|
C.M. Kruger posted:On the opposite side of things we have Madame Nhu: this sounds like it could only be possible in an era where the US foreign policy consensus could feel shame for the actions of itself and its proxies not anymore baby! this machine runs and bombs where it may
|
#
?
Jan 21, 2024 11:05
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 4, 2024 16:25 |
|
|
Robert Facepalmer posted:Royal Navy and USN were big into cribbage USN subs were supposedly really into it. Hmm do USN ships tend to have strong regional contingents? I used to play a lot of euchre - with my ex-wife's family, from Michigan. I got the impression it's a big thing in Indiana/Illinois/Michigan/Ontario (with slightly different rules from place to place) but pretty niche elsewhere.
|
|
#
?
Jan 21, 2024 17:17
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:Hmm do USN ships tend to have strong regional contingents? I used to play a lot of euchre - with my ex-wife's family, from Michigan. I got the impression it's a big thing in Indiana/Illinois/Michigan/Ontario (with slightly different rules from place to place) but pretty niche elsewhere. I doubt it. The military learned some hard lessons in WW2 about mass casualty events loving specific regions when you do that, or even gutting individual families.
|
|
#
?
Jan 21, 2024 17:31
|
|
|
Euchre is also big in the Cincinnati/NKY area. Spades is still the card game of choice in the US Army since WW2.
|
|
#
?
Jan 21, 2024 18:12
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:Hmm do USN ships tend to have strong regional contingents? Probably not after the Sullivans. I would say it was more that you could throw a stick and hit 'German/Dutch-descended farm kid' than any specific region. If a few guys know how to play it isn't too hard to teach other people to play when you have lots of time with not much else going on.
|
|
#
?
Jan 21, 2024 18:55
|
|
|
I suspect that a lot of ships are just going to develop their own unique culture regardless of where the people on them at a particular time are from, too. If playing Connect Four is weirdly popular with the first crew, for example, that could stick around for a long time as some people filter out and new people filter in, but there's enough of the Old Connect Four Guard to keep it alive and rope in the new guys.
|
|
#
?
Jan 21, 2024 19:08
|
|
|
MilHist adjacent. Y'all know a lot about Nazis, so maybe you can enlighten me: Is there are strong relationship between the discovery of proto-Indo-European language(s) and the development of Nazi ideology? I'm not talking about modern scholarship on Indo-European peoples and languages. I'd like to know if early and incomplete discoveries in linguistics led to some very unscientific leaps to conclusions. To clarify: I'm not implying that Indo-European study is racist in any way. I inferring that some very racist people took early hypotheses about Indo-European languages as "evidence" of their pre-conceived notions. And I'd like to learn how emerging linguistic theories like Grimm's Law and Neogrammarian ideas influenced anti-semitism and racial thought in the early 20th century.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2024 01:54
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:I suspect that a lot of ships are just going to develop their own unique culture regardless of where the people on them at a particular time are from, too. If playing Connect Four is weirdly popular with the first crew, for example, that could stick around for a long time as some people filter out and new people filter in, but there's enough of the Old Connect Four Guard to keep it alive and rope in the new guys. That might explain why there are so many D&D geeks in the Army.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2024 01:55
|
|
|
Bagheera posted:MilHist adjacent. Y'all know a lot about Nazis, so maybe you can enlighten me: O hey, I can be useful for a change. How much did things like Grimm’s law affect 20th century antisemitism? Probably none at all. All the stuff you’re mentioning was waaaay earlier ; Jacob Grimm proposed his law in 1822, and he was building on a lot of already pretty good scholarship. Philology (what we now call “historical linguistics”) is super old, since at least the Classical Period : the Ancient Greeks loving loved it. By the 20th century they’d nailed that stuff down pretty good already when it came to anything Indo-European, especially Germanic. That being said, we know tons about the world now but there are still flat-earthers and poo poo around ; just because the knowledge is available doesn’t mean it’s not being ignored. The Nazis believed a lot of crazy poo poo and them resurrecting some long-disproven etymologies (or whatever) for political reasons would definitely be on brand. Nor should we discount that some early nonsense linguistic theory could have affected 18th or 19th century antisemitism which in turn created the racist terroir for Nazism. Bad ideas have a tendency to bounce around cultures long after they’ve been shown to be nonsense, see almost all depictions of the Middle Ages in mass media. The problem is that while I could talk to you all day about linguistics, I don’t know poo poo about Nazis*. Someone might be able to point you at some reading on antisemitism in 19th century Germany/early Nazi cultural poo poo. If you bump into a linguistics thing you could PM me or post in the linguistics thread. We’re generally very helpful. *by which I mean “no more than anyone else who’s been reading this thread for several years” ; occasionally some knowledge gets through my thick, blond hide so I guess I know “some”. Just not a relevant amount.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2024 03:47
|
|
|
It was a thing, but I wouldn't call it mainstream Nazi thought. It was more the sort of thing that Himmler and other people into weird, mystical, esoteric crap cared about, and even then it was a smaller thread. For example, at one point in the late 30s Himmler sent an expedition to Tibet to look for the home of the Aryan race. Yeah, that weird little nugget of Nazi in one of the Uncharted games (3 I think?) was based on a kernel of truth. For the most part if you want to trace the origins of the Nazis particular flavor of racially-obsessed nationalism you're looking at a few French crackpots in the late 19th century (most notably one who's name is escaping me right now and I"m not walking to a bookshelf to look it up, he was obsessed with racial homelands) and the German Romantic (as in the literary movement) obsession with agrarianism.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2024 05:01
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:It was a thing, but I wouldn't call it mainstream Nazi thought. It was more the sort of thing that Himmler and other people into weird, mystical, esoteric crap cared about, and even then it was a smaller thread. For example, at one point in the late 30s Himmler sent an expedition to Tibet to look for the home of the Aryan race. Yeah, that weird little nugget of Nazi in one of the Uncharted games (3 I think?) was based on a kernel of truth. If it's the Hyberborea and ancient astronauts guy, that was Robert Charroux.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2024 10:41
|
|
|
If you're ever wondering who's to blame for some hot white nonsense: It's always the Theosophists.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2024 10:52
|
|
|
Thanks a million. I learned about Indo-Europeans through two podcasts (The History Of The English Language and Tides Of History), and that encouraged me to read the source they both drew on, "The Horse, The Wheel, and Language." It's really amazing how they can make a reasonable guess about primitive cultures that no longer exist. On that note, have scholars reconstructed other language families? Proto-Semitic? Proto Sino-Tibetan? One example I recall: The Uto-Aztecan language family include Nahuatl and Comanche, as well as many small indigenous groups in the southwest US and northern Mexico. This lends credence to the Aztec myth that they came from a tribe in the Sonora desert and migrated into central Mexico. As I was reading/listening about PIE, I saw where someone could misconstrue the research. Language, ethnicity, and culture influence one another, but they are independent. There's a tendency, however, to see them as one unit. If someone thinks the spread of a language represents the spread of a specific ethnicity, it's easy to see the spread of PIE as a conquering wave of ubermensch building homelands from the Britain to Bangladesh. As Groda mentioned, I think Thosophism did just that: They thought the Proto Indo-Europeans were some mystical race of white wizards who ran half the world. I figured Nazis and other racist groups in Europe would have jumped to the same conclusion.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2024 14:17
|
|
|
Bagheera posted:Thanks a million. I learned about Indo-Europeans through two podcasts (The History Of The English Language and Tides Of History), and that encouraged me to read the source they both drew on, "The Horse, The Wheel, and Language." It's really amazing how they can make a reasonable guess about primitive cultures that no longer exist. I haven't read this book, but I get very leery when anthropologists do language stuff. They, as a discipline, have a well-earned reputation for saying some piping-hot bullshit and then refusing to address whether or not it's true. The big one being that the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is still kicking around there and getting research grants, despite having absolutely no evidence for it and a poo poo ton of counter-evidence, most of which is 80 years old at this point. I'm not going to read that book because my time on this world is pretty limited, but I would take a lot of the stuff they say with a 40-pound bag of rock salt just on principle. As to other proto-languages : yeah, we've reconstructed loads of them. For certain values of "reconstructed". A reconstruction of a language doesn't mean there's like Duolingo PIE edition or something. It's more like the partially filled-in phylogeny of extinct species you'd get in paleontology : we know that these two species evolved from this other thing, which evolved from this other thing, and we have some random fossilized toe bones/words for "sister in law" that we can use to tell a surprising amount about them, but you're never going to get a full Jurassic Park thing/have a conversation in the language. Vowels in particular are hard to do besides basic poo poo like what the contrasts are : figuring out what the vowels are besides "back, high" vs. "front, low" is really hard. This is probably the wikipedia page to get you started. It's a wikipedia page, so obviously it's not gonna answer your deepest questions or give a full survey of the field, but that'll get you started. For an actual book, I always recommend The Power of Babel by John McWhorter : it's pitched at laypeople, John is a very, very good writer and it provides a nice intro to language evolution as a concept. Lots of Asterix and Obleix comics in there too, which is always a plus.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2024 16:19
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:Lots of Asterix and Obleix comics in there too, which is always a plus. Well, you've sold me on the book, at least.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2024 17:18
|
|
|
Tias posted:If it's the Hyberborea and ancient astronauts guy, that was Robert Charroux. Nah, it was a French writer who was big in the hyper-nationalist Boulangerist movement in the last quarter of the 19th century, and who got into Parliament as a representative from somewhere out near the German border. Nancy I think. He wrote a bunch of anti-immigrant stuff that played a role in heating things up right before some anti-immigrant pogroms against Italian migrant workers in SE France (yeah, that was a thing for a hot minute in French history). His basic thesis was that there is an eternal and unbreakable bond between French peasantry and the literal, physical soil of France, and that the nation, it's culture, and its history are the direct product of this bond. Hence his virulent anti-immigrant stance, as an immigrant will never have this eternal bond and therefore can never be French. I can't remember off the top of my head if he made the leap to doing a  face about what happens when an immigrant has a kid with a French person and jumping to immigrants polluting the blood, but it's the sort of short hop that is kind of inevitable once you start in on that kind of literal blood and soil rhetoric. I'll dig around and find the name later. Began with a B
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2024 20:23
|
|
|
I haven't read it, but last year a book came out that might be of interest to anyone looking into Indo-European questions: Jean-Paul Demoule's The Indo-Europeans: Archaeology, Language, Race, and the Search for the Origins of the West.
|
|
#
?
Jan 23, 2024 00:33
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:Nah, it was a French writer who was big in the hyper-nationalist Boulangerist movement in the last quarter of the 19th century, and who got into Parliament as a representative from somewhere out near the German border. Nancy I think. He wrote a bunch of anti-immigrant stuff that played a role in heating things up right before some anti-immigrant pogroms against Italian migrant workers in SE France (yeah, that was a thing for a hot minute in French history). as a descendant of us פֿראַנצויזישע יידן I've had a fun few moments trying to remember which late 19th french writer you are talking about. Not because I think you're wrong, but rather because there are so many and I can't recall a B guy
|
|
#
?
Jan 23, 2024 13:56
|
|
|
Edgar Allen Ho posted:as a descendant of us פֿראַנצויזישע יידן I've had a fun few moments trying to remember which late 19th french writer you are talking about. Not because I think you're wrong, but rather because there are so many and I can't recall a B guy It was Barres. He was quite a prick. Also an important touch stone if you're discussing 19th century proto-fascism and anti-semitism. I forgot until I skimmed his wiki but dude also, predictably, had opinions about Dreyfus. Of course he's not THE father of racist proto-fascism or anything, but he's a pretty solid example of the stew of ideas that was sloshing around at that time and which the Nazis ultimate distillation emerged from. He's also a pretty emblematic example of how a lot of those issues were most severe in France, not Germany, in the 50 years before WW1. I attended a lecture by Chris Browning once where he made the comment that if you went back in time to 1900 or 1910 and told someone that inside the next 50 years a European country would commit unspeakable atrocities in an attempt to wipe the Jews from existence they would probably guess France, or maybe Russia.
|
|
#
?
Jan 23, 2024 14:04
|
|
|
Oh I thought you meant Arthur de Gobineau.
|
|
#
?
Jan 23, 2024 14:18
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:I haven't read this book, but I get very leery when anthropologists do language stuff. They, as a discipline, have a well-earned reputation for saying some piping-hot bullshit and then refusing to address whether or not it's true. The big one being that the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is still kicking around there and getting research grants, despite having absolutely no evidence for it and a poo poo ton of counter-evidence, most of which is 80 years old at this point. I'm not going to read that book because my time on this world is pretty limited, but I would take a lot of the stuff they say with a 40-pound bag of rock salt just on principle. Dude, it's a good book. Don't be weird about archeology.
|
|
#
?
Jan 23, 2024 14:34
|
|
|
Fangz posted:Oh I thought you meant Arthur de Gobineau. No, but he's another good one. He's also illustrative of a different trend in 19th century racism, although here it's also important to make a distinction between hyper-nationalist nativeism as an element of proto-fascism and racism. Do the two march hand in hand? Absolutely, because once you start talking about the ineffable and immortal soul of your people and how it is tied to the land and therefore no foreigner can ever be truly French/German/English/whatever* then you are an extremely short jump away from other peoples being lesser, but one does not necessarily follow the other. The best example of this is Nazi racial thinking, which 100% did allow for non-German (and even non-Aryan) peoples who had maintained their racial integrity and, while they might be ultimately antagonistic to the German people in the winner-takes-all struggle of peoples against on another, were not necessarily inferior. Inferiority was assigned to those peoples who had no connection to their ancestral land (Jews) or who had intermixed with other races so much that their own racial identity was hopelessly diluted (Slavs, also Jews, big accusatory finger pointed to the assumed racial future of the United States). But, anyways, if we're talking strains of 19th century racism de Gobineau is a good example of so-called scientific racism and an attempt to find a rational basis for existing prejudices. Barres is an example of Romanticism in racism (which is important because of how influential Romanticism was on 19th century nationalism), which basically boils down to feelings and things that you know to be true because of ancient, quasi-mystical forces. It's a two-track approach that works well for bringing in a broad cross section of society. *As an aside, there is a moment in history around this time where a bunch of white Americans started latching onto these kind of nativist ideas and kinda looking around and going "well we're all immigrants does this mean the Natives were . . . right?" This dovetails with the "noble savage" literature that was becoming really popular too (Metamora: Last of the Wampanogs being the most famous, but there were something like 100 similar plays written in the US in the mid-19th century) and the end result is that you have a bunch of people claiming a very small amount of direct descent from natives, especially native chiefs. Not much, mind you, just like one great-grandparent. Don't want to call in question how white we are after all! But we totally have a deep and spiritual bond with the land as a result, and can rightfully claim both ancient ties of blood as well as modern right of conquest over those savages. See also: how Pocahontas became a key American myth (edit: and yes I know she was real, but myth in the sense of how her story was interpreted, presented, and changed over the years). It's a literal marriage of two cultures that places white, settler Europeans to be the legitimate heirs to both the physical land that they are displacing the natives from, as well as the metaphysical connection that the rightful occupants have. Which is why I, a New York WASP in 1880, am a fully legitimate American and you, Mr. Irish person getting off that boat, are immigrant trash who needs to go home and stop polluting the racial makeup of my country.
|
|
#
?
Jan 23, 2024 15:05
|
|
|
Vincent Van Goatse posted:Dude, it's a good book. Don't be weird about archeology. You ever watch a talk by an economist or a poli-sci person where they give an example from history and it's so poorly understood you'd fail an undergrad on the spot for it? Anthro people do that with language a lot. It's really more a cultural/linguistic anthro thing than an archeology thing, but they swim in the same pool and frequently pick up a bunch of the same poo poo. They have a tendency to get way the hell out over their skis and say some buck wild poo poo. A big part of my pat lecture(s) on "No Chinese characters aren't magic pictures of concepts, you numpty" is from dealing with anthro people.
|
|
#
?
Jan 23, 2024 16:04
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:Anthro people do that with language a lot. I don't think it helps that Linguistics is in the Anthro department in most US schools. (Four fields, etc.)
|
|
#
?
Jan 23, 2024 16:23
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:You ever watch a talk by an economist or a poli-sci person where they give an example from history and it's so poorly understood you'd fail an undergrad on the spot for it? Me, a Chad, confidently teaching the undergrads: Note the cross shape. It's clear this character was for ritual purposes. Write that down, class. You, a soybeta, owned: Noooo the letter t has no origin in Christianity!!! What idiot told you that!!??
|
|
#
?
Jan 23, 2024 16:57
|
|
|
Dopilsya posted:Me, a Chad, confidently teaching the undergrads: Note the cross shape. It's clear this character was for ritual purposes. Write that down, class. My Catholic friend once tried to convince me of that second one once.
|
|
#
?
Jan 23, 2024 21:52
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:You ever watch a talk by an economist or a poli-sci person where they give an example from history and it's so poorly understood you'd fail an undergrad on the spot for it? Yes I have, many times. And because of that I can confidently say: dude, slow your roll. The book is literally "Here's what linguists say about the evolution of Proto-Indo-European and when it happened and there's an archeological culture that mirrors that evolution exactly in time and space so there's likely a correlation and here's how it played out according to what we know of archeology." Also you're the first linguist I've encountered with anything negative to say about it and you haven't read it. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Jan 23, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 23, 2024 22:41
|
|
|
I’m impressed at the innovation of judging the book without even seeing the cover, I have to say. Saves a lot of time, I’m sure.
|
|
#
?
Jan 23, 2024 22:42
|
|
|
Fiiiiiiiiiine. I’ll read the book and report back.
|
|
#
?
Jan 23, 2024 23:04
|
|
|
PYF books you shamed XD into doing a book report on
|
|
#
?
Jan 23, 2024 23:12
|
|
|
A few days late, but I have a stupid question about Chiang Kai-shek that's been rattling around my brain for a while: that name doesn't look like other Chinese names I'm familiar with. Is that because of some weird old englishification method that's not used any more? Or did he legit have an odd name?
|
|
#
?
Jan 24, 2024 09:44
|
|
|
Tree Bucket posted:A few days late, but I have a stupid question about Chiang Kai-shek that's been rattling around my brain for a while: There are two ways to romanize Chinese, Wade-Giles and Pinyin. Wade-Giles is the older one, made by a couple of white dudes. Pinyin was developed in the 50s, by a group of Chinese linguists. Since English speakers used Wade-Giles for a long time, its still the standard for most famous Chinese people from before the Communist revolution. Chiang Kai-Shek and Sun Yat-sen are examples. People associated with the PRC usually get Pinyin now, e.g. Mao Zedong - but that wasn't always the case, back in his time his name would have usually been spelled Mao Tse-tung. In the ROC, Wade-Giles is still most common AFAIK. That's perhaps another reason that CKS gets romanized with Wade-Giles, although personally I think its just inertia. Xiahou Dun is probably going to yell at me for being completely wrong whenever he wakes up. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 24, 2024 10:13
|
|
|
Tree Bucket posted:A few days late, but I have a stupid question about Chiang Kai-shek that's been rattling around my brain for a while: I just bothered to look into this one, because I got curious too. It's a combination of two romanizations: Wade-Giles (old) romanization of the Mandarin pronunciation of his family name, and the common Cantonese romanization of his personal (courtesy) name. That all happened due to funny political circumstances (the ROC was based in Canton) at the time he started using the name, and once it was his "name in English" it stuck. A modern-day Chinese person would just read out 蒋介石 in whichever Chinese language they speak. You'll notice other Cantonese names look much more like "Kai-shek", than the pinyin spellings of Mandarin pronunciations we're used to seeing in like, the news. Cantonese sounds pretty different from Mandarin. That was a fun rabbit hole.
|
|
#
?
Jan 24, 2024 10:15
|
|
|
Thanks, scholars. Gotta say, Wade-Giles is a resplendently British-sounding pair of names.
|
|
#
?
Jan 24, 2024 10:42
|
|
|
Please defer to an actual scholar rather than what I dug up out of curiosity, if it comes to it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 24, 2024 11:01
|
|
|
Ohtori Akio posted:Please defer to an actual scholar rather than what I dug up out of curiosity, if it comes to it. No, that's pretty much correct. Both Sun Yat-Sen and Chiang Kai-Shek are Cantonese takes on the names. I'm more used to "Jiang Jieshi" myself, which is the Mandarin pronunciation and pingyin. Generally if you see a Chinese name with a bunch of Ks in it there's a good chance it's Cantonese.
|
|
#
?
Jan 24, 2024 12:35
|
|
|
God I love that I didn't have to type up any of that. Just gonna throw out that Chiang Kai-shek was briefly further Anglicized by Americans into "Chancre Jack". It's not the least accurate way to think of General Jiang.
|
|
#
?
Jan 24, 2024 15:37
|
|
|
It is spelled Chang, you philistines! https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/jeb-bush-marco-rubio-relationship-114308/ quote:“I can’t think back on a time when I’ve ever been prouder to be a Republican, Marco,” Bush said, before recounting the tale of “Chang.”
|
|
#
?
Jan 24, 2024 16:33
|
|
|
Huh,I thought recent research shows that Chiang actually hated "enterprenurial capitalism" personally, and was more in favour of government owned business like Mainland China today, but when did Republicans care about small details like that really?
RC01214 fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Jan 24, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 24, 2024 17:00
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 4, 2024 16:25 |
|
|
RC01214 posted:Huh,I thought recent research shows that Chiang actually hated "enterprenurial cqpitalism" personally, and was more in favour of government owned business like Mainland China today, but when did Republicans care about small details like that really? TRUMAN LOST CHINA !!!
|
|
#
?
Jan 24, 2024 17:20
|
|
