A Collection of Unimitigated Pedantry

[Jacob]

Are you all familiar with the A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry blog?

It might be up the alley of a few folks here. It's the musings of a historian (with a focus on ancient Greece & Rome and military history) applying analysis to pop culture (frequently The Lord of the Rings and A Game of Thrones, but other stuff too). He also has a series of posts for people interested in building realistic fantasy worlds.

He sometimes does political commentary too, viewed through the lessons of the ancient world. I don't always agree with him, but it makes for interesting reading IMO.

Some topics he's covered which I've enjoyed:

A Military Historian Analysis of the Battle of Helm's Deep

On the Fremen Mirage

A Collection on Sparta

... but there's lots more.

[Admiral Yi]

Goddamn that motherfucker is longwinded.

[Habbaku]

Definitely familiar, and I read him regularly. I know ulmont also reads him.

He's worth the time.

[Jacob]

Goddamn that motherfucker is longwinded.

d

Fair

[Berkut]

I am very much enjoying his articles on the Fremen Mirage.

Although I think maybe he is kind of stating the obvious. Nobody reads Dune and thinks "Yeah, that is totally and obviously how these things actually work!". It's an interesting concept because we know that actually is not at all how things really work.

But its a great set of essays about how human societies develop irrespective of that point.

And I very much love this kind of stuff - I think it is the very best antidote to the pseudo-libertarianism that is so popular these days.

[grumbler]

The Fremen Mirage articles seem to be built on a whole series of strawman arguments.  I've never seen any other author who has postulated what he proposes as the argument he wil set out to demolish:

First: That people from less settled or 'civilized' societies – what we would have once called 'barbarians,' but will, for the sake of simplicity and clarity generally call here the Fremen after the example of the trope found in Dune – are made inherently 'tougher' (or more morally 'pure' – we'll come back to this in the third post) by those hard conditions.

Second: Consequently, people from these less settled societies are better fighters and more militarily capable than their settled or wealthier neighboring societies.

Third: That, consequently the poorer, harder people will inevitably overrun and subjugate the richer, more prosperous communities around them.

Fourth: That the consequence of the previous three things is that history supposedly could be understood as an inevitable cycle, where peoples in harder, poorer places conquer their richer neighbors, become rich and 'decadent' themselves, lose their fighting capacity and are conquered in their turn.

I do note that he doesn't actually say who has made that claim.

It's an interesting read, by and large, but if one doesn't know much history it won't be clear to them that 25% of the time he is mistaken (e.g. neither the Inca nor Aztecs were one of the original civilizations), and if one does know history, 25% of his points are recognizable as either mere truisms or else not relevant to his argument.

As Yi noted, he is longwinded as well.

[Threviel]

Isn't that more or less a claim from the life of Cyrus? Ive seen it used in the context of Mesopotamia and the successful invasions from the east. It's very often used in discussions about the fall of the Roman Empire. The Mongols in China also. I've seen it as a cause of the fall of the Achaemenids. The invaders go soft living in luxury, loses the properties that made them successful and fall for another barbarian.

Although I have no sources I would like to believe that his points are more or less truisms for people with a passing interest in history.

[Berkut]

Dan Carlin, who has a great bunch of podcasts, including one set of outstanding ones about the Mongols, at least puts forth the idea of the "Hard men make good times, good times make soft men...." etc., etc. concepts.

I don't know if there is some singular historian who has made anything like such a positive claim, but I think it is a common sentiment in culture at least.

[The Brain]

Why does he think that the movie 300 is "profoundly irresponsible"? He doesn't elaborate on that (just links to some YT video).

[Threviel]

Love his analysis of the battles in LotR. Tolkien knew his shit.

[Sheilbh]

Dan Carlin, who has a great bunch of podcasts, including one set of outstanding ones about the Mongols, at least puts forth the idea of the "Hard men make good times, good times make soft men...." etc., etc. concepts.

I don't know if there is some singular historian who has made anything like such a positive claim, but I think it is a common sentiment in culture at least.

Yeah - I don't know if it's really claimed but that's definitely a Herodotus theme and I think it's a part of ibn Khaldun's theories too which is why they both have a pretty cyclical take.

[Threviel]

Dan Carlin, who has a great bunch of podcasts, including one set of outstanding ones about the Mongols, at least puts forth the idea of the "Hard men make good times, good times make soft men...." etc., etc. concepts.

I don't know if there is some singular historian who has made anything like such a positive claim, but I think it is a common sentiment in culture at least.

Carlin was, amongst others, what I was thinking of above. In his episodes on the mongols he mentioned it and on his episodes on Cyrus he mentions it. Carlin often uses dated sources and he paints compelling images, but he is not a historian. I expect that many people that listen to his podcast believes in the tough barbarian, weak farmer trope.

[grumbler]

Dan Carlin, who has a great bunch of podcasts, including one set of outstanding ones about the Mongols, at least puts forth the idea of the "Hard men make good times, good times make soft men...." etc., etc. concepts.

I don't know if there is some singular historian who has made anything like such a positive claim, but I think it is a common sentiment in culture at least.

But the Fremen Mirage is not that "hard times make hard men, who make good times," but rather that unsophisticated, outnumbered, and poor societies will breed tougher men who will then "inevitably [his emphasis] overrun and subjugate the richer, more prosperous communities around them."

The cycle encapsulated in "The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been" from Romance of the Three Kingdoms is NOT the Fremen Mirage.  Nor is the cycle between despotism and personal freedoms in Herodatus anything to do with the Fremen Mirage.  The Fremen Mirage seems de novo.

[Sheilbh]

The cycle encapsulated in "The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been" from Romance of the Three Kingdoms is NOT the Fremen Mirage.  Nor is the cycle between despotism and personal freedoms in Herodatus anything to do with the Fremen Mirage.  The Fremen Mirage seems de novo.

That's not my take on Herodotus. One of his themes is the cycle between hardship/hard-living (often nomads) who take over richer (often settled areas) become luxurious and are in turn taken over/fail against the hard-living.

[Threviel]

You are perhaps interpreting it too literally groggy. The inevitably part is probably meant as to how the tripe is interpreted. When they go sissy they will inevitably fall rather than every empire will inevitably fall.

Also, his 4 points might be wrong in some details, but some minor details don't take everything away from his arguments.