johnfabian
2yr ago
time traveler who thought he was watching Charles II's coronation
johnfabian
2yr ago
I've wondered before whether the most "powerful" man in history was Napoleon; in the sense that he was the individual who had the most agency as both the ruler of a strong and rich country, and with effectively no internal institutions that were outside of his control/influence to oppose him.
johnfabian
2yr ago
The triple crises of 1793 seemed to be the tipping point - the simultaneous worsening of the wars against external enemies, the counter-revolutionary insurrection in the Vendée, and the federalist revolts in the provinces. These all put great pressure on the Revolution and at the same time confirmed all the deepest paranoias of the revolutionary élite: there was a grand conspiracy of royalists, priests, and double-faced revolutionaries. Up until that point all the invective thrown around between various political factions had more or less come to nothing: the great surge of denunciations in 1791 and 1792 and resulted in effectively almost no arrests or serious consequences for those accused except a general sense of fear and intimidation. When the Girondins and Jacobins would casually accuse each other of treason this did not manifest in any attempt to hold them to account; even during the September Massacres when various elements of the Paris Commune issued warrants of arrest for Girondin leaders they were not carried out. It was ultimately the mob that stormed the legislature on June 2 1793 and forced the first factional arrests, and even then the detained Girondin leaders were treated very well by their captors (who supposedly considered them arch-traitors). It was only after the further worsening of the various crises as well as assassinations of several prominent Montagnards (particularly Jean-Paul Marat's killing by a Girondin woman, the circumstances of which again suggested a vast conspiracy) that really kicked off the state-led internal violence. August and September 1793 were the key periods of escalation there as the State mobilized the entire population for the war effort, a phase of Total War directed both internally and externally.
johnfabian
2yr ago
The September massacres were spontaneous and the French government had no part in planning it (though the Parisian government did). It fit more in the pattern of this kind of spontaneous violence that the élites would then affirm as "regrettably necessary."
johnfabian
2yr ago
Emotions were always "high" among the larger mass of people; the poster below referenced the "Great Fear" which was a mass paranoia following the storming of the Bastille as an example. This kind of paranoia around "ordinary" property crime was very common around that time; France had experienced a series of bad harvests, inflation, and general privation leading up to and during the early years of the Revolution. There was a persistent economic desperation among the peasantry and urban poor that helped fuel more radical elements.
Among the revolutionary élites who were generally of the well-off middle class, Tackett argues it was the completely unexpected success and then rapid reforms of the Revolution that caused this sudden emotional heightening. It's hard to imagine for myself what it would've been like to live through if you had been born into a world that seemed fixed and unchangeable, and all of a sudden in a matter of months you had been able to mold it to your (very recently arrived at) worldview. There are quotes from various figures in that period of 89-90 (that Tackett constantly references as the "spirit of '89") of this general sense of euphoria and utopianism.
johnfabian
2yr ago
The book has a really well thought out world that it hints at but doesn't directly tell you about. When I first read LOTR, I was fascinated by these little glimpses of a larger world that the plot exists in (e.g. mentions of Fëanor), and it made me positively hungry to learn more. Which of course was by design - years later I read a bit where Tolkien talked about how he showed a bit of scenery on the horizon, so to speak, to make the reader curious what's over there and want to learn more. But this makes the book really interesting to me.
It is really something that blew my mind as a 9 year old; there are all these references in the text to some greater shared culture that the reader is not a part of. It makes it really feel like an alien world, that their touchstones are something unknown and unknowable to us. It's very much a contrast to other mediocre sci-fi/fantasy which often does a poor job of creating that second world, such that their cultural memory and way of speaking is still very much that of a person living in modern-day North America or Europe. You know, like when a character in the year 48032 speaks of "the 20th century band The Beatles". And it's just cooler when the text doesn't trip over itself to keep its reader in the know. 9 year old me thought it was really cool that the battering ram Grond was named after the "Hammer of the Underworld", but it was even more awesome that Tolkien then made no attempt to explain what that meant.
(Of course this was all largely accidental: Tolkien meant for The Silmarillion to be published alongside The Lord of the Rings so that all these unexplained references would be filled in by the accompanying backstories. But I think it ended up working great as it turned out)
johnfabian
2yr ago
As an unabashed and unrepentant Tolkien superfan, I will say that Fellowship takes off significantly once they get to Bree. If you're not there yet, definitely hold on.
What's the appeal in Lord of the Rings?
It's a phenomenal tale told with beautiful prose. But really the core of the appeal of fantasy is of being transported to another place; to escape the dull, superficial reality we live in for a world that is suffused with magical unreality. Part of why Tolkien sits at the apex of the genre is that The Lord of the Rings depicts a world much grander than our own, shrunken and withered. There is a sense of longing and nostalgia for a forgotten and irrevocably lost past when we greater than we are now. I think that people very keenly feel some loss of wonder and grandeur in the world, whether that loss be cultural, intellectual, environmental, and Lord of the Rings laments that loss in a very evocative way.
johnfabian
2yr ago
I'm reading The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution and I'll probably end up writing about it. Very fascinating history book in that it gives rather scant attention to the narrative history of the revolution (it kind of assumes you know the story) in order to focus mostly on the emotions of people during the Revolution. It's something I've idly thought might be an interesting approach before so to find it in the library and see it actually work is cool.
johnfabian
2yr ago
The thing that this meme forgets about (and a lot of men in general forget about) is all the women who aren't beautiful
johnfabian
2yr ago
A month ago the BBC suspended their most famous personality for tweeting something critical of the government's asylum policies.
The distinction is there were various kind of camps:
-
Arbeitslager (work camps), which were slave labour camps. Inmates were treated very poorly, but there was an active effort to keep them alive because they provided either useful manual labour or some element of skilled labour.
-
Konzentrationslager (concentration camps), where the inmates were more or less expected to work at menial tasks until they died.
-
Vernichtungslager (extermination camps) where almost all individuals were murdered immediately, usually within an hour or two of arrival. Only the strongest individuals would be selected as sonderkommandos, and these groups would be liquidated from time-to-time. If you had made it to November 1943 (the end of Operation Reinhard), the only extermination camp operational past that point was at Auschwitz (with the exception of a brief resumption of gassing operations at Chelmno in June 1944). The others were all farther east and by mid-1943 the Nazis realized they were at risk from a sudden Soviet advance.
The two main reasons why Auschwitz gets so much attention in memoirs/popular histories is that Auschwitz had a work camp, a concentration camp, and an extermination camp; so while more people were murdered there than anywhere else, there were also tens of thousands of survivors. Additionally, it was the principle destination for the western (and Hungarian) Jews who were the last to be targeted, so they were both those who entered the concentration and labour camp systems last (making them most likely to survive), and those able to freely write about their experiences post-war.
johnfabian
2yr ago
By October 1943 the Holocaust was in many ways complete; somewhere around 5 million Jews were already dead at this point. By far the largest remaining Jewish population in Europe was in Hungary, who was still an ally (and wouldn't start deporting its Jews to Auschwitz until after March 1944 when Germany seized control). The remaining Jews still on the chopping block were smaller populations in western countries: Italy, France, the Netherlands, and Germany itself.
johnfabian
2yr ago
Up until September 1939 German policies were focused on forcing Jewish emigration from Germany. From the beginning of the war movement of Jews was curtailed for security reasons, and there were a series of massacres by invading forces in Poland; but this violence was not deliberate policy, merely tolerated. The deliberate, purposeful, mass killing of Jews (although this was still absent some larger unifying plan) did not start until Operation Barbarossa.
I think the largest point you're missing is that in the eye of the Nazis, time spent killing Jews was not a distraction from existential war, but a fundamental part of it.
The Prussian officer corps had inherited a pathological fear of franc-tireurs from their experiences in 1870-71 and 1914. Nazi and reactionary political thought emphasized the duplicity of Jews, their creation and fundamental enmeshing with Bolshevism. The planned invasion of the Soviet Union was meant from its conception to be a Rassenkrieg. The Bolshevik system was to be torn out root and stem, and all its mouthpieces and enablers with it. To this extent Jews were a fundamental security risk to rear areas and a existential threat to the Heer's design for a rapid victory: they would be the inevitable saboteurs, partisans, Bolshevik agitators. That was the threat the Einsatzgruppen formations were meant to combat. Only the liquidation of the adult male Jewish population would secure the rear areas and ensure German victory. (Later this objective would be expanded incrementally to include all Jewish individuals in the Soviet Union).
After the failure of Operation Barbarossa the nature of the killing of Jews shifted more to that of retribution than immediate security concerns, but again this was in concordance with a future vision of a Europe that was Judenfrei.
edit: you get a sense of the Nazi perspective on this in Himmler's October 4 (1943) Posen speech. An excerpt:
I want to also mention a very difficult subject ... before you, with complete candor. It should be discussed amongst us, yet nevertheless, we will never speak about it in public. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30 to carry out our duty as ordered, and stand comrades who had failed against the wall and shoot them -- about which we have never spoken, and never will speak. That was, thank God, a kind of tact natural to us, a foregone conclusion of that tact, that we have never conversed about it amongst ourselves, never spoken about it, everyone ... shuddered, and everyone was clear that the next time, he would do the same thing again, if it were commanded and necessary.
I am talking about the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that is easily said. "The Jewish people is being exterminated," every Party member will tell you, "perfectly clear, it's part of our plans, we're eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, a small matter". And then along they all come, all the 80 million upright Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. [mockingly] They say: all the others are swine, but here is a first-class Jew. And none of them has seen it, has endured it. Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 are there or when there are 1000. And ... to have seen this through and -- with the exception of human weakness -- to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned. Because we know how difficult things would be, if today in every city during the bomb attacks, the burdens of war and the privations, we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and instigators. We would probably be at the same stage as 16/17, if the Jews still resided in the body of the German people.
johnfabian
2yr ago
Did Germany "struggle" killing 6 million Jews? I think people may not be aware of how condensed the timeline of the Holocaust actually was. Part of this I think is reflective of "survivor's history", which I talked about before here: the people who survived the Holocaust and disproportionately shaped western perceptions of it were by necessity aberrations from the norm. They were mostly western Jews whose march to the death camps began after the large majority of Jews were already dead.
The vast majority of victims of the Holocaust were eastern European Jews, whose mass extermination was conducted in a fairly narrow timeframe (with the notable exception of Hungarian Jews). The Holocaust as can be coherently defined started on June 22, 1941 with the invasion of the Soviet Union. Within six months of that mark, somewhere around a million Jews were dead - the victims of bullets, nationalist militias, POW camps, forced starvation, and experimental mobile gassing vans. In January 1942 Nazi bureaucrats assembled to plan the Final Solution, and by the end of that year roughly another 3 million Jews had died, mostly asphyxiated by carbon monoxide. This brings us to roughly two-thirds of the final total within a span of 18 months. The purpose-built extermination camps built for Operation Reinhard operated for another half a year or so until they were sabotaged or dismantled, and by that time most of the remainder had been killed. The remaining Jews still to die at this point were mostly westerners or Hungarians who would mostly be poisoned by hydrogen cyanide at Auschwitz.
johnfabian
2yr ago
I read the article and found it all amusing. I'm all for auteur-driven storytelling, but it seems at Amazon they want it both ways - they want their shows about niche interests to have massive budgets and be tentpole hits. This queer baseball comedy cost >$10 million per episode to make; that's blockbuster TV territory, not what you pay for a single creative vision.
I'm no fan of The Big Bang Theory, but if you actually want a show to hit that kind of viewership yeah, maybe you do need to play to the common man. And if not maybe you need a way to control costs. Amazon seems to want to have the prestige of HBO, and thinks that spending a couple billion dollars oughta do it. But HBO didn't become HBO through financial largesse. They had a very deliberate vision of what they wanted to be.
johnfabian
2yr ago
Even among the pros there's enough variability that the worst player going into a 140+ strong tournament can put together four great rounds and win. It happens time-to-time even at the major championships
johnfabian
2yr ago
Golf's "eliteness" varies from region-to-region. In the UK and Ireland it's very much also a working man's game. In Canada and Australia it gets a little more expensive, but there are still plenty of clubs to join in that $500 to $1,500 price range for a year's membership. In the US it gets even more expensive still, especially down south, but still affordable to a wide range of the population. Then in continental Europe it can be quite expensive and in east Asia it's truly an elite thing
In North America it's much more the country club setting that is elite than the game itself
johnfabian
2yr ago
I'm sure your dad will love it. Playing golf with my dad is one of my favourite things to do, and definitely something we'll both remember as we grow older.
johnfabian
2yr ago
It would depend how high up on the chain you were, so to speak. "Feudalism" was a series of interwoven, reciprocal, personal arrangements between lords and vassals; if you were a King or Duke your vassals would be other nobles, but if you were a minor lord or knight or clergyman or landholder the people that were bound to you (and you to them) would be peasants. You would make your oaths to each other, you would feast them at least once per year (and likely more commonly than that), you would know their personal problems as it would be you who had to intercede in quarrels and disputes, and also succor (and exploitation) if a harvest failed or there was a fire, etc.
johnfabian
2yr ago
It's that time of year again: The Masters, my favourite dose of noblesse oblige
I've seen it lamented numerous times here and elsewhere of the decline of noblesse oblige. I chalk it up to the internationalization of finance and wealth and the simultaneous decline in nationalism: the peers of the ultra-wealthy are the ultra-wealthy of other countries, not their neighbours or countrymen who they generally try to spend as little time as possible in the company of. God forbid that they might actually have to mix with the unwashed masses. Before you were obliged to in an attempt to forestall some peasant revolt from burning your estates, but now you've got private security defending all fourteen of your mansions, so what would really be the harm even if you lost one?
But at least in Augusta, Georgia there's some vestige of that lost spirit. Every year the Masters is held at the ultra-exclusive Augusta National Country Club, arguably the most prestigious golf tournament (give or take The Open) and the pinnacle of achievement of one of the hobbies of the elites. And every year the Masters goes overboard in creating a prestigious, elevated, and somewhat stiffly artificial environment. No expense is spared, no detail overlooked: the fairways are painted a verdant green, Rae's Creek is dyed its iconic dark blue, and the telecast features a chorus of (not-actually-present) birds so you can't hear the highway traffic. It's pure spectacle, and a treat to watch.
And you can watch it. Rather than hiking ticket prices to the eye-watering levels the open market would demand, the tournament distributes tickets via lottery ($140 for a day ticket, but if they hit the retail market they usually go for multiple thousands). And once you're on-site, the costs for food and drink are almost cartoonishly inexpensive. Oh, you couldn't secure tickets or are too far away? Well they built maybe the single-best website for watching sports: an infinitely customizable setup where you can watch whichever players or holes you wish. I've never used the app for mobile but people rave about it as well. These are both free of charge and have no region locks, and feature not one single advertisement or imposition upon the watcher. It's sporting entertainment at its ultimate best, built not for profit but purely for the prestige of being able to give it to the masses.
johnfabian
2yr ago
If you didn't see the comment below, researchers speculate that the reporting about installing suicide nets on the bridge near me increased bridge suicides for the next few years, even as bridge suicides declined in general over the decade. They suggested that perhaps the proximate cause of spikes in bridge suicides was the reporting on them.
It's really hard to ignore the media element with respect to mass shootings. It's one of those things you'll wonder if people 1,000 years from now will shake their heads and think "fucking idiots!"
johnfabian
2yr ago
I'm not kneejerk against any introspection of root causes. I think that's a very important thing to do when designing long-term policy. My point is that this discussion of root causes in the wake of some tragedy is, in my mind, often not sincere; they don't actually care about the problem, and the talk of root causes is simply a pretext to do nothing.
johnfabian
2yr ago
If you haven't been riding North American public transit post-COVID, you might genuinely just not know. It's gotten a lot worse these past few years. So if your reference point is Amsterdam your view is going to be pretty skewed.
I went down to Florida a week ago to golf some. I was on the putting green before a round and overheard some boomers talking about the different guns they owned, and the conversation eventually shifted to the new Florida gun laws that allow permit-less CC (think someone joked "do you have a holster attachment on your bag?"). They were all dumbfounded as to why anyone would want someone with no firearms training to have guns on them in public, and couldn't understand the possible motives for passing such a bill.
The next day driving north I saw a random with a gun for the first time in my life on the interstate; two motorcyclists on a windy day (so their shirts were flapping up) with holsters on over their sweatpants (and no helmets).
More options
Context Copy link