boiledleather

[boiledleather]

It has always been my understanding that socialism is a stepping stone to communism, kind of a first stage. Is that wrong?

I know this may sound like an extremely stupid question but is socialism and communism the same thing?

No, they are different things.

Socialism is an economic system that concerns itself with the ownership of the means of production and methods by which to enact and manage such an arrangement. That's it, full-stop.

Communism is a way by which to interpret history through the relationship through the mode of production, a philosophical understanding of the economics as pertaining two classes in which one exploits the other, an economic system that stressed common ownership of the means of production and distribution of the fruits of production, and so on. The latter is far more specific and grandiose than the former.

I don't blame anyone for not knowing. These days the terms are thrown around to mean "thing I like/dislike."

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[boiledleather]

They were anti-colonialist where the Western colonies were concerned, that's for sure.

As a Social Democrat, what would you say has been its historical tendencies towards colonialism and upliftment of developing nations? Why is that Communism, despite some acknowledged failures (Afghanistan, Tibet, Xinjiang), is seen as more anti-colonialist by comparison?

That's a really interesting question. Honestly, when it comes to social democracy's record on de-colonization, it's something of a mixed bag. One of Eduard Bernstein's major flaws, his feet of clay, is that he was pro-imperialism - although to be fair, the SPD as a whole was pretty consistently anti-colonialist between the 1890s and 1914. On the other hand, the British Labour Party did very little about empire and was arguably pro-empire up until 1945. Clement Attlee, however, had a personal interest in decolonization and was a committed supporter of Indian self-governance since the 1930s, and negotiated the independence of India, Pakistan, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka. On the other hand, Attlee wasn't entirely consistent on this point - he rather mis-handled the British Mandate in Palestine, African colonies were bypassed for de-colonization, and the Attlee government began the counter-insurgency in Malaysia. So something of a mixed bag, as I said.

Attlee's policies did have a long-term effect on the Labour Party - it opposed British involvement in the Suez Crisis on a united basis despite its divisions on other issues, for example. Likewise, the Harold Wilson government was characterized by broad sympathies to the cause of decolonization but a relatively weak commitment to accepting much risk. For example, Wilson refused to send British ground troops to Vietnam but did provide intelligence and jungle warfare training and wouldn't publicly denounce the war.

He did remove British troops from Singapore, Malaysia, and the Persian Gulf and supported de-colonization in Africa, but he rather screwed up in Rhodesia where after insisting on black suffrage in return for Rhodesian independence, he refused to send the British military to "fight our kith and kin" when Ian Smith unilaterally declared independence for his apartheid state, delaying liberation for many years.

By contrast, the Soviet Union and China could more straightforwardly support anti-colonial insurgencies (that often blended nationalist and communist ideologies) in no small part because the Bolsheviks had been anti-WWI and anti-imperialism pretty consistently thanks to Lenin's influence.

And if you were an anti-colonial insurgency, would you prefer the folks who might give you a thumbs up or the folks who would give you weapons?

[boiledleather]

Obama for sure.

Are you in favour of term limits for members of Congress? Like the way that say Michigan has stricter rules on how long you can be in. Or maybe something like they can't serve more than two consecutive terms, but could serve again after another term.

I am against term limits for pretty much all elected offices; I consider it to be the worst of the "good government" reforms, because its actual impact is so directly counter-productive to its intended outcome. After spending eight years in California politics at a time when term limits dominated state politics, I can say with some confidence that term limits had a poisonous and corrosive effect on both the political culture of the state and the policymaking process.

The logic behind term limits is that it is supposed to discourage the formation of a professional class of politicians and encourage the ideal of the disinterested citizen representative who serves his time in government and then goes home, a la Cincinnatus. This did not happen, because term limits doesn't actually change the electoral process to make it easier for amateurs to win elections, nor is it the case that there's a finite pool of professional or would-be professional politicians who will be disbarred from the political process.

Instead, term limits encouraged politicians to spend even less of their time focusing on the business of government and more time raising money and planning their re-relection, because now they had to develop a complicated hop-scotching career path that went from assembly to senate and then to some statewide office and then back down to county supervisor or something else minor, and so on.

Moreover, because the number of elected positions tends to dwindle as you move up the political ladder, this encouraged a vicious culture of musical chairs, where politicians constantly schemed to stab other politicians in the back to clear the field for their own campaigns. This led to some truly ugly primaries and a general low level of trust between politicians that made cooperation on legislation even more difficult.

Finally, let's talk public policy. Contrary to "good government" ideology, in reality being a legislator or an executive or a judicial officer is a real specialized profession that people have to develop expertise (both in the legislative or executive process, and the details of a certain subset of public policies that the politician cares about) over time. Term limits directly attack that development of expertise - if all you have is two terms and generally freshmen politicians spend their first terms with no clue as to what they're doing, you're never going to learn to be very good at your job, and you don't have much of an incentive to get good at your job because you're going to be kicked out permanently anyway. But you know who has infinite amounts of time to learn to get good at the political process and the details of public policy? Lobbyists for wealthy corporations. Very quickly, the lobbyists become the source of expertise that legislators turn to to help them write legislation and tell them how to vote, because they're the only ones who know what they're doing. Moreover, term limits massively encourage revolving door politics, because when everyone's running to keep ahead of the term limit axe, a permanent job that pays much better than legislative office and still lets you stay in politics sounds really good.

[boiledleather]

I like fdr as well but why specifically is he arguably the greatest over say washington or lincoln. Im guessing policy?

I don't actually rate Washington particularly highly as a president - he tended to be rather passive when it came to his own administration and favored allowing his Cabinet members to take the initiative (Hamilton on economic policy, Knox on the military, sometimes Jefferson on foreign policy), and when he did have a policy issue he was personally interested in - the national university, for example - he could only rarely get it through Congress.

As to why FDR is the greatest president, he successfully dealt with both the unprecedented national crisis of the Great Depression and the largest war in U.S history. So he's a two-fer.

[boiledleather]

Brillant!

Sorry, I´m trying to rephrase it. I get the idea that Jaime will go back to KL to kill Cersei after she wins her trial. But even such an extremely emotional character might see that her losing would mean the life of his beloved children. So I thought that it´s them dying despite it all (and in Tommen´s case probably because of Cersei´s actions) that will really drive him over the edge.

I don't think the question of the trial's outcome as it might affect his children will really come into Jaime's head. Indeed, Jaime has almost to some extent separated in his mind Cersei and their children with respect to her trial; while he freely admitted to himself in ADWD that he could not save Cersei because she was "guilty of every treason laid against her", he did not seem to extend that conclusion to their children - namely, that if Cersei were guilty of treason in having extramarital (and incestuously conceived) children, those children would at best be considered bastards with no right to the throne, and at worst murdered as abominations in the eyes of the Faith. Instead, Jaime was still thinking of himself as free to return to the capital in his ADWD chapter and planning on revealing Myrcella's true paternity to her, and had as of the end of AFFC been considering how to reorganize young Tommen's royal government. In other words, I don't believe Jaime will think "oh well Cersei had to say she was not guilty because our kids were at stake" or that he will move past the results of the trial for the sake of their kids; rather, I think for Jaime, the trial is squarely and solely about Cersei, with the question of their children a separate and entirely personal matter.

That is not to say that Tommen's and Myrcella's deaths - and unfortunately, they are prophetically doomed to die (however specifically that happens), and likely sooner than later - could not have any impact on Jaime, of course; however, I do not feel confident on the timeline of their deaths relative to his return and his decision to kill Cersei. In any event, though, I think what will motivate his return to the capital is the outcome of the trial as it relates to what Jaime has already been brooding on with Cersei. Having confessed to the High Septon that she had had sex with both Lancel and the Kettleblack brothers (notably all three, even though in actuality she likely only had sex with one of them), Cersei will, by emerging victorious in her trial, "prove" that she never had sex with Jaime - both an open confirmation to the world of Tyrion's spiteful revelation to Jaime at the end of ASOS, which has so bothered him since, and a public denial of the romantic-sexual relationship that had defined his and Cersei's lives for more than two decades. If "innocence" was what Jaime had wryly answered Hildy when she asked what he liked most in a woman, here was the exact opposite - a woman legally considered innocent by virtue of success in a trial by combat, yet one whom Jaime knows more than anyone else to be guilty (strictly in the sense of having done what she denied doing). Given his long-simmering resentment, bitterness, and violent thoughts toward Cersei in AFFC and ADWD, I think Jaime's motivation is to confront Cersei about what he might see as the ultimate betrayal of their relationship, and ultimately to decide to kill her in that confrontation.

[boiledleather]

How would you make Daeron I &Baelor I interesting 3-dimensional characters?

So we do know a few things about Daeron:

he was a military prodigy, and prodigies tend to have interesting psychological issues when it comes to how they relate to their age peer groups versus adults who are more on their level.

he was close to his sister Daena the Defiant, hence the gift of the Dornish shortbow, but he didn't marry her.

he was unusually well-read, being both a keen student of military history who had studied previous campaigns against Dorne and learned from past mistakes, and being the only Targaryen king to personally author a book - a book which tends to get high marks for literary style.

Daeron is somewhat loosely based on Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, two of the great classical conquerors, although apparently he wasn't gay and possibly did get married although never had a child.

That's not nothing when it comes to rounding out a figure who otherwise is largely a military hero figure. One certainly gets the sense of someone who was extremely confident, brave and daring, cultured and intelligent, but perhaps a bit naive and overly trusting.

As for Baelor, I think we get quite a bit of interiority in his rather tumultuous life. Certainly we get the sense of someone who had quite a few positive qualities - his barefoot trek through Dorne and his willingness to endure dangerous trials shows a rather uniquely pacifist form of bravery and determination, his commitment to diplomacy, his solicitude for the poor, and his accomplishment of effectively seizing control of the Faith of the Seven through the move of the High Septon from the Starry Sept to the Great Sept.

At the same time, Baelor's central psychological problem was that he was torn between two extreme and opposing drives - a particularly intense form of piety that demanded physical suffering and promised miracles on the one hand, and then an equally intense sex drive which he sought to completely repress, leading to an obsession with controlling women's sexuality and women's bodies.

[boiledleather]

Do you think Jaime would have defended Elia and her children against the Mountain? Or his presence would have not made a difference?

I think the question is somewhat missing the point:

Prince Rhaegar burned with a cold light, now white, now red, now dark. “I left my wife and children in your hands.”

“I never thought he’d hurt them.” Jaime’s sword was burning less brightly now. “I was with the king … [sic]”

Jaime believed in that moment (or convinced himself that he believed - the answer is up to you) that Tywin would not hurt Elia or her children. Jaime likewise knew, as the sack of King's Landing was happening, that Aerys II had refused his, Jaime's, offer to negotiate a surrender and was also meeting with Rossart to conduct the wildfire plan. With no reason to suppose (again, in his own mind, at least) that Elia and the young Targaryens were in any danger, and with the knowledge that it was a question of minutes at most to stop the wildfire plot he alone (apart from the king and his pyromancer co-conspirators) was fully aware of, Jaime had no reason to go and defend Elia and/or her children (especially from an attack he did not know was imminent/already begun - Jaime's memory suggests the scaling of Maegor's Holdfast was happening simultaneously to Jaime killing Rossart and Aerys).

But Tywin did hurt them, of course, and much worse - sending some of his most brutal lieutenants to murder Elia, Rhaenys, and Aegon (and in particularly grisly, violent ways). The fact that Jaime feels a strong sense of guilt over their end is demonstrated by Rhaegar's appearance with this very line in Jaime's dream, as well as the dream-Jaime's reaction to it. The dimming light of Jaime's sword reflects his own guilty memory of the event, shadowed by the knowledge of what had happened: Jaime might answer the ghostly Rhaegar's accusation by citing the more important work of stopping Aerys' last mad act, but he knows that by choosing to be there (i.e. in the throne room to kill Aerys), he denied himself the ability to be elsewhere - that is, with Elia and the children, being killed at virtually the same moment by Tywin's own men.

It's not about whether Jaime would have defended Elia and her children against the Mountain, because that's a scenario that could not have happened. Jaime could not have done differently from what he did and still be Jaime (or this still be the same story) - but that doesn't mean Jaime doesn't know what the alternative was now, and does not mean he does not feel the pain of that choice still.

[boiledleather]

How legitimate are Melisandre's powers? Specifically the shadow that killed Renly

The answer depends on what you mean by "legitimate".

Shadowbinding is a real (in the sense of "actually existing as a thing") phenomenon in the world of Westeros and Essos (as well as, potentially and/or presumably, the planet's other continents), documented well outside Melisandre herself. Daenerys specifically describes "Quaithe of the Shadow" as a shadowbinder; Quentyn Martell notes "masked shadow-binders from Asshai by the Shadow" at the Merchant's House in Volantis; Archmaester Marwyn and Mirri Maz Duur are said or claim to have studied with shadowbinders; and Yandel refers to the "[m]ost sinister of all the sorcerers of Asshai" as "the shadowbinders, whose lacquered masks hide their faces from the eyes of gods and men". So in the sense of legitimate as "being exactly as intended or presented ... neither spurious nor false", I would call Melisandre's shadowbinding powers "legitimate": Renly and Cortnay Penrose really did die, and Catelyn was an eyewitness to the former's death and described exactly the manner in which the shadow killed him.

Are Melisandre's shadowbinding powers "accordant with law or with established legal forms and requirements" or "conforming to recognized principles or accepted rules and standards"? Well, that depends on your personal view of shadowbinding in general, Melisandre's use of shadowbinding in particular, and the greater impact either or both have on this world (which is itself subject to personal views on the rightness or wrongness of its socio-political systems, claims within such systems, and the subsequent rightness or wrongness of impacting such systems and/or claims). So far as we know, there is no written law or legal precedent in this world regarding shadowbinding (though it could well exist), leaving the question more focused, I think, on its use as a tool of assassination. As I mentioned when I talked about Stannis' knowledge of the plan to kill Renly, the justification or lack thereof for the manner of killing Renly (as well as Cortnay Penrose, the other victim of Melisandre's shadow-assassination) is very much dependent on each individual reader's view of the situation. Is shadow-assassination better, worse, or equal to, in moral as well as legal terms, assassination by a human hand (and/or any form thereof - better or worse than poison, than a knife, etc.)? Is shadow-assassination better, worse, or equal to a pitched battle or an extended siege? Was Melisandre's use of shadowbinding made better or worse, if at all, in its service to Stannis' cause - is Stannis' cause justified in this world and/or out of it, and if so, to what extent does that justification in turn allow for any given means of supporting the cause? I can't answer these questions for all readers, nor would I want to (and nor do I think these are necessarily the only points to consider); the author leaves them instead for readers to ponder, debate, and critically investigate. (And it is of course worth noting that our knowledge of how a person successfully learns and/or uses shadowbinding is almost totally nonexistent.)

[boiledleather]

I know some people still, wrongly, blame Sansa for Ned's assassination. Do you think Sansa blames herself?

(Putting aside the obvious takeaway that Sansa did not cause Ned's death, and that the people to blame for Ned's death are Joffrey, Ilyn Payne, and Littlefinger.)

Anyway, Sansa was extremely depressed following the murder of her father - sleeping as much as possible (even trying to drug herself into further sleep), crying and refusing food when she was awake, even twice seriously considering suicide. That Sansa recognizes that she was taken advantage of by both Cersei and Joffrey is explicit, thinking to herself that "[o]nce she had loved Prince Joffrey with all her heart, and admired and trusted his mother, the queen", but since "[t]hey had repaid that love and trust with her father's head", she "would never make that mistake again". Hurt, angry, and betrayed, Sansa was overwhelmed with guilt at the knowledge that she had not only trusted the queen with information, but that she had publicly, formally begged Joffrey to spare her father, only to be forced to watch him die instead.

However, Sansa has not thought much about her personal experience of, or role in, Ned's death and the events leading up to it in subsequent books. This is not to say Sansa does not think of Ned or his death at all, but rather that factors both personal and political have I think affected Sansa's memories of her father, and more specifically her father's murder. That the murder, and its broader preceding events, still trigger painful, angry memories in Sansa is clear: she was filled with revulsion when Joffrey took her hand at his nameday tourney because "he had answered her plea for mercy by presenting her with her father's head", hoped for Morros Slynt to die at the same tourney because "it had been Janos Slynt who seized Lord Eddard's severed head by the hair and raised it on high for king and crowd to behold, while Sansa wept and screamed", trembled at reentering the Tower of the Hand because "[s]he had not set foot inside that place since the day her father fell from grace", and remarked that she'd like to see Stannis burn the Great Sept because she had believed it so beautiful "before Joffrey beheaded her father on its steps". At the same time, Sansa has spent quite a bit of time in situations that required her to publicly disavow her relationship with her father: first in King's Landing, where she learned to automatically identify her father (in public) as a traitor, and then with Littlefinger, who has insisted on supplanting Ned as her "true" father, conflating the political necessity of giving Sansa a plausible fake identity with his personal (and, obviously, incredibly gross) fantasy of Sansa as the daughter he never had by Catelyn.

It may be that Sansa has to some extent repressed the memory of her father's murder - including and especially her own involvement, not in the murder itself but in the circumstances of the surrounding days and weeks - because of the tremendous pain it caused and continues to cause her. Just as Sansa never considers the implications of Lysa's admission to her - and, importantly, Littlefinger's - responsibility for the murder of Jon Arryn, and just as Sansa does not reflect (post hoc, obviously, given her lack of professional medical knowledge or training to know of its poisonous properties herself) on the maester's reluctance to continue dosing Robert Arryn with sweetsleep, so perhaps Sansa has subconsciously decided not to dwell on the circumstances of her father's arrest and death in order to lessen the pain of reliving those events and her part in them. If that's the case, then I could see such memories returning in a big way to the front of her mind when (not if) Sansa has her realizations about the others - recognizing Littlefinger as the mastermind behind Jon Arryn's murder, Robert Arryn's murder, and, most importantly for Sansa, her father's murder (among his other crimes). Perhaps Sansa will be able to return to these very painful memories in order to realize that Littlefinger was there when she approached the small council for mercy for her father, there when she begged Joffrey in open court to spare Ned - and there when Ned was killed, the lone major attendee who seemed not to react at all as Joffrey called for Ned's head.

[boiledleather]

It’s like poetry or whatever but the Knight of the Laughing Tree and the Knight of Tears as fascinating parallels of and inverses to one another.

In both cases, the goal of the mystery knight is to make an objective point, without the details of their respective identities muddling or neutralizing the message. Indeed, one potential advantage of an individual donning the disguise of a mystery knight is the ability to send such a message to the competitors and/or attendees of any particular event, pursuing a goal otherwise unobtainable or complicated by their persons. Yet where other mystery knights may have wished simply to convey their individual worthiness to compete irrespective of their identities (as, perhaps, Baelon Targaryen did when he tilted as the “Silver Fool” to win his spurs at Old Oak, or as Jonquil Darke did when she entered the War for the White Cloaks as the “Serpent in Scarlet”), Prince Aemon and Lyanna Stark were not interested (or, at least, entirely interested) merely in jousting for the sake of jousting; their victories in the tilt mattered less than their motivations for doing so.

Instead, for both Aemon and Lyanna, their points attempted to correct wrongs which inextricably linked the personal and the political. Aemon’s personal love for his sister (complicated as it might have been by his devotion to the vows of the Kingsguard) was clear, and on those grounds alone he might well have resented the preferment of his brother’s mistress over his beloved sister. Yet the insult did not end at mere familial (or even potentially romantic) closeness between Aemon and Naerys. By publicly attempting to snub the present queen for his current mistress, Aegon IV was declaring to the assembled courtiers and aristocrats that his wife - the only woman he could, at least openly and officially, have a publicly approved romantic/sexual relationship with - was not the fairest woman in the land (or at least among the tourney attendees). Beyond being a major breach of courtly etiquette, such a move could suggest greater ambitions on the part of the king to remove Naerys from her place as queen - no empty threat, when Aegon IV had (likely) already used Morghil Hastwyck as a proxy to accuse Naerys of adultery and when the Brackens had schemed to replace Naerys with Barba. Aemon, himself the champion for Naerys against Morghil and one of the voices to call for Barba’s dismissal, would thus again take up the defense of his sister-queen to an insult at once personal and political.

Likewise, Lyanna framed her rescue of Howland from the bullying squires in terms at once familial and feudal. Howland was, so Lyanna declared him, “my father’s man”, the most fundamental expression of the political order which obligated her, as a member of the liege family, to protect the liege’s vassal with her own power. Just as Lyanna cared for Howland herself following the attack (“t[aking] him back to her lair to clean his cuts and bind them up with linen”, in the tale told by Meera Reed) and welcomed Howland into the bosom of the Stark household at Harrenhal - again emphasizing the personal responsibility of her as a Stark to look after a Reed of Greywater Watch - so Lyanna recognized her role as redeeming the honor of young Howland. It was her duty as a resident Stark to personally take up arms against the master of those squires and defeat them (albeit in a play-combat context), much as Lord Rickard would have been expected to do should anyone have made war on any of his vassals. The insult to Howland had triggered Lyanna’s personal obligation to him as a Stark; here was her opportunity to do as her Stark ancestors had done for generations, caring for and defending the people under Winterfell’s protection.

Yet Aemon and Lyanna diverged in the means by which they conveyed their respective messages, placing them on opposite ends of a symbolism spectrum. For Aemon, the proper moniker to demonstrate his point was the Knight of Tears. Even without the specifics on his shield’s device, the designation conveyed Aemon’s sense of grief at the humiliation of his sister. While the disguise may have subtly recalled the history between the siblings - when Aemon had, so the songs relate, wept to see his sister wedded to their brother - its main purpose was, I think, to communicate the objective shame of the king’s proposed action. If the king himself would forget (or actively refuse) his social duty to his lady wife, Aemon would remind him - not as his brother (whom then-Prince Aegon had ignored in their quarrel at Aegon’s wedding to Naerys), nor as his Kingsguard (since Aemon would, at least in his mind, owe the king his unquestioned loyalty), but as the representation of a chivalric ideal. To so great an insult, Aemon’s guise suggested, any true knight must surely weep - and only such a true knight could redeem the honor of a queen so disparaged by her king.

Lyanna, for her part, also sought to shame the men who (indirectly) humiliated the person she sought to defend, but in a way which more directly mocked the knights in question. The Blount, Haigh, and Frey knights she challenged may not have directly or publicly insulted Howland Reed as Aegon IV attempted to do to Naerys, but their squires’ harassment of Howland reflected none too well on the knights themselves as ostensible instructors of honor and chivalry. The laughing weirwood thus mocked the pretensions of both the knights and their squires to the outward appearance of chivalry. Where the squires had failed in honor by attacking a young and much smaller man, their knights would fail in the public demonstration of knighthood, being roundly defeated by the Knight of the Laughing Tree. This mystery knight, and openly bearing the symbol of a non-Andal, non-Seven-worshiping land and people (and thus without inherent ties to the Andal tradition of knighthood), would humble the knights whose squires had acted so unchivalrously. That Lyanna was of course no knight herself only underlined the joke intrinsic to the choice of device: she could not be the chivalric ideal as Prince Aemon (himself one of the most publicly celebrated knights of all time) had been as the Knight of Tears, but she could secretly advertise that these knights would be unhorsed by a teenage girl with no formal knightly training.

In turn, both Aemon and Lyanna found (or likely found, in Aemon’s case) in the outcomes of their tourneys reversals of their chosen disguises. Aemon might have symbolically wept to see Naerys so insulted by their brother, but in emerging victorious in the tilt, Aemon perhaps restored a smile to Naerys’ face. In being presented with the crown of the queen of love and beauty, Naerys had been publicly acknowledged as the fairest woman in the land (at least in the context of the tourney). Too, that it was a mystery knight who presented her this honor (supposing Aemon was still disguised when he did so) may have only underlined the triumph in Naerys’ mind; to all onlookers, this was not a brother playing favorites against their loathed eldest sibling, but a true representation of knighthood defending the position of the queen. Aegon IV would not cease his attempts to humiliate and undermine his wife after this event, but in at least this instance, the queen and not the king’s mistress (or the king himself) would have the last laugh, thanks (with no small sense of irony) to the Knight of Tears.

By contrast, while Lyanna had chosen a laughing device for her tourney stunt, the end of the tourney of Harrenhal was “the moment when all the smiles died”. If Lyanna had succeeding in (literally) beating honor into the knights whose squires had so abused Howland Reed, she then found herself on the opposite side of the knightly dynamic, the unexpected recipient of the crown of the queen of love and beauty at the hands of Rhaegar Targaryen. Where his great-great-great-great-great-granduncle had refuted an attempt to honor the king’s mistress and instead acknowledged the queen as the rightful queen of love and beauty, Rhaegar likely seemed, to the attendees of Harrenhal, to do precisely the opposite - grossly publicly insulting his own present wife (and the future queen) for the sake of a would-be mistress. Not for Lyanna the power or desire of a Prince Aemon, to follow through on crowning a queen of love and beauty, and so not for Lyanna the ultimately happy outcome promised by her weirwood’s laughing face; hers would be that “sadder story” alluded to by Meera Reed, one more full of tears than Aemon’s tourney victory.

[boiledleather]

BLAH 172 | Kaiserreich - War 1914, with Jim McGeehin

We are finally here: World War I has broken out, and now it's off to the military history. But not so fast! Before you think we're down to discussing which caliber of gun is superior to which, let me assure you: we take the big view, and look at how politics and war intersect and why the war isn't over by christmas, but rather evolving into something else entirely.

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[boiledleather]

What is your interpretation of Jon’s parentage reveal? Aside from him being against amassing power for himself or being king/leader, despite a strong claim, in contrast to every other leader in the story. Since he already had a theme of dual identity/bastard/not belonging even without Targ heritage, what significance does the big reveal hold for his individual character and story arc?

It's really hard to say without having the actual book yet, but I do expect examination of the genre's hidden prince tropes. Not so much politically, but on an individual level. What does that information do to a person?

I also think that themes about family will be heightened when Jon has knowledge of his biological father's family. Now that Jon can choose, what does he choose? Who are his family? Why?

[boiledleather]

Killing slavers isn’t actually a flaw (except for her not killing them all)

Flaws are things that are bad.

It's not the what, it's the how. Dany indulged her temper in this case, and killed 163 slavers in a gruesome and painful manner. It did not accomplish much. 163 slavers wasn't enough to cow the rest. Like @publiusmaximum said on the previous post, the correct answer was either zero (remembering that execute none =/= do nothing) or all of them.

I do feel that Dany's decision to kill those slavers, like that, was more about her anger than it was a thought-out decision to give justice to the slaves of Meereen. Again, I think Dany is quite aware of this flaw and usually very mature about handling it. Not so in this case.

[boiledleather]

Was there anything that Rhaegar could have done to ensure his family’s safety during the war? It seems like he was stuck in hard place due to his father. I see him get blamed alot for this and I don’t see what else he could have done other than maybe send them to Dragonstone

What Rhaegar could have done to keep his wife and children safe was to depose his father.

He should have been planning to do so as soon as he heard his father had burned a major lord alive, mocking his right to trial, then demanded another major lord break guest right to kill yet more Westerosi VIPs. Any plans he had in that direction before that, as he hinted to Jaime he might have had, needed to be moved up his schedule. Yes, in the middle of the war, because what on earth could the rebels negotiate for with Aerys at the helm?

I think Rhaegar was a long way behind the play in recognising just how unfit for rule his father was. Frankly, the minute Aerys refused to hold Rhaenys on the grounds she 'smelled Dornish', that should have been his clue that he'd likely need to keep his Dornish wife and Dornish-descended children away from his father. This is not someone who'd take all due care with their health and safety.

[boiledleather]

Just as an addendum: https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1600511558777540613

In the thread, he talks about broken hopes of restitution for aristroctats. Only this year, we had a major debate ("major" in historian circles, anyway) about the question of restitution for the Hohenzollerns (the descendants of good ol' Willy). They demand several castles and the surrounding estates back that were nationalized under the communists. This is a dicey issue, because these guys are heavily implicated in the rise of Hitler. That's where historians come in: the German restitution law stipulated that if property was seized by the communists, you get it back, if possible. In the Hohenzollern case, it would be possible in many cases; we're talking many, many millions worth in property, not to speak of art that right now is in the public domain (where it belongs). However, and this is the rub, if you where instrumental in Nazi Germany, these claims are forfeit. So, the Hohenzollern employ a historian who churns out papers "proving" that they're the non-naziest people imaginable, whereas the rest of the profession has to waste time to prove that the Hohenzollern prince who donated to Hitler, met with him and discussed the restoration of the monarchy did in fact do all these things, and not ironically. It's a very German debate in that the courts need to arbiter expert historian assessments of this very arcane fact. So far, the Hohenzollern are losing, thankfully. But it's still not over. This drama is replicated a lot in the lower rungs of aristocracy, and of course in other well-to-do, bourgeois families as well.

What the hell is going on in Germany right now? Where the people that got arrested today like modern day Jacobites?

The answer isn't nearly as funny as you'd like, sadly.

For a couple years now, Germany has been having a real problem with right-wing infiltration of its military, security services, and police. (Or more accurate to say that Germany has been recently made aware that it has this problem, which has been something of a spreading ulcer for some time.) Not only has there been a significant uptick in anti-semitic violence committed by people in and around the security services, but quite famously the assassination of a leading politician from Angela Merkel's own party by a neo-Nazi who was associated with a doomsday prepper group made up of hard-right police and military.

As you can see from that last article, there is quite a bit of complicated ideological fermentation on the German far-right, bringing together QAnon-style anti-vaxxers with these neo-Nazi security services groups, as well as these German-style sovereign citizen types, and yes of course members of the supposedly "respectable" far-right party Alternative für Deutchland.

The particular coup attempt that was thwarted on Tuesday bears a lot of the hallmarks of this far-right collaboration - you have the storming of the Reichstag as happened in 2021, you have the kill lists of politicians that seem to come out of both the QAnon and doomsday prepper groups, the conspiracy theories about the "deep state" and the need to establish a new, militarized state, etc. Even the inclusion of this German prince isn't particularly surprising - one of the ways that these far-right groups like to historicize their nationalism is to say that both the Federal Republic of Germany and the Weimar Republic were illegitimate impositions of occupying powers and that the only legitimate government of Germany is the old Imperial government. Hence why when they tried to storm the Reichstag in 2021, they carried the old black, red, and white Imperial flag.

[boiledleather]

Great stuff!

It’s like poetry something something but also comparing and contrasting Dontos Hollard being saved as a boy and Dontos Hollard being saved as an adult.

Dontos Hollard owes his salvation as a child not just to Ser Barristan Selmy, but specifically Barristan Selmy’s commitment to his own conception of knighthood. It was not simply that Barristan’s ironclad belief in his duty as a knight of the Kingsguard - such that he volunteered to rescue the king - prevented Tywin’s plan of razing Duskendale (perhaps with young Dontos Hollard inside, if he had been there). With the boy Dontos, Ser Barristan demonstrated his belief in an even more fundamental knightly charge than that of his Kingsguard vows - that is, to “defend the young and innocent”, as Lyonel Baratheon commanded of young Raymun Fossoway at the time of the latter’s knighting (a core virtue for Barristan, as evidenced by his later horror at the murders of Rhaegar’s children and the suggestion of killing the Meereenese child hostages). Dontos Hollard the child would presumably have meant nothing to Barristan; indeed, as the nephew of Ser Symon Hollard, who had slain Ser Gwayne Gaunt of the Kingsguard during the Defiance, Dontos might have appeared to Barristan as the heir of that past wrong, and so a fitting outlet for vengeance (just as Barristan had himself slain Symon, thus avenging his sworn brother). Yet Barristan called for Dontos to be spared anyway; Dontos’ identity as an innocent child appears to have mattered to Barristan far more than his so recently traitorous (and for Barristan, personally antagonistic) familial connections.

Of course, Barristan did not go quite so far as to challenge the order of a king now consumed by paranoia and a mania for violence. Rather, Ser Barristan couched his obedience to his chivalric charge in similarly knightly terms - begging young Dontos’ life as a “boon” which a grateful king could grant to this sterling knight who had done him such a service (compare, say, the would-be king Renly’s ceremonial grant of a boon to the melee champion Brienne, or the would-be king Joffrey’s likewise formal offer of a boon to the the knightly Tyrell sons after “[t]he roses [had] support[ed] the lion” at the Blackwater). In this moment completely devoid of chivalric courtesy - the ruthless, near absolute destruction and damnatio memoriae of two noble dynasties in the aftermath of a hostage crisis and siege - Dontos’ one hope rested with the promise of knighthood. Handed back his life as a knight’s boon, Dontos was allowed to journey to King’s Landing to serve as a squire, with the promise of a knighthood of his own one day. If there could never be (certainly not under Aerys II) a return of House Hollard to its pre-Defiance standing, Dontos’ knighthood might at least have restored some sense of personal dynastic honor; Dontos could, so it might have been presumed, live out his life as the sort of deposed but genteel knight Jaime imagines Edmure becoming in AFFC. Knighthood, in other words, both immediate and promised, comes to the rescue for the boy Dontos Hollard.

As an adult, Dontos Hollard finds himself again needing rescue from the murderous whims of a violent, sadistic king - but his salvation comes in a form far different from that he had experienced as a child. Summoned to the lists for Joffrey’s namely tourney - if no grand event, at least ostensibly more peaceful and chivalric than the Defiance of Duskendale - Ser Dontos appears as a foolish, indeed obscene drunk; only his horse maintains any sort aristocratic dignity, its “swirl of crimson and scarlet silks” denoting the barry gules and rose of House Hollard’s sigil, as Dontos himself stumbles half-naked around the yard. The promise of knighthood as his childhood salvation has soured badly: Ser Dontos may have the formal title of knight, but in his utter failure to make even the barest showing at that core knightly sport, the joust (and against a freerider, of the lowest class of knight often scorned by blue-blooded Westerosi chivalry), Dontos has hardly demonstrated himself a knight in practice.  

Yet Dontos is saved from the king’s command for his death - not by a knight, but by a facially un-knightly expression of true knighthood. Indeed, there is something of a role reversal here from Duskendale, where Ser Dontos the knight (roughly about the age Barristan once at the time of the Defiance) owes his rescue to a child - not only one roughly about the age Dontos was at the destruction of the Darklyns and Hollards, but one who had herself so recently experienced the cruel extermination of her father and the Stark household, leaving her, like young Dontos, a child of a traitor dynasty (at least in the eyes of the crown) alone in the capital. Yet if Sansa is herself no knight, she nevertheless reveres the mystique of knighthood, understanding the role of a true knight as one who is (so she will think later) “sworn to defend the weak … and fight for the right”. Seeing a man who “was drunk and silly and useless, but … meant no harm” - that is, one of those “weak” whom knights were sworn to protect - Sansa takes the (considerable!) risk of arguing for his life to Joffrey, just as Barristan Selmy had done to Aerys in begging for the life of young Dontos. Just as Dontos had personally meant nothing to Barristan during the Defiance, so Dontos means nothing personally to Sansa here (his involvement in Littlefinger’s scheme to spirit her from the capital not yet begun); Sansa calls for his life simply because it is not right that a weak and innocent man should be murdered at the king’s whim, an expression (albeit unconscious on her part) of that core knightly responsibility.

Naturally, Sansa cannot rely, as Barristan did, on any sense of royal gratitude to save Dontos; where Aerys II could not refuse his so recent rescuer when the latter asked for a boon, Joffrey is as of this tourney regularly abusing Sansa, even threatening here to drown her for merely suggesting Dontos’ life should be spared. Instead, it is Sandor Clegane who provides the justification, corroborating Sansa’s clumsy warning of ill fortune to convince Joffrey against murdering a man on his birthday. Sandor Clegane, perhaps more than any other character in the series, specifically reviles and disdains the formal conception of knighthood - yet here, draped in a white cloak in a bitter parody of Barristan Selmy (as Sandor himself had replaced that virtual epitome of the Kingsguard), Sandor laconically (and, to be sure, indirectly) fulfills that knightly charge of defending the weak. Sansa then seizes on Joffrey’s temporary stay of execution to transform Dontos into a royal fool; where Barristan’s plea for Dontos’ life had set the latter on the path of royal squire and eventually knight, Sansa’s suggestion strips Dontos of any future knightly dignity, but in a way which would (so she might have presumed) save his life long-term (as indeed, a fool’s very position allows him some sense of license, preserving the fool from retaliation by the people he taunts). Once, one of the the most (publicly) admired knights of the Kingsguard (themselves supposed to be “the finest swords in all the realm”) had used his knightly position to save the life of the young Dontos and given him the promise of knighthood for his future; now, a young girl and a man who had vehemently rejected knighthood save the adult Dontos through the elimination of his knightly identity.

[boiledleather]

Are we sure about the whole "the throne cuts those it deems unworthy of ruling" thing? I thought you were pretty big on the idea that monarchy is flawed by default, and the Iron Throne being no more than a very cumbersome McGuffin is a keystone of the series. idk, to me the author did a good job showing through various biased POVs that the Iron Throne cuts people because it's made of blades, and that different factions will use this fact for propaganda, murder and the likes. What do you think?

I think both things can be true at the same time! The author's written a throne made of swords, so a) of course people are going to get cut if they sit on it and b) the symbolism is right there and too tempting not to use.

But yes, if the throne would cut everyone and anyone, and the throne cuts people not worthy of rule, then maybe we have problems more fundamental than what butt is in the chair. That's one of the many problems with monarchy, after all: it demands perfection of the monarch, who is just another human being.