Greatest manager of the 20th century. Most famous #Mingrelian since Medea. ACAB (except the NKVD).
Mar 11, 2023 • 61 tweets • 9 min read
@Peter_Nimitz Things I learned from "Village Life In Late Tsarist Russia", the first-ever systematic ethnography of a Russian peasant community, done in 1902 by Olga Tian-Shanskaya but never published in her lifetime:
(A warning: it's extremely depressing.)
1) The single most surprising thing by far was how anti-natal peasant attitudes were.
Central Russia may have had the highest fertility of anywhere in Europe, to the point where it was facing a Malthusian crisis, but it *wasn't* because peasants wanted a lot of kids.
On the one hand, it seems that the current trend among classicists is towards arguing that Greco-Roman infanticide was much less common and less gender-biased than previously thought...
E.g., this paper points out that supposed evidence for massively-skewed gender ratios in ancient Greek populations is actually dubious, and that there's no clear evidence of sex-selective infanticide being widespread in practice. academia.edu/3166682/Greco_…
I’m getting this from Maimonides’ “Mishneh Torah”.
The actual Talmudic passages show it was a debated, controversial issue. But the wrong side appears to have won.
Jun 11, 2022 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
I’m *shocked* that those devoutly Catholic Poles keep sanctimoniously damning me for that whole Katyn unpleasantness.
Why, by the rulings of their own most distinguished and humane theologians and canon lawyers, the NKVD’s actions were morally in the clear!
😇🙏🔫🤯😵🪦
Specifically, I refer to the great Francisco de Vitoria, that heroic defender of the Indians and proto-liberal theorist of universal human rights.
Even for him, all combatants are guilty and can legitimately be killed even after capture.
Extremely dismayed to learn recently that Medieval English serfdom was *much* closer to chattel slavery, in terms of both theoretical understanding and concrete legal effects, than is commonly thought.
@Evollaqi This strongly challenges both Anglophilic narratives about how the common law never recognized slavery, and English participation in New World slavery thus represented a dramatic break with national tradition.
