Victor David Hanson

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Victor David Hanson

Postby JohnnyFishfinger » Wed Nov 02, 2011 10:47 am

some of you may know of him, I only came across last night. the guy is a Historian of the Peloponisian War which is one of the events in ancient history I spent some time studying a while back. What I like about the clip (it was filmed in 2006) is that at minute 17 he basically predicts the arab spring. He talks about the collision of the western influence on muslim population through technology with their autocratic islamist or dictatorial regimes...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhhNxWZxQz8

http://victorhanson.com/Author/index.html
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJpyHbcXTIs
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Re: Victor David Hanson

Postby Kurt » Thu Nov 03, 2011 9:23 am

The truelly shocking thing about VDH is that he ever got anything correct at all.


Hanson has always done a lot of talking. He got one correct, but really he is the official historian of US intervention. He compares everything, everything that the US does to some kind of Warfare in the Ancient or Classical era.

an earlier thread.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=17799

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=12238
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Re: Victor David Hanson

Postby JohnnyFishfinger » Thu Nov 03, 2011 2:46 pm

Kurt wrote:The truelly shocking thing about VDH is that he ever got anything correct at all.


Hanson has always done a lot of talking. He got one correct, but really he is the official historian of US intervention. He compares everything, everything that the US does to some kind of Warfare in the Ancient or Classical era.

an earlier thread.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=17799

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=12238


Haven't made up my mind about him but i ll definitely have a look at his Classics' studies. Great archive threads btw, a lot of blood was boiling at the time!
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Re: Victor David Hanson

Postby Spartan Actual » Thu Jun 21, 2012 1:34 am

Kurt wrote:The truelly shocking thing about VDH is that he ever got anything correct at all.


Hanson has always done a lot of talking. He got one correct, but really he is the official historian of US intervention. He compares everything, everything that the US does to some kind of Warfare in the Ancient or Classical era.

an earlier thread.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=17799

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=12238


Hansen is absolutely brilliant, and the reason he traces everything back to Ancient Greece is because it was the formative culture providing the foundation that allowed for your ability to intelligently question him, for a society with the protection of personal property rights, and even for the development of the Internet, allowing us to debate this (which itself is very Hellenic).
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Re: Victor David Hanson

Postby Kurt » Thu Jun 21, 2012 2:35 am

Spartan Actual wrote:
Kurt wrote:The truelly shocking thing about VDH is that he ever got anything correct at all.


Hanson has always done a lot of talking. He got one correct, but really he is the official historian of US intervention. He compares everything, everything that the US does to some kind of Warfare in the Ancient or Classical era.

an earlier thread.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=17799

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=12238


Hansen is absolutely brilliant, and the reason he traces everything back to Ancient Greece is because it was the formative culture providing the foundation that allowed for your ability to intelligently question him, for a society with the protection of personal property rights, and even for the development of the Internet, allowing us to debate this (which itself is very Hellenic).


Greece as The West is a fairly new invention that probably has its tradition in the Mediterranean-centered outlook of Ancient Rome than an actual traceable cultural tradition. I find Ancient Greece to be more akin to Persia than any group in Europe, except for the gods and perhaps looking towards Alexander as a unifying conqueror. I think Greece as the Birth of the West was really a Roman invention in their method of co-opting conquered people's cultures and Religions.

Hanson seems to tie mostly warfare back to Greece and the modern conflicts he compared to the Ancient Greek ones already seem dated, like we are reading an editorial from the New York Times in 1912 talking about the horrors of letting women vote. He is or was a mouthpiece from 2002 to about 2006 (lets face it, the War in Iraq was seen as pretty much all bullshit after 2006) in the same way Thomas Friedman was the mouthpiece for neo-liberal globalization (with such nonsense like one country with a McDonalds will not go to war with another country with a McDonalds.)

The successful British Empire had Stubbs and Kipling while the substandard American Empire (where we go into debt rather than make a profit from wars) has idiots like Friedman and Hanson both getting rich with banal observations presented as serious scholarship.
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Re: Victor David Hanson

Postby JohnnyFishfinger » Thu Jun 21, 2012 9:45 pm

Rationalism started off in Greek cities and achieved its peak with the creation of the EU and other forms of social engineering. ironically, it's demise has already started in Greece..
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Re: Victor David Hanson

Postby Spartan Actual » Fri Jun 22, 2012 12:01 am

While I agree completely with the "idiots like Friedman" comment and he lunacy of the American method of NOT covering expenses (let alone turning a tidy profit from war), your dismissal of Greek contribution to both warfare and sociology needs augmented. The entire concept of the phalanx was Greek, and it gave non-Hellenic adversaries fits. Further, while we all learn in elementary school that "democracy" is a Greek word, only really well-versed teachers understand the importance of the Greek concept of private property, the necessity of its protection, and the impact to any society if those protections are at risk.

Although we're seeing some of this now in the States, it's inception was in the Greek City-States
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Re: Victor David Hanson

Postby Kurt » Sat Jun 23, 2012 4:47 pm

I do not doubt Greek contribution to Western Culture with words and warfare. I just do not think the Greeks themselves were European, I think they were more Asiatic.

The West just included them in its origin myth instead of telling the truth, that we "adopted" Ancient Greece. Rome adopted them so long ago and since Greece pre-dated Rome we took Greece as the foundation.

But if you look at Greece from an archeological perspective in art, dress and food they are more similar to Persia than they ever were to any culture in Europe. I am not dismissing their contribution but I am just saying Greece is not our origin as a culture.

I think Rome is more of an origin but that too is a bit exaggerated. The Barbarians won, but the Roman's had writing so we, the winners, get the perspective from the conquered and viewed their cultural collapse as a tragedy that is somehow the fault of barbarians (us).

I think aside from roads and plumbing the average westerner would feel much more comfortable traveling back in time and hanging out with Goths and Celts than we would Romans.

"So, after you left your four year old child in the wolf infested dump because he was sickly you went to celebrate by watching a man dressed as a bull slaughter disobedient slaves in an arena...then what?"

Another argument for adoption rather than origin would be the difference of over 600 years between Hippocrates and Galen. Before Galen Roman medicine consisted of "Signs" and "The Laying of Hands". Signs were very important in the Roman religion and incidents around ones life would be used to diagnose and cure an illness, as would the laying of hands (Jesus was such a Roman story) but it was Hippocrates that had the idea of prognosis and emphasized humors as the source of health, which is what Galen adopted in the 2nd century AD.

If Greece was the origin of Western culture, why the break of 600 years in medical knowledge that we kept until about 1650AD? I would guess it was that Rome was at a point where it was just starting to discover the world that it had conquered and Galen started reading Barbarian Greek writing and adopted it during the Antonine Plague (his treatments must have worked much better than Roman ones). If Greece had been our origin then Jesus would have been recorded as healing by diagnosing someone as being to hot or cold or dry and wet in their diet, but instead he layed hands in the not-Greek way.
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Victor David Hanson

Postby Michaelgah » Sat Aug 17, 2019 11:02 pm

As I said I agree but you have to take in consideration who it came to those shots as well. He wasnt at his best that night, far from it; the whole team was way beyond their expectations.
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Postby el3so » Tue Sep 17, 2019 1:14 am

Michaelgah wrote:As I said I agree but you have to take in consideration who it came to those shots as well. He wasnt at his best that night, far from it; the whole team was way beyond their expectations.
This sh!t shouldn't pass the Turing test.
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Re:

Postby Kurt » Tue Sep 17, 2019 1:04 pm

el3so wrote:
Michaelgah wrote:As I said I agree but you have to take in consideration who it came to those shots as well. He wasnt at his best that night, far from it; the whole team was way beyond their expectations.
This sh!t shouldn't pass the Turing test.


He did not. Forgot to delete his post though when I removed the account.
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