mdennehy · July 25, 2016 16:11
diff --git a/gistfile1.txt b/gistfile1.txt
 _"Wars are actually the norm for humans,”_
 Nope. Statistics says otherwise. Unless the dead are rising and voting again. Armed conflict is - and has been - in a steady decline for a *very* long time. _*Visibility*_ of armed conflict (and bad things in general) on the other hand seems to have hit a local knee in an exponential curve…
 _" To us now it seems obvious that we survived the Plague, but to people at the time it must have seemed incredible that their society continued afterwards.”_
 Nope, it didn’t. The Black Death caused the destruction of the society that preceded it; what came afterwards was utterly, fundamentally changed. For the better, from our point of view, it introduced things like human rights and workers rights at a fundamental level by creating a shortage of labour so extreme that it forced nobles to in effect negotiate with serfs. That seems straightforward to us today because of a thousand years of getting used to it (more or less) but at the time? That was the equivalent of someone inventing low-cost teleportation today. 
 _"For the people living in the midst of this it is hard to see happening and hard to understand. To historians later it all makes sense and we see clearly how one thing led to another. “_
 Nope. For those living in it, it’s blindingly obvious, the focus of their times. Those in the past weren’t idiots just because they didn’t have widespread literacy. And historians aren’t able to piece stuff together that readily because data is lost preventing that, and also because history books are written with serious biases. For example, most English people won’t know the origin of “gunboat diplomacy” as a term in any detail, but every Chinese kid will learn it in history classes; most Irish kids never hear of the Draft Crisis of 1918 and we happily celebrate the 1916 rising as the real cause of the war of independence. In fact even his next line illustrates this:
 _"During the Centenary of the Battle of the Somme I was struck that it was a direct outcome of the assassination of an Austrian Arch Duke in Bosnia. “_
 Nope. That was a trigger event, not a cause. The causes were well established pressures that long preceded that event (and arguably events like the building of the Baghdad Railway - something that gets left out of most history books in schools - were more important). If it hadn’t been that assassination, odds are high it would have had a different trigger event but would still have happened.
 _"Then after the War to end all Wars, we went and had another one. Again, for a historian it was quite predictable. “_
 Nope. First of all, there’s a pretty widespread view that the first and second world wars were really just one war with an intermission; secondly _historians_ were not predicting the outbreak of the second world war because it was happening _then_, not 50 years beforehand, when their subject matter starts. _Politicians_ and political commentators were making predictions. 
 _"as with before, most people cannot see it”_
 Oh ffs. This is just “I’m special, everyone else is an idiot”, but using a few hundred words where seven would do. 
 _"Brexit in the UK causes Italy or France to have a similar referendum. Le Pen wins an election in France.”_
 Rather ignores the point that the French are loving Brexit for giving them a solution to Le Pen (giving the UK an EEA deal without financial passporting and stealing all the business from the city for Paris).
 _"Trump wins in the US. “_
 That’d be a disaster yes; but it’s rather ignoring that this weekend is the first time Trump’s ever been ahead of Clinton in the polls ( http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/president/ ) and that’s because of the post-RNC bump and the post-DNC bump for Clinton will wipe that back out. 
 _"It will come in ways we can’t see coming, and will spin out of control so fast people won’t be able to stop it.”_
 This *has* happened before, but the opposite has happened as well. We’ve avoided wars several times in living memory when it seemed inevitable. 
 _"It’s an easy route but the wrong one.”_
 So is thinking that absolutely nobody else sees the problem and ignoring every piece of data we have that says it’s not _automatically_ the end of the world. Sure, if nobody did anything, it’d be bad, but that’s not what happens. Ever. Humans are funny like that. 
 _"Well, again, looking back, probably not much. The liberal intellectuals are always in the minority. See Clay Shirky’s Twitter Storm on this point. The people who see that open societies, being nice to other people, not being racist, not fighting wars, is a better way to live, they generally end up losing these fights. They don’t fight dirty. They are terrible at appealing to the populace. They are less violent, so end up in prisons, camps, and graves. We need to beware not to become divided (see: Labour party), we need to avoid getting lost in arguing through facts and logic, and counter the populist messages of passion and anger with our own similar messages.”_ 
 Drop dead. That bit of bile is just the “we need to be strong and make liberalism great again” speech.
	_"Wars are actually the norm for humans,”_
	Nope. Statistics says otherwise. Unless the dead are rising and voting again. Armed conflict is - and has been - in a steady decline for a very long time. _Visibility_ of armed conflict (and bad things in general) on the other hand seems to have hit a local knee in an exponential curve…
	_" To us now it seems obvious that we survived the Plague, but to people at the time it must have seemed incredible that their society continued afterwards.”_
	Nope, it didn’t. The Black Death caused the destruction of the society that preceded it; what came afterwards was utterly, fundamentally changed. For the better, from our point of view, it introduced things like human rights and workers rights at a fundamental level by creating a shortage of labour so extreme that it forced nobles to in effect negotiate with serfs. That seems straightforward to us today because of a thousand years of getting used to it (more or less) but at the time? That was the equivalent of someone inventing low-cost teleportation today.
	_"For the people living in the midst of this it is hard to see happening and hard to understand. To historians later it all makes sense and we see clearly how one thing led to another. “_
	Nope. For those living in it, it’s blindingly obvious, the focus of their times. Those in the past weren’t idiots just because they didn’t have widespread literacy. And historians aren’t able to piece stuff together that readily because data is lost preventing that, and also because history books are written with serious biases. For example, most English people won’t know the origin of “gunboat diplomacy” as a term in any detail, but every Chinese kid will learn it in history classes; most Irish kids never hear of the Draft Crisis of 1918 and we happily celebrate the 1916 rising as the real cause of the war of independence. In fact even his next line illustrates this:
	_"During the Centenary of the Battle of the Somme I was struck that it was a direct outcome of the assassination of an Austrian Arch Duke in Bosnia. “_
	Nope. That was a trigger event, not a cause. The causes were well established pressures that long preceded that event (and arguably events like the building of the Baghdad Railway - something that gets left out of most history books in schools - were more important). If it hadn’t been that assassination, odds are high it would have had a different trigger event but would still have happened.
	_"Then after the War to end all Wars, we went and had another one. Again, for a historian it was quite predictable. “_
	Nope. First of all, there’s a pretty widespread view that the first and second world wars were really just one war with an intermission; secondly _historians_ were not predicting the outbreak of the second world war because it was happening _then_, not 50 years beforehand, when their subject matter starts. _Politicians_ and political commentators were making predictions.
	_"as with before, most people cannot see it”_
	Oh ffs. This is just “I’m special, everyone else is an idiot”, but using a few hundred words where seven would do.
	_"Brexit in the UK causes Italy or France to have a similar referendum. Le Pen wins an election in France.”_
	Rather ignores the point that the French are loving Brexit for giving them a solution to Le Pen (giving the UK an EEA deal without financial passporting and stealing all the business from the city for Paris).
	_"Trump wins in the US. “_
	That’d be a disaster yes; but it’s rather ignoring that this weekend is the first time Trump’s ever been ahead of Clinton in the polls ( http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/president/ ) and that’s because of the post-RNC bump and the post-DNC bump for Clinton will wipe that back out.
	_"It will come in ways we can’t see coming, and will spin out of control so fast people won’t be able to stop it.”_
	This has happened before, but the opposite has happened as well. We’ve avoided wars several times in living memory when it seemed inevitable.
	_"It’s an easy route but the wrong one.”_
	So is thinking that absolutely nobody else sees the problem and ignoring every piece of data we have that says it’s not _automatically_ the end of the world. Sure, if nobody did anything, it’d be bad, but that’s not what happens. Ever. Humans are funny like that.
	_"Well, again, looking back, probably not much. The liberal intellectuals are always in the minority. See Clay Shirky’s Twitter Storm on this point. The people who see that open societies, being nice to other people, not being racist, not fighting wars, is a better way to live, they generally end up losing these fights. They don’t fight dirty. They are terrible at appealing to the populace. They are less violent, so end up in prisons, camps, and graves. We need to beware not to become divided (see: Labour party), we need to avoid getting lost in arguing through facts and logic, and counter the populist messages of passion and anger with our own similar messages.”_
	Drop dead. That bit of bile is just the “we need to be strong and make liberalism great again” speech.
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