• Sign up or login, and you'll have full access to opportunities of forum.

Milestones

Go to CruxDreams.com
I am automatically suspicious of any country which has "Democratic" in its title. It is usually euphemistic at best and often meaning entirely the opposite, rather like "industrial action"
I agree. Any here live in the dear, departed Deutsche Demokratische Republik?

On to a true Milestone:
Four Hundred Years ago on November 11th (their calendar), or November 23rd (ours) refugees from the religious persecutions under James I (VI - Eul), anchored on the ship Mayflower, just within what is now Provincetown Bay (part of Massachusetts Bay),
signed an agreement for ordering the colony they were about found. Known today as the Mayflower Compact, it sought to form “a civil body politic,” even though the signers were all devotedly religious. Importantly, their new political community would be framed by “just and equal laws” — laws that would apply without discrimination to all their members. Here, at the very beginning of the American story, one can discern the concepts of equal justice and government by consent of the governed.

1533px-The_Mayflower_Compact_1620_cph.3g07155.jpg
 
1533px-The_Mayflower_Compact_1620_cph.3g07155.jpg
A bunch of white middle-class men, with a woman to make the tea.
Has anything really changed?
 
Aesthetically it's a fail,
View attachment 925654
because well yes, that is an attempt at a direct figurative representation, (it's not 'abstract' or 'transcending' or anything)
I think only that the "hairball" in the middle is aesthetically wrong. I like the expression of the face, it shows a somewhat separated and confident, probably even arrogant female. It is the kind of female which if you like them to get rid of vou simply have to flirt with her. I used that "trick" often by women working for the police or security services.
 
I agree. Any here live in the dear, departed Deutsche Demokratische Republik?

On to a true Milestone:
Four Hundred Years ago on November 11th (their calendar), or November 23rd (ours) refugees from the religious persecutions under James I (VI - Eul), anchored on the ship Mayflower, just within what is now Provincetown Bay (part of Massachusetts Bay),
signed an agreement for ordering the colony they were about found. Known today as the Mayflower Compact, it sought to form “a civil body politic,” even though the signers were all devotedly religious. Importantly, their new political community would be framed by “just and equal laws” — laws that would apply without discrimination to all their members. Here, at the very beginning of the American story, one can discern the concepts of equal justice and government by consent of the governed.

View attachment 927610
Except it wasn't the beginning of the story for the Wampanoag, who'd been around at Patuxet (that these incomers were calling 'Plymouth') for 12,000 years or so.

A bunch of white middle-class men, with a woman to make the tea.
Has anything really changed?
:tejeqteje: she's knitting too - multi-tasking!
 
Maybe if he was living today, but he isnt, furthermore in 500bc I dont recall in any book the term "Turks"
And if the Persians had won the battle, Athens (which they had just left in ruins) would never have been restored - so Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Thucydides, Herodotus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and a great many more who laid the foundations of Western civilisation would never have flourished, and the world we live in today would certainly be a very different one.
 
Well it would be very different indeed, better or worse none can answer that.
That would be a huge butterfly effect and the 2500 years followed would be very different.
The persians hadnt the principles of democracy and the rest but they had developed many sciences as good as greeks. mathematics, physics, geometry, medicine etc.
 
An historic milestone when The Prince of Wales laid a wreath for the German war dead, and spoke to the Bundestag, partly in German:


Needless to say, some anti-Euro British newspapers are saying he is getting involved in politics, but since when has friendship and reconciliation been forbidden?
 
Well it would be very different indeed, better or worse none can answer that.
That would be a huge butterfly effect and the 2500 years followed would be very different.
The persians hadnt the principles of democracy and the rest but they had developed many sciences as good as greeks. mathematics, physics, geometry, medicine etc.
Indeed, a lot of what is thought of as the achievement of Greece (and more particularly Athens) in philosophy and science was simply the western end of a continuum extending through the Persian Empire- with its cultural and intellectual foundations in the earlier civilisations of Mesopotamia - and beyond to India.
 
Hm, I was always astonished when I read, about "what everything" the Greek city states decided in democratic votes when they had democracies.
The building of all the temples of the Acropolis in Athens and how they had to look like, the rebuilding of cities after wars etc., all of this was decided in democratic votes and now imagine how much time and even more taste all these "simple" people must have had when they decided about the look of their cities in the future and the look of theatres for their future and how impressive all these remaining ruines are for us until today.

So, maybe, this knowledge and the pride of their Greek self-determination was the only reason why they fought so bitterly for the first time in European history for something so "abstract", "irreal", "new" and "unknown" in those times but what we call today "freedom" and "liberty".

And in this context, the battle(s) of Thermopylae was/were possibly the most decisive and most legendary of all battles in European history because of its inspirational example in history.
The Greeks were the first on the European continent who fought for this strange and abstract ideal of "personal liberty" and "freedom from a foreign king" who did not speak their language and could not at all understand what these strange Greeks were fighting for.

 
THERMOPYLAE
View attachment 928860
the battle of the “Hot Gates”..
Will the Persians be able to penetrate this tight, moist cleft in the landscape.. or will 300 babes in metal g-strings be able to keep their rock-girt crevice unviolated? :eek:

There are so many untold stories in human history of which I would really like to know the plain truth and -for example- I did not know how hot the gates there really were!

By the way, I remember to have heard from the Iranian government in 2006 to plan a 'movie-counter-representation' to "300", when this movie was in the Western cinemas:

I guess, the Iranian counter-representation was too expensive and we have to live with many historical lies for a long time.

Another famous example for such a common lie is the story of "Little Red Riding Hood", which was really rejected by an Italian legal court. As far as I know, in Italy, even fictional characters can be judged by legal courts as long as there is public interest and someone who was probably traumatized by this fairy-tale in his or her childhood, made a legal complaint against this "little fairy-tale-slut with her exciting red clothes and caps".

Believe it or not, the Italian court found the poor wolf "innocent" and to be a victim of the bad defamation of the "Little Red Riding Hood" and her family!
There even was a German newspaper story - "The Affair of the Little Red Riding Hood" - about that Italian court decision some decades ago, because we Germans were absolutely shocked that our fairy-tale's female hero was in fact a little criminal "Lolita" although many of our German animal rights activists were celebrating because they always claimed this special poor wolf must have been absolutely innocent:


So, we see, justice can be done even centuries after "fictional" crimes and truth will always triumph in the end!

(By the way: In German, this fairy-tale is simply named "Rotkäppchen" = "Little Red Cap". Why is it in English "Little Red Riding Hood" and why or on what is she "riding" and what is the "hood"?)
 
Last edited:
The earliest version of the story that gives her a red head-covering is Charles Perrault's 'Le petit chaperon rouge' - I think 'un chaperon' could be any sort of child's headwear. Rotkäppchen would be a translation from that, and the earliest English versions seem to have called her Little Red-Cap. I can't find when the 'Riding Hood' was introduced, but I guess the bouncy rhythm of 'Little Red 'Riding Hood' is more appealing than the rather dumpy 'Little Red Cap'. As you say, at no point in the story does she ride anything.
 
The earliest version of the story that gives her a red head-covering is Charles Perrault's 'Le petit chaperon rouge' - I think 'un chaperon' could be any sort of child's headwear. Rotkäppchen would be a translation from that, and the earliest English versions seem to have called her Little Red-Cap. I can't find when the 'Riding Hood' was introduced, but I guess the bouncy rhythm of 'Little Red 'Riding Hood' is more appealing than the rather dumpy 'Little Red Cap'. As you say, at no point in the story does she ride anything.
Or get ridden!!!
 
Back
Top Bottom