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SeanF

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Everything posted by SeanF

  1. AIUI, space travel is purely about transportation. There is no fighting in space. With space travel now, effectively, under Paul’s control, presumably they can isolate each enemy planet in turn, and destroy its forces.
  2. What’s really sad is that it made them millions. Maybe I should claim that I discovered some post-it notes written by Tolkien, and write a fanfic.
  3. Skimming through Learning to Lead, we miss a lot of those posters. A lot is made at the end of Dany choosing to be Dragon, rather than Mhysa, but to me, it’s a case of both/and, rather than either/or. A good leader has to be both Mhysa and Dragon, on occasion. Striving too hard for peace in Meereen, nearly led to disaster. States don’t launch armadas, and bring thousands of soldiers onto your soil, because they want peace. People rarely lay down the whip, unless they are compelled to. And a “peace” that can only be secured by allowing people to be eaten by lions for the amusement of sadists, is a peace that is not worth having.
  4. If it's an external enemy, then there is no issue. If say, the King faced an uprising from a section of the nobility, and he summoned the LC to take command as Hand, then it's a grey area, I think. One can argue it's taking a side, or one can argue that defending the King is defending the Realm. The doctrine of neutrality generally, becomes an even greyer area if central authority essentially collapses, as we see in ADWD.
  5. If the Realm faced a major threat, and the LC was the best general, I think it would be entirely legal (and sensible), for the King to appoint him. Defence of the Realm is entirely in accord with the Night’s Watch vows.
  6. I think this was a good series, which I participated in.
  7. I think it’s justified, given that Russian oil revenues are funding the invasion.
  8. There’s a video of the one who had his ear hacked off having it being fed to him.
  9. Terrible vengeance was exacted on the Darklyns and Hollards, but the townsfolk lived. Had the king been killed, probably every living creature in the city would have been killed.
  10. I would only envisage it for the duration of the war, and the immediate aftermath. But, leading a war against an external enemy would keep to the spirit of the vows. Or, perhaps a successful warrior king, who abdicates in favour of his son when he comes of age, like Murad II, and takes the Black, to keep out of his way. Then, quite suddenly, the Realm faces a deadly threat and his son tells him: ”If you are king, return and lead your army. If I am king, I command you to lead my army.”
  11. Joffrey has Sansa beheaded, outside the Great Sept, instead of Ned. Joffrey is a vicious enough idiot to do this, and it costs the Lannisters everything.
  12. There were no good options here. Tywin Lannister was preparing to storm the city. Had he done so, yes, Aerys would likely have been killed, but hundreds of the inhabitants would have been killed or raped.
  13. I could envisage it if, say, the country was at war, the king was a boy, and the LC were the most experienced soldier.
  14. If it’s IS, is it likely to be revenge for Syria?
  15. What put me off Prince of Thorns, early on, is the protagonist recounting raping a farmer’s daughter, before locking her in a barn with her family, and burning them alive.
  16. It all depends how far Martin decides to go in plumbing the darkest depths of human nature. Perhaps the endgame is Dany as vicious tyrant; Arya as dead-eyed assassin; Sansa as murderous hypocrite; Bran as manipulator; Jon as undead horror.
  17. He was very much the two D's favourite, and George Martin's too, but for different reasons. The two D's saw him as a virtual saint, one of the few good men in terrible world. George Martin loves him as a cunning villain, like Richard III or Harry Flashman. I do think that when a character is overly favoured by their creator, a lot of people will push back against that, the same way that a lot of people push back against a character being overly vilified. It's a particular issue with fanfiction, where quite often, an author will stan so hard for a character that the reader will end up hating them. I think that a lot of viewers of the series hated Tyrion by the end, because we were told how wise and humane he was, but what we were shown was that he was inept and treacherous. Tyrion in the books goes beyond being an amusing rogue, to being pretty vile in ADWD.
  18. That makes sense. As well as suggesting it’s well past time to offer “daddy” his reward.
  19. I think LF will put a lot of pressure on her, by arguing that :- (a) her life is on the line, for so long as she’s not the Lady of the Vale. Being wed to Harold, as Lord, will secure her future. (b) The Vale’s armies can avenge the murder of Robb, Catelyn, and her people by destroying the Twins, and the Freys. (c) Sweetrobin is a lackwit, who will never be able to rule the Vale. “The lad’s death would be a mercy.” (d) She’s already too deeply implicated in his schemes to back out, now, having lied to the Vale lords about her aunt’s death.
  20. It’s interesting that the Gracchi were not totally devoid of aristocratic support, precisely because of the fear that Rome would run out of soldier-farmers. Of course, most were venial, selfish, and short-sighted, and by the end of the Republic, the traditional nobility had almost destroyed each other. Although the details are unclear, it does look as if the Eastern emperors deliberately redistributed land from great landlords, in the face of Arab invasions, so as to recreate that class of soldier farmers, willing to fight for their own land, rather than being indifferent to a change of masters. To round it off from my own studies, Navarrese peasants were a much tougher proposition for the French than landless labourers in the South, because they proprietors defending their farms.
  21. France decriminalised male/male sex in 1791, and it was not generally a crime in its African colonies. It became a crime, in such places, after independence. Independent countries are responsible for their own laws in this regard. In general, the tendency has been for the laws against homosexuality to become harsher than in the colonial period, in Africa. A big justification that is given for anti-sodomy laws in Uganda (probably the harshest in any African Christian country), is the behaviour of King Mwanga II, who executed dozens of pages in 1886, because they'd converted to Catholicism, and refused to allow the king to exercise the traditional royal prerogative of penetrating them. Pre-colonial Africa was no idyll.
  22. The last century or so of the Republic was an undoubted horror show. Generals waged wars for slaves and plunder, to pay off the costs of their political careers at home. The provinces were ruthlessly extorted by governors, and the publicani. And, ultimately, the Romans brought back to Italy, the lethal violence that they had exported to the rest of the Mediterranean, in the form of servile wars and power struggles between the dynasts. One of the very few men who saw that Rome could either be a republic, or an empire, but definitely not both, was Cato the Younger.
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