Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Our goal...was to basically to create a whole new experience for people that retains the positive aspects of smoking, the ritual and everything, but that makes it as healthy and socially acceptable as possible." - cf drinking alcohol

"What if they'd swallowed their pride in the beginning and hired some former tobacco executives, people who actually know how to handle a heavily regulated product, instead of pretending they were just another work-hard, play-hard Silicon Valley start-up? - they wouldn't have got funding.

The British dither, the Americans starve.

Rather than a consequence of the French Intervention, the British lost America through their own stupidity.

American ships attacked British ports.

The Dutch Revolt and creation of the United Provinces a precusor for the American Revolution.

"Despite Silicon Valley being in the business of manufacturing technologies of long-distance virtual communication, cyber space has not supplanted city-space."

"...the Habsburg army was understrength and underfinanced and it is a routine part of any book on the First World War to blame the Hungarians for this," cf Ring of Steel, it blames the Hungarians for everything.

"This was true too Germany, where the army also became just a pleasant rite of passage - years of hanging around in a terrific uniform and making friends..." - cf the last episode of Blackadder - "Fifteen years of military experience perfecting the art of ordering a pink gin and saying 'do you do it doggy doggy' in Swahili, then suddenly four and half million heavily armed Germans hove into view.

"As all Hungarians now lived inside the Empire any territorial extension would result in a larger percentage of non-Hungarians...This pathological, zero sum, ethnographic obsessiveness drove Vienna mad..." - zero sum is also a feature of Hungarians dealings with each other.

"...this last attempt to satidfy minorities pleased nobody: it was seen by Poles as a frightening concession and by Ruthenians as merely an unsuccessful piece of cynicism to try to buy them off." - How does this work in Switzerland?

"Franz Ferdinand was an unusual Habsburg in that he was poor at learning languages, and his complete failure to master Magyar may have been he hated Hungary so much." - I find, however, that mastering a language is the high road to despising the people who speak it. When you don't understand a word they are saying, you can imagine so much more of them.

"The entrance price was to become literate and learn a new language and this process generated a further 2,000,000 or so 'fresh' Hungarians between 1850 and 1910. The largest group in this converted total were Jews, about 700,000 followed by Germans (500,000) Slovaks, Romanians and South Slavs."

"With the wretched ease of hindsight it is obvious the land-grab of 1867 was a terriblevmistake for Hungary. Hypnotized by visions of some ancient medieval state and by apocalyptic fears of their own national extinction the Hungarians tried to create a state which was even bigger than Italy and failed."

"For the Hungarians it became axiomatic that any actual extension of the Empire would be a disaster - to bite off a bigger bit would result in more slavs or Romanians, who would further dilute a Hungarian presence already spread thin." - true story, just look at the ethnographic map. Hungary was an island surrounded by larger ethnies mostly still outside the borders of the Empire.

"The strange role of Latin in Hungary had itself originated in the Middle Ages as elsewhere in Europe, but somehow it had maintained itself as a lingua franca that stretched across the kingdom, allowing Slovak to speak to Romanian. It may be just loopy obscurantism to suggest that Latin should in fact have been imposed on everybody, but it would have solved this problem, and more plausibly than...Volapük or Esperanto

"The British more or less gave up on the Austrians over their chronic indecision over the Crimean War, and this really masked the last gasp of one of the great constants of Central Europe: the British use of Austrian troops to pin down the French and get killed in large numbers, while the British helped themselves to colonies in the rest of the world."

'The Austrians owed the Russians everything for their help in defeating thr Hungarians but now, only four years later, they found themselves siding with the Allies out of fear of Russian ambition to take over Moldavia and Wallachia from the Ottomans and thereby block the Danube."

"With each passing decade dramas around rights, language and religious worship were played out. The twists and turns of Hungarian liberals who wished to democratize Hungary sufficiently to share power with the aristocrats but not sufficiently to allow in the Romainian and Slavic majority..." - after Trianon? When the majority was magyar.

"Indeed one of the motors of the French Revolution was a new sense of national rather than merely dynastic humiliation" - is there a fundamental difference between insular and continental nationalism?

"In 1784 the hideous revolt of Horea, Closca and Crisan erupted."

"The end of [Rákócsi's] rebellion saw a further overwhelming surge of thousands of colonists...[258] Many merchants were Jews, Greeks and Armenians and the strange process by which Hungarians tended to ignore economic activity of a non-agrarian kind began."

"Now, with the string of victories, all Hungarians fell into Habsburg hands for the first time...The truly horrible revolt of Ferenc II Rákocszi, which lasted from 1703 to 1711, caused staggering levels of further devestation, some 85,000 of his kuruc dying in battle and perhaps 400,000 civilians dying from plague and famine." cf war of Spanish Succession

"But the 'Crown Lands of St. Stephen' are a fantasy giving a sense of ancient destiny to an arena of political power for Budapest that in practice only existed from 1867 to 1918 and therefore has no more God-given legitimacy than any other random date bracket." - the name perhaps more realistic than Magyarország.

"Britain's and the United States' entire histories are based around their ability to opt in or out of conflict - their isolation making them near invulnerable" - so we can never expect a global political system to emerge from the anglosphere?

"an effect in bronze which is both violent and erotic in a way not generally looked for by people visiting crypts"...the eye of the beholder, more Benny Hill than Kenneth Clark.

"Everywhere in the Habsburg lands the classical gods and their helpers have almost as secure a presence as their modern, jealous and notionally monotheistic replacement, God." - Obviously, he has not travelled extensively in Danubia.

"The fantasy that this enormous new land was in fact 'Hungary' would be cruelly exposed within moments of the last Habsburg Emperor resigning in 1918."

"Each rebellion was damaged by the fatal quitetism of the Hungarian nobility. No matter how severe the emergency the nation always refused to do as it was told and never rose up as it was supposed to do." - A trait passed on the democratic Hungarian nation.

"But if they failed then the Habsburg family would vanish and - much shorter and crisper - book would end in the next few pages."