throwaway3060

All of those also had some amount of brain drain around that time.

I don't think the first one is how anyone in modern times would define a public square.

Literal public squares in real life also don't have gatekeepers. They're just open spaces where anyone can naturally congregate. Emphasis on the "open".

Perhaps Musk is in his legal right to turn Twitter into a walled garden, but it certainly seems like false advertising to me after he kept describing his model as a public square. You can be a public square or a walled garden, but not both.

To add a bit, the brain drain has been going on since at least the end of the Soviet Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-wave_Russian_emigration

The Soviet Union arguably had some of world's finest engineering talent, but many of those most skilled left as soon as they could. Some of these, or their children, would go on to found startups.

I've read that article too, and never got the impression it quite went that far. That there wasn't some unified group, sure, but I never heard anyone claim that (maybe reflecting when I first learned about them?). Maybe that's what Wilson meant, but if so it isn't very clear - it sounded to me like she's claiming that all those constituent groups the Egyptians wrote about, that Bret Devereaux touched upon, didn't actually exist (and worse, that this is the consensus position).

Edit: It occured to me, perhaps Wilson is thinking about this subject primarily from the Greek perspective, when most of what we know comes from others.

I thought she would be, but apparently classicist and historian have less overlap than I'd have assumed. I don't know how else to explain this one, I was shocked when I read that line.

r/askhistorians, which as far as I know is reliable, does not seem to dispute that they at least existed. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mwbdpd/why_...

Edit: Charitably, it could be awkward phrasing - not that the sea peoples didn't exist, but that the whole hypothesis around them is believed to be off.

I am not an expert in this space, so hopefully an actual expert will come by and clarify, but I am pretty sure that "The current consensus [...] is that there was no such thing as ‘the sea peoples’" is just flat out untrue. (IIUC, what is the current consensus is that they did not "cause" the late bronze age collapse). That colors how I read the rest of the review.

Edit: Personally, I enjoyed that particular addition to the plotline, as unrealistic as it is.

Suddenly started happening to me out of nowhere while browsing. Really does feel like one of the last pillars of the old internet just toppled - that reading is open to anyone. New Reddit is basically unusable.

Edit: I still am a strong believer in anonymous usage of the internet. Increasingly it feels like we've become an endangered species.

So, anyone who had owned a plot of land was at least deserving of property rights - but given that lots of people's in the 20th century were unfairly stripped of their property rights and never compensated, I wouldn't expect anything.

As they did not possess sovereignty in the region, I don't recognize any sort of collective national claim of ownership to the overall region.

That isn't how that works.

But incidentally, what is Palestinian land? There has never been a recognized state of Palestine, so how would we define collective ownership of the land? Since individual Palestinians didn't own every single parcel of land.

This is not what the word "colonialism" means in modern times; which imperial state is exploiting the resources of the destination?

That, too, is a classic Russian disinformation line, from Soviet times actually where the word antizionism gained international usage, as a barely hidden legitimized alternative to antisemitism.

Maybe you don't mean it that way, but if you are going to choose to use the word, you don't get to deny how it has historically been used.

Russia has been weaponizing disinformation for over 100 years. You are comparing a tiny country to a former superpower. I am amazed by the frequency of comments on the Internet that need to make this comparison, somehow simultaneously relying on antisemitism and downplaying what Ukraine is going through.

Actually, maybe I'm not that surprised. Using Jews as a scapegoat has been a pretty common tactic in older Russian disinformation too.

Is it? Don't know about other countries, but I am pretty sure the constitutional bedrock of the United States is to limit the federal government's ability to be malignant, even at the cost of some benefit. Whether that has been achieved is a separate question.

Not to defend Amazon here, but I think this is talking about the already severely limited streaming benefit of Prime, not the dedicated Amazon Music paid subscription. The former is not really comparable to a actual paid music subscription service.

It is doing a lot of work. People who vilify the US rarely bother to make the distinction, to acknowledge the good (and the ones who do get crowded out). Human nature is not that forgiving.

When you constantly get villainized for being involved, that makes it a lot harder to justify to the populace that these things are worth doing. People actually do listen, but not always in the way one intended. At this point, is it any wonder that much of the populace is now convinced that non-involvement is the moral choice? (And I say this as someone who fears this state of affairs)

I've been hearing the school strike was an Iranian misfire, actually.

I remember that the alternative has also unleashed hell on Earth for countless innocent people.

At some point, you have to take the path that offers at least some hope for the future. To turn into something that has lost all hope - there is no fixing that.

Going after the monsters that murdered thousands of Americans was entirely justified.

Russia's problem is that all their reasons for invading Ukraine, they made up. The very people Russia claims to have been 'saving', are the ones that they are disproportionately killing.

The same state's leader that sold to Russia the drones being used to violate Ukraine's sovereignty?

As big as this is, the Russia-Ukraine war pretty much marked the end of the post-WW2 era and redefined global relations between the powers. In that sense, this is yet another major shift within this new era. But also, the series of events that led to this point does connect to the Russia-Ukraine war, and maybe doesn't happen without it.

If you're going to go pre-20th century, Russia has the dubious distinction of having waged the most "total" recorded genocide in history, the Circassian genocide.

Just because you haven't heard of Russia colonizing doesn't mean it didn't happen just as much. It just wasn't where the other imperial empires were. How else would one city come to a rule a continent-sized territory? A big difference is, they didn't keep records of such things. People picture Siberia as an empty wilderness and have no idea that rich societies once lived there.

Then Liebowitz was wrong (and Kanheman, though it seems to me he wasn't trying to make a reasoned argument in that interview). And thus, those who cite him would presumably do better to read other, more historical sources.

> Comparisons needn't be limited to one event or one atrocity.

You can't openly call a group Nazis and then claim you only meant in terms of their behavior on the western front. It misses the whole point, not to mention it makes people forget what the Nazis did.

> All? I doubt that.

Yes, at times all.

What is ample? Can you provide any evidence that Gaza can be put in the same breath as Leningrad? Russia calls all the West "Nazis", should we just listen to them?

I think you really need to learn more about the eastern front, if you're going to keep making or supporting comparisons based on incomplete knowledge. There is no comparison between the experiences in France and the experiences in Ukraine during WW2. There is a reason why historian Timothy Snyder titled one of his books "Bloodlands".

Gaza is no Leningrad or Stalingrad.

Less genocidal federation? That is quite the claim.

The Soviets starved millions of people to death, in order to secure their control. All that help was then built on the backs and blood of those victims. At least let's be honest about that much.

Given the track record of knowledge of the eastern front beyond the iron curtain, maybe he didn't. I don't know how anyone can read about Operation Barbarossa, the full scope of the plans to wipe out half of the continent, and come away with the impression that anything else, let alone a regional conflict, is even in the same universe.

But this isn't about Leibowitz, who isn't here to try to explain himself. This is about the idea that a falsity is "not up for debate".

Are you trying to imply there is a comparison between Gaza and Leningrad? Where a number equal to the entire modern population of Gaza perished?

Something is very wrong with education on WW2 if anyone thinks this is a reasonable thing to say. A bubble, I suppose.

I thought for a bit whether I should reply to this or not. But I noticed one point in here I felt obligated to correct.

If your idea of the Nazis is their occupation in the west, then you are missing most of the picture. Their atrocities in the east are far beyond anything that has ever taken place on this Earth before or since. There is no comparison whatsoever.