Quotulatiousness

March 1, 2021

Why the Bronze Age Collapse matters today. Dr. Eric Cline (If Civilization Collapsed Would We Know?)

Filed under: Asia, Books, Europe, Greece, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages
Published 13 Jun 2020

Ladies and Gentlemen we arrive finally to the part of our series that you have all been waiting for! And that is the Bronze Age Collapse and here to guide us through it is none other than Dr. Eric Cline, the rock star archaeologist, historian and author of none other than 1177 BC!

He will give us an overview history of the collapse along with sharing his own personal views on the subject! Guiding us briefly through archaeology, trade, national politics, and contact in the ancient Mediterranean we will get a nice picture of the Bronze Age and how it all came crashing down in a perfect storm of events. But what is ever more awesome is he even gives us the inside scoop on why he wrote 1177 BC? And how he did it!

But at the end of this episode we come to our modern world and Dr. Cline explains why the Bronze Age Collapse matters today. What we need to look at when comparing it to our modern world and the current events and impacts affecting our world. Did the peoples living through the Bronze Age Collapse know they were living in a collapse? And he asks a delicate and intense question and that is if civilization collapsed today would we know?

Check out our new store! teespring.com/stores/the-history-shop​

Support Dr. Eric Cline at the links below!

Personal web page: https://ehcline.com​

Get all of his books here at his Amazon Author page:
https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks…​

GW pages:
https://cnelc.columbian.gwu.edu/eric-…​

https://anthropology.columbian.gwu.ed…​

https://gwu.academia.edu/EricCline​

Image credits: Manna Nader, Gabana Studios Cairo

Hittite 3D City and intro footage credits: 3D reconstruction of Imperial Hittite Karkemish by Giampaolo Luglio, Turco-Italian Archaeological Expedition to Karkemish directed by Nicolò Marchetti (University of Boologna)

KARKEMISH (Carchemish) 1300 BC (3D) – The Southern Capital of the Empire Hittite

https://youtu.be/RsTdoY__F4U​

Music Attribution: Herknungr – Megaliths | Dark Neolithic Meditive Shamanic Ambient Music https://youtu.be/oc8FQwNjPu0

In the 2020 US federal election, “Each side felt that the stakes were existential”

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Anton discusses what he calls the “Continuing Crisis” in the Claremont Review of Books:

“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

A full understanding of what happened that Wednesday would begin with the ruling class’s decades-long betrayal and despoliation of what would eventually come to be called Red or Deplorable or Flyover America. But the more proximate cause was the 2020 election — easily the highest intensity such contest of my lifetime. Each side felt that the stakes were existential. The accuracy of those feelings doesn’t matter; their existence was enough to drive events.

As an incumbent seeking a second term, President Trump — even after the COVID lockdowns had tanked America’s previously supercharged economy — seemed to have a lot of things going for him: near-unanimous support from the base, high primary turnout even though he faced no opposition, a seemingly unified party, approval ratings not far from Barack Obama’s in 2012. According to Gallup, in September 2020 56% of Americans reported doing better than they had four years prior — a level that, in ordinary times, would all but guarantee an incumbent’s re-election.

But these were not ordinary times. It was also easy to see — and many friends and supporters of the president did see, and warned about — shoals ahead. The Democrats used the pandemic as an excuse to accelerate and intensify their decades-long effort to loosen and change American election practices in ways that favor their party. In the spring, they began openly talking about staging a coup: literally using the military to yank Trump from power. It’s one thing to hold a “war game” and plot in secret about a president’s ouster, but why leak the result? Only if you want the public prepared for what otherwise would look like outrageous interference in “our democracy.” Democrats and their media allies also, and for the same reason, assiduously pushed the so-called “Red Mirage” narrative: the story that, while you are likely to see Trump way ahead on election night, he will certainly lose as all the votes are counted. This was less a prediction than preemptive explanation: what you see might look funny, but let us assure you in advance that it’s all on the up-and-up.

In response (or lack thereof) to the other side’s assiduous preparations, the president, his staff, his campaign, and his party committed four serious errors of omission. First, they made hardly any attempt to work with Republican state officials — governors, legislatures, and secretaries of state — to oppose and amend rule changes that would disadvantage them and favor their opponents. As far back as the 2016 election, Trump had complained that Hillary Clinton’s popular vote total had been padded by several million votes by illegal immigrants. Yet he and the GOP did very little to tighten state election procedures. Second, after having failed adequately to oppose those changes, they mounted far too few legal challenges to get them overturned or modified. Third, having declined to challenge the changes, they barely even tried to ramp up their own mail-in voting operation to rival the Democrats’. Fourth, despite numerous loud predictions — both as boasts and warnings — that the election outcome would be unclear and disputed in several states, no team was assembled in advance to investigate and, if necessary, litigate the results. Florida 2000 came as a surprise to candidates Al Gore and George W. Bush. Nonetheless the Bush campaign was able to field almost immediately an army of lawyers, including experts on election law, headed by a former secretary of state, the wily James Baker. The Trump team had at least six months’ warning and, as far as I can see, did nothing to prepare.

H/T to “currencylad” at Catallaxy Files for the link.

Solothurn S18-1000: The Pinnacle of Anti-Tank Rifles

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Oct 2017

Among all the antitank rifles developed between the World Wars, the highest quality and most sophisticated was the Solothurn S18-1000. It fires the 20x138B cartridge which was also used in the Finnish Lahti L-39 and the German 20mm Flak guns, and it does so using a semiautomatic action and an 8-round box magazine. It is a short-recoil system, with a rotating bolt rather similar to that of the MG-34 machine gun.

The recoil-operated action of the Solothurn helps dampen its recoil more than the Lahti, and is definitely a more comfortable gun to shoot. The Solothurn is equipped with both iron sights and an optical sight (we used the irons in this shooting, because the rubber eye cup on the scope is fairly hard and brittle on this example). Remarkably for its 100+ pound weight, the gun definitely jumps back a few inches when fired unless one has firmly sunk the bipod feet into the earth. However, the recoil force is really more of a push than a sharp impact, and combined with the large surface area of the shoulder pad it is not at all a bad experience.

A number of different countries bought the S18-1000 (and many others bought the smaller S18-100), including the Italians and Hungarians. The only combat account I was able to find was from a Dutch antitank gun team that used one to successfully engage several German armored cars during the invasion of the Netherlands in 1940.

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QotD: Anti-semitism in Harold Lamb’s novels

Filed under: Asia, Books, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The “brushes with anti-Semitism” lie in Lamb’s portrayal of the Jewish merchants of the time [Wikipedia]. They sell the Cossacks clothes, weapons, food, and gunpowder and turn the freebooters’ loot into cash. They are depicted as avaricious, cowardly, mean, and quite willing to toady to the warriors and princes they serve. How are we to interpret this in light of Lamb’s sympathetic portrayals of a dozen other races and cultures?

Of course it’s possible Lamb was simply replaying anti-Semitic attitudes he had absorbed somewhere. But in reading these stories I had another moment like the one in which I understood that [Edgar Rice] Burroughs [Wikipedia] was using “white” as culturist code for “civilized”. It was this: the behavior of Lamb’s Jewish merchants made adaptive sense. Maybe they were really like that!

Consider: The Jews of Lamb’s milieu lived under Christian and Islamic rulers who forbade them from carrying weapons, who despised them, who taxed and persecuted them with a heavy hand. If you were a Jew in that time and place, exhibiting courage and the warrior virtues that Lamb was so ready to recognize in a Mongol or an Afghani was likely to earn you a swift and ugly death.

Under those conditions, I’m thinking that being cowardly and avaricious and toadying would have been completely sensible; after all, what other options than flattering the authorities and getting rich enough to buy themselves out of trouble did Jews actually have?

Lamb seems to have have mined the historical sources pretty assiduously in his portrayals of other cultures and races. Rather than dismissing Lamb’s Jews as creatures of his prejudices, I think we need to at least consider the possibility that he was mostly replaying period beliefs about Jewish merchants, and that those beliefs were in fact fairly accurate. He certainly seems to have tried to do something similar with the other flavors of human being in his books.

Nowadays we tend to interpret Lamb’s Jewish merchants through assumptions that read something like this: (1) All racial labels are indications of racist thinking, and (2) all race-associated stereotypes are necessarily false, and (3) all racial labels and race-related stereotypes are malicious. But it seems to me that, at least as I read Burroughs and Lamb, all these assumptions are highly questionable. As long as you hold them, you can’t notice what “whiteness” in Burroughs really means, or account for the genuine multiculturalism of Lamb’s books.

Eric S. Raymond, “Reading racism into pulp fiction”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-01-18.

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