There’s also no such thing as a “right to exist”. That was a very smart PR line cooked up by the Israeli government. No such thing is in international law. A state exists, or it doesn’t. No state has such a right, it’s only brought up surrounding Israel because of a concerted push by their advocates to muddy the…

Here’s how I read this;

Probably fair, but I don’t know her exact relationship with either the Neo-Pagan community or how much Native American stuff she appropriates (I’m sure as hell not paying for her books). 

This woman is gross, and reminds me of manipulative and egocentric New Age charlatans who used to start mini-cults loosely associated with the Neo-Pagan community. Usually while stealing liberally from various traditions, especially Native Americans, and describing themselves as persecuted when people decried their…

I think you’re misunderstanding your citation. The stealing aspect goes all the way back to Latin, which was long dead as a spoken language by the 13th century. That is tracing the origin of the English word to French circa that time, which is probably when it is first attested, and it seems to maintain the “seize…

I’m honestly not sure. I’ve been focused in other directions for awhile. I do remember that most people, analysts and academics, took it fairly seriously when Gaddafi threatened mass murder. He had the ability, and once he started calling people in the east “rats” and the like it looked like he’d hit the psychological…

The way some of your comments were worded struck me as fueling the myth. I do think we’re in agreement in general. Though, FYI, the “Dark Ages” is a term most historians abandoned awhile ago. It’s a problematic term because people misunderstood the intent.

Branching out from awful soccer takes into the political sphere. He could be on Fox News in 6 months and I wouldn’t bat an eye. 

I can’t say it’s entirely accurate, but there was very good reason to revise the figures down, including mass graves that were exhumed and found to be much smaller than previously thought.

We don’t know. Livy suggests they may have, but Livy is a bit of a fabulist. We don’t know they were forcibly abducted, as I said on another post. There’s circumstantial evidence that they could have consented, but it’s far from definitive. The entire story may be an invention trying to tie the Romans to the Sabines…

War had an entirely different social, religious, and political framework than just killing people. That comparison is really problematic. How societies justified warfare varied, but war is not just a larger scale of murder when talking about psychology and socio-cultural logic. 

I don’t think you can write off Livy, despite his biases, precisely because I know there are parallels in other Indo-European societies. I mentioned that in another comment, but “marriage by abduction” generally involves the consent of the women. That’s not proof Livy is telling the truth by any means, but the tribal…

I stated my “angle” clearly. You’re fueling the “dark past” myth by making broad generalized claims based on projecting modern information onto the past. It’s bad history.

They got married, and later were a key variable in brokering peace between the Romans and the Sabines because they didn’t want their husbands or their kin to die. The Sabines agreed to combine with Rome, and settled with the Romans. You could have found this out on Wikipedia.

I saw the downgraded numbers. I wrote a paper arguing that the invocation of R2P was probably invalid given the lower numbers, based on the initial paper proposing R2P. Though that was after the fact, and no one had any reason to doubt those numbers given Gaddafi’s behavior.

The brilliant philosopher of the modern right, everyone.

I’m not, it’s a problem, but the evidence it existed in the past is, as far as I know, thin. I’m sure it did happen in the past, there will always be abusive men, but on the level of the modern societies? No. The status of women fundamentally took a nosedive in the early modern period, removing legal rights they’d…

Most political nicknames are dumb. But it makes a good soundbite, and it’s stuck, so it’d be political malpractice to abandon it while it still has use.

Status and wealth matter. I’d argue ancient laws that provide no recourse for low status women who are raped, whether slaves or some other form of low status, isn’t terribly different than how police treat prostitutes now. They’re low status, often abuse and trafficked, and generally have no real recourse inside the…

It’s not impossible, but I think that framing is skewed. It can be technically true while still remaining misleading, particularly his usage. It’s also impossible to know. But it still feeds the “dark past” myth that people like King use to diminish their own dangerous views.