Toxn

ALL HAIL

ALL HAIL

ALL HAIL

Nuh-uh!

Trading cities! During the classical era and the later Islamic expansion, sub-Saharan African cities along the East and West coast of the continent were intimately tied into the global trade network. In the West, this was anchored by trade in gold and salt*, and relied on the passage of caravans through the Sahara. Indeed, trade was so extensive that the gold coinage of Europe during the high medieval era can largely be sourced back to mines in West Africa. In time, states like Benin rose to power on the basis of a web of trade routes which criss-crossed the continent: North-South through the Sahara and the coast, East-West through the plains and forests South of the Sahara. Situated as it was between the plains and the forests further South, Benin found itself in a favourable position to trade its own manufactured goods (especially cotton goods) for copper and horses. In the East, trade was more diffuse and tied to coastal cities which bartered external goods for raw goods sourced from the interior. In the classical era, merchants from Southern Arabia and Axum established coastal trade posts and way-stations, married the locals and founded cities. Trading manufactured iron goods and foods (spears, axes, wine and so on) for spices, shells, horns, palm oil and slaves; these little colonies eventually grew into regional trade hubs. It was only with the rise of Islam, however, that they were integrated fully into the world trade network. By the fourteenth century a string of city-states extended along the East coast of the continent (to what is now Mozambique), each functioning as a node along the great Indian ocean trade route. The length and depth of this route can be seen in the Chinese porcelain fragments which can still be found all along the eastern coast of the continent. So it was that the Portuguese, arriving at the East coast after rounding the Cape, were confronted by a string of well-settled cities; their tall stone houses decorated with carved wooden doors, Indian cloth, Iranian rugs, Chinese ceramics and Persian silverware. There were also books aplenty, written in Swahili using an Arabic script. The cities produced no real goods of their own besides coins and provisions, and made their profits by dint of carefully husbanded monopolies and stiff tariffs on goods. Having stared in wonder at these exotic and storied cities, the Portuguese then set about ravishing them utterly. With a century of rounding the Cape, they managed to loot, burn, pillage and destroy every major trade city along the coast. And having done so, they then found themselves too hamfisted to manage or repair the intricate trade system they had laid waste to. * One famous waystation on this route, Tagaza, was known for it's houses. These had since ancient times been built from solid blocks of salt, roofed with skins.

Is the liquor licence system in your area as expensive and hopelessly corrupt as it is in mine?

We're going to get to the fulani et al as well at some point

The standard for forged knives is 90', so a good sword should bend almost into a circle.

Dude, you would love Ethiopian history. I must admit that I don't know enough of it myself (my summaries are coming largely from a broad overview sort of book), so I've been trying to hunt down books again.

Japanese swords = case hardened bullshit confirmed.

More Nubians! Aksum/Axum, which came into our story at the end of the meroitic era, ended up having a glorious and long history of its own. Previous theories (of the sort which crop up disturbingly often whenever the concept of African civilizations comes up) posited that Axum was essentially founded by migrating semitic peoples from the middle east. Today, it is known that the origins of the empire predate any sustained contact with semitic peoples by a hundreds of years. In any case, Axum spent a while as a fellow trade polity to Meroe, located principally along the coast of what is now North-Eastern Ethiopia. Certainly, there was a large Arabian influence (principally religious and linguistic), which faded over time as a distinct local culture emerged. For a while, as trade shifted and the city of Adulis became a key point in the route linking Ptolemaic Egypt and the East (including India), a strong whiff of high Greek culture came in with the ships. In time the city of Axum itself, located inland of Adulis, became the focus of a civilization at the centre of world trade. By the first century CE, Axum had become powerful. It's rulers erected gigantic stelae and minted gold and silver coinage. It was in this phase (sometime in the fourth or fifth century CE) that the fledgling empire toppled the rickety remains of grand old Meroe - which had by then been partially colonised by a people that Axumite inscriptions referred to as the Red Noba (or Nubians, for anyone keeping score at home). Here inscriptions by the Axumites themselves (in Ge'ez, a form of writing which survives to this day) hold that the then-king Ezana marched an army into Meroe and defeated the Noba at the ford of Kemalke. From here, he seems to have become rather indiscriminate in his campaign and destroyed Noba and Kushite towns alike, North and South. With the competition removed, Axum was ready to make its mark on the world. Ezana (or perhaps his predecessor) also oversaw another momentous event: the adoption of Christianity into Axum. With this, the slow diversion of the empire into the Ethiopia we know and love today was started. In terms of their military, Axum was nothing special for the time and the place. This meant that they were light-infantry/archer heavy, with the use of iron being taken up rapidly (as opposed to the slow assimilation of iron tools into Egyptian society). Horses were known, but were probably limited to light cavalry/skirmishers suitable for the mountainous terrain.

ME is Europe when it's convenient for folk. In any case, read the substantive content.

Nothing is new. http://www.unz.com/gnxp/old-europeans-were-old-school-thugs/

From a habitation perspective; it's interesting that we don't even know if the radiation flux received on the trip out (let alone once you land) will cause problems: http://www.space.com/24731-mars-radiation-curiosity-rover.html http://news.uci.edu/health/long-term-galactic-cosmic-ray-exposure-leads-to-dementia-like-cognitive-impairments/ The worst case scenario here is that your astronauts don't even make it to the red planet before becoming permanently brain-damaged by cosmic ray exposure and the like. Also: Earth-2 needs more love simply for demonstrating that we have no working theoretical foundation for designing contained ecosystems. We know effectively nothing here.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/slow-food-artisanal-natural-preservatives/ This. 1000x this.

They used a stock picture of the (new) South African navy?

Thanks, this is great.I'll update after the weekend with something on Aksum/Axum.

Unless the leader being prosecuted comes from Africa, of course. Gotta love the ICC...

Having a German surname (Pretoria also has a pretty sizeable ethic German community) I eventually got pissed of with the idea of ethnicity beyond "well, yeah, my ancestors had to come from somewhere" *. This didn't stop me from sperging out over having French Huguenots on my mom's side and various Scots on my dad's side. Or that there is a town in the Cape named after one branch of my family. * Non-German germans make such a thing of it.

Yet another video showing how English South Africans rapidly develop... odd accents the second they get out of the country. Truly we are blank slates for the world to impress upon.

It's other name is the horror toad...

We could full up the thread with frogs alone.

Because there is way too much ignorance and a bunch of awesome civilizations, I'm starting an African history thread. First up, the OG cool culture that wasn't Egypt (although they also were, sort of): Nubia. Nubia is actually more of a place (the civilizations there had names like Wawat, Irthet and Kush), located beyond the second cataract of the nile. After being conquered by the Hyksos and then absorbing them China-style, a newly-invigorated Egypt conquered most of this region and turned it into a colony. After a long while (about 500 years), the Egyptian state became all crusted up and useless (a periodic thing for Egypt), splintered into the upper and lower kingdoms and was finally taken over wholesale by the Kushites. Thereafter Kushite Egypt found itself at war with the Assyrians (who were mean SOBs of the first order, and were the first major users of iron tools), held them off and eventually fell to a former Assyrian satrapy coming out of Sais. The Kushites withdrew and Egypt returned to business as usual: repeatedly being invaded, absorbing successive foreign dynasties, brother-sibling incest and necromancy, in pretty much that order. The Kushites struggled on after this, before seeing a second flowering in the form of an institutional move to the city of Meroe - which was located further South than the previous capital. This movement produced something of a renaissance, and for a time Meroitic civilization flourished as a trade empire (especially in iron) distinct from Egypt both culturally and technologically. In the process it fended off some of the bigger powers in the region, including the Romans. In due time, however, Meroe itself succumbed to age, changing climate and trade, and the intrusions of neighbouring Axum. From a military perspective, the Nubian area is interesting because of the strong emphasis on the bow. Nubian archers were prized as mercenaries, and came armed with longbows (and later composite bows and thumb rings). They showed remarkable consistency in this and could be found shooting fools full of arrows in armies ranging from bronze-age Egypt to late-period Persia. This picture is both full of shit and the only decent image I could find. So it goes.

Played all of two games with Hosho last night (my whole half hour of -actual- free time) but did alright. Low tier uselessness tends to get counteracted by low tier players believing that torpedoes meant to be manfully accepted as is. Having decent speed and turning time (looks accusingly at Langley and Bogue) also makes it much easier to deal with the inevitable DD that slips through the net. My last game saw me losing my air wing and playing tag with a DD for five minutes - dude must have launched 5 or 6 torp salvoes by the end. I survived the match but we lost on points

The Babadook The Babadook follows young widow Amelia and her troubled tot Sam as they discover a disturbing book during a nightly bedtime reading and unwittingly unleash its sinister central figure on their quiet lives. As it turns out, the key to the creature’s undoing is merely to recognize it and rebuke it—something that Amelia eventually discovers. But this revelation comes after a slow-burning, suspenseful battle of wills, prolonged by a centrally important fact about Amelia that critics have largely overlooked: she is working class. Clues to Amelia’s class status are scattered throughout the film, but they’re most clearly manifested in conspicuous articles of fashion. Minutes into the film, Amelia sits across from the administrators of her son’s private school, who are all neatly outfitted in crisp suits and slick buns. She is sporting an unraveling ponytail and the uniform she wears to work as an orderly in a nursing home: a papery pink shift with a peter-pan collar and opaque white stockings that taper into a pair of scuffed Keds. Amelia’s clothing is conspicuously gendered—the powerful actors in this horror story don’t wear pink collars and Keds. But more than that, her attire functions as a permanent reminder of the fact of her work, a kind of stigmata of the service sector. All the dramatic action among the film’s adult humans proceeds to flow from this core disjuncture of class. The school administrators condescend to her in icy-precise professional language, telling her, in so many words, that she has failed to correctly parent her son. And in the next scene, Amelia sits next to her sister, a smooth-haired woman in black nylons and a blazer, and barely listens as her upwardly mobile sibling natters on about installation art pieces. Miffed by this indifference to her class ascent, Amelia’s sister abruptly calls off the joint birthday party they had planned for their children. This leads to a round of pointedly class-based recriminations, all upbraiding Amelia for not “properly” celebrating her son’s birthday. Mom-shaming is powerfully distilled in the unraveling nightmare of The Babadook. Hounded as she is by these disciplinary markers of privilege, Amelia takes momentary refuge in fantasies of material bliss. In a brief dreamy interlude just before her niece’s birthday party, Amelia eats ice cream in a glassy, modern shopping mall, sitting alone on a sofa positioned in front of windows full of fashion spreads and mannequins draped in haute couture. Unable to shop or buy, she contents herself with food—alone. Back in real life, however, Amelia continues to face more quiet but powerful crucibles of class division. When the birthday party arrives, five sleekly outfitted moms congregate in Amelia’s sister’s Crate & Barrel dining room and gaze accusingly at Amelia through their chicly underdone makeup. Pearls and gems dot their lobes and throats; our Amelia positively wilts in their presence, looking dazed and bedraggled as she listens to patronizing talk of their volunteer work with “disadvantaged women” and to humblebragging about their husbands’ careers. The pinched scowls only intensify when Amelia’s son throws a tantrum and she sternly orders him out of the room. Amelia is overwhelmed: it is, in part, her exhaustion that allows the dreadful Babadook to pass into her life. A string of visual cues reminds viewers of her inability to keep up: her clothes, her hair, the puttering station wagon she drives, the blandly functional flat-soled shoes on her feet. As the movie slides into the gothic terror at its heart, it’s just as plain that the totems of her everyday working-class life are what feed her primal, and potentially lethal, state of social isolation. They differentiate her from her peers, their pastimes, and most crucially, their enlightened parenting practices. Here is where The Babadook is most painfully realistic. So many parenting techniques earn their cachet from the glamorous elites who evangelize for them: think The Big Bang Theory’s Mayim Bialik hawking the wonders of co-sleeping for The Today Show, or supermodel Gisele Bündchen asserting that international law should require all mothers to breastfeed for at least six months in a luscious Harper’s Bazaar spread. Mothers who can’t pay to play are not only reviled as bad parents, but also marginalized as gauche. There’s an overlooked irony at the heart of all the mom-shaming so powerfully distilled in the unraveling nightmare of The Babadook. Amelia and her imperiled son are ultimately helped onto the right path out of their lonely ordeal not by all the well-appointed power moms hovering around them, but rather by the Australian welfare state. As the film closes, a pair of dogged social workers checks in with the traumatized pair, and the realization sets in that these have been the only characters to evince real concern for the well-being of this single working mom and her deprived child. Beyond the claustral terrors of a classic horror-fantasy, The Babadook leaves us with a surprisingly far-reaching epilogue: the film leads us to imagine the kind of programs that could make life as a working-class parent more leisurely and secure, like child allowances, paid maternity leave, and all the sundry baby benefits that are commonplace in European social democracies. Ladies who lunch seem capable of providing only bitter censure, and good politics, with concrete material assistance, will have to be in place before the rest of us can gather the few pearls of wisdom their parenting fashions offer. This is the real horror story of The Babadook: our culture is at a loss to make the hopeful epilogue to Amelia’s story match up with the kind of social isolation that spurred on her brief descent into madness and terror. Note: this is not a work of satire on my part, but an actual published review. I haven't seen the movie though.