Why did they put a semicolon in the middle of this sentence?
To bother you
It makes you sound smarter and well; read.
One Piece, of all things, phrased this concept better
Everyone so damn defensive about history texts like they’re fucking gospel.
Norm was a funny guy. It was a joke.
The only thing I’m annoyed about is the use of the semi colon
Take away the “that” and the semicolon is okay, but you should go full colon.
Same advice as with your mom, actually.
I love a good mom roast. It’s almost a lost art these days, or at least it feels like that.
I mean, while there’s certainly a bias towards the victor, there’s definitely some histories that have slipped through from people who were very much not the victors. Josephus comes to mind, even if he did so by surrendering to the victors; Thucydides and Athens lost the Peloponnesian War; for a more recent example, the American South’s narrative on the Civil War.
You would need to be extremely racist to think the good guys won the Opium War or the wars of European conquest in the Americas or Africa, and even centuries of propaganda spin don’t change that. And there are cases like the Siege of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade that was rightfully vilified even at the time.
Are you familiar with the concept of sarcasm? Or contextual reading?
You would have to lack a certain kind of thinking to take this quote that was posted in the memes community seriously
deleted by creator
Definition of a meme according to the Meriam Webster dictionary. “an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video)” looks like an amusing captioned picture to me.
If we’re truly being pedantic, this is a meme as it is an idea shared and spread in a culture.
Indeed.
Also just naive to think that there are “good guys” and “bad guys”. When you dig into the nuance of any conflict its almost always complicated.
Did you guys just completely miss the joke or something? I mean it’s not subtle or anything…
The joke refers to the addage that history is written by the victor, but that just isn’t true.
Exactly. That is part of the joke.
Norm understands that it’s not true, he pokes fun at it because most people do tend to take it as fact. He ridiculizes how silly that thought is.
deleted by creator
The oppressed, butchered and exterminated victims of the European colonial systems would like a word with you…
That’s the joke.
Are you under the impression this is a statement made genuinely? Who do you think Norm Macdonald was?
I realize he’s talking about “history is written by the victors” but I thought of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds
Its object was to solve the problem of evil, that is, to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering in the world with the existence of a perfectly good, all-powerfuland all-knowing God, who would seem required to prevent it
I’m reminded of HAL from 2001 for some reason. Maybe because HAL was given two conflicting goals and went insane trying to reconcile them with each other, rather than simply discarding the goal that was obviously just some nonsense.
Beings are possible together, in turn, when they do not enter into contradiction with each other. For instance, it is logically possible that a meteor might have fallen from the sky onto Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s head soon after he was born, killing him. But it is not logically possible that what happens in a given world (e.g. that Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia) also does not happen in the same world (i.e. that Jimmy Wales did not found Wikipedia).
If this is the best of all possible worlds then God must be pretty fucking terrible at making worlds.
How great it would be to realize that our god is the equivalent of a grade school child making finger painting and crayon drawing versions of worlds in the timeout chair and this was just the one we got stuck with.
I go with Schopenhauer:
Arthur Schopenhauer argued, contrary to Leibniz, that our world must be the worst of all possible worlds, because if it were only a little worse, it could not continue to exist.
We appear to be working on proving Schopenhauer’s theory.
That was the point of the satiric novella Candide.
I couldn’t get past this…
Is that Leibniz?
Such a fancy boy
Edit: didn’t click the link before posting. Dunno if I should be impressed or concerned that I recognized this dude lol.
He might look like a dandy, and might have been way too weirdly Christian, but the man was a fucking genius. Still think his notation style for calculus was better than Newton’s
Wai? Dude looks like he plays drums in a Spinal Tap tribute band. What could be better than that?
da winors wrait da histoorie buks. I am weri smort.
Thank you
Good guy Pyrrhus.
How many Americans in this thread have every read or seen anything about the Vietnam war written by a Vietnamese person ?
I’ve searched and could find no books, no movies, no tv shows written or produced by a Vietnamese person available in English.
Why is that ? I thought history was written by the victors.
Movies all with english subs or dubs
“When the tenth month comes” “the abandoned field” “the little girl of Hanoi”
Books available in many languages including English.
“The sorrow of war” “Last night I dreamed of peace” “Mourning headband for Hue” “nothing ever dies”
Just to name a few. Ive seen 1 and read 2. Nobody won that war and it never should have happened.
Maybe The Sympathizer (or the book it was based on)?
I’m not sure who told you the U.S. won the Vietnam War, but I have some bad news.
Idk maybe you need a new search engine I used DDG and found this list
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/186705.Books_on_Vietnam_War_from_Vietnamese_s_perspective
Also I’m sure many are aware of the Mai Lai Massacre and other events and the overall war itself is widely known as a “loss” for the US military.
And most everyone in the world knows about Agent Orange and the fallout from using it on those people that still today affects them.
I’ve never read an account of Vietnam from a Vietnamese person, so I’m adding one of these to my reading list. Thanks for sharing!
