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Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

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Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#31

Post by gherkinnn »

verve_rat wrote: post #23
gherkinnn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm torn. Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India. Same foot soldiers. Same cooks. But it was Alexander who got them there. And yet we loose so much by glossing over the cooks and masons and smiths and horsemen. Stories lost. Lives lost. Knowledge lost. It's been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went in to D-Day are never talked about. It's all cliffs, Pri…

Real Engineering did a great series on the logistics of D-day. https://youtu.be/sYXYG_F1EK0 We have shit tons of information about the fine grained details of WWII. You should look it up some time.

Never mind me, I’ve seen the Mulberry Harbour myself.

Doesn’t change the fact that it’s not part of the shared idea of that operation and over time will fall in to obscurity.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#32

Post by agumonkey »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #30
gherkinnn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew the title, not its contents. Thanks. From Wikipedia [0]: > In the booklet's penultimate chapter, Butler recommended three steps to disrupt the war racket: > 1. Making war unprofitable. Butler suggests that the means for war should be "conscripted" before those who would fight the war > 2. Acts of war to be decided by those who fight it > 3. Limitation of militaries to self-defense Reminds me of a point Danny S…

>Reminds me of a point Danny Sjursen made in his book Ghost Riders of Baghdad [1]. Paraphrasing (badly): Presidents, hawks, and other decision makers have no skin in the game. Their families are safe. They just rake in the dollars. In a conscript army, there is at least a chance that their sons too are sent to die. There might be an expectation that one has to have some experience before taken seriously in these matt…

sharing the cost sounds like a better notion of democracy than sharing the votes

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#33

Post by avgcorrection »

gherkinnn wrote: post #12
MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #4

This reminds me of a poem by Berthold Brecht: Questions From A Worker Who Reads Who built Thebes of the seven gates? In the books you will find the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock? And Babylon, many times demolished Who raised it up so many times? In what houses of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live? Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished Did the masons go? Great Rome I…

I'm torn. Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India. Same foot soldiers. Same cooks. But it was Alexander who got them there. And yet we loose so much by glossing over the cooks and masons and smiths and horsemen. Stories lost. Lives lost. Knowledge lost. It's been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went in to D-Day are never talked about. It's all cliffs, Pri…

The distinction between killing people and ordering people to kill people.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#34

Post by avgcorrection »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #30
gherkinnn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew the title, not its contents. Thanks. From Wikipedia [0]: > In the booklet's penultimate chapter, Butler recommended three steps to disrupt the war racket: > 1. Making war unprofitable. Butler suggests that the means for war should be "conscripted" before those who would fight the war > 2. Acts of war to be decided by those who fight it > 3. Limitation of militaries to self-defense Reminds me of a point Danny S…

>Reminds me of a point Danny Sjursen made in his book Ghost Riders of Baghdad [1]. Paraphrasing (badly): Presidents, hawks, and other decision makers have no skin in the game. Their families are safe. They just rake in the dollars. In a conscript army, there is at least a chance that their sons too are sent to die. There might be an expectation that one has to have some experience before taken seriously in these matt…

What egalitarian times those were.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#35

Post by Spooky23 »

guerrilla wrote: post #16
gherkinnn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm torn. Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India. Same foot soldiers. Same cooks. But it was Alexander who got them there. And yet we loose so much by glossing over the cooks and masons and smiths and horsemen. Stories lost. Lives lost. Knowledge lost. It's been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went in to D-Day are never talked about. It's all cliffs, Pri…

> Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India How do you know that? Leadership and management are real jobs but there's often existing demand, goals and plans that these people are employed by those around them for. I'm willing to go out on a limb and wager that's the way it always is actually. Everyone's a product of their environment and their times, standing on t…

But someone leads. Look around you. Most leaders are really managers phoning it in.

But when the right person with the right resources at the right time is there, magic happens. All three legs of the stool have to be there.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#36

Post by gherkinnn »

1cvmask wrote: post #25
gherkinnn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm torn. Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India. Same foot soldiers. Same cooks. But it was Alexander who got them there. And yet we loose so much by glossing over the cooks and masons and smiths and horsemen. Stories lost. Lives lost. Knowledge lost. It's been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went in to D-Day are never talked about. It's all cliffs, Pri…

Alexander the Great and his Macedonian army was composed of many groups like Thessalians and Macedonians. Greeks were a small portion of it: "The Greek cavalry was not considered as effective or versatile as the Thessalian and Macedonian cavalry." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Macedonian_army

You are correct.

I hesitated using “Greeks”, but then stuck with the common parlance.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#37

Post by gherkinnn »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #30
gherkinnn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew the title, not its contents. Thanks. From Wikipedia [0]: > In the booklet's penultimate chapter, Butler recommended three steps to disrupt the war racket: > 1. Making war unprofitable. Butler suggests that the means for war should be "conscripted" before those who would fight the war > 2. Acts of war to be decided by those who fight it > 3. Limitation of militaries to self-defense Reminds me of a point Danny S…

>Reminds me of a point Danny Sjursen made in his book Ghost Riders of Baghdad [1]. Paraphrasing (badly): Presidents, hawks, and other decision makers have no skin in the game. Their families are safe. They just rake in the dollars. In a conscript army, there is at least a chance that their sons too are sent to die. There might be an expectation that one has to have some experience before taken seriously in these matt…

That was my understanding too.

Though I don’t know when or why it changed. Was it mechanisation? Or the development of standing armies? Entrenched aristocracy?

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#38

Post by v-erne »

kragen wrote: post #5
bambax wrote: post #3

> The documents are laid out like a modern spreadsheet > a wonder of the ancient world Very slightly OT, but it's a shame history has been divided between "Ancient Times" and "our era", because it's obvious we are contemporaneous to these people who wrote down their daily activities in a journal and kept track of what was owned to whom on a paper table that looked like a spreadsheet. Not just contemporaneous: we are…

We use coinage and alphabets, transmute rocks into metal, have near-universal literacy, fly through the air like birds, bring the fire of the Sun to Earth to slay our enemies, walk on the Moon, transplant hearts and kidneys from one person to another, and bring forth plentiful harvests within glass temples in frozen wastelands. We craft elephants of iron that swallow us when we wish to travel from one city to another…

So basically everything is amazing and nobody is happy

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#39

Post by Jeff_Brown »

bambax wrote: post #15
kragen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use coinage and alphabets, transmute rocks into metal, have near-universal literacy, fly through the air like birds, bring the fire of the Sun to Earth to slay our enemies, walk on the Moon, transplant hearts and kidneys from one person to another, and bring forth plentiful harvests within glass temples in frozen wastelands. We craft elephants of iron that swallow us when we wish to travel from one city to another…

All of what you're describing happened after the Industrial Revolution, and most in the last 20 years. Yet the cutoff between Ancient Times and "our era" (?) happened 2000+ years ago, for some reason. Also, we don't fly "like birds". We are flown, crammed into metal tubes that are more similar to ancient galleries carved in mountains, mentioned in the OP, than to any bird. Edit: As a matter of fact I don't understand…

I think you're both right. We live completely differently now, but it's not clear that our essence has greatly changed.

In particular, that our values have changed is wonderful. But that's a cultural development. I'm convinced most of the people I've known would have shrugged at slavery like most Romans did, had they grown up with it. (Maybe they would have questioned it as children, but by adulthood they would have choked those questions down.)

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#40

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

gherkinnn wrote: post #12
MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #4

This reminds me of a poem by Berthold Brecht: Questions From A Worker Who Reads Who built Thebes of the seven gates? In the books you will find the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock? And Babylon, many times demolished Who raised it up so many times? In what houses of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live? Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished Did the masons go? Great Rome I…

I'm torn. Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India. Same foot soldiers. Same cooks. But it was Alexander who got them there. And yet we loose so much by glossing over the cooks and masons and smiths and horsemen. Stories lost. Lives lost. Knowledge lost. It's been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went in to D-Day are never talked about. It's all cliffs, Pri…

I don't think that this is an 'exlusive or' situation; The emphasis in the poem is on the small man, who is not often treated as being as part of the big picture, but who has to pay the bills, in the final analysis.
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