Links - 3rd August 2023 (1)

EP16 Powers Thrones and Dan Jones | Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum | Podcasts on Audible | Audible.com - "'I just watched Ridley Scott's The Last Duel about a 14th century duel between two dudes over, whether Adam Driver, the Adam Driver character  Jacques Le Gris,  had raped the wife of Matt Damon,  Jean de Carrouges.  And have gotten in the hands of the writers, Damon and Affleck, the director Ridley Scott, this has become a movie that is, that is really about Hollywood's politics and American gender politics, ah, in the 21st century, it's just put into, it just happens to be taking place in the 14th century. Now, the costume in that movie is the 14th century. So they're not all wandering about in skinny jeans with iPhones, I'll grant you that. We don't really do that anymore. But what is obvious throughout that entire movie is that this is one big analogy for the modern world.'

A Republic Lost at Sea - Dan Carlin's Hardcore History | Department of Classics - "‘The hijacking of Alexander the Great's body is one of my favorite stories and maybe the best example of that phrase that possession is nine tenths of the law right? I love that and I love the the visits to Alexander's mummified corpse and there's one in your story and then there's, was it Caligula or Nero that also went and maybe supposedly stole the armor later. I love that story. But I also love the fact that you can tell that this is a conquest dynasty, the Ptolemies because they're there for three centuries or something. And their last ruler Cleopatra is the only one to speak Egyptian in the whole group.’
‘Yeah, no, it really is. It is kind of amazing. And some people think it's more evidence for what might be possible that her mother and maybe her grandmother were Egyptian or at least party, partly Egyptian’
‘You said Persian maybe too’
‘Yes, there is definitely some Persian in there because the Ptolemies, the Ptolemies intermarried. But yeah, I mean, they, they really kept themselves apart from the Egyptians. They used Egyptians increasingly in the, as the dynasty, in the later years of the dynasty. They used Egyptians in the beginning, they kept themselves quite aloof from Egyptians. And some ancient texts refer to Alexandria as Alexandria at Egypt, Alexandria by Egypt, we might say, rather than Alexandria in Egypt. So itself is separate from Egypt’...
‘If you are trying to argue against the great man theory of history, right, the ancient or even Churchillian way of looking at these things. It's so hard when you get to this era, because the individual personalities, you know, seem to be seem to be defying any rules about trends and forces or Marxist economic theory’...
'There's all the difference in the world between someone like Anthony who's very talented, and someone like Octavian who's just a supernova when it comes to what it takes to be a strategist and to to win a war. Personality really does make a difference.'...
[On Marcus Anthony winning against Augustus and the Empire having two capitals] ‘I like to say that the two best sellers of the Roman Empire today are the New Testament, and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. And they're both written in Greek, not in Latin. Well, if Alexandria had remained as a cultural and political capital, then the culture that would have developed in the Roman Empire would have even been more Eastern, more Greek, more looking towards the East, than what develops in Rome, and that would have had a big impact on Western culture as well.’"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Herodotus - "‘Herodotus is an individual, nobody has hired him to do this. He is not a spokesman for any regime. And he's actually been called rather nicely, I think, the denial of official history. So insofar as he was a storyteller, what's interesting to us historians is how he graded the types of as Tom was saying, predominantly oral sources, and he came up with a tripartite classification. The best, i.e. the most reliable is eyewitness evidence. The second one is hearsay evidence. You've heard it from somebody who claimed to be an eyewitness. And third and way down is tradition. And you'll find Herodotus moderating and modulating the ways in which he represents what his sources have told him, but very rarely does he say, this is the one and only line that can be taken. This is the absolute truth and we must not deviate from this. In fact, his ideal was not so much truth as what he called something like unerringness. And so you'll often find him saying it's not my job to tell you what certainly was the case, i.e. what actually happened. My job is to tell you what my sources told me. And then of course, what he does is shape those sources into the kind of narrative for the best’...
‘When we say *the Greeks* won the Persian Wars, something like 32 or 33, Greek communities were bold enough and resolute enough to stand together… and swear that they would resist. The other 700 or so in the Aegean, not to mention all the other Greeks around the Mediterranean, around the Black Sea who weren't involved at all. They actually either fought with the Persians, I mean, on the Persian side, or they tried to stay neutral. And there are some pretty big fish in amongst the allegedly neutral. I'm talking about you, Argos. And there is some pretty nasty examples of Greek cities going over and siding with the Persians. I mean, you Thebes’...
'Plutarch… wrote an entire tract called On the Mean Spiritedness of Herodotus. It is, actually it was Plutarch, who was the more mean spirited, but the reason that he took that line was that he thought that Herodotus had maligned his fellow Boeotians of Thebes'"

Meme - autumn @adrusi: ""half of americans are below sixth grade reading level" ok but sixth grade reading level is like:
- Harry Potter books
- The Hobbit
- Starship Troopers
- The Old Man and the Sea
- His Dark Materials series
why do we need more than half the population above this level?"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Manhattan Project - "‘Very cleverly, in the Soviet Union, something that Groves, could not have done anything at all about a physicist called George Flareoff [sp?] was in the army. And he was on two weeks leave from the front. And he visited the local university to see what had happened in nuclear fission in the previous two years. And he looked in the library and discovered two things. First of all, there was not a single paper in the literature that had been published on nuclear fission in two years, which was a big shock. And secondly, the likes of Niels Bohr and Fermi and great scientists like that, had published nothing themselves. And he put two and two together and realized that they must be operating on a secret project somewhere to develop fission into a weapon. And alerted Stalon to the, to the fact. Actually Stalin was already aware of this because of spying that had taken place earlier... Klaus Fuchs, and there were other spies. Fuchs somehow evaded vetting. The irony is that he had been a communist in Germany before he left and came over to Britain after escaping Hitler. But the only evidence that MI5 had about this was papers from the Gestapo. Coming from the Gestapo, they just ignored them and disregarded everything.’...
‘Nobody really knew what was going to happen. Groves had prepared three versions for the New Mexico governor. The New Mexico governor was aware that the military were gonna do something but of course, he didn't know what the details of it were, but Groves had prepared three statements. One that the test had been okay. The second level was there had been severe damage. And the third one was an obituary of all present, including himself’...
'When you see these things on the TV, what you see is the flash and an instant bang. Of course, it wasn't like that. This was 20 miles away, it took nearly five minutes for the sound, the shock wave to reach the scientists, and the awesome sight that they had seen, and already there was this mushroom cloud developing, they must have been wondering what was going to arrive in five minutes when the shock wave came. And what arrived, it was like thunder echoing from the mountains all around, which just continued and continued. And the mushroom cloud continued rising 20,000 feet into the air, changing color granted as it did, gradually, the light level went down. And then the real sunrise took place in the east. This is all taking place in the south. The word awesome is used but on that occasion, I think it really was'...
‘When fission was discovered, it was probably regarded as a pretty arcane, academic science experiment. But, you know, sometimes an arcane discovery can have just enormous consequences that nobody can foresee all of all of them and can really change the world’"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Corals - "‘When Captain Cook crossed the Pacific and he discovered Hawaii he was astonished by the number of people there. There are more, there were more people on Hawaii in Captain Cook's day than there are now and I've been to Hawaii and it's a big busy rather spoiled part of the world. And that's what, because these people effectively lived off the sea. And they lived off most of the time the reefs and they had a very hierarchical structure.’...
‘Whether or not plastic has large scale direct impacts on marine life I think is still up for debate. There's certainly evidence that at local scales plastic can be ingested by marine organisms and, and cause them ill health. We've done some work looking at the um the ingestion of microplastics by tiny little coral reef larval fishes that in the first few days when you know nutrition is so vital for their survival that they're consuming these non-nutritious toxic laden particles. It can only probably be a bad thing but evidence for that scaling up to impact populations I think is still out for debate at the moment’"

Hardcore History 67 – Supernova in the East VI - "We once described ideas like an intellectual contagion and there were many people who said the Arab Spring was only made possible because of modern day communications but, that's happened many times in the past. Those of you who look at the famous year of 1848, the so-called year of revolutions and how many revolutions sprung up in so many different countries at once. What if the Japanese could cloud seed a revolution here on a bunch of these colonially oppressed... subject peoples?...
In 1939, pretty much every major country in the Second World War, decried the idea of bombing civilians. By 1945, none of those countries have a moral leg to stand on anymore, because either they've already done it themselves, or they've done things you might even see and call worse."
Clearly the atomic bomb was unnecessary and was just to intimidate the Soviets

Hardcore History 69 – Twilight of the Æsir - "‘Another historian who estimates that 14% of all the silver pennies minted by the entire Frankish Empire over the entire century of the 800s went to pay off the Vikings. Just for protection money. Just for go away funds right. Doesn't include any of the money the Vikings directly stole or looted in their many many attacks. Doesn't include any of the money that the Empire had to spend to defend themselves or fight the Vikings. Doesn't include any of the lost productivity or emotional costs of all the people the Vikings killed or stole and sold into slavery’"

Meme - Debra DeLoach @FungalSquirrel: "Wife sent me this fig and asked if scientists would find it funny. I dunno about you, but I giggled until I wheezed.
Fig 1
Fig 2
*Figs (fruit)*"

Meme - "If god is all loving and forgiving, would he forgive someone for not believing in him, without being asked?
No -> Then he is not all loving and forgiving.
Yes -> No one needs to believe nor worship him.
Paul Andrew Ryan
It really is that simple."

Meme - "M&S
Est 1884
The All Day Breakfast is served til 11.30am"

Canine Vs Child - "Canine – Human Child Development Comparison
Birth: Begins Walking vs Useless
6 weeks: Can be taught to defecate outside vs Useless
6 months: Recognizes own name, knows several tricks, can clearly communicate needs to it’s owner vs Louder and useless
2 years: The human and dog have learned to co-exist in a mutually beneficial manner.  The dog provides a positive impact on the human’s blood pressure vs Just the Opposite
13 years: Knows it is a loved member of the human’s family vs Knows…..everything"

Meme - "When your lusband says he's taking you out for 5 guys and its just a burger joint *Maegan Hall*"

Butter Studio on Instagram: “🧜‍♀️ 𝐃𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐆𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲! 🧁✨ We’re ending the school June Holidays on a big bang❗️ Sing & dance to any @disneylittlemermaid …” - "We’re ending the school June Holidays on a big bang❗️ Sing & dance to any @disneylittlemermaid song or come dressed as a character to get a FREE cupcake at Butter Studio 💛 Join us for a magical celebration of #disney The Little Mermaid at any of our retail stores and indulge in our mouthwatering handcrafted, enchanting treats. 🌊🎶🎭 Bonus Giveaway: Go all out and impress us to get a complimentary Mickey Cupcake Dozen Box!
[*Limited to 1 winner / outlet]"
People are going crazy these days : SingaporeRaw

Bald–hairy - Wikipedia - "Bald–hairy (Russian: лысый — волосатый) is a common joke in Russian political discourse, referring to the empirical rule of the state leaders' succession defined as a change of a bald or balding leader to a hairy one and vice versa. This consistent pattern can be traced back to as early as 1825, when Nicholas I succeeded his late brother Alexander as the Russian Emperor. Nicholas I's son Alexander II formed the first "bald–hairy" pair of the sequence with his father."

Meme - "Bath and Body Works might wanna reconsider that link..."
"JOIN OUR TEAM!
bbwjobs.com"

Meme - "If a clownfishs female partner dies, it will change gender and mate with its children in order to reproduce. This information ruined finding nemo for me"
"When your wife dies and your son starts looking kinda of thicc"
"No wonder he wanted to find him so bad"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Shakespeare's Sonnets - "‘I think they are incredibly problematic especially to modern readers and there is a real streak of cruelty running through those poems so in 130 for example, the the poet does not just say that this woman is basically ugly but he describes her breath as reeking. Um he says that where angels, where angels kind of float, you know she she treads on the ground and there's almost an implication that you know if I didn't love you nobody would… we also as modern readers I think need to think very carefully about the um about the rhetoric of darkness and how that is treated. The insinuation that darkness is considered of a par with sinfulness or as a negative value, as opposed to the fair Petrarchan ideal, it's incredibly problematic and especially um you know in racial terms we need to think carefully about that... there was a really significant black population in early modern London, there was a lot of immigration going on, the slave trade was in force and that means this language of darkness I think would have read differently even within Shakespeare's lifetime as it obviously reads very differently to us today’...
'It's almost impossible to find one that is unequivocal about love. I think you immediately get the lines about rough winds shaking the darling buds of May or Autumn is coming, winter is coming, with the implication that you know the Beloved may be beautiful now but this is not going to last. That um that beauty decays over time and eventually there will be death'"
Or maybe people in the 16th century weren't looking to be offended by everything so they distinguished between black skin and black colour. Ironic, since we're also told that race was invented by colonialism to justify their project

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth - "‘Both Robert and Catherine have talked about the Republic. And at the same time, we've been talking about kings, and that sounds like a contradiction in terms. The monarch, although with that, had the title of king was more like an elected president, and was seen by the nobles as their servant. The nobles even had the right to rebel if they considered the the king had broken the law. So it's, they're not quite kings as the rest of Europe thought of it. In fact, quite a lot of people said that, you know, these Polish kings are not kings at all’...
‘It's based on Renaissance ideas. And one of the points that we have to emphasize about Poland-Lithuania is that it takes on those Renaissance ideas of what a republic is, which are based on classical ideas, on writers like Aristotle, Cicero, Polybius, and so on. And they put it into action. Now, when we think of a republic, and when many historians write about early modern Europe and write about republics, they think of a system without a king, because that's what happened in England in 1649. But they, when Bodin publishes his book, he calls it the six books of the Republic… in ancient thought, a republic is a community of citizens. It's not a state. Today, we think of it as a form of the state, a non monarchical form. But when Poles think about their republic, they think about a community of citizens.’...
‘85% of Jewish people alive today can track their origins back to the, this, this this Poland-Lithuania Republic… comparatively, there was as you pointed out anti-Semitism, but compared what was going on elsewhere, it was extremely tolerant in that area.’...
‘Parliaments were limited by law to six weeks in the 16th and 17th centuries, they often extended their term. But they had to do so unanimously. Now, what happened in the great crisis of the middle of the 17th century was the, a parliament was reaching the end of its debates on a Friday. And the speaker said, I'd like to reassemble on Monday does anybody object? And one Lithuanian delegate stood up and said I object and disappeared from the chamber, got on his horse and rode back to Lithuania. Now that was a problem, because usually what happened is that people would follow the guy out and say, Okay, what's your problem? What do you want? Can we persuade you to withdraw your objection. And sometimes that worked, and sometimes it didn't. But this time, the whole thing was broken, and the whole parliament was broken. And that meant that no legislation, no taxes were agreed. And over the course of the 17 century, this device began to be used, and it by 18th century it was being used by Poland's neighbors, who saw this as very convenient. If somebody could be persuaded to stand up and say, I object, then the Parliament would fail. And then the 18th century in the reign of Augustus the Third between 1733 and 1763, only one Parliament reached a conclusion and parliament met every two years by law. This was the anarchy that undid the Republic. But in terms of the Union, when they wanted to reform this in the 1650s, the Lithuanians said look, if you remove unanimity, the Union will be finished because we will not be able to to outvote the Polish majority.’"

Social app IRL, valued at $1 billion, shuts down because it doesn't have any users IRL - "IRL, a social app meant to connect young people and discover events, seemed to have everything going for it. The company was able to overcome the challenges of running an event discovery app during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when everyone was stuck inside. With a killer domain name in IRL.com and a pivot to also focusing on online event discovery, IRL eventually grew to 20 million users, according to its founder Abraham Shafi, raising more than $200 million in VC funding.  One problem: It appears that the vast majority of those 20 million users are fake.  According to a report from The Information, IRL employees have been skeptical of user base claims from Shafi, who was also the CEO of the company until he was suspended by the board of directors in April. A subsequent investigation by the board found some shocking information that vindicated those employees' skepticism.  The board's investigation found that 95 percent of IRL's supposed 20 million users were actually "automated or from bots."... This isn't the first time something like this has happened in the tech space. For example, just earlier this year, JP Morgan sued the founder of Frank, an app it required for $175 million, for lying about the startup's user numbers."

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Ghislaine Maxwell's US jail conditions 'are torture' - "‘Ghislaine has been in prison now for nearly 250 days and counting. She is in effective isolation in a cell that measures six foot by nine foot and which includes a concrete bed and a toilet. There is no natural light. She is under 24 hour round the clock surveillance with 10 cameras, including one that moves and tracks her movements. That is her existence. Every day’…
‘She is awaiting trial on very serious charges on the conditions that she's held under the authorities say that what you describe is in place in order to prevent other inmates from harming her and to stop her harming herself. Hence, the cameras, hence the isolation.’
‘Well, this is ridiculous. Ghislaine is not as suicide risk. She has never been a suicide risk. There are daily mental evaluations of her. She has shown no indication that that is her intention. It's. she's been completely overmanaged. And why is that? Because Jeffrey Epstein died in federal custody. So this is a grotesque overreaction.’"
Epstein also denied having suicidal thoughts before he died, so

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Thousands queue overnight to pay respects to the Queen - "‘Someone said something to me Yesterday actually, which is we’re Elizabethans, and I never identified as that before and now I've realized that the Queen has been there for my whole life and at times of distress like in covid she said the right thing at the right time and she always has and she'll be missed more than I think most of us ever realized’...
'We really lack opportunities for collective experience at the moment. Um you know with church attendance having declined hugely and a lot of people's experiences now being chopped up into these tiny bits you know whether it's on computers or on TV. Um we're less unified than we were and I think there is this yearning for something that had that goes back many years that has that sense of legitimacy and continuity and collective experience that the monarchy embodies'"

British Supermarket Lowers Beep Volume at Checkouts to Honor Queen - "it was difficult to tell that they'd scanned any of their groceries at the Morrisons self-checkout, because the supermarket chain had turned off their beeps out of respect for the late Queen Elizabeth...  A spokesperson for the supermarket chain told The Northern Echo that the checkout beeps had not been turned off, but the volume had been lowered. But all of the music and loudspeaker announcements have been temporarily switched off in all Morrisons locations."

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, The Today Debate: What Do We Want From Our Monarchy? - "‘We do not train people anymore in this country to be statesmen. The one person we do train is the monarch. The Queen was very good at it because she was raised to do it. That's why she was so good at doing it’...
‘Non-controversial is vital, okay. Which is what would be interesting. I mean Charles is going to be a very interesting King. I'm not I'm not arguing with that. I'd rather welcome it. I welcome someone who's challenging the government, saying are you sure that cost of living crisis isn't a pity… I think to be uninteresting is a requirement. not to be the sort of person to whom someone might turn if they wanted to support in some cause’"

Bunnycraft06 seems to be friends with the staff, and has gotten one of them to false mute me - "Bunnycraft06 plays invadedlands skyblock, and seems to be friends with one of the staff. I killed him in pvp, and he then got very mad and somehow got me muted. IT says in my mute that the reason was Spam (report). I can say with 100% confidence that I was not spamming, and this is a false mute. I am not so mad about the mute as I am mad about the unfair power this player has. I just made this post to tell everyone (especially the staff) that players should not be able to make claims against another player and have them punished. I also want to ask the staff if this was maybe an automated mute, or if a staff muted me. I would also like to mention that bunnycraft clearly got me muted, as he sent me a message statine "Enjoy your mute.""
"Nothing says look at my meager power more than "Enjoy the mute"". Facebook group admins are very guilty of this

Meme - "I'm not Chinese but I can def cook sum ramen while we watch a movie"
"thats definitely a way to start a conversation with someone that's chinese"
"Who's ur favorite communist"

Magdalena Solis - "Magdalena Solis participated in a blood-drinking sex cult in Mexico.  She helped to convince villagers in Yerba Buena that she was a goddess and orchestrated blood rituals that involved numerous murders.  When the human sacrifices were discovered outside the village, police came in and rounded up the cult."

Meme - "THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF PROCRASTINATION
NAPPING
SNACKS
SOCIAL MEDIA
MINOR CHORES"

Meme - "A note from my mailman
Please trim your bush so I can better service your box"

Meme - "Cunk on Dune
The Atreides come from Caladan, a world full of water, where they bury their dead in the cliffs.
The Duke has an army, a.son who bred by weird space nuns that control minds using a box and their other box.
They leave this world when drug addicts from space tell them to mine crack in a desert. Holy war is coming."

Meme - "Birds really got no chill *birdshit as bukkake on statue of woman with face to the sky*"