In other news

I feel Democrats aren't thinking this through very well, and are opening a Pandoras box better left closed. Essentially the Democrat argument is that states, local govts, and even civilian miiitias have the legal right to obstruct federal rulings and actions they dont agree with.

If this does become a new norm, I dont think it is going to work out very well for all the people enthusiastically supporting the Democrats and civilian militias right now.

Time will tell I guess.

They do have the legal right to do what they are doing, my guy.

nobody is more aware of how tenuous and provisional our understanding of history is than historians. so despite the caveats, I guarantee historians of Mohammed are aware that the Koran isn’t an unbiased source for his life and conquests.

the raw data does need to be interpreted, but I think it’s a mistake to call ancient writings the mediator of the raw data rather than just an additional piece of data. not even the best ancient historians are better than the worst historian in any top 1000 university in the world.

I understand your general point and agree it has validity. But FWIW the Koran itself barely mentions Mohamed at all, and says nothing about his life. That was all retrofitted in a couple centuries later.

bruh, you're talking about the same historians who write books about kings who's sole mention/evidence comes from guys who sandwiched a their story about them in between a tale of the minotaur and zeus banging sheep

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristagora... - look at this wiki, look at it

see how long and detailed it is

now - bear in mind the entirety of our ancient knowledge on him is solely from herodotus, a man who wrote about 1,000 tranlsated english words on him and then literally moved on to talk about gold digging ants in india

his wiki page is over 2,000 words

so all of that wiki is from people being like oh we gotta work this guy into our narrative - because there is not a shred of archaeological evidence on this man ever - nobody else mentions him, he's not on any coins, his name is not found on any documents or carvings, nowhere on this planet does he exist outside of a brief mention by herodotus, the same man who immediately following that wrote about gold digging ants in india

was aristagoras a real person and not something he made up? likely

is anything we have on him going to be remotely accurate - no ffing way

and mind you, if you read his work - it's clear that he treats his passages on griffins and cyclops with the same seriousness as he does with real people - the only reason we're able to differentiate because common sense tells us "hey we shouldn't treat zeus like a historical figure" and "there probably weren't really snakes guarding treasure" - so with those it's easy to dismiss - but it gets super tricky when he's writing about people without supernatural powers - where does the story end and the history begin

so that lenghty aristagoras wiki entry is based on hundreds of modern pages written about him - all done by puzzle piece sleuthing historians trying to fit in a narrative for a man who for all we know never existed - and if he did exist, what we know is impossible to be accurate - even if herodotus were faithful to the record, he was relying upon oral histories originating from a time decades before he was born

this is what i'm talking about - you get a sexy narrative like the koran or herodotus and you really, really want nothing more than your dig to somehow sync up with is, and given how subjective the work is - you're going to find the answers you're looking for - see troy and how we've "found it" 3 times despite that it quite possibly never existed

Facts do not care about your feelings. And the fact is that you helped enable the worst POTUS in US history, and now he’s attacking his own constituents to stroke his diseased ego you colossal dipshit. You’d have been better served had you voted for a log.

did you read the section titled “herodotus as a source” which points out that historians themselves are aware of this problem, and a fair number of them are skeptical of the information we know as a result?

I’m not disputing that ancient sources are unreliable, I’m disputing that historians by and large don’t already account for this in their analysis. That’s what Dunyain was implying when he said that what we believe/teach about the conquests of Mohammed. He said that there is an ideology preventing people from being skeptical about these things, which I deny.

Now if you’re not saying that historians aren’t just regurgitating ancient sources uncritically, then we don’t disagree. Or if you’re saying that people can have bad historiographical practices I also don’t disagree with that.

I will also point out that while I like wikipedia, it’s not a legitimate source for academic consensus. In this article quite a few sources are before 2000, which indicates that they don’t offer a great insight into methodologies that are common and accepted today. Further, the sources are much fewer and not very well incorporated. So it’s not even a particularly good article by wikipedia’s standards.

i think we're arguing two different things here

nowhere do we disagree on the fact that historians are aware stuff is super sketchy

i'm saying that doesn't do too much to stop a lot of presupposition which lay people then tend to not be aware of - or even worse, that they embrace that ignorance to instead tell a cleaner story

yes, if you were to read aristagoras' wiki you're already well beyond the normies which those people are catering to - just think history channel or high school textbook type content - just how many times did they ever declare "we actually have very sketchy and unfounded understanding of this era" - basically never - it's done with good reason - but most people have absolutely no clue just how haphazardly and flimsy our agreed upon ancient history actually is and absolutely none of it would hold up in a court of law

for instance, one of the biggest misperceptions is due to historians creating maps because people love looking at maps

the issue with this is things like this are mostly lies

there's an amazing article/book/essay/podcast out there that i tried finding it but couldn't - it's basically something to the effect of "all ancient maps lie to you"

the image above is the one we all know and love, various versions of that are found in textbooks and websites galore

but hey let's look at a more detailed version of it

still more or less the same right?

yes, but that's only because this map was made knowing it had to uphold expectations

maybe that's just highlighting the massive cities right... well kinda... but for all intents and purposes, unless there's a dot signifying a city - whether or not there were people living there is besides the point because that wasn't under roman administration - nobody living in between those dots paid taxes nor served in the legions, they were off the grid

if you zoom in on the sahara, it becomes even more pronounced, we know for a fact that outside of a small handful of oases, egyptian population hugged the nile and coasts - so why pretend like roman rule extended hundreds of miles in the desert? because people make maps for a modern audience in mind where distant frontier borders do exist and are patrolled with modern technology

and it's not just where there is dessert - basically anywhere that wasn't directly adjacent to a large population center was an independent region not large enough to be worth the resources of governing

a truly accurate map of the roman empire should look like this - but this is a map you'd have to defend and explain and painstakingly label all the settlements

Very "why did you make me hit you" energy.

Minnesota should secede from the union and become a Canadian province.

Trump and his droolers hate Somalis and Hispanics, and Minnesota has both. Why would they care if Minnesota left? Seems like a win-win.

“If you didn’t burn dinner, I would have had to beat your ass!”

Very WhiteTrashy, which is exactly what the Republican Party has become under Trump.

The hypocrisy of the right is astounding. If Biden had assembled a bunch of untrained armed masked men and sent them into red cities and states to detain people without cause and break into homes without warrants, not to mention murder people in the streets, you would be livid. Hell, you got your panties in a wad because of wearing a mask during a pandemic.

By the way, the legality of quite a bit of this is at best questionable, and mostly just not legal at all. The "federal rulings" are nothing but the current fascist regime making rules as they go.

I dont think Trump or the right would really care. I think most would be ok with a Minnesota for Alberta swap.

That being said, I actually don't know who would fight against this harder, the Democrat Party or the people of Minnesota.

The national Democrat Party would not only lose seats in the House and Senate, but a massive fundraising shortfall from losing all the kickbacks from the fraud they facilitate in the Twin Cities.

And of course the working people of Minnesota will have no interest in having even more of their income siphoned off for taxes; and the Somalis themselves would oppose such a move, as so much of their income is defrauding the US govt. The GDP of Somalia would literally crater if this happened, it is so dependent on "remittances" taken from the US Healthcare/NGO complex.

I'm calling bullshit on this.

That doesn't mean it isn't true. Google AI says remittances from the US are 25% of Somalia's GDP, which means it is probably much higher when you account for all the fraud. We are hearing stories of suitcases and suitcases filled with $100 bills being smuggled out daily straight from MSP to Mogadishu.

You probably dont know a single thing about Somalia. But it is about as corrupt and failed a state as there is. It is basically an entire country run the way the Somali community conducts itself in Minneapolis. And they are constantly attacking all their neighbors to take land, on top of all the piracy. They are basically Putin's Russia without the organizational skills.

Unfortunately they are useful to unprincipled state actors like China and Turkey, who dont give a **** how they conduct themselves, as long as they provide regional access. So they are given a lot of diplomatic support to conduct themselves very poorly.

So it is your position that whatever fraud is occurring cannot be stopped. Interesting take. You obviously do not have faith that Trump can fix it. You’re an idiot.

If you haven't been paying attention, the good ole usa is moving towards putins Russia, with the organizational skills.

Trump just put a 25% tariff on India for buying Russian oil, and the EU saw an opening to fill the void by signing a massive trade deal with India. And then went and bragged out it. They couldn't be sabotaging any effort to put pressure on Putin any more if they tried.

And Europe is still Russia's biggest customer of fossil fuels, even more than China or India. It goes through intermediaries to make it all appear clean, but everyone knows where it is originating from.

That being said, the European strategy seems to be working, as Russia (and Ukraine) do seem to be running out of men to throw into the meat grinder. Very cynical to support Putin's war economically while supporting the other side militarily; but it does seem to be serving Europe well.

Again, you understand very little of what you speak.

Who is "we" and from where are you "hearing stories."

What exactly are you trying to say here? You don't know anything about Somalia if you think that the current state is the result of some sort of deliberate community decision or a product of some sort of inherent ethnic dishonesty. In a country as poor as Somalia, most people are just trying to get by. They lack the means, and often the information, to exert any meaningful influence on the people who are claiming to govern the country.

Of course Trump isn't going to be able to clean up the fraud. He is already backing down. The Democrats, their civilian militias, and rogue judges that strike down any attempt to stop the fraud are going to win this battle, with 2 martyrs dying for the cause. I just wonder if it is going to be a very Pyrrhic victory if this becomes a new norm.

There are some people here who apparently have no idea what day to day life is like for poor people in poor countries. By and large, you aren't sitting around thinking big thoughts about the government. Your concerns are much more prosaic. And if you live in a rural area, your interaction with what Westerners think of as government may be minimal.

Well, you didn't understand my point, so whatever.

You and juan really need to get together and decide whether left-wing protesters are dangerous civilian militias or effete, blue-haired soy boys.