Give me a run down of Europe from 1450 to 1650, /his/.
and then it got better
>>904679
Spain beats France, France beats Spain.
>>904679
So these Ottoman guys were like "We would like Constantinople" and the Byzantines were like "no man it's ours", so then the Ottoman guys invaded and took the city over, and promptly renamed it Istanbul because it sounds better.
Blood on the tennis court edition
What's the point? Everyone has fucking terrible taste. There's always the same stale, emotionless, 19th century shit.
>>908143
BUT DUDE, THE SKILL. THE SKILL INVOLVED!!
Is there any way that the World Wars could have been prevented?
Hard-Mode: You aren't allowed to assassinate any of the Axis leadership.
War only propagated to the whole world through the alliance network. No alliances, no world wars.
>>907799
>Kill Karl Marx
>Kill Princip
That was easy.
Cut Germany's balls off after ww1.
Maintain a strong military to deter German stupidity.
Make German pay denbts.
Does the end justify the means? Please explain why.
depends on what the end is.
>>907619
So you are saying yes, essentially?
Yes, but you have to think about the second order effects of "bad" behavior. Turns out if the Prince backstabs his way to the crown, he creates a norm where backstabbing is normal and then he himself is killed.
What is the weirdest historical fact/story you know?
Oswald Mosley shot a shark with a revolver while Franklin D. Roosevelt watched
Germans and Brits had a Christmas party in the noman's land between trenches during WWII.
Just makes you realize how absurd wars are.
>>901858
*WWI
fuck
ITT god-tier cities
FILENAME DELENDA EST
Not the best by any measure, but imagine it.
Pre-snackbar Muslim cities, all mystical and Aladdin and shit.
CITY OF GOLD
What were ancestors doing in 1500?
I'm descended from poor farmers from the northern Indus Valley, so, dunno
Farming?
I come from WASPs.
My ancestors were busy being English noblemen.
Farming and fighting wars.
How did one nation fall so far?
moslems
>>906485
Mughal Empire?
>>906475
BUILD TOILET
Tell me about Maori /his/
>>905071
They literally ate an entire tribe of pacifists
It was like a /pol/ joke
>hello new friends, would you like to be equals?
RAAAAWWWRRR
OM NOM NOM
>>905071
Hard cunts who were hated by everyone else but were just too damn good to be killed off. They were also one of the few indigenous peoples to really mount a proper resistance to English colonization and they had a remarkable amount of success at it.
They get along with kiwis much better than abos do with 'strayans.
a people who existed as long as the white man but in 50000 years only managed to invent the pineapple
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
>>903626
The historian looks backward. In the end he also believes backward.
"It's blood all the way down"
>>903626
>mfw people unironically believe this
Do you like him, /his/?
I have only listened to interviews with him and he seems on point, though a lot of people seem to hate him. He also seems to be shat on a lot for his philosophy thoughts.
>>903353
As an insight meditation teacher, reading Waking Up by Sam Harris was simultaneously joyful and shameful. It is a fine book that points to a weakness in the culture of awakening that is hard to look at directly. In his usual style, he is honest to the point of painful, and sometimes it can be hard to take.
Let me back up.
For those who don’t know Harris, he is a neuroscientist who became most well known for publishing The End of Faith, a book promoting the idea that what we believe influences how we behave, and that faith-based beliefs lead to rather irrational behavior. Like flying planes into buildings. He’s dry, technical, but funny and obviously not afraid of controversy. Apparently people really like that combination, because The End of Faith stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over 30 weeks. Harris quickly moved from obscure neuroscientist to intellectual sensation, and was lumped in with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett as the leading edge of a revitalized post-9/11 atheist movement described as “new atheism.” Together they were ironically dubbed the “four horsemen.”
But Harris is an odd fit among the horsemen. While Hitchens, Dennett, and Dawkins all rail against the privileged position that eastern spirituality seems to have among western intellectuals, Harris openly disagrees with them, making the case that despite the woo-woo clearly at work in the offerings of Deepak Chopra, The Secret, and similar new age flim-flam, there is something valuable to be found in the spiritual traditions of Asia that is being obscured, rather than revealed, by pop spirituality. He uses his public platform to urge people to dig a little deeper.
>>903365
It turns out he is speaking from experience. Waking Up is not just an introduction to Buddhist meditation and the liberation that it leads to, it is a spiritual memoir told from the perspective of a consummate rationalist and skeptic. One who stumbles upon enlightenment.
After a few chapters of fleshing out why some spiritual practices are fruitful human endeavors and others are not, and correlating the claims of mystics with modern neuroscience, Harris gets down to the memoir part of his book and dishes on his own experiences. I was thrilled to read that Harris begins his spiritual search in U Pandita’s meditation center, where he practices a rigorous form of insight meditation. Harris is told that he is working through the progress of insight toward “cessation,” and will attain his first taste of awakening upon that strange moment of non-occurrence. For readers of my site, or fans of insight meditation, this should all sound very familiar.
When I read this part of the book I was rooting for Harris, excited to hear what he makes of the shift in consciousness that occurs after cessation. I looked at how many pages were left and anticipated that there would be a detailed account of how he reconciled his own encounter with nibbana with cutting edge brain science. This, I thought, is the book I’ve been waiting for.
So imagine my disappointment, shock really, when on the same page he reports that he couldn’t do it, and gave up.
No cessation. No stream entry. Zilch.
Something, I thought, went horribly wrong.
>>903368
It is not exactly clear from the book what happened. In retrospect he reasons that moving toward a goal (cessation) did not feel like the right path to enlightenment, and that truth can be glimpsed no matter where one is on the path, and truth is not found in a state, cessation is not necessary and… his explanation started to feel fishy as I read it. Frankly, this sounds like a rationalization after the fact. Indeed, it sounds identical to what he was taught by the teachers and traditions that he encountered after he left Pandita’s center (Advaita and Dzogchen). So what was he really thinking and feeling at the time he threw in the towel?
A hint can be found in his description of the wall he hit during a year-long retreat:
“But cessation never arrived. Given my gradualist views at that point, this became very frustrating. Most of my time on retreat was extremely pleasant but it seemed to me that I’d merely been given the tools by which to contemplate the evidence of my non-enlightenment. My practice had become a vigil. A method of waiting, however patiently, for a future reward.”
Harris is describing an insight practice that has stalled out in one of the stages along the progress of insight. In another passage he points out that his movement through the progress of insight wasn’t very clear and although he had many interesting experiences he did not know if he was making any progress at all. Why didn’t he know?
What concerns me most about this is that Harris does not describe what would have been the best, most natural, and sensible antidote for his struggle: someone simply telling him where he was on the path and what to do to move on. I wonder what kind of book Waking Up would be if someone had simply taken him aside at that time and said “hey, relax, you are in lower equanimity. It goes on for a while and can sometimes feel uneventful. Here’s what you can do about it…”
Why does life appear to be so rare and unique if it is a natural phenomenon?
Do you think human beings are alone in the universe or that we lack the mental capacity to figure out if we are alone or not?
Perhaps life is only viewed as something so special because we are a part of it. Maybe life is just another natural system on Earth, inherently no different from the weather.
We attribute value to life because we arn't edgelords.
>>903314
some possibilities
a) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis
b) most stars did not produce enough CHON for life too develop yet, will be more later.
c) intelligent life always drives itself extinct
d) intelligent life does not wander from from it's planet in constant expansion
I personally believe that life forms that believe in constant explanation will drive themselves extinct, and those that don't will be regulated to a small amount of space
ITT: Post right wing propaganda posters and pictures
no commies allowed
Cross of Santiago <3
>tfw you'll never fight for the blue shirts
Did the US really lose the Vietnam war?
If yes, why?
>>901886
Did you actually go there to win anything?
Well, we sure as shit didn't win.
I don't know if I'd call it a "loss" as I'm not entirely convinced there was a real goal besides "let's see how much military hardware we can sell before people get tired of this"
As a Hindu I have great deal of respect for the two great wizards of Monotheism. Clearly both Mohammad and Jesus were wizards with very strong magical powers.
But which one of them would have won in a sorcerer's duel?
>>901126
Bible Jesus and Quran Jesus are on different power-levels.
You have to specify which.
Bible Jesus wins when he loses.
It doesn't bode well for Jesus. His only attack "Turn Cheek" is basically an antique "magikarp splash," and does nothing whatsoever. Mohammed has the power to throw stones, and carries a sword. Jesus however has the ability to resurrect the dead, leading to a stalemate over infinite series of combats where Mohammed beheads Jesus n times and Jesus resurrects himself n+1 times, until Mohammed dies of old age or possibly venereal disease.
>>901141
Bible Jesus vs Koran Mohammad.
![918px-India_geo_stub.svg_[1].png](https://i.imgur.com/We5ShrZ.png "918px-India geo stub.svg [1]")
