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| 11/23 |
| 2007/3/13-17 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq] UID:45953 Activity:moderate |
3/13 Victor Hanson loves '300', unsurprisingly:
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson101106.html
I still don't think the Spartans were that 'free',
perhaps driven, disciplined, manly, into men,
very manly manly manly, but 'free'? nah.
\_ I thoroughly enjoyed the movie and still agree with you. It was a
Spartan tale told by a Spartan to Spartans.
\_ Yeah I find the movie fun on a gruesome, fun, manly
men doing manly things level. People who read deep
political themes into the movie make me sad.
\_ Gayest. Movie. Ever.
\- on a contemporary note, worth reading the "putatively
about the Persians, but not really" play "The Persians"
[n.b. the wikipedia article about this play is not good].
but once again, for a really amazing work of politcs and
history, with great bearing on contemporary events, rush
forward to events 150yrs laterm and read Thucydides "great
work for all time", History of the Peloponnesian War.
The story of the "fall of Athens" is interesting ... how
do the "enlightened" athenians alienate their neighbors and
allies when their enemies are led by a bunch of freakish,
fascist. Hmm, it's almost like "what does the US have to
for there to be any competition in a paropaganda war
with a bunch of crazies who behead people on tv".
\_ It's more complicated than that and pre-dates the Bush
admin by a few decades or more. If you'd like to discuss
we can start a new thread starting with European colonial
activity in the Middle East and India/Pakistan/Afghanistan
over the last few hundred years, the decline of European
powers as world powers post WWII/during the Cold War, the
West's greatly increasing need for energy out-pacing supply
growth and the recategorization of terrorists as freedom
fighters in various places over time. Then again,
nevermind, even the cliff notes of the cliff notes are too
long for the motd.
\- your comments dont make any sense as a response or
reaction to mine. or really on their own. i was making
\_ I was responding to your last sentence or two.
a specific narrow point: athens, the enlightened side
in the "judgement of history", were in some sense the
bad guys because of the "arrogance of power" ...
[do you know what happened "after" the pel war?]
john dryden wrote:
"When the chosen people grew too strong
"The rightful cause at length became the wrong.
At least in the case of the trojan war, there were
good an bad guys on both sides. while in the case
of the pel war, the leaders of the other side,
the spartans, was kind of a freakish society.
today, none of these people who say thinks like
"the us is the greatest threat to world peace"
actually are pro-north korea or the the islamic
fundamentalists, but the they are more likely to
be affected by us actions ... not belgian style
harsh colonialism, but control of the free trade
agenda, framing the debate on many other issue etc.
and dramatic events like abu graib have accelerated
\_ I don't think abu graib was dramatic. I think it
was overly hyped to be much more dramatic than it
was and was used as a proxy for the secret prisons
the more hard core sorts are taken to but no one has
real information about but which may (or may not)
have 'dramatic events' taking place inside.
this and have eroded some of the good will from
us work in the green revolution, medical science
etc. yes, the selective choice of labels such as
who is a freedom fighter and a terrorist, who are
friendly and unaccetable dictators, who can have nukes
etc is an example of this agenda control.
\_ That sort of agenda control goes both ways. If you
look at the EU press and what a number of their
politicos are saying you'd think Hamas was an
oppressed movement of farmers having their figs
stolen in the night while Hezbollah were a bunch of
pacifist nuns doing the good works of The Peoples,
while the US and allies are world wide villains
and the worst sort of evil imaginable. It's naively
laughable stuff but plenty believe it. This change
in perception is relatively new dating back to only
the early 90s. Prior to that groups like the PLO
were always described as terrorist organizations.
The PLO hasn't changed. Only the names. Overall,
though, I agree with what you're saying. There's
just so much more to it and really the motd isn't
a great place for a discussion that would do the
topic justice.
\- BTW, by agenda control i dont mean (just)
how you spin things [the freedom fighter vs
terroist issue]. i mean literally agenda
control at meetings for say the doha trade
round ... "the most important trade problem
today is software and dvd piracy and the pro-
death forces who want to remove longer terms
for medical patents and micky mouse copyright".
\_ Ah, I see. I'll buy that. No one likes when
someone bigger pushes their agenda. And that's
\- not to mention double standards.
\_ That's the whole point of being bigger.
When you are that much more powerful,
the negotiations are not among equals
but more about how much the little guy
is _allowed_ to have. It is the nature
of power, especially in international
affairs. No one likes being the little
guy and doubly so if they were once the
big time colonial power who owned and
stripped a large chunk of the planet at
the tip of a sword or rifle barrel.
\- yes, i have read the melian dialog
too. and i also know what happened
to athens in the coming decades.
some of the countries being dealt
with high-handedly are not "little
guys", e.g. china. they us
expendiently switches between "we're
right because we are good" and "might
makes right". so start getting ready
for more "fuck yous" from the
international community. it will
be interesting to see how the us
deals with negotiations about cost
bearing on global warming, how they
react to things like china setting
up bilateral deal rather than the
"unversalist" approach of GATT/WTO
etc.
\_ I wasn't really going for the
melian dialogs but they did have
a point. As far as the non-little
guys go, if they get big enough,
such as the USSR during the cold
war, you just get bi-lateral talks
among equals, as expected. If they
are small, then the US is back to
melian style dialog, as expected.
There's no such thing as a unified
international community. There are
nations that have shared goals, but
no further than that. It is always
possible to pick off member states
of a larger coalition, setting up
favorable side deals, etc. I see
no problem. At worst, as I said,
you deal with other large entities
with the respect they've earned as
equals or nearly so. What is so
horrible about that? Are you
predicting some sort of Great Down
Fall of the Evil US when we have to
deal with others as equals? US
power is relatively new to the
planet. Pre-WW2 the US was a joke
on the world stage. We didn't have
a military of any note, any serious
industrial capacity, or much of
anything else going on. What we
did have was a whole lot of
potential which was seen in WW2 to
today.
The Mickey Mouse Copyright Act to you, pal!
We're now at what? 75 years after the death
of the author? 100? How long ago did Walt
die?
\_ Geez, he died in 12/1966: 40 years.
\_ "The Persians bring with them exotic beasts like a rhinoceros and
elephant, and the leader of the Immortals fights Leonidas in a
duel (which the Greeks knew as monomachia)."
No, he doesn't. Was Hanson actually paying attention?
\- in a bit of a coincidence, professor delong has blurb on
the peloponnesian war (where the melian dialog comes from):
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/03/history_as_trag.html
the parts quoting thucydides are worth readings [remind
you of anything? ... bushco, darth cheney, john kerry],
the stuff on kagan is probably not so interesting if you
are not familar with him or his 4vol "standard" work on
the pel war, it's leadup and aftermath.
kagan is kinda crazy .. he's an ultra rightwinger at yale
and was considered sort of a hazard and loose canon ...
who had to be removed form various committees etc.
harvard:harvey mansfield::yale:donald kagan.
if you are interested in international politics, thucydides
is well-worth reading. inspite of being 2400 yrs old ... before
nukes, before even nation states, before global reach of
nations ... but still many deep lessons about might and right,
bandwagoning vs balancing [if you are a minor power, do you
ally with #1 or #2], alliance management, preventative war,
relative vs absolute gains, balance of threat theory, the
importance of individuals vs "historical forces", fog of war,
hawks and doves and domestic politics, ideology and the enemy
law in war ... and the writing is amazing [thuycidides is
supposed ot be one of the absolute hardest to read in the
original tho ... very difficult greek ... it's even "greek"
to a lot of people who know some greek.] it's also an amazing
story at just a plot level ... the tide keeps turning as things
go wrong, leaders die at the wrong time etc.
\_ new post about kagan:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/03/your_onestopsho.html |
| 11/23 |
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| www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson101106.html Printer Friendly October 11, 2006 History and the Movie "300" by Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers (Adapted from the introduction to the forthcoming book trailer published by Black Horse Comics, Inc. to accompany Director Zack Snyder's new film "300") The phrase "300 Spartans" evokes not only the ancient battle of Thermopylae, but also the larger idea of fighting for freedom against all odds -- a notion subsequently to be enshrined through some 2500 years of Western civilization. Even today we remember the power of the Spartans' defiance. "Come and take them," they tell the Persian emissaries who demand their arms. "Then we will fight in the shade," the Spartans boast when warned that the horde of Persian arrows will soon blot out the very sunlight. "Go tell the Spartans that here we lie obedient to their commands" the tombstone of their dead reads. In 480, an enormous force of more than a quarter-million Persians under their King Xerxes invaded Greece, both to enslave the free city-states, and to avenge the Persian defeat a decade earlier at Marathon. The huge force of ships and soldiers proved unstoppable on its way west and southward until it reached the narrow pass at Thermopylae ("The Warm Gates") in northern Greece. They hoped to stop Xerxes' horde outright -- or at least allow enough time for their fellow countrymen to their rear to mobilize a sufficient defense of the homeland. Among the many Greek contingents was a special elite force of 300 Spartans under their King Leonidas -- a spearhead that offered the other Greeks at Thermopylae some promise that they could still bar the advance of the vastly superior invader. And that hope proved real for two days of hard fighting. The vastly outnumbered, but heavily-armed Greek infantrymen in their phalanx -- taking advantage of the narrow terrain and their massed tactics -- savagely beat back wave after wave of advancing Persian foot soldiers and cavalry. But on the third day of battle, Leonidas's Greeks were betrayed by a local shepherd Ephialtes, who showed the Persians an alternate route over the mountains that led to the rear of the Greek position. When he realized that he was nearly surrounded, Leonidas nevertheless made a critical decision to stay and fight, while ordering most of the other various allies to flee the encirclement to organize the growing Greek resistance to the south. Meanwhile the King and his doomed 300 Spartans, together with other small groups of surrounded Thespians and Thebans, would indeed battle to buy the Greeks time. They ranged further out from the pass on this third and last day of battle -- at first with spears and swords, finally with teeth and nails --killing scores more of Persians. The last few Spartan survivors were buried under a sea of Persian arrows. The body of Leonidas was found among the corpses, his head soon impaled on a stick as a macabre reminder of the wages of resistance to the Great King of Persia. The Greeks took encouragement from the unprecedented sacrifice of a Spartan King and his royal guard on their behalf. And so a few weeks later at the sea battle of Salamis near Athens -- and then again the next year at the great infantry collision on the plains of Plataea -- the Greeks defeated, and eventually destroyed, the Persian invaders. The rallying cry of the victors was Thermopylae, the noble sacrifice of the final stand of the outnumbered Greeks, and especially the courage of the fallen Three Hundred Spartans under King Leonidas. So almost immediately, contemporary Greeks saw Thermopylae as a critical moral and culture lesson. In universal terms, a small, free people had willingly outfought huge numbers of imperial subjects who advanced under the lash. More specifically, the Western idea that soldiers themselves decide where, how, and against whom they will fight was contrasted against the Eastern notion of despotism and monarchy -- freedom proving the stronger idea as the more courageous fighting of the Greeks at Thermopylae, and their later victories at Salamis and Plataea attested. Greek writers and poets such as Simonides and Herodotus were fascinated by the Greek sacrifice against Xerxes, and especially the heroism of Leonidas and his men. And subsequently throughout Western literature poets as diverse as Lord Byron and AE Houseman have likewise paid homage to the Spartan last stand -- and this universal idea of Western soldiers willing to die as free men rather than to submit to tyranny. Steven Pressfield's novel Gates of Fire and the earlier Hollywood movie The 300 Spartans both were based on the Greek defense of the pass at Thermopylae. Recently, a variety of Hollywood films -- from Troy to Alexander the Great -- has treated a variety of themes from classical Greek literature and theater. But 300 is unique, a sui generis in both spirit and methodology. The script is not an attempt in typical Hollywood fashion to recreate the past as a costume drama. Instead it is based on Frank Miller's (of Sin City fame) comic book graphics and captions. Miller's illustrated novelette of the battle adapts themes loosely from the well-known story of the Greek defense, but with deference made to the tastes of contemporary popular culture. and in some sense its muscular warriors, virtual reality sets, and computer-generated landscapes recall the look and feel of Robert Rodriquez's screen version of Sin City. Yet the collaboration of Director Zack Snyder and screenwriters Kurt Johnstad and Michael Gordon is much more of a hybrid, since the script, dialogue, cinematography, and acting all recall scenes of the battle right from Herodotus's account. The film was not shot on location outdoors, but in a studio using the so-called "digital backlot" technique of sometimes placing the actors against blue screens. The resulting realism is not that of the sun-soaked cliffs above the blue Aegean -- Thermopylae remains spectacularly beautiful today -- but of the eerie etchings of the comic book. The Spartans fight bare-chested without armor, in the "heroic nude" manner that ancient Greek vase-painters portrayed Greek hoplites, their muscles bulging as if they were contemporary comic book action heroes. Again, following the Miller comic, artistic license is made with the original story -- the traitor Ephialtes is as deformed in body as he is in character; King Xerxes is not bearded and perched on a distant throne, but bald, huge, perhaps sexually ambiguous, and often right on the battlefield. The Persians bring with them exotic beasts like a rhinoceros and elephant, and the leader of the Immortals fights Leonidas in a duel (which the Greeks knew as monomachia). Shields are metal rather than wood with bronze veneers, and swords sometimes look futuristic rather than ancient. Again, purists must remember that 300 seeks to bring a comic book, not Herodotus, to the screen. Yet, despite the need to adhere to the conventions of Frank Miller's graphics and plot -- every bit as formalized as the protocols of classical Athenian drama or Japanese Kabuki theater -- the main story from our ancient Greek historians is still there: Leonidas, against domestic opposition, insists on sending an immediate advance party northward on a suicide mission to rouse the Greeks and allow them time to unite a defense. Once at Thermopylae, he adopts the defenses to the narrow pass between high cliffs and the sea far below. The Greeks fight both en masse in the phalanx and at times range beyond as solo warriors. They are finally betrayed by Ephialtes, forcing Leonidas to dismiss his allies -- and leaving his own 300 to the fate of dying under a sea of arrows. But most importantly, 300 preserves the spirit of the Thermopylae story. The Spartans, quoting lines known from Herodotus and themes from the lyric poets, profess unswerving loyalty to a free Greece. They will never kow-tow to the Persians, preferring to die on their feet than live on their knees. If critics think that 300 reduces and simplifies the meaning of Thermopylae into freedom versus tyranny, they should reread carefully ancient accounts and then blame Herodotus, Plutarch, and Diodorus -- who long ago boasted that Gree... |
| delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/03/history_as_trag.html Emmanuel Saez Writes in About American Income Inequality Rising Rapidly in 2005 J Bradford DeLong (2007), "What Should We Think About When Refounding the International Monetary System?" Support this weblog A Note on Comment Policy: Trolling comments get deleted, usually--I don't have time to moderate this properly, but I am trying to keep it a discussion rather than a foodfight. Tip Jar My Berkeley Schedule * Spring 2007 Schedule REVISED: Office hours: I'm off the lecturing line. I should be in the building about a third of the time, attending pointless bureaucratic meetings about a sixth of the time, and buried in the library the rest of the time... North, Wallis, and Weingast: Economic History Seminar for March 19 * J Bradford DeLong (2007), "What Should We Think About When Refounding the International Monetary System?" Main | J Bradford DeLong (2007), "What Should We Think About When Refounding the International Monetary System?" March 14, 2007 History as Tragedy: The Peloponnesian War: Hoisted from the Archives Atrios is talking about the Kagan family--Yale historian father Donald and neoconservative hack children Fred and Robert. History as Tragedy: The Peloponnesian War: Hoisted from the Archives: The Thirteen-Year-Old got Donald Kagan's (2003) Peloponnesian War (one volume) for Christmas.... doesn't think much of it: Daniel Mendelsohn: Critic at Large: Kagan... he wants his work to "meet the needs of readers in the 21st century"... "an uninterrupted account will better allow readers to draw their own conclusions." you tend to come away from his history with an entirely different view of the war than the one you take away from Thucydides.... revisionist championing of Cleon and other Athenian hawks, whose policies he consistently presents as the only reasonable choice. "It is tempting to blame Cleon for the breaking off of the negotiations," goes a typical bit of rhetorical strong-arming. Anyone who hasn't read Thucydides will be inclined to agree. peace party (with its "apparently limitless forbearance") and of the cautious policies recommended first by Pericles and then by Nicias, a figure for whom Kagan has particular disdain. Nicias had tried to bluff the Athenian Assembly into abandoning the invasion of Sicily, declaring that it would require far greater expense than people realized; but they simply approved the additional ships and troops. This leads Kagan, bizarrely, to characterize the Sicilian Expedition as "the failed stratagem of Nicias." As for the Athenians' massacre of the Melians, Kagan dismisses it as "the outlet they needed for their energy and frustration." Kagan's perspective on events and personalities at first suggests an admirable desire to see the war with fresh and unsentimental eyes. But after a while it becomes hard not to ascribe his revisionism to plain hawkishness, a distaste for compromise and negotiation when armed conflict is possible. His book represents the Ollie North take on the Peloponnesian War: "If we'd only gone in there with more triremes," he seems to be saying, "we would have won that sucker." It is certainly the case that I have always found it very strange that Kagan is not much, much more hesitant than he is to dismiss and overturn Thucydides's analytical conclusions and moral judgments. We know next to nothing about the Peloponnesian War that he did not. He knew a great deal about the Peloponnesian War that did not make it into his book. His judgments are based on much more information than we have now, whether he lays out that information in a manner that is to Donald Kagan's liking or not. Actually, we do know one important, big thing about the Classical Greek world that Thucydides did not know (and that, strangely, Kagan appears not to know). There is a deep, powerful sense in which time was on the side of Athens and its empire. Each decade that the war between Sparta and Athens remained cold rather than hot was a decade for metics and immigrants to the Geek world to think whether they wanted to live in Spartan-allied oligarchies dominated by a closed guild of landowners, or in Athenian-allied places where the (male, citizen) demos ruled and where there was much more growth, commerce, trade, and opportunity. Each decade that the war between Sparta and Athens remained cold rather than hot was a decade for rich Spartiates to marry the daughters of other rich Spartiates, and for poor Spartiates to find that they could no longer afford the Spartan lifestyle and so drop out of the citizen body--and of the main line of battle. By 350 Sparta could--this is a guess--put only one-fifth as many professional hoplite soldiers into the line of battle as it could have two centuries before. Each decade that the war was postponed was a decade for Athens, its economy, its trade network, and its empire outside of Achaea and Aetolia to grow. A policy of postponing the showdown--even if one of "apparently limitless forbearance"--was a policy of greatly increasing the relative strength of the Athenian side. But what is most disappointing to Mendelsohn (and most disappointing to me) is that he finds Kagan's Peloponnesian War to be a very different and much less interesting thing than Thucydides's Peloponnesian War (or, I would argue, than the Peloponnesian War wie es eigentlich gewesen). The lessons from Kagan's Peloponnesian War appear to be that war against Bad Guys calls for Harsh Measures and Total Mobilization. are no different from the ones that the tragic playwrights teach: that the arrogant self can become the abject Other; that failure to bend, to negotiate, inevitably results in terrible fracture; that, because we are only human, our knowledge is merely knowingness, our vision partial rather than whole, and we must tread carefully in the world... proves a rough master that brings most men's characters to a level with their fortunes... the cunning of their enterprises and the atrocity of their reprisals. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries.... The fair proposals of an adversary were met with jealous precautions... Revenge also was held of more account than self-preservation. but when opportunity offered, he who first ventured to seize it... thought this perfidious vengeance sweeter than an open one, since... success by treachery won him the palm of superior intelligence.... in their acts of vengeance they went to even greater lengths, not stopping at what justice or the good of the state demanded, but making the party caprice of the moment their only standard.... History as Tragedy: The Peloponnesian War: Hoisted from the Archives: Comments It's funny, my take away from the Kagan book was that the Athenian hawks were wrong, and that the peace party was right. Could be reading comprehension issues on my part, or just a fairly pacifistic mental filter on my part. Or, perhaps, the case against the Athenian hawks is just SO overwelming that even Kagan couldn't construct a persuasive counter narrative. March 14, 2007 at 12:53 PM Very good, but I think you err in your estimation of Sparta, and in the resulting verdict that time was on Athens' side. Sparta certainly showed diplomatic flexibility in allying with the Persian empire, its former enemy, for the wealth of the Persian empire gave Sparta the ability to build a fleet that rivalled that of Athens. Because of this diplomatic flexibility, it was not necessary for Sparta to allow social or economic flexibility. However, if the war had continued and Sparta started to get into serious danger of losing (and Alcibiades' abortive attempt to forge an alliance between Athens and Sparta's rebellious vassals was the only strategy which really threatened Sparta) then Sparta would seriously have reconsidered its socioeconomic system. Both at the start of its history (Lycurgus) and near its end (Agis and Cleome... |
| delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/03/your_onestopsho.html Support this weblog A Note on Comment Policy: Trolling comments get deleted, usually--I don't have time to moderate this properly, but I am trying to keep it a discussion rather than a foodfight. Tip Jar My Berkeley Schedule * Spring 2007 Schedule REVISED: Office hours: I'm off the lecturing line. I should be in the building about a third of the time, attending pointless bureaucratic meetings about a sixth of the time, and buried in the library the rest of the time... North, Wallis, and Weingast: Economic History Seminar for March 19 * J Bradford DeLong (2007), "What Should We Think About When Refounding the International Monetary System?" A Tiny Revolution: Donald Kagan: Yikes: I already knew he's one weird scary dude. But it turns out his weird scariness goes deeper than I'd imagined. you should not destroy what is our common protection, the privilege of being allowed in danger to invoke what is fair and right. you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must... Of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.... March 15, 2007 at 02:16 PM There's a lesson there somewhere. It's depressing not see much learning and growth over the millenia. What are we to do with folks who see this through the Athenian eye? March 15, 2007 at 05:10 PM I listened briefly in the office to Martha Raddatz explaining how we could not leave Iraq just after explaining how tragic war is, and I have not the slightest idea how we learn to think war is hell so let's carry on warring. March 15, 2007 at 05:17 PM One problem I have with the Athenian's bitter cynicism is the pretense that everyone is alike. No, the Melians wouldn't have done the same (I don't think) if they'd had the same power. March 15, 2007 at 05:33 PM Some Athenians were power-mad, bitter cynics. Any more than Burke was a leader of the French Revolution. Like Burke, Thucydides catalogued and chronicled a series of political events that he loathed and feared. He shows us how insane blood-lust can speak in cool tones. Sensible people see that Thucydides was appalled by the insane blood-lust, and see that cool tones do not vouchsafe sanity. Kagan sees a vindication of the cool rationality of blood-lust. It would be like a Shakespearian scholar telling us that Iago was right and Desdemona deserved to die--no, worse, it would be like a Shakespearian scholar telling us that *Shakespeare* thought those things. But then again, Kagan shares many other affinities with the Straussians. Reading this horrendous misinterpretation of the Melian dialogue moves him into a different category. March 15, 2007 at 06:56 PM My take-home lesson was that it wasn't an indictment of democracy, but of having the wrong kind of people in charge of a democracy. They started with leaders like Pericles and by the time of the Melian Dialogues people like Creon had their grubby fingers on the levers. One obvious reason was that the hardships of war brutalized Athens. There may have been a suggestion that the upper classes tended to die in combat, leaving the more short-sighted and selfish in charge. Leaving aside the social snob aspect, Thucicydes may be saying that war had a bad effect on their human feelings, whatever the social rank. IIRC, they launched the Sicilian Expedition a few years later, so it was detrimental to their judgment as well. a campaign against Melos provided the Athenians with the outlet they needed for their energy and frustration" reminds me of "go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something", Mr Frieman's contribution to the demonstration of our cognitive superiority to those emotional wogs. March 15, 2007 at 07:31 PM But of course Kagan wasn't writing a commentary on Thucicydes, he was writing a history of the Pelloponesian war, of which Thucydides is one source among several. Moreover, the book cited by Schwartz is a one volume abridgment of his full three volume history. In the full version he places the slaughter of Melians in the context of several similar incidents showing the "growing frightfulness" of the war. As for Thucydides reproduction of the Melian debates, he argues that Thucydides intended an ironic contrast between the Athenians' brutal amoral outlook with the Melians and their naive confidence that the gods and fortune would protect the Sicilian expedition. March 15, 2007 at 07:58 PM Anne: Somebody's talking about your city slicker Central Park red tailed hawk. com/politics/blogs/wolcott In "Wood Peckers that I Have Known." I grew up in surburbia and have seen red talked hawks before, ho hum. It's the ospreys along the coast that have come back that I am impressed with. March 15, 2007 at 08:21 PM rd, "the outlet they needed for their energy and frustration" sure can cover a lot. Something like that formulation was used by Mr Limbaugh to explain those rowdy, lovable frat boys at Abu Ghraib. I read Kagan's high concept book on the beginnings of wars, and it seemed well reasoned. March 15, 2007 at 09:15 PM Kagan wrote how many years after Braudel and the Annales school of history? A school that started looking at a whole spectrum of causative factors ranging from demography to economics to ideology (infrastructure, structure, superstructure in the framework of Ferguson, 1999, see below) ? " "A further conflict was inevitable, for the Athenians could not long allow their will and authority to be flouted" by a small state... If there was a convention of warfare of the period to do what was done to the Melians, than he should cite it, this would be a fact, albeit unpleasant, or alternatively cite an exceptional breech. That Kagan was no doubt a tenured professor in a prestigious university (like Bernard Lewis) makes it all the more laughable, idiotic, and ironic. War and Society in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds: Asia, The Mediterranean, Europe, and Mesoamerica, Centerfor Hellenic Studies. us tagometer: Morning Coffee Videocasts "Economics Only" Feed About Brad DeLong * J Bradford DeLong is a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, chair of its political economy major, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and was in the Clinton administration a deputy assistant secretary of the US Treasury. |