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I know I've spoken in defense of WW2 books, but have you considered at least reading about other wars just to shake things up?

i like how dilbert is so low-key proud of the achievements of britain but has no interest whatsoever in, you know, the history of the british empire or european conflicts.

no wonder he talks about ‘white people’s racial ability to cooperate’. guy has evidently never read a single book of history ca. 1500-1880.

OK, I wasn't telling you to go read a book about WW1 instead of WW2, but the fact that you find it boring leads me to believe that you don't actually know that much about it. It's not called "the war that changed the world" for nothing. "WW1 is boring" is a take a middle schooler would have being ground into the dust by the endless dates and names in a packet stripped of its human element. Get over it and read some books. How can you claim to be a WW2 history buff and yet so fully dismiss the Great War?

the rest are americans being stupid.

Few people are aware that Alexander made it as far as America, but was stopped by the blessed second amendment.

World War 1 is interesting because it is basically the story of how western civilization destroyed itself at it's very height.


The curriculum that we use for World History starts with the French Revolution then moves onto the industrial revolution and new imperialism before getting to World War 1. I explain to the kids how advanced and far beyond the rest of the world the Europeans are before it all comes crashing down on them in 4ish years.

The kids then look at me and ask "why can't we learn about 2pac?"

how is history overtaking me, exactly? i read contemporary history; i previously used to edit it.

you really pursue the most farcical arguments. you DON'T read. what do you know? what the murdoch papers tell you? there there.

yes and it's the business of contemporary history to write and comment upon it.

how many book-length works have you read about the 21st century? how many novels, plays, tv shows, movies, documentaries, etc, have you consumed that takes the 21st century as its subject or focus? how many courses of formal education have you taken on contemporary culture or history?

you literally don't know what you're talking about. it's embarrassing.

i'm sure you are really 'in touch' with the 'real world'. a 50-year-old engineer who lives at home with his parents in an australian bungalow suburb. again, what connects you to global currents and the 'real world', exactly? murdoch media? really, what is it that keeps you so well apprised?

you're a fucking idiot.

People who study history don't get dilbert's respect because to dilbert, history isn't a respectable subject unless it's the 25th picturebook about the Western European theater of WW2.

I wish I was making this up.

the idea that studying history is going to gradually let you create a perfect, faultless, right-every-time political system is fatuous. it's liberal meliorism of the highest order. the 'liberal' conception of history, that is, of a gradual progression over time towards some ever-increasing level of achievement, 'the perfectibility of man', and so on, has been endlessly critiqued and debunked ... from within the discipline of history. it is a highly specific, enlightenment-tradition idea that was born in the 18th century and died the hardest of deaths after ww1/ww2.

we now see that it is perfectly possible for the most 'advanced' civilisations in the history of mankind to regress and revert to the very worst barbarism, sometimes in a rapid succession. weimar germany, the vienna of the dual-monarchy, belle epoque paris, imperial london, etc, were some of the most sophisticated and urbane societies that humanity has ever seen; and yet, it didn't stop the conflagration ... twice. that's a very salient point.

but to say that studying history is literally 'useless' is just plainly ridiculous. being aware of human situations and political conflicts in the past gives you a wellspring of wisdom, fact, precedent, from which to inform future decisions. there isn't a serious thinker on earth who would pretend that the best way to make political or social judgments is to go back to first principles, every time, and to come up with some de novo jugdement. that just isn't even how human intelligence works. even the pre-historical, mythical past is a vast repository of human wisdom which societies have passed down, one to another.

it's no accident that the first serious civilizations to ever emerge from mesopotamia were also the first to invent systems of writing, of recording things, and thus who carried a material conception of 'history'. all of the first literate civs, like the sumerians, looked back to pre-literate and pre-historical civilizations in their area.

great idea. let's all decide to 'forget history' and erase the past because 0.01% of people are psychopaths or megalomaniacs and who are obsessed with leaving a 'legacy'.

you know who else did a great deal of harm? totalitarian regimes who wanted to erase or rewrite history according to their narrow and unflinching precepts. like the soviet union, who wanted to cast all of culture as a narrow advert for their technocratic workers' utopia, presided over by ... engineers, scientists, and men of the Future.

It doesn't matter what kind of rune system you've created, or if you've invented the abacus or sundial - if you can't cook your food your civilisation is over.

doesn't your mum or sister still prepare all your meals? can you even cook and look after yourself? frankly i doubt it.

Last edited by uziq (2022-07-07 05:03:17)

if you'd read an anthropology, sociology or psychology book, you'd know that people are driven to do such things for all sorts of reasons. study power. study desire, the libido, the ego/superego/id, the death drive. study human societies and collectives. there's a lot more going on than 'i want to be remembered'. poets want to be remembered; shakespeare wrote sonnets to time. didn't need to kill or harm anyone in the process.

you're an adult. you need to really broaden your range of reference and imagination. you are a very, very trivial man.

Last edited by uziq (2022-07-07 05:22:48)

I don't really get your point, dilbert. If literacy and recorded memory of civilization were to disappear overnight, people would still find reasons to brutally maim and kill their neighbors.

Why read any books at all? Especially WW2? I'm worried you might decide to become the next Mussolini for your love of the subject.

Dilbert_X wrote:

An you're simply wrong.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ … sian-lands

History books are clearly the problem here.

where did i deny that putin has been reading about peter the great and getting ideas? people look to the past, invented or real, to sustain their own lies and delusions all the time. johnson fancied himself churchill. hannibal and caesar sought to emulate alexander the great.

but if you think someone's actual motivation and impetus, the reason they commit to sending 10,000s of their citizens to die, is 'to be in a history book like peter the great one day' ... oh my god, learn to use your fucking head, my guy.

putin has also been highly influenced by modern political theorists like Dugin. much more relevant to shaping putin's worldview than, erm, peter the bloody great. putin was substantially shaped by his experience in the KGB, which explains a lot more about his worldview, his attitudes to the west, and his basic psychological make-up than, erm ... peter the bloody great.

putin's 'imperial russia revival' is a symptom of an ageing, likely ailing, old man spending years alone reading books during the pandemic. he got a few ideas in his head that obviously reinforce ... a lifetime of ideas, feelings, attitudes that he has developed. it clearly complements and gives a grandeur to ideas and feelings, resentments i should say, that he has harboured for years. of course! recapturing the glory of imperial russia! that's a fine drape for his reheated cold war geopolitics.

you are thick as mince, i swear.

Last edited by uziq (2022-07-07 05:38:14)