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Feb. 1st, 2014 03:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* TW: Torture. A leader of the Ukrainian protests was kidnapped and... they are saying held prisoner and beaten, but the severity of the wounds and the whole keeping him in darkness thing looks like torture to me. He has been released alive, but several others have disappeared and the bodies looked to have been tortured to death.
* Congress voted to cut 8.7 billion dollars of food assistance to children, veterans, seniors, and the working poor as feeding people is "stealing, but disclosing how much money Congress people are personally getting in farm insurance corporate welfare to big agro-business and insurance, as taking food out of the mouths of poor people to give to millionaires and billionaires somehow is not stealing since only the rich and the corporations are people. Remember, Congress People deserve a guaranteed income for their outside businesses, but school children don't deserve a guaranteed enough to eat or enough heat in their homes in winter. Amy Clobishar claims taking $90.00 a month out of the pockets of people making less than subsistence thanks to the low minimum wage "doesn't effect most of the people in this country." After all these are 850 thousand of the poorest people in this country, not corporate people or rich people, who are deserving of our charity, being already rich and therefore not needing the charity we are giving them. as making people chose between heating and food does not harm rich people or corporate people. Yet more proof that people who work for a living aren't considered human by Republicans. Remember, they insist that this cruelty is necessary because it is what Jesus would do.
* Yet more on various rich people claiming that being asked to pay a fair share of tax is exactly like the Holocaust.
* On the Racial Implications of the Atlanta metro area snow response. "Atlantageddon: Snow response brings blowback:"
* "The FBI Just Busted the King of Revenge Porn:" http://gawker.com/revenge-porn-kingpin-hunter-moore-arrested-by-fbi-1507555135?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_facebook&utm_source=gawker_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
* "Eating nuts caused tooth decay in hunter-gatherers:" http://phys.org/news/2014-01-nuts-tooth-hunter-gatherers.html
* "Unique Neolithic child cemetery found in Egypt:" http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/01/2014/unique-neolithic-child-cemetery-found-in-egypt
* "Neolithic mural may depict ancient eruption:" http://phys.org/news/2014-01-neolithic-mural-depict-ancient-eruption.html
* "Royal tomb from Second Intermediate Period discovered in Upper Egypt:" http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/9/40/91062/Heritage/Ancient-Egypt/Royal-tomb-from-Second-Intermediate-Period-discove.aspx
* "Discovery of ancient Egyptian tomb of Khonsuemheb:" http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140108170515.htm
* "Ancient Greeks Used Portable Grills at Their Picnics:" http://www.livescience.com/42414-ancient-cooking-mycenaeans-portable-grills.html
* Above Average Plausible, but absent a body we are unlikely to ever know. Another Alexander the Great Poisoning Theory: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11184474
* "War elephant myths debunked by DNA:" http://phys.org/news/2014-01-war-elephant-myths-debunked-dna.html
* "Uncannily Lifelike Roman Masks Recreated in Wax:" http://www.livescience.com/42334-lifelike-roman-wax-masks-recreated.html
* rysmiel@lj made a comment pertinent to the conversation about the slaughter of peasants and food storage in A Song of Ice and Fire vs. RL Medieval warfare in a comment thread, which I'm putting here with permission so more people have a chance to see it and my response.
rysmiel@lj: I do think GRRM is trying to consciously do something with degenerate feudalism that is in a non-sustainable state toppling towards collapse which nobody in it realises, though. There's quite a lot of backstory in ASoIaF that makes not a blind bit of sense, but I do feel that the last couple of books are intentionally dropping hints that a fiar bit of that is the people of Westeros mythologising their past rather than their actual past.
Me: That makes sense. I'm only halfway through three. I do think the situation as depicted with them slaughtering all peasants they encounter might or might not make tactical sense, but long term fucks them over from both a food production/storage perspective (Winter is coming!) and a political/able to hold territory sense.
Does that mean people don't do stupid violent things that lead to eating the seed corn literally? No. However, in RL situations, these sorts of things are either short term measures, a genocide against one segment of the population thing, or early modern or modern things that require a whole other level of resources and organization than a medieval society can maintain or even create (depending on things like population, technology, infrastructure, etc.). Even in those situations you get massive depopulation in the effected area.
It could only be drastically worse with the really long seasons alluded to in the books. Given real world civilizations in the RL past that delt well with multiple year food storage for multiple year famines, you need an extremely strong centralized government, a large standing army, and a massive bureaucratic organization to handle taxation/food tithing/food storage/Food distribution. RL Feudal type governments tend to have a lot of distributed power with a variable, but often weak centralized government, weak taxation/bureaucratic infrastructure compared to more centralized systems, little or no standing army, and are notoriously bad at handling multi-year famines. Basically, your classic Feudal government does not tax/make people tithe every year in sufficient quantity to store up a five, ten, or even forty year grain supply and distribute it in years when the crops are bad so that pretty much everyone can subsist. Instead, rich people have enough to eat, the middle class tighten their belts, and the lower classes starve and occasionally cannibalize each other if you get a run of bad weather luck. You get boom and bust population curves as a result, even when the over all arc of a century or multiple centuries are generally curving in one direction, you can get some big fluctuations and extreme hardship in regions that are particularly hard hit or that rely on food imports from regions that are hard hit.
As I've been reading ASoIaF and/or watching the show, I am constantly worried about what the hell they are going to be eating at mid-winter if they are burning so many fields and/or killing all the people harvesting what is likely to be the last good crop for years. When I say this I mean it is literally on my mind pretty much all the time. Maybe this is particularly worrisome to me because I've read the RL accounts of the disruption, depopulation, and misery caused by "The Year without a Summer." Also, I know pretty intimately how bad it got when they simultaneously had several years where it rained so much the crops rotted in a large swath of Northern Europe, while a particularly deadly sheep and cattle murrain was going on, both of which were made worse by a particularly virulent influenza epidemic that meant labor intensive measures to, say, prevent sheep that were not sick from drowning when when the river overflowed it bank from the same rain that was destroying the crops. The resulting starvation left survivors, particularly those who were still growing and developing what would become their adult immune systems, with a chronic weakness against epidemic disease a couple decades later when the great pestilence came along. Similarly, I've studied fairly closely the depopulation spiral of the late Roman Empire/Early Middle Ages transition, and the mulch-generational one that came from round after round of the Great Pestilence coming to kill the young that culminated in the deep dip around 1400. So many peasants are dead and uprooted in Westeros by where I am in book three that I'm imagining a Greenland style die off in the North made worse by civil war, invasion, zombies, and the multi-year winter thing to the point there should be hardly anyone or no one left when Summer comes again, with a pretty extreme dip in the Southern provinces of Westeros where I'm assuming more food is surviving storage and presumable they are getting little summers inside the Big Winter. To me, the horrible part of them burning Winterfell, isn't the emotional loss, but the loss of what I'm assuming were massive grain stores intended to feed everyone in the region over the big Winter (and in part the old unique manuscripts, but that always bugs me whatever the context). While they don't mention where exactly thee stores are or that they even explicitly exist, but I can't see how the couldn't if anyone survived previous winters up there ever.
I'm not saying that GRRM isn't doing this intentionally. I don't know him personally and I haven't read all the books. In fact, I'm rather hoping he IS doing it intentionally. That way their is hope of it all making some sort of sense at the end. If it's not intentional... well, there are serious problems and I'm going to be pretty damned pissed off at some point in the future when the last one is published.
In other words, both what you are positing and what was being discussed in that thread can easily both be true. I am hoping that they are.
* Today is more box and furniture tetris, with extra laundry and floor cleaning as the white cats were having some sort of competition to see who could vomit in the most places.
* "The Few, The Fervent: Fans Of 'Supernatural' Redefine TV Success:" http://www.npr.org/2014/01/15/262092791/the-few-the-fervent-fans-of-supernatural-redefine-tv-success
* Congress voted to cut 8.7 billion dollars of food assistance to children, veterans, seniors, and the working poor as feeding people is "stealing, but disclosing how much money Congress people are personally getting in farm insurance corporate welfare to big agro-business and insurance, as taking food out of the mouths of poor people to give to millionaires and billionaires somehow is not stealing since only the rich and the corporations are people. Remember, Congress People deserve a guaranteed income for their outside businesses, but school children don't deserve a guaranteed enough to eat or enough heat in their homes in winter. Amy Clobishar claims taking $90.00 a month out of the pockets of people making less than subsistence thanks to the low minimum wage "doesn't effect most of the people in this country." After all these are 850 thousand of the poorest people in this country, not corporate people or rich people, who are deserving of our charity, being already rich and therefore not needing the charity we are giving them. as making people chose between heating and food does not harm rich people or corporate people. Yet more proof that people who work for a living aren't considered human by Republicans. Remember, they insist that this cruelty is necessary because it is what Jesus would do.
* Yet more on various rich people claiming that being asked to pay a fair share of tax is exactly like the Holocaust.
* On the Racial Implications of the Atlanta metro area snow response. "Atlantageddon: Snow response brings blowback:"
* "The FBI Just Busted the King of Revenge Porn:" http://gawker.com/revenge-porn-kingpin-hunter-moore-arrested-by-fbi-1507555135?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_facebook&utm_source=gawker_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
* "Eating nuts caused tooth decay in hunter-gatherers:" http://phys.org/news/2014-01-nuts-tooth-hunter-gatherers.html
* "Unique Neolithic child cemetery found in Egypt:" http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/01/2014/unique-neolithic-child-cemetery-found-in-egypt
* "Neolithic mural may depict ancient eruption:" http://phys.org/news/2014-01-neolithic-mural-depict-ancient-eruption.html
* "Royal tomb from Second Intermediate Period discovered in Upper Egypt:" http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/9/40/91062/Heritage/Ancient-Egypt/Royal-tomb-from-Second-Intermediate-Period-discove.aspx
* "Discovery of ancient Egyptian tomb of Khonsuemheb:" http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140108170515.htm
* "Ancient Greeks Used Portable Grills at Their Picnics:" http://www.livescience.com/42414-ancient-cooking-mycenaeans-portable-grills.html
* Above Average Plausible, but absent a body we are unlikely to ever know. Another Alexander the Great Poisoning Theory: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11184474
* "War elephant myths debunked by DNA:" http://phys.org/news/2014-01-war-elephant-myths-debunked-dna.html
* "Uncannily Lifelike Roman Masks Recreated in Wax:" http://www.livescience.com/42334-lifelike-roman-wax-masks-recreated.html
* rysmiel@lj made a comment pertinent to the conversation about the slaughter of peasants and food storage in A Song of Ice and Fire vs. RL Medieval warfare in a comment thread, which I'm putting here with permission so more people have a chance to see it and my response.
rysmiel@lj: I do think GRRM is trying to consciously do something with degenerate feudalism that is in a non-sustainable state toppling towards collapse which nobody in it realises, though. There's quite a lot of backstory in ASoIaF that makes not a blind bit of sense, but I do feel that the last couple of books are intentionally dropping hints that a fiar bit of that is the people of Westeros mythologising their past rather than their actual past.
Me: That makes sense. I'm only halfway through three. I do think the situation as depicted with them slaughtering all peasants they encounter might or might not make tactical sense, but long term fucks them over from both a food production/storage perspective (Winter is coming!) and a political/able to hold territory sense.
Does that mean people don't do stupid violent things that lead to eating the seed corn literally? No. However, in RL situations, these sorts of things are either short term measures, a genocide against one segment of the population thing, or early modern or modern things that require a whole other level of resources and organization than a medieval society can maintain or even create (depending on things like population, technology, infrastructure, etc.). Even in those situations you get massive depopulation in the effected area.
It could only be drastically worse with the really long seasons alluded to in the books. Given real world civilizations in the RL past that delt well with multiple year food storage for multiple year famines, you need an extremely strong centralized government, a large standing army, and a massive bureaucratic organization to handle taxation/food tithing/food storage/Food distribution. RL Feudal type governments tend to have a lot of distributed power with a variable, but often weak centralized government, weak taxation/bureaucratic infrastructure compared to more centralized systems, little or no standing army, and are notoriously bad at handling multi-year famines. Basically, your classic Feudal government does not tax/make people tithe every year in sufficient quantity to store up a five, ten, or even forty year grain supply and distribute it in years when the crops are bad so that pretty much everyone can subsist. Instead, rich people have enough to eat, the middle class tighten their belts, and the lower classes starve and occasionally cannibalize each other if you get a run of bad weather luck. You get boom and bust population curves as a result, even when the over all arc of a century or multiple centuries are generally curving in one direction, you can get some big fluctuations and extreme hardship in regions that are particularly hard hit or that rely on food imports from regions that are hard hit.
As I've been reading ASoIaF and/or watching the show, I am constantly worried about what the hell they are going to be eating at mid-winter if they are burning so many fields and/or killing all the people harvesting what is likely to be the last good crop for years. When I say this I mean it is literally on my mind pretty much all the time. Maybe this is particularly worrisome to me because I've read the RL accounts of the disruption, depopulation, and misery caused by "The Year without a Summer." Also, I know pretty intimately how bad it got when they simultaneously had several years where it rained so much the crops rotted in a large swath of Northern Europe, while a particularly deadly sheep and cattle murrain was going on, both of which were made worse by a particularly virulent influenza epidemic that meant labor intensive measures to, say, prevent sheep that were not sick from drowning when when the river overflowed it bank from the same rain that was destroying the crops. The resulting starvation left survivors, particularly those who were still growing and developing what would become their adult immune systems, with a chronic weakness against epidemic disease a couple decades later when the great pestilence came along. Similarly, I've studied fairly closely the depopulation spiral of the late Roman Empire/Early Middle Ages transition, and the mulch-generational one that came from round after round of the Great Pestilence coming to kill the young that culminated in the deep dip around 1400. So many peasants are dead and uprooted in Westeros by where I am in book three that I'm imagining a Greenland style die off in the North made worse by civil war, invasion, zombies, and the multi-year winter thing to the point there should be hardly anyone or no one left when Summer comes again, with a pretty extreme dip in the Southern provinces of Westeros where I'm assuming more food is surviving storage and presumable they are getting little summers inside the Big Winter. To me, the horrible part of them burning Winterfell, isn't the emotional loss, but the loss of what I'm assuming were massive grain stores intended to feed everyone in the region over the big Winter (and in part the old unique manuscripts, but that always bugs me whatever the context). While they don't mention where exactly thee stores are or that they even explicitly exist, but I can't see how the couldn't if anyone survived previous winters up there ever.
I'm not saying that GRRM isn't doing this intentionally. I don't know him personally and I haven't read all the books. In fact, I'm rather hoping he IS doing it intentionally. That way their is hope of it all making some sort of sense at the end. If it's not intentional... well, there are serious problems and I'm going to be pretty damned pissed off at some point in the future when the last one is published.
In other words, both what you are positing and what was being discussed in that thread can easily both be true. I am hoping that they are.
* Today is more box and furniture tetris, with extra laundry and floor cleaning as the white cats were having some sort of competition to see who could vomit in the most places.
* "The Few, The Fervent: Fans Of 'Supernatural' Redefine TV Success:" http://www.npr.org/2014/01/15/262092791/the-few-the-fervent-fans-of-supernatural-redefine-tv-success