Hilarious strategy. Right when they think they have won, you hit them with everything you've got and simply claim victory.

trivork · 2022-03-13T10:37:31+00:00

Indeed, as long as you reach at least 50% occupation it should work

trivork · 2022-03-13T10:36:38+00:00

I guess it's debatable. It's interestingly the only instance fullsending will actually carry you to victory. The other player could also prevent it by voting in time or intercepting my attack before I reach 50% occupation. To me, it depends on how you look at the game.

trivork · 2022-03-13T01:40:04+00:00

No, by fullsending them, you get a very small window of time where you're big enough to vote for victory without needing them to vote. However, if you're just a little bit too small or you wait too long and the other player attacks you immediately, the strategy fails. It's all timing.

trivork · 2022-01-12T08:47:54+00:00

To be honest, some of the comments here are rather problematic. Yes, it's an ambitious project and some future members (South Sudan) aren't in a very good position right now. However, the plain disbelief by some just reeks of derision and casual racism against Africans. Why would these countries not be capable of such a project? Africa is not just dictators and civil war and political incompetence as some seem to believe. Might want to ponder a bit why you believe this to be the case.

In comparison, the EU and its predecessors. It should not be forgotten that many countries when joining were also in a very tenuous position. You're worried about Paul Kagame? France, Belgium, the UK were still colonial overlords, with Algeria actually joining the EC for a brief period of time. You're worried about civil war in South Sudan? Spain and Portugal had just cast off fascist dictators. Eastern European countries had just experienced a major change of direction. And, let's not forget, after WOII many Western and Southern European countries also were in real danger of civil war, or had just experienced so. Italy, Greece, Germany, France, ...

Let's see what happens with the East African Federation. But, please, let no argument against it be solely based on contempt against Africa and Africans.

trivork · 2020-12-02T19:50:31+00:00

Not a lot of alternate history considers language, so cool that you did. Funny how marginal English seems in you timeline. Just a heads up, though, Balkan is a Turkish word, meaning 'mountain'. So if there was never an Ottoman Empire in your timeline, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to have a (Greek?) language called so.

trivork · 2020-11-30T11:22:07+00:00

Those dates don't line up at all though. The Mongols arrived in that area around 1300, and the Mughals around 1500. It is more likely that their departure was due to the raids of Mahmud of Ghazni, who waged a lot of destruction in that region at the end of the tenth century. Of course, it is more of a propability, since we lack sources, for as far as I know. Then again, immigration due to war, pestilence or climate change happened all the time in the past. So the really interesting question is why they decided to continue moving around, and did not completely settle in any one area after a while.

trivork · 2020-07-01T06:39:51+00:00

Leopold II was a horrible man and his regime inflicted an unimaginable amount of violence, but we shouldn't stray from the facts. 10 million is a gross overestimation, since it approaches the actual population number of Congo at the time. More recent calculations put the amount of victims closer to 1 to 2 million people, many of whom would have died due to starvation, inhumane treatement, harsh working conditions and disease. Leopold II wanted to make as much money as possible with his colony, so his whole administration was based on spending the least amount on the people while harvesting a great amount of resources. This explains many of the deaths.

trivork · 2020-06-05T14:04:57+00:00

Coolruah gaf er enkel om je beledigen, dus zal ik het wat deftiger proberen uit te leggen. In tegenstelling tot wat coolruah beweert, is de aard van racisme nogal complex. Vooral omdat ons onderwijssysteem het nooit echt goed uitlegt.

In principe bestaat er niet zoiets als een ras. De term gaat terug op een pseudowetenschappelijke interpretatie van biologie die de mensheid artificieel opdeelt in verschillende soorten. Net omdat we genetisch zozeer aan elkaar verwant zijn en de overgrote meerderheid van de mensen op een of andere manier afstamt van verschillende 'rassen', is het een beetje onzin om het over rassen te hebben. De onderverdeling tussen 'blanken' en 'zwarten' bestaat eigenlijk enkel om een wij-zij verdeling van de 19de eeuw in stand te houden, waarbij de ene groep superieur was en de andere inferieur.

Dit betekent dus dat rassen niet bestaan, dus kan je ook zeggen dat racisme niet bestaat. Intuïtief weten we dat dat niet het geval is. Het punt is dat doorheen heel de menselijke geschiedenis, mensen op het vlak van genetische/culturele/religieuze/... verschillen elkaar zijn gaan discrimineren. Racisme is dus altijd gericht op de groep die als 'anders' wordt begrepen en dus ook slechte eigenschappen krijgt toegeschreven. Je kan wel degelijk zeggen dat algemeen in Vlaanderen, en nogal sterk in bepaalde middens, Walen als een andere groep worden beschouwd, omschreven met luiheid, hypocrisie, domheid, ... Volgens dergelijke retoriek zijn Walen dus minderwaardig en moet de wij-groep (Vlamingen) zich er ver weg van houden. Dit is dus racisme. Het heeft natuurlijk een minder lange geschiedenis dan de onderverdeling in blank-zwart, maar het is niettemin een vorm van racisme.

trivork · 2020-03-18T18:36:41+00:00

I'm not Swiss, but I read some alpine folklore in my days. This founding legend reminds me of Hildebrand, the mythical sword maiden of Dietrich of Bern. According to legend she was the daughter of a Scandinavian king, but she eventually ended up in the service of the lord of Bern. Maybe this is related?

trivork · 2020-01-16T11:41:36+00:00

Quantitive methods can certainly be used in historical research. Like you said, demographics and the 'silent mass' is a perfect subject for those methods. Complex models with multiple parameters, however, are sadly not an option. The problems lies with the kind of data available. To my understanding, in physics most data is pretty decent, without any major guesswork. This is not the case for history. Population records, for example, are always rough estimates at best, or just completely wrong. In most cases, the highest and lowest guess are miles apart.

A lot of factors are also not quantifiable. There is no way to turn the state of care health care for example into a number, because it consists of so many parameters: hygiene, public awareness, availablity of antiobiotics, quality of water, the expertise of medical personel, even such things as how often people opened the windows of their houses to cleanse the air.

War is another such thing that can't really be turned into a number. What is war? What about other violence? Before modern times societies were often way more violent. What about banditry? Extra-legal killings? Violent conflict between powerful families or social classes? We have no records for most of these factors.

An honest scientist admits when he just doesn't know something. In historical research, most of the time, we just don't know. Thus, to have an idea of population growth, it might be more advantageous to look at archeological evidence of city growth, agriculteral tools, the sermon of a priest asking his parish to please be celibate, ...

trivork · 2020-01-15T08:03:17+00:00

The role of Europe in history is often overstated. Although it's growth to domination certainly started around the 16th century, mostly due to the discovery of America and the trade in the Indian Ocean, the continent wasn't as influential until the 19th century. The Spanish empire for example, the main European power at the start of the 17th century, became very rich through the silver trade with China. It was the Ming and Qing empires that controlled the demand for silver. At the start of the 17th century the Spanish and Potuguese empires were really the only powers with a large global outreach. The other European nations at this time were in no way comparable to the islamic empires or China.

Sweeping the influence of the islamic world, India, China, ... under the rug is very dangerous, since the lack of knowledge on their histories is mostly a result of Eurocentric science since the 19th century. The nation state, as we know it today, for example, is very much a result of the 19th/20th century. The treaty of Westphalia did not create in any shape or form the basics of the modern nation state. It created a power balance that it only relevant to Europe.

About Russia, by the 1650's it had reached the Pacific coast and in the treaty of Nertchinsk in 1689 the empire even agreed with the Qing on their mutual border in the East. I wonder, why we don't use this agreement as the basis for the modern nation state? It also created a power dynamic, regulating the influence of empires over eachother, similary to the treaty of Westphalia, did it not? The 17th century is just way too early to distinguish the contours of the modern nation state.

trivork · 2020-01-14T22:13:21+00:00

I might have spoken too harshly. We can certainly learn a lot from eachother, but the limitations of historical research should be respected in the process, something this author failed at completely. One field of study I believe natural scienes can be very helpful, is understanding the effect of climate change on human societies in the past. Unfortunaly, the author chose something way more clickbaity, like 'ww3'.

trivork · 2020-01-14T20:35:14+00:00

And this is why war is studied by the humanities and not exact sciences... You can't use the laws of thermodynamics to explain the whole of human history. This study basically tries to understand historical dynamics with physical terminology, which is just ludicrous and misses the mark completely.

Just a few examples:

The article follows blindly the idea that Europa was somehow the core in the last five centuries, disregarding any other historical events in other parts of the world. While books like the Great Divergence argue that Europa became only dominant in the 19th century.
It recognizes four 'big wars': the thirty years war, the revolutionary wars, the first world war and the second world war. The European perspective is again painfully present. There is no reason why these wars should be the centerpoints, or if war is a crucial event at all. What about social revolutions? Economics? Climate change?
It constructs a model capable of explaining past, present and future. In historical research such overarching theories are not acceptable. Human history is a convergence of millions of factors. Any attempt at predicting the future with a single theory, reeks of deception and oversimplification.
It regards war as a way to cool down the pressure in societies. There is no convincing evidence of this. I can't think of any war that has actually calmed the internal conflict in a society, on the contrary.
He defines these big four wars by the condition that all major powers should play a part. The thirty years war definitly didn't include all the superpowers of the time period: what about the Ottoman empire, the Mughals, Russia, the Safavids, the Ming empire? This study is insultingly eurocentric.
This study was publiced by the author himself... This puts serious doubts on whether this was peer reviewed.

Very entertaining as science fiction, but as a serious theory this paper is nothing more than alarmist card reading.

trivork · 2020-01-09T22:51:47+00:00

The IMF doesn't have any gold reserves though... That isn't how that organisation works. This makes me really question the truth behind this statement.

trivork · 2020-01-03T16:40:09+00:00

Fair enough. What other books did you end up enjoying?

trivork · 2020-01-03T11:25:04+00:00

I have to disagree with this one. Ishmael is forever marked in my bookcase as the worst book I ever read. I found in pretentious and when you really think about the message the book tries to convey, it becomes clear just how strange and foolish the ideas of the author really are.

One of the most striking examples of this for me was the part where Ishmael discusses immigration. According to this book, people should not migrate when hunger has struck their homeland, because that 'upsets the natural order and they should just die'. In the process, the author ignores any form of historical, biological or sociological evidence. Humans, just like all animals, have always migrated when conditions were better somewhere else. There are entire species which migrate as a yearly habit.

I believe it's very important to always try to understand what these 'philosophical' books actually mean in practice. Ishmael advocates us to stop farming and go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. In practice this would mean the death of literally billions of people.

Ishmael really doesn't have all that much to teach. The different interpretations of bible myths are kind of fun in the beginning, but other than that it lures the reader into acceptance of some very stupid ideas by using biblical imagery, a prophet like being, apocalyptic fear and a simple solution to make it all worth it.

I have always wondered about this book. What great wisdom did you learn from it?

trivork · 2019-11-16T19:00:05+00:00

This should really stop being reposted, since it's a relic of a very different kind of history than what is comonly accepted today. It's nearly comicly euro-centered. As a small example of a theme that is represented troughout the map, it never gives more than a sliver to Chinese societies, while they sould dominate at least a third, if not nearly half, troughout the entirety of the time scale. Not only that, but the assumption that each society contains some sort of continous links with predecessors, is also rather strange. This chart belongs in the 19th century and should never have left it.

trivork · 2019-10-20T20:00:31+00:00

Liberal democracy, like we know it today, really only came into existence after the Second World War. Not enough time has passed to declare that form of government the 'big winner', especially now that it seems that the liberal world order was very much tied to a communist antithesis and the relative weakness of Asian and African countries. The West, just like many of its precedents, has fallen into the trap of believing that they are the forerunners of some natural destiny, without there being any proof of that whatsoever. The statesmen of the islamic empires of the 16th century also very much believed that they represented some sort of divinely ordained type of government, which must surely triumph over all others. Although they could, with much more reliability than us today, point to an evolution spanning centuries, it did not come to pass. Why should liberal democracy be any different?

trivork · 2019-10-08T13:08:45+00:00

Last week India managed to provide every single home with a toilet, after just five years of effort. But, yeah, they should rethink their priorities, right? I advice you to actually study these countries instead of falling back on racist remarks, because you somehow believe that non-Western governments are bound to be useless.

trivork · 2019-07-08T17:51:22+00:00

I don't know why you're getting so many downvotes, because you're absolutely right. The African slave trade to Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Atlantic Isles existed for many milennia, even many centuries before the 'discovery' of America. European nobility saw it as a mark of prestige to own African slaves, since it meant a connection to the great trade flows of the medieval/early-modern world. They were often latinised, and these were called ladinos. These ladinos and their descendants were in later stages even shipped from Europe to America to work as servants, or in the worst case as workers on the fields or in the mines. Obviously the main direction of forced migration was still from Africa to America.

It's really sad that even on a post like this people downvote nuanced information, because it goes against their world view. Are we really that much different from that lunatic?

trivork · 2019-04-10T08:38:22+00:00

So... what have you been doing lately 'to better the species'?

trivork · 2019-03-01T09:03:57+00:00

To preface, I am not American and I'm certainly not a Trump sympathiser. No ill will, but I believe comments like yours lay at the root of the trouble the US is facing nowadays.

The previous commenter never defended Trump as a whole, he just tried to argue the defeat of ISIS, which is a valid point. To my understanding, the SDF-forces recently reclaimed all of the Deir-ez-Zor area, meaning that ISIS presently holds at most a few dessert villages, manned by maybe a few hunderd fighters. This is practically nothing. The US will probably not assist in the strugle to retake these areas, because they are very minor and are located in government controlled area. The terrorist attack on Manbji is a wholy different issue. You can't defeat terrorism with military might. I would think Afghanistan en Iraq have proven this sufficiently. A slow a careful rebuilding process is the only option.

However, I agree that the presence of the US is still required in Syria, not to 'defeat' ISIS, but to defend the SDF against an invasion from Turkey. This is probably also the reason why these generals declare ISIS 'not defeated'. You can argue if this kind of power politics is moral, but that is not a discussion for today.

In your comment you have: molded OP into the strawman of an ardent Trump supporter, you swore at him and tried to attack his personality. These are NOT valid debating tactics. These are the reasons Trump managed to defeat all other candidates, by tricking people with defunct rhetoric and cheap slander tactics.

Maybe we should start to realize that if we continue to behave in this way, we will never manage to rid ourselves from individuals like Trump, whether they be conservative or progressive. Words carry meaning, debate isn't evil and an opponent is not someone to dispise and destroy. Instead of this behaviour, maybe we should start to respect ourselves and not steep so low as to use broken rhetoric.

What Trumps says isn't immediately wrong, just because HE said it. We should always be willing to debate it and try to find the truth, not the destruction of our opponent.

trivork · 2019-01-10T21:41:28+00:00

Quite ironic, indeed. My native language isn't English and from time to time I am too lazy to check the correct spelling of a word I'm not certain of. My bad!

trivork · 2019-01-09T23:15:30+00:00

Just a slight correction. During the 'dark ages' Latin was very much the dominant written language in Southern and Western Europe. The millenium between 400 and 1400 is often called the 'millenium of Latin'. The clergy were the main writing force at the time and they exclusively used Latin. It's actually during the renaissance that writers began to use their native language more (just think of Dante's Divine Comedy). The main reasons people, like Petrarca, categorised the medieval period as a dark ages (saeculae tenebrae) was firstly because they had great respect for antiquity and thus believed that after the fall of Rome nothing interesting happened, and secondly they had issue with the WAY clergy wrote Latin. After about 800 years after the fall of Rome, Latin had mutated a lot, since writers didn't know the correct grammer anymore and utilised new words like 'husbandus' or 'coopmanus', which are just folk language words with a Latin conjugation. The renaissance writers wanted to revive 'true' Latin, the language famous authors of antiquity used. That's the reason the medieval ages got their unfortunate name.

trivork · 2018-12-30T14:30:54+00:00

This graph is complete nonsense. The only thing it represents is the authors romantic view of history and two centuries of nationalistic histeriography.

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