Hard News: About Occupy Wall Street
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Richard Aston, in reply to
he idea of war as a thing where you pack up your military and go way overseas is modern
um .. what about the Crusades
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DCBCauchi, in reply to
Some of the best innovations of military technology, for civilians caught in the middle, were the ones that meant the soldiers camped on your land weren’t also eating all your food.
Ye gods, ‘foraging’ soldiers.
I’m a big fan of Sigismondo Malatesta. When he was 13 years old, the bastard nephew of the head of the Malatesta clan (who died with no clear heir), he was surrounded by outright enemies and treacherous advisers out for themselves.
At 13, Sigismondo had to secure his title and lands (which the Malatesta never owned outright, but controlled as vicars of the Pope). He did this brilliantly. He then went on to become the best mercenary captain in Italy and built the first fortress designed to withstand artillery (because he needed it, especially after he pissed off the Pope). Sigismondo’s speciality was the dramatic change of side, at the moment of battle when it would make all the difference.
He filled his court at Rimini with painters, poets, and philosophers, ignored the political marriages he had to make in favour of the peasant love of his life, Isotta, for whom (and also to piss off the Pope) he built what is probably the best building in the world (even though it was only ever half finished). In (I think) 1449, he wrote to the Medici in Florence: ‘Send me that painter you were telling me about. I want him to paint my cool new building. He doesn’t have to do any work though. I’ll put him up while he thinks about it.’ Sigismondo knew how to get good things done.
Sigismondo said something like: ‘Even if God did exist, why would he bother with the insignificant likes of us, crawling around on the surface of one of many planets?’ They weren’t all ignorant and superstitious back in the day. People think.
In the 19th century, many writers and critics used Sigismondo as a model for the Renaissance tyrant, based on the lies and calumnies the Pope and his stooge, Federico da Montefeltro, told about him.
I want to hang out at his court with Piero della Francesca, who took up the offer the snobby un-named Florentine painter declined.
I’m getting a little off-topic again.
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Revisionists...
Or what this nation could be like by now if our Pakeha ancestors had worked together with Maori rather than fighting to take their land...
Christchurch has been offered a chance to rectify this by rebuilding with a Maori perspective...
Christchurch could become "the Machu Picchu of New Zealand" if it is rebuilt with a Maori perspective, city councillors have been told.
At yesterday's draft central-city plan hearings, Maori designers and architects called on the Christchurch City Council to make better use of the city's indigenous culture.Not quite sure how Machu Picchu relates to that vision, unless they are saying that Chchch is truly a lost city or perhaps that Thor Heyerdahl's theories of Polynesian origins are correct...
Re-iterating and altering reality...
that whole field of fictional Alternate Histories and other multiversal explorations can be interesting and entertaining. PK Dick's The Man in High Castle, Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream and Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union are stand outs, for me, in Godwin's Theory of Re-evolution. Harry Turtledove has been prolific and I've always had a soft spot for Nigel Cox's Tarzan Presley (reissued as Jungle Rock Blues after ER Burroughs' lawyers finished with them - iirc)What is it good for...
The whole idea of war being a thing where you go and fight people a long way away with whom you have little cultural contact would have baffled everyone right up to, oooh, Napoleon. There just wasn’t any point to it. (Not much point now, come to that.)
Edwin Starr aside, you obviously aren't in the munitions business...
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Rich Lock, in reply to
Peace is the norm
If you live a first world country, yes it is. On your own doorstep.
But that's relatively new - last 2-300 years. And arguably not true if, say, you grew up living in fear that the dastardly commies would chuck an ICBM into your home town.
And most first world countries currently have troops fighting proxy wars ostensibly on behalf of their citizens all over the world.
And while OWS hasn't (yet) turned violent, there's a real danger of civil disturbance - there's already been mass arrests on the brooklyn bridge.
To characterise 'peace' as 'not currently living in a war zone' is to define 'peace' rather too narrowly and to miss my point. Peace is not the norm.
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Tales from midden earth...
Pre-European Maori culture was an extremely highly sophisticated stone-age culture, an off-shoot of the culture that explored and colonised the Pacific, from Taiwan to Hawai’i to Easter Island to New Zealand. All by knowing how to use flax and stone, the sea and the stars.
Ditto for Australia's Aboriginal people...
An egg-shaped ring of standing stones in Australia could prove to be older than Britain's Stonehenge - and it may show that ancient Aboriginal cultures had a deep understanding of the movements of the stars.
Fifty metres wide and containing more than 100 basalt boulders, the site of Wurdi Youang in Victoria was noted by European settlers two centuries ago, and charted by archaeologists in 1977, but only now is its purpose being rediscovered.
It is thought the site was built by the Wadda Wurrung people - the traditional inhabitants of the area. All understanding of the rocks' significance was lost, however, when traditional language and practices were banned at the beginning of the 20th Century. -
DCBCauchi, in reply to
My favourite bit was that it could be anywhere up to 20,000 years old. You can't tell, because it doesn't matter. Like the shark, it does the job, no need to change.
Oh, and good bolding!
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Sacha, in reply to
well you do - the rest of us hear that and think "Aucklander" ....
(or "Aussie")Really? Do we have a linguist in the house who can elaborate?
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NZ troops were busy throughout most of the 20th century: WW1, WW2, Korea, Vietnam. In a small way in Gulf Wars 1 and 2. I'd venture we're not especially at peace.
And the list of recent and ongoing wars is quite a long one. Many of them we hear nothing about.
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DexterX, in reply to
Good point re healthcare, public transport etc.
The isolation I was referring to was the possible breakdown of extended family relationships in favour fo the pursuit of material gain.
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Lilith __, in reply to
The whole idea of war being a thing where you go and fight people a long way away with whom you have little cultural contact would have baffled everyone right up to, oooh, Napoleon. There just wasn’t any point to it.
I agree with Rich that your definition of "war" is very narrow. Ever since the major Eurpoean powers had the techonology to travel long distances by sea, they've been taking over distant lands and stripping them of resources. In some cases native peoples were displaced and died of imported diseases more than they were murdered; in some cases they were simply massacred. The awful history of Tasmania is one such example.
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DCBCauchi, in reply to
with whom you have little cultural contact
I think this is the phrase both you and others are missing.
Let’s not forget that, 2000-odd years ago, the rich Romans in Britain had things from everywhere from Africa to China in their houses.
And 2000 years before them the rich Egyptian.
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Lilith __, in reply to
and the Conquistadors had cultural contact with the Americas? England had cultural contact with Australian aborigines?
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DCBCauchi, in reply to
and the Conquistadors had cultural contact with the Americas? England had cultural contact with Australian aborigines?
For the first at least, when the Conquistadors rocked up to America, they found a couple of shipwrecked European sailors who’d already been there for a while.
One had acclimatised, wore native clothing, had a native wife and home, and spoke the native language. He told anyone who would listen not to believe a word that Cortes guy was saying. The other couldn’t get over the Mayans being human-sacrificing devil-spawn and was still rotting in jail, gibbering mad. That's who everyone listened to.
Not that long before the Conquistadors showed up, on the other side of America, Polynesian sailors were trading chickens with a people related to the Maya for kumera. (Speaking of going gibbering mad, is that spelt right?)
As for the second, and more generally, you can’t make war on someone you have no cultural contact with, by definition.
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Lilith __, in reply to
That's fascinating Ian, thank you.
Prof Norris and his Aboriginal partners used Nasa technology to measure the position of each rock in relation to the sun, and to demonstrate the connection with the solstices and equinox.
"It's truly special because a lot of people don't take account of Aboriginal science," says Reg Abrahams, an Aboriginal adviser working with Prof Norris.
As happened with Stonehenge, the discovery could change the way people view early societies. It is only recently that it has been demonstrated that Aboriginal societies could count beyond five or six.
I hope they manage to date the circle, if it were older than Stonehenge that would be awesome.
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Rich of Observationz, in reply to
I think there are a few people at Creech AFB who do just that every day.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
Friended on PhageBook...
and the Conquistadors had cultural contact with the Americas?
England had cultural contact with Australian aborigines?I think that cultural contact was mostly Smallpox...
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DCBCauchi, in reply to
I think there are a few people at Creech AFB who do just that every day.
Ha! Quite. Difference between spears and bombs eh?
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DCBCauchi, in reply to
I hope they manage to date the circle, if it were older than Stonehenge that would be awesome.
Of course they’ll date it, thanks in part to Bruce’s work on radiocarbon accuracy no doubt.
My point was that it hasn’t needed to change since before Stonehenge. You can’t date it stylistically, because the style works as is. It hasn’t needed to change in 20,000 years, because it’s fully developed and resolved. It works. All of its development is lost in the wilds of time.
It is older than Stonehenge, and made the same way as Stonehenge (not to mention many other things), no matter when that particular one was made.
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BenWilson, in reply to
For all of human history but the twentieth century – excluding colonisation, because that usually wasn’t about deliberately making war on people, making profits was preferable – going to war meant, pretty exclusively, going to war with your neighbours.
It did, and it still does. But I dispute that war was some unusual thing that made little sense. It was a source of profits. You take another tribes land and enslave some of it's people and kill or drive off the rest, and you've made more than you could ever dream of growing out of your own soil. It was the number one most popular way to make incredible riches, until you reached the limit imposed by the others who were doing it too. If you weren't in the class of people capable of leveraging military power, your chances of great fortune were next to nothing - anyone with a hundred goons could turn up at your house, kill you, and take everything you had.
The slightest military advantage was seized immediately, no matter how enlightened the society, as the perfect time to wage war on neighbors, and the more successfully you did it, the more you would do it.
Even now there are huge profits in war. The arms industry is enormous. The economic power of military projection is huge. The war in Iraq is so clearly about controlling oil. Even if it's just to stop the Russians or the Chinese getting it cheaper. There is simply no more decisive and powerful way to nullify a competing economy than by smashing it in war.
What decisively changed in the 20th Century was the realization that intra superpower war was no longer viable. Only proxy war could possibly make sense, when the major powers had the ability to destroy entire cities with a single bomb.
So we have had near endless proxy wars ever since. When the Soviet Union collapsed, American military power projection didn't end - it just flailed around for new enemies and didn't have to look far. It's quite amazing that the total collapse of all reason for maintaining such an enormous drain on US coffers didn't lead to any reductions at all. Even now, facing recession bordering on depression, there are no moves to cut those costs. Obama has not brought the troops back home from Iraq in 3 years since he was elected. If anything, his use of military power has simply become more direct and brutal, substituting black ops executions for open conflict, striking with impunity wherever in the world he feels like it.
This is my greatest fear about capitalism, that it is intricately tied to war. And it is my greatest reason to think that it should not be fought directly, using war, which only feeds it. But I don't know what to do, and I think this is precisely why the Occupy Wall Street movement appears scattered.
In this kind of time, the world is unfortunately especially ripe for decisive cult-type leadership. I hope that leader will be more like Gandhi than the obvious alternatives that have been so popular through human history.
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How to start building Stonehenge
1 Take two sticks.
2 Place one stick in the ground at a good vantage point for watching the sun rise.
3 Place the other stick in the ground so that, when you're standing over Stick 1, the sun rises in a line with Stick 2.
4 Watch where the sun rises in relation to Stick 2.
5 When it has gone as far in one direction (along the horizon) as it will go and starts moving back towards Stick 2 again, take another stick and place it in the ground so it is in a line where the sun rose at its furthest extent.
6 Repeat steps 4 and 5 for the other direction.
7 Replace your sticks with stones.
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
Aboriginal cultures had a deep understanding of the movements of the stars.
I also liked that they knew how to calculate Venus rising at dawn over a particular site. It's not a simple calculation since it varies from year to year with a complicated cycle. When asked how they knew which day it would rise at that location they replied "we count the days *", which for a culture not meant to be able to count past 5 is interesting.
* I'm pretty sure there was a silent "stupid" in the sentence.
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DCBCauchi, in reply to
It was a source of profits.
It was a way of dealing with scarcity.
But everything else you say is spot on, I reckon. The last thing we need are cult-like leaders. You say scattered. I say focusing. From a whole variety of perspectives.
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Lilith __, in reply to
You can’t date it stylistically, because the style works as is. It hasn’t needed to change in 20,000 years, because it’s fully developed and resolved. It works.
I don't see why Aboriginal culture and technology would not have changed radically over that 20,000 years: if it hadn't it would surely be unique in the world. It's just a pity that history with all its changes and nuances is lost to us.
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Simon Grigg, in reply to
The isolation I was referring to was the possible breakdown of extended family relationships in favour fo the pursuit of material gain.
Ok, gotcha and I'm with you on that. I have wondered how the dispersal of the rural family unit will change China in the decades to come. I guess Chris is a better voice on that than we are.
Although I'd think that 150 years of countless wars, civil wars, famines, cultural revolution, communisation etc would perhaps have disrupted the family and village unit as much if not more than the ascent of western styled materialism. Maybe, though, it did exactly the opposite.
I've often looked at very old people in China and pondered just what they might have seen across their long years. Much of it is likely beyond my comprehension.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
It is older than Stonehenge, and made the same way as Stonehenge (not to mention many other things), no matter when that particular one was made.
and nowadays we have The Long Now Foundation
The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.
with folk like Stewart Brand, Brian Eno, Danny Hillis, Kevin Kelly and Esther Dyson amongst others on the board, it gives ya hope…
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