• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

blessmycottonsocks

Antediluvian
Joined
Dec 22, 2014
Messages
9,337
Location
Wessex and Mercia
Just dropped through my letterbox.

Really looking forward to reading this later, as Witchfinder General is probably my favourite movie!
 
Just dropped through my letterbox.

Really looking forward to reading this later, as Witchfinder General is probably my favourite movie!
Mine arrived yesterday, I'm off back to bed in a minute to read that article.
 
Looking forward to the new issue, still haven't renewed my subscription, so have to wait for WHSmith to get theirs in, which never seems to be on the due out date.
 
Mine arrived in the post today, nice birthday present, esp. the Witchfinder General article which was very well done. Also, the simulacra on the Letters page - anyone seeing a profile of Tom Baker?
 
Mine arrived in the post today, nice birthday present, esp. the Witchfinder General article which was very well done. Also, the simulacra on the Letters page - anyone seeing a profile of Tom Baker?
Happy birthday GNC!

Unfortunately (fortunately because I'm happy) I'm in the process of moving in with my girlfriend, and haven't been home to check whether it's arrived. Probably won't see it until the weekend. Hope it's worth the wait.
 
Mine arrived in the post today, nice birthday present, esp. the Witchfinder General article which was very well done. Also, the simulacra on the Letters page - anyone seeing a profile of Tom Baker?

Happy Birthday!
 
Thanks everyone.

Back at the mag, I've finished the 17th Century articles, and couldn't help but make the connection between the literal witch hunts of those days and the fake news business 400 years later. Seems every age has its delusions.
 
Thanks everyone.

Back at the mag, I've finished the 17th Century articles, and couldn't help but make the connection between the literal witch hunts of those days and the fake news business 400 years later. Seems every age has its delusions.

Hope you had a good 'un!
And at least take comfort from the fact that times have moved on and even today's alleged anti-Semites won't have to fear the sound of Matthew Hopkins' boots crunching on the gravel up to their front door.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Jim
p

In today democracies misinformation is common place, at least we can vote which has some effect. International conglomerates play a large role using money - influence to get their agendas regardless of who we vote in.
Democratic countries are -have been guilty of severe human rites violations: Churchill's bleeding of India, The death of 10K's of German POW's in allied camps after WW2, the US in Vietnam, France in North Africa. However the enemies of democracy: Nazi's, dictators, Communist, terrorists organizations, theocracies, etc. have -have had a way of making our violations appear minor.

And France in Vietnam. They started the whole mess. It was just America's mistake to try to sort it out.
As for German POWs, Wiki suggests over 300,000 died in Russian camps. And don't forget, when the Red Army advanced on Berlin hardly any girls or women went unraped.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Jim
And France in Vietnam. They started the whole mess. It was just America's mistake to try to sort it out.
As for German POWs, Wiki suggests over 300,000 died in Russian camps. And don't forget, when the Red Army advanced on Berlin hardly any girls or women went unraped.

I was just suggesting that the US may could have been better staying of things at times, certainly not WW2.

At my 1st place of employment we had a gent that was in Berlin when they took over. He said he said they stoped a bus or tram (can't remember) forced everyone off and gunned them down on the spot.

The eastern front was the place where the worse atrocities in history occurred. Likely the 2 most heinous organizations of all time were - are Nazism and Communism.
 
Entertaining kicking given to von Daniken's "theories" on the Fortean Library section. Won't stop him, though.

Impressive Poseidon on pages 6-7.
 
Oh yeah, and the daddy longlegs request? Because obviously it's really difficult to catch them usually, isn't it? You hardly ever see them, do you? The bright elusive daddy longlegs of love, as the old song goes.
 
read the short about the surgeon who "autographed" a patient's liver with his initials S.B. I'm sure this has happened at least once before: a doctor in the USA initialled his work while stitching up a patient and carved his initials into the patient's skin at the end of a row of stiches - with a scalpel - on the grounds that every piece of art needed a signature, or something. He had mental health issues and was struck off the register and the hospital had to pay quite a lot in compensation, as I recall - looking for the case and further details. I also recall reading something about a surgeon in Germany after WW2. In this case he was described as being far too old to practice and suspected of suffering from Alzheimers, but Germany had lost so many doctors in the war that they had to take what they could get to fill the gaps - this brain surgeon was still there approaching eighty, and apparently his initials went somewhere inside the patient's skull but not in the brain tissue itself. There's quite an interesting fortean sub-set emerging here!
 
The Archaeology section talks about the newly discovered geoglyphs in Palpa. This flippant sentence engenders curiosity.

"There are also images of apes and a whale."

Apes? A striking cryptozoological discovery if proved. Or are monkeys intended?
 
The Archaeology section talks about the newly discovered geoglyphs in Palpa. This flippant sentence engenders curiosity.

"There are also images of apes and a whale."

Apes? A striking cryptozoological discovery if proved. Or are monkeys intended?

How could De Loys be so wrong... and yet so right?
 
Maybe they had the sort of apes that delivered a lesson in accurate taxonomic nomenclature if they were erroneously described as "monkeys". That's the sort of lesson that sticks...
 
read the short about the surgeon who "autographed" a patient's liver with his initials S.B. I'm sure this has happened at least once before: a doctor in the USA initialled his work while stitching up a patient and carved his initials into the patient's skin at the end of a row of stiches - with a scalpel - on the grounds that every piece of art needed a signature, or something. He had mental health issues and was struck off the register and the hospital had to pay quite a lot in compensation, as I recall - looking for the case and further details. I also recall reading something about a surgeon in Germany after WW2. In this case he was described as being far too old to practice and suspected of suffering from Alzheimers, but Germany had lost so many doctors in the war that they had to take what they could get to fill the gaps - this brain surgeon was still there approaching eighty, and apparently his initials went somewhere inside the patient's skull but not in the brain tissue itself. There's quite an interesting fortean sub-set emerging here!

this is it: incredibly Dr Zarkin was still allowed to practice afterwards.... or maybe this is yet another example and the original one I'm looking for is still out there somewhere; picking up stories that a Dr Duntsch in Texas (brain surgeon) did exactly the same thing, but no conclusive stories as yet

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/22/...d-his-initials-into-patient-lawsuit-says.html
 
And France in Vietnam. They started the whole mess. It was just America's mistake to try to sort it out.
As for German POWs, Wiki suggests over 300,000 died in Russian camps. And don't forget, when the Red Army advanced on Berlin hardly any girls or women went unraped.

Notoriously, the Russians institutionalised this. Stalin himself brushed off protests from his ally General Tito about the appalling behaviour of the Red Army troops who drove the Germans out of Yugoslavia. He pointed out that just in case Stalin hadn't noticed, the Yugoslavians did not count as the enemy and his people should expect better treatment from their liberators. Stalin shrugged and told Tito not to be such a sensitive snowflake; in his opinion the Russian soldiers who were liberating Eastern Europe should expect the gratitude of the women they were liberating and Yugoslavian women should feel privileged that they were expected to give a bit back. Or something. (This came back to bite Stalin and Krushchev in the bum later when Tito, remembering this, said "screw you" and went independent of Moscow). That kind of set Soviet policy when they broke out of their 1939-41 borders and into Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania and Yugoslavia - it wasn't just German women who were mistreated. By the time the Russians got into Germany they'd had lots of practice. Solzhenitzyn first became a dissident as an artillery officer in 1945: he saw the way the Red Army was behaving and didn't like it, and tried to enforce standards of decent behaviour on the men he commanded. (to be fair, a lot of German accounts don't fit the "mass rape" narrative; many Germans were pleasantly surprised at the decent and humane behaviour of the front-line Red Army soldiers they encountered and the way their officers enforced an expectation of decent conduct. In many cases the really bad behaviour came later, with second-echelon or occupying troops, or men recently released from prison or PoW camps who were mad for vengeance).

Anthony Beevor, I think it was, pulled together a narrative that suggests that there was a mass feeling in the Red Army in 1944 that having recovered the USSR and thrown the Germans out, they should stop there, with Germany beaten, and then let the politicians negotiate a peace. Beevor and others suggest there wasn't an appetite for going on with the war; an awareness that Russia had suffered horrendous losses already and could anything really be gained by losing even more in a mad rush for vengeance? A general sentiment in Russia, an undercurrent, was - let's stop here. Demobilise. Rebuild our nation. In this climate, reasons had to be generated for wanting to go on to Berlin; the new propaganda narrative was one of generating real hate and anger against Germany, and disseminating an informal assurance to the troops that they could pillage and plunder and rape as much as they liked and there would be no sanctions - appealing to the lowest common denominator - was a part of this. It also helped the propaganda narrative that the first extermination camps were discovered at about this time: a concrete, real, non-fabricated, reason to hate Germans. so many Russian PoW's being liberated was also a factor in changing Red Army attitudes - the incoming liberators saw how prisoners had been treated by Germany, especially the survivors of those taken in 1941 who'd lived through it for three years, and this hardened opinion. significantly. (The Russians weren't alone in this: the British reconquest of Burma in 1944-45 was marked by real hatred of the Japanese for the same reasons, and it is the case that not all that many Japanese prisoners were taken - even when they actively wanted to surrender.)

Something else that gets lost under the radar - the hideously bad behaviour of the Red Army has obscured this, along with a post-war narrative that said British and American troops were 100% good guys - is that while it was never institutionalised in the same way and sanctions were enforced, there was a significant amount of rape and plundering carried out by the Western Allies too. French colonial troops had a bad reputation for this, especially in Italy. But that's what comes of being on the winning side...
 
Last edited:
Maybe they had the sort of apes that delivered a lesson in accurate taxonomic nomenclature if they were erroneously described as "monkeys". That's the sort of lesson that sticks...
I suppose I shouldn't get too pedantic. The linguistic distinction between apes and monkeys is, I understand, an English thing (I don't believe it exists in French or German), and it's certainly not taxonomic. In fact I don't believe there is a taxonomic equivalent of 'monkey', nor one for 'ape' which excludes humans. But still, the article was in English, and in English there's a distinction.
 
I suppose I shouldn't get too pedantic. The linguistic distinction between apes and monkeys is, I understand, an English thing (I don't believe it exists in French or German), and it's certainly not taxonomic. In fact I don't believe there is a taxonomic equivalent of 'monkey', nor one for 'ape' which excludes humans. But still, the article was in English, and in English there's a distinction.
I thought than humans, hominids and hominins were included as part of the "great ape" category (shh, don't mention that to anyone in Tennessee...) and the distinction between apes and monkeys was that the latter had tails. Not vestigial, but proper tails. I could be wrong. I very often am.
 
I suppose I shouldn't get too pedantic. The linguistic distinction between apes and monkeys is, I understand, an English thing (I don't believe it exists in French or German), and it's certainly not taxonomic. In fact I don't believe there is a taxonomic equivalent of 'monkey', nor one for 'ape' which excludes humans. But still, the article was in English, and in English there's a distinction.
as Terry Pratchett pointed out, the distinction certainly exists in Oook, the language of orang-utans...
 
I thought than humans, hominids and hominins were included as part of the "great ape" category (shh, don't mention that to anyone in Tennessee...) and the distinction between apes and monkeys was that the latter had tails. Not vestigial, but proper tails. I could be wrong. I very often am.
That's the problem. Know-it-alls (and I've done this myself) are quick to point out that apes aren't monkeys. But that distinction is made in the English language, not necessarily in all languages. In taxonomy, there is no monophyletic clade (a clade which includes an ancestor and all of its descendants, and nothing else, of which modern taxonomists are so fond) which includes both old world and new world monkeys, but excludes apes and humans. In other words, taxonomically, there's no such thing as a monkey.

Similarly, people are fond of saying that humans are apes (in more recent years I've heard that humans and apes share a common ape-like ancestor), but if someone says they saw an ape in the zoo, do we assume they might possibly be talking about one of the zookeepers, not in a derogatory manner, but because they're apes too? The word ape is an English one, not scientific nomenclature, and probably didn't originally include humans, and it could be argued still does not in usual discussion, unless one is describing the appearance or manner of a particular human as ape-like. And I've also known people similarly described as hippos and pigs, but doubt that would carry much weight in the halls of natural history either.

The other day, my stepdaughter said 'It's probably not true [there's a fortean in the making with the right guidance], but at school they said people are animals too.' My girlfriend and I agreed they are, like you do. But I mulled this over afterwards. The word 'animal', in general use, is an English word used to describe those creatures which are not humans. Nobody uses it to include people unless they're saying something like, 'humans are animals too', which wouldn't need saying if it was understood that the word included humans.
 
Finally got mine yesterday, really enjoying it so far, SD Tucker's Strange Statesmen article on Gabriel Green, the contactee and 60s presidential candidate is an interesting read, I hadn't heard of Green before now, a good theme follow up from last issue's article on Nixon, Jackie Gleason and the aliens. Loved the look of Gleason's Round House :eek:
 
Just got it today.

Interesting long letter from Joseph Barnes about the development of Horror and SF in popular culture through the mid 20th Century. Worthy of being a Forum article.

Good Forum piece on the 50th anniversary of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I'm going to see the re-released classic next Sunday.
 
That's the problem. Know-it-alls (and I've done this myself) are quick to point out that apes aren't monkeys. But that distinction is made in the English language, not necessarily in all languages. In taxonomy, there is no monophyletic clade (a clade which includes an ancestor and all of its descendants, and nothing else, of which modern taxonomists are so fond) which includes both old world and new world monkeys, but excludes apes and humans. In other words, taxonomically, there's no such thing as a monkey.

Similarly, people are fond of saying that humans are apes (in more recent years I've heard that humans and apes share a common ape-like ancestor), but if someone says they saw an ape in the zoo, do we assume they might possibly be talking about one of the zookeepers, not in a derogatory manner, but because they're apes too? The word ape is an English one, not scientific nomenclature, and probably didn't originally include humans, and it could be argued still does not in usual discussion, unless one is describing the appearance or manner of a particular human as ape-like. And I've also known people similarly described as hippos and pigs, but doubt that would carry much weight in the halls of natural history either.

The other day, my stepdaughter said 'It's probably not true [there's a fortean in the making with the right guidance], but at school they said people are animals too.' My girlfriend and I agreed they are, like you do. But I mulled this over afterwards. The word 'animal', in general use, is an English word used to describe those creatures which are not humans. Nobody uses it to include people unless they're saying something like, 'humans are animals too', which wouldn't need saying if it was understood that the word included humans.

I suppose you could say humans are animals but we got the evolutionary upgrade to Animals 10.
 
Just got it today.

Interesting long letter from Joseph Barnes about the development of Horror and SF in popular culture through the mid 20th Century. Worthy of being a Forum article.

Good Forum piece on the 50th anniversary of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I'm going to see the re-released classic next Sunday.

"Its origin and purpose still a total mystery."
 
Back
Top