"Everyone has a cross to bear, some more readily visible than others. This does not mean that everyone is a victim, however. I'd downvote this if I could simply because sometime in the past decades it became socially encouraged to claim victim status as the solution to every problem."

I totally agree. To paraphrase Aeschylus: humanity is suffering. As you say, everyone in the world has a cross to bear, a source of suffering that they wish they could do without. Guess what? We're humans, not gods, and suffering is just part of the game we have to play.

That said, there are sources of real tragedy and there are sources of minor discomfort. Being too good looking would certainly fall into the latter category. Would any of these people interviewed trade in their good looks for a world in which the mortality rate for children was over 50%? Had they been born just 200 years ago, or in the developing world for that matter, the best looks in the world wouldn't save them from the experience of losing several children. As others have pointed out, the interviewees are all wearing trendy clothing and have absolutely perfect teeth. This suggests to me that none of them have had to experience the grinding desperation that is poverty. It is also highly unlikely that any of the men interviewed will be forced to fight in a war during their lifetime; in the ancient Greek world there was no such thing as a conscientious objector, warfare was incessant, and roughly half of all adult men would die on the battlefield as opposed to old age.

I could go on, but the point is that to live in the modern, industrialized world is to live as securely, prosperously and removed from suffering as human beings have ever been in our 150,000 year history as a species. Someone being "too good looking" is such a minor concern when put in the perspective of the developing world and the human past. If the greatest source of hardship in someone's life is that their good looks cause them some minor social discomfort, then they need to stop claiming victim status, wake up and get some perspective.

A stupid indulgence in victimhood. The common thread these people complained about is that they felt that their physical attractiveness brought certain stereotypes along with it, i.e. she's pretty so she must stupid. The amazing thing about stereotypes like that is they evaporate within 30 seconds or so of actually talking to the stereotyped person. And people tend to want to talk to and get to know attractive people! How is this a problem again?

A first impression of a person will often be based upon stereotypes and that's true for all people, attractive or not. If this is the biggest source of suffering in these peoples' lives then they have got it really fucking good. With all the REAL problems that people face in the world, there is no reason to indulge this pointless victimization.

"Did no one notice the guy screaming "cease fire" for the last thirty seconds of the video?"

Probably a function of sustained fire damaging your hearing. Without hearing protection, firing live ammunition immediately causes a sharp ring in your ears coupled with slight pain, like a pin-prick but sustained over time. With each additional round fired the pain and ringing increase. The only sustained fire I've been around has involved blank ammunition, which is no where near as loud as live, but I have to imagine that after a 10-15 minute firefight your hearing must be absolutely shot.

I recall being on the M-16 qual range and realizing to my horror that I had forgotten to insert my earplugs when I fired the first shot. Since targets are continuously popping up, and whether or not I qualified on the weapon depended on me hitting each one of them, I had to wait until the first 20 round magazine was expended before inserting ear plugs. At the end of that my hearing was pretty well shot, almost as badly as coming out of a rock concert, and bothered me for the next few days. I have to imagine that a sustained fire fight must leave you in a near deaf state, and unable to immediately hear commands.

"I just saw this on the big screen a few weeks ago. Awesome movie."

You lucky bastard. Blade Runner is one of my all time favorite movies and I was so excited when I first heard that the Final Cut would get a theatrical run. Then my excitement was brutally crushed when I discovered it was not going to play ANYWHERE in the SF Bay Area. Chicago got it but not San Francisco? WTF?

"thats an in-effective way of getting your war on!"

It was actually a very effective way to get your war on. The musket only had an effective range of about 50 yards and was extremely inaccurate. The only way to make effective use of the weapon was therefore to mass your men. The idea was that if you if you have a group of musketmen standing shoulder to shoulder, firing in volleys, then the mass of musket balls being fired would be bound to hit something. Were they to spread out and fire individually, the inaccuracy of the musket would prevent them from hitting a damn thing. In other words, in order to mass their fire they HAD to mass their men.

In this particular attack, where the French are unsupported by artillery, the Brits would not have had to sustain quite so many volleys. It takes roughly twenty seconds to reload a musket, which is plenty of time for an attacking force to run across the 50 yards or so where musket fire threatens them. This then is what the attack would have looked like: the Brits march across the open field until they are roughly 50 yards away from the French; the French fire a volley and begin reloading; the Brits fire a volley and then charge in with the bayonet; the Brits will most likely close to hand to hand range before the French can finish reloading; a bayonet fight breaks out where numbers, skill and bravery determines who wins. Not quite as suicidal as this makes it out to be, eh?

If the French had artillery however, the Brits would be pretty well fucked. They'd be sustaining artillery fire from the moment they began marching to the attack, such that by the time they actually reached musket range, their attacking force would be so diminished that they would no longer be combat effective.

Still a pretty cool clip, nevertheless.

Anything with Clint Eastwood = Automatic Upvote

"Instead of that question, let’s hope the general will be asked what we so often forgot during Vietnam: Is this worth the cost in lives and money?"

And is that not a question for policy makers, rather than policy implementers?

I hardly think he's equating leftists with terrorists. Rather that Bin Laden's latest video draws inspiration from the out there conspiratorial rants that you tend to find in the comment sections of political blogs. The point isn't that leftists are closeted terrorists, but that Bin Laden's latest video is as pathetic as the most out there conspiracy theorists.

Whoa, I wasn't expecting the soldier to be holding his protest in uniform. That is way, way out of line. As Lurch mentioned, you sign a contract when you enlist that makes it clear that you're at the beck and call of the US government for eight years. Stop loss sucks and is completely unfair, especially considering that most Americans are completely unwilling to serve a day, let alone years. The fact of the matter is however, that having your time on active duty extended is a possibility that is made known from the moment you enlist, and as such it should be considered before signing the contract not after the extension has occurred.

Frankly, I think it's pretty disgusting how unwilling most Americans are to serve during a time of war. Whether you are for or against the war, Americans are suffering and sacrificing at this very moment. That the nation isn't willing to help shoulder that burden and instead prefers not to think about it, is pretty low in my opinion. Even if you think the ruck march is a complete and utter waste of time and energy, you shoulder the ruck sack of the guy who is struggling so that you can all make it through. When the Ancient Greeks debated in their assemblies whether or not to go to war, the people arguing for and voting for war knew full well that either they themselves or their sons would be fighting in it. Perhaps if more Americans didn't choose to ignore military service, we wouldn't have chosen this war to begin with.

"I need more info of course, but this essay misses it's intent."

You didn't find the Nashi literature full of fabricated US media headlines designed to stir up nationalist sentiment just a tad bit troubling? What about the ideology test to get admitted to the summer camp? Where the "correct" answer is demonstrably false rumor again designed to stir up nationalist sentiment?

Part of this organization seems analogous to the College Democrats and Republicans. But if this report is anything to go by it sounds as if there is also a hefty dose of political and ideological indoctrination designed to build a pro-government cadre of young people.

"Palestine was designated as the Jewish National Home by the League of Nations, enshrining this designation in international law. Why should the Jewish people give up any part of Palestine?"

The Jewish National Home described in the Balfour Declaration, which was later incorporated into the British League of Nation Mandate over Palestine, does not necessarily suggest that there is international legal precedent for an Israeli state encompassing all of historical Israel. One, the Balfour Declaration itself was a wartime expedient designed to build support for WWI among European and, especially, American Jews so its value as legal precedent is suspect. Two, the British Government, who issued the Balfour Declaration, made two other, contradictory agreements: one with King Hussein, in the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, which gave all Arab speaking lands, except for the Lebanon, to his rule in exchange for orchestrating an Arab uprising against the Ottomans; and the second with the French in the Sykes-Picot Agreement which divided up Ottoman territories for French and British colonization and administration. Three, the League of Nations Mandate was in violation of the League's charter: it denied the right to self-determination to former Ottoman subjects. Four, the Balfour Declaration describes a Jewish National Home within Palestine which shall not "prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine", not a Jewish state. Five, the Balfour Declaration was a declaration by fiat of the British Government that was performed with out consultation with or consideration of the Palestinian people. For these, and numerous other, reasons it is unwise to take the Balfour Declaration as international legal precedent for an Israeli state.

Fortunately, we don't have to take the Balfour Declaration as precedent. The 1948 UN Special Commission on Palestine enshrines the existence of separate Israeli and Palestinian states living alongside eachother. It is important to note however the the borders of these two states look very different from the borders we see today. In the 48-49 war, the Israelis seized territory beyond the '48 borders and declared them unconditionally Jewish. This seizure of land was in violation of international law but was tolerated, largely as a result of European guilt over the holocaust. Israel expanded it's borders yet again in the Six Day War of '67, in which they launched preemptive strikes against Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, seizing and retaining territory to this day. The seizure of land by war is in violation of the UN charter and as result numerous UN Security Council Resolutions (242 and 338 among others) have been drawn up condemning Israeli's seizure of land and demanding that it be returned. The point is that Israel has a legal right to exist, but it illegally holds much of the land it currently possesses.

A final legal issue is Israel's denial of right to return to Palestinian refugees, a clear violation of international law. Israel faces a demographic problem, in that if they allow refugees to return, within a generation Arabs will outnumber Jews in the Israeli state. Israel would then have to either give up its Jewish identity, or give up its democracy in order to suppress Arab influence over the state. Israel doesn't have a solution to this problem as the Jewish birthrate is much lower than Palestinian. As a result, their only choice, from their perspective, is to continue to violate international law, with the knowledge the US financial and military back will remain, until a longterm solution can be devised. In the mean time, Palestinian refugees continue to languish in the conditions of refugee camps.

In response to Yoghurt:

I agree with most everything you've said. For whatever reason I'm having a difficult time articulating a complete response so I think instead I'll just make a couple of quick points.

1. In terms of looking at continents and their respective histories, Diamonds theory is dead on. Agriculture arose in the different continents at different times in history due primarily to the geography of the continents. In this respect Diamond is absolutely convincing.

2. At a level smaller than continental level, his theory is of very little use. Why did the Greeks and later the Romans conquer the Mediterranean? Asia Minor, the Levant, Mesopotamia and Egypt, all had agriculture and writing long before either Greece or Rome. The answer lies in culture.

3. I am probably being a bit too presumptuous in reading a politically correct rewrite of history into Diamond. Nonetheless that was my reaction when reading him and my most recent post seeks to explain that reaction.

4. I briefly brought up Mycenean Greece and Classical Greece primarily to illustrate point number 2. Culture can be the edge that allows one of two otherwise equal societies to dominate the other. Culture can also allow a technologically inferior society to overcome a technologically superior culture.

At the macro-scale of Diamonds theory this discussion may be less than relevant. However in order for Diamonds theory itself to be truly relevant it needs to have an explanation at the micro-level as well, which it doesn't because it omits discussion of the role of culture. Given that he states that his book has real world political applicability (16), it is not out of line to criticize him for failing address the micro-level of interactions between societies. In that respect I think he fails for all of the above reasons..

"First off, the part about the New Guinean islanders you have totally taken out of context"

I concede that I took it out of context but Diamond nevertheless wants to have his cake and eat it too. He condemns racist explanations of human history as being loathsome and wrong (19). He is clearly making a moral judgment about racism here: that it is loathsome. If I said Black Americans have evolved to be on average less intelligent and less well motivated than their white counterpart, I have clearly made a racist statement. I have drawn distinctions between groups that should only, if I want to avoid racist thinking, be made between the characters of individuals; hence, in the previous sentence I have made a racist statement. 2 pages after his moral judgment on racism, Diamond explains the environmental forces that acted upon the New Guinean population that caused them to evolve a higher degree of intelligence than their New Guinean counterparts. He even goes so far as to conclude that "in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners" (21). While he qualifies that statement as only being probable, rather than true, he has nevertheless made a racially charged, if not outright racist, statement. He made a moral judgment, yet two pages later me makes the sort of statement he had just condemned.

As for the context of his statements, he is trying to disprove a specific racist argument seeking to explain history. That argument uses Australia as its prime example: that European colonists were able to build a complex, urban society within 100 years where as the Aborigines had lived there for over 40,000 years without having progressed beyond a hunter-gather society. The explanation continues by saying that clearly, given the identical environment, the Europeans most have been more intelligent than the Aborigines (19). Diamond seeks to disprove that explanation by stating that "sound evidence for the existence of human differences in intelligence that parallel human differences in technology is lacking" (19). He then goes on to give his example of superior New Guinean intelligence to show that a people with stone-age technology can be more intelligent than a people with modern technology. Therefore, the inverse of the assumption upon which the Australia example rested (technologically advanced people are more intelligent than less advanced people) is in fact true.

Now my problem here isn't that Diamond is wrong, I suspect that he is in fact right that New Guineans are on average smarter than Westerners. Rather, the issue I take with him is his alternate repudiation and acceptance of racism; he can't have it both ways if he wants to be intellectually consistent and honest. It is politically correct to say that a brown man is smarter than a white man, but it is not PC to do the reverse; Diamonds repudiation and acceptance of racism lines up with this sort of political correctness.

Now political correctness in and of itself has no bearing upon a book's argument, other than the inconsistency between two introductory pages . The reason why I brought up political correctness in Diamonds introduction is because it reveals a sensitivity to political correctness that caused him to steer clear of politically charged aspects of human history, namely culture. The politically correct dogma with regards to culture is relativism. It is not PC to claim that one culture is superior to another. Were Diamond to seek to explain history by looking at how the practices of one culture could superior than another, allowing the former to conquer the latter, then he would violate his own politically correct sensibility. He therefore does not talk about culture, which to my mind is the glaring weakness of his book.

He instead chooses to explain how geography determines how quickly a people could adopt agriculture, domesticated animals and writing; the three tools that allow for rapid technological advancement and eventual conquest. People that settled in geography that predisposed them to more rapid acquisition of those three tools were more likely to conquer their neighbors. The fates of human societies were therefore determined by accidents of geographic settlement. Aborigines aren't less sophisticated than Europeans, they just unknowingly settled in a region whose geography would put them irreparably behind in the technology race that determines who is the conqueror and who is the conquered. Diamond does a great job of explaining the geographical role in the acquisition of those three tools, and towards that end he has a great book.

The problem is that he ignores how different cultures will make use of those three tools, and the technologies they produce, in different ways. What he needs to do to complete his account is to also investigate cultural factors, but to do so he risks violating PC dogma and hence he shied away from that.

"Been meaning to read this book... just too darn lazy! "

While worth reading it's quite overrated. It is primarily an attempt to provide a politically correct explanation for why Europeans have dominated the globe. While he has a convincing argument based upon geographical determinism, he completely ignores the role culture has in human affairs. Given that he isn't a historian, I suspect he simply wasn't aware that different cultures have arisen in the exact same geographical environment at different times, yet have had radically different fates. A key example is Mycenean Greek culture (short lived, long dead, with no influence on modern life) and Classical Greek culture (persisted over a millenia after having dominated the known world and continues to directly influence the modern world). Both cultures existed in the exact same environment and yet the had such different fates. Diamond has no explanation for such occurrences.

Going back to the issue of political correctness, Diamond goes to great lengths in his introduction to explain how he wanted to get away from racist explanations of why some civilizations have dominated others. He talks about how he doesn't buy that one civilization, particularly Western European Civilization, can be smarter, stronger, etc. than another civilization. About ten pages later however he apparently forgets all of this and goes on at great length about how much more intelligent indigenous New Guinean islanders are than your average Westerner. Apparently racist explanations are perfectly acceptable so long as its not Western Europeans being considered superior.

"Maybe one of these days Hollywood will get it right and do their research and use the facts, which are even more interesting than the half truths they sell to get the average person to go and see this garbage."

As skrob says its best to think of 300 as a stylized story the Greeks would have told among themselves and in that respect the film is extremely accurate.

Much has been made of how the Spartans don't wear any armor in the film, which is of course completely ahistorical. In a stylized account of Thermopylae, the near-naked bodies of the Spartans is entirely Greek. Were it not for US homophobia I'm sure the film-makers would've filmed the Spartans without their loincloths. In Greek art there is something called heroic nudity. All Greek men worked out nude, daily, as a community in preparation for when they would have to fight shoulder-to-shoulder together in the phalanx. This obsession with physical fitness caused them to idealize masculine beauty. As a result, much of their more stylized art depicts heroic men as being nude and buff as hell. Hercules, for example, frequently shows up just wearing his lion skin cloak. Were the Greeks to have had access to film, and decided to make a movie about Thermopylae, I am certain that the Spartans and other Greeks would have been depicted naked, just like in 300.

Another issue that is often raised is the depiction of Xerxes. No, he probably wasn't 10 feet tall and probably didn't have the voice of god. That however isn't the point. Xerxes was treated as god-king by his subjects and he ruled the largest, wealthiest and most powerful empire in the world. The Greeks were well aware of how powerful and impressive a guy he was. In fact, they frequently referred to Xerxes, and his descendants, simply as the King, as if the Persian Emperors were the only rulers of all that wasn't Greece. Given all of this, it is entirely appropriate for Xerxes to have the appearance of a god in the movie.

Another interesting thing they did with Xerxes was gold imagery. This goes back to Aeschylus's Persians where the imagery of wealth permeates the entire play, shifting in meaning to symbolize Persian wealth and power in the beginning of the play, to symbolizing Persian weakness and downfall. Ancient Greece was not a wealthy land by any measure. The great public works projects of Classical Athens were payed for by imperial tribute, not some inherent money-making ability of the Athenians. The Greeks, therefore, viewed extreme wealth with suspicion. They felt that a man that doesn't work for his living isn't fully a man. Wealth and leisure was therefore associated with effeminacy. Going back to 300, note how Xerxes wears golden chains over his body and has both golden nail polish and eye shadow. The effect the filmmakers were clearly trying to acheive was the association of gold with makeup, and therefore the feminine. Xerxes, despite his god-like stature, strikes the audience, with his makeup, as being much less manly than Leonidas. This is of course exactly how the Greeks viewed it.

I could go on, there are plenty of interesting examples of "Greekness" in 300. The point is that while 300 is not completely historical, it is very, very Greek. The filmmakers clearly did their research and read their classical texts.