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It's easy for me since there isn't much methodology around "we pointed a gun at this tank and blew a big hole in it". Hooray for rivet counting.
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Aug 9, 2017 23:39
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Disinterested posted:That's not going to help you unpick this problem: Lucky for me I don't have to come within miles of that problem.
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Aug 9, 2017 23:50
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nothing to seehere posted:The humanities, where "Put a bunch of names into a spreadsheet and see if anything interesting pops up" is novel research. Even a standard data entry job is really complicated if to do it you need to know how to read 17th century German from jerks who would constantly borrow from other languages.
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Aug 10, 2017 00:01
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SlothfulCobra posted:jerks who would constantly borrow from other languages.
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Aug 10, 2017 00:09
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Wait why does Marxist history suggest that Capitalism is the reason for the abolition of slavery? Surely Marxists would view slavery as the end result of unchecked Captialism? Also it kind of ignores that the motivating force for abolition was overwhelmingly ideological as far as I'm aware?
OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Aug 10, 2017 |
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Aug 10, 2017 00:31
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OwlFancier posted:Wait why does Marxist history suggest that Capitalism is the reason for the abolition of slavery? Surely Marxists would view slavery as the end result of unchecked Captialism? Also it kind of ignores that the motivating force for abolition was overwhelmingly ideological as far as I'm aware? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_history
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Aug 10, 2017 00:41
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Well more I mean that Capitalism alone seems unlikely to end slavery. Obviously it substantially predates it. As does democracy, for that matter. I dunno that sounds like a weird Progressive kind of view of history, or whatever you call that thing where you believe that history is just counting up towards utopia and has necessary stages to go through and you can't go backwards. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Aug 10, 2017 |
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Aug 10, 2017 00:43
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OwlFancier posted:I dunno that sounds like a weird Progressive kind of view of history, or whatever you call that thing where you believe that history is just counting up towards utopia and has necessary stages to go through and you can't go backwards. edit: what you just said is an accurate description of marx's beliefs, i thought as a leftist you would know this
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Aug 10, 2017 00:48
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HEY GAIL posted:capitalism is merely one link in the chain, slavery belongs to a much earlier mode of production, which feudalism then the class society (capitalism) supplanted. capitalism monetizes all human relations but it doesn't cause slavery, according to marx. the idea that capitalism brings only bad things and all bad things is a vulgarization of marx's ideas. capitalism gives rise to democracy, not slavery. pointing out that the idea that slavery would be ended by capitalism is essentially Marxist is a tactic I should try on more neo-confederate shitheads although I have been reading Freehling's Road to Disunion and it's got some interesting stuff in there about how long the South clung to the fantasy that slavery would just go away if we gave it time (and took no significant action to actually end it)
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Aug 10, 2017 00:49
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I like the minimal Marx I've read and had explained to me, and I agree with his ideas about economics and I subscribe broadly to the labour theory of value which is more than enough to get me Angry About Capitalism, but I guess history is like his weird bad third album or something. For someone who broke ground by being critical, thorough, and analytical it seems weird to look at the rest of history and be so reductionist about it.
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Aug 10, 2017 00:50
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OwlFancier posted:I guess history is like his weird bad third album or something. For someone who broke ground by being critical, thorough, and analytical it seems weird to look at the rest of history and be so reductionist about it. "all hitherto existing history is the history of class struggle," that's the center of what he believes you should probably read this for yourself and see what you think, not get it explained to you by people who want you to agree with them edit: that's what dialectical materialism means, materialism means it's a materialist conception of history, determined by socioeconomic relations, and dialectical means he's read a shitload of hegel HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Aug 10, 2017 |
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Aug 10, 2017 00:55
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Probably but that involves reading and I rarely read things, even things I like reading, lost the draw completely some years ago and I can barely slog through anything nowadays, even old favorites. I suppose I've never really seen the weird historical inevitability thing like that? I always associate that more with social liberalism. Like when he says that Capitalism is unstable and will be replaced I find that compelling but I've never subscribed to the notion that Communism is the inevitable replacement, I think he's correct in the assessment that history can be viewed as more stable periods which undergo major changes in a comparatively short time as a result of major changes in circumstances, things like the discovery of America, the fall of western Rome, invention of industrialization, presumably the discovery of agriculture, that sort of thing, and those produce substantial social restructurings which spread common features throughout their societies for the duration of that period of stability, but it's weird to me to suggest that that's all according to some bizzare celestial itinerary or something. Frankly I would probably suggest that trying to apply all of that to pre-global society is kind of hard because ideas spread so much more slowly and you get different areas bleeding ideas across each other from different origins through different processes. I think it works much better in the time he was writing and afterwards. Much earlier and it starts to lose meaning. I dunno I guess I've never gotten the impression that anyone I've spoken to about it bought into that "right side of history" stuff and they all seemed to think that was pretty silly, which I agree with. Maybe I just know weird Marxists. There's an important difference between desiring a thing and believing it to be inevitable. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Aug 10, 2017 |
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Aug 10, 2017 01:05
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HEY GAIL posted:edit: that's what dialectical materialism means, materialism means it's a materialist conception of history, determined by socioeconomic relations, and dialectical means he's read a shitload of hegel Did he leave any record of his opinions on Saxon pikemen?
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Aug 10, 2017 01:05
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OwlFancier posted:Probably but that involves reading and I rarely read things What do you think you're doing in this thread / forum, exactly?
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Aug 10, 2017 01:53
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, by Eric Schlosser. An utterly horrifying book about the history of America's nuclear program. A great read if you don't plan on sleeping that night. It's now a horrifying documentary too, if anyone is interested. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/command-and-control-chapter-1/
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Aug 10, 2017 02:39
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OwlFancier posted:Wait why does Marxist history suggest that Capitalism is the reason for the abolition of slavery? Surely Marxists would view slavery as the end result of unchecked Captialism? Also it kind of ignores that the motivating force for abolition was overwhelmingly ideological as far as I'm aware? The reasoning behind it stems not from a specific commitment of Marx's on the issue but a vulgarisation of his ideas. A lot of Marxist historians fell in to the trap of believing, essentially, that people only ever acted on the basis of their perceived economic interests, and the assumption followed that therefore slavery must have been in declining profitability. This is a bastardisation of Marx's fundamental view that socio-economic conditions tend to generate ideology rather than visa versa. There are more complex arguments made: that slavery is an impediment to advanced forms of production like manufacturing (unlikely), is less productive than free labour (believed by many abolitionists - and not true) or not as innovative (also not true) or that capitalism is in general conducive towards political liberalisation. A Marxist history of abolition is still possible, but it relies on a very sensitive and complex argument about what generated the ideological demand for abolition. I must say I think Hey Gal mischaracterises Marx's views on slavery here too. For Marx (though his views changed over time) Marx is the foundational bedrock of modern capitalism, and if anything has reached its most naked and aggressive form in modernity. Very famous quotation: quote:Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance. Marx is also extremely interested in comparing the wage-slavery and child-slavery of industrial capitalism in Europe and underlining their mutual reliance.
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Aug 10, 2017 03:56
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Disinterested posted:We need to be particularly suspicious of politicians. . . OwlFancier posted:Well more I mean that Capitalism alone seems unlikely to end slavery. Obviously it substantially predates it. As does democracy, for that matter. These posts trigger me greatly 
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Aug 10, 2017 03:57
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wdarkk posted:They contain a similar amount of water and mud? As a person who spends a lot of time in Cajun country and has more than a passing interest in the Great War,  BoBtheImpaler posted:It's now a horrifying documentary too, if anyone is interested.
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Aug 10, 2017 04:03
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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I'm finally reading Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919 'cos I want to know more about the making of Versailles and everything dudes talked about during it, and one thing she's brought up is this fear among the Allies that if the peace process dragged on too long and foundered, then the war would resume and German troops would outnumber the Allies' armies. I get that demobilization was a thing, but weren't the Germans also demobilizing their troops, too? The ones that didn't decide to join the Freikorps or the Spartacists, at least.
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Aug 10, 2017 04:22
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Squalid posted:These posts trigger me greatly What about them?
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Aug 10, 2017 04:23
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This is an extremely loaded question, but it is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and I'd like to know what are generally considered good books about the atomic bombings? I have a personal connection to the bombing (not related to a survivor but long complicated story made short my great aunt was a nurse at Hiroshima and had some extremely strong opinions wrt nuclear weapons). But beyond the actual bombing* I don't know anything about the decisions that led up to it being dropped, and everything I've found is extremely politicized for obvious reasons, and any discussion it gets brought up in immediately devolves into people yelling past each other. I'm not so interested in discussion in this thread because I would rather not get the thread closed down. *fun story, my great aunt collected photos of Hiroshima for some morbid reason, and showed me photos of what it looks like when you are too close to a blast when I was 7. I couldn't sleep for weeks because I was afraid of ant walking crocodiles coming for me. Also don't look up ant walking crocodile of you are easily sickened because it is still one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen.
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Aug 10, 2017 04:40
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Don Gato posted:This is an extremely loaded question, but it is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and I'd like to know what are generally considered good books about the atomic bombings? I have a personal connection to the bombing (not related to a survivor but long complicated story made short my great aunt was a nurse at Hiroshima and had some extremely strong opinions wrt nuclear weapons). But beyond the actual bombing* I don't know anything about the decisions that led up to it being dropped, and everything I've found is extremely politicized for obvious reasons, and any discussion it gets brought up in immediately devolves into people yelling past each other. I'm not so interested in discussion in this thread because I would rather not get the thread closed down. I am not a trained historian by any means, but I enjoyed Downfall for pretty much the reasons you listed. https://www.amazon.com/Downfall-End-Imperial-Japanese-Empire/dp/0141001461
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Aug 10, 2017 04:46
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Frinkahedron posted:I am not a trained historian by any means, but I enjoyed Downfall for pretty much the reasons you listed. quote:Unlike the man leading a horse across the nearby "T" Bridge, Mrs. Aoyama could not possibly leave a permanent shadow on the ground. From the moment the rays began to pass through her bones, her marrow would begin vibrating at more than five times the boiling point of water. The bones themselves would become instantly incandescent, with all of her flesh trying simultaneously to explode away from her skeleton while being forced straight down into the ground as a compressed gas. Within the first three-tenths of a second following the bomb's detonation, most of the iron was going to be separated from Mrs. Aoyama's blood, as if by an atomic refinery. The top few millimeters of soil, as they converted to molten glass, would be shot through with such high concentrations of iron that, had the greenish-brown layer of glass been permitted to slowly cool, it would have been hidden beneath a sheet of carbon steel; but a slow and stately cooling was not to be. By the time the sound of the explosion reached her son Nenkai two kilometers away, all the substance of his mother's body, including blood-derived iron and calcium-enriched glass, would be ascending toward the stratosphere to become part of the strange radioactive thunderstorms that were to chase after Nenkai and the other survivors. Excerpt, "The Last Train from Hiroshima" by Charles Pellegrino. No idea how reputable, but holy gently caress FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Aug 10, 2017 |
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Aug 10, 2017 05:00
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Don Gato posted:*fun story, my great aunt collected photos of Hiroshima for some morbid reason, and showed me photos of what it looks like when you are too close to a blast when I was 7. I couldn't sleep for weeks because I was afraid of ant walking crocodiles coming for me. Also don't look up ant walking crocodile of you are easily sickened because it is still one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen. Now I am torn between my urge to find out what on earth an "ant walking crocodile" and my worry that trying to find out would lead to something bad.
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Aug 10, 2017 05:07
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I'd guess it's a description of severely burned victims crawling towards witnesses/rescuers
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Aug 10, 2017 05:23
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Disinterested posted:What about them? The incredulity at a Marxist vision of historical progression for the obvious reasons. Your post mostly because I hate the theory of the Protestant work ethic and recently worked myself up about it in the ancient history thread and instinctively dislike even the hint of a defense of it. I can't take any issue with the meat of the methodological arguments although I myself wish economic/structural explanatory frameworks for understanding history were more popular. It's like, my favorite flavor of ice cream is mint chocolate chip and want to eat it with everything all the time, and that guy just said vanilla is good too sometimes especially with pie. Man i can't argue with that but I still feel compelled to start loudly talking up how I could really go for some mint chocolate right now.
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Aug 10, 2017 05:24
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OwlFancier posted:Probably but that involves reading and I rarely read things, even things I like reading, A tad late to the party but I think your core problem is that you are using a different definition of "Marxist" than the people talking theory and history in here. When a historian is referring to a Marxist interpretation they are usually looking at what disinterested and hey Gail outlined. Large ideas about the primacy of economic forces in history. It usually has very little to do with political Marxism. What's more, there is an increasing tendency for people to misuse the term "Marxist" as a short hand for a whole basket of other beliefs. On the part of the left i usually see it as a stand in for radically progressive, somewhat like an old school version of "woke", and on the right it's basically "godless communism". It's one of those terms where the popular meaning and technical meanings are quickly diverging and causing allnumber of headaches as people only exposed tangentially to the original ideas confuse or misinterpret them as a result, similar to what you see with the term "fascism".
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Aug 10, 2017 05:27
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I guess it's helpful to keep in mind that there's a 'political marx' and an 'economic marx', and they sometimes change places during his writing career.HEY GAIL posted:more "liberate" really At times like these I can't help but think of James Nicoll: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
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Aug 10, 2017 06:25
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FAUXTON posted:No idea how reputable, but holy gently caress Probably not very. EDIT: Gotta upgrade that to Oh Holy poo poo No: quote:“There’s a hazy line between ‘truth’ and invention in creative nonfiction, but good writers don’t have to make things up,” Jeffrey Porter, an associate professor of English and nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa, wrote in an e-mail message. In the case of Mr. Pellegrino, whose book claimed to expose a secret accident with the first atomic bomb, Mr. Porter wrote: “Maybe the idea of a scoop was irresistible. But somebody should have been skeptical.” Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 06:34 on Aug 10, 2017 |
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Aug 10, 2017 06:29
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So that last train from Hiroshima book, uh, it's a difficult read. Ahh, so that's what the foreword was going on about. Way more effort goes into the uncomfortable detail of it all than any narrative (so far everything being covered seems to be well before the afternoon on the day of) so I doubt any historically relevant discovery is being knitted together beyond detailing the event on a visceral level. FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 06:42 on Aug 10, 2017 |
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Aug 10, 2017 06:30
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Don Gato posted:This is an extremely loaded question, but it is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and I'd like to know what are generally considered good books about the atomic bombings? I have a personal connection to the bombing (not related to a survivor but long complicated story made short my great aunt was a nurse at Hiroshima and had some extremely strong opinions wrt nuclear weapons). But beyond the actual bombing* I don't know anything about the decisions that led up to it being dropped, and everything I've found is extremely politicized for obvious reasons, and any discussion it gets brought up in immediately devolves into people yelling past each other. I'm not so interested in discussion in this thread because I would rather not get the thread closed down. It's obviously more about how the bombs came to be in the first place, but I really love Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It's an amazing piece of literature - it even won a Pulitzer - and covers the physics involved, the political path of how the Manhattan project came to be, the actual development process, and the decision to drop the bombs. Only the epilogue actually covers the bombing itself however. Multiple physicists centrally involved in the Manhattan Project itself have lauded it as the greatest work ever written about the Project. And not to start the derail you're actively trying to avoid, but the decision to use the bombs wasn't really that complicated when you view it from the perspective of the guys who actually made the decision, most importantly Harry Truman: "Japan isn't surrendering, Americans are tired of this war, we spent a ton of money on these bombs and now they're ready, lets use them."
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Aug 10, 2017 06:36
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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FAUXTON posted:So that last train from Hiroshima book, uh, it's a difficult read. Bullshit tends to be.
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Aug 10, 2017 06:36
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Bullshit tends to be. 
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Aug 10, 2017 06:44
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Bullshit tends to be. But enough about grading
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Aug 10, 2017 06:51
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Big sidetrack, but I have a pet peeve about words being used "wrongly" or that anyone can athoratively decide "this is THE universal meaning" of a term. I don't mean it'd somehow be wrong to have a strict definition of a word within a subject or subject-discussion, but I am saying that stipulating that a common usage of a word is wrong, that is bloody stupid. Historians can disagree, but one school of linguistics says that no definition of any word can be claimed to be correct at any time. Languages evolve, stasis doesn't happen, meanings shift, and people do what they want. Language is communication and the only thing that matters is if you understand eachother. So, if people largely starts 'misusing' a word but still understands what's being said, then that is a-ok. Same with spelling, if you understand it then it is tecnicly correct. And if a majority is now using an older word in a shifted meaning, then, that's what that word means now. If people understand and miscommunication is not happening, then the words and the language is working and correct. No one owns anything, authority isn't real, words change. The There's a reason we don't speak Latin anymore. In a sense we're speaking what it evolved to be. So when people say fascist with the meaning that that's a person who enjoys seeing political opponents getting stabbed by australian samurai pineapple clowns, and you know that they doo, then that's what fascist means. Because words change.
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Aug 10, 2017 06:51
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Aug 10, 2017 07:05
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Sure, but it's an issue when there are misunderstandings because people are using two different definitions, or the speaker means one and the listener only knows the other. If I say marxists think capitalism cured slavery it's a very different thought if I'm leaning on a classical economic meaning than a more current political one. It's also an issue when the term is used to impart emotional energy that might not otherwise be warranted. If you call someone a fascist thoughts immediately go to jackboots, prison camps, and gas chambers. Using it as a blanket pejorative for "right wingers I don't like" is not only imprecise from a history geek "definition of fascism" sense, but is also probably wildly exaggerating the crimes of the target. No matter how lovely your local American PD is they aren't "fascist thugs," and using that label is problematic because of the cultural and historic resonance it has. This is poo poo that changes with time. Once upon a time calling someone a Jacobin was a big loving deal with loads of meaning but it's since faded into obscurity. Meanwhile a "republican" used to be a very loaded, divisive term, yet usage has almost completely neutered it. I'm sure there are better examples, this is just what I'm coming up with in the early AM. As it stands we're still within living memory of the horrors of 20th century fascism, so people still notice when the term is used in a way that clashes with that experience. Maybe in 100 years time and common usage will have eroded it to the point that the historical meaning is archaic, but we're not there yet.
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Aug 10, 2017 07:09
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Cyrano4747 posted:I'm sure there are better examples, this is just what I'm coming up with in the early AM. I have a pet theory that in a post-1991 environment, when most of the communist parties (and communists themselves) evaporated but the right-wing kept calling left-leaning people communists and socialists despite them not being any such thing, communism is now on the way to being rehabilitated. Simply because labeling everything left-leaning communist makes communism look a lot better when people start getting mad at privatization and welfare cuts.
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Aug 10, 2017 07:38
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Wow, that didnt take long to get suggestions. Looks like my reading list has gotten much, much larger, thanks for the suggestions SlothfulCobra posted:Now I am torn between my urge to find out what on earth an "ant walking crocodile" and my worry that trying to find out would lead to something bad. My Japanese was always really bad so maybe my translation is off but they were the poor souls who were close enough to the blast to have every exposed inch of skin instantly burn and lost all their facial features as a result, but were too far away to have been killed instantly. They looked more like aliens or crocodiles and they slowly would shuffle towards rescue workers, or if they were lucky they would stumble into the river and drown. I was told the ant walking name came from their disturbing shuffle and the fact they walked in large lines, kind of like ants.
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Aug 10, 2017 07:59
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If the commies can be rehabbed, maybe tank destroyers can too
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Aug 10, 2017 08:09
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