The History Thread

[mjmooney]

Bottom line is, (as with most school subjects) you either find it interesting, or you don't. If you do, all the Georges and Marys aren't a problem. If you don't, it's all a bore. 

[Xann]

https://www.nathanmediaservices.co.uk/teletext-viewer/

[chrisp65]

 

 

[bickster]

30 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

 

 

Is he actually Welsh? He should be hung from a lampost for that tweet alone

[chrisp65]

He faced some ridicule recently because the day after Rees Mogg said the leader of the Scottish tories was a lightweight, he was asked what he thought of the leader of the Welsh tories. To which Mogg answered he didn’t know the name of the leader of the Welsh tories.

ART Davies defended Mogg (and I guess himself), by saying there wasn’t actually a leader it was a sort of group effort. But he literally describes himself as leader on his own twitter header.

The guy couldn’t be any thicker if you cloned him and glued the two of them together.

[bickster]

35 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

He faced some ridicule recently because the day after Rees Mogg said the leader of the Scottish tories was a lightweight, he was asked what he thought of the leader of the Welsh tories. To which Mogg answered he didn’t know the name of the leader of the Welsh tories.

ART Davies defended Mogg (and I guess himself), by saying there wasn’t actually a leader it was a sort of group effort. But he literally describes himself as leader on his own twitter header.

The guy couldn’t be any thicker if you cloned him and glued the two of them together.

There's something about people with the surname Davies and being a Tory, do they share the same brain cell and swap it around randomly?

[MakemineVanilla]

2 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

 

 

It has to be said that some of Churchill's critics claim that he was partly responsible for starting WW1, and that the unjust settlement for that war, made WW2 inevitable.

Some say that Thatcher did the same, in that her government's failure caused the Falkland's war, which she then enjoyed political advantage by winning.

A lot of people died and she won an election.

It is an interesting historical topic to list those who were culpable of creating a crisis but are most famous for resolving it.

Churchill and the The General Strike might serve as an example, as he created the crisis by going back on the gold standard, which screwed the miners by making British coal competive.

[The Fun Factory]

5 minutes ago, MakemineVanilla said:

It has to be said that some of Churchill's critics claim that he was partly responsible for starting WW1, and that the unjust settlement for that war, made WW2 inevitable.

Some say that Thatcher did the same, in that her government's failure caused the Falkland's war, which she then enjoyed political advantage by winning.

A lot of people died and she won an election.

It is an interesting historical topic to list those who were culpable of creating a crisis but are most famous for resolving it.

Churchill and the The General Strike might serve as an example, as he created the crisis by going back on the gold standard, which screwed the miners by making British coal competive.

You could argue most of Churchill's career was an disaster- part of the Liberal Party collapse and lost his seat in 1921, the gold standard, the general strike, his stubbornness over India, the 1945 landslide defeat, and so on.  There are many things which you could put valid criticisms, but he was a unique individual who provided leadership in our darkest hour. A brilliant writer and orator even if you disliked him. The man won the Nobel prize for literature. A cross between poetry and prose.

 

[bickster]

21 minutes ago, MakemineVanilla said:

A lot of people died and she won an election.

I'm waiting for Johnson to start a war, he's in a similar place in the polls that Thatcher was before she let the Argentinians invade the Falklands

[MakemineVanilla]

2 minutes ago, The Fun Factory said:

You could argue most of Churchill's career was an disaster- part of the Liberal Party collapse and lost his seat in 1921, the gold standard, the general strike, his stubbornness over India, the 1945 landslide defeat, and so on.  There are many things which you could put valid criticisms, but he was a unique individual who provided leadership in our darkest hour. A brilliant writer and orator even if you disliked him. The man won the Nobel prize for literature. A cross between poetry and prose.

 

I have read a few biographies, which have left me with a suspiciously jingoistic glow, and so I tend to think they are generally written to satisfy the myth.

I don't doubt his greatness as a man, but I don't think the myth should be taken at face value.

I certainly give credence to the opinion that the Churchill myth has damaged the UK, as successive leaders have attempted to seek similar global fame.

I would list Blair amongst those guilty of that.

 

[The Fun Factory]

12 minutes ago, MakemineVanilla said:

I have read a few biographies, which have left me with a suspiciously jingoistic glow, and so I tend to think they are generally written to satisfy the myth.

I don't doubt his greatness as a man, but I don't think the myth should be taken at face value.

I certainly give credence to the opinion that the Churchill myth has damaged the UK, as successive leaders have attempted to seek similar global fame.

I would list Blair amongst those guilty of that.

 

Well I think even Churchill knew by the end of WW2 Britain was basically finished as  top level world power as it was largely US led. He saw it a as a pyrrhic victory.  He wouldn't have ballsed up the Suez like Eden did when he did finally retire. He actually wanted greater western european co-operation post 45 which most tory's tend to forget.

Edited January 24, 2022 by The Fun Factory

[Chindie]

He also wanted to start World War 3 sharpish to crush the Russians.

[Mandy Lifeboats]

3 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

 

 

Why do these people still propagate the myth that Britain stood alone against the Nazis?

In 1939 we declared war. So did New Zealand, Australia, Canada, India, South Africa and numerous parts of the British Empire.  

[chrisp65]

Just now, Mandy Lifeboats said:

Why do these people still propagate the myth that Britain stood alone against the Nazis?

In 1939 we declared war. So did New Zealand, Australia, Canada, India, South Africa and numerous parts of the British Empire.  

 

I suspect he’ll try and work something clever around the ‘turned the tide’ part of the tweet.

Unfortunately, clever and Davies are not two things you often find together. He’s had a good day when he remembers to sit down to shit.

[mjmooney]

I hate it when that happens. 

[A'Villan]

Quote

Edward (Ned) Kelly probably came into the world in June 1855, although his brother Jim would later say that Ned was born ‘at the time of the Eureka stockade’. That might or might not have been true, but it tells us something about the political sentiments associated with the Kelly family. I’ll come back to that later. First Ned’s family background. His father, John (Red), was born in Tipperary, Ireland, in 1820 and sent to Van Diemen’s land (Tasmania) in 1841 for stealing two pigs. After serving his seven years, Red went to the mainland to try his luck on the gold fields. He was one of the few lucky ones, earning enough to lease some land in the Port Phillip district, a part of NSW that would become the state of Victoria in 1851. That same year he married Ellen Quinn, the 18-year old daughter of a farmer he had been working for as a bush carpenter. During the time they were together, they had eight children, five daughters and three sons. Ned was number three and the eldest boy. 

 

For every one of us, our background and upbringing are critical in determining who we will become and it was no different for Ned Kelly. First of all, it was important that his family had Irish roots. Not only had his father been sent here from Ireland, his grandfather, James Quinn, had been a free settler from County Antrim, who had arrived in Australia, as Red had, in 1841. James, Ellen’s father, rented a block of land at Wallan, about 50 kilometers from Melbourne, where he ran stock and horses. For a while everything was fine, but from the end of the 1850s, members of the Quinn clan kept getting arrested for cattle duffing (theft). Most of the charges were dismissed, but it set up a strained relationship between Ned’s family and the local police. This was exacerbated when Red himself was charged with cattle stealing and being ‘in illegal possession of one cow hide’ in 1865. He was sentenced to 25 pounds or six months goal. Before the end of the prison sentence, the money was raised and Red was released. But because he had been suffering from dropsy (oedema) before he went in, he died not long after. [1]

 

It was December 1866 and suddenly Ned, not quite twelve years old, was the male head of the family. His mother, now a widow with eight children, moved to a small landholding in the Greta district. This made her a selector, somebody who fell under the provisions of the Grant Act of 1865. I’ll come back to this a little later, but for now it is enough to know that selectors were small farmers, who could select a piece of land if they were willing to sign up to a number of conditions. They had to fence the property, build a house and live there, put at least 10 per cent of the land under cultivation and pay the rent. If they were unable to do that, they could lose their land and everything on it. Most of the fertile land that had access to water went to big landowners called squatters and people like Ellen Kelly were left with the unprofitable scraps. The family was poor, there were too many mouths to feed and soon young Ned got into trouble with the law himself. In 1869 and 1870 he was in front of the court a number of times. First accused of assaulting a Chinese digger, then for highway robbery, as the apprentice of local bushranger Harry Power. While he got away with those, he earned his first prison sentence at the end of 1870, for sending an indecent letter.  

 

Not long after his release from goal in 1871, he was back in front of a judge, this time for stealing a horse. Although the police exhibited some questionable conduct before and during Ned’s arrest, he was convicted to three years and hard labour. While Ned was in jail, his younger brother Jim was also arrested and sentenced to five years for the theft of four cows. In 1874 Ned was released, in time to see his mother marry an American, George King. For the next couple of years, everything went quiet. Ned took a job in the lumber industry, then panned for gold and spent some time mustering. But in 1877 he got arrested again, for being drunk and disorderly. On his way to court, two police officers, Fitzpatrick and Lonigan, grabbed him by the throat and the genitals, apparently because Ned refused to be handcuffed. It did not help to dilute the bad blood that already existed between the Kelly’s and the police, and soon Ned decided to throw caution to the wind and specialize in cattle duffing and horse stealing fulltime. [2]

 

Then things went from bad to worse fairly quickly. In 1878 there was the ‘Fitzpatrick incident’. In April, Ned and his brother Dan were suspected of horse stealing and a warrant was issued for their arrest. Fitzpatrick, the police officer Ned had already been in trouble with before, came to the Kelly house to try and arrest the boys. Although there are a number of versions of what happened then, in the end Fitzpatrick had a wrist wound and after some skirmishes Ellen Kelly , Ned’s mother, was arrested for attempted murder. In October she was sentenced by Judge Redmond Barry (remember that name!) to three years hard labour. Ellen took her newborn baby Alice with her, because she also lost her house and land after being unable to pay the rent. Realising this was serious, Ned and Dan went into hiding, with the police in hot pursuit. A few weeks later the two parties ran into each other at a place called Stringybark Creek. Again, there are several different accounts of what happened there, but a few hours later police offers Lonigan (see above), Kennedy and Scanlon were dead. Ned and his brother Dan, who had been joined by their friends Joe Byrne and Steve Hart, were now officially the ‘Kelly Gang’. In November a law was changed, so the gang could be outlawed and a reward of 500 pounds put on their heads. In essence, this meant that anyone could shoot and kill them without needing a trial first.

 

But this did not happen. Ned and his Gang were famous by now and the people in the bush and the small villages helped them out by feeding and hiding them. This was especially the case after the Kelly Gang pulled off robbing a bank at Euroa in December of 1878. Not only because they took the money and got away with it, but above all because they destroyed paperwork that tied poor selectors to their debts. Now more than ever, the small farmers viewed the Gang as the Australian version of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Geographer and historian John McQuilton explained this phenomenon by looking at what had happened in Victoria in the years leading up to what he called ‘the Kelly outbreak’. Before the 1840s, most of the land had been controlled by squatters, large landowners who had established themselves in the area as a social and political elite. They not only held most of the land, but also had a good amount of politicians and the best part of the police in their pockets.  

 

Then gold was found in Victoria and tens of thousands of people streamed in from everywhere around the world. Some of them were lucky, most were not, and when the Rush was over, there were a lot of people with nowhere to go. From 1860 to 1884, the Governments of the day tried to enact a series of Land Acts, to make it possible for ex-diggers to select and lease land, at the low price of 1 pound per acre. As we have seen before, there were conditions attached and a lot of these so-called selectors did not manage to make a go of it. Some of them because they knew nothing about farming and failed to rotate their crop, focusing on the farmers’ choice for the region, wheat. Other small farmers were unsuccessful because the rich squatters had taken up the best parcels of land and the best stock to put on it, leaving the selectors with very little. Over all, McQuilton says, the land reforms were a fiasco. Of the 1.8 million acres that were made available, 1.6 million went to the squatters, not the selectors, as had been the intention. During this process, the selectors had watched the squatters use legal loopholes, dummying, harassment and corruption to get their way. They also knew that many of the Judges and JPs were squatters themselves, which did not bode well for the impartiality of the judicial system. On top of that, there was a strong relationship between the squatters and the police. Also, country duty was very unpopular within the police force, which usually meant that the bush got the worst men, who were corrupt, low in morale and often engaged in misconduct, prejudice and bias. [3]

More on the website link 

 

 

https://www.australia-explained.com.au/history/ned-kelly

Edited January 27, 2022 by A'Villan

[A'Villan]

Quote

In 431 BC war broke out between Athens and Sparta - the two superpowers of the Greek world. Socrates was enlisted as a hoplite, a wealthy and well-equipped infantryman. Shunning personal comfort and able to endure great personal hardship without complaint, he was to make quite a name for himself.

 

One story, in Plato's 'Symposium', describes how Socrates remained oblivious to harm even in retreat. After one disastrous battle, this total lack of concern is said to have intimidated the pursuing enemy so much that he was left completely untouched while hundreds of his fellows were picked off and slaughtered.

 

Plato also recounts that when Socrates returned to Athens after a long tour of duty, he refused to answer his friends' questions about the war. Instead he insisted they first tell him the more important news about how the search of truth was going. 

 

 

https://www.pbs.org/empires/thegreeks/characters/socrates_p3.html

[fruitvilla]

On 24/01/2022 at 07:32, bickster said:

There's something about people with the surname Davies

I'd love Alphonso Davies at Villa.

On 24/01/2022 at 07:47, The Fun Factory said:

You could argue most of Churchill's career was an disaster- part of the Liberal Party collapse and lost his seat in 1921, the gold standard, the general strike, his stubbornness over India, the 1945 landslide defeat, and so on.  There are many things which you could put valid criticisms, but he was a unique individual who provided leadership in our darkest hour. A brilliant writer and orator even if you disliked him. The man won the Nobel prize for literature. A cross between poetry and prose.

God, this is so reasonable.

It's all effing luck, being in a particular place, at a particular time, with the a set of attributes, polished by genetics and environment.

[A'Villan]

50 minutes ago, fruitvilla said:

I'd love Alphonso Davies at Villa.

God, this is so reasonable.

It's all effing luck, being in a particular place, at a particular time, with the a set of attributes, polished by genetics and environment.

I don't mean to come across as a total git here but I couldn't disagree more.

Don't take this as a slight on you, please, it's not, but this line of thinking really bothers me because I've entertained it and at times believed it long enough to see how detrimental it is for us.

This notion that we are this inconsequential blob of matter that are strangers in a universe so large, helpless to the whims and ways of the world, well it hurts me that we see it so. It hurts because I am inclined to think that this mentality is planted in us by design to divorce us from what's true.

I do enough ranting and expressing my views on here that I am wanting to balance respecting other people's space and energy, and by that I mean I don't want to assume what I post is of interest to everybody, I'd be inclined to say it isn't.

When it comes to our role in this life and that so many are so hopeless in their attachment to the mindset that life is explained best by science and our existence is insignificant and meaningless. I want to rip the heart right out of the chests of those responsible for seeing that we as a people became so out of touch with who we are, when we tell ourselves we live in a democracy, which means power of the people, and yet simultaneously we say we are powerless to determine our own fate. We tell ourselves we are the best version of ourselves any society has known. I bloody wonder about that. My word, I do.

I don't have the time and energy today to write you why I am so strong in my stance here, but this very subject is what my post in the thread on what we most dislike in ourselves was on about. I think there's an important and perhaps even urgent need for people to at the very least explore what makes us who we are a little deeper than just handing it over to a scientific method and those dedicated to it. 

Take the initiative for yourself. Maybe that's why we find ourselves thinking it's all left to chance, because we have forgotten how to take it upon ourselves to think creative, critical and self determine.

I'm by no means saying I have discovered all the answers for myself and by myself. 

The acknowledgement of a lack of knowledge is when we can begin to wonder and develop as there is room for learning to take hold. If the only room you have in that wonderful world of yours is to accept scientific facts, I think you've sold yourself well and truly short.

[MakemineVanilla]

9 hours ago, fruitvilla said:

It's all effing luck, being in a particular place, at a particular time, with the a set of attributes, polished by genetics and environment.

I think my favorite part of the teleivision series Cosmos, was when Carl Sagan explained the events and counted up the number of generations which led to the existence of everyone alive today.

It might not have been a miracle but it sure was one hell of a winning-streak!