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Cyrano4747 posted:Refined horse poo poo.
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Aug 2, 2017 10:29
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Doctor Malaver posted:I know this is tongue in cheek but what's the issue with South Slavic languages? They are difficult for non-Slavs to learn but once you get there pronunciation follows writing (and the other way too) really well. Letters are always pronounced the same. OK, words can be written down wrong based on ije/je and č/ć variants but it never produces confusion in actual communication. Native speakers err with that too. Recent orthographical reform. Recent enough that an actual linguist was the one doing it. Cyrillic is derived from Greek and has its own problems.
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Aug 2, 2017 13:51
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cheetah7071 posted:The issue is that I don't know anything about them so I wouldn't think to mention them. Are those the ones saint Cyril developed the writing for? I guess that would make them share the property other good orthographies have that they were intentionally created by a single person who isn't just blindly copying what the neighbors are doing. Most European orthographies work fine - I don't think your point is very good.
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Aug 2, 2017 14:05
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French dig unearths 'little Pompeii' near Lyon quote:The ruins of an ancient Roman neighbourhood of luxury homes and vast public spaces have been found by archaeologists in south-eastern France.
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Aug 2, 2017 14:36
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Kanine posted:what do u guys think about the whole weber theory that protestantism is the reason for the emergence of capitalism? Trash. Capitalism is a product of hugely increased productivity of capital.
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Aug 2, 2017 15:03
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You just know that "lustful pan" is BBC speak for "pan with comically giant priapism" Briefly on why Weber is bullshit. First off, let's start with the basics. What does Weber argue, exactly? Weber's argument is first that capitalism is a state of mind as much as anything else, a willingness to subordinate all sorts of traditional beliefs and activities (cultural traditions, customary practices, emotional attachments and bonds) to the naked pursuit of economic gain. Personally I think this is a bit questionable to start with but I"ll leave it for the philosophers and economists to argue this point. The major problems most historians have is with his second major component to his argument, that Protestantism was unique in encouraging its followers to embrace a calling and reject distractions from it. If God has called you to be a carpenter you should be the best loving carpenter you can be and avoid frivolities like hobbies. This focus makes you uniquely suited to out-compete your fellow carpenters, which in turn means you prosper and become the engine of the economy. This is the famed "Protestant work ethic" that he identified. Here are the reasons why I think he's full of poo poo. 1) economic concentration and large scale investment - capitalism in other words - did not begin with Martin Luther. Just look at the loving Renaissance era Italian city states for christs sake. What the gently caress else are you going to call Florentine bankers and Venetian traders if not capitalist, and not a one of them was anything other than Catholic As gently caress. This isn't small scale mom and pop enterprise, these are international consortiums that become rich and powerful enough to dictate government policy. This is also all ignoring the fact that a lot of similar activity can be seen before the collapse of the Roman empire. The basic capitalist concept of leveraging economic wealth (be it monetary or in production facilities) to generate more wealth faster wasn't exactly a foreign concept. Now, the argument can be made that Weber isn't saying that the protestants were the first to come up with this poo poo, but that their unique religious culture made them vastly more predisposed to it, thus giving countries where they were in the majority a major advantage. In this way I'm being a little unfair to Weber, but I still think it's worth pointing out as a lot of the people who quote him today take this extreme version of him. 2) More importantly, though, Weber fundamentally fails to understand Protestant/Calvinist (in his case he's mostly thinking the Calvinists, Puritans, and Presbyterians - he's very much trying to explain the economic ascendancy of the US in the early 20th century) theology. His basic problem is that he conflates earthly vocation for religious calling. That single mindedness that he claims allows the protestant to become the perfect capitalist, if it exists, shouldn't be directed to earthly pursuits but to spiritual awakening. Put simply, he conflates earthly callings with spiritual callings in the writings of lots of influential Protestants, and ignores their injunctions that argue directly against what he is claiming. 16th - 17th century Protestant writers were adamant that spiritual callings trumped earthly concerns, and there was even significant mistrust of accumulating wealth. Calvin in particular condemned any gain achieved at your neighbor's expense and the accumulation of wealth. Richard Baxter, whose writings Weber leans on to make his own argument, wrote specifically on the issue of earthly labor and employment and urged believers to choose a job in which they would do the most service to god and, and explicitly states that they should not choose a position that will bring them the most wealth or honor but where they can do the most good and best avoid sinning. In short, a lot of the hang ups about worldly activities and their sullying effect on the soul that Catholics had were brought over to Protestantism.
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Aug 2, 2017 15:41
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Personally I would suggest that people realizing that they can become hella rich is what leads them to fixate on becoming hella rich. The facility produces the mindset, there's a really obvious issue with trying to suggest that it happens the other way around. Unless he's trying to suggest that all the proto capitalists without any concept of wealth accumulation just went and took the orders instead because that's basically the same thing obviously.
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Aug 2, 2017 18:56
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OwlFancier posted:Personally I would suggest that people realizing that they can become hella rich is what leads them to fixate on becoming hella rich.
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Aug 2, 2017 19:08
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Cyrano4747 posted:2) More importantly, though, Weber fundamentally fails to understand Protestant/Calvinist (in his case he's mostly thinking the Calvinists, Puritans, and Presbyterians - he's very much trying to explain the economic ascendancy of the US in the early 20th century) theology. His basic problem is that he conflates earthly vocation for religious calling. That single mindedness that he claims allows the protestant to become the perfect capitalist, if it exists, shouldn't be directed to earthly pursuits but to spiritual awakening. Put simply, he conflates earthly callings with spiritual callings in the writings of lots of influential Protestants, and ignores their injunctions that argue directly against what he is claiming. 16th - 17th century Protestant writers were adamant that spiritual callings trumped earthly concerns, and there was even significant mistrust of accumulating wealth. Calvin in particular condemned any gain achieved at your neighbor's expense and the accumulation of wealth. Richard Baxter, whose writings Weber leans on to make his own argument, wrote specifically on the issue of earthly labor and employment and urged believers to choose a job in which they would do the most service to god and, and explicitly states that they should not choose a position that will bring them the most wealth or honor but where they can do the most good and best avoid sinning. In short, a lot of the hang ups about worldly activities and their sullying effect on the soul that Catholics had were brought over to Protestantism. I think you're misrepresenting Weber a little. From what I remember, he specifically introduces quotes about the sinfulness of accumulated wealth, and then makes the point that investing that wealth back into your work is not "accumulation," which makes reinvestment into your workshop or whatever a moral use of money. There's a loophole for business expenses.
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Aug 2, 2017 19:32
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HEY GAIL posted:Nah, the explanation is they felt anxious. Because here's the part of Weber's thesis that Cyrano didn't mention, which is that he focuses on Calvinism because they believe in predestination--the "elect" are saved and the rest are damned, but unlike the Catholics, there's nothing either group can do about it. It doesn't depend on how righteous you are. You can look for signs that you might be elect in this world, however, and one of those signs is supposedly earthly success. So Weber's argument is that if you can't tell whether or not you're saved (and that's difficult) you can use business success as a sort of tracking isotope. Then they take that feeling and transfer it to business success itself. Even so, Weber says Protestants feel anxious all the time. But if you can't do anything about it then why would you care how businessly successful you are? You either won the lottery or you didn't. It would make more sense for people who didn't believe in predestination.
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Aug 2, 2017 21:13
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The counter-argument is that, while you can't couch the drive to acquire wealth in Calvanist terms for that reason, you absolute can forgive perceived sins committed in the pursuit of wealth in Calvanist terms. This could reduce the stigma of being a businessman in Calvanist areas, which could potentially drive the movement of wealth out of noble hands and into bourgeois hands. Of course, there's so many insanely conflated factors in any broad social change, and, y'know, capitalism also exists outside of Calvanist and even Protestant areas so I wouldn't buy this as more than a small piece of a much larger puzzle.
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Aug 2, 2017 21:20
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OwlFancier posted:I mean I thought it was industrialization. I thought it was the black death?
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Aug 2, 2017 21:24
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I was gonna say I am not sure I have sufficient traverse in my eyeballs to give an appropriately sideways look to the assertion that being a greedy bastard is a novelly protestant vice.
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Aug 2, 2017 21:26
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(If my memory serves me...) Hugh Trevor-Roper argues almost the reverse - that Counter-Reformation persecution led to an exodus of Huguenots from Catholic Europe, creating a concentration in the few places which tolerated them. Because expertise was often held by families, technical knowledge migrated in blocks. This led to the increase of expertise in these relatively tolerant locations, which in turn accelerated economic and industrial growth in places like London or Amsterdam. It has less to do with Protestant ideology than with Catholic willingness to persecute in this period.
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Aug 2, 2017 21:37
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OwlFancier posted:But if you can't do anything about it then why would you care how businessly successful you are? You either won the lottery or you didn't. Because you're worried about going to gell. You can't control whether you're saved or dammed, but you really don't want to be damned, so you scrutinize your life for outward signs of salvation, and worldly success becomes a proxy for the state of your soul. "If I were damned", you think, "why would God bless me in this world so much. Surely, I enjoy divine favor."
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Aug 2, 2017 22:06
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But there's still nothing you can do about it so why worry? Maybe I'm odd.
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Aug 2, 2017 22:46
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OwlFancier posted:But there's still nothing you can do about it so why worry?
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Aug 2, 2017 22:59
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Also, if you believe that God rewards the elect in this world, then if everyone who's been rewarded on this world does something there's got to be something to it, no?
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Aug 3, 2017 01:11
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It also overlooks the entire Muslim world, where the bulk of commerce in the middle ages took place.
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Aug 3, 2017 01:51
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You could rephrase that to saying it overlooks everywhere in the world that isn't Western Europe.
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Aug 3, 2017 01:57
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CommonShore posted:(If my memory serves me...) Hugh Trevor-Roper argues almost the reverse - that Counter-Reformation persecution led to an exodus of Huguenots from Catholic Europe, creating a concentration in the few places which tolerated them. Because expertise was often held by families, technical knowledge migrated in blocks. This led to the increase of expertise in these relatively tolerant locations, which in turn accelerated economic and industrial growth in places like London or Amsterdam. This counter-theory seems perfectly plausible, with one major caveat: we have already assumed that there was a difference in economic development between Catholic and Protestant places. However there isn't. Modern research has almost completely undercut the empirical underpinnings of the Protestant Work ethic, or at least reduced the effect to something very small and explainable through more parsimonious hypotheses. In the 19th century there was a great concern and interest in this evident phenomena of rich and successful Protestant nations and merchants. Even Catholics took it seriously and speculated as to the cause of their own failure to succeed. It was out of this apparent circumstance that Weber proposed his theory to explain this difference which everyone could plainly see. Unfortunately for the theory of the Protestant Work when economic historians actually looked at the data they couldn't find any difference. There is no significant difference in the rate of economic growth or savings or otherwise between Protestant and Catholic states of Europe and there never has been. Of course this is partly explainable by the small sample size and high variance, but it still contradicts Weber's own expectations and those of other theories seeking to explain a theoretical religious impact on development. Still determined to find supporting evidence, researchers sought to make comparisons on finer scales. Unfortunately data is rather scarce going back more than a couple hundred years, so you usually have to use some kind of proxy for GDP. One of the most recent papers on the subject by David Cantoni used city size as a proxy for economic growth. If Protestantism had a real effect on economic development, you'd expect to see a difference in city growth between Protestant and Catholic regions. In fact, Cantoni found zero difference. Religion had no impact on economic growth. Another mark against Weber. Now there are some studies that have found religion had some small effect on long-term economic trends. A 2009 paper by Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann looked at Catholic and Protestant communities in rural Prussia and found Protestant regions had significantly higher economic growth. However when they looked deeper into their data, they noticed Protestant regions had significantly higher literacy as well as economic prosperity. When they used literacy as their explanatory variable instead of religion, they found they did a better job of predicting the economic outcome between regions. That is to say, it wasn't some kind of abstract Protestant anxiety or metaphysics which manifested in higher savings rates and hence greater long-term economic growth that explained differences in outcomes. Rather it was that the Protestant effort to help everyone read the bible turned out also to leave people better educated, which there is lots of evidence directly produces positive impacts on the economy . Cantoni does not think Becker and Woessmann's work contradicts his, as he posits that the effect of Protestantism on literacy in urban areas would be much smaller as the baseline level was substantially higher. So basically, the Protestant Work Ethic is a theory explaining a phenomena that never existed, or at least one we can't prove ever existed. I'm not sure why it was seen as so self-evident in Weber's day, I suspect it was just another weird obsolete prejudice among many others popular in that era. Squalid fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Aug 3, 2017 |
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Aug 3, 2017 02:03
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Koramei posted:Hah, ancient history isn't safe either in East Asia These Korea posts inspired me to pull out my Korean history book by Kyung Moon Hwang and see what he as to say on Hangul: A History of Korea: An Episodic Narrative posted:King Sejong the Great I thought this book was pretty good, and it was amusing to see the author take shots at conventional Korean historiography which he thought was bullshit, even if I had no prior idea what these common Korean narratives were.
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Aug 3, 2017 02:34
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OwlFancier posted:But there's still nothing you can do about it so why worry? To be fair, if you're not worried about the fact that there's a chance you're going to be tortured for eternity, and, even worse, that you'll forever be denied the presence of God, the source that is all that is good and right and decent, all joy, all pleasure and all love, and in the knowledge that it's your own fault, because you're lower than a worm, a fully wretched creature full of sin and death and wickedness, with nothing in you that is decent, or good, or redeemable or beautiful, and the only hope you have to avoid that is the grace of God, who willingly took human form and was tortured and killed, so that you might have, if He so chooses, for reasons that you cannot know, a chance to enjoy His wholly undeserved mercy to save you from your just punishment, even though your very existence is loathful to Him and fills Him with such intense sadness and misery that that alone is a sin, that you could cause a being that is wholly Love to suffer so....if that doesn't worry you, what sort of things do?
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Aug 3, 2017 03:30
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Death is nothing to us; for the body, when it has been resolved into its elements, has no feeling, and that which has no feeling is nothing to us.
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Aug 3, 2017 04:28
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Epicurius posted:To be fair, if you're not worried about the fact that there's a chance you're going to be tortured for eternity, and, even worse, that you'll forever be denied the presence of God, the source that is all that is good and right and decent, all joy, all pleasure and all love, and in the knowledge that it's your own fault, because you're lower than a worm, a fully wretched creature full of sin and death and wickedness, with nothing in you that is decent, or good, or redeemable or beautiful, and the only hope you have to avoid that is the grace of God, who willingly took human form and was tortured and killed, so that you might have, if He so chooses, for reasons that you cannot know, a chance to enjoy His wholly undeserved mercy to save you from your just punishment, even though your very existence is loathful to Him and fills Him with such intense sadness and misery that that alone is a sin, that you could cause a being that is wholly Love to suffer so....if that doesn't worry you, what sort of things do? Failing to attain tranquility. Figured you'd know that one.
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Aug 3, 2017 05:23
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Epicurius posted:To be fair, if you're not worried about the fact that there's a chance you're going to be tortured for eternity, and, even worse, that you'll forever be denied the presence of God, the source that is all that is good and right and decent, all joy, all pleasure and all love, and in the knowledge that it's your own fault, because you're lower than a worm, a fully wretched creature full of sin and death and wickedness, with nothing in you that is decent, or good, or redeemable or beautiful, and the only hope you have to avoid that is the grace of God, who willingly took human form and was tortured and killed, so that you might have, if He so chooses, for reasons that you cannot know, a chance to enjoy His wholly undeserved mercy to save you from your just punishment, even though your very existence is loathful to Him and fills Him with such intense sadness and misery that that alone is a sin, that you could cause a being that is wholly Love to suffer so....if that doesn't worry you, what sort of things do?
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Aug 3, 2017 10:48
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HEY GAIL posted:is my hat big and fluffy enough Answer: No. Your hat can always be bigger and fancier.
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Aug 3, 2017 12:37
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Mike Duncan's audio book is available for pre order.
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Aug 3, 2017 14:21
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Arglebargle III posted:Mike Duncan's audio book is available for pre order. It was pretty awesome and nostalgic to hear the theme music on the podcast
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Aug 3, 2017 14:22
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First civilizations of Greece are revealing their stories to sciencequote:For the first time, scientists have obtained and analyzed genome sequences from the ancient Minoans and Mycenaeans, who lived three to five thousand years ago and were Europe's first civilized people. It gives us a small sense of the migrations and intermingling of populations in the distant past, which may eventually shed some light on the spread of culture and origins of languages.
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Aug 3, 2017 15:31
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Saw this today. Thought some of you may be interested to read about it and who knows, maybe one of you has the required expertise/knowledge to assist. Translate these chinese characters for 15 000$ each quote:A Chinese Museum Is Offering Big Money to Whomever Can Decode This Ancient Script
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Aug 3, 2017 16:09
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Epicurius posted:To be fair, if you're not worried about the fact that there's a chance you're going to be tortured for eternity, and, even worse, that you'll forever be denied the presence of God, the source that is all that is good and right and decent, all joy, all pleasure and all love, and in the knowledge that it's your own fault, because you're lower than a worm, a fully wretched creature full of sin and death and wickedness, with nothing in you that is decent, or good, or redeemable or beautiful, and the only hope you have to avoid that is the grace of God, who willingly took human form and was tortured and killed, so that you might have, if He so chooses, for reasons that you cannot know, a chance to enjoy His wholly undeserved mercy to save you from your just punishment, even though your very existence is loathful to Him and fills Him with such intense sadness and misery that that alone is a sin, that you could cause a being that is wholly Love to suffer so....if that doesn't worry you, what sort of things do? Well it's more that if that's going to happen anyway then worrying about it's not going to do any good. It makes sense if you think you can do something to stop it but much like death in general, if you can't, just ignore it. I'd worry about... oh... getting my beard to grow straight, that seems like something I can do something about.
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Aug 3, 2017 17:02
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Those hats must've been so loving gross irl.
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Aug 3, 2017 18:32
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OwlFancier posted:Well it's more that if that's going to happen anyway then worrying about it's not going to do any good. Sure, point taken. But look at how many people now worry about death, or if they'll get sick, or theyll be a victim of a terrorist attack, or all sorts of things they can't control. In fact, a lot of the time, people worry more about risks they can't control than those they can, just because they feel helpless. When you add to that a religion where the authorities actively encourage this sort of guilt and fear, it's out there.
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Aug 3, 2017 19:04
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The Lone Badger posted:Answer: No.  Hendrick and Everhard Kockman at three-and-a-half years old, Johanna Vergouwen, 1683
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Aug 3, 2017 19:16
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Imagine trying to get a three year old to wear that outfit and stand still long enough to pose for a painting
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Aug 3, 2017 19:32
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cheetah7071 posted:Imagine trying to get a three year old to wear that outfit and stand still long enough to pose for a painting Just murder some relatively similar sized street urchins and pose their bodies with the outfits.
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Aug 3, 2017 19:59
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Give a three-and-a-half years old a real sword AND a flute, now that's a deathwish.
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Aug 3, 2017 20:15
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JaucheCharly posted:Give a three-and-a-half years old a real sword AND a flute, now that's a deathwish. the flute though, that's on your head, parents
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Aug 3, 2017 20:35
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LingcodKilla posted:Just murder some relatively similar sized street urchins and pose their bodies with the outfits. Or at least paint the faces and then stick the rest on mannequins.
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Aug 3, 2017 21:13
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