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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 10h

They certainly can. You'd rather they didn't though.

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 10h

I don't have it to hand, but I've seen arguments that labor-saving advances in male-coded fields tend to be used to create more leisure time, whereas advances in female-coded household activities tend to just raise 'standards' - the new time is consumed by a higher bar of 'respectable.'

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 10h

Most modern workers today have no such excuse, but lingering social norms leave men working fewer hours on household tasks, though my understanding is that gap closes a little with each generation.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 10h

One point that seems relevant to me in that comparison is that in a lot of cases, you could at least understand part of the male/female labor divide in peasant households being due to the fact that agricultural labor could be so physically demanding that a human body can only work fewer hours.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 10h

So it seems to me the truth of it is 1) few if any people in modern industrial countries work harder than medieval peasants but 2) medieval peasant women worked more hours than the men and 3) modern American women, at least, work more hours on average than men, when household labor is considered.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 13h

The emotional and social mechanics of a war against an external foe, however unjust the war and the cause, are very different from an internal war.

No Russian soldier is going to go home to their family in Ukraine, but a lot of American soldiers expect to go home to their families in NY, CA, etc.

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Reposted by "Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux

Stephen DeCasien, Ph.D. @sdecasien.bsky.social · 1d

Four years since starting the Ancient Naval Casting Project! Finishing the bow, the beeswax model, and casting it was the highlight of my PhD. Hopefully future projects will be as rewarding.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 15h

And that's before the very obvious situation where someone who is a sole-caregiver or sole-breadwinner for a minor child who can't care for themselves might be unwilling to risk arrest if they don't have some sort of strong communal support structure they can be 110% sure will look after their kid.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 15h

So it doesn't seem to me particularly controversial to note that accepting a major time commitment and responsibility for a small human who cannot meaningfully consent to situations that might risk violence would limit someone's ability to engage in protest.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 15h

In really simple terms, for instance, my decision to try to go to an Oct 18 No Kings protest initiates a negotiation: either my spouse needs to be watching the kiddo, or we need to arrange a babysitter. Babysitting time is neither infinite nor generally free.

Follow-on decisions and costs ensue.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 15h

This feels oddly confrontational for the simple observation that you'd expect the parents of young children to be somewhat less represented at protests than the elderly or younger adults.

Which is just obviously true to anyone who currently has or has raised kids?

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 16h

I mean, sure but we're not fighting for the soul of the ICE goon. ICE is not decisive. ICE goons, supported by the military, can suppress nation-wide protests. ICE alone, with the military standing aside or opposed, cannot.

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Reposted by "Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux

George Gantsoudes @pedsortho.bsky.social · 1d

Please remember that the disgust people have over Christopher Columbus is not based on some modern, 21st century “woke” ideology, but rather on contemporaneous accounts of atrocities that make many modern genocides appear quaint in comparison.

Below, are the accounts of Bartlomé de las Casas.

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had in-vested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died.
While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.
Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides... they ceased to pro-create. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and fam-ished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desper-ation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fer-tile... was depopulated... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write....

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 18h

It's a boutique publisher.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 18h

Reminding me I have to start my little one on the Children's Illustrated Clausewitz (a real thing that really exists: www.helios.house/books/childr...) early, so she can learn basic things many security 'professionals' have failed to, like, 'what is war and what is it for, exactly?'

Dead Carl @deadcarl.bsky.social · 18h

There’s the joke about Sun Tzu being basic instructions for idiots like “feed your troops” but the most important part of Clausewitz is also just “think about what you are actually trying to accomplish”

brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 18h

What I love about our habit of confusing Means for Ways is that we also confuse Ways for Ends.

Innovation is entirely neutral.

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Reposted by "Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux

Mira of Kyiv 🇺🇦 @reshetz.bsky.social · 18h

Guys a donation a day keeps the russian away

Oksii ✚ 🇺🇦 @oksii33.ukr.monster · 1d

Our awesome Finnish friend proposed us a huge matching up to €5000, but we still didn’t get it (€825 to go), we need to get it by tomorrow💙💛

send.monobank.ua/jar/3Zuzxk994D
PayPal [email protected]

Need your €5🫣

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 18h

This is kinda why I put 'rate' in scare quotes, because I don't understand why we'd 'expect' a 'rate' at all. It's not clear to me how we'd estimate or expect a 'rate' of ideas or even how we'd quantify it.

It is clear to me that our knowledge as a species continues to grow.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 19h

The fact that it does in humanistic fields might suggest they're not quite as post-truth subjective as some folks think.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 19h

I'd say 'become an academic,' but you've already checked that box, so I have no further suggestions.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 19h

But that's not the same as saying 'nothing new is happening.'

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 19h

...wouldn't we expect the amount of field-disrupting new knowledge to decrease as a factor of time under conditions where new knowledge is being generated? There ought to be diminishing marginal returns to knowledge creation as easier insights are reached first.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 20h

H. van Wees, Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities (2004), @roelkonijn.bsky.social Classical Greek Tactics (2018), and Roel's bibliography for everything between.

For an outline of the early phases of the debate, E.L. Wheeler, "Land Battles" in the Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare (2007).

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 20h

More on this from me: acoup.blog/2023/12/22/c...

Collections: How Many People? Ancient Demography

One of the first questions anyone asks about past societies is, ‘how many people were there?’ It is one of those basic bits of information and generally speaking those of us who teach t…

acoup.blog

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 20h

Meanwhile, McEvedy and Jones (1978), the dataset anyone not a classicist is going to use for historical population in the deep past has it at 2.5m for all of Greece, which is bonkers low and mostly based on Beloch and I think clearly wrong and yet 'consensus.'

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 20h

M.H. Hansen did an estimate by polis-count, and came up with 4-6m for Greece and you can still feel him choking back on his assumptions, rather than just rolling out and saying, "Beloch is wrong! The real number was *double* what he thought!" though that is the implication of the numbers.

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