Eh. Speculative fiction is different from magical realist revanchism in a lot of critical ways.
But they both routinely serve as metaphors for the modern era.
Eh. Speculative fiction is different from magical realist revanchism in a lot of critical ways.
But they both routinely serve as metaphors for the modern era.
Mandelorean is a western
It nakedly and obviously cribs from Seven Samurai, The Good The Bad And the Ugly, and Wolf and Cub.
Misogynists hated Leia back in the 70s, too.
But it’s still actually fun to watch, with his pacing, and good characters.
I disagree with all of this.
Eight was half of a good movie. Seven was a series of vinettes of varying quality that ended in disappointment.
I was genuinely shocked to see how good an actor Hayden Christensen was when he wasn’t in a Star Wars movie.
Herodotus got a lot of things wrong
Show me the first hand written account from the period that refutes him.
That’s a terrible argument. That was one pharaoh and the monument would have been finished within his lifetime
That’s two pharaohs and the mega-monuments completed over 27 years that Ramses lived to see were the exception rather than the rule.
And, again, I was talking about the Jesus of the Bible
The Gospel of Mark is part of the Bible. That makes Jesus at least as historical as anyone in Herodotus’s Histories. Significantly more so in many respects, as Herodotus writes on The Trojan War, some 800 years before his birth.
If there was a real Jesus, we have absolutely no idea what, if anything, said about him in the Bible actually happened or was something we said because there is no evidence of it outside the Bible
You could say the same of the Anatolian tribes or the Achaemenid dynasty or Sparta.
there is no real physical proof that Jesus Christ ever existed
Go back far enough and there is vanishingly little biographical evidence that any singular person existed. From the Mayan Empire to the Australian Aboriginal People, you can wave your hands and dismiss them all, due to the lack of first party written accounts of their existence.
Where on Earth do you get the idea that monuments to pharaohs were not built within their lifetime?
Consider the Boy Pharaoh, Tutankhamen. He was dead at the age of 17, before the completion of his tomb. And thanks to repeated grave robberies, his tomb had to be repaired and refortified on subsequent occasions. His elderly successor and family advisor, Ay, was buried who died four years after his own ascension to the throne, effectively swapped Tutankhamen’s intended tomb and claimed it as his own, but never lived long enough to see it completed.
Numerous unfinished or partially completed tombs dot the Valley of Kings. And even the Great Pyramids have several chambers that were started but never filled out before the builders were retasked to the next Pharaoh in line.
It also misses my point.
The standards by which we hold “historical Jesus” would disqualify a litany of other historical figures of antiquity, as the bulk of our knowledge comes from reprints of reprints of surviving accounts of other accounts which are themselves often politicized documents intended to score contemporary points.
The Hellenistic Era might as well not exist, for all the first party accounts of the era that survive. Herodotus was dead before Darius the Great was even born, and yet his histories are fundamental to understanding the Achaemenid Empire during his reign. The only surviving copy is dated fifty years after the events it claims to document. That’s roughly as reliable as The Gospel of Mark, which is dated some 30 to 80 years after the death of its primary subject matter.
If you want to hold historical figures to equal standing, you’re going to write off everyone from Archidamus II to Cyrus I. Obliterating huge swaths of history with a single pen stroke, because Herodotus is an unreliable narrator.
if we did, we know nothing about him except what was written a long time after he would have died
Hardly the first instance of a historical figure with unreliable historical accounts. You could make the same criticism of Egyptian pharaohs. They were deified in their eras, too. Their monuments were not completed until many of them were long dead. I guess we should just ignore them and pretend they had no impact on the course of history.
Written while Jesus was still alive?
You could disprove the existence of Socrates with this line of reasoning.
Quite a bit has been written on the possible siblings of Jesus.
It doesn’t matter.
I’d say the “Real Historical Jesus” matters at least as much as a Real Historical Julius Caeser or a Real Historical Abraham Lincoln.
I always relate it to Ian Fleming having a schoolchum who’s father’s name was Ernst Stavro Bloefeld.
That’s different in so far as Fleming was simply borrowing a name for a totally independent character. But Fleming was, himself, a Naval Commander and intelligence officer who leveraged his own biography to inform James Bond’s personal traits. What’s more, he borrowed heavily from the reports and anecdotes of other intelligence officials both during and after WW2 to inform the behaviors and attitudes of his side characters in his original novels.
It actually is pretty interesting to talk about “The Real James Bond” from a historical standpoint, because British intelligence services were pivotal in maintaining the imperial and international financial controls necessary to run a globe-spanning empire.
In the same vein, you might be curious to read about “The Real Julius Caeser” after working through the Shakespearean play or “The Real Abraham Lincoln” after getting through the stories where he’s a Vampire Hunter. These biographies inform all sorts of cultural and economic norms of the era. And reading about historical individuals can be both entertaining and illuminating, particularly when you begin to consider how your own world ended up as it is today.
“Why is Christianity a globe-spanning religious movement going back 2000 years?” is a question worth interrogating. And you can’t really interrogate that question without asking who this Jesus guy was or how he got so popular.
Gaza has a border with Egypt as well.
Not anymore. The IDF controls the strip of land between Gaza and Egypt and has secured it against any further aid crossing the border.
Hamas has pretty much total iron first control of Gaza
I was under the impression the IDF had a bit of influence there, what with all the tanks and bombers and soldiers scouring every inch of the war-blasted landscape.
Quit while you’re ahead
Quoting Carl Sagon to explain why gravity would kick in before Coyote looked down
This is also an idea behind the Dark Forest Hypothesis
I think that’s less about warp-speed weapons and more about natural resource constraints and the unpredictable nature of technological advancement causing advanced civilizations to preemptively obliterate one another.
But yes, the only practical defense against superluminal weaponry would be to avoid getting spotted.
If their engines aren’t constrained by speed of light, why would their weapons be?
at such long ranges you could move your ship and avoid a directed energy weapon
But how would you know an energy weapon had fired? Wouldn’t you be constrained by the speed of light, regardless?
One often fuels the other