rohirwine
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Posts posted by rohirwine
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Ok, the bottum line for guns is. We Americans don't care what you Europeans and Canadians think about our owning guns. It;s my right to have guns and if the Government wants to take them, they'll have to pry them from my cold dead fingers. Because there WILL be a new Civil War if they tried.
I said a bloodier war in the 1800's *but of corse a European would forget that...*
Also:
Thats a classic European answer...
All you said was "Everything before 1865 had no impact on the way people think today."
Also, the US sufferd preaty badly in WWII just like everyone ells. INFACT: more American troops died in WWII then English, Dutch, and I think French.
Please stop being insulting towards a cathegory of forumers here.
This forums are not for rants, but for well mannered and rational discussion.
If you have to start a fight a boxing ring is a better suited place.
Thanks
Rohirwine
P.S. Klaas: USSR lost 24 milions during WWII.
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You think our forign policy has ticked people off... Many Americans *And other people like Africans* think the Europeans are trying to re-enstate imperialism.
Really? Ever been to Africa? Ever spoke with an African?
I've been to South Africa recently. I got the impression they were quite angered with G.W. Bush and Tony Blair for attacking Iraq and wanting to put a strong foothold over the biggest oil reserve of the world (at least it's so the geologists say). Obviously SA is far from being representative from the whole continent, the fact is that criticism is headed to governments, not countries, and it's not Europe against America, against Africa etc. Everyone has its share. I'm italian, so my government is responsible like yours in what is happening in Iraq. To tell the truth, it even slipped off a reserved government document that admitted that italian troops were sent to Nassirya because in that region an italian oil company had many interests. There was no need of such kind of documents to see that this kind of reasons were behind the whole reconstruction affair.
And in a way, it feels like you are... Look at it: You tell America to leave other nations alone. You tell Asians they need Human Rights *They do but that is another issue*, you tell Africans who they can and cannot trade with. You ignore South America. You insult Arab traditions. ...Don't you feel this is the simplest way to start a nice flame war?
From the outside you honestly look like you are trying to take over the world!People in the US and Africa and S. America think you're arogent! *They think were arogent as well but thats another issue*Same as above: you're putting too many "instant flame-war pills" on the table for my taste, dude.
In any case the fact that in Africa and in S.America think that both Europe and the US are arrogant is precisely the same issue: economic exploitation driven by western economic powers. This puts US and Europe in the same boat, i fear.
Now I'm sory but ya'll need to realize that the rest of the world honestly dosn't care anymore.You say people think our policy is "Condem the French, ignor the Germans, forgive the Russians"
Other people think you'rs is "Whien, whine, whine".
To be honest, one day ya'll are going to piss of some one who is going to Nuke you'r @#$%.
Sory for the rant...
Really? I feel that there is no use to tell "sorry for the rant" after attacking other peoples with nothing more that unbased invectives (without even trying to easen the tone with some more general terms than "you"): what has been said it's been said, you perfectly knew what you were saying and i'm sure you're perfectly able to understand this the tone and kind of "arguments" are quite in danger of offending or annoying someone.
This forum is for rational, well mannered discussion. If you have some issues and arguments you are free to explicate them and defend your point of view, if you are going to use this forum as your backyard to shout out your anger and despise towards everyone, it's better that you to find a better suited place.
I invite you to moderate your manners before someone feels annoyed , please.
Regards
Rohirwine
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Don't do that!
I mean: do not polish them unless you have a very professional consulence from someone.
Bronze is a strong corrosion resistant material, but today's polishers are somewhat very harmful to old metals. You can have it ruined by the process. Before polishing it, gather some information over the proper manner of doing that, please...
(But if you want, there's no problem in framing it, of course...
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Happy birthday dude!
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Try with: http://dougsmith.ancients.info/
It has some infos.
Unfortunately my paleograhy skills have almost left me and my numismatic ones never existed.... :/
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I believe the major reasons for the different viewpoints in Europe and America are:
1.) The U.S. was founded because citizens owned guns. Without citizen-ownership of firearms, there would never have been the battles around Boston in 1775 to start the Revolution. Early state militias were manned by citizen-soldiers who carried their own weapons (not unlike the Greek hoplites of old, methinks!).
Are you so sure about that? There are many cases in world's history (even recent one) where a nation gained its freedom from an oppressive occupant without starting from a widespread gun ownership, but building its military potential from almost zero.
I honestly think there are many other factors that made Americans overthrow British rule: economic, social , political. War is a consequence and is determined by politics, mostly (Klausewitz belived so, at least).
2.) The only major war to actually decimate parts of the U.S. was the Civil War - and it was never about guns. Since then, the American nation has never had to deal with the horrors of modern warfare, as the Europeans have.Hum, this is questionable too, at least if you did not intend US territory, but America as a Nation. In that case, US suffered quite a lot from WWII (much less from WWI) and psychologically even more from the Vietnam war.
3.) During the early years of America, the only way to defend one's family from hostile natives was to "pack heat."I confess i'm a bit ignorant over this matter, but i suspect that a better relationship with natives in the colonies early days could have eased thos problems a bit.
Anyway, in general, shooting is also a sport (i.e. target shooting), even if one can always resort on air propelled rifles and guns (no firearms really needed). So i don't condemn target shooting, but, as a general level , i suspect that if criminals think it's probable you have a gun with you, they'll shoot you before taking the risk of being shot themselves. From this point of view, gun ownership is not a dissuasion, but rather its contrary. I remember i read some scientific articles dealing with it on "Nature", but i frankly do not remember them clearly, so i won't quote them.
The Geneva Conventions: they are not a rule on how to kill. They have been developed to limit the bloodshed humanity experienced during WWII. To you the task of saying if they achieved their goal or not, but that's a fact. And, frankly, i'm quite happy they exhist, even if disregarded by the very signators of them. A least we have a sort of moral manifesto about what is and what isn't accepted by our ethics. Their greatest limit is that they did not regulated the dealing with informal combatants (i.e. partisans, guerrillas, call them whatever you want), while imho, these should be granted like other man-in-arms.
What i find quite annoying (politically speaking) is the refusal of the USA to have their citizens serving under arms being trialled by other nation's courts for crimes committed in those nations and involving those nation's citizens.
Some examples: the already mentioned killing of Nicola Calipari and injuring of Giuliana Sgrena (BTW: Calipary was not a bodyguard but a high level secret service officer), another case was the infamous eccide of the Cermis cable-way: two US Marines C. airmen flew their EA6B too low and cut the cables of the cableway. There were 20 deaths, none of them american. The US refusedto let their servicemen to be trialled in any one of the victim's nations (ITaly, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Austria, Poland. And trialed them in the USA. The outcome is not important here. What is important is that if an Italian, German soldier commits a crime in the USA, he is certainly to be judged in that country. This is not fair, imho.
Anyway: i'm going a bit
so i stop here. -
Yes, indeed, in Europe is generaly not allowed to shoot someone if he threatens you. You are only excused if it's possible to proove that you had to do it because in immediate danger of life.
The only thing that i have to say about this thread is that more guns around mean more deaths, imho.
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Well, i voted yes, before reading the whole thread, and now i feel i swung more to the NO side. Not because i'm against EU, on the contrary, because we need an EU deeply felt by it's citizens. That constitution is a sort of photocopy of the agendas of left-wing liberals(a la Gerhard Schroeder): you all see what is going on in Germany, following that sort of policies. And yes: allowing so many countries into the EU was a mistake, but it was done feeling that the danger of having them more tied to the USA than to EU was real (and in any case accepting them into the EU didn't work against this danger in most cases, imho)...
...European Union should be a political and social being before an economical and commercial one. They are doing it almost in the reverse order...
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Hmm, i must say i do not agree on allowing every dialect, patois regional language to become official on national scale, but i agree that it should have some chances of officiality at the regional level.
The problem is that, given the financial opportunities that this status gives (cultural projects, language courses, workplaces) it can easily lead to ask the "officiality" for languages that are actually nothing more than a dialect (it happened in my region, here in Italy).
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Hmm, i suspect the phoenician alphabet is more involved than the greek one (Etruscans had strong ties with Chartago and the phoenicians in general.
I forgot to mention the core region of their civilization was called "Etruria", then "Tuscia" (by latins), wich lately led to Tuscany. Many Tuscans today, regard themselves as descendants of Etruscans (but, imho it's a questionable point of view...).
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Yes, i suppose so.
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Etruscans (sp?: we call them Etruscs) didn't write in pure greek alphabet. More precisely: they knew greek alphabet but they used one of their own, obviously derived by the phenician one, so in some letters it resembled the old "linear B" one (as for an example: the theta was a sign similar to the celtic cross of our beloved 0 a. d.), in others it was similar to the greek one.
Historians are still quarrelling about who they were. It is quite clear their influence over the earlier Roman centuries and it's probable that a part of the original Rome population was of etruscan descent. Many religious and political institutions descended byetruscan counterparts (the Pontifex Maxismus as istance). In their apogeum, their zone of influence (they never had a centralized empire: they had a number of state-cities) spanned from Neaples to the foothills under the Alps. They beated the greeks from Massilia, with the help of the Phoenicians (in the naval battle of Alalia, begin of VI cent.), but were severely beaten by the Greeks of Cuma (in 474 b.c. irc).
After that stroke (wich affected mainly the Etruscans from Caere, today's Cerveteri) they constantly lost terrain and power till the coming of the great Celtic invasion (again V cent. b.c.) and in 320 b.c., wich shattered utterly their recuperating chances, wiping their position of power in the Po valley (northern Italy).
They are mainly known for their deep and somewhat shadowy conception of the afterlife, in wich they believed theyr deads contnued to live like in life. For this reason aristocrats had great and luxurious tobms built.
Building typologies were different and depended by artistic taste of the period, materials avaible and geographic conformations: they were all excavated underground in any case, and were all cluttered in Necropolis, usually in the immedieate outskirts of the cities.
They were both a shrine for the deads and a monument remembering the citizens the wealth, glory and power of the family wich commissioned them.
Etruscan language is still widely obscure. We are able to read some sentences mainly due a etruscan-phoenician bilingual golden plate founded near the coastal site of S.Severa (then known as Pyrgi) in Latium, but this is all we can do. Scholars are fairly sure it's not an indoeuropean language, but they are usure of the relations to other linguistic families.
(Wealthy) Etruscans were usually fond of fine potteries, jewelry, bronze tools and fine food. They run and extensive network of commercial contacts both with Phoenicians and Greeks. They probably involved most italic populations (Romans included) in their strugle to extend their commercial and political influence, bringing them not only domination and oppression (we must remember most sources were written by the roman point of view), but also teching them to read and write, spreading new tastes and technologies amongo those tribes (sheperd tribes, to be more precise) and making them discover new horizons(sorry for this little poetic licence...
)Edit: i forgot to mention theycalled themselves Rasena, or Rasne, and were called Tyrsena by the Greeks, noun that clearly led to later Tyrrenoi and finally to the name of the Tirrenian sea.
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I'll have to wait for a Mac version, i fear. Anyway:pictures looked awesome... !
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Well, the crowning of Chrlemagne was a sort of "coup de main" (dunno a suitable english expression...). In any case: the pope exploited Charlemagne arrival and crowning in Rome to make an highly simbolic deed: the church had the last word over crownings, this was the meaning. Actually hisorians doubt strongly that Charlemagne had this in mind when he decided to be crowned in Rome. He was somewhat fooled by that little rascal in white tunic...
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Do you think that the people thought otherwise than we think now? They didn't. Homo Sapiens Sapiens ALWAYS thinks alike (not: not equal, depends from person to person). People in the Middle Ages for exemple didn't think otherwise, they only didn't think as much filosophic as we do know, because they had their minds set on other things. You can say that we are more intellegent than the people back then, but you're wrong. We're better educated, agreed, but we only achieved our highly evolved society because that education, which gives us the ideas of people in the past.
As an history scholar and former biology student i completely disagree with this, sorry: people in the past thought with different perspectives and percieved reality in a much different way that we do. One of the hardest thing to do for historians is to dress the thinking habits of people of the past.
As i stated above (and the same did others), our analysis of truth are depply influenced by our culture, wich is something wich changes with time. Ethical values are not the same along centuries, even when they retain the same term.
As an example: democracy as intended by greeks had not the same meaning of today.
The only thing i agree upon is when you say that intelligence remained more or less equal over centuries and that people focused over different problems.
The fact is that we changesd our methods of thinking along with our ethical and moral values. To use logic, you have to learn it. It's not something innate.
And logic has been many times redefined over centuries and it's being redefined as we're talking right now.
It may be right that the human brain hasn't changed much from ancient times, the problem is that Nurture and not Nature is what defines wich kind of intelligence you'll exhert. And Nurture means culture, education, thinking systems and logical methods, wich, you must concede this, have changed much since Ancient Greece or Middle Ages.
As Gramsci defined it: culture (and human thinking in general) is a superstructure. Something not set by genetics, but by human society itself and its interactions with the outside world.
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Just an historical sidenote: priests could get married until the gregorian reform of the XI cent.
The reform had nothing to do with faith, but with power and ecclesiastic estates. Since high-priests (abbots, bishops, arch-bishops etc.) usually came from the nobility, and wanted to dispose of their possesions like every other feudal lord, it was of prime importance for the church to deny them the right to give in inheritance any of the possessions of the churches, abbeys, monastries and so on. Forbidding marriage (and expecially breeding
) was the logical move. This does not mean that priests ceased to have childrens and concubines, it rather implies that those sons were not recognized (i.e. they were considered illegittimate) and had no right over any estate or property of their natural father (guess who inherited those properties instead? 
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Humm, for what concerns me, i won't disturb Polybius for basing some political theory.
Imho, history never repeats (i.e. no circles): conditions change every time, so you technically cannot experience two exactly alike situations.
We are mostly influenced by our "culture" wich is an evolutive adaptation for survival. Culture evolves, so conditions under wich political changes occur evolve too. That's the main point, imho, and one of the reasons why a dictatorship exactly like Nazism or Fascism cannot take place once more: there could be something similar to _Nazism or Fascism, but nothing exactly like them (this doesn't mean we can "lower the guard", of course).
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Hmm,my first consideration is that, i'm for multiculturalism, at some conditions.
People asking for relativistic multiculturalism (i.e. everybody may retain his full cultural heritage and ask for it to be respected and granted in any case) are indeed asking us to go begin a nice clash of civilizations.
Some form of compromise must be accepted. Compromise is the key to peaceful coexhsitence, imho.
So, the main difference is the will to accept some compromises and to respect others. This should be the discriminating point, imho, while judging if someone is a hate-monger or simply a critical thinker.
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I'm not talking about movies, but newspapers.
In any case, the point is still there: if we doubt of every media (news, newspapers, radio broadcasts an the rest), we will eventually have no base to discuss upon.
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Well, if this is the case: nobody here knows for sure.
We are all talking about reported informations, aren't we?
Only Mrs. Schiavo knew for sure, and his husband, and people who confirmed his statement about her desire to be let to die.
I wonder if this sort of relativism can bring us to some point.
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Our media (in Italy) reported she expressed her will to be let to die in case she had to suffer from conditions like the ones she suffered (i.e. PVS).
Of course italian media can have reported the thing wrongly, but i doubt they all made a mistake.
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Hmm, i suppose that her will (confirmed by witnesses) to be let to die if her conditions were to become without any chance of recuperation, should be the issue here.
I would like that people let me die if i had to suffer from that kind of conditions. I've already lived this kind of situation, even worse, i have seen it happening to an alert (i.e. non-vegetative) close relative of mine.
He wanted to be let to die. Now i wish i could have done it (euthanasia it's illegal in Italy), and not let him feel humiliated by his conditions and experiencing the constant and progressive worsening of his physical and mental conditions.
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I like the idea of getting people arrested for what they actually do rather than what they think. That should always be the way.
Ok, let's take it from another point of view.
The police discovers a new mafia gang, responsible for a series of killings, robberies and other crimes.
They manage to get the material executors, but they also find evidence that a group of other people (in Italy usually called "the cupola") organized, planned the crimes and convinced (or ordered) those criminals to perpetrate those crimes.
I suspect that this kind of evidence sould bring those people (the bosses) directly to their comfortable, four stars, state financed residence (i.e. cells...
).I do not see any reason why the same logic (given similar evidences are found) has not to be applied in the field of political extremism.
In Italy, we had a big terrorism problem, as long as people responsible for organizing, instigating and orchestrating those terrorist attacks were considered prosecutable.
Let me propose another analogy.
Suppose Hitler never killed anyone during his political carreer, but still wrote Mein Kampf, ordered the jews extermination, imprisoned (and killed) political opponents and so on. Would we still consider him responsible or not?
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Hmm, well, as for the first part, i understand your point of view, but, imho, if those acts of violence have been istigated by extremist propaganda, those istigators must be prosecuted as well (for istigation and apology of crime: we do have such rule here in Italy, seldom applied though).
Regarding fascism: i fear we disagree here. The fact that in Italy things weren't so harsh (but, trust me, what is supposed to be widely known about it it's only the iceberg top), does not mean that ideologically fascism and nazism weren't siamese brothers. Maybe italians focused their racism against blacks and arabs (since we had colonies in that period), but trust me there was little difference in the principles behind mistreatment, exploiting, segregation and mass murdering of people colonized by Italy (yes, we had our own concentration and extermination camps in Libya before the war: 100.000 deaths, mostly women, children and old people). Can we forget that fact that there were mass murdering of Ethiopians during and after our aggression war? And wasn't that aggression the logical consequence of the principle that inferior people did not have the right to rule themselves as they wanted?
We had race laws launched in 1938. If you read them litterally, they were even more fierce in determining who was to be regarded as a jew (in comparison with nazi's Nuernberg laws) or as a <<negro>> (i'm sorry if anyone feels offended by this term, i used it only as an exact quote to explain how much we got depraved in our ethic sensibility).
The only luck that Europe got was that we did not have the resources nor the military and industrial power to even emulate what Germany committed. I assure you that Italy did not lack the will to follow the same path, it's only that we weren't able to stage nothing more than a cruel and tragic mockery of our bigger brother's new order.
Operation Iraqi Freedom
in Hall of Intellectuals
Posted
I'm pleased to share "europeans politics" too...
Imho, we experience a sort of dissociation between our politicians and the common people's view.
Some examples:
1)almost 70% of europeans felt the war in Iraq was wrong and that it had few or nothing to do with solving the problem of Al-Qaeda. Nevertheless some governments decided to follow G.W.B. in this "Iraqi freedom" enterprise. Of course, statistics change from country to country, and even in time. Nowadays i feel that that figure is quite representative.
2)Most european people feel the EU is too much focused over commercial and economic issues, and too eager to forget social issues. As a matter of facts, i suspect the vote in France had something to do with this. Nevertheless, in the european parliament, our representatives stubbornly continue to vote laws and rules to grant some economic powers some sort of profit, rather than protect european citizens by their appetite.
3)The enlargement of the EU: here i'll only stick to my opinion, since i do not have a clear figure of european public opinion in this matter.
The european politicians again, used mostly an economic meter to accept another country in the union. Imho, this is again a mistake: countries should adhere to a minimum of civil rights respect first, and then be asked to respect some economic parameters. Ths is the exact contrary of what is going on in Europe.
As for the general view that Klaas depicted, i agree with him.Wether i do not know much about belgian politics in Congo.
my two cents