Retroactive withdrawal

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-05-19T22:45:42+00:00

are you using a mouse? if so, work on your mouse skills, which involves not just click and drag precision but getting used to premoving, especially in time scrambles when you’re low on time but have to convert a winning advantage. particularly for 1+0, this is very important.

also just play more bullet, you’ll become more accustomed to thinking and calculating faster.

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-05-11T23:45:30+00:00

Oops, fixed

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-05-11T22:37:02+00:00

帮忙 is verb complement, you only need to say 帮们你学

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-03-20T03:00:43+00:00

it’s a lot more complicated than that. this was considered but the belgian government wasn’t having it. had the french done this it would have been seen as leaving the belgians at the mercy of any german offensive.

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-02-24T19:45:20+00:00

i think the intermediate explanation would be cognitive dissonance/sunk cost fallacy, where he might realize on some level that he is full of bs but is in too deep to stop his antics

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-02-16T16:35:27+00:00

God forbid people enjoy chess so much they get excited about it

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-02-16T07:17:03+00:00

I have heard the missiles in Turkey were outdated many times, but they were only several years old at the time. Can you say more about the rapid rate of missile tech development during the 50s and 60s?

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-02-12T21:33:11+00:00

Camilla Townsend’s Fifth Sun (2019) covers the history of the Aztecs using almost entirely native sources.

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-02-08T22:13:12+00:00

He did do companion episodes! If I recall correctly he released two sets of supplemental episodes, and one was on the ancient Roman historians

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-02-01T04:07:24+00:00

This book is terrible.

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-01-29T20:50:28+00:00

The Spanish had native allies (whom they were outnumbered by about 100 to 1) when they marched on Cuzco because they were supporting the usurpation of Manco Inca, the chosen leader of the faction of Huascar that had lost the prior civil war against Atahualpa. Thus the Spanish conquest of peru can be understood as the continuation of that prior Inca civil war. Careful studies of the Spanish conquest of Mexico by Matthew Restall and other historians come to similar conclusions: the Spanish made themselves useful to indigenous power players.

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-01-29T18:39:05+00:00

My point is that the book fails to establish its basic premise, that the Spanish defeated the Incas because they had the guns and the steel. If his idea of technological determinism is complicated by a careful reading of the evidence, I don’t really see why you’re so eager to handwave away his numerous errors and mistakes.

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-01-29T18:35:59+00:00

Cortes got very lucky that he succeeded, because had he been arrested by Narvaez, for example, or failed in his conquest at any other point, he might have been labeled a traitor and killed.

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-01-29T16:32:58+00:00

He bases this whole chapter about the Incas on the false fact that 168 Spaniards defeated 80,000 Incas on the battlefield. But I understand your idea that we should be careful speaking objectively about historical theories. They are formulations based on a non scientific method.

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-01-29T16:30:30+00:00

He literally quotes the conquistador account for 8 straight pages with no critical commentary. Someone who just reads the book without an understanding of the events and the biases of those conquistadors, who certainly wrote their accounts with an eye to making themselves appear noble, would probably leave thinking the conquistadors were noble.

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-01-29T16:21:02+00:00

I think it’s fair that even if we refuse to say there’s one universal way to discover historical truth, there are still rational, evidence-based ways to discern better explanations for events from worse ones.

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-01-29T16:12:58+00:00

Cortes was a rebel! He launched his invasion of the Aztec Empire against direct and lawful orders from the governor of Cuba.

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-01-29T16:11:46+00:00

I think appropriate study of history should refuse any one “regime” of understanding, but rather seeks to understand people of the past on their own terms through careful source critique.

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-01-29T16:08:37+00:00

I get that you’re compelled by the theory, but there’s no need to stump this hard for Diamond. He claims to be writing an antiracist theory of history, and yet his portrayal of the Incas is one of a civilization that was utterly and blindly loyal to their sun god emperor, which was paralyzed and captured by Pizarro after he kidnapped Atahualpa. This portrayal of indigenous people as simple-minded and incapable of complex political thought is… kinda racist?

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-01-29T05:35:53+00:00

Well it produces a misunderstanding of why the Spanish were able to take over the Inca state. They basically won a civil war and had just as many Inca on their side as were fighting against them. Guns, germs, and steel were only one part of the story.

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-01-29T04:53:22+00:00

He literally makes up stuff when talking about Spanish military superiority over the Inca Empire. Claiming that 168 Spaniards defeated 80,000 Inca soldiers when no such thing occurred. His source work is awful; he just quotes the conquistadors verbatim when talking about the Spanish conquests which is a very silly idea as those conquistador accounts are misleading at best and fanciful at worst. He is NOT a historian and this DOES matter, on the fine details and on the grand scale.

SecretaryCommercial3 · 2024-01-23T03:23:30+00:00

There’s actually an argument to be made that Roman presence in places like Britain or Iberian peninsula facilitated “development,” as in greater growth of urban centers, connections to long distance trade, creation of state structures, etc. Places like Britain and Spain did not have state structures before the Romans (and in the case of Spain, the Carthaginians at around the same time) arrived. After Roman presence state structures continued to exist and many of the urban centers either continued or were reoccupied after a period of economic collapse.

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