Are we 'sliding back' to an era of organic community, universal moral consensus, rational thought, intellectualised faith, humane and balanced architecture, scientific discovery, polyphonic music, and dynamic tension between civil and ecclesiastical authority? Not really! https://t.co/r8ll90Hrwo
"Women who read 30+ books a year aren't reading real books. Unlike me, who read 5 books last year. Those books were How to Trick People so you can Become Rich, Why Men Are Better, Why Emotions don't Matter, Money Money Money and Finance Bros don't need Hoes"
In 1956 Peter Cushing invited a film crew into his Kensington home to show off his hobby of painting miniature toy soldiers and battling with them using rules created by fellow hobbyist H.G. Wells.
The iconic actor was an old-school wargamer.
Mind blown?
@lefineder A lot of people are bringing up "ghost soldiers", under strength units, fake reports, etc which were all real, but even so the late Roman army really was massive. All of these just brought it from a paper strength of ~600,000 to something like 400,000, which was still huge.
@lefineder (The very specific answer to "where was this vast Roman army when the Goths spent decades moving throughout the empire, or when the Rhine frontier fell in 406? Or when Rome was sacked and Britain was abandoned in 410?" is "fighting civil wars.")
@serbiaireland@lefineder Individual Germanic troops were no less loyal than anyone else, and given how often they were cremated in their uniforms (from archeology) they seem to have been pretty proud of their service. Whole tribes serving under their own leaders were often a different story, though.
"we should not lay claim to all that the law allows, for the ancients regarded the extreme of the law as the extreme of oppression." - Columella, De Re Rustica.
This is a general category but the distinction between Latin and Old English derived words -- freedom vs liberty, house vs home, work vs labor -- is difficult to express in most other languages since these usually translate to the same word.
An interesting challenge I just thought of: there's a common trope of declaring that certain German, French, Chinese, etc. philosophical or literary concepts are untranslatable. What's a concept from the *English* philosophical tradition which is similarly untranslatable?
A dozen British Army division commanders were KIA or DOW at the front in WW1. The notion that all the generals were fools, donkeys, etc, is Woke Marxist twaddle not taken seriously by any bona fide military historians -- but you do you.
The Kremlin's preferred candidate for Armenian prime minister (elections are on June 7th) has "IC 1706 FSB" listed as his workplace in Russian passport records — designation typically used for informants and foreigners operating under FSB supervision
The book this is from is one of my favorites on tactical level modern warfare, with many lessons that are still valid, so I'm going to do a full thread for it.
Russian forces attempted to shoot down a real stork with an FPV interceptor drone on the southern front.
The stork narrowly escaped by entering a sharp spin at the last moment to evade the attack.