gaze
May 4th, 2016
Congrats to Andrew from Wakefield for winning this month’s raffle – a signed, dedicated copy of Wrong Again, God Boy.
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Latest book…
Random oldie…
September 4, 2006-
- NICE T-SHIRT (Thank you for not provoking my uncontrollable lust). Currently unavailable.
islam, nutty as a squirrel
Treats goats better than any girl
The curse of being female
Is life in an islamic jail
Its enough to make decent people hurl
Nice. Addresses my largest gripe against Islam. The greatest threat to feminism and sexual equality is the stupid young woman covered in a sheet who claims Islam is liberating. And idiots in the west on the left (of whom I am one – a western leftist idiot) steadfastly refuse to acknowledge it. Quislings – is that too strong a word?
Gotta say, I was laughing just by the first panel alone.
Reminds me of that Sydney imam who compared women who don’t wear full hijabs as uncovered meat for cats to lick up. And of course there is Mo’s own history with little girls.
Made me laugh, but in truth, many other dogmas are just as backwards – I was recently kicked out of a church in Rome for having the audacity to have a bare shoulder – and this in a church dedicated to Mary Magdalen!! And El Al asking women to move because some man thinks he’ll be contaminated by a female – got news for ya dude… you’ve more than likely at least once in your lifehad your genitals inside your mother’s – it’s called childbirth.
No woman anywhere will truly be liberated as long as there is a thing called “fashion” to which they are enslaved.
@Someone
I think you may be slandering poor Mo now… We don’t know anything about his history with little girls, do we? As he’s a body double of Mohammed, I mean.
Andrew. From Wakefield. Either someone is trolling you or that is the funniest coincidence ever.
No woman anywhere will truly be liberated as long as there is a thing called “fashion” to which they are enslaved.
1- men are also subject to ‘fashion’ in both the west and Islam
2- Unlike the sharia laws, neither gender is obliged to follow ‘fashion’ in the west
3 having clothing laws ordained by ‘god’ is enslavement by others
having ‘fashion’ dictated by social pressure is just voluntary self enslavement
there is a difference
” Women in the West are objectified and sexualised from an early age” Thus spake the Prophet in your cartoon. In the East they are fucked even earlier and the example was set by that same Prophet – PBUH! – whose favourite wife was serviced by him when she was nine!
David Amies
AH, about this fashion thing.
Women dress for other women – not to attract them but to sort out the hierarchy amongst themselves. ( What man ever remembers a woman’s dress?)
Men talk about cars and football not to attract women but to sort out the hierarchy amongst themselves.
Then those at the top group pair off with each other and so on down the hierarchy. Give or take some latitude that is.
So people will always be slaves of fashion – it is a biological imperative. Just don’t spend too much money on it.
In Canada during the last election cycle, the then PM tried to make an election issue of banning the niqab. That didn’t end well for him. We can’t offer immigrants freedom, and then lay on restrictions based on not liking their choices. So in Canada, the wearing of the burka or niqab is is voluntary and an expression of personal liberation – unless there’s some asshole insisting that his wife or daughter wear it. It’s a dilemma and a paradox.
http://www.darwinharmless.com/thoughts_and_comments/?p=1251
Christian nuns (used to) wear coverings similar to the Islamic coverings. There’s nothing inherently evil about a professional costume.
It’s when you force every woman to wear it whether they like it or not… when you force schoolgirls to stay inside their burning school rather than escaping without their “proper” coverings… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Mecca_girls%27_school_fire
The problem is fundamentalism, not Islam.
@Chris Phoenix
You do realize that “fundamentalism” means being dedicated to fundamentals, the basic ideas, of the religion? Therefore Islam is most certainly the problem.
Men requiring women to be covered from head to toe says much more about the men than about women. But then Islam is the religion whose afterlife seems like a 15 year old male virgin’s wishful thinking.
You can’t spell fundamentalism without spelling “mental” and adding a funda at one end and an ism at the other end.
Tim Keating, care to let us in on the joke?
@Acolyte of Sagan: Andrew Wakefield not ringing any bells?
About fashion; I would just like to point out that in the west, we insist that both sexes cover their genitals. Also there is the problem with showing nipples, for men ok, women, not so.
AoS: Andrew Wakefield, disgraced doctor, darling of the Anti-Vax movement.
Hmmm seems our “murican” anti-vaxxers are not too different than the islamists in Pakistan and Bangladesh that are killing members of the Polio teams out there.
Re
islamists in Pakistan and Bangladesh that are killing members of the Polio teams out there.
it is the nature of Islam that it will never tire of finding people to murder
AF
Also there is the problem with showing nipples, for men ok, women, not so.
Maybe you’re talking USA, but in Europe topless is not uncommon. (although, of late it is becoming less popular, mostly because of the behavior of bunches of certain young males in groups. And also, see eg //http://southendnewsnetwork.com/news/three-southend-beaches-to-ban-bikinis-this-summer-in-trial/ ).
Disclaimer: I may not be a valid judge in this, being the holder of a INF (nudist) passport from the time of my schooldays.
Re Christian nuns (used to) wear coverings similar to the Islamic coverings
they still do
BUT nuns are self selected for a religious following
the Islamic sharia ruling would apply to everyone
In a truly Muslim country, beer would be free and undrunk and women naked and unmolested.
Perhaps Saudi Arabia will be willing to try your idea Jobrag – on a trial basis of course
Jobragg, Very true. Although it perhaps better descibes wishful thinking of that aforementioned afterlife.
However if you were to add men to the mix you have certainly described Dr J de W’s perfect country.
And I still don’t understand why Andrew has dropped in from Wakefield?
WW:
However if you were to add men to the mix you have certainly described Dr J de W’s perfect country.
Regrettably, even in Europe only a few small sites and a very small percentage of beaches actually fit that description.
Reminds me. When our children were still kids (boy 12 and girl 8) we had a holiday in Florida. Learning about a strech of beach that was for nudists, the children wanted to go. The entrance was guarded (well, ok) but… THE CHILDREN WERE NOT ALLOWED TO ENTER! At least the guards had the decency to be embarassed when our son used his TV-watching skills in English to explain his and his sisters disappointment.
Ahh
Something wrong with my THML skill. Please imagine an end-of-bold after the NOT
KeithC & Grumpy, thanks for that. I’d forgotten about that Muppet.
Walter, Andrew Wakefield is a disgraced anti-vaxxer. Andrew from Wakefield, on the other hand, is obviously a fellow with excellent taste in religious mockery.
Quick change of subject; I see Lord of Up seems to have flounced for good. How many lying trolls does it take to get on over on the C&B crowd?
Don’t know. It’s never happened.
At the risk of incurring the page rage of AoS –
Who are the ‘elect’ who get to comprise this ‘C & B crowd’?
and saying someone has ‘flounced for good’ only a few weeks after they were last seen is possibly a bit too early to say with certainty
The C&B crowd are the commentariat of these hallowed pages, the C&B being, of course, the Cock and Bull. No ‘elect’ about it.
Lord of Up is simply a bully (he pickets abortion providers and harasses the women who go there. That’s bullying). Bullies don’t hang around when their bullshit is met with derision. He is also a liar, and when liars ate caught out they are loathe to stick around. That’s why I said he’s gone for good.
However, human nature being what it is, if he reads this he will be tempted to comment just to prove me wrong, but as I’ve pre-empted that possibility then a comment from him now would just be proving me correct, and that’s the last thing he’ll want to do. The poor sod made the classic mistake of entering a battle of wits despite being unarmed.
One more thing (to steal from Columbo); I don’t ‘page rage’, I am placidity personified.
@Darwin Harmless. I assume you try to combine irony with rethorics? I am not in the mood. Firstly, we do not “offer” ABSOLUTE freedom. We have a society ruled by the law, a law the delimit the behaviour of its citizens. The citizens elect representatives making the law WE find Just and agreeable. If you referanse to rights, many should not be regards as absolute. They cannot be, because some of them are in conflict with each other. This is e.g. very evident with “right” to religions freedom. BELIEF is in its nature individual/solipsistic, RELIGION is in its nature social, it is the fabric in which the beliefs are enacted/experienced/expressed. This is an arena for power, where the powerful may(and usually will) use their ability to supress the weak. I am sure an advanced society (like Canada) have other laws liming the powerful’s ability to supress /exploit the weak………yes?
I don’t agree with Acolyte of Sagan (hey, the wordplay in the name just became clear to me,.. funny !) when he says “one more thing (to steal from Columbo)…”. You can’t just write a bit, then add “One more thing” and claim to steal from Columbo. There should be pause, a bit of an awkward silence… You can do that by entering some empty lines in your text
…
…
….
Like so, or like Pink Squirrel sometimes does, you know 😉 …. (Oh no, we’re not going that road again !)
…
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Oh, and one more thing… (see ?)… Do you have a pen ?
Reading my previous post, I realize that I lied when I marked the checkbox “I am not a spammer”. Sorry about that !
Sorry for doubleposting. My previous post was garbeled by a crappy autocorrect insisting I was typing in another language. @Darwin Harmless. I assume you try to combine irony with rethorics? I am not in the mood. Firstly, we do not “offer” absolute freedom. We have a society ruled by the law, laws that delimit the behaviour of its citizens. The citizens elect representatives making the law they find just and agreeable. If you refer to rights, many of these should not be regarded as absolute. They obviously cannot be, because some of them are in conflict with each other. This is e.g. very evident with “right” to religions freedom. BELIEF is in its nature individual/solipsistic, RELIGION is in its nature social, (besides scripture, rites, etc) it is the fabric in which the beliefs are enacted/experienced/expressed. This is an arena for power, where the powerful may(and usually will) use their opportunity to supress the weak. I am sure an advanced society (like Canada) have other laws liming the powerful’s ability to supress /exploit the weak………yes?
On the absoluteness of rights:
“Violence is the gold standard, the reserve that guarantees order. In actuality, it is better than a gold standard, because violence has universal value. Violence trancends the quirks of philosophy, religion, technology and culture (…) It’s time to quit worrying and learn to love the battle axe. History teaches us that if we don’t, someone else will.”
— Jack donovan, “Violence is golden”.
Maybe a bit charging, but worth thinking about?
On the subject of violence, it does make more of an impression than talk. For instance, you can have a room full of people screaming at each other and all it takes is just one notably violent act (even if it’s violence against furniture or property) to get everyone to (momentarily) shut up and pay attention.
Does that mean violence should be the answer, however? Not necessarily. If the violence is pointless then it becomes as empty as the rhetoric and eventually everyone is using it to everyone’s detriment.
does
One more thing (to borrow from Columbo);
satisfy the grammar dogmatists
in the news
http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/offbeat/man-tries-to-sue-god-for-being-mean-to-him/ar-BBsJSau?ocid=spartanntp
Cassanders, you sound angry and I’m not sure why. (“I am not in the mood.”??) I’m also not sure what your point might be. Please let me know the specific thing I said that you take issue with.
“I am sure an advanced society (like Canada) have other laws liming the powerful’s ability to supress /exploit the weak………yes?” Well, obviously. We have all the usual – laws against fraud, false advertising, armed robbery, slander and libel, sexual harassment, exploitative working conditions, etc. , The SEC has all kinds of rules designed to protect the gullible from the sophisticated.
Sometimes our laws don’t go far enough. For example, homoeopathic “remedies” are sold as if they actually do something and this fraud is allowed to continue unrestrained. Oh, and it’s legal to cut bits off an infants genitals but only if the infant is a male.
Sometimes our laws go too far. For example, mere nudity warrants arrest for no logical reason that I can think of, other than that our culture cannot imagine nudity without sexuality.
Again, what’s your point? And thanks in advance for your clarification.
DH
mere nudity warrants arrest for no logical reason that I can think of, other than that our culture cannot imagine nudity without sexuality.
Like I always tell the goddites: If course it should be forbidden. If the Good Lord would have wanted us to go nude, he would have made sure we were born naked.
Btw: ruling on nudity varies by country, and the way that ruling is maintained changes at a wimp.
1. Dr JdW:
On the absoluteness of rights:
[quote — Jack Donovan, “Violence is golden”.]
Maybe a bit charging, but worth thinking about?
Hardly. Mr Pinker argues in The better angels of our nature quite convincingly that there is a sharp decline in violence, worldwide. Order is less and less maintained or restored by violence.
Shaughn:
Sure hope Pinker has a better view on the future than Donovan.
I hope it will not become clear during my lide, nor my (grand-)childrens’
As the population increases and the per capita total of available resources decreases proportionally
there will be an increase of violence to whatever measure the population feel stressed to inflict/mete out
According to Matt Ridley’s The rational optimist this world will be able to sustain 9 billion people somewhere around 2050 at the present level of the western society. And Ridley is as fact based as Pinker. After that, population will decrease just because of decrease in births that comes with that degree of welfare.
I’m afraid there is no hope of extinction for mankind.
@Darwin Harmless. Something along these lines: The religious freedom you offer isn’t absolute. When religious creeds (or the. fulfillment of-) are in conflict with other rights (Canadians) regards as important, there is no need to allow the religious’ to.have precedent.
I disagree Shaughn -ultimate extinction of humanity is certain if islam or any other religion becomes world dominant – the same is true if science is dominant – but unlike religion science at least offers a slight chance of humanity eventually avoiding the death of the sun.
Regardless of whether you think species survival is a good or bad thing in itself
Given Shaughn’s final comment
I suggest we keep WMD’s away from his reach
Dr John de Wipper, southendnewsnetwork is a satirical news site.
As for Andrew from Wakefield – I know at least 4 Andrews from Wakefield. It’s a very common name, and a reasonably large place.
PS, I sincerely doubt science will be able to withdraw the second law of thermodynamics. And it is pretty sure I will no live long enough to see oherwise.
To get rid of religion, one must get rid of mankind. Since extinction of mankind in the near future is beyond hope, we’ll not be freed from religion. Never mind the wmd’s – three species are known to survive even nuclear blast: cockroaches, rats and humans.
Shaughn – I’ve enjoyed Matt Ridley’s writings on natural selection, sexuality & altruism, but feel he’s been a bit of a laughing stock as a libertarian political & economic thinker since he helped to crash Northern Rock bank and was bailed out with taxpayers’ money. But, to be fair, I’ve not read The Rational Optimist & will put it on my reading list. Meanwhile, how do you feel about Monbiot’s view of Ridley’s facts? – http://tinyurl.com/monbiotvsridley
Better Angels is accusing me from a bookshelf nearby: I’ve dipped into it but must buckle down some time when I’m feeling cheerful enough. I enjoy Pinker on his own subjects (Language Instinct, Blank Slate) but, again, didn’t really go for his venture into ethics in (IIRR) the second half of The Blank Slate.
As for Sam Harris basing ethical arguments on a Daily Mail article …
To get rid of religion, one must get rid of mankind
not true
1] it has been shown that some people are predisposed towards a tendency to pariedolia/supernatural belief
some on the other hand do not have that aspect to their brains
Therefore it would not be necessary to get rid of all of humanity , but just selectively remove the portion which are prone to religious belief
not saying that would be a sound or very PC pathway – just that it could be done
2] while removing the ‘faith gene’ from the population might be problematic and very long term- to remove organised religion from humanity would only require 3 generations at most
to take a parallel – cruelty to animals still occurs – organised public animal baiting doesn’t
@ pink squirrel quoth: “it has been shown that some people are predisposed towards a tendency to pariedolia/supernatural belief”
Source? Not this I hope (a la Dr John) – http://tinyurl.com/gullibilitygene
PS – just selectively remove the portion which are prone to religious belief
Ending up with some 0.000…009 percent of the original amount (close enough to nothing, for me) of which there is no guarantee that their offspring is ‘clean’.
My hopes are with Pink Squirrel – but, regrettably, my fears are not.
With the -admitted- limited scope of west-European view, i am more afraid than hopeful. See eg the current strife of Turkey to turn over there secular constitution in favor of an Islamic-law based one.
HackneyMartian, I do not expect Ridley to live up to his own standards. Marx did not, Clausewitz did not, Rousseau did not and those who tried to live to their theoretical standard made a terrible mess.
Which is more or less Ridleys point: despite all doomsday predictions the predominant western culture achieved a worldwide higher standard of living than ever for more people than ever despite all theorizing that predicted otherwise. The mechanism behind that is its ability to adopt new ideas and techniques and adaptation to change. Monbiots critisism does not harm that main thought. In The Evolution of Everything: How Ideas Emerge Ridley seems to elaborate on that mechanism – haven’t read that one yet but it is on the bucket list.
The idea is not entirely Rideys, by the way. In Why the West has won Victor Davis Hanson follows the same argument, it is found in Michael Pyes The Edge of the world , as well as in David Priestland Merchant, soldier, sage. Hanson argues also that western strength is based upon the very notion that westerners fught on a base of self interest down to the lowest soldier where opposing cultures did not. There, men were not free nad not ultimately fighting for their own good.The idea returms in Persian fire by Tom Holland thus linking war and trade to western democratic thought.
Ridleys train of thought seems to fit in a broader framework than jus libertarian theorizing, which suffers from the usual flaw: the ceteris paribus assumption. Which is always countered by empirical panta rhei. As argued by Ridley.
Thanks, Shaughn. Just quickly – ” the ceteris paribus assumption. Which is always countered by empirical panta rhei.”
– signomi, den katalavaino – could you unpack that please?
Ending up with some 0.000…009 percent of the original amount (close enough to nothing, for me)
number does not matter as long as the gene pool without the ‘faith gene’ remains sufficiently diverse to allow ‘outbreeding’
Meanwhile, on the train home last night after the Iron Maiden concert, a female fan flashed her boobs at the rest of us after disembarking.
Not trying to make a point, just stating a fact.
ala Wikiipedia
Ceteris paribus or caeteris paribus is a Latin phrase meaning “with other things the same” or “all or other things being equal or held constant”
It means, “My clever theory is all true, if the real world doesn’t mess up.”
Panta rhei “everything flows”
The real world refuses to comply with your crackpot theory.
The neoliberals have also made a huge mess trying to follow their theory.
Australia is a warm country so taking your top off only makes the point -its warm and I don’t care
Plainsuch, thanks. I did wikiP but haven’t gone deeply into Heraclitus and didn’t want to commit a fox paws.
Shaughn – in a spirit of debate – and sorry in advance for where I misunderstand you –
You said “The mechanism behind that [Western success] is its ability to adopt new ideas and techniques and adaptation to change.“ I suppose I shouldn’t debate a book I haven’t read yet, but according to this review, Ridley sets out to account for western inventiveness and adaptability, and the mechanisms he proposes are (1) specialisation and (2) trade, which cross-fertilises the specialisations. William Easterly, the NY Times reviewer, is a development economist and seems to think that Ridley’s thesis is fun but flaky.
Are specialisation or trade particularly Western phenomena? Surely it’s an old observation that once you have enough economic surplus, you get specialisation?
The trade point really seems to be about communication, and reminds me of Ursula le Guin’s anarchists, who ‘built the roads first, the houses second’ (The Dispossessed, 1970-odd). She probably got that point from someone like Kropotkin.
I happen to be enjoying Pye’s The Edge of the World right now, and I can’t see that he claims that trade is western. He says his aim is to show that before modern land transport, the North Sea coasts and their hinterlands were linked and developed by seaborne trade, just as much as the Mediterranean. He carefully disclaims any argument for the superiority of northern culture. But I haven’t got beyond his Viking chapter yet. In that, he discusses how the Vikings opened the great river routes to Byzantium. Surely they did that to get at the focus of world trade in the Levant, where the goods of India, Persia, China and Africa met. The Indian Ocean was also a trading sea from early times, as Tom Holland mentions in In the Shadow of the Sword.
It seems to me that the expansion of Europe moved at every opportunity from trade to subjugation. The Spanish and Portuguese forced the south Americans into silver mines. The early British in India often lived civilly in the host society, but later on India’s textile industry was reshaped to serve British interests, and all over the various empires the subject economies were turned to export of minerals and cash crops at the new rulers’ terms of trade. China held out for a long time, but in the end the West made a pretext for forcing our way in there too. This behaviour continues to the present day through structural adjustment.
You say: “Hanson argues also that western strength is based upon the very notion that westerners fought on a base of self interest down to the lowest soldier where opposing cultures did not. “
Some examples that occur to me to try this on:
the crushing of Athenian democracy by Philip of Macedon
the Spanish civil war
the Sandinista overthrow of Somoza
Stalingrad
Vietnam
Wounded Knee
Afghanistan C19-date
I can’t see how Persian Fire supports this. Holland’s departure point is Thucydides’s despotic east -v- free west view. But he immediately points out that the Spartans of Thermopylae lived under a military oligarchy whose subject Peloponnesian states might have preferred Persian rule. And he ends with the Macedonian overthrow of Athens. Athens also lost the Peloponnesian war to Sparta. And had a disastrous military adventure in Sicily. In fact the Athenians don’t seem to have been all that good at war a lot of the time.
I haven’t been so happy about the The ‘Athens – Renaissance – Enlightenment – The West’ line since reading Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: the Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation, and more recently Jim Al-Khalili’s account of Arabic science, Pathfinders. Happy to expand on that if you haven’t got round to them. David Deutsch (good Popperian) and Philip Ball have both written on scientific method and the West without giving the rest of the world more than a sentence or two.
I suppose I’ve just emptied the C&B. Sorry. And someone’s probably stolen my coat.
Aargh, sorry: the Easterly review of Ridley is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/books/review/Easterly-t.html
HackneyMartian, I’m still here, jotting down a note to look up the books you’ve mentioned. One of the many good things about the C&B is that it’s a resource for my continuing education. 🙂
Let me get you one for the road while you look for your coat. (Are you sure you did bring a coat? I’ve found the evening weather to be so balmy lately that I’ve been going out without one.)
And, while you’re looking, maybe you can tell me–in places where Muslim females wear the niqab, at what age are they required to start wearing it? Is it at the same “early age” as when “women in the west are objectified and sexualised?” Given the existence of beauty pagents where the contestants for the Baby Miss title are 12 months old or younger (yes, newborn girls are eligible to compete!), when I imagine a newborn in a niqab, I wonder whether I’m being fanciful or realistic.
I’m hanging in there, HackneyMartian. If only just.
But i did recognise one book and would like to add that #idontcarewhattheother9are but The Dispossessed is one of the top ten books ever written.
In my humble opinion.
Two cents’ worth (is that apostrophe appropriate?), I suspect that like puberty the obligation to wear a niqab will continue to arrive ever earlier. Indeed in the competitive piety stakes I imagine that families that favour it will race to the bottom and babies will be burkaed soon enough.
two cents’ worth – we have showers here, so it’s it’s my battered old blue goretex cycling shell. Would you mind looking under your chair? Where I live in Hackney, I see men & women in all versions of muslim, jewish & indeed christian dress. Lots of teenage girls go around very stylishly in gorgeous scarves and skintight jeans. I believe Lizzy Windsor wears a headscarf a lot too.
WalterWalcarpit – I re-read The Dispossessed when I have a cold & want to talk to old friends. My favourite recent political speculative fiction is Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution tetralogy, very intelligent, tough-minded & funny. Followed I think by some of Neal Stephenson’s stuff.
Thanks Plainsuch for explaining ceteris paribus and panta rhei in such brevity and wit!
HackneyMartian, in the same sprit of debate, I’m summarizing trends and developments of generations and centuries in a few sentences.
Economic surplusses, specialisation and trade are not particularly Western phenomena. The point in which the West differs from the rest is social and economic flexibility and mobility. Other cultures seem to have been more rigid and less susceptible for change. A western farmer could, by means of trade, become a merchant and socially move upwards, he and his possesions protected by law. His counterpart elsewhere would have fount that much more difficult and much more subjugated to the whims of his lords. The Fugger bankers family rose from obscurity to extreme richess in a few generations and so did many more to a lesser extent.
If our medieval guilds would have been more rigid and the church wouldn’t have given opportunities for social mobility, intsead of pinning down everything and everyone on tradition, things would have been very different.
Of course, Pye discaims any argument for Northern (or western) superiority. But the Northsea is northern/western and his book focusses on that sea and coast and what activities emanated from there. That region is much and much more outbound than any other region, although any other more or less similar coastal region could have done the same. But there were european galleons at the chinese coast, no chinese junks at the european coast.
It seems to me that the expansion of Europe moved at every opportunity from trade to subjugation seems a quite right observation to me. In which they were surprisingly successful, considering they were and are such a tiny minority. What made (makes) them able to achieve that? The Hanson argument is on the long run, not individual battles and fights. You’ve mentioned spanish&portuguese in south america, british in india, europe in china, I may add the dutch in the netherlands indies. Military strength is part of the deal in which, in the long run, and despite occasional setbacks, the western/northern military performed better. You mention a few instances of the contrary, but these are occasional setbacks. Macedonia disappeared, the Athen democracy reappeared in the long run; Spanish civil war: where has Franco’s fascism gone? Nazism and communism battling at stalingrad: both gone. But they might illustrate that the only danger for an western army is another western style army. Military the west won the vietnam war but at the conference table: that was irrelevant. Vietnam nowadays: less and less communist and more and more ‘capitalist’. Wounded knee did not alter the final fate of the northersn american natives. The sandinista vs somoza is hardly a western army agains a nonwestern; as for afganistan – that is a problem since 18xx – buti guess no western power ever had enough interest to conquer that baren area. And even then – outside afganistan, afghan forces are irrelevant.
The Spartans, nasty neighbours as they were, and their bullied neighbours defeated the persians. Those greeks thought themselves free and indepentent men fighting for their own chosen way of life. On the other hand, as Holland describe, the persians were subject to the whims of their ruler. That is what Hanson thinks the basic difference that explains why that minority was succesfull, and will be in the long run on average, more than others.
Thank, Shaughn. I think I catch your drift better now & I’m sorry for perhaps caricaturing some of your thoughts. This is the C&B, not Youtube, I must remember that.
I expect you know Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond’s take on the Mystery of the West. I’ve not read it since it came out in ’98, so I took it down again just now & opened it on your very question: why didn’t junks appear off Cape Trafalgar? Diamond goes another layer down into the question of geography. I suppose Pye echoes him. Compared to China, JD suggests that Europe benefited from being fragmented by internal seas (Baltic, Med, North) and mountain ranges, which generated lots of competing political entities. So, for example, when Columbus couldn’t get funded in Italy, he went to Spain just when Ferdinand and Isabella were looking for a prestige project. China’s geography allowed it to be unified very early, which meant that if the emperor or the bureaucrats took against something, it didn’t happen. Balkanisation is an advantage.
Diamond also asks what happened to the early dominance of the Fertile Crescent. He proposes that the land & climate weren’t robust enough to take centuries of intensive agriculture, which is why there are semi-deserts where Mesopotamians once farmed. Europe’s more temperate, wetter ecology allowed the land to support farming long-term and Europeans could safely adopt crops and inherit technology as they moved west from the middle east, without making a dust bowl.
The Balkanisation theory is interestingly similar to island speciation (see e.g. David Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo), though I’m not in favour of taking such analogies too far.
Diamond’s overall idea is that Eurasia was the continent most likely to become rich and over-populated quickest because it has a large continuous temperate zone and the best choice of plants and animals suitable for domestication. With China and the Levant eliminated, that left ‘inventive Europe’.
You might be another person who would enjoy Ken MacLeod. He has a similar blend of military and political theory to you, and lots of twisty ideas. I don’t know if you read speculative (‘science’) fiction but hey, if it’s good enough for Huxley, Lessing, Wells, Orwell and McEwan … You’d also probably like Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, though he can go on a bit and can’t do endings – it’s a celebration of the explosion of science & commerce in the late seventeenth century, featuring (among others) Isaac Newton as the Mad Master of the Royal Mint, and at least one Exploding Puritan.
Here (for fun & the incurably flippant) is Chesterton’s anticipation of Hanson:
I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchmen I did not much desire.
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,
Where you and I went down the lane with ale mugs in our hands
The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.
Plainsuch, brevity & wit indeed & sorry I didn’t say so more plainly.
two cents, thanks for the pint, did you find my jacket?
WalterWalcarpit, yes, the apostrophe in my name is correct. What is the worth of my opinions? My opinions have a worth of two cents. (What metal those cents are made out of varies depending on how much the reader values my comments 😉 .) When I post a comment, I post my two cents’ worth. As a UPOTWA sympathizer, I was very careful to check how my name should be spelled and punctuated before I began posting comments here.
See also http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/393950.html and http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/03/31/penny-dreadful . The copy editors at The New Yorker magazine are notorious sticklers; they allowed cents’ to be used in the published article, so I figured I’d be safe from a POTWA if I used it myself.
For more on UPOTWA and POTWAs, see the comments section in http://www.jesusandmo.net/2012/05/23/there/ .
HackneyMartian and WalterWalcarpit, now you’ve got me trying to re-write Bye, baby Bunting as Bye, baby Burka, about how Baba’s gone to get the baby a niqab–but it’s too hard to get it to say what I want and still rhyme, so I’m trying to put it out of my mind.
Oh, yes–HackneyMartian, here’s your jacket. I found it on the floor near the bar. I guess you took it off there when you ordered drinks for our table, and it fell off your arm while you were bringing the two fistfuls of glasses to us. Slippery little devil, that goretex!
Damn, did I buy a round without even knowing it? Time for bed.
Gotta love this place!
The next round is on me.
One for the House, Barmaid. Including Jesus & Mo, Author and yourself of course.
Oh, and for what it is worth, probably less than two cents, I finally understand the appearance of Andrew, from Wakefield.
I scrolled to the top of the page to move to today’s fres ‘toon and there he was winning a book entitled “Wrong again”.