Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
True! Though I'd say by that time the dynamic had changed with growing urban populations, greater peacetime safety for trade, and the advent of firearms (something I forgot to mention in my first post is that of course Medieval city-states were at near-constant low-level war with each other, and of course that was long over by the 1600s). The town-dwellers were no longer rough-and-ready armed merchants, and likely "softer" in daily life, but instead good raw material for the sort of training and drill that made gunpowder armies effective.
Bartender_Venator
16hr ago
Well, slightly tangential point, but, before the Italian Wars (i.e. before expensive gunpowder warfare), Italian city-states generally fought using their own citizens, and pound-for-pound tended to beat knightly forces coming down from Germany. Barbarossa's defeat at Legnano is perhaps the most famous. I find the difference in standards between the Italian city forces and their aristocratic opponents telling of, well, a difference in standards - knights had banners, which could easily signal a rapid charge or a galloping retreat, but the Italians carried heavy war-carts which could not easily retreat and so had to be defended to the death.
It's hard for us to see it now, but in the Middle Ages, the urban merchants were the hard men. Sure, the successful ones ended up sitting in fortified towers, but for the most part commerce between cities or regions was a dangerous occupation that demanded the constant capacity for self-defense anywhere outside the walls of your city (and inside, if there was a feud going on). Nobles may have spent much more time training for wars, jousting, etc., but they actually faced significantly less danger than merchants. They would train a lot, charge valiantly, and if the battle turned, they could either ride away or surrender for ransom. And since pitched battles were rare in the Middle Ages, more often they were burning peasant villages or sitting around during a siege. As the saying goes, an armoured knight was an F-15 on a medieval battlefield - well-equipped, well-maintained, very expensive, and very difficult to kill - but the burghers and their urban militias were something more like Toyota Hiluxes, and those win wars too.
Bartender_Venator
17hr ago
Thanks, hadn't caught that post of his.
Bartender_Venator
19hr ago
Good review! I also recently read Rejection and, incidentally, it came up in my most recent writers' group, with opinions similar to yours. We all loved "Pics", and opinion on "The Feminist" and the closing stories were a little divided. Not that it's a bad story, but that it has to compete with writers like ARX-Han who are both more extremely online and willing to be actually edgy. I think Tulathiamutte is masterful in going right up to the limit of "safe edgy" that the uniformly-leftist literary scene will accept, and so he's able to scandalize without any unacceptable transgressions. He's also just not as convincing in his portrayal of the online world, partly because of that (he can't make the actual incel arguments, hence the need for the "narrow shoulders" thing) and partly because, I assume, he's a bit older, has a social life, and all the other things that stop people from being in weird corners of the internet 24/7.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Look, I get that Sparta hecking sucks and Lysander was a freaking pissbaby chud. But Devereaux just can't accept that the ancient world had fundamentally different values from ours, and their best men admired Sparta for reasons which would get them instantly banned from /r/Hellas.
Pop quiz - name a famous Spartan military victory not involving an alliance with Persia. Not a pop quiz - you can't name something other than military victories that is plausibly cool about Sparta.
Sorry bro the agoge was metal. As for battles, there are three aspects to this. The first is the battle of Sardis, if you need an answer to your quiz. The second is that asking for a Spartan victory, or even battle, not involving Persia is like asking for a French battle not involving England (actually, to torture the metaphor, the typical relationship was something closer to Persia's Britain and Sparta's Prussia. Persia had fingers in every pie, and even victories against them usually had some element of deal-making. The third is that the whole neatly-counterintuitive anti-Spartan reading of the Peloponnesian War fundamentally misunderstands Spartan strategy. Sparta had a high-quality army that they knew was very difficult to replace. This led them to essentially adopt a sea command/fleet-in-being strategy on land. The Spartan army could go where it wanted and do what it wanted as long as it didn't commit to a protracted siege or risky battle, and, since they didn't want to give battle either, the Athenians were reduced to a naval strategy which ended up overextending and destroying them at Syracuse and Aegospotami. Devereaux is on firm ground when he claims that Spartan society is unacceptable to modern sensibilities, and that the Spartan setup was fundamentally unsustainable because of their inability to absorb casualties in pitched battles, but he'd have to be a much better historian to "well ackshually" Thucydides and Xenophon.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Devereaux is excellent at finding some idiotic thesis a couple guys (he would say "bros") on Twitter hold, claiming it's the bailey to a sensible motte, burning down the bailey, and claiming he's destroyed the motte.
You know who's actually really good on this particular historical topic?
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
It's also intellectually sanitized.
This etymological complexity has been largely lost in the term's contemporary internet usage, which has reduced "simp" to a simple insult for male emotional availability or respect toward women.
Does this reflect the author's actual views on the modern use of the word "simp", or just RLHF giving the Generic California Ideology interpretation of the terms he's prompted it with? Impossible to know.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Don't forget his "REAL Historian Reacts to Paradox Games?!" posts.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
If you like Margiela Replicas I would recommend CB I Hate Perfume, as well.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
So you're sold the story that it'll always be your family foundation. You're in control, you set the mission statement, you pick the board, your kids will be on it. But, over time, there's a lot of social pressure to let the right people on the board (if you have other big donors, they'll insist on putting their people on the board, that's "just how it's done"). And then, all of a sudden, the board has total control of "interpreting" your "mission", goodbye and don't forget to wipe the urine off grandpa's grave on the way out. Rich people are infinitely more naïve about using their money than you'd think. If you want to avoid that, you have to make the 501c3 a disposable entity so that you can dispose of the board with it.
It's actually far harder to spend that much money than one would assume, too. You have to hire experienced finance guys just to get it out the door on a reasonable schedule, and that's probably one reason these things swing so hard to the left. The institutional left is a gaping maw for money. They have an infinite recruiting pool for potential salaries, or at least as infinite as there are underemployed kids with fake majors, and you rarely have to worry about them actually achieving their goals because reality is in the way. I have no idea the extent to which the tax code was written for that purpose, but it sure did serve the long-term goals of the various people who made 501c3s what they are today (including the dearly beloved then-Speaker Johnson, known as an idealist who would never twist public policy for personal ends).
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
I can recommend that. I recall thinking while I read it that, if my son could end up reading Fermor's books without having to stop and look up an historical reference every page or two, I'd consider him a cultured man. I'd also recommend Fitzroy MacLean's Eastern Approaches.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Depends on the restaurant. A lot of higher-tier restaurants have unattractive waitresses/waiters who are clearly food/cocktail nerds and ostentatiously good at their job. The hipster food revolution has put quite a bit more emphasis on appearing knowledgeable rather than svelte.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Even today I doubt the majority of the women of that class are "ambitious girlboss" as opposed to "MRS degree". This discussion is trying to draw a false dichotomy between waitress and girlboss, when there is in fact a secret third thing, which is naturally upper-class women who want to get married, have kids, and probably run a nonprofit/vanity business to stave off the boredom of having the help do everything.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Ironically Timothy Mellon is a big fan of Trump, he helped pay salaries for the US military during the shutdown and donated to Trump's campaigns. It seems he is not in control of the foundation, however. A certain Elizabeth Alexander runs the show.
This is WAD. Unless you've explicitly set up a structure to avoid it, it's basically impossible to keep family control of nonprofit foundations on a multi-decade timescale, let alone a multi-generation timescale, so you should expect that any megarich family's tax-exempt money is eventually going to go to an Elizabeth Alexander (though divorcing your wife or dying before her is a quicker route to that).
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
Huh. Surprised that it's so broad rather than just not T&A-priority, but would explain a bit.
Women naturally have higher bodyfat% than men, even before modern obesity, and so women with abs are rare enough that most guys will never encounter one in their intimate life or even their crushes. You've got to be a real connoisseur.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
Leviathan is a great read but it's weird. Don't expect a straightforward work of modern political theory.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
The thing about the sort of Academic Experts who would have talked to or gotten money from Epstein is that due diligence just does not exist in that world. If Epstein had been tried for chopping up puppies with an axe, and it was national news, probably fewer than 10% of the professors etc. that he talked to would have thought to google him and respond with some condemnation of axe murder. It's a bit different for CEOs and university presidents, because their PA is supposed to do that, but I doubt many of their PAs actually do due diligence on routine meetings either.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
I forget the comic who said it, but I recall a line that went "you know, being an ugly woman is a lot like being a man. You're gonna have to get a job."
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
The Hill Country, Fredericksburg, etc. are like that because they're affluent second home/tourist traps. Stay out late in a small town and you'll see the frontiersman admixture - or, as Mann's Satan quoted Bismarck, that "the German is never himself until he has half a bottle of champagne in him".
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
Taleb calls it "dictatorship of the most intolerant" (never say he doesn't learn from his own ideas).
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
I can't imagine any charity in Scotland that isn't utterly full of quangocrat shite, but Scottish Sports Futures at least does nice things for kids her age sometimes.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
I find this argument generally compelling - although there's never a single determining factor in this stuff, you've done a good job isolating and naming a concept most people have trouble discussing. It does remind me of Nietzsche, who discusses this process extensively in The Genealogy of Morals, and shares an emphasis on individual character over rationalizing moral systems. I'd recommend taking a look at it for inspiration (Kaufmann or Del Caro translations).
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
>mfw Germans will literally have entire revolutions just so they can find an ideology that lets them be even more conformist
>mfw they did this like eight times
Though, to be fair, there was a properly independent-minded strand of German society that did emigrate here. You can see it in Texas, the Mountain West, rural Wisconsin, etc. In Minnesota it's drowned out by Sw*des and other Scandis, who are now the world's poster boy for "very nice but mildly stifling high-trust society that falls apart catastrophically the moment someone comes along and starts defecting."
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
Most simply, Germans/Scandinavians are hysterical conformists with a tendency to go Way Too Far on whatever the current dominant ideology is. Luckily this one doesn't seem to involve any panzers yet. The Midwest more generally is always about 5-10 years behind the coasts culturally (5 in big cities, closer to 10 elsewhere), so the Great Awokening is really hitting them now.
Iirc England actually didn't have that many long-distance trading companies of their own, though they certainly had some. International trade was mostly conducted by the Dutch/Flemings and the Hansards, who were both tough merchant-pirates. What England really had going for them was that they were a much more organized state (by very relative standards), so they could hand off the tough work to foreigners and mostly expect safe trade within the isle, as you mention. But again one has to distinguish between 13th Century England/Italy and 16th Century England/Italy.
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