Stultus Maximus posted:

Okay, a quick look on wikipedia has 20% casualties for Antietam and 28% for Gettysburg so I'm not sure about that graph.

quote:

I'll take a second to also note that historically there has been little distinction in reporting battlefield casualties from fatalities. Fatality refers to an actual death, while casualty refers to either death or severe injury. Since even very minor wounds often would result in death due to little knowledge of the human body or as a result of infection, to get injured was a much more serious thing in wars until just after the American Civil and Napoleonic Wars. Historians of those eras either didn't or couldn't record the differences as well as we can today. This also muddles the facts when we try to compare wars of different times. An example of this would be to compare the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American military history, to the Battle of Cannae, one of the most crushing defeats to the Roman Empire. At Antietam we have, however, a total fatality count of only 2% while at Cannae it can be reported that there was over 53% casualty rate. From this we can see what likely has happened is that most of those who died at Antietam did so after the battle and that most of its history probably refers to death and injury, while Cannae would suggest that there is little record differentiating between deaths and injuries.

Godholio posted:

Ah, hell, you're right. One look at that map and the only possible response is "What the gently caress?!"


Fair enough. But I prefer to discount the ideas of the early modern philosophers who started the noble savage garbage to begin with, considering they were mostly concerned with their own nationalist or religious agendas. As a general rule I agree about sweeping definitive statements. I'll admit War Before Civilization is the best work I've read in this area; it's not really where I've focused, but I thought Keeley made a lot of strong arguments.

Godholio posted:

It's pretty interesting. The Hobbes-Rousseau sections early are pretty dry but lay the groundwork for a lot of the rest of the book. And he covers more than just that. There's a good argument that our (probable) misconceptions about prehistoric combat and warfare are due to philosophers getting in the way and archaeologists who succumb to their own biases, followed by more archaeologists unwilling or unable to rock the boat of popular scholarship.

EmptyVessel posted:

Oh, hey sorry for not seeing this earlier.
I'll probably check it out (or at least add it to the ever growing pile of stuff to read). Hopefully he's aware enough to include himself in the bolded bit and guard against it. It's a tricky balancing act. Starting with a discussion of philosophical approaches does make me twitch a bit - in my world philosophy comes in last after you've tested the excavation evidence to destruction against a variety of theories - it suggests he has an intellectual position he's setting out to prove rather than being guided by the evidence. Very academic in other words.
Since his book came out in '96 I'd not be at all surprised if it was a reaction against the 'peaceful, gynocentric Old Europe' theories of Marija Gimbutas and her supporters and so might be a bit overly emphatic in the opposite direction. (Gimbutas's Civilization of the Goddess came out in '91 and as you might imagine was jumped on by all sorts of lunatic as 'proof' of a lovely, new-agey past that was ruined by those horrible, violent men.)
There's no real critical (positive or negative) reaction to Keeley's book noted on Wiki which is a bit unfortunate (positive quotes from the New York Times doesn't really cover it imo).

Okay, looked at this review linked from the Wiki page: http://www.troynovant.com/Franson/Keeley/War-Before-Civilization.html which I'm afraid doesn't fill me with confidence (no clue what the reviewers qualifications are but the rest of his site is pretty odd).
The section headed "Neolithic fortified camps in England overrun" is referencing Roger Mercer's work at Hambledon Hill (Roger taught me Neolithic and Bronze Age British archaeology a long time ago..) but seems to be making a basic mistake of taking some site specific evidence and presuming it must be repeated more generally. To the best of my knowledge we do not have a large number of these sites with evidence for destruction and archery attack, we have a couple but we also have examples (the majority) that have no such evidence so why not treat that as the hypothetical norm? The quote ends "Whatever ritual or symbolic functions the enclosures might have had, they were obviously fortifications, some of which were attacked and stormed." which presumes a set of values in prehistory that match his own - ritual and symbolic function may have been of primary importance to the particular culture that built causewayed camps and dismissing this so casually is not good. 'Obviously fortifications' is also a dangerously certain statement that relies on his own presumption of function based on form (note we have no evidence above ground level for these places so we have to guess how things are actually built in the vertical). Presumably he knows that the 'causewayed' part of the name refers to the presence of multiple causeways running across the banks and ditches surrounding the sites which is kind of counter-intuitive if what you are trying to do is prevent people approaching your boundaries. Choice of terminology is a problem too, 'causewayed camp' is too suggestive of one type of use, I'd use 'causewayed enclosure' as more neutral language. How does he deal with the fact that more than a few causewayed enclosures have little evidence of habitation inside them? Obviously these need a different read. (See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causewayed_enclosure)
In the previous section there's a quote "This death toll represented more than 60 percent of the village's population, estimated from the number of houses to have been about 800." - see the obvious problem? He's talking about percentage of population killed based on an estimated population that has to make certain presumptions about things like the contemporary occupation of all structures and acceptable maximum/minimum numbers of people inhabiting each one. Too many variables, should have more possible readings, ideally including mutually exclusive ones.
Based on what is said here Keeley is guilty of generalising from the specific too much, the list of examples from all over space (and time) all fitting into one theoretical reading is worryingly like what I call James Frazer-itis (as in the Golden Bough) where examples from societies living in completely different ways (climate, economic-base, technological capability, density of population, etc. etc.) are presumed to mean the same thing all neatly fitting into one over-arching explanation. There's also new evidence coming up all the time that changes our (necessarily limited) view of the past - i.e. the recent demonstration using trace element analysis of dental enamel that cattle eaten at extremely large winter feasts at sites near Stonehenge in southern Britain were raised in the Orkney Islands at the far northern tip of Britain. This doesn't have to mean that Orcadians took part in these feasts but it must mean that far longer, friendly links existed in the past than has been generally thought. These links might have been exclusively economic or symbolic (it's been suggesged that Stonehenge was a central 'sacred place' for the whole of Britain) or (more likely) some combination of both these and other currently not considered factors. There are also culturally specific cases where what we would see as horrific violence is considered a 'good and desirable' thing - pretend I put in here the quote from the start of John Greenway's 'Down Among The Wild Men' that details the eye-popping violence that accompanies an aboriginal coming of age ceremony, it's well worth reading for sheer wtf!! but unfortunately I don't have my copy with me.

drat that's a lot of words...
tl/dr There's always more and it's always more complicated.

As compensation/apology have a link to a satirical story dealing with both military bureaucracy and history A Medal for Horatio. First came across this in a nice collection of speculative fiction called 'Apeman, Spaceman' edited by the anthropologist Carleton Coon as a way of exploring alien (to the reader) ways of dealing with the world.

Zeris posted:

Splode posted:

Wow did nobody crash a humvee into a plane while high on speedballs this week or something?

EmptyVessel posted:

Dunno what your fetish has to do with all that verbiage I posted but Good job I guess.

hogmartin posted:

I was hoping for a selfie of McNally sitting on a throne of skulls but it looks like Imma have to keep waiting for that one

EmptyVessel posted:

drat that's a lot of words...
tl/dr There's always more and it's always more complicated.

Aranan posted:

I watched some E4 jump into the middle of a conversation between a retired MSG and an FSE just to correct their grammar.

EmptyVessel posted:

Dunno what your fetish has to do with all that verbiage I posted but Good job I guess.

hogmartin posted:

I went off watch one day underway, did my cleaning and stuff, took a shower, and headed to my rack. Then I caught a whiff from the galley - Taco Tuesday! Holy poo poo, I will stay up for this wonderful reward of soft tortillas and tasty meat and cheese, plus whatever lettuce and tomato that hasn't gone to poo poo yet. I am already spooning salsa and sour cream onto a warm meaty pouch in my mind and anticipating shoving it into my face-hole.

Then I remember it's actually Thursday.

Then I look under my rack and find that in the lower rack is STS3 Smeagol Feet, the rankest stalest non-showering shithead there is. His goddamned BO smelled like tacos enough that it made me hungry for tacos and now I have to live with that forever.

Kung Fu Fist gently caress posted:

does this mean you shoved his warm meaty pouch into your face hole?

Splode posted:

Yeah I think we're all hoping to hear some good news

Godholio posted:

Have you raised hell with a Congressional someone-or-other?

McNally posted:

For what? The VA taking forever? That's par for the course.

Icon Of Sin posted:

If you told DAV, VFW, AL, or any other veteran service org everything you've said here and they verified even a quarter of it one of their lawyers would get an spontaneous erection for the level of destruction they'd be about to unleash on the VA.

McNally posted:

If the Army could be sued for being the Army, we wouldn't have an Army.

Lazy Reservist posted:

New thread title.

Lazy Reservist posted:

New thread title.

McNally posted:

So I need to establish my wife's estate so I can settle some of her affairs (she has a pending personal injury case from a car accident last year, for example) and I have no idea how. I brought it up with Casualty Assistance and they said they'll make an appointment for me with Legal.

Legal only opens its appointment book on Thursday at 0830. Once the appointments for the following week are filled, they close the book until the next Thursday. So it took three loving weeks for me to get an appointment because clearly some dumbfuck SPC who got a DUI or some loving PV2 who's trying to fight his Article 15 for punching his platoon sergeant in the dick or whatever should get priority over a survivor trying to get their deceased spouse's affairs in order.

Finally get my appointment. Turns out I didn't need to loving talk to Legal, I just needed to take my marriage certificate and my wife's death certificate to the county loving courthouse and get a letter of administration.

So after 15 loving years of war, apparently I'm the first fucker who needed to get an estate set up because Casualty Assistance didn't know a loving thing about it. I'm the first survivor who needed to do taxes because Casualty Assistance had no loving clue how to get my wife's W-2.

I'm loving finished with these clueless fucks.