Linkfest

Linkfest 2022-06-24: The End of the Hoplite

A great Twitter thread on how innovations in military doctrine amongst the Greeks changed the world.

Georgy Flerov was a young nuclear physicist in the Soviet Union who ( in 1943) sent a letter to Stalin advocating an atomic bomb project. It is not clear that Stalin read that letter, but one of Flerov’s arguments was particularly interesting: he pointed out the abrupt and complete silence on the subject of nuclear fission in the scientific literature of the US, UK, and Germany – previously an extremely hot topic.

Stopping publications on atomic energy ( which happened in April 1940) was a voluntary effort by American and British physicists. But that cessation was itself a signal that something strategically important was going on.

The Grey Goose Chronicles: The Celtic Curse: Haemochromatosis & Agriculture

Stone Age Herbalist speculates about what the selective advantage of heterozygous hemochromatosis is.

The Dacian: Meditations on Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane part II

Alexandru Constantin expands on his last Substack on sacred space.

The Long View: The New Absolutes

Garrison Keillor once characterized the United States as a nation founded by religious zealots who wanted to practice religious intolerance to a degree forbidden by the laws of England. While this is perhaps a churlish formulation of the matter, nevertheless it is the case that one of the defining features of American culture has always been a tendency to moralize issues and then to impose the morals by social coercion and, ideally, by statute. Colonial tax resistance, Abolitionism (of slavery), Prohibitionism (of liquor), anticommunism, feminism, the anti-smoking campaign: the roll-call of movements and causes designed to make people be good would make a serviceable backbone for any general narrative of American history.