Don’t forget ‘houseless’ or ‘transient’ to describe homeless. Or ‘bodies with vaginas’ to describe women. Or ‘latinx’ to describe latinos. Pretty sure all of these are exonyms. The linguistic contortions we have to perform to describe things we already had perfectly acceptable words for is absurd and rarely serves the person or thing being described.
As I understand it, "people with <x> genitalia" is a trans-accepting way of discussing medical issues without rejecting anyone's gender identification. Having a vagina is no longer considered necessary or sufficient to be called a "woman".
I’m not the OP, but I think we deeply erred by conflating gender and biological sex characteristics into a single word. Unfortunately, the solution to retain men/women for gender and use more specific terminology for sex is problematic.
- There’s a greater argument to be made for binary biological sex, and you can attach obvious descriptions to it to make the two categories distinct.
- Gender on the other hand is more fluid (both historically in its expression, and in between cultures).
- Biological based terminology can be used historically (e.g. Women’s History)
There are millions of discoveries per year because the universe has unbounded complexity and detail. Only a small subset of discoveries would ever impact someone.
I think a worse problem is the advertisement-based revenue stream and the analytics enabled by modern technology. They have to keep the audience’s attention, or their revenue dries up. So they try to maximize engagement, which often steers them in a direction that’s more about the feelings of the reader; what’s left is very little room for any serious thought.
There’s also the Twitter mob. If you don’t toe the line to some people’s preferred narratives you start losing advertisers and getting death threats.
I like people that can take something right in front of everyone’s eyes and figure something out that completely changes the way people think about the world. Thales and Herodotus come to mind.
When they try to change the way they’re viewed instead of bringing up relevant facts, you know that they know that they don’t have a leg to stand on.
I say we do to Facebook what JFK wanted to do to the CIA.
Imagine social media without a profit motive. Decentralize, distribute and encrypt the fuck out of it. I don’t want curated feeds, I want to keep in touch with people I know.
Are the battle outcomes fair comparisons? What if they had great warriors but poor decision makers? Could they have fought poorly matched battles for the sake of conserving resources, etc?
I don’t care about Sparta one way or another. But simply “looking at numbers” can be deceiving.
I highly recommend the linked series; it's accessible and fascinating.
The upshot though is: Think of battle at the time as being a little bit like some sort of bizarre college sport where everyone lines up, locked arms, and then smashes into each other. With, yes, weapons, but fatality rates were not enormous.
Spartiates - the tiny warrior elite of Sparta - are a bunch of very rich asshole frat boy jocks who are far too cool to train or anything, but that was fine because training doesn't really matter for a glorified shoving match, and nobody else was bothering to train either. What matters a bit more is that they spend every day living together, eating lots of meat, getting drunk, raping and torturing slaves, and if they feel like it, going hunting, so they're all beefy, well fed, fit, and can afford the very best gear. Also they have excellent cohesion thanks to all that bonding while drinking and/or torturing slaves, so man for man, they're pretty effective. Of course, these battles/shoving matches are big enough that they have to drag along a bunch of non-citizens and slaves and allies from other Greek city states to pad out the numbers, so that undercuts their advantage. Although note that Spartiates are by far the most prestigious, and there's a strict rule that both teams line up with the most prestigious on the right side, facing the enemies left side (where the weakest, poorest, and least prestigious units are slotted in).
So yes, individually, Spartiates were...well, not great warriors, but man for man they were the most effective fighters on the field, especially since they consistently faced the weakest opponents. But Spartan armies were not unusually effective, and Sparta as a polity failed to achieve its strategic objectives. History is full of glorious defeats where Spartiates lost impressively; so much so that in one famous instance where a bunch of Spartiates were captured by Athenians, they had to confirm that they were actually Spartans - not because they lost (that wasn't unexpected) but because they were expecting a doomed fight to the end.
So yes, Sparta was let down by truly horrible logistics and diplomacy, but their military record wasn't much better. Quite good at beating up their slaves and/or the weakest unit on the opposing army though, so there's that?
This description also works well for the bands of knights in the so-called age of chivalry.
It’s easy to be on the winning side when you’re cruising around on a horse, protected from random arrows and blows from unarmored people on foot, and hacking away at same from above with a sword or axe.
Spartan martial prowess wasn't anymore effective, individually or as a group than any other group of their time. Eating beef and raping slaves is simply not good enough reason to persist this mythology.
Carthaginian sacred band had better equipment, fitness, tactics and discipline, combined with a religious zeal that made their morale unbreakable. They also ate meat, whatever that's worth. Apart from a single dubious and assuredly propagandized solo account from well known liar in history, Sparta simply has no consistent feats to backup any of the mythology that has been popularized by comic books and movies.
By off chance, did you mean the Thebian Sacred Band? Since they did beat the Spartans, whereas the Carthaginian Sacred Band was a different era, and while known for being "elite" by we know them best by two defeats they suffered.
Are the battle outcomes fair comparisons? What if they had great warriors but poor decision makers? Could they have fought poorly matched battles for the sake of conserving resources, etc?
I don’t care about Sparta one way or another. But simply “looking at numbers” can be deceiving.
Does it matter, though? A loss is a loss. It doesn't matter if they lost because their warriors were weak, or if their leaders were poor strategists. They still lost, and a big part of the mythos around Sparta (at least to me) is that they were a city of strong warriors who won most of their battles.
