Alright, Alright

I left a comment on Skeptical Eye (no link to piss Nikk off), basically calling any comparison of modern America to Germany between the Weimar Republic and later on Nazism as bullshit.

And I left it at that. My life, my bullshit. Fuck you.

I was called out. Sorta. Mostly for not expanding and something else I didn't quite get.  Personally, I think the chap read too much into it though.

Nonetheless, it was a fair argument brough up in a critical thinking context. Too many people do say things without much thought.

***

For the record, I know I've only said I have a Major in History but I never really delved into what I studied. While I tried to spread the wealth a little by studying Latin America, Russia and China, my real focus was on North America and Western Europe.

In addition, I complemented history with political science course. I'm one class short of a minor in political science.

Yeah, I was a solid student but since I didn't live in any of the places I studied, my "expertise" is restricted to the books.

All this pent up information is not all useless; at least I hope. The main positive is I'm able to go from Nietzsche to Dante and Aristotle without missing much of a beat, meaning I can follow a conversation on major issues, philosophies and histories without getting lost.

The other advantage is I can spot pseudo-analogies from a mile away - or as I put it on SE: Bull shit. Not because the history as written was necessarily correct but it furnished me with a proper starting point. The rest is just a fucking journey. Don't stop believin' hold on to that feelin'!

Comparing Weimar to America is bull shit. I say that because the differences between the two are obvious. It may not be to others. I realize that. Moreover, I haven't read anything that sufficiently convinces me otherwise. My door is always open. I may have a stock pile of hundreds of history books and hundreds more of periodicals, but all that proves is I can stack books in order and that I know jack squat despite taking some hard stances from time to time.

The thing is, I don't always expand because I'm guilty of assuming my readers already know this crap. I shouldn't but that's the truth. Maybe it's a cop out to be lazy too.

Meh.

All I know is I learned to be suspicious and skeptical of analogies. It takes special care and many things to fall into place for different eras to be compared (evidence, facts etc). It's a little like trying to compare sports teams or athletes from different eras*. Even if the facts fall in line, next come the psychological paradigm of getting into the mindset of the subjects you're studying and therein lies the artist in the historian.

The context, circumstances and conditions are usually completely crooked. There's a difference, I think (I seriously could be wrong here) between similarities and flat out analogies.

Not saying I haven't come across good stuff, for example, I enjoy Victor Davis Hanson's comparisons of Antiquity with modern America. By and large, however, the analogies game is tough gig I submit.

Ok.

Enough of this bull shit.

* From The American Scholar titled Baseball's Loss of Innocence. by Douglas Goetsch. I think this part summarizes nicely what I probably failed to do above:

"When I hear fans discuss, often very knowledgeably, what steroids have done to baseball, the conversation inevitably turns to the Hall of Fame and the hallowed statistics, the great names accompanied by their immortal numbers: Aaron/755, DiMaggio/56, Williams/.406, Ruth/60, or Maris/61* (the infamous asterisk never actually appeared in the record books, but still made his life miserable). In such exchanges, someone eventually declares that we can’t compare players from different eras on account of different technology, stadiums, lengths of season, rule changes, and so forth.



Here’s another reason you can’t compare eras: each one had its own scandal that affected the record books. The number I keep coming back to is 54—Babe Ruth’s home run total in 1920, the year following the Black Sox. That’s when baseball introduced the latest version of the “rabbit ball”—Lardner called it the “T.N.T. ball”—which had a soft cork center making it much livelier off the bat. The previous record for home runs in a season had been 29, set by Ruth the year before. Two seasons earlier Ruth and Frank Schulte shared the league lead in homers with 11. In 1998, when attendance was still flagging due to a strike-shortened season and a canceled World Series four years prior, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa put on a record-breaking and (as we found out) steroid-fueled home run race that captivated the nation. But long before that, in the wake of baseball’s biggest scandal to date, fans were treated to an unprecedented display of offensive power, the league willing to dilute its record books by putting the ball on steroids.



After 1919, you could argue—as Ring Lardner certainly would have—that it wasn’t even baseball anymore. But should that diminish the achievements of Ted Williams or Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays, Don Larsen or Sandy Koufax? Maybe the question of which numbers are sacred is something each fan needs to answer for himself. For me personally it’s .545, my lifetime Little League batting average, along with the numbers 21 and 42—worn by Roberto Clemente and Jackie Robinson."