Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

""...It was little short of marvellous that men could stand such an intense strain." Considering that they came from the country with the least experience of mass conscription he was right." Disagree: a volunteer army is always going to have better morale than a conscripted one.

"'high casualty rates may have helped to prolong the war' because high troop turnover prevented fatigue and despair from becoming too widespread." There's always a silver lining?

"Typical was the resistance to the turnover tax...." Is there any other reason for this than a profits tax is easier to manipulate?

"...and when revolution did sweep from the northern ports southward to Berlin and Munich it was made not by the war's economic losers but by its relative winners: the soldiers and sailors, who had been better fed than civilians, and the industrial workers, whose real wages had fallen least."

'Unbelievably, 22,000 engineering workers went on strike in April 1918, with the Germans less than fifty miles from Paris.' That I do find unbelievable.

'economic historians have argued that this was one reason British employers did not hasten to introduce new machinery or mass production techniques: for one thing British skilled workers were affordable and, for another, they would make employers' lives he'll if attempts were made to impose standardised piece rates on them.' Does this present us with an economic mechanism for the dumbing down of the workforce?

"It's scarcely credible, but true, that intelligent men in Britain thought they were fighting footnotes and intelligent men in Germany thought they were defending E-flat chords." If you substitute 'intellectual' for 'intelligent', it's entirely credible.

"In fact, much wartime propaganda was not produced by governmental agencies at all, but by autonomous organisations or private individuals, so that much of the time the role of the institutions described above was merely one of co-ordination." So Britain has had a fourth estate for a long time, again the same question did communism destroy independent media in Hungary, or was there none to destroy?

So German war aims in 1914 were to create the EU, excluding Britain and Spain. :-o

"If war must break out, better now than in one or two year's time when the Entente will be stronger.' The problem with Ferguson's argument is that it doesn't discuss Germany's exit strategy. Surely if war now will merely result in less of a beating than war later, then the even better option is to negotiate something that avoids war all together. The Germans must have war aims in mind, what were they?

"The key to the arms race before 1914 is that one side lost it, or believed that it was losing it." Having already drawn the parallel with 1989, he needs to address why the Soviet Union didn't try an preemptive strike. :-D

"I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure". It seems Hume's notion of perception is broader than in ordinary speech: even beliefs are defined as lively perceptions. Would 'mentations' be a better term?

"It's all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?"

"British foreign policy between 1900 and 1906, then, was to appease those powers which appeared to pose the greatest threat to her position, at the expense of good relations with less important powers. The key point is that Germany fell into the latter category; France, Russia and the United States into the former."

"'Not a biscuit, ' Laura thinks in Rozsi's voice, 'not a nut,' Illustrates the difference, the English celebrate with drink, Hungarians with food.

"Or the burning radiators" so after a 30 years in a more temperate climate, Hungarians do not adapt. It must be the result of childhood conditioning.

"Here they're Philistines. They like game shows." A fact that escaped Roger Scruton, and my nostalgia.

To what extent did Hume's skepticism about rationality make Freudian and Marxian conceptions of man possible?

"Her accent is improbable even by Hungarian standards." That's what I was thinking.

"It is 'almost impossible for the mind of man to rest, like those of beasts, in that narrow circle of objects, which are the subjects of daily conversation and action'". He's kidding, right? Or has the world changed so much?

"Flid " - a word I haven't used since I left school, quite rightly!

"But the truth is that being unworthy of a nickname is a disaster. You are invisible." As a teacher, I have agonised over this.

Good lord! Every one talks like Lugosi Béla.

The Canterville Ghost, so much more successful as a humourist than a gothic novelist.

The birth of evolutionary philosophy? "...the existence of bodies... is an 'affair of too great importance to be left to our uncertain reasonings and speculations."

""They do not believe, as we do, that a B MUST occur, or that given an A a B MUST occur, but only that a B A WILL occur, or that if an A occurs a B will occur." I must be one of them, but then who isn't?

"Upon the whole, then, either we have no idea at all of force and energy, and these words are altogether insignificant... " I think this is the where I got to after three years of physics. Amazing that I studied it for another four.

"No wonder the crazy English turn the onset of gout into a family event." We do?

"In Hungary each country gentleman is a Cicero" a little harsh on Cicero, I feel.

"The trouble stems from Home's tendency to conflate the question of what our idea of necessity is an idea of, or what is our idea of necessity, and the quite different question of how that idea ever gets into the mind..."