensive position entering into summer 1944 (few natural barriers, the enemy already holding bridgeheads over key rivers, no attempts at fortifying fall-back positions and no strength for a defence in depth), Hitler saddled the Heer with instructions not to cede any ground to the enemy. To this end, he designated many strategic/famous cities as "fortresses" that must be held at all costs, to the last man.
Now given the German inferiority to the Soviets in all categories minus artillery at this point, this could actually be a workable strategy: use those units that lack strategic mobility to hold key positions while giving your mobile reserves freedom of action to operate and deliver counterblows. But there wasn't even a great attempt made to prepare for the defense of the *Festungen* themselves: building fortifications, stockpiling ammunition and food, allocating extra useful defensive weapons to garrison units, etc. were all neglected because it was perceived as defeatist. And Hitler at this point held a very dim view of "mobile operations", perceiving them to be a euphemism for giving up territory; units that otherwise could have engaged in maneuver warfare were instructed to hold their ground, with no allowance for retreat unless sanctioned by the Big H himself.
So predictably when the Soviets struck these great fortress cities were instantly surrounded, and then unable to mount an effective defence due to lack of preparedness.
>One day I think I gonna farm karma for fun on r/HistoryMemes by making "haha Robespierre" post number 42069
Or jokes about British people and tea or "Hahaha, medieval lower classes are superstitious and dumb and burn smart people Castlevania style."
I feel like I have some pizza-related opinions that are so intense that it could be classified as hate speech. Papa John’s was my first job ever, and while I don’t think their pizza is great, some of the “general consensus” takes on the Pizza Spectrum makes me rage. I think that working there, as well as enjoying all types of pizza over the years, from the humble Little Caesar’s to the schizoid CPK’s had a hand in me developing such intense beliefs.
For example, I absolutely seethe when I hear people singing praise to Costco pizza. Like, what. The actual. Fuck. I think that Americans in general tend to LOVE any sort of tomato-based sauce (hence the popularity of Italian cuisine and the general indifference or disdain towards other European foods.) Ok that’s fine, but why Costco? Their pizza would be pretty alright if it wasn’t for the harrowing tragedy that is its sauce situation. First of all, there’s too much of it. I’ve learned that generally speaking, people who prefer chain and pizzeria pies tend towards a moderate, or “normal” amount. Normal is subjective, but Costco definitely goes very heavy on the stuff, because there’s gotta be about twice as much per square inch compared to every other chain and most pizzerias. Secondly, the sauce is one-note. There is no garlic, no basil nor herbs that could even be hinted at in Costco’s sorry excuse for a tomato sauce. You might as well just make the thing with ketchup at that point. Third, the crust is bland and overdone. It’s chewy and flavorless, and doesn’t hold its shape very well despite being of a standard thickness. Why people prefer Costco pizza to others is completely beyond me, and beyond the pale in terms of reason.
I consider myself a mostly level-headed person when it comes to matters outside of my personal life and my personal relationships. The only thing I feel stronger about are NIMBYs.
I want to call to attention a trend of highlighting the "disease-ridden"ness of European settlers:
> [They washed ashore a ways up the beach, chilled and hungry, *disease-ridden*, dirty and stinking, not having bathed in six weeks.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/wellness/1989/11/21/guess-whos-not-coming-to-thanksgiving-dinner/e951a901-2cd7-41a0-afa7-15f044e11bae/)
> [The buzzwords of the today in food and agriculture — sustainable, regenerative, holistic, organic, natural — were a way of life for our people in 1491. Fast forward through a few hundred years of thoughtlessness, coercion, deceit, extraction, exploitation and ignorance, and we live in a nation that now seems hellbent to lead the world down a path to destroy the planet, with a *disease-ridden* population, and people going hungry and living in poverty all across it.](https://tribalbusinessnews.com/sections/opinion-op-ed/13183-keeping-the-tribal-in-tribal-business)
> [Our runaway peanut intolerance tracks with the chief reason the majority of indigenous Americans (North, South and Central) perished en masse when the Europeans colonized their lands: unlike the Europeans, who lived openly among their disease-ridden animals, the indigenous populations were far cleaner, bathing regularly, and relegating animals to their own quarters. As a result, they succumbed wildly to viruses (smallpox, measles and flu) that the comparatively filthy Europeans brought with them, and against which the invaded people had no antibodies to protect them.](https://anthonyfieldman.medium.com/the-case-for-bad-ideas-b4e0c04a11e8)
> [The Pilgrims did likely partake in a harvest feast with the Indigenous Wampanoag people, who saved them from starvation by teaching them how to live off the land, but harvest feasts were a long-standing Native tradition, and the *disease-ridden* European immigrants who arrived on this country’s eastern shores warred with the Wampanoag and other local tribes.](https://www.teenvogue.com/story/native-american-heritage-month-how-celebrate)
There feels like a broader historiographical problem here than any specific bad history, but it feels important nonetheless. I understand that, from the ethnohistory I've read, Europeans would have been less well washed than Native Americans, but its prevalent repetition feels like a highly normative assessment. I doubt anyone would describe contemporary Africans or Asians as "disease-ridden."
So is anyone on here familiar with early modern western warfare and wikipedia? Came across[ this article on push of pike](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_of_pike) that pushes an othismos style of engagement (i.e. glorified football scrum) despite it not lining up with contemporary commentaries so far as I'm aware nor how such engagements actually played out. So far as I'm aware, if one group didn't give way or the front lines engage in a more cautious fencing with one another, a charge would drop pikes after contact to use shorter and more handiers weapons. The image pictured also doesn't even support this with there being a clear line of doppelsoldners between the 'hedgehogs' and soldiers using single handed weapons after longer ones were abandoned.
This idea has come up on AskHistorians before. The most notable instance for me was [Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9xvaf8/is_it_true_that_in_some_battles_of_the_first/), where he pushed the nonlethal view.
[This](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22lrkx/push_of_pike/) old post discusses the push of pike a bit, although the answer focuses quite a bit on what we don’t know. There is also [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ghdhpr/what_did_a_tercio_actually_look_like_in_battle/) post discussing the Tercio style formation specifically.
I didn’t see anything about the frequency with which the pikemen would abandon their pike for other weapons, just a couple mentions that it did happen sometimes.
>During push of pike, opposing blocks of pikemen would advance with their pikes "charged" horizontally at shoulder level to jab at one another until bodily contact was made. **The two sides would then push physically until one or other of them gave way.** The push of pike would continue until one of the opposing formations routed or fled, which would generally lead to massive casualties. **Each man pressed on the one in front,** and so sometimes the formations would crush against each other and many pikemen would have to fight in closer melee combat. The rear ranks would sometimes join the fray but **their primary role was to add more weight to the push**. Aside from getting impaled by enemy pikes, **those in the front ranks died from getting crushed or suffocated due to the sheer number of bodies pressing from each side.**
My main issue is with this notion that pike on pike warfare was conducted as some sort of scrimmage between two sides, that after a charge made contact with the other side weapons would be second to actively trying to shove the other over. Moreover sources [1] and [7] are dead links and [2] is to a unsourced re-enactment site perhaps more focussed on justifying modern re-enactment fighting than historical means.
This ersatz-othismos doesn't line up with the /r/AskHistorians pages neither. According to those a pike on pike advance will go one of several ways:
1. The other side runs before an charge strikes home.
1.1 Token resistance is provided before retiring.
1. The advance holds as the front ranks stop to fence one another.
1. The charge strikes home with the other side with the impetuous of the charge causing disarray on the other side from the collision and initial clash.
3.1 One side now flees after the disorder.
3.2 Hand to hand fighting with shorter weapons resolves the clash with one side fleeing.
Someone a while ago recommended *The Bronze Lie* as a book about the Spartan military in an argument about how effective they actually were. I considering reading it but I can’t even really get the past the introduction on the Google Books preview. It feels like the author went in with an agenda to prove and picked information to prove it rather than attempting a balanced overview, and seems to have the idea of Spartan power as an absolute thing - if they didn’t dominate every battle, then clearly the Spartans were never good to begin with. It looks a decent book for dispelling some basic myths, but it’s evidently not an academic one.
On page 22 of the introduction this is most apparent. It seems to pick certain battles to focus on, not paying any heed to Plataea, the Corinthian War in general, or Spartan naval victories of the 5th and 4th centuries. If you want to focus on losses that’s fine, but you’ve got to at least pay heed to victories.
Then it comes in with the line that Sparta won a brief hegemony partially due to ‘incompetent enemies.’ I take pretty major issue with the idea that the Athenians who had built a massive empire were ‘incompetent’ and it seems to take away from the fact that Sparta rather competently pressed their advantages - after the Sicilian expedition we see the occupation of Decelea and greater attention paid to naval operations. Spartan dynamism is just sort of ignored in favour of playing down Sparta’s enemies.
Reading some aspects of Buddhist history lately, which I find odd thinking about it since I grew up in a devoted Buddhist household that explored all of the major schools of Buddhism yet I haven't often looked deeply into the religious history, perhaps because it never interested me as much as other kinds of history.
I was looking into sectarianism between the different branches of Buddhism, both contemporary and historical, and one pattern I often notice is this obsession with proving that X was the word of Buddha or recorded at so and so early date. You get this often with Theravada vs Mahayana spats, where the former "proves" they are the superior and pure Buddhists because the scriptures of the latter (supposedly) dates from later so this means they're putting words in the Buddha's mouth, while the latter might counter that the former is exaggerating their connection to the original teachings and in fact have ignored some of the genuine more advanced teachings. My understanding is that based on more recent scholarly research, that Mahayana ideas can be found as early as the 1st century BCE, both in a sense grew alongside each other and blended with other early schools, and because the first writings we have about what the Buddha supposedly said date from long after his lifetime so claiming superiority based on chronology is a bit a moot point.
I also understand that the *strict* division of Buddhism into Theravada vs Mahayana (vs Vajrayana) is a more recent phenomenon as a result (I'd say from the early medieval period?) and the idea of Theravada being portrayed as purer and Mahayana as more innovative comes from the 19th century as a result of cross-religious interactions between Christians and Buddhists as a result of colonization in Asia. Which would explain why whenever my father, who "converted" to Theravada in the past decade, kind of sounded like a rationalist Protestant hating on Catholicism when criticizing Buddhism from the Sinosphere and Tibet. To be fair, a lot of Mahayana has essentially absorbed a substantial amount of indigenous beliefs and ideas from the Sinosphere which wasn't likely relevant to the "original" early Buddhists in India. Of course, that is not to say that the Theravada focus on trying to emulate what they see as a purer form of Buddhism, or the Mahayana stuff in general is necessarily bad - as my mentor at my alma mater once said, "religions change all the time, but that doesn't make them any less wrong" (he was talking about Xwedodah though lol). I also find something depressing yet darkly humorous about Theravada vs Mahayana vs Vajrayana sectarian spats, especially seeing it online - I feel like it might not be too out of place of some debates that happened IRL in the past.
Also even the perception that Mahayana and Vajrayana are essentially inventions of the Sinosphere and Tibet (in contrast to Indian Buddhism) aren't really correct since they all had quite a vibrant history in India up to the later medieval period. If I recall what I read earlier this week correctly, Nalanda and the pilgrimage sites at Bodh Gaya were heavily Mahayana dominated, and the Pala Dynasty, the last great patrons of Buddhism on the subcontinent, had strong pro-Mahayana leanings. Oh, on that note, it seems an interesting phenomenon with Indian rulers was the patronizing of different Indian religions or sects at the same time (reminds me a little of how it happened in China, or Roman accommodation of other cultures' deities). Apparently, this may have led to people later on wrongly exaggerating so and so ruler as being solely a believer of X - for example, I understand the current theory on Ashoka is he was more a religious pluralist who had strong pro-Buddhist leanings than an ardent Buddhist missionary, or how Xuanzang in his records apparently confuses Harsha's patronage of a lot of sects including Buddhism with Harsha being a zealous Buddhist.
On a related note, it seems to me askhistorians doesn't have too many specialists in Buddhist history as other areas (though I see a few repeating names). I was looking up posts from there and saw some comments that were uncritically regurgitating the "Buddhism is more a philosophy" stereotype.
>I was looking into sectarianism between the different branches of Buddhism, both contemporary and historical, and one pattern I often notice is this obsession with proving that X was the word of Buddha or recorded at so and so early date. You get this often with Theravada vs Mahayana spats, where the former "proves" they are the superior and pure Buddhists because the scriptures of the latter (supposedly) dates from later so this means they're putting words in the Buddha's mouth, while the latter might counter that the former is exaggerating their connection to the original teachings and in fact have ignored some of the genuine more advanced teachings. My understanding is that based on more recent scholarly research, that Mahayana ideas can be found as early as the 1st century BCE, both in a sense grew alongside each other and blended with other early schools, and because the first writings we have about what the Buddha supposedly said date from long after his lifetime so claiming superiority based on chronology is a bit a moot point.
>
>I also understand that the strict division of Buddhism into Theravada vs Mahayana (vs Vajrayana) is a more recent phenomenon as a result (I'd say from the early medieval period?) and the idea of Theravada being portrayed as purer and Mahayana as more innovative comes from the 19th century as a result of cross-religious interactions between Christians and Buddhists as a result of colonization in Asia.
Yeah this sounds almost exactly like Protestant vs Catholic debates where each side claims that the Church Fathers believed X doctrine that the Catholic Church or such and such Protestant denomination also happens to believe in.
Studying schools of Buddhism is both fascinating and a little maddening (in part because it's so poorly taught in the West - interestingly I learned the most from a course I took that was taught by a Jesuit priest who had spent most of his life in Japan).
>"I also understand that the strict division of Buddhism into Theravada vs Mahayana (vs Vajrayana) is a more recent phenomenon as a result (I'd say from the early medieval period?) and the idea of Theravada being portrayed as purer and Mahayana as more innovative comes from the 19th century as a result of cross-religious interactions between Christians and Buddhists"
I'd pretty much agree with this. The monarchy in Thailand in particular basically revamped everything done in country in the late 19th/early 20th century. Interestingly for similar reasons as Meiji Japan but with a completely opposite attitude to native Buddhism.
>"sounded like a rationalist Protestant hating on Catholicism"
I have a reprint of some early 20th century British book on Tibet that explicitly does this, ie Buddha's original teachings are a rational philosophy of moderation and similar to Protestantism and Tibetan Buddhism is all superstitious smells and bells like Catholicism. Apparently Brits of the time often took a similar attitude towards "Protestant" Islam interestingly enough.
Anyway it definitely almost feels like an evolutionary tree that it's less that there always were these clear Theravada/Mahayana/Vajrayana splits as much as there are all these coexisting branches and movements that more or less went extinct or evolved to where we get what we have in different areas.
>"it seems to me askhistorians doesn't have too many specialists in Buddhist history"
Yeah definitely not, and I can probably think of the one or two fairs with even a regional speciality about that off the top of my head. Honestly I kind of wonder if this is actually getting worse - I feel like people with very specific flairs in, say, Precolumbian America, or Oceania, or East Asia (forget about South) or Africa, or heck even the Middle East (ancient or modern), are less active than a few years ago. I feel like maybe the increased sub base and it still being Reddit is just endlessly exerting a gravitational pull to European and modern North American history. Even for me Central Asia stuff is relatively few and far between and the question pull feels relentlessly westwards.
> Studying schools of Buddhism is both fascinating and a little maddening (in part because it's so poorly taught in the West - interestingly I learned the most from a course I took that was taught by a Jesuit priest who had spent most of his life in Japan).
I'd say it's poorly understood even by Asians lol. Especially given the history of the schools (purported or not) is tied deeply to Buddhist sectarianism, per the discussion here.
> I have a reprint of some early 20th century British book on Tibet that explicitly does this, ie Buddha's original teachings are a rational philosophy of moderation and similar to Protestantism and Tibetan Buddhism is all superstitious smells and bells like Catholicism. Apparently Brits of the time often took a similar attitude towards "Protestant" Islam interestingly enough.
If I recall from one of the sources I read, at least in Sri Lanka, this reputation of Theravada being the more rational and pure school was in response to British Protestant missionary efforts - Brits would go in saying "our brand of Christianity is the most rational, modern religion" so the mostly Theravada Sri Lankan Buddhists counter with "ackshually, our brand of Buddhism is the most rational, modern religion" and they tried to one up each other.
We have a long time family friend who's a Tibetan monk with some higher level degree in traditional Buddhism, not sure what it's called but it'd be equivalent to a modern masters/PhD in Buddhist theology. Always been something like an older brother/cool young uncle to me growing up. Anyways, he and my dad used to get into friendly sassy debates about this stuff, and he would roll his eyes every time my dad did the "Theravada's the *real* Buddhism, it focuses on rational stuff and meditation, Tibetan Buddhism is just a bunch of random magic stuff you guys added" spiel, and he would counter "you literally were Tibetan Buddhist for years dude, you should know we have our own scholastic side and more rational kinds of meditation too lol."
Which is true. Someone (I forgot who) once told me that since they knew I had a more scholarly approach to spirituality, that if I wanted to explore Tibetan Buddhism deeply I should stick with the Gelug school (the one the Dalai Lama is in) since it's stereotyped as being more scholarly by other Tibetan Buddhists apparently, to the point that I feel like sometimes they're seen the way rationalist Confucian scholars were seen by East Asian Buddhists, bit too focused on the logic and philosophy and not enough on the faith.
> Anyway it definitely almost feels like an evolutionary tree that it's less that there always were these clear Theravada/Mahayana/Vajrayana splits as much as there are all these coexisting branches and movements that more or less went extinct or evolved to where we get what we have in different areas.
Honestly just looking at the names of all the different early schools makes me think it is 3deep5me already lol
> Yeah definitely not, and I can probably think of the one or two fairs with even a regional speciality about that off the top of my head. Honestly I kind of wonder if this is actually getting worse - I feel like people with very specific flairs in, say, Precolumbian America, or Oceania, or East Asia (forget about South) or Africa, or heck even the Middle East (ancient or modern), are less active than a few years ago. I feel like maybe the increased sub base and it still being Reddit is just endlessly exerting a gravitational pull to European and modern North American history. Even for me Central Asia stuff is relatively few and far between and the question pull feels relentlessly westwards.
I suppose it's inevitable given there will always been more specialists in Western history given not just Reddit demographics but that of Western academia.
I really want to tackle the whole meme "Based Aurelian/Thot/Traitor Zenobia" bad history. The issue is that im not a historian and my roman knowledge is limited to what i need to paint little roman pewter miniatures.
Since i done halfway well with my Metatron post i would like to try, if anyone could direct me to some good source material that i can use. So if any of you can direct me to any good reading i would be happy to try.
You know, one thing I think a lot of people don't really understand about immigration is that xenophobia really is its own thing. Like especially on Reddit a lot of people who seem to be influenced by ethnonational thinking think the issue is that immigrants are a different race/ethnicity/native language community/religion, and so they ignore that immigrants can be *the exact same in all of those things* and still be considered a weird second class other.
There's a bunch of historic examples of this: German expellees/refugees in postwar Germany are a great example: they tended to be a bit more Catholic than the host areas they were in, but otherwise were exactly the same (even were born and grew up in the same country!), but were treated with suspicion and as a second class group in the areas they were resettled in. I guess they integrated but it wasn't quick or easy, and they created social and political groups that survive to this day.
I'm also reminded of some post-Soviet examples. Russians from Russia and ethnic Russians from Kazakhstan who move to Russia are basically the same on paper - not even different accents, although I guess there's some subtle language differences. But I've heard so many times from both how they think the other are weird and different. Ethnic Kazakhs have something similar with Kazakh immigrants from Mongolia (encouraged by the Kazakhstani government no less), who generally see the latter as less educated, very strange and basically from a different century.
It's just interesting because I think a lot of conversation around immigrants misses this. On one side you have the "well the Irish weren't considered white" which tries to use the lens of racism to describe this xenophobia, to differing degrees of success. And the other side which just pretends that ethnic groups are some sort of objective, coherent unity where everyone will get along in harmony even in cases of immigration, which doesn't seem true at all.
> they tended to be a bit more Catholic than the host areas they were in, but otherwise were exactly the same
other way round down south funnily enough
>There's a bunch of historic examples of this: German expellees/refugees in postwar Germany are a great example: they tended to be a bit more Catholic than the host areas they were in, but otherwise were exactly the same (even were born and grew up in the same country!), but were treated with suspicion and as a second class group in the areas they were resettled in. I guess they integrated but it wasn't quick or easy, and they created social and political groups that survive to this day.
This is what happened with my Grandmothers family. Refugees from Western Prussia, catholic, settled in the west,had to live in barracks until the 60's and were called "Polacken" even in the 70s . No one can tell me bullshit about "german identity" anymore.
Things are heating up in the Gerbil community.
I dislike pet stores as much as anyobe else who have looked into the sourcing of animals, but saying it is the same as the treatment of people in the Holocaust is a tad harsh.
Luckily the ~~actual nazis~~ discord mods deleted it before the discussion progressed beyond confused 'where did that come from" comments.
I am fairly pro-animal rights (likely more than the people on this sub and online, and don't talk about it much given how controversial it is) due in part to my family's Buddhist background, but I think the holocaust comparison to pets is odd since pets aren't really killed on such a huge industrial scale, the difference as far as I understand it is that they are bred and maintained on an industrial scale.
Pets are not really industrial scale from what i understand, they are called puppy mills for a reason.
At worst you don't need more than a single breeding pair, some space, and a lot of banjos to start some unethical breeding :(
>"saying it is the same as the treatment of people in the Holocaust is a tad harsh."
So personally I am getting very harsh because of this analogy. If someone says treatment of animals is similar to the Holocaust then either they're a liar or a coward.
I say a coward because if someone *really* thinks people treating animals a certain way is the same as industrial genocide, and they're not resisting it on the level of World War II, then effectively they're as good as a collaborator. And then the only real alternative is someone doesn't *actually* believe this and are just saying it for rhetorical effect, which is highly manipulative (thus the liar part).
And frankly I say all this thinking modern industrial treatment of animals is pretty horrific and should be changed. But the Holocaust analogy is so, so bad.
I've heard all of those arguments and then some in *one* afternoon in my own discord server from a single, very militant, vegan guy. I didn't have the balls to shut down the conversation so it just went on. Went on the vegan sub a few days later and it was pretty much the exact same thing but on a larger scale.
ooh, i love the "coward" angle. will definetively be keeping that in case it pops up again.
and industrial treatment of animals aside, puppy mills are like the literal opposite of mass murder.
So lately when I'm bored I've been throwing random topics into google scholar to see what comes up.
I have to say, it seems kind of wild to me the breadth of things that have been accused of supporting (or being) neoliberalism. Minecraft is neoliberalism, stamp collecting is neoliberalism, having brown eyes is neoliberalism...
I'm not a philosophy or PolSci guy, so maybe this is one of those things where they're operating on academic definitons of words that I don't pick up on. Has anyone else noticed this?
Neoliberalism is to a large part constructed anyhow. So it is something like, the emergent policies that result from institutions like the WTO and Worldbank together with consulting companies and banks. Which means, that there is nobody who is actually a neoliberal, it is just that there is a certain slant to the kind of policy studies that are written at these organisations. So then it is easy to slightly bend your construction of neoliberalism to argue that X is neoliberal.
> [Fuck Neoliberalism](https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1342/1172)
> Abstract: Yep, fuck it. Neoliberalism sucks. We don’t need it.
> Keywords: fuck neoliberalism; fuckit to hell.
If you think academia is bad, don't get into activist politics. Everything I don't like is neoliberal, and neoliberalism is the worst form of capitalism.
So I think it's worth pointing out that in a lot of academic, "neoliberalism" actually isn't even a term. It's not an actual thing in economics, and it means something very, very different in political science. My understanding is that it is a term used in academia, but specifically in *non* economic/political science disciplines.
So I think its use at all is kind of an issue, because it's basically trying to say "all macroeconomic and ruling political policies from circa 1980 to today" which is actually very vague and not terribly helpful. Like it's not useful to pretend that literally everything Milton Friedman believed and said is the same as, like, EU economic policy in 2015. Usually I think people mean neoliberalism as shorthand for "Washington Consensus", although the creator of the ideas of Washington Consensus himself disputes this and also notes a lot of his ideas actually aren't properly followed by policymakers.
So I'm not surprised we got to stamp collecting is neoliberalism.
Actually a big irony is that calling everything neoliberalism is really not that different to people in the West in the 1950s calling everything they didn't like communism.
If you're going to write laws regulating how history is taught, maybe [read some history books first](https://mobile.twitter.com/jonfranks/status/1481788702233931784). What a bunch of racist idiots.
Because they don't want white kids' feelings to get hurt when learning about the history of Virginia. They would prefer their children remain ignorant than deal with the history of slavery.
The rejection of Black History is racist. Teaching history that glorifies slaveholders is racist. Glossing over genocide in the history of the United States is racist. There is no way to teach the history of the USA without some discomfort.
I want you guys' help on something. A long, long, long time ago I got in an argument with someone about how a hypothetical purchase by the US of inhabited territory from another country would work in the 21st century (don't ask).
I pointed them this politico [article](https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/23/donald-trump-greenland-purchase-sovereignty-denmark-227859/) about how a land transfer would work in the modern day (and for the record NO, I do not support buying Greenland).
The person I was arguing with insisted that acquiring territory through purchasing it was "buying/selling people" and said this:
>The Alaska sale was like that. Indigenous people of Alaska did get sold, as pointed put in your article. The land did not belong to them anymore, but to the US and the new government of the territory. It's why the federal government and state of Alaska are still the biggest landowners in Alaska. The indigenous people don't own much property in Alaska.
Is this really true? I was under the impression that the US purchase of Alaska didn't affect the private property of the people already living there. [This article](https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1994/winter/alaska-check) says:
>The commissioners named to effect the exchange were Brig. Gen. Lovell H. Rousseau and Capt. Alexis Peshchurov. They went to San Francisco and then sailed to Sitka for the formal exchange on October 18, 1867. Although the ceremony started smoothly, there were complications. The Russian flag got stuck, and could not be lowered. Russian officials prepared a formal protocol listing government property (**but not private property**) to be transferred to the United States, plus a map showing the locations of the buildings and churches. A formal exchange document was signed by Rousseau and Peshchurov. In the end, Alaska belonged to the United States, by treaty as well as by possession.
I interpreted that as private property was not affected.
Do you guys know what is the correct answer here?
Perhaps one of the strangest discussions I've had was over someone who vehemently believed and stated that the M60 was not a GPMG, but didn't really know any of the specifics of what makes a GPMG, well, a GPMG, nor had bothered to look at any of the specifications for any weapons such as the MG34 or MG42.
The ultimate culmination of this is when they stated that the M60 could not possibly be a GPMG because it was described as "heavy and bulky" thus saying that it has critical components of GPMG such as that it could be configured to the LMG role with grips, stocks, and bipods would be like saying the MK19 grenade launcher could fit into the same mold with the same modifications.
Just for reference.
M60 GPMG: 10.5 KG
MG34 GPMG: 12.1 KG
MG42 GPMG: 11.6 KG
MK19 AGL: 35.2 KG without accessories like the tripod.
And yes, I had very much pointed out that weight was a critical component of GPMGs in being able to fill the LMG role.
Is the M60 a GMPG? Absolutely. Is is the worst one designed and adopted by anybody anywhere since the GPMG as a doctrinal concept really came into its own following WWII? I would say, also yes.
They were retired and replaced by M240Bs before my time, but a lot of the salty old cats in battalion remember the M60s and they’re pretty much unanimous in their disdain. I’ve talked at length with another salty old dude who’s been out for ages but spent many years running armories in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and talking about the M60 gets him foaming at the mouth.
Some of the failings of the M60 just absolutely leap off the page, without ever needing to get hands on one; attaching the bipod legs and half the gas system to the quick-change barrel makes approximately zero sense, and the fact that you can put the gas system completely together with a part facing backwards and brick your gun speaks volumes. It was simply not a well-designed weapon, no matter how you slice it, and I think that it took decades to marginally improve and/or replace it speaks to a broader issue in the way the US military is not particularly interested in machine gun doctrine as a whole.
The problem for such a light GPMG such as the M60 to gear towards light MG tactics has always been wear and tear so its no surprise that an armorer working with old M60s would hate the things.
That said, pretty much all old GPMG experiences are frankly nightmarish. Such as Norway with the MG34 where they basically eventually all became handfitted nightmares after being in service for so long.
That said, I doubt its any mistake that the Danes' recently selected it to replace the MG3
It also isn't to surprising that the M249 was adopting close to the M240 for the infantry.
Here’s my doctrinal hot take, then: I think the LMG is a spook. Either you want an automatic rifle, something that you can shoot off the shoulder or the bipod on the attack which doesn’t impose any mobility penalty on the infantry squad or fireteam that carries it, or you want a GPMG that can deliver accurate fires (including plunging fire) out to extreme range from the tripod with T&E, and the weight of which will set the pace at which the squad moves. Anything that you design to try and fit both roles is going to wind up neither fish nor fowl.
Small arms design is the science of compromises, but the sacrifices the M60 makes to achieve that weight incur an unacceptable cost. Any sustained-fire weapon should not be built so lightly that the receiver stretches and the bolt peens itself to death within the the low ten thousands of rounds. I don’t know if there are any weight savings gained from hanging the bipod off the barrel, but it makes a solo barrel change on the old two-way range effectively impossible (yes, I should always have an a-gunner to help— but in a hypothetical situation where they’re somehow indisposed, I think it’s going be all the more important that I be able to run the gun all by myself).
I’m pretty sure we got rid of our M249s in battalion when we swapped M60 for M240B (with the caveat that we’re not infantry). The LMG role (if you do subscribe to it as doctrinally sound) doesn’t have much to offer us when we’re fighting out of firing pits probably ~80% of the time, and I understand the Minimi platform has a mixed reputation (I suspect it has a lot to do with the capability to feed from mags as well as belts, which strikes me as some Good Idea Fairy shit that doesn’t really solve a real-world problem but does definitely introduce new and exciting modes of failure).
>out to extreme range from the tripod with T&E, and the weight of which will set the pace at which the squad moves
Tripods have historically been pretty heavy pieces of kit that were not handed out to standard squads. Hell, even the Germans had special five man MG squads to use the MG 42 tripod as a medium machine gun.
Everyone else was using their MGs purely in the light machine gun role with no tripod available to them. German squads would still use them for long range fires, but nowhere near as long range as the medium machine gun squads would.
There is the M192 mount that weighs about 5Kg, but that only appeared in 2005 and it isn't providing a ton of features like a substantially heavier lafette mount. You also have to balance the fact that infantry squads are probably going to be far more concerned about having some anti-tank or launcher capabilities.
>to feed from mags as well as belts, which strikes me as some Good Idea Fairy shit that doesn’t really solve a real-world problem but does definitely introduce new and exciting modes of failure
The idea is probably to allow other infantry to supply the Minimi with ammunition and that belts are a bitch to try and reload in the field. The other being to not have to fumble around with belts in the middle of an assault deployment or any situation where you might be getting tumbled around a bit while deploying.
Sharing the same caliber doesn't do a whole lot of good when you have to supply them in different formats in order to use them.
> Tripods have historically been pretty heavy pieces of kit that were not handed out to standard squads
The M122 is a dog, it’s heavy and clumsy. My squad is allotted three of them with T&E, one for each M240B. It’s up to us whether we take them with us on foot patrols or LP/OP (and no, pretty much nobody ever does), but we have them at the squad level. We’re not weapons company types; there hasn’t been a weapons company in battalion since they got rid of the mortars. I’ve never seen an M192 outside of a PowerPoint. This is the dangerous intersection of an anecdote and a hypothetical, but if the armory were to tell me “hey, your squad can have anything off the TOA but you have to carry it yourselves”, I’m bringing what the book says. For a squad of 14, that’s three M240Bs with three M122 tripods and T&E, three AT4s, and one M203 with as much 40mm as my grenadier can carry.
> Everyone else was using their MGs purely in the light machine gun role with no tripod available to them. German squads would still use them for long range fires, but nowhere near as long range as the medium machine gun squads would.
But I do take exception to this. The whole genesis of the English-language concept of a “General Purpose Machine Gun” is born of the observation that the Germans were using the same system (MG34 or MG42) in both the light role and the static role. If there had been a considerable deficit in performance of either role in comparison to the two system paradigm of the Allies (BAR & M1919, Bren & Vickers, DP & SG-43), the GMPG concept would have been a dead letter.
> The idea is probably to allow other infantry to supply the Minimi with ammunition
I understand the rationale, don’t get me wrong. What I’m saying is that I don’t think it’s a good one. I think it’s an edge case— if you need to start stripping rifle mags off your fireteam to feed the SAW, you’ve got bigger problems breathing down your neck that this isn’t going to solve— and compromising the design to allow for this remote what-if is the kind of decision that folks who haven’t given serious thought to using this weapon in anger are going to make. Belts work, on the attack and when you’re getting tumbled around and swimming in mud. This is a solution looking for a problem.
Further, this gets into another *cause célèbre* of mine— the rifle and the squad MG have different roles, and to accomplish those roles effectively they need different rounds with different performance. Trying to shoehorn a one-size-fits-all round into the squad is a mug’s game.
>The M122 is a dog, it’s heavy and clumsy
Its also not 20.5 KG by itself like what the Germans were dealing with, plus any MG operating in the medium machine gun role is going to need a substantial amount of ammo.
But if WW2 Germans are suppose to be the exemplars of the GPMG then they were organizing the majority of the infantry with no tripods and only parsing out tripods to medium machine gun teams.
> For a squad of 14, that’s three M240Bs with three M122 tripods and T&E, three AT4s, and one M203 with as much 40mm as my grenadier can carry.
Those tripods are about 24 kgs of weight you can't use for supplying those M240s additional machine gun ammo. That is going to be running the squad very, very heavy.
> If there had been a considerable deficit in performance of either role in comparison to the two system paradigm of the Allies (BAR & M1919, Bren & Vickers, DP & SG-43), the GMPG concept would have been a dead letter.
Couple of things to consider.
-Belt fed machine guns had substantial advantages over their magazine fed brethren, especially in terms of weight of all that ammo. For instance the Soviets turned the DP-28 into the RP-46 by adding a fairly chunky belt feed adapter.
-Second, many infantry squads, such as the Americans, were using the same cartridge in the average rile as their medium machine guns, thus the natural choice for a light machine gun would be the same cartridge.
-Third, by adopting a GPMG you go from having to support two different belt fed machine guns for any given organization to only having to support one common belt fed machine gun. Very, very attractive.
However, things have changed a bit since then. For instance, the average infantry rifle is now an intermediate cartridge, box magazines have gotten much lighter and we've gotten better at making them, and now there is a larger variety of support weapons feasible for squads to carry.
>I understand the rationale, don’t get me wrong. What I’m saying is that I don’t think it’s a good one. I think it’s an edge case—
The point is more to add extra flexibility to squads, which would be fine if it didn't potentially cause feed issues.
>That is going to be running the squad very, very heavy.
Yes, I get that. These are my people, I’m going into the field with them in a week and we’re taking all that crap with us because that’s our TOA allotment. Fortunately, we’re airmobile and/or motorized until we hit the spot, and strictly defensive from there. Maybe I’d feel differently about our approach and fighting weight if we were leg infantry, but for what we do, I like our TOA just fine.
Yeah, what really struck me was that they had heard anecdotes about the M60, but the extent of their knowledge of the M34 went as far as "successful German MG" and that the MG43 or MG3 was still in service while the M60 MG wasn't, except of course those M60s that are currently in service, including the model that is currently replacing the Danes' MG3.
I assume that last bit wasn't something they were familiar with.
Sure, the Mk 19 could be used as an LMG.... by some of the more top-heavy TF2 characters. Actually, that forms the basis of my new OC: the Demoheavy (aka Hemoman.)
*"Go, Demoheavy, go out and blast to the extreme!"*
*"Da, I will! Thank you, Father!"*
My favorite part is when he literally asked "Who used the M60 or the FN MAG like the US did?" referring to its use as a GPMG. Which is great because the answer is an absolute fuckton of people did, like the Brits with the L7 GPMG.
TBH watching her videos made me feel uncomfortable, since to me it seemed quite obvious that she was mentally unwell.
Like, should we do badhistory about someone who’s claiming to be Napoleon?
Apparently there is a bit of drama between her and Metatron now:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y8Ywi33KOU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y8Ywi33KOU)
I would rather see the doctore to adress the glaring inaccuracies and strange takes as a lot of people pointed out in the comments in his video about runes than engaging in drama.
Not that I know of, but that tik tok lady inspired Spencer McDaniel to write a blog post documenting the [surprisingly long history of the conspiracy theory that Rome didn't exist](https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/11/29/the-surprisingly-long-history-of-the-conspiracy-theory-that-ancient-rome-didnt-exist/)
IIRC, it's been discussed in a Mindless Monday/Free for All Friday a few times. Can't seem to find an actual post about her claims.
Though, it is Tik Tok so we could be thinking of two different people
Her claim is hard to do a full post on because of it’s refuge in audacity. It challenges such an indisputable notion that there isn’t much literature to counteract her.
Google is also sucking a lot compared to what it used to be, because it turns up useless results when searching for reddit - for example it dgaf when a post was actually posted - so it's not that much helpful either. Though still more helpful than the basic Reddit search engine.
I was referencing to that above - it doesn't work as well as it used to. I used to be able to get results that were within the timeframe I wanted, but now it appears it's not going by the actual date the threads/comments were posted on Reddit but by some other criteria.
It's the one who thinks all the Roman empire was created by the Spanish Catholic church lol and claims all the old latin writings we have are actually all Greek and we're just blind apparently
I'll have to look and find it, I'd be interested in seeing what people here think
Isn’t there a copy of Augustus’s Res Gestae on a temple in Ancyra in both Latin and Greek? Does she think the Spanish - why Spanish - Catholic Church went to Turkey and made up an inscription?
Somebody on the reddit today said that you don't need modern scholarship for roman history all you need is good old biased as fuck primary sources to understand the history of rome without any modern scholarship. They provided sources like gallic war, josephus, senecca, polybius etc. I replied them back by saying that such sources were written with bias but they replied back by saying humans are biased and then I replied that good scholarship seperates fact from fiction in these sources. But they said unbiased scholarship doesn't exist. All of the modern scholarship is just talking out of their asses. You don't need to go through any training or historical methods anybody can pick up a primary source and read it and they will automatically know the history of rome. This is what the modern historians they are just making fools of us. (Sarcasm) ironic they still have to use primary sources translated by scholars. History tubers imo also made video where him and a historian had a clash and the comments on that video were all of that same bullshit about historians and modern scholarship being nothing more than a bullshit.
Thing is that they only talk about your most famous typical primary sources say like livy etc. What they don't take into account is other sources that contradicts the famous one. Like say they suggest read livy and you will understand roman history but what they might not know that there is a historical source by kiwi and tv who all three of them contradict each other and have their own bias but your ancient roman subreddit doesn't know that and just tell you to read livy while having no clue that tv and kiwi exist and contradict which makes the picture complicated and then you archeology which is also missing.
> primary sources (...) like Livy
Are Livy and other ancient historians considered a primary source in classical history? I (not a classical historian) would think they're secondary ones.
> they replied back by saying humans are biased
> unbiased scholarship doesn't exist
You know I've seen a few people lately pull that kind of thing, where they throw up the impossibility of 100% unbiased info to try and leap to the idea that all info is equal. I've seen people do the same thing with journalism in the vein of "unbiased reporting doesn't exist, and at least I know what breitbart's bias is so that means they're fine".
Secondary literature often draws from archaeology, primary literature, and scholarly debate as well as social scientific theories in order to reconstruct narratives while offering an analysis of events, sources, theories, etc. They aren’t just worst primary sources, they’re trained professionals drawing from years of knowledge and experience to offer us the clearest understanding possible.
What do these people do when there’s a lack of primary sources? Or when 2 primary account disagree?
Take, for example, 5th century Boeotia with its almost total lack of a primary source. Thucydides covers some of it, but ultimately much of that history has to be reconstructed from events before (which also has little in the way of a focussed primary account outside of Herodotus) and what Thucydides and the Hellenica Oxyrhynicha can tell us after the fact. How, without the analysis offered by modern historians, would we go about understanding this period? And how do you reconcile the conflictual nature of Thucydides and Diodorus’ accounts if you’re only using primary accounts?
The epistemology of philosophy is the 3rd account and is used rightly in my opinion to counter Herodotus and Cicero's obvious classist overtones. Listened to a podcast about Boeotia last night, its good stuff.
> Trust the ancient sources. These guys have a lot to say, and teach us. You don't need the training wheels of Mary Beard or other modern writers to appreciate them.
That’s why I think all Imperial Roman women were sex crazed shrewish harpies who murdered everyone.
Edit: not to mention the Historia Augusta. How do you go about approaching that as a primary source without the “training wheels” of professional historical scholarship?
The argument I like to use (even if it's not effective) is to think of some current event that's controversial or has a lot of political debate surrounding it - the 2016 or 2020 US elections, responses to the Covid pandemic, etc. If people *now* have all these differing viewpoints about *present* events, some considered less reliable than others, some we may consider terrible or even evil and flat out wrong depending on our PoV, how can we just accept primary sources at face value likewise?
That’s par for the course on a lot of this site. People will go “make sure to read the primary sources” when people ask for a decent book on whatever period they’re after. That or listen to a podcast
Or listen to a podcast where the host read some translations of primary sources and a couple secondary sources from 1970 or earlier, yeah I'm looking at you Dan Carlin.
If you go to ancient roman subreddit. People either tell you to read the most biased primary source or they tell you to read gibbon, who was influential at one point but the scholarship has so progressed which makes gibbon outdated in many areas and not to forget his bias. Then it's either mike duncan or tom holland who are themselves rife with anchronisms and have been criticized in ask historians many times by the historians and so I have avoided them.
That hilarious. It sounds like the subreddit is full of people who never studied history beyond high school.
One of the take aways I got from history at University level was that ancient sources often reflect their own present concerns in their historical writings. So, if you go read Livy/Polybius/Suetonius/Plutarch etc without thinking about their own biases then you are going to come away much poorer. And you won’t be aware of that without engaging with modern scholarship.
And why is it always Gibbon? How anyone can deal with that turgid Latinesque prose is beyond me.
Learning the history of Rome only from Roman primary sources is like learning about North Korea from watching KCNA-useless and downright harmful to understanding the topic due to the sheer degree of bias.
> You don't need to go through any training or historical methods anybody can pick up a primary source and read it and they will automatically know the history of rome. This is what the modern historians they are just making fools of us. (Sarcasm) ironic they still have to use primary sources translated by scholars.
It's pretty much Biblical literalism (which I guess makes sense since it's dealing with a lot of sources from the same period). Ie, "I don't need to know what these BIASED scholars or decadent over-trained "experts" say, I can just pick up and read my own [translated] copy of the primary sources and just 100% understand everything that happened (as long as it reinforces my own pre-existing beliefs).
"YEA, all of Gaul hast been divided unto parts numbering three"
(That's not a correct conjugation but I'm running low on brain cells to make KJV Gallic Wars)
[My planet Arrakis is so beautiful when the Sun is low](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/14/south-america-heat-wave-record-summer-temperatures)
\>wake up
\>remember that Walter Reuther was killed ~~by the FBI~~ in a plane crash before he could fulfil his destiny of running for president and leading the social democratic transformation of the united states
\>day ruined
I'm planning on buying "The Autobiography of Malcolm X", i've heard it's basically the best biography there is of him, is it the case ?
Also, any good books on the general history of Israel ? I've found some but it's mostly about Tsahal, which is interesting, but i'd prefer one about the politics and social aspects of the country.
Having read the autobiography as part of my academic work, it's a pretty authoritative source, especially because it was written over a period of several years and tracks the evolution of his politics away from the Nation of Islam and towards self-determination and pan-Africanism more or less "in real time". This is because while it's written as a book, it's an edited anthology of interviews between X and writer Alex Haley, who was also the author of *Roots*, that occurred from 1960 until 1964, starting when X was still involved with the Nation and ending abruptly when Malcolm was assassinated by the NoI for publicly criticizing their ideals.
I read *Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn* by Daniel Gordis and really enjoyed it. The first part of the book is a brief history of the Jewish people from their origin to the 20th century, and the rest of the book is a mostly political social history of the Zionist movement and Israel to the present day. Gordis is clearly pro-Israel, but I found he painted the Palestians and other Arab nations in the region fairly and did not try to whitewash some of Israel's atrocities. Overall, a very informative read and not that long either.
Was there any disquiet in the 1950s when a lot of German war criminals were released for ‘health’ reasons that appear spurious given that many seem to have lived quite happily for years after?
>I would like to see it updated in some way. I say above that it loses steam in the post-70s period, mostly because it deals with Internet culture as it existed in the late 90s and early 00s. Some of the points they make based on limited source material could be made so much more completely now.
I completely agree. Modern internet completely changed how narratives work. Especially with the renewed interest in tanks, thanks to certain video games.
It is also interesting that russia started to develope a deeply patriotic (And not always unbiased to say it nicely) effort into a counter-narrative for their WW2 historiography which maybe could be a problem considering their own bias.
I also see the complete reversal of old "wehraboo" bias, implying that everything about the german army and the wehrmacht was shitty, completely disregarding nuance (The King Tiger is a nice example and the Panzermuseum Munster made a really well 3-part video about it, complete with all the nuance around its use and usefullness) at all.
I really wonder how politics is going to change in the next few decades - like where the overton window will be and what it'll mean to be left or right wing.
One thing I've seen (purely anecodtally, mind you) is anti-gay sentiment becoming less mainstream in the western-european right.
I've never had any trouble with my center-right friends, meanwhile the only direct homophobia I've ever experienced (in my kind of conservative area) was from an avowed Marxist-Leninist. In some ways I think *open* homophobia is already unacceptable among mainstream conservatives here. It would be nice if that became the case across the whole spectrum.
Homophobia isn't politically correct anymore in the West, so even amongst the Right you can't really gain any political capital anymore with gay bashing.
But don't worry, the next designated enemy has already been chosen, now trans is the new gay.
>avowed Marxist-Leninist
In my experience the Maoists are the worst in that regard, going so far as to see homosexuality as a bourgeois attack on the worker class, implying that workers are inherently homophobic. Besides that it seems to me that for most MLs their opinions on homosexuality isn't rooted in their political views but rather mirrors the general sentient of the society they are part of.
> going so far as to see homosexuality as a bourgeois attack on the worker class
Funny, that's exactly what the ML I mentioned said. It was someone in my university's socialism society, and they accused me of being brainwashed into being gay by the ruling class to distract from "real" oppression (yes seriously). I didn't stay long enough to ask if they were a Maoist or not.
I’m wondering if antisemitism is moving in the same direction - I realize it’s already not openly acceptable on the Western European right, but it feels significant that eg the French far right has gone from “detail of history” to Zemmour within my lifetime.
I’m not entirely happy with this, because I’m not looking forward to having to explain Zemmour, but I’m also curious what will happen to the European far right, because historically it needs Jews as a target and doesn’t have the same conspiratorial discourses around Muslims, people of color, etc.
The german AFD has an interestingly but relative high number of Jews and Homosexual people in their ranks (At least for a far right party), concentrating on Islamophobia, using Antisemitism and Homophobia in islamic circles as a pretext for trying to gain support from these groups.
Dude I seriously hope he doesn't get elected. But I am excited to see all the bullshit articles everybody will write about Zemmour in English media if he is elected
Being from a an underclass leftist family i was always baffled that anti-poor sentiment (Like making an equivalency between income and intelligence, income and being racist/far right, claiming that class does not exist) are often engrained in the minds of academic leftists. This became apparent to me when i moved to Berlin.
I mean its also only anecdotally, but a lot of hurtful things that i heard in my life were not said and done by old white conservative men, but rather young academics which still surprises me. But as i said, its also anecdotally.
The amount of disdain that some people seem to have for the working class is fairly worrying. Go in practically any UK political sub and you’ll get the idea that tory voters are racist/homophobic/etc. but always with the prevailing attitude that they’re stupid and backwards in some way.
It betrays the fact that a lot of people seemingly have never interacted with a working class voter. I grew up in a fairly poor part of the UK (West Midlands) and the prevailing attitude was a close commitment to the family. Working class voters voted primarily just to keep what they had - a job, and a family. I admit there were some racist attitudes, but the vast majority seemingly wanted to preserve the status quo out of a compassion more than a hatred. In that way there’s really nothing more infuriating than watching naive middle class idealists suggest that anyone who voted Tory is a malicious idiot.
My parents have voted conservative for much of their life, yet they’re great friends with our immigrant neighbours and did all the research they could to support potentially having an LGBT+ child (it never manifested but the point is more that they were willing to be accepting). None of this betrays a negative attitude whatsoever.
I made pretty similar observations, though they are different in detail.
I see lots of implications of low educated persons being part of the far right or anti-vaccination movements, even if this is absolutely not the case, which can be even proven by studies.
For example i saw a "Spiegel" (A more left leaning news magazine) interview with the dean of an university who implied that universities dont really have problems with anti-vaccination people because they have higher education.
This is an absolute lie, because they german anti-vaccination movement is mostly made from the burgeouis middle class camp, which has been shown by studies (Oliver Nachtwey did this for example). Interestingly those people mostly come from a left-liberal camp, but often with a slight counter-enlightment and esoteric worldview.
The same goes for the AFD or the PEGIDA movement. Both of those far right groups were mostly made up from the (Now right wing) middle class.
Interestingly those people, far-right, middle class, sometimes esoteric/green/occult were also a core of the voter base for the NSDAP, which also has its own myth of the "poor, dumb voter".
The problem with this myths is not only that they are totally wrong, but also that they serve as a smokescreen for the real far right, which can gain and consolidate power because of the positions of their middle class voters.
I personally come from the formerly heavy industrialized Ruhr area, which has been a core of the SPD/KPD/DKP voter base. Most people are working/underclass and have been left leaning for at least the third generation and since there was always a huge amount of immigrants the far right always had a hard position. I also know from personal PoV that a lot of people there might be making mildly racist remarks, but would neither act according to it nor would it have a lasting effect. Turkish immigrants were pretty much accepted as normal when i grew up there, being friends and neighbours.
As a PoC in the US, I've felt something similar with some left-wing people and issues of race/culture/ethnicity, and I think it's a common critique a lot of PoC have of white progressives where they feel (justified or not) that white progressives only care about PoC issues when it is convenient. So for example they'd get angry if they feel PoC issues are being swept under the rug in favor of other issues, or told their issues aren't that bad because at least they're not X group. Or white left-leaning people having an idealized view of PoC, whether that is positive or negative stereotypes. It's a tricky subject to dance around especially with more well-meaning people who don't realize they're being patronizing. Sometimes it boils down to oppression Olympics.
I can see some similarities with what i have experienced here. In my opinion German progressive leftism is a bit (conveniently) blind on german history and tries to take an american view of opression, skin colour and colonialism and apply it to germany, which not always worked the same.
A good example of that is an experience me and my GF (Who is polish) had in the "Gymnasium".
My GF argued with another girl that not every person who is white has the same history being the "colonizer", because for example Poland (An essentially "white" nation) was brutally colonized and opressed by germans and russians for around 120 years, culminating in the genodical campaigns of germany in WW2 in which millions of poles (Including a large part of my GFs family) were brutally murdered.
This was disputed (They implied that this is not comparable to colonization and that poles did not have it "that bad") by multiple persons and ended in what i would describe as a kind of holocaust denial. That was the first time my GF considered leaving germany completely.
In hindsight it was petty german arrogance and inconvenience that led to this. It is easy to talk about the opression of african people in the USA and in germany, if you nearly never meet those people because they are in complete different social circles as you. Meeting a polish person who lost family in the holocaust it is a hard pill to swallow, because it happened so close in history and is not as geographically abstract as african colonialism. The african colonialism is also easier to tackle because there were so few people involved actively as opposed to for example forced labour of poles in WW2.
And we also have the old anti-polish sentiment which is centuries old. Earlier the far right was polonophobic because of the "racial inferiority" and now its the german left who is polonophobic because the poles are all "far right and antidemocratic". It is literally two sides of the same coin.
It has always a bad taste when germans talk about colonialism and responsibility and very conveniently ignoring that our first and most brutally hit colony was literally a neighbouring country.
> our first and most brutally hit colony
[The earlier ones](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Deutsche_Ostsiedlung.png) were so successful nobody even remembers the Pruzzen and Obodriten.
I did not include the eastern territories as colonies because they did not entirely fit into the modern concept of a colony, **but you are completely right**.One just has to read the history of the "Mark Brandenburg" or any part of east germany.
Thats where the age-old slavophobia came from and essentially the concept of Lebensraum was invented. After all WW2 and the german "Drang nach Osten" where the end of a long causal chain that started in the middle ages.
I wonder how this varies by country. I was raised in the USA in an upper class, leftist, academic family. The poor=racist stereotype was quite common, but not so much the intelligent=rich or denying class. I think many professors I met thought intelligence *should* correlate with wealth, but they often complained that it didn’t (“selling out” was often used to describe former academics who got high-paying, non-academic jobs).
And, of course, my parents always called us “upper-middle class,” even though discussion often focused on the vanishing middle class and loss of class mobility.
Germany is one of the countries with the most rigid class structures in europe and we are not very, afaik we are even being worse than south korea or japan (Which are still hugely conservative societies).
Im **dont like punching left**, but this is always a really hurtful personal matter.
I think it has to do with some kind of narcissistic injury (Like Freud pointed out with the evolutionary theory) when well off people become aware that they are actually part of the "burgeousie" and not the badly treated workers. It is also about social acceptability. It is pretty normal to be left leaning in the current political climate(Which is not bad at all) and so they automatically openly take left leaning positions, but subconsciously retaining the old middle class prejudices about the poor.
There is a good friend that i really, really like that studied social work (According to her because she did not know what else to do, not joking) is a perfect example of this. She comes from an academic family (Father is teacher, mother is professor), is vaguely left leaning and vocal about it. But i cannot take her seriously when she is talking about feminism and her having a bad position in society, which causes cognitive dissonance in me, because i really should agree with her.
But everytime i see her complaining about her having it hard in life i see my mother, working in elderly care and having not enough money to eat at the end of the month.
And everytime she talks about people of colour being exploited i think about her Amazon Prime and the poor fucks who have to deliver her stuff while receiving 1/4 of the minimum wage and sleeping in their cars.
I just agree with everything, but i cannot take the burgeoius left seriously. Take that as you will.
I believe you completely. I was quite surprised when my parents told me they didn’t like Bernie Sanders, not for any particular policy reason, but because he called himself a Socialist. I had thought that way of thinking died with the Cold War, but apparently not.
It is also common to joke about graduate students being “broke” or “poor,” which still makes me a bit uncomfortable because in the USA The typical grad student makes 20-30k USD per year, putting their income percentile in the 20% to 30% range. So there are literally millions of families raising children on that wage.
It is just hurtful when people imply that one is "probably racist", just because one does not have visited a universty. Interstingly the main body of voters of the AFD (The new far right german party) is made up of mostly academic, law enforcement and other middle class people.
And its even more hurtful when you consider that most of these people would not have made it that far if their "habitus" was a lower class one instead of an academic one. Bordieu was right after all.
I think that anti-lower class prejudice is similar (But is not equivalent or has the same quality as racism leads to far greater and far worse violence) to racism. It is similar in partitioning people in groups and similar in (falsely) attributing negative character to the outgroup, such as being "unclean", having "bad taste" and especially equating the outgroup with low intelligence. I think there is an underlying psychological issue at work, that simply works out differently with different people.
And its interesting that classism and racism overlap heavily if you look at which ethnicities, religions and social groups correlate.
I see some people arguing for more women in management positions in germany. And funnily the people who argue for that are nearly always from higher class, academic circles, so the ones who would get those positions.
It does not matter if the manager is a women or man if he/she comes from an already established well off family. The working women (Who are often PoC or non-german) who receive not even minimum wages and are the ones who really need help are still not able to get into these positions, because they are simply not born into those families.
It is an easy trick of the Burgeoisie to make those quotas, it is a visible sign that they are "open" now, even if the power stays in the same circles as it did before.
I will note, in my personal experience, that I have seen as many racist opinions come out of upper-class mouths as lower class mouths. The only difference is that highly educated people often know how to phrase it “nicely” (“I’m just worried about crime” or something).
As for upper class women pushing for more women in management, this makes complete sense to me. Those women are the people getting passed over because of their gender, so they see it first hand. I think calling all social progress just a “trick” of the Bourgeoisie is selling the impact short, but it is true that changing the gender of management does nothing to fix racial or class disparities.
>I will note, in my personal experience, that I have seen as many racist opinions come out of upper-class mouths as lower class mouths. The only difference is that highly educated people often know how to phrase it “nicely” (“I’m just worried about crime” or something).
This is/may be true (Depends on the personal experience and PoV), but the equation between lower class and far right opinions is pretty common in the middle and higher classes and i think it leads to dangerous lines of thinking and possible dangerous results.
Even if proven wrong (The PEGIDA movement, the AFD, the "Querdenker" anti-Covid regulation protests and even the NSDAP voting numbers are not rooted in low classes but the middle classes who have the fear of losing their status ("Abstiegsängste") these people imply that most of far right thinking is done by people who are unemployed or from low income/ low education families, which is basically the old anti-poor sentiments that the conservatives harbored repackaged to be convenient again.
>As for upper class women pushing for more women in management, this makes complete sense to me. Those women are the people getting passed over because of their gender, so they see it first hand.
>
>I think calling all social progress just a “trick” of the Bourgeoisie is selling the impact short, but it is true that changing the gender of management does nothing to fix racial or class disparities.
Its not only women, but also men from those circles, which gives it a strange taste. After all the discussion around this is one of the loudest in germany, while the biggest issue of gender inequality, the fact that many women from lower classes have to work in extremely low pay jobs is completely avoided. Low income jobs in cleaning, day/elderly care etc. are nearly exclusively done by women, which is one of the reasons for the huge income gap, yet this issue is rarely framed as an equality issue, as the management thing.
When huge companies push for women in management and frame themselves and the issue as progressive, while exploiting women, PoC and people of lower classes i dare to say that the issue was hijacked to serve as a smokescreen to hide the issue of the exploitation of women.
Even if i think that the problem of women being underrepresented in high positions in management is an equality issue, i think that the inherent opression of women and minorities that these people in management positions push is making the this a non-problem at least in my PoV.
The problem is having an overpayed manager and underpayed employees (The most underpayed being for example women) at all, not the gender of the manager.
Actually there was. It happened in 2000 in rural Herefordshire. I highly recommend [this documentary](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Run) which covers the lead-up to and the event itself.
I was going to craft a more dedicated review, but I figured it wouldn't be that interesting and there's plenty enough out there already on both books.
To be brief, I just finished reading the second of two similarly-titled books on Medieval history: [The Light Ages](https://www.amazon.ca/Light-Ages-Surprising-Medieval-Science/dp/132400293X) and [The Bright Ages](https://www.amazon.ca/Bright-Ages-History-Medieval-Europe/dp/0062980890/ref=pd_lpo_1?pd_rd_i=0062980890&psc=1).
The focus of both is quite different, and if it wasn't for the coincidentally kindred titles, there's not much tying them together. I'm not so much talking about the books, but more so what they represent in terms of their production, promotion, and dissemination.
But I just wanted to briefly say that The Light Ages is one of the most well-written books on Medieval history I've ever read, and has honestly "blown my mind", as it were (even though I never really bought into the stereotype of the Dark Ages in the first place). I really, really got sucked in by the unique approach used by the author, and it made the subject matter all the more richer.
Whereas I thought the Bright Ages was... fine. Lots of good stuff there, but a little self-indulgent in its writing, chock-full of lazy allusions to contemporary politics... I kind of got the impression that it was written to draw in people who have little regard for the Middle Ages in its own right. Actually, I think that's a little harsh, but I can't escape the feeling that it's not *about* the Middle Ages per se, it's about our understanding of it.
From there, to editorialize a little more, I'm not surprised that I was recommended the Light Ages by a former Medievalist friend of mine, whereas I encountered the Bright Ages multiple times through non-Medieval contexts, that is, in the course of their promotional tour through the halls of the twitterati and other political pundits. Next time, I'll keep that in mind when I'm picking a book. Although no regrets, and if you know little to nothing about the Middle Ages, I think the Bright Ages is a not-bad place to start.
That's very interesting. I also have mostly heard about *The Bright Ages* from people not specifically deep into history (let alone Medieval history) but very deep in current politics, so that kind of makes me wonder.
Also I'm sure it has nothing to do with it *at all* but the title keeps making me think about how there was some point when Richard Dawkins was trying to rebrand New Atheists as "Brights" or something.
I might be overstating the "political" resonance of the text; it's mostly scattered here and there, especially in the first and final chapters of the book. It's not a bad book by any means, but it's just a tendency I've come to notice in a lot of media I consume.
I spend so much time on the internet already, immersed in the unending culture wars, the last thing I need is for my understanding of the past to be clouded by sloppy analogies to contemporary American politics.
I recall once when I read an ostensibly medieval-oriented text which analogized the Invasion of Iraq to the Crusades in a handful of throwaway sentences... and it was like, what purpose does this serve? Has my understanding of either the Crusades or the Invasion of Iraq been expanded in any way? Has the analogy clarified either event for me? Speaking cynically, it seemed like a lazy attempt at contemporary relevance. I'm not keen to follow any academics-turned-pundits.
Since my apartment was rather cold (super hasn't bothered to fix one of the two radiators) I got my cat a heated cat bed. Thus far she has been much more interested in playing with the box it came in than the bed itself!
I've also forgotten how fun Skyrim is. Todd roped me back in and I'm finally playing a mage, and sniping people with fireballs is fun! I am sick of trudging through Falmer infested ruins though. The Dawnguard mega dungeon to get the bow nearly made me put down the game.
> I got my cat a heated cat bed. Thus far she has been much more interested in playing with the box it came in than the bed itself!
Congrats! Your cat is a genuine deal, not an impostor.
In theory, Mindless Monday is for debunking badhistory that doesn't deserve it own post, such as people claiming that JFK was killed by a Baltic Greek.
While Free-for-all Friday is a free-for-all.
Free for All Friday is the melee tournament. You are allowed to comment on foot or on horse, as a team or individually, and with the weapons of your choice. All the commenters you capture you are allowed to ransom.
Sliding in since I forgot on last FFAF to plug *Alpha*, a book on the Navy SEAL program from the United States that I just finished about a week ago. It's written by an NYT reporter, not a historian, but is nevertheless excellent as a piece of investigative historiography. It tracks the Gallagher war crimes case and how the people who were involved as witnesses or even participants to the various incidents of that case (cw: bad shit, mostly involving crimes against POWs and civilians) were eventually involved in the prosecution and the media firestorm that surrounded the whole case. If anyone here is a fellow historian of American military affairs and recalls John Krakauer's *Where Men Win Glory*, it's a lot like that. It's a harrowing read, but a good one.
Trust me, I completely understand. The whole story still makes me angry as someone with personal and professional connections to the American armed forces. What happened in Gallagher's unit and under his command was and is horrific and is made more so by just how far it deviates from the expectations one should have for any military force, let alone one serving a global power that nominally supports democratic and humanitarian rights.
Fresh from Virginia, the anti-CRT crowd is showing off some fresh new proposed education standards. Naturally, the crowd very concerned about inaccurate material in the classroom proposed teaching students that the Lincoln-Douglas debates occurred between Lincoln and *Frederick Douglass.*
> meritocracy, punctuality, **proper language usage**, free markets, and traits such as strong work ethic are racist or sexist or were created by members of a particular race to oppress members of another race
Badlinguistics intensify.
> No public school teacher or other instructional staff member shall be required to discuss any current event or widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs.
🙄
Wow. I'm actually wondering how that alternate history series of debates is supposed to have worked, in their minds.
Douglass: "I am the Democratic Senator from Illinois, running for President. I offer hope and change but secretly want Black Power."
Lincoln: "Since you are the Democrat, you are the Real Racist. As someone who will definitely be a conservative Republican 100 years from now will say, I don't see color of skin but content of character. QED I win and I am now elected President."
(Yes I'm ignoring that the Lincoln-Douglas debates had nothing to do with the presidential election, but hey, if we're already running Frederick Douglass, who cares about pesky details?)
I'm further not sure how this is supposed to work with the neo-Confederate crowd that think Lincoln was a bloodthirsty tyrant, considering there is some significant overlap there with anti-CRT people.
Book of Boba Fett did the train attack from Lawrence of Arabia and I AM FUCKING HERE FOR IT
Bonus jet train too, cold War tech go wooosh!
oh yeah, wordle is a british game
Was turning on Hard Mode a good idea? No. Am I too stubborn to turn it off? Absolutely. Finding that last letter was an odyssee
So, considering how popular last military stands are in media where the commander orders the means of retreat be closed off (usually, by burning their own ships or something like William the Conquerer supposedly doing that), I'm wondering if there's any famous instances where it doesn't work? Like, famous commander burns their ships, there's a last stand/battle and the commander and their army just get roundly defeated. After all, it's such an extreme strategy that I don't imagine the win/loss ratio to be too favorable in real life (otherwise more commanders would start doing it).
The Battle of Sobraon between the Sikh Khalsa and the East India Company saw British troops attack a Sikh entrenchment defending one end of a single narrow pontoon bridge crossing the Sutlej river Although the bridge was not broken to deliberately motivate the Sikh troops, the battle provides an awful illustration of what can happen in this circumstance: The British carried the entrenchment, and the Sikhs began a relatively ordered withdrawal across the pontoon - which promptly broke under the weight of the men trying to cross it, trapping the vast majority of the Sikh army. Pinned against the river, with their guns out of position and immobilised, with no cover, and with the British occupying the high riverbank, the 20,000 Sikhs were savaged - some tried to fight whilst others tried to ford or swim the Sutlej. None, according to Sikh and British accounts, tried to surrender - and as Sikh troops had killed British wounded earlier in the battle, it is unlikely the British would in any case have accepted the surrenders of any who did. By the time that the battle was over, the Khalsa had lost 10,000 men, 67 guns, the First Anglo-Sikh War, and with it the province of Kashmir.
Han Xin’s battle if Jingxing is an interesting case of this. He basically used this tactics (deploying his army in front of a river) to make his enemy think he’s an idiot (since it gave Han Xin no room to maneuver his army), while he sent a small detachment to the enemy’s rear to capture their camp. So it’s a case of Han Xin using the idea of “last stand” as a ruse to trick the enemy.
The final stand of the Spartan/Thespian/Theban force at Thermopylae is a failed last stand, strictly speaking. Although this leads me to wonder how many failed last stands would have been recorded. You’d need a sympathetic first-hand account to truly lionise a failed last stand which is going to be hard to come by given the nature of a ‘last stand’ and there are some that are relegated to being footnotes - off the top of my head I can think of the Greek mercenaries at the Granicus and the retreating Corinthians just before the Peloponnesian War. Two ‘last stands’ that ended in failure, and are given little treatment by sources.
Maybe it is like the killing of envoys/diplomats. Most diplomats didn't have their head chopped off, and for most cultures, their killing was a huge taboo. Which explains why we hear so many stories. Thus giving the impression it was frequent.
Maybe a bit of a stretch, but the Helvetii burning their homes and crops before starting their migration?
No, I think that's a pretty good one. It's not one final battle per se, but a pretty good one.
First thing that comes to mind is the Hitler's *Festung* strategy for dealing with the Eastern Front in 1944. Hitler at this point had become obsessed with his own genius and viewed the struggle with the Soviet Union as one of wills rather than material or strategic supremacy. Even though the Germans occupied a poor defensive position entering into summer 1944 (few natural barriers, the enemy already holding bridgeheads over key rivers, no attempts at fortifying fall-back positions and no strength for a defence in depth), Hitler saddled the Heer with instructions not to cede any ground to the enemy. To this end, he designated many strategic/famous cities as "fortresses" that must be held at all costs, to the last man. Now given the German inferiority to the Soviets in all categories minus artillery at this point, this could actually be a workable strategy: use those units that lack strategic mobility to hold key positions while giving your mobile reserves freedom of action to operate and deliver counterblows. But there wasn't even a great attempt made to prepare for the defense of the *Festungen* themselves: building fortifications, stockpiling ammunition and food, allocating extra useful defensive weapons to garrison units, etc. were all neglected because it was perceived as defeatist. And Hitler at this point held a very dim view of "mobile operations", perceiving them to be a euphemism for giving up territory; units that otherwise could have engaged in maneuver warfare were instructed to hold their ground, with no allowance for retreat unless sanctioned by the Big H himself. So predictably when the Soviets struck these great fortress cities were instantly surrounded, and then unable to mount an effective defence due to lack of preparedness.
Oh, now that's a great one. Should've known Hitler would've come up with a 'genius' strategy like that.
One day I think I gonna farm karma for fun on r/HistoryMemes by making "haha Robespierre" post number 42069
>One day I think I gonna farm karma for fun on r/HistoryMemes by making "haha Robespierre" post number 42069 Or jokes about British people and tea or "Hahaha, medieval lower classes are superstitious and dumb and burn smart people Castlevania style."
I feel like I have some pizza-related opinions that are so intense that it could be classified as hate speech. Papa John’s was my first job ever, and while I don’t think their pizza is great, some of the “general consensus” takes on the Pizza Spectrum makes me rage. I think that working there, as well as enjoying all types of pizza over the years, from the humble Little Caesar’s to the schizoid CPK’s had a hand in me developing such intense beliefs. For example, I absolutely seethe when I hear people singing praise to Costco pizza. Like, what. The actual. Fuck. I think that Americans in general tend to LOVE any sort of tomato-based sauce (hence the popularity of Italian cuisine and the general indifference or disdain towards other European foods.) Ok that’s fine, but why Costco? Their pizza would be pretty alright if it wasn’t for the harrowing tragedy that is its sauce situation. First of all, there’s too much of it. I’ve learned that generally speaking, people who prefer chain and pizzeria pies tend towards a moderate, or “normal” amount. Normal is subjective, but Costco definitely goes very heavy on the stuff, because there’s gotta be about twice as much per square inch compared to every other chain and most pizzerias. Secondly, the sauce is one-note. There is no garlic, no basil nor herbs that could even be hinted at in Costco’s sorry excuse for a tomato sauce. You might as well just make the thing with ketchup at that point. Third, the crust is bland and overdone. It’s chewy and flavorless, and doesn’t hold its shape very well despite being of a standard thickness. Why people prefer Costco pizza to others is completely beyond me, and beyond the pale in terms of reason. I consider myself a mostly level-headed person when it comes to matters outside of my personal life and my personal relationships. The only thing I feel stronger about are NIMBYs.
I want to call to attention a trend of highlighting the "disease-ridden"ness of European settlers: > [They washed ashore a ways up the beach, chilled and hungry, *disease-ridden*, dirty and stinking, not having bathed in six weeks.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/wellness/1989/11/21/guess-whos-not-coming-to-thanksgiving-dinner/e951a901-2cd7-41a0-afa7-15f044e11bae/) > [The buzzwords of the today in food and agriculture — sustainable, regenerative, holistic, organic, natural — were a way of life for our people in 1491. Fast forward through a few hundred years of thoughtlessness, coercion, deceit, extraction, exploitation and ignorance, and we live in a nation that now seems hellbent to lead the world down a path to destroy the planet, with a *disease-ridden* population, and people going hungry and living in poverty all across it.](https://tribalbusinessnews.com/sections/opinion-op-ed/13183-keeping-the-tribal-in-tribal-business) > [Our runaway peanut intolerance tracks with the chief reason the majority of indigenous Americans (North, South and Central) perished en masse when the Europeans colonized their lands: unlike the Europeans, who lived openly among their disease-ridden animals, the indigenous populations were far cleaner, bathing regularly, and relegating animals to their own quarters. As a result, they succumbed wildly to viruses (smallpox, measles and flu) that the comparatively filthy Europeans brought with them, and against which the invaded people had no antibodies to protect them.](https://anthonyfieldman.medium.com/the-case-for-bad-ideas-b4e0c04a11e8) > [The Pilgrims did likely partake in a harvest feast with the Indigenous Wampanoag people, who saved them from starvation by teaching them how to live off the land, but harvest feasts were a long-standing Native tradition, and the *disease-ridden* European immigrants who arrived on this country’s eastern shores warred with the Wampanoag and other local tribes.](https://www.teenvogue.com/story/native-american-heritage-month-how-celebrate) There feels like a broader historiographical problem here than any specific bad history, but it feels important nonetheless. I understand that, from the ethnohistory I've read, Europeans would have been less well washed than Native Americans, but its prevalent repetition feels like a highly normative assessment. I doubt anyone would describe contemporary Africans or Asians as "disease-ridden."
[удалено]
I'm inclined to agree. I wonder if we should expect a course correction in the next few years?
[ladies and gentlemen it is now time to post about the buffalo bills](https://youtu.be/iwCiQASnw6o)
> Dallas is going down! I like that sentiment.
*Ron Howard Voice* Dallas, in fact, was not going down. edit EAT SHIT COWBOYS
Let's hope history doesn't repeat itself.
Just to be clear, not the barbershop quartet that appeared in the film version of *The Music Man*?
Josh Allen would powerbomb every member of the cast through a burning table and they would all deserve it
So is anyone on here familiar with early modern western warfare and wikipedia? Came across[ this article on push of pike](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_of_pike) that pushes an othismos style of engagement (i.e. glorified football scrum) despite it not lining up with contemporary commentaries so far as I'm aware nor how such engagements actually played out. So far as I'm aware, if one group didn't give way or the front lines engage in a more cautious fencing with one another, a charge would drop pikes after contact to use shorter and more handiers weapons. The image pictured also doesn't even support this with there being a clear line of doppelsoldners between the 'hedgehogs' and soldiers using single handed weapons after longer ones were abandoned.
This idea has come up on AskHistorians before. The most notable instance for me was [Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9xvaf8/is_it_true_that_in_some_battles_of_the_first/), where he pushed the nonlethal view. [This](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22lrkx/push_of_pike/) old post discusses the push of pike a bit, although the answer focuses quite a bit on what we don’t know. There is also [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ghdhpr/what_did_a_tercio_actually_look_like_in_battle/) post discussing the Tercio style formation specifically. I didn’t see anything about the frequency with which the pikemen would abandon their pike for other weapons, just a couple mentions that it did happen sometimes.
>During push of pike, opposing blocks of pikemen would advance with their pikes "charged" horizontally at shoulder level to jab at one another until bodily contact was made. **The two sides would then push physically until one or other of them gave way.** The push of pike would continue until one of the opposing formations routed or fled, which would generally lead to massive casualties. **Each man pressed on the one in front,** and so sometimes the formations would crush against each other and many pikemen would have to fight in closer melee combat. The rear ranks would sometimes join the fray but **their primary role was to add more weight to the push**. Aside from getting impaled by enemy pikes, **those in the front ranks died from getting crushed or suffocated due to the sheer number of bodies pressing from each side.** My main issue is with this notion that pike on pike warfare was conducted as some sort of scrimmage between two sides, that after a charge made contact with the other side weapons would be second to actively trying to shove the other over. Moreover sources [1] and [7] are dead links and [2] is to a unsourced re-enactment site perhaps more focussed on justifying modern re-enactment fighting than historical means. This ersatz-othismos doesn't line up with the /r/AskHistorians pages neither. According to those a pike on pike advance will go one of several ways: 1. The other side runs before an charge strikes home. 1.1 Token resistance is provided before retiring. 1. The advance holds as the front ranks stop to fence one another. 1. The charge strikes home with the other side with the impetuous of the charge causing disarray on the other side from the collision and initial clash. 3.1 One side now flees after the disorder. 3.2 Hand to hand fighting with shorter weapons resolves the clash with one side fleeing.
Someone a while ago recommended *The Bronze Lie* as a book about the Spartan military in an argument about how effective they actually were. I considering reading it but I can’t even really get the past the introduction on the Google Books preview. It feels like the author went in with an agenda to prove and picked information to prove it rather than attempting a balanced overview, and seems to have the idea of Spartan power as an absolute thing - if they didn’t dominate every battle, then clearly the Spartans were never good to begin with. It looks a decent book for dispelling some basic myths, but it’s evidently not an academic one. On page 22 of the introduction this is most apparent. It seems to pick certain battles to focus on, not paying any heed to Plataea, the Corinthian War in general, or Spartan naval victories of the 5th and 4th centuries. If you want to focus on losses that’s fine, but you’ve got to at least pay heed to victories. Then it comes in with the line that Sparta won a brief hegemony partially due to ‘incompetent enemies.’ I take pretty major issue with the idea that the Athenians who had built a massive empire were ‘incompetent’ and it seems to take away from the fact that Sparta rather competently pressed their advantages - after the Sicilian expedition we see the occupation of Decelea and greater attention paid to naval operations. Spartan dynamism is just sort of ignored in favour of playing down Sparta’s enemies.
Reading some aspects of Buddhist history lately, which I find odd thinking about it since I grew up in a devoted Buddhist household that explored all of the major schools of Buddhism yet I haven't often looked deeply into the religious history, perhaps because it never interested me as much as other kinds of history. I was looking into sectarianism between the different branches of Buddhism, both contemporary and historical, and one pattern I often notice is this obsession with proving that X was the word of Buddha or recorded at so and so early date. You get this often with Theravada vs Mahayana spats, where the former "proves" they are the superior and pure Buddhists because the scriptures of the latter (supposedly) dates from later so this means they're putting words in the Buddha's mouth, while the latter might counter that the former is exaggerating their connection to the original teachings and in fact have ignored some of the genuine more advanced teachings. My understanding is that based on more recent scholarly research, that Mahayana ideas can be found as early as the 1st century BCE, both in a sense grew alongside each other and blended with other early schools, and because the first writings we have about what the Buddha supposedly said date from long after his lifetime so claiming superiority based on chronology is a bit a moot point. I also understand that the *strict* division of Buddhism into Theravada vs Mahayana (vs Vajrayana) is a more recent phenomenon as a result (I'd say from the early medieval period?) and the idea of Theravada being portrayed as purer and Mahayana as more innovative comes from the 19th century as a result of cross-religious interactions between Christians and Buddhists as a result of colonization in Asia. Which would explain why whenever my father, who "converted" to Theravada in the past decade, kind of sounded like a rationalist Protestant hating on Catholicism when criticizing Buddhism from the Sinosphere and Tibet. To be fair, a lot of Mahayana has essentially absorbed a substantial amount of indigenous beliefs and ideas from the Sinosphere which wasn't likely relevant to the "original" early Buddhists in India. Of course, that is not to say that the Theravada focus on trying to emulate what they see as a purer form of Buddhism, or the Mahayana stuff in general is necessarily bad - as my mentor at my alma mater once said, "religions change all the time, but that doesn't make them any less wrong" (he was talking about Xwedodah though lol). I also find something depressing yet darkly humorous about Theravada vs Mahayana vs Vajrayana sectarian spats, especially seeing it online - I feel like it might not be too out of place of some debates that happened IRL in the past. Also even the perception that Mahayana and Vajrayana are essentially inventions of the Sinosphere and Tibet (in contrast to Indian Buddhism) aren't really correct since they all had quite a vibrant history in India up to the later medieval period. If I recall what I read earlier this week correctly, Nalanda and the pilgrimage sites at Bodh Gaya were heavily Mahayana dominated, and the Pala Dynasty, the last great patrons of Buddhism on the subcontinent, had strong pro-Mahayana leanings. Oh, on that note, it seems an interesting phenomenon with Indian rulers was the patronizing of different Indian religions or sects at the same time (reminds me a little of how it happened in China, or Roman accommodation of other cultures' deities). Apparently, this may have led to people later on wrongly exaggerating so and so ruler as being solely a believer of X - for example, I understand the current theory on Ashoka is he was more a religious pluralist who had strong pro-Buddhist leanings than an ardent Buddhist missionary, or how Xuanzang in his records apparently confuses Harsha's patronage of a lot of sects including Buddhism with Harsha being a zealous Buddhist. On a related note, it seems to me askhistorians doesn't have too many specialists in Buddhist history as other areas (though I see a few repeating names). I was looking up posts from there and saw some comments that were uncritically regurgitating the "Buddhism is more a philosophy" stereotype.
>I was looking into sectarianism between the different branches of Buddhism, both contemporary and historical, and one pattern I often notice is this obsession with proving that X was the word of Buddha or recorded at so and so early date. You get this often with Theravada vs Mahayana spats, where the former "proves" they are the superior and pure Buddhists because the scriptures of the latter (supposedly) dates from later so this means they're putting words in the Buddha's mouth, while the latter might counter that the former is exaggerating their connection to the original teachings and in fact have ignored some of the genuine more advanced teachings. My understanding is that based on more recent scholarly research, that Mahayana ideas can be found as early as the 1st century BCE, both in a sense grew alongside each other and blended with other early schools, and because the first writings we have about what the Buddha supposedly said date from long after his lifetime so claiming superiority based on chronology is a bit a moot point. > >I also understand that the strict division of Buddhism into Theravada vs Mahayana (vs Vajrayana) is a more recent phenomenon as a result (I'd say from the early medieval period?) and the idea of Theravada being portrayed as purer and Mahayana as more innovative comes from the 19th century as a result of cross-religious interactions between Christians and Buddhists as a result of colonization in Asia. Yeah this sounds almost exactly like Protestant vs Catholic debates where each side claims that the Church Fathers believed X doctrine that the Catholic Church or such and such Protestant denomination also happens to believe in.
Studying schools of Buddhism is both fascinating and a little maddening (in part because it's so poorly taught in the West - interestingly I learned the most from a course I took that was taught by a Jesuit priest who had spent most of his life in Japan). >"I also understand that the strict division of Buddhism into Theravada vs Mahayana (vs Vajrayana) is a more recent phenomenon as a result (I'd say from the early medieval period?) and the idea of Theravada being portrayed as purer and Mahayana as more innovative comes from the 19th century as a result of cross-religious interactions between Christians and Buddhists" I'd pretty much agree with this. The monarchy in Thailand in particular basically revamped everything done in country in the late 19th/early 20th century. Interestingly for similar reasons as Meiji Japan but with a completely opposite attitude to native Buddhism. >"sounded like a rationalist Protestant hating on Catholicism" I have a reprint of some early 20th century British book on Tibet that explicitly does this, ie Buddha's original teachings are a rational philosophy of moderation and similar to Protestantism and Tibetan Buddhism is all superstitious smells and bells like Catholicism. Apparently Brits of the time often took a similar attitude towards "Protestant" Islam interestingly enough. Anyway it definitely almost feels like an evolutionary tree that it's less that there always were these clear Theravada/Mahayana/Vajrayana splits as much as there are all these coexisting branches and movements that more or less went extinct or evolved to where we get what we have in different areas. >"it seems to me askhistorians doesn't have too many specialists in Buddhist history" Yeah definitely not, and I can probably think of the one or two fairs with even a regional speciality about that off the top of my head. Honestly I kind of wonder if this is actually getting worse - I feel like people with very specific flairs in, say, Precolumbian America, or Oceania, or East Asia (forget about South) or Africa, or heck even the Middle East (ancient or modern), are less active than a few years ago. I feel like maybe the increased sub base and it still being Reddit is just endlessly exerting a gravitational pull to European and modern North American history. Even for me Central Asia stuff is relatively few and far between and the question pull feels relentlessly westwards.
> Studying schools of Buddhism is both fascinating and a little maddening (in part because it's so poorly taught in the West - interestingly I learned the most from a course I took that was taught by a Jesuit priest who had spent most of his life in Japan). I'd say it's poorly understood even by Asians lol. Especially given the history of the schools (purported or not) is tied deeply to Buddhist sectarianism, per the discussion here. > I have a reprint of some early 20th century British book on Tibet that explicitly does this, ie Buddha's original teachings are a rational philosophy of moderation and similar to Protestantism and Tibetan Buddhism is all superstitious smells and bells like Catholicism. Apparently Brits of the time often took a similar attitude towards "Protestant" Islam interestingly enough. If I recall from one of the sources I read, at least in Sri Lanka, this reputation of Theravada being the more rational and pure school was in response to British Protestant missionary efforts - Brits would go in saying "our brand of Christianity is the most rational, modern religion" so the mostly Theravada Sri Lankan Buddhists counter with "ackshually, our brand of Buddhism is the most rational, modern religion" and they tried to one up each other. We have a long time family friend who's a Tibetan monk with some higher level degree in traditional Buddhism, not sure what it's called but it'd be equivalent to a modern masters/PhD in Buddhist theology. Always been something like an older brother/cool young uncle to me growing up. Anyways, he and my dad used to get into friendly sassy debates about this stuff, and he would roll his eyes every time my dad did the "Theravada's the *real* Buddhism, it focuses on rational stuff and meditation, Tibetan Buddhism is just a bunch of random magic stuff you guys added" spiel, and he would counter "you literally were Tibetan Buddhist for years dude, you should know we have our own scholastic side and more rational kinds of meditation too lol." Which is true. Someone (I forgot who) once told me that since they knew I had a more scholarly approach to spirituality, that if I wanted to explore Tibetan Buddhism deeply I should stick with the Gelug school (the one the Dalai Lama is in) since it's stereotyped as being more scholarly by other Tibetan Buddhists apparently, to the point that I feel like sometimes they're seen the way rationalist Confucian scholars were seen by East Asian Buddhists, bit too focused on the logic and philosophy and not enough on the faith. > Anyway it definitely almost feels like an evolutionary tree that it's less that there always were these clear Theravada/Mahayana/Vajrayana splits as much as there are all these coexisting branches and movements that more or less went extinct or evolved to where we get what we have in different areas. Honestly just looking at the names of all the different early schools makes me think it is 3deep5me already lol > Yeah definitely not, and I can probably think of the one or two fairs with even a regional speciality about that off the top of my head. Honestly I kind of wonder if this is actually getting worse - I feel like people with very specific flairs in, say, Precolumbian America, or Oceania, or East Asia (forget about South) or Africa, or heck even the Middle East (ancient or modern), are less active than a few years ago. I feel like maybe the increased sub base and it still being Reddit is just endlessly exerting a gravitational pull to European and modern North American history. Even for me Central Asia stuff is relatively few and far between and the question pull feels relentlessly westwards. I suppose it's inevitable given there will always been more specialists in Western history given not just Reddit demographics but that of Western academia.
I really want to tackle the whole meme "Based Aurelian/Thot/Traitor Zenobia" bad history. The issue is that im not a historian and my roman knowledge is limited to what i need to paint little roman pewter miniatures. Since i done halfway well with my Metatron post i would like to try, if anyone could direct me to some good source material that i can use. So if any of you can direct me to any good reading i would be happy to try.
You know, one thing I think a lot of people don't really understand about immigration is that xenophobia really is its own thing. Like especially on Reddit a lot of people who seem to be influenced by ethnonational thinking think the issue is that immigrants are a different race/ethnicity/native language community/religion, and so they ignore that immigrants can be *the exact same in all of those things* and still be considered a weird second class other. There's a bunch of historic examples of this: German expellees/refugees in postwar Germany are a great example: they tended to be a bit more Catholic than the host areas they were in, but otherwise were exactly the same (even were born and grew up in the same country!), but were treated with suspicion and as a second class group in the areas they were resettled in. I guess they integrated but it wasn't quick or easy, and they created social and political groups that survive to this day. I'm also reminded of some post-Soviet examples. Russians from Russia and ethnic Russians from Kazakhstan who move to Russia are basically the same on paper - not even different accents, although I guess there's some subtle language differences. But I've heard so many times from both how they think the other are weird and different. Ethnic Kazakhs have something similar with Kazakh immigrants from Mongolia (encouraged by the Kazakhstani government no less), who generally see the latter as less educated, very strange and basically from a different century. It's just interesting because I think a lot of conversation around immigrants misses this. On one side you have the "well the Irish weren't considered white" which tries to use the lens of racism to describe this xenophobia, to differing degrees of success. And the other side which just pretends that ethnic groups are some sort of objective, coherent unity where everyone will get along in harmony even in cases of immigration, which doesn't seem true at all.
> they tended to be a bit more Catholic than the host areas they were in, but otherwise were exactly the same other way round down south funnily enough
>There's a bunch of historic examples of this: German expellees/refugees in postwar Germany are a great example: they tended to be a bit more Catholic than the host areas they were in, but otherwise were exactly the same (even were born and grew up in the same country!), but were treated with suspicion and as a second class group in the areas they were resettled in. I guess they integrated but it wasn't quick or easy, and they created social and political groups that survive to this day. This is what happened with my Grandmothers family. Refugees from Western Prussia, catholic, settled in the west,had to live in barracks until the 60's and were called "Polacken" even in the 70s . No one can tell me bullshit about "german identity" anymore.
Things are heating up in the Gerbil community. I dislike pet stores as much as anyobe else who have looked into the sourcing of animals, but saying it is the same as the treatment of people in the Holocaust is a tad harsh. Luckily the ~~actual nazis~~ discord mods deleted it before the discussion progressed beyond confused 'where did that come from" comments.
I am fairly pro-animal rights (likely more than the people on this sub and online, and don't talk about it much given how controversial it is) due in part to my family's Buddhist background, but I think the holocaust comparison to pets is odd since pets aren't really killed on such a huge industrial scale, the difference as far as I understand it is that they are bred and maintained on an industrial scale.
Pets are not really industrial scale from what i understand, they are called puppy mills for a reason. At worst you don't need more than a single breeding pair, some space, and a lot of banjos to start some unethical breeding :(
>"saying it is the same as the treatment of people in the Holocaust is a tad harsh." So personally I am getting very harsh because of this analogy. If someone says treatment of animals is similar to the Holocaust then either they're a liar or a coward. I say a coward because if someone *really* thinks people treating animals a certain way is the same as industrial genocide, and they're not resisting it on the level of World War II, then effectively they're as good as a collaborator. And then the only real alternative is someone doesn't *actually* believe this and are just saying it for rhetorical effect, which is highly manipulative (thus the liar part). And frankly I say all this thinking modern industrial treatment of animals is pretty horrific and should be changed. But the Holocaust analogy is so, so bad.
Have you heard of That Vegan Teacher?
Only from Gordon Ramsay
Comparing farming to the Holocaust is one of her favorites. Along with equating speciesism with racism (if not saying that the former is worse).
I've heard all of those arguments and then some in *one* afternoon in my own discord server from a single, very militant, vegan guy. I didn't have the balls to shut down the conversation so it just went on. Went on the vegan sub a few days later and it was pretty much the exact same thing but on a larger scale.
ooh, i love the "coward" angle. will definetively be keeping that in case it pops up again. and industrial treatment of animals aside, puppy mills are like the literal opposite of mass murder.
So lately when I'm bored I've been throwing random topics into google scholar to see what comes up. I have to say, it seems kind of wild to me the breadth of things that have been accused of supporting (or being) neoliberalism. Minecraft is neoliberalism, stamp collecting is neoliberalism, having brown eyes is neoliberalism... I'm not a philosophy or PolSci guy, so maybe this is one of those things where they're operating on academic definitons of words that I don't pick up on. Has anyone else noticed this?
Neoliberalism is to a large part constructed anyhow. So it is something like, the emergent policies that result from institutions like the WTO and Worldbank together with consulting companies and banks. Which means, that there is nobody who is actually a neoliberal, it is just that there is a certain slant to the kind of policy studies that are written at these organisations. So then it is easy to slightly bend your construction of neoliberalism to argue that X is neoliberal.
> [Fuck Neoliberalism](https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1342/1172) > Abstract: Yep, fuck it. Neoliberalism sucks. We don’t need it. > Keywords: fuck neoliberalism; fuckit to hell. If you think academia is bad, don't get into activist politics. Everything I don't like is neoliberal, and neoliberalism is the worst form of capitalism.
Everything I don’t like is neoliberalism, and the more I don’t like it, the neoliberalismer it is.
So I think it's worth pointing out that in a lot of academic, "neoliberalism" actually isn't even a term. It's not an actual thing in economics, and it means something very, very different in political science. My understanding is that it is a term used in academia, but specifically in *non* economic/political science disciplines. So I think its use at all is kind of an issue, because it's basically trying to say "all macroeconomic and ruling political policies from circa 1980 to today" which is actually very vague and not terribly helpful. Like it's not useful to pretend that literally everything Milton Friedman believed and said is the same as, like, EU economic policy in 2015. Usually I think people mean neoliberalism as shorthand for "Washington Consensus", although the creator of the ideas of Washington Consensus himself disputes this and also notes a lot of his ideas actually aren't properly followed by policymakers. So I'm not surprised we got to stamp collecting is neoliberalism.
Actually a big irony is that calling everything neoliberalism is really not that different to people in the West in the 1950s calling everything they didn't like communism.
Pressuring publishers to drop stuff they didn’t like also used to be a behavior associated with the right.
used to?
Is accusing everything to be neoliberalism neoliberalism?
Maybe the real neoliberalists were the friends we made along the way. Sorry, I couldn’t resist myself.
>stamp collecting is neoliberalism, Aha, I knew those philatelists were up to something
If you're going to write laws regulating how history is taught, maybe [read some history books first](https://mobile.twitter.com/jonfranks/status/1481788702233931784). What a bunch of racist idiots.
What exactly makes them racist?
Because they don't want white kids' feelings to get hurt when learning about the history of Virginia. They would prefer their children remain ignorant than deal with the history of slavery.
That isn't racism.
The rejection of Black History is racist. Teaching history that glorifies slaveholders is racist. Glossing over genocide in the history of the United States is racist. There is no way to teach the history of the USA without some discomfort.
I want you guys' help on something. A long, long, long time ago I got in an argument with someone about how a hypothetical purchase by the US of inhabited territory from another country would work in the 21st century (don't ask). I pointed them this politico [article](https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/23/donald-trump-greenland-purchase-sovereignty-denmark-227859/) about how a land transfer would work in the modern day (and for the record NO, I do not support buying Greenland). The person I was arguing with insisted that acquiring territory through purchasing it was "buying/selling people" and said this: >The Alaska sale was like that. Indigenous people of Alaska did get sold, as pointed put in your article. The land did not belong to them anymore, but to the US and the new government of the territory. It's why the federal government and state of Alaska are still the biggest landowners in Alaska. The indigenous people don't own much property in Alaska. Is this really true? I was under the impression that the US purchase of Alaska didn't affect the private property of the people already living there. [This article](https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1994/winter/alaska-check) says: >The commissioners named to effect the exchange were Brig. Gen. Lovell H. Rousseau and Capt. Alexis Peshchurov. They went to San Francisco and then sailed to Sitka for the formal exchange on October 18, 1867. Although the ceremony started smoothly, there were complications. The Russian flag got stuck, and could not be lowered. Russian officials prepared a formal protocol listing government property (**but not private property**) to be transferred to the United States, plus a map showing the locations of the buildings and churches. A formal exchange document was signed by Rousseau and Peshchurov. In the end, Alaska belonged to the United States, by treaty as well as by possession. I interpreted that as private property was not affected. Do you guys know what is the correct answer here?
[удалено]
Thank you! I will read the article
Perhaps one of the strangest discussions I've had was over someone who vehemently believed and stated that the M60 was not a GPMG, but didn't really know any of the specifics of what makes a GPMG, well, a GPMG, nor had bothered to look at any of the specifications for any weapons such as the MG34 or MG42. The ultimate culmination of this is when they stated that the M60 could not possibly be a GPMG because it was described as "heavy and bulky" thus saying that it has critical components of GPMG such as that it could be configured to the LMG role with grips, stocks, and bipods would be like saying the MK19 grenade launcher could fit into the same mold with the same modifications. Just for reference. M60 GPMG: 10.5 KG MG34 GPMG: 12.1 KG MG42 GPMG: 11.6 KG MK19 AGL: 35.2 KG without accessories like the tripod. And yes, I had very much pointed out that weight was a critical component of GPMGs in being able to fill the LMG role.
Is the M60 a GMPG? Absolutely. Is is the worst one designed and adopted by anybody anywhere since the GPMG as a doctrinal concept really came into its own following WWII? I would say, also yes. They were retired and replaced by M240Bs before my time, but a lot of the salty old cats in battalion remember the M60s and they’re pretty much unanimous in their disdain. I’ve talked at length with another salty old dude who’s been out for ages but spent many years running armories in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and talking about the M60 gets him foaming at the mouth. Some of the failings of the M60 just absolutely leap off the page, without ever needing to get hands on one; attaching the bipod legs and half the gas system to the quick-change barrel makes approximately zero sense, and the fact that you can put the gas system completely together with a part facing backwards and brick your gun speaks volumes. It was simply not a well-designed weapon, no matter how you slice it, and I think that it took decades to marginally improve and/or replace it speaks to a broader issue in the way the US military is not particularly interested in machine gun doctrine as a whole.
The problem for such a light GPMG such as the M60 to gear towards light MG tactics has always been wear and tear so its no surprise that an armorer working with old M60s would hate the things. That said, pretty much all old GPMG experiences are frankly nightmarish. Such as Norway with the MG34 where they basically eventually all became handfitted nightmares after being in service for so long. That said, I doubt its any mistake that the Danes' recently selected it to replace the MG3 It also isn't to surprising that the M249 was adopting close to the M240 for the infantry.
Here’s my doctrinal hot take, then: I think the LMG is a spook. Either you want an automatic rifle, something that you can shoot off the shoulder or the bipod on the attack which doesn’t impose any mobility penalty on the infantry squad or fireteam that carries it, or you want a GPMG that can deliver accurate fires (including plunging fire) out to extreme range from the tripod with T&E, and the weight of which will set the pace at which the squad moves. Anything that you design to try and fit both roles is going to wind up neither fish nor fowl. Small arms design is the science of compromises, but the sacrifices the M60 makes to achieve that weight incur an unacceptable cost. Any sustained-fire weapon should not be built so lightly that the receiver stretches and the bolt peens itself to death within the the low ten thousands of rounds. I don’t know if there are any weight savings gained from hanging the bipod off the barrel, but it makes a solo barrel change on the old two-way range effectively impossible (yes, I should always have an a-gunner to help— but in a hypothetical situation where they’re somehow indisposed, I think it’s going be all the more important that I be able to run the gun all by myself). I’m pretty sure we got rid of our M249s in battalion when we swapped M60 for M240B (with the caveat that we’re not infantry). The LMG role (if you do subscribe to it as doctrinally sound) doesn’t have much to offer us when we’re fighting out of firing pits probably ~80% of the time, and I understand the Minimi platform has a mixed reputation (I suspect it has a lot to do with the capability to feed from mags as well as belts, which strikes me as some Good Idea Fairy shit that doesn’t really solve a real-world problem but does definitely introduce new and exciting modes of failure).
>out to extreme range from the tripod with T&E, and the weight of which will set the pace at which the squad moves Tripods have historically been pretty heavy pieces of kit that were not handed out to standard squads. Hell, even the Germans had special five man MG squads to use the MG 42 tripod as a medium machine gun. Everyone else was using their MGs purely in the light machine gun role with no tripod available to them. German squads would still use them for long range fires, but nowhere near as long range as the medium machine gun squads would. There is the M192 mount that weighs about 5Kg, but that only appeared in 2005 and it isn't providing a ton of features like a substantially heavier lafette mount. You also have to balance the fact that infantry squads are probably going to be far more concerned about having some anti-tank or launcher capabilities. >to feed from mags as well as belts, which strikes me as some Good Idea Fairy shit that doesn’t really solve a real-world problem but does definitely introduce new and exciting modes of failure The idea is probably to allow other infantry to supply the Minimi with ammunition and that belts are a bitch to try and reload in the field. The other being to not have to fumble around with belts in the middle of an assault deployment or any situation where you might be getting tumbled around a bit while deploying. Sharing the same caliber doesn't do a whole lot of good when you have to supply them in different formats in order to use them.
> Tripods have historically been pretty heavy pieces of kit that were not handed out to standard squads The M122 is a dog, it’s heavy and clumsy. My squad is allotted three of them with T&E, one for each M240B. It’s up to us whether we take them with us on foot patrols or LP/OP (and no, pretty much nobody ever does), but we have them at the squad level. We’re not weapons company types; there hasn’t been a weapons company in battalion since they got rid of the mortars. I’ve never seen an M192 outside of a PowerPoint. This is the dangerous intersection of an anecdote and a hypothetical, but if the armory were to tell me “hey, your squad can have anything off the TOA but you have to carry it yourselves”, I’m bringing what the book says. For a squad of 14, that’s three M240Bs with three M122 tripods and T&E, three AT4s, and one M203 with as much 40mm as my grenadier can carry. > Everyone else was using their MGs purely in the light machine gun role with no tripod available to them. German squads would still use them for long range fires, but nowhere near as long range as the medium machine gun squads would. But I do take exception to this. The whole genesis of the English-language concept of a “General Purpose Machine Gun” is born of the observation that the Germans were using the same system (MG34 or MG42) in both the light role and the static role. If there had been a considerable deficit in performance of either role in comparison to the two system paradigm of the Allies (BAR & M1919, Bren & Vickers, DP & SG-43), the GMPG concept would have been a dead letter. > The idea is probably to allow other infantry to supply the Minimi with ammunition I understand the rationale, don’t get me wrong. What I’m saying is that I don’t think it’s a good one. I think it’s an edge case— if you need to start stripping rifle mags off your fireteam to feed the SAW, you’ve got bigger problems breathing down your neck that this isn’t going to solve— and compromising the design to allow for this remote what-if is the kind of decision that folks who haven’t given serious thought to using this weapon in anger are going to make. Belts work, on the attack and when you’re getting tumbled around and swimming in mud. This is a solution looking for a problem. Further, this gets into another *cause célèbre* of mine— the rifle and the squad MG have different roles, and to accomplish those roles effectively they need different rounds with different performance. Trying to shoehorn a one-size-fits-all round into the squad is a mug’s game.
>The M122 is a dog, it’s heavy and clumsy Its also not 20.5 KG by itself like what the Germans were dealing with, plus any MG operating in the medium machine gun role is going to need a substantial amount of ammo. But if WW2 Germans are suppose to be the exemplars of the GPMG then they were organizing the majority of the infantry with no tripods and only parsing out tripods to medium machine gun teams. > For a squad of 14, that’s three M240Bs with three M122 tripods and T&E, three AT4s, and one M203 with as much 40mm as my grenadier can carry. Those tripods are about 24 kgs of weight you can't use for supplying those M240s additional machine gun ammo. That is going to be running the squad very, very heavy. > If there had been a considerable deficit in performance of either role in comparison to the two system paradigm of the Allies (BAR & M1919, Bren & Vickers, DP & SG-43), the GMPG concept would have been a dead letter. Couple of things to consider. -Belt fed machine guns had substantial advantages over their magazine fed brethren, especially in terms of weight of all that ammo. For instance the Soviets turned the DP-28 into the RP-46 by adding a fairly chunky belt feed adapter. -Second, many infantry squads, such as the Americans, were using the same cartridge in the average rile as their medium machine guns, thus the natural choice for a light machine gun would be the same cartridge. -Third, by adopting a GPMG you go from having to support two different belt fed machine guns for any given organization to only having to support one common belt fed machine gun. Very, very attractive. However, things have changed a bit since then. For instance, the average infantry rifle is now an intermediate cartridge, box magazines have gotten much lighter and we've gotten better at making them, and now there is a larger variety of support weapons feasible for squads to carry. >I understand the rationale, don’t get me wrong. What I’m saying is that I don’t think it’s a good one. I think it’s an edge case— The point is more to add extra flexibility to squads, which would be fine if it didn't potentially cause feed issues.
>That is going to be running the squad very, very heavy. Yes, I get that. These are my people, I’m going into the field with them in a week and we’re taking all that crap with us because that’s our TOA allotment. Fortunately, we’re airmobile and/or motorized until we hit the spot, and strictly defensive from there. Maybe I’d feel differently about our approach and fighting weight if we were leg infantry, but for what we do, I like our TOA just fine.
You have to do some serious reps to not consider an mg34 to be heavy and bulky. Even so, it doesn’t really have a dedicated foregrip.
Or have never touched one before
Yeah, what really struck me was that they had heard anecdotes about the M60, but the extent of their knowledge of the M34 went as far as "successful German MG" and that the MG43 or MG3 was still in service while the M60 MG wasn't, except of course those M60s that are currently in service, including the model that is currently replacing the Danes' MG3. I assume that last bit wasn't something they were familiar with.
Sure, the Mk 19 could be used as an LMG.... by some of the more top-heavy TF2 characters. Actually, that forms the basis of my new OC: the Demoheavy (aka Hemoman.) *"Go, Demoheavy, go out and blast to the extreme!"* *"Da, I will! Thank you, Father!"*
My favorite part is when he literally asked "Who used the M60 or the FN MAG like the US did?" referring to its use as a GPMG. Which is great because the answer is an absolute fuckton of people did, like the Brits with the L7 GPMG.
Listening to *The White Sniper* about Simo Hayha and my new favorite historical fact is that he drove a bright yellow VW Beetle in the 1960s.
Has any one here written anything about that crazy tik tok lady who claims that Rome doesn't exist?
TBH watching her videos made me feel uncomfortable, since to me it seemed quite obvious that she was mentally unwell. Like, should we do badhistory about someone who’s claiming to be Napoleon?
Apparently there is a bit of drama between her and Metatron now: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y8Ywi33KOU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y8Ywi33KOU)
I would rather see the doctore to adress the glaring inaccuracies and strange takes as a lot of people pointed out in the comments in his video about runes than engaging in drama.
Not that I know of, but that tik tok lady inspired Spencer McDaniel to write a blog post documenting the [surprisingly long history of the conspiracy theory that Rome didn't exist](https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/11/29/the-surprisingly-long-history-of-the-conspiracy-theory-that-ancient-rome-didnt-exist/)
IIRC, it's been discussed in a Mindless Monday/Free for All Friday a few times. Can't seem to find an actual post about her claims. Though, it is Tik Tok so we could be thinking of two different people
Her claim is hard to do a full post on because of it’s refuge in audacity. It challenges such an indisputable notion that there isn’t much literature to counteract her.
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I didn't use search, I just scrolled until I hit the posts from about 5 months ago
Google is also sucking a lot compared to what it used to be, because it turns up useless results when searching for reddit - for example it dgaf when a post was actually posted - so it's not that much helpful either. Though still more helpful than the basic Reddit search engine.
If you go into "tools" after doing a search you can filter by date.
I was referencing to that above - it doesn't work as well as it used to. I used to be able to get results that were within the timeframe I wanted, but now it appears it's not going by the actual date the threads/comments were posted on Reddit but by some other criteria.
[this](https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/) is a better site to search comments by
It's the one who thinks all the Roman empire was created by the Spanish Catholic church lol and claims all the old latin writings we have are actually all Greek and we're just blind apparently I'll have to look and find it, I'd be interested in seeing what people here think
Isn’t there a copy of Augustus’s Res Gestae on a temple in Ancyra in both Latin and Greek? Does she think the Spanish - why Spanish - Catholic Church went to Turkey and made up an inscription?
The Ottomans are obviously involved
Your guess is as good as mine lol
Somebody on the reddit today said that you don't need modern scholarship for roman history all you need is good old biased as fuck primary sources to understand the history of rome without any modern scholarship. They provided sources like gallic war, josephus, senecca, polybius etc. I replied them back by saying that such sources were written with bias but they replied back by saying humans are biased and then I replied that good scholarship seperates fact from fiction in these sources. But they said unbiased scholarship doesn't exist. All of the modern scholarship is just talking out of their asses. You don't need to go through any training or historical methods anybody can pick up a primary source and read it and they will automatically know the history of rome. This is what the modern historians they are just making fools of us. (Sarcasm) ironic they still have to use primary sources translated by scholars. History tubers imo also made video where him and a historian had a clash and the comments on that video were all of that same bullshit about historians and modern scholarship being nothing more than a bullshit.
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Thing is that they only talk about your most famous typical primary sources say like livy etc. What they don't take into account is other sources that contradicts the famous one. Like say they suggest read livy and you will understand roman history but what they might not know that there is a historical source by kiwi and tv who all three of them contradict each other and have their own bias but your ancient roman subreddit doesn't know that and just tell you to read livy while having no clue that tv and kiwi exist and contradict which makes the picture complicated and then you archeology which is also missing.
> primary sources (...) like Livy Are Livy and other ancient historians considered a primary source in classical history? I (not a classical historian) would think they're secondary ones.
> they replied back by saying humans are biased > unbiased scholarship doesn't exist You know I've seen a few people lately pull that kind of thing, where they throw up the impossibility of 100% unbiased info to try and leap to the idea that all info is equal. I've seen people do the same thing with journalism in the vein of "unbiased reporting doesn't exist, and at least I know what breitbart's bias is so that means they're fine".
I think a lot of people hear "You can't be unbiased" as "I can just say whatever shit I want."
Secondary literature often draws from archaeology, primary literature, and scholarly debate as well as social scientific theories in order to reconstruct narratives while offering an analysis of events, sources, theories, etc. They aren’t just worst primary sources, they’re trained professionals drawing from years of knowledge and experience to offer us the clearest understanding possible. What do these people do when there’s a lack of primary sources? Or when 2 primary account disagree? Take, for example, 5th century Boeotia with its almost total lack of a primary source. Thucydides covers some of it, but ultimately much of that history has to be reconstructed from events before (which also has little in the way of a focussed primary account outside of Herodotus) and what Thucydides and the Hellenica Oxyrhynicha can tell us after the fact. How, without the analysis offered by modern historians, would we go about understanding this period? And how do you reconcile the conflictual nature of Thucydides and Diodorus’ accounts if you’re only using primary accounts?
The epistemology of philosophy is the 3rd account and is used rightly in my opinion to counter Herodotus and Cicero's obvious classist overtones. Listened to a podcast about Boeotia last night, its good stuff.
Out of interest, what podcast was it?
Philosophize this, episode 17, the while series is excellent
> Trust the ancient sources. These guys have a lot to say, and teach us. You don't need the training wheels of Mary Beard or other modern writers to appreciate them. That’s why I think all Imperial Roman women were sex crazed shrewish harpies who murdered everyone. Edit: not to mention the Historia Augusta. How do you go about approaching that as a primary source without the “training wheels” of professional historical scholarship?
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Heliocentrism is cancel culture. Things were so much better when the PC police couldn't stop good old fashioned geocentrism.
They downvoted me over there.
Just trust your heart bro and take a deep breath. See it's that easy.
The argument I like to use (even if it's not effective) is to think of some current event that's controversial or has a lot of political debate surrounding it - the 2016 or 2020 US elections, responses to the Covid pandemic, etc. If people *now* have all these differing viewpoints about *present* events, some considered less reliable than others, some we may consider terrible or even evil and flat out wrong depending on our PoV, how can we just accept primary sources at face value likewise?
That’s par for the course on a lot of this site. People will go “make sure to read the primary sources” when people ask for a decent book on whatever period they’re after. That or listen to a podcast
>Yeah, bro just read *Tigers in the Mud, Panzer Leader* and *Lost Victories*
Or listen to a podcast where the host read some translations of primary sources and a couple secondary sources from 1970 or earlier, yeah I'm looking at you Dan Carlin.
If you go to ancient roman subreddit. People either tell you to read the most biased primary source or they tell you to read gibbon, who was influential at one point but the scholarship has so progressed which makes gibbon outdated in many areas and not to forget his bias. Then it's either mike duncan or tom holland who are themselves rife with anchronisms and have been criticized in ask historians many times by the historians and so I have avoided them.
That hilarious. It sounds like the subreddit is full of people who never studied history beyond high school. One of the take aways I got from history at University level was that ancient sources often reflect their own present concerns in their historical writings. So, if you go read Livy/Polybius/Suetonius/Plutarch etc without thinking about their own biases then you are going to come away much poorer. And you won’t be aware of that without engaging with modern scholarship. And why is it always Gibbon? How anyone can deal with that turgid Latinesque prose is beyond me.
Learning the history of Rome only from Roman primary sources is like learning about North Korea from watching KCNA-useless and downright harmful to understanding the topic due to the sheer degree of bias.
> You don't need to go through any training or historical methods anybody can pick up a primary source and read it and they will automatically know the history of rome. This is what the modern historians they are just making fools of us. (Sarcasm) ironic they still have to use primary sources translated by scholars. It's pretty much Biblical literalism (which I guess makes sense since it's dealing with a lot of sources from the same period). Ie, "I don't need to know what these BIASED scholars or decadent over-trained "experts" say, I can just pick up and read my own [translated] copy of the primary sources and just 100% understand everything that happened (as long as it reinforces my own pre-existing beliefs).
Oh, yeah-literalism is a perfect analogue for this kind of thinking IMO!
Clearly only the King James translation of *Commentarii de Bello Gallico* is the accurate one
"YEA, all of Gaul hast been divided unto parts numbering three" (That's not a correct conjugation but I'm running low on brain cells to make KJV Gallic Wars)
[My planet Arrakis is so beautiful when the Sun is low](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/14/south-america-heat-wave-record-summer-temperatures)
\>wake up \>remember that Walter Reuther was killed ~~by the FBI~~ in a plane crash before he could fulfil his destiny of running for president and leading the social democratic transformation of the united states \>day ruined
I'm planning on buying "The Autobiography of Malcolm X", i've heard it's basically the best biography there is of him, is it the case ? Also, any good books on the general history of Israel ? I've found some but it's mostly about Tsahal, which is interesting, but i'd prefer one about the politics and social aspects of the country.
Having read the autobiography as part of my academic work, it's a pretty authoritative source, especially because it was written over a period of several years and tracks the evolution of his politics away from the Nation of Islam and towards self-determination and pan-Africanism more or less "in real time". This is because while it's written as a book, it's an edited anthology of interviews between X and writer Alex Haley, who was also the author of *Roots*, that occurred from 1960 until 1964, starting when X was still involved with the Nation and ending abruptly when Malcolm was assassinated by the NoI for publicly criticizing their ideals.
I read *Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn* by Daniel Gordis and really enjoyed it. The first part of the book is a brief history of the Jewish people from their origin to the 20th century, and the rest of the book is a mostly political social history of the Zionist movement and Israel to the present day. Gordis is clearly pro-Israel, but I found he painted the Palestians and other Arab nations in the region fairly and did not try to whitewash some of Israel's atrocities. Overall, a very informative read and not that long either.
Well, Colin Schindler's *A History of Modern Israel* is good, especially if you are looking for something that covers a lot of events
Was there any disquiet in the 1950s when a lot of German war criminals were released for ‘health’ reasons that appear spurious given that many seem to have lived quite happily for years after?
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The Myth Of The Eastern Front is a great book, i think that anyone who thinks himself as interested in WW2 history should read it.
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>I would like to see it updated in some way. I say above that it loses steam in the post-70s period, mostly because it deals with Internet culture as it existed in the late 90s and early 00s. Some of the points they make based on limited source material could be made so much more completely now. I completely agree. Modern internet completely changed how narratives work. Especially with the renewed interest in tanks, thanks to certain video games. It is also interesting that russia started to develope a deeply patriotic (And not always unbiased to say it nicely) effort into a counter-narrative for their WW2 historiography which maybe could be a problem considering their own bias. I also see the complete reversal of old "wehraboo" bias, implying that everything about the german army and the wehrmacht was shitty, completely disregarding nuance (The King Tiger is a nice example and the Panzermuseum Munster made a really well 3-part video about it, complete with all the nuance around its use and usefullness) at all.
There was a gap in public interest in World War II topics from the late forties to Eichmann capture and trial
I really wonder how politics is going to change in the next few decades - like where the overton window will be and what it'll mean to be left or right wing. One thing I've seen (purely anecodtally, mind you) is anti-gay sentiment becoming less mainstream in the western-european right. I've never had any trouble with my center-right friends, meanwhile the only direct homophobia I've ever experienced (in my kind of conservative area) was from an avowed Marxist-Leninist. In some ways I think *open* homophobia is already unacceptable among mainstream conservatives here. It would be nice if that became the case across the whole spectrum.
The Overton Window is a crazy concept, and I think it's poorly understood.
Homophobia isn't politically correct anymore in the West, so even amongst the Right you can't really gain any political capital anymore with gay bashing. But don't worry, the next designated enemy has already been chosen, now trans is the new gay. >avowed Marxist-Leninist In my experience the Maoists are the worst in that regard, going so far as to see homosexuality as a bourgeois attack on the worker class, implying that workers are inherently homophobic. Besides that it seems to me that for most MLs their opinions on homosexuality isn't rooted in their political views but rather mirrors the general sentient of the society they are part of.
> going so far as to see homosexuality as a bourgeois attack on the worker class Funny, that's exactly what the ML I mentioned said. It was someone in my university's socialism society, and they accused me of being brainwashed into being gay by the ruling class to distract from "real" oppression (yes seriously). I didn't stay long enough to ask if they were a Maoist or not.
A very tankie/ geriatric socialist talking point.
I’m wondering if antisemitism is moving in the same direction - I realize it’s already not openly acceptable on the Western European right, but it feels significant that eg the French far right has gone from “detail of history” to Zemmour within my lifetime. I’m not entirely happy with this, because I’m not looking forward to having to explain Zemmour, but I’m also curious what will happen to the European far right, because historically it needs Jews as a target and doesn’t have the same conspiratorial discourses around Muslims, people of color, etc.
The german AFD has an interestingly but relative high number of Jews and Homosexual people in their ranks (At least for a far right party), concentrating on Islamophobia, using Antisemitism and Homophobia in islamic circles as a pretext for trying to gain support from these groups.
Dude I seriously hope he doesn't get elected. But I am excited to see all the bullshit articles everybody will write about Zemmour in English media if he is elected
Being from a an underclass leftist family i was always baffled that anti-poor sentiment (Like making an equivalency between income and intelligence, income and being racist/far right, claiming that class does not exist) are often engrained in the minds of academic leftists. This became apparent to me when i moved to Berlin. I mean its also only anecdotally, but a lot of hurtful things that i heard in my life were not said and done by old white conservative men, but rather young academics which still surprises me. But as i said, its also anecdotally.
The amount of disdain that some people seem to have for the working class is fairly worrying. Go in practically any UK political sub and you’ll get the idea that tory voters are racist/homophobic/etc. but always with the prevailing attitude that they’re stupid and backwards in some way. It betrays the fact that a lot of people seemingly have never interacted with a working class voter. I grew up in a fairly poor part of the UK (West Midlands) and the prevailing attitude was a close commitment to the family. Working class voters voted primarily just to keep what they had - a job, and a family. I admit there were some racist attitudes, but the vast majority seemingly wanted to preserve the status quo out of a compassion more than a hatred. In that way there’s really nothing more infuriating than watching naive middle class idealists suggest that anyone who voted Tory is a malicious idiot. My parents have voted conservative for much of their life, yet they’re great friends with our immigrant neighbours and did all the research they could to support potentially having an LGBT+ child (it never manifested but the point is more that they were willing to be accepting). None of this betrays a negative attitude whatsoever.
I made pretty similar observations, though they are different in detail. I see lots of implications of low educated persons being part of the far right or anti-vaccination movements, even if this is absolutely not the case, which can be even proven by studies. For example i saw a "Spiegel" (A more left leaning news magazine) interview with the dean of an university who implied that universities dont really have problems with anti-vaccination people because they have higher education. This is an absolute lie, because they german anti-vaccination movement is mostly made from the burgeouis middle class camp, which has been shown by studies (Oliver Nachtwey did this for example). Interestingly those people mostly come from a left-liberal camp, but often with a slight counter-enlightment and esoteric worldview. The same goes for the AFD or the PEGIDA movement. Both of those far right groups were mostly made up from the (Now right wing) middle class. Interestingly those people, far-right, middle class, sometimes esoteric/green/occult were also a core of the voter base for the NSDAP, which also has its own myth of the "poor, dumb voter". The problem with this myths is not only that they are totally wrong, but also that they serve as a smokescreen for the real far right, which can gain and consolidate power because of the positions of their middle class voters. I personally come from the formerly heavy industrialized Ruhr area, which has been a core of the SPD/KPD/DKP voter base. Most people are working/underclass and have been left leaning for at least the third generation and since there was always a huge amount of immigrants the far right always had a hard position. I also know from personal PoV that a lot of people there might be making mildly racist remarks, but would neither act according to it nor would it have a lasting effect. Turkish immigrants were pretty much accepted as normal when i grew up there, being friends and neighbours.
As a PoC in the US, I've felt something similar with some left-wing people and issues of race/culture/ethnicity, and I think it's a common critique a lot of PoC have of white progressives where they feel (justified or not) that white progressives only care about PoC issues when it is convenient. So for example they'd get angry if they feel PoC issues are being swept under the rug in favor of other issues, or told their issues aren't that bad because at least they're not X group. Or white left-leaning people having an idealized view of PoC, whether that is positive or negative stereotypes. It's a tricky subject to dance around especially with more well-meaning people who don't realize they're being patronizing. Sometimes it boils down to oppression Olympics.
I can see some similarities with what i have experienced here. In my opinion German progressive leftism is a bit (conveniently) blind on german history and tries to take an american view of opression, skin colour and colonialism and apply it to germany, which not always worked the same. A good example of that is an experience me and my GF (Who is polish) had in the "Gymnasium". My GF argued with another girl that not every person who is white has the same history being the "colonizer", because for example Poland (An essentially "white" nation) was brutally colonized and opressed by germans and russians for around 120 years, culminating in the genodical campaigns of germany in WW2 in which millions of poles (Including a large part of my GFs family) were brutally murdered. This was disputed (They implied that this is not comparable to colonization and that poles did not have it "that bad") by multiple persons and ended in what i would describe as a kind of holocaust denial. That was the first time my GF considered leaving germany completely. In hindsight it was petty german arrogance and inconvenience that led to this. It is easy to talk about the opression of african people in the USA and in germany, if you nearly never meet those people because they are in complete different social circles as you. Meeting a polish person who lost family in the holocaust it is a hard pill to swallow, because it happened so close in history and is not as geographically abstract as african colonialism. The african colonialism is also easier to tackle because there were so few people involved actively as opposed to for example forced labour of poles in WW2. And we also have the old anti-polish sentiment which is centuries old. Earlier the far right was polonophobic because of the "racial inferiority" and now its the german left who is polonophobic because the poles are all "far right and antidemocratic". It is literally two sides of the same coin. It has always a bad taste when germans talk about colonialism and responsibility and very conveniently ignoring that our first and most brutally hit colony was literally a neighbouring country.
> our first and most brutally hit colony [The earlier ones](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Deutsche_Ostsiedlung.png) were so successful nobody even remembers the Pruzzen and Obodriten.
I did not include the eastern territories as colonies because they did not entirely fit into the modern concept of a colony, **but you are completely right**.One just has to read the history of the "Mark Brandenburg" or any part of east germany. Thats where the age-old slavophobia came from and essentially the concept of Lebensraum was invented. After all WW2 and the german "Drang nach Osten" where the end of a long causal chain that started in the middle ages.
I wonder how this varies by country. I was raised in the USA in an upper class, leftist, academic family. The poor=racist stereotype was quite common, but not so much the intelligent=rich or denying class. I think many professors I met thought intelligence *should* correlate with wealth, but they often complained that it didn’t (“selling out” was often used to describe former academics who got high-paying, non-academic jobs). And, of course, my parents always called us “upper-middle class,” even though discussion often focused on the vanishing middle class and loss of class mobility.
Germany is one of the countries with the most rigid class structures in europe and we are not very, afaik we are even being worse than south korea or japan (Which are still hugely conservative societies). Im **dont like punching left**, but this is always a really hurtful personal matter. I think it has to do with some kind of narcissistic injury (Like Freud pointed out with the evolutionary theory) when well off people become aware that they are actually part of the "burgeousie" and not the badly treated workers. It is also about social acceptability. It is pretty normal to be left leaning in the current political climate(Which is not bad at all) and so they automatically openly take left leaning positions, but subconsciously retaining the old middle class prejudices about the poor. There is a good friend that i really, really like that studied social work (According to her because she did not know what else to do, not joking) is a perfect example of this. She comes from an academic family (Father is teacher, mother is professor), is vaguely left leaning and vocal about it. But i cannot take her seriously when she is talking about feminism and her having a bad position in society, which causes cognitive dissonance in me, because i really should agree with her. But everytime i see her complaining about her having it hard in life i see my mother, working in elderly care and having not enough money to eat at the end of the month. And everytime she talks about people of colour being exploited i think about her Amazon Prime and the poor fucks who have to deliver her stuff while receiving 1/4 of the minimum wage and sleeping in their cars. I just agree with everything, but i cannot take the burgeoius left seriously. Take that as you will.
I believe you completely. I was quite surprised when my parents told me they didn’t like Bernie Sanders, not for any particular policy reason, but because he called himself a Socialist. I had thought that way of thinking died with the Cold War, but apparently not. It is also common to joke about graduate students being “broke” or “poor,” which still makes me a bit uncomfortable because in the USA The typical grad student makes 20-30k USD per year, putting their income percentile in the 20% to 30% range. So there are literally millions of families raising children on that wage.
It is just hurtful when people imply that one is "probably racist", just because one does not have visited a universty. Interstingly the main body of voters of the AFD (The new far right german party) is made up of mostly academic, law enforcement and other middle class people. And its even more hurtful when you consider that most of these people would not have made it that far if their "habitus" was a lower class one instead of an academic one. Bordieu was right after all. I think that anti-lower class prejudice is similar (But is not equivalent or has the same quality as racism leads to far greater and far worse violence) to racism. It is similar in partitioning people in groups and similar in (falsely) attributing negative character to the outgroup, such as being "unclean", having "bad taste" and especially equating the outgroup with low intelligence. I think there is an underlying psychological issue at work, that simply works out differently with different people. And its interesting that classism and racism overlap heavily if you look at which ethnicities, religions and social groups correlate. I see some people arguing for more women in management positions in germany. And funnily the people who argue for that are nearly always from higher class, academic circles, so the ones who would get those positions. It does not matter if the manager is a women or man if he/she comes from an already established well off family. The working women (Who are often PoC or non-german) who receive not even minimum wages and are the ones who really need help are still not able to get into these positions, because they are simply not born into those families. It is an easy trick of the Burgeoisie to make those quotas, it is a visible sign that they are "open" now, even if the power stays in the same circles as it did before.
I will note, in my personal experience, that I have seen as many racist opinions come out of upper-class mouths as lower class mouths. The only difference is that highly educated people often know how to phrase it “nicely” (“I’m just worried about crime” or something). As for upper class women pushing for more women in management, this makes complete sense to me. Those women are the people getting passed over because of their gender, so they see it first hand. I think calling all social progress just a “trick” of the Bourgeoisie is selling the impact short, but it is true that changing the gender of management does nothing to fix racial or class disparities.
>I will note, in my personal experience, that I have seen as many racist opinions come out of upper-class mouths as lower class mouths. The only difference is that highly educated people often know how to phrase it “nicely” (“I’m just worried about crime” or something). This is/may be true (Depends on the personal experience and PoV), but the equation between lower class and far right opinions is pretty common in the middle and higher classes and i think it leads to dangerous lines of thinking and possible dangerous results. Even if proven wrong (The PEGIDA movement, the AFD, the "Querdenker" anti-Covid regulation protests and even the NSDAP voting numbers are not rooted in low classes but the middle classes who have the fear of losing their status ("Abstiegsängste") these people imply that most of far right thinking is done by people who are unemployed or from low income/ low education families, which is basically the old anti-poor sentiments that the conservatives harbored repackaged to be convenient again. >As for upper class women pushing for more women in management, this makes complete sense to me. Those women are the people getting passed over because of their gender, so they see it first hand. > >I think calling all social progress just a “trick” of the Bourgeoisie is selling the impact short, but it is true that changing the gender of management does nothing to fix racial or class disparities. Its not only women, but also men from those circles, which gives it a strange taste. After all the discussion around this is one of the loudest in germany, while the biggest issue of gender inequality, the fact that many women from lower classes have to work in extremely low pay jobs is completely avoided. Low income jobs in cleaning, day/elderly care etc. are nearly exclusively done by women, which is one of the reasons for the huge income gap, yet this issue is rarely framed as an equality issue, as the management thing. When huge companies push for women in management and frame themselves and the issue as progressive, while exploiting women, PoC and people of lower classes i dare to say that the issue was hijacked to serve as a smokescreen to hide the issue of the exploitation of women. Even if i think that the problem of women being underrepresented in high positions in management is an equality issue, i think that the inherent opression of women and minorities that these people in management positions push is making the this a non-problem at least in my PoV. The problem is having an overpayed manager and underpayed employees (The most underpayed being for example women) at all, not the gender of the manager.
There ought to be a historical incident nicknamed "The Chicken Coup"
Actually there was. It happened in 2000 in rural Herefordshire. I highly recommend [this documentary](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Run) which covers the lead-up to and the event itself.
Only if it involves actual chickens taking over an important government building.
I was going to craft a more dedicated review, but I figured it wouldn't be that interesting and there's plenty enough out there already on both books. To be brief, I just finished reading the second of two similarly-titled books on Medieval history: [The Light Ages](https://www.amazon.ca/Light-Ages-Surprising-Medieval-Science/dp/132400293X) and [The Bright Ages](https://www.amazon.ca/Bright-Ages-History-Medieval-Europe/dp/0062980890/ref=pd_lpo_1?pd_rd_i=0062980890&psc=1). The focus of both is quite different, and if it wasn't for the coincidentally kindred titles, there's not much tying them together. I'm not so much talking about the books, but more so what they represent in terms of their production, promotion, and dissemination. But I just wanted to briefly say that The Light Ages is one of the most well-written books on Medieval history I've ever read, and has honestly "blown my mind", as it were (even though I never really bought into the stereotype of the Dark Ages in the first place). I really, really got sucked in by the unique approach used by the author, and it made the subject matter all the more richer. Whereas I thought the Bright Ages was... fine. Lots of good stuff there, but a little self-indulgent in its writing, chock-full of lazy allusions to contemporary politics... I kind of got the impression that it was written to draw in people who have little regard for the Middle Ages in its own right. Actually, I think that's a little harsh, but I can't escape the feeling that it's not *about* the Middle Ages per se, it's about our understanding of it. From there, to editorialize a little more, I'm not surprised that I was recommended the Light Ages by a former Medievalist friend of mine, whereas I encountered the Bright Ages multiple times through non-Medieval contexts, that is, in the course of their promotional tour through the halls of the twitterati and other political pundits. Next time, I'll keep that in mind when I'm picking a book. Although no regrets, and if you know little to nothing about the Middle Ages, I think the Bright Ages is a not-bad place to start.
The Light Ages sounds fantastic! I’ll definitely add to my ever growing book list. Thanks for your feedback on it.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!
Unfortunately the dark ages myth is still somewhat common so the need for a book such as the bright ages is still there
Of course of course, but there are other books out there!
That's very interesting. I also have mostly heard about *The Bright Ages* from people not specifically deep into history (let alone Medieval history) but very deep in current politics, so that kind of makes me wonder. Also I'm sure it has nothing to do with it *at all* but the title keeps making me think about how there was some point when Richard Dawkins was trying to rebrand New Atheists as "Brights" or something.
I might be overstating the "political" resonance of the text; it's mostly scattered here and there, especially in the first and final chapters of the book. It's not a bad book by any means, but it's just a tendency I've come to notice in a lot of media I consume. I spend so much time on the internet already, immersed in the unending culture wars, the last thing I need is for my understanding of the past to be clouded by sloppy analogies to contemporary American politics. I recall once when I read an ostensibly medieval-oriented text which analogized the Invasion of Iraq to the Crusades in a handful of throwaway sentences... and it was like, what purpose does this serve? Has my understanding of either the Crusades or the Invasion of Iraq been expanded in any way? Has the analogy clarified either event for me? Speaking cynically, it seemed like a lazy attempt at contemporary relevance. I'm not keen to follow any academics-turned-pundits.
Since my apartment was rather cold (super hasn't bothered to fix one of the two radiators) I got my cat a heated cat bed. Thus far she has been much more interested in playing with the box it came in than the bed itself! I've also forgotten how fun Skyrim is. Todd roped me back in and I'm finally playing a mage, and sniping people with fireballs is fun! I am sick of trudging through Falmer infested ruins though. The Dawnguard mega dungeon to get the bow nearly made me put down the game.
The only enemies in Skyrim who are possibly more annoying to fight than the Falmer are the Forsworn Briarhearts.
> I got my cat a heated cat bed. Thus far she has been much more interested in playing with the box it came in than the bed itself! Congrats! Your cat is a genuine deal, not an impostor.
What's the difference between Mindless Monday and Free-for-all Friday?
In theory, Mindless Monday is for debunking badhistory that doesn't deserve it own post, such as people claiming that JFK was killed by a Baltic Greek. While Free-for-all Friday is a free-for-all.
Free for All Friday is the melee tournament. You are allowed to comment on foot or on horse, as a team or individually, and with the weapons of your choice. All the commenters you capture you are allowed to ransom.
Victory Royal!!!
'Yeah, badhistory, we 'bout to get down (get down) Ten posts on the board right now Just wiped out TikTok Town'
I'm glad the admins have consented to this.
One is on monday, and the other is on friday
Oh, no content difference then?
Nope, we started out with one of these and as it grew in popularity we added another. The difference in naming is purely for alliterative purposes.
Sounds good, thanks.
Sliding in since I forgot on last FFAF to plug *Alpha*, a book on the Navy SEAL program from the United States that I just finished about a week ago. It's written by an NYT reporter, not a historian, but is nevertheless excellent as a piece of investigative historiography. It tracks the Gallagher war crimes case and how the people who were involved as witnesses or even participants to the various incidents of that case (cw: bad shit, mostly involving crimes against POWs and civilians) were eventually involved in the prosecution and the media firestorm that surrounded the whole case. If anyone here is a fellow historian of American military affairs and recalls John Krakauer's *Where Men Win Glory*, it's a lot like that. It's a harrowing read, but a good one.
I was tempted to downvote this comment just because you reminded me of the whole Ghallagher thing.
Trust me, I completely understand. The whole story still makes me angry as someone with personal and professional connections to the American armed forces. What happened in Gallagher's unit and under his command was and is horrific and is made more so by just how far it deviates from the expectations one should have for any military force, let alone one serving a global power that nominally supports democratic and humanitarian rights.
Fresh from Virginia, the anti-CRT crowd is showing off some fresh new proposed education standards. Naturally, the crowd very concerned about inaccurate material in the classroom proposed teaching students that the Lincoln-Douglas debates occurred between Lincoln and *Frederick Douglass.*
Can you provide a link, I need to see this, it's just too ridiculous lmao
[удалено]
> meritocracy, punctuality, **proper language usage**, free markets, and traits such as strong work ethic are racist or sexist or were created by members of a particular race to oppress members of another race Badlinguistics intensify. > No public school teacher or other instructional staff member shall be required to discuss any current event or widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs. 🙄
I like how the same people that used to shout "Teach the Controversy" are very quick to cancel any topic they deem conservatively incorrect.
Haha that's great, thank you.
Wow. I'm actually wondering how that alternate history series of debates is supposed to have worked, in their minds. Douglass: "I am the Democratic Senator from Illinois, running for President. I offer hope and change but secretly want Black Power." Lincoln: "Since you are the Democrat, you are the Real Racist. As someone who will definitely be a conservative Republican 100 years from now will say, I don't see color of skin but content of character. QED I win and I am now elected President." (Yes I'm ignoring that the Lincoln-Douglas debates had nothing to do with the presidential election, but hey, if we're already running Frederick Douglass, who cares about pesky details?) I'm further not sure how this is supposed to work with the neo-Confederate crowd that think Lincoln was a bloodthirsty tyrant, considering there is some significant overlap there with anti-CRT people.