Fun read on the tyranny of “enlightenment”
(twitter.com)
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The larger point is correct, but he's getting a few things wrong here.
Most Americans underestimate the disaster that was the French Revolution. The Bolshevik revolution was a follow-up on the French Revolution. In fact, the Bolsheviks modeled themselves after the 'Jacobins', the craziest of the revolutionaries, while denouncing their opponents as 'Girondins'.
Luckily, the metric clock and calendar didn't catch on like the other metric measurements did.
The Twitter thread didn't specifically address the metric system.
But before reading the atheist reasons for going to a base 10 chronological system, I thought "Man, those French fucks love them some SI units"
The metric systems replaced... approximately the same number of measures in France as it has varieties of cheese. So that was actually an improvement. Whereas there was only 1 Gregorian calendar.
They could have easily selected any of those traditional systems of measures to standardize on nationwide instead of creating a new one. But the jacobins didn't really care about making measurement simpler, they just wanted to smash all traditions to make room for their fake utopia.
Correct. Maybe I'm biased because I'm used to the metric system. But a decimal system seems better to me, at least for measurements, than traditional systems. Anyone who has to work a lot with different scales, like scientists, does use the metric system.
That wasn't the only time they pulled that stunt. They've tried this several times after it failed.
The Khmer Rouge started at Year 0.
And they only made it to like, 5.
Archive tweets god dammit. Especially if it's a thread and I can only see the first post because Musk is a homo
Eh... if it's an archive, you will only see the first post even if you have an account.
Ghostarchive captures threads and at least some replies. Archive of an unrolled thread works as well.
Thanks, Ghostarchive would be great if it works like that.
And what precisely do you mean with unrolled thread? The one for which you need to reply on Twitter?
I mean use this: https://threadreaderapp.com and archive the resulting page.
Thanks, that'll help me a lot trying to keep archives.
You can also use a nitter instance that still works (xcancel.com, nitter.poast.org) and archive that - although that won't work for longer threads, it eventually collapses them after like maybe 20 posts. It's good for capturing at least some replies to single tweets though.
But anyway, you're not new here, you really didn't know about that? I know Ghostarchive.org is pretty obscure (I actually found out about it when that tranny janny Bardfinn kept using it), but Threadreaderapp has been around for years, smh
Didn't know there were still Nitters around that worked. 20 posts is still WAY better than the trash you get on Twitter's own website.
I think I've vaguely heard about it, but I never considered it a viable alternative. I used Nitter for archiving threads for a while. But if this is the one I'm thinking about, it only archives the stuff posted by the guy himself, when I am interested in getting the context for replied and the like. That is more useful as ammunition.
kill baby robespierre
Calendars, time keeping, and counting systems have all changed multiple times over the course of human history. The only reason you can make fun of this attempt is because it failed. If this is even true.
We can make fun of it because it failed, yes, but it’s not like that failure happened in a vacuum. There’s not someone flipping a coin on whether a given timekeeping system catches on and this one just got unlucky. It failed because it was a retarded and unnecessary change that did nothing but cause confusion at best and a deliberate attack on societal cohesion pushed through in a much-hated attempt to engineer a top-down changing of values at worst.
That’s why it deserves scorn, not just some arbitrary “well, this one didn’t happen to catch on but plenty of others have” silliness.
I mean there kind of is. It's just the coin flip happened thousands of years ago. That's why there's a random mix of base 10 and base 12. Ever notice that there's two roman vanity months in the middle of the year and now the Sept- Oct- Nov- and Dec- months have prefixes for 7,8,9,10 but are the 9th,10th,11th, and 12th months? Everything is a clusterfuck of random traditions and royal decrees. What's one more?
But they're not random, that's the point. Each one had goals and motivations behind it, each one had consequences, and some of them were better than others. If you want to say "the coin flip happened thousands of years ago," how far back do you want to take that? Is it a "coin flip" that we happen to be on a planet with 12 lunar cycles in a typical year, which gave us natural preferences towards 12 unit cycles for keeping time? Is it a coin flip that we have ten fingers and ten toes and that's why we use base ten for our numbers? Sure, maybe (although it's worth noting that the religious perspective, which this system was deliberately made in opposition to is that that isn't random), but at that level we can say that about literally everything in every aspect of human society. That doesn't mean its not worth looking at some of the more immediate causes.
Yep, close enough at least.
Nope. The number of hours in a day has no natural basis. I guess you could argue 12 is a "timey" number due to the lunar cycles, but then why 2x12? Why not 4x12 or 365? And then why 60 minutes and seconds? The Sumerians invented that shit purely for mathematical convenience. And if they can do it, why can't someone else?
Some cultures count by moving the thumb between the sections of each finger, which is base 12. You only think base 10 is good for counting and 2x12 is good for dividing the day because you were raised that way through some quirk of history far beyond your control. You could easily find yourself living in a world of base 10 timekeeping and base 12 counting had history gone differently (and not really that significantly). Colloquially, I would call this a coin flip.
Look, we can argue about whether specific examples are good or bad, but you're not addressing the larger point: what in human history can't be called a coin flip under your standard? And what is the value of ignoring the motivations behind something in recent history that is relevant to modern issues just because somewhere thousands of years ago it could have gone a different way?
The tweet thread opens with simple ridicule, implying that we should all dismiss base 10 time as preposterous on its face. This is not the case. That is all.
Everyone has noticed that. December was the 10th month, hence the 'decem'. January and February were the 11th and 12th months, followed by the new year which was in March until the Gregorian reform.
It is not random that there are 12 months. It's 12 because in an average year, there are 12 lunar cycles, which unfortunately do not add up to 365.25 days.
I like that you're willing to take a controversial stand.
But you are wrong. The changes that you mention in history were organic. They replaced a system that was less good by one that was better. Nobody mourns the loss of the interkalaris.
This one was imposed top-down not for pragmatic reasons, but based on ideology. Which is why it sucks so much. Caesar didn't hire an ideologue. Neither did Pope Benedict. In Persia, it was Khayyam. It was the foremost men of the age who designed calendars. People stuck to them because they were good, unlike the work of the Jacobins.
If anyone wants to learn about the French revolution but doesn't know where to start, Season 3 of the Revolutions podcast is solid.
Mike Duncan is a liberal and nowadays retweets fake research that shows "migrants don't commit more crimes", but he was very fair throughout that podcast which was released in 2014.
Aren't you engaging in the Murray Gellman Amnesia effect here? Why would you trust someone who is a total lunatic to tell you the truth about some other subject?
Read a work of serious history if you want to know about the French Revolution. Even the historians who regard the French Revolution as a positive, don't sugarcoat its wrongs.
Well I'd say he wasn't a total lunatic back when he did this specific series, but setting that aside, he doesn't interject his own opinions.
It's a retelling of events. And I know enough about the French revolution from other sources to know he played it about as straight as possible.
Even if their motives were not so iconoclastic, time resists such standardisation. The year, the lunar month and the day aren't whole number multiples of one another, let alone multiples that be neatly divided into weeks and seasons, so it's inevitably either going to be a mess or fall out of sync with reality.