It's you who misunderstand, but what else should we expect from someone who posts such shallow replies? Read the first few sentences of the American declaration of independence sometime.

Just to add something, "best" is vaguely defined here. The effectiveness of the weapon depends on what you are going to use it for. If effectiveness in war means what it used to mean for a long time, i.e. "killing more of the enemy than are killed of ours", then nuclear weapons are still the best, unbeatable weapon. But effectiveness today seems to mean "killing as many of the enemy, precisely selected, without damaging your reputation (measured by civilians and works of art destroyed) too much". On the offensive side, drones seem to be one of the best ways of doing this and they are being worked on heavily.

But perhaps -- and this is something that defense tech firms rarely stop to consider because of the additional expense and difficulty -- effectiveness really ought to mean "incapacitating or disarming as many of the enemy as possible without killing them but without endangering the lives of our own soldiers too much". I freely acknowledge that this latter goal is much harder, and that there has been some minimal research into it with noise or the above-mentioned pain gun, but it is also obviously more humane and very likely the way of the future. We ought to be trying to get there much harder.

An extensive vocabulary is useful only insofar as it helps you make your meaning clear or use a pretty turn of phrase. But using uncommon words merely to seem intelligent is pure snobbery, and we instinctively react against snobbery and pretension. In this case, there was really no use for the Latin words instead of the plain and better-understood Saxon ones. E.g.

"They try, but they can't, because they wear shoes precisely designed to prevent any form of rapid ambulation."
->
"They try, but they can't, because they wear shoes precisely designed to prevent them walking quickly."

We could have kept "any form of" but it wasn't needed.

Straw man. The part about teenager being a social construct, like childhood, is spot-on. Childhood was a very different thing before the Victorians, people in ages before that wouldn't recognise our idea of childhood. Similarly, the teenager is a social construct of the last half of this century (though some say it began in the 20s).

'Twas ever thus. In all the history of mankind, most people have never taken the effort to think hard and properly, and their language merely reflected this. There's no difference between the ugly and stilted English of Palin supporters I recently saw on television and the ugly and pretentious English I read when someone links me to an article in the New Yorker. In both cases, the speaker or the writer hasn't anything interesting to say, but must say something, so he lets his mouth or fingers do the talking or writing for him, without having to rely on any thinking at all. But attend a few meetings in a business or listen to a few politicians' speeches, or read some scholarly essays, or pick up a popular novel, or watch some television drama -- from the present or any time in the past -- and you will find the same phenomenon: brilliant people with something to say will find ways to express their meaning in good English (or whatever other language). Ordinary people with nothing to say will cover up the fact with bad English. (Just remember to account for selection bias with past works.) Orwell used to write about this kind of thing, both in 1984 and his polemics and essays like "Politics and the English Language".

Because I can't stand the fucking taste? Yeah, it's an acquired taste too.

I think he's just trying to say there's a difference between free speech for some reason and free speech for speech's sake. Words without meaning are just hot air, and I'm not terribly bothered that Facebook, being a private corporation, decided to enforce one further censorship. After all, they already don't allow things to do with nudity and sex and gore and other random stuff. Many forums filter out words like fuck and shit. I don't agree with these types of rules, I think they're all misguided, and I don't like the forums that do it. But I know some people will always want to run their boards (and what else is facebook than a really big forum/board/BBS) in a way they hope will promote a decent community and reasonable discussion, and though I think the efforts do more harm than good, I don't care. The only thing in this incident which I deplored was Pakistan's blocking of Facebook, because as a government, it ought to be held to a higher standard -- Pakistanis can choose not to use Facebook, but they can't choose not to use their government, and they couldn't choose to use Facebook once their government decided it didn't want them to. But I'm not from Pakistan so all I can do is be disappointment at their backwardness and small-mindedness with respect to things like political freedom and the other rights delineated by documents like the UDHR which they only pay lip-service to. In an ideal world, Facebook wouldn't have backed down, but let's not forget who are the real infringers of freedoms here -- the government of Pakistan.

But books have shown that flipping is much more efficient than scrolling around. I'm sure there will be books of e-paper or oled pages stuck together eventually, and I'll certainly be buying them.

It's kind of what I said, but part of what you said is exactly the kind of propaganda I'm talking about. Kings of England haven't been able to pull that sort of shit since the Magna Carta. Fact is, the people who came here first were the folks who had nothing to lose, the dregs of society. Later, merchants and wealthy investors came, but the beginnings were relentlelssly lower-class. Ditto Australia.

Except for a few happy periods in its history, there has always been something of an anti-intellectual trend in the US. Perhaps it has to do with the people who originally came here and the way the revolution is portrayed in its history books, but there is a great deal of reverse snobbery, and that goes against intellectualism too.

The mods were on a Friday night bender... They probably looked up, didn't see a moon, and were grateful for the explanation.

I personally prefer Craig, but have you read any of the books? The Bond of the books is Craig to a tee, all the others are rather different.

Hi,

Thanks for the wealth of info. I see I've been wrong about some of my ideas about the two Boer wars. I'm going to order Pakenham's book and read through it, but obviously that will take months, so I'm afraid our debate, which has been interesting and informative for me, is over. Thanks and have fun.

Cheers,
laddie

Wish that were true. KDE 3 ran perfectly fine on my macbook pro (last year's model). Then I finally switched to KDE 4 and found the simplest damn apps stuttering and hogging the CPU.

Just to clarify one thing for you: I'm not British (nor a woman). I'm
Hungarian, and the total time I've spent in Britain is roughly a day
between two flights. Nor have I ever learnt history from them through
textbooks or whatever. My country actually has good reason to be angry
at the Allied decision to ignore the southern front during the War,
though I understand Churchill was overruled on that by Roosevelt.

> Is that actually what you believe ? Sheez... the historical records
> are very clear on how wrong you are. You basically got EVERY detail wrong.

I'm afraid it's your details that are wrong, but I can understand they
would be, for nationalistic reasons.

> The first boer war was a small war, but Britain was hardly that unprepared
> -the difference is that our lose-knit tactics WORKED better, we knew the
> country, we knew the teritory and my ancestors were excellent marksman -
> it was a basic survival skill for them. They took down a soldier with
> every single bullet fired - and could take out a squadron before anybody
> even managed to see ONE of them because they were THAT good at camouflage
> (again - a basic survival skill in their culture).

The first Boer war involved a few thousand Boers and about a thousand
British soldiers, who being unprepared (untrained) for the conditions and
terrain with which the Boers were perfectly familiar, was a predictable
and one-sided affair. I think we have no disagreement here.

> In the second war, we repeatedly won almost every battle, in fact in the
> first two years of the war Britain achieved only TWO successes. They
> took Pretoria and they won one battle. So we laid siege to Pretoria,
> and also most of the cities where British folk lived - and kept winning
> every battle. When it got to 10-to-1 numbers by the end of the second
> year - there was no POSSIBILITY anymore of winning a conventional war,
> so we came up with our guerilla warfare, small squads of between three
> and five highly mobile soldiers, working entirely indepently - raiding
> supply chains and taking on (and defeating) much bigger squads by being
> better at fighting in this country. Again - we were winning. Without
> the concentration camps we WOULD have won the war.

The second Boer war was not the same as the first. You fielded tens
of thousands of troops, properly organised and equipped with proper
artillery. When these failed, you turned to guerilla tactics, which the
British countered by locking down supply lines and key infrastructure
points and with a scorched earth policy. Both of you fought with small
mobile units, but that doesn't mean that they were on either side these
undisciplined free-thinking hippies you try to paint them as. I would
say neither of you fought much differently from the other; for instance
you both shot spies out of hand and often with little proof.

> Now... as for the rest. Yes it bloody well WAS a struggle for
> liberation. We were NEVER British immigrants, our ancestry was
> predominantly Flemish, Dutch, French and German - in fact Modern day
> Afrikaans is so close to Flemish that I can chit-chat with Flemish
> people as if we're both speaking to a mothertongue speaker. The two
> boer republics WERE independent republics for nearly 80 years by the
> time of the first boer war - and their independence had previously
> been recognized by Britain in 1853. The desire for our gold and
> diamonds was the major reason why you decided that you now wanted to
> conquer these democratic republics we had built and reinstall over
> us the monarchic rule we had fled from more than a century before,
> the process that culminated in the foundation of these republics.

BS. You were not British immigrants, but immigrants nonetheless. When
British immigrants then came to your country from the Cape Colony, just
as American immigrants arrived in Texas and Rupert's Land on the other
side of the globe, tensions eventually broke out. Both sides were to
blame for the tensions (e.g. the Jameson Raid). The British sent you an
ultimatum to give equal rights to the immigrants, you in turn started the
war (yes, don't try to paint it as Britain having started it). In Texas,
the immigrants sparked the war, but that is a trivial difference. These
things happen, but trying to portray either war as an independence
struggle or a war for resources is crass nationalism. Before you cite
other nationalistic idiots like Rhodes, remember that he wasn't in any
sense a policymaker, just a loudmouth. You would also do equally well
to look to Kruger if you don't want to be laid open to the charge of
calling the kettle black.

Also, I think you're confusing Florence Nightingale with Emily Hobhouse.

> The fact is - that worked. Modern Afrikaners raised under the apartheid
> era's absolute conviction on complete military discipline and mind control
> (we had mandatory drill practice in all schools for crying out loud)
> imagine that our ancestors were like that. They weren't - we copied that
> idea from the British AFTER the war, when we saw how effective it was
> at making people go along with whatever powermad atrocities you feel like.

Copied from the British? Your comment seems odd, given that that country
has never had a draft except during the World Wars. Possibly you copied
it from the Germans or Americans. The latter influenced you a lot after
all, as with Sarie Marei. But probably the Germans, for after all the
English and Dutch traditions are ones of individual liberty and prize
the individual very highly, unlike the other Continental and non-Western
traditions. Your country happens to have both the Dutch and English
(and Scottish) traditions running through its veins.

On that topic, I wouldn't be so quick to call the Germans a beacon of
freedom and whatnot whilst dismissing the English-speaking countries,
for all the shameful things done by Bush and Brown and Rudd and their
predecessors. The German's love of freedom is new and untested. I think
a nation's character, if there can be such a thing, is illustrated
by its record in adversity and crisis. What happened to Germany when
its prosperity dried up in the 30s? What happened to Britain when its
prosperity dried up in the 50s? The cases are not directly comparable,
but on broad lines, the answer is Hitler and the National Health Service,
respectively.

For reference, I think all war that doesn't ultimately save lives or
liberties is unjust and every death caused thereby an abomination. Under
such general terms, I do condemn both your countries for being so
trigger-happy, just as my country and continent were trigger-happy the
1910s. All that said, what happened in your country was not an uncommon
pattern and it was really not an independence struggle.

About your comments on the Second World War, I recall there being only
one South African division fighting at Alamein, but of course I imagine
many were captured at Tobruk. I'd be grateful for exact numbers, because
as far as I remember the proportion of troops went roughly like English,
Australian, Indian, South African, and misc. Empire/Britain. In any case,
I believe the British would have continue to throw troops and materiel
at the problem, much as they did, until they won. Due to Ultra and the
Royal Navy, they could prevent German reinforcements but send theirs
with impunity. I don't think it's wise to claim that the outcome of
the campaign there hinged on which side South Africa participated on,
which is not to discount the enormous sacrifice involved in having
fought on the British side, something which I think used to bind the
Allies together very closely.

Finally, I share your views on Kitchener. The man was so insensitive
and thoughtless that he was a butcher, both in your country and on the
Western Front later.

I'm glad you share my desire to throw out the spin and BS, so forgive
me if I'm abrasive or insensitive as we try to get to the truth of
these matters... I like nothing better than discovering a new truth and
correcting a mistake in my ideas. Do go on.