Ironies of History

[Moose-tache]

(*) Unpopular opinion: About the one good thing that could be said about it is that it helped spread democratic ideas. Other than that, it took a century before we got a stable democracy, and pretty much everything that actually got done during the Revolution was a step backwards.

It also gave us the metric system.

And silly Dutch names!

[Ares Land]

(*) Unpopular opinion: About the one good thing that could be said about it is that it helped spread democratic ideas. Other than that, it took a century before we got a stable democracy, and pretty much everything that actually got done during the Revolution was a step backwards.

It also gave us the metric system.

And silly Dutch names!

Silly Dutch names?

Ah, yes, good point, the metric system. I like the Republican Calendar a lot too, too bad we didn't keep it!

[Raphael]

Ah, yes, good point, the metric system. I like the Republican Calendar a lot too, too bad we didn't keep it!

What's weird is that I've seen some people from places whose climate is pretty different from that of France promote that calendar.

[Ares Land]

What's weird is that I've seen some people from places whose climate is pretty different from that of France promote that calendar.

I suppose in practice we'd just ignore the etymology (just like we don't really notice that October isn't the eighth month).
A solution would be to keep the principle but translate/adapt the nouns in each country. A bit of an oversight. (Also, it uses cumbersome Roman numerals, and doesn't provide a Year Zero)


The metric system may have been a bit premature. If we'd waited a century, we could have defined the foot as 2×10^34 Planck lengths and the pound as 2×10^7 Planck masses.

[Raphael]

Another possible entry in this thread: One of the most important foundational texts of Communism has a title that sounds like the title of an investment guide for capitalists.

[WeepingElf]

The first German foreign minister after WWII to deliver a declaration of war was Joschka Fischer, of the pacifist Green Party, in 1998.

[Raphael]

Arguably, the same kind of feedback loop that allowed Microsoft to dominate the desktop and laptop OS market for decades has marginalized them in the smartphone and tablet OS market.

[Raphael]

You know what happened earlier today? The German parliament passed a bill repealing a ban on advertising or providing information about abortion.

[Raphael]

I learned recently that Benito Mussolini's father, who was politically quite radical, named him after Benito Juárez.

[hwhatting]

I learned recently that Benito Mussolini's father, who was politically quite radical, named him after Benito Juárez.

Well, M. started off as a Socialist...

[zompist]

The metric system may have been a bit premature. If we'd waited a century, we could have defined the foot as 2×10^34 Planck lengths and the pound as 2×10^7 Planck masses.

That might be premature itself! I don't think any physicists are happy with what we know about things at that scale. Once we have a working theory of quantum gravity, I expect we'll have much more salient (and smaller) units to build on.

[keenir]

I suppose in practice we'd just ignore the etymology (just like we don't really notice that October isn't the eighth month).
A solution would be to keep the principle but translate/adapt the nouns in each country. A bit of an oversight. (Also, it uses cumbersome Roman numerals, and doesn't provide a Year Zero)

have any Year Zeros actually gone well?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Calendars also usually start with the first "Year of [Whatever]".

[Travis B.]

Year Zero

[rotting bones]

Year Zero

I like this idea, but I don't like the state enforcing it.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I think it's a terrible idea.

[rotting bones]

Love it. I crave more destruction of tradition in my life.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

That is such a viscerally unpleasant notion I begin to suspect trolling.

[rotting bones]

That is such a viscerally unpleasant notion I begin to suspect trolling.

If it's so terrible, then why did it appeal to millions of people not too long ago? People with too little tradition want more. People with too much want less. Sounds like common sense to me. I don't want people to assume from my name and/or looks that I have any fondness for Islamic laws, and I don't feel it's good that my relatives feel it is their duty to try and arrange a marriage with a cousin who's more than a decade younger than me. That's what tradition means to me in practice, not the stuff they advertise on tourist guides. It's when bureaucrats try to codify common sense preferences into state ideology that they give birth to monsters.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I don't want people to assume from my name and/or looks that I have any fondness for Islamic laws, and I don't feel it's good that my relatives feel it is their duty to try and arrange a marriage with a cousin who's more than a decade younger than me. That's what tradition means to me in practice, not the stuff they advertise on tourist guides. It's when bureaucrats try to codify common sense preferences into state ideology that they give birth to monsters.

While I don't have your lived experiences, and don't care any more than you do for any of those things, the idea of the "destruction of tradition" means to me the destruction of relics, history, art, and culture into the bargain (because this seems to be what's happened in practice), and not merely the breakdown of hierarchies and systems of abuse.