Soy History
#1
In this thread, I'd like to discuss forms of historical analysis, and extrapolate upon those that are (and are not) Norwood. Kirill made a Substack post on the matter that serves as a good point of introduction.

Good as it is, we can simplify Kirill's three systems into two employed by modern Americans en masse. I'll call these "systemic" and "factoid" histories, and while both are bad, I don't actually think both are soy per se, more on that later. These will be the two you will encounter in academia and popular history, and there will, of course, be some overlap.

"Systemic" histories are essentially the "black box" philosophy described by Kirill. X amount of food reserves and Y amount of unrest will result in Z unless X is boosted to lower Y. Hearts of Iron 'tism history. I'll add that systemic historical analyses put lots of stock in certain events being "paradigm shifts" when they were certainly not. The Peace of Westphalia resulting in "Westphalian sovereignty". Colonial powers "carving up the Middle East at random" being the reason for all conflict there post-WW2. Muh oil. Systemic historians were claiming for any number of reasons that the state was centralizing during the 16th and 17th centuries while any basic analysis of the primary sources will reveal that European kingdoms were bankrupting themselves paying mercenary entrepreneurs to raise armies for them, then having to assassinate them when they became powerful enough to overthrow their employers, a la Albrecht von Wallenstein.

All told, I don't necessarily believe the "systemic" school is soy by default. I might set myself apart from many Amarnites by distinguishing between academics and die ewige Norwoodites, even if I also believe there is quite a bit of overlap. Systemic thinking generally comes from being so enclosed in an academic bubble that they believe anything besides putting financial data points on a line graph is not real history. I've seen genuinely high IQ individuals become ensnared in this form of thinking for that reason.

The "factoid" school, however, is firmly in the realm of the receding hairline. Imagine a balding man with a full beard, gyno tits, sitting at the bar in a craft brewery, phone open with Drunk History on play, saying, "did you know that back in the Middle Ages, they would just toss their poo out the window onto people's heads? They didn't even bathe!" Imagine another balding man sitting at the same bar, retorting with, "Actually, they did bathe! Did you know that Hitler only had one testicle?" The "factoid" school is the great soy vortex where history goes to die, inhabited by countless millions Kings & Generals and Atun Shei viewers. Did you know that America forced scientists from the Third Reich to work for them post-WW2? That's why five million black babies get shot by the police every day.

The third unmentioned school here is the "Great Man" school, hardly existent outside of the strawmen of perturbed academics. Where it does exist, it's mostly used to put negroes on impossibly high pedestals, i.e. Toussaint l'Ouverture. Nonetheless, it frustrates academics and Norwoods alike because it is impossible to disprove, and implicitly carries with it the idea of the Nietzschean overman.

I'm sure there's other methods of analysis out there, but these are the ones I've encountered. Thoughts?
#2
a truly awful screed by kaminets, especially the black box part

"The Black Box obfuscates the fact that things never just happen; that people do things, and that these people have names and addresses" - Kaminets
#3
I think Norwoodism proper is when factoid historians try to cloak themselves in systematic terminology and explanations in order to seem more sophisticated. People who are just interested in pop history are usually just normies with passive interest or retards
#4
I think this "systemic" view of history is a bastardization of what Fernand Braudel et al. sought to do in their work: being able to identify the great mid and long term constants in history, and how civilization shifts (Braudel was concerned, mostly, with the jump from the Middle Ages to the "modern" era) happen across centuries. "Systemic" history approaches its subject in a similar way, but instead of the cautiously materialistic method that someone like Braudel would employ, it waters down this still presumed materialism by framing them into iron truisms; the named "black box", something that is supposed to hide all that happened around it, instead of putting them on a frame.

I recommend Braudel's short article "The Responsibilities of History", which offers a good rundown on what a bird eye view of history attempts to do and, most importantly, what doesn't.

The "gotcha school!" and the "bad vibes" one isn't even worth to engage in with earnest. While I can see smart people falling into "black-box"-ing, and I will admit I have been guilty of it myself on occasion, the other two are just a sign of stupidity. It's just a cheap way to intellectually flex against imaginary groups of people, like traditionalists.
#5
Hardcore History fan here. Let me give you guys an updoot!
Where does Howard Zinn fit in? Sole reliance on emotion and xenophilia... Or Michael Parentti, with the "reagan-thatcher is hitler" meme... Someone do a thread on the genealogy of the meaning of historicism
#6
The only significant element of these schools of bad history that Kaminets is not subject to in his own thinking is the monocausal attribution of complex historical events to changes in technology. He's right to include that under the "factoid" school of history of the sort he portrays in that substack post, but this necessarily leaves out many poles of factoid history seen in published works. There's the assembled factoid history of Niall Ferguson types formed of anecdotes like "the purchasing power of gold has remained constant for five centuries." But those who relate the most useless facts in proportion to the profundity of their main arguments are anthropologists writing on topics incidental to history. See the Matsutake mushroom book. These also tend to be the books whose theses are most often related to others in confidence.

Anyway, Kaminets copes too much for me to take him as an authoritative source on bad history. Case in point: his gloating about the Era of Violence after the Russo-Japanese war and "That 1:1 land K/D ratio (I'm still going to actually about German WW2 K/D THOUGH)" as if the (much more obvious) political ramifications of Russia's defeat were not so obviously more important, and if he were not passing over a decade where Russia relied on Japanese co-operation to preserve its interests in northern Manchuria. His references to the Great Game as a source of British Intelligence bad vibes is also very Logo-like, which explains why the latter was hailed as a great understander of Russian culture for months on the Russians with Attitude podcast, but at least with the latter case you could say he was being charitable to his oldfag twitter mutual.

As for his counterfactuals about how influential Russia would be if it had not lost the Russo-communism, and his gloating about Soviet communist victories, I give him the benefit of the doubt, because socialism definitely sucks, and I am subject to my own Imperial-Eclipse-inspired systematic biases about the latter.
#7
(03-07-2022, 03:52 PM)DCreighton Wrote: The only significant element of these schools of bad history that Kaminets is not subject to in his own thinking is the monocausal attribution of complex historical events to changes in technology. He's right to include that under the "factoid" school of history of the sort he portrays in that substack post, but this necessarily leaves out many poles of factoid history seen in published works. There's the assembled factoid history of Niall Ferguson types formed of anecdotes like "the purchasing power of gold has remained constant for five centuries." But those who relate the most useless facts in proportion to the profundity of their main arguments are anthropologists writing on topics incidental to history. See the Matsutake mushroom book. These also tend to be the books whose theses are most often related to others in confidence.

Anyway, Kaminets copes too much for me to take him as an authoritative source on bad history. Case in point: his gloating about the Era of Violence after the Russo-Japanese war and "That 1:1 land K/D ratio (I'm still going to actually about German WW2 K/D THOUGH)" as if the (much more obvious) political ramifications of Russia's defeat were not so obviously more important, and if he were not passing over a decade where Russia relied on Japanese co-operation to preserve its interests in northern Manchuria. His references to the Great Game as a source of British Intelligence bad vibes is also very Logo-like, which explains why the latter was hailed as a great understander of Russian culture for months on the Russians with Attitude podcast, but at least with the latter case you could say he was being charitable to his oldfag twitter mutual.

As for his counterfactuals about how influential Russia would be if it had not lost the Russo-communism, and his gloating about Soviet communist victories, I give him the benefit of the doubt, because socialism definitely sucks, and I am subject to my own Imperial-Eclipse-inspired systematic biases about the latter.
I think Kirill has himself said that there's nothing inherently wrong with Logos intended approach to history, it's more so that he creates several exceptions for the figures he likes. Kirill is just a more consistent structural materialist IMO.
#8
I didn't read Kaminets as saying that about Logo with reference to anything more concrete than conspiracist suspicions, though admittedly we may be thinking of different comments. There is something interesting he said about Logo before he blocked him, which was that both his and Logo's interpretation of their elite had them building (Robot-?)slave colonies on Mars in the near future.
#9
[Image: f57vs7.png]

"Did you know that Germany's groundbreaking experimental technologies made with the shoestring budgets and scrounged materials which they could muster late war... broke down?! I bet you chuds feel real stupid now!"
#10
Soy and norwood are often conflated, but not as I understand intended to be synonymous.
#11
I don't think factoid history is a Norwood phenomenon; some of the most elegant historians you'll find will often just be old men with a passion for their little cultural niche who delight in telling you obscure facts of said niche.
#12
(03-01-2022, 06:50 AM)Guest Wrote: Hardcore History fan here. Let me give you guys an updoot!
Where does Howard Zinn fit in? Sole reliance on emotion and xenophilia... Or Michael Parentti, with the "reagan-thatcher is hitler" meme... Someone do a thread on the genealogy of the meaning of historicism

Howard Zinn is the world's most accomplished Bad Vibe Historian, but in his work the bad vibes don't come from association with Bad People since almost all people in power in history were Bad. I had to read chapters of his book for AP US History and it was all "did you know group x suffered in way y during period z?"

The real question is: where does Nigel Carlsbad fit into all this? He does have some Gotcha School qualities but his Gotchas are always aimed at less plebian misconceptions. (See his post "What Was Whig History?" for a great example of this). It's important to remember that ways of thinking about history are all useful in moderation and become counterproductive only when taken to the extreme and not balanced by other ways of thinking. The benefit of Gotchas in Moderation is that they remind people that their picture of the past is always a simplified version of what actually existed, and Carlsbad does that excellently and for topics that would otherwise be left to less scrupulous commentators. Without Gotchas, people would base their conception of history entirely on hearsay and you'd hear a lot of "Germans lost WWII because of snow" style takes.
#13
(02-21-2022, 04:01 AM)cats Wrote: The third unmentioned school here is the "Great Man" school, hardly existent outside of the strawmen of perturbed academics. Where it does exist, it's mostly used to put negroes on impossibly high pedestals, i.e. Toussaint l'Ouverture. Nonetheless, it frustrates academics and Norwoods alike because it is impossible to disprove, and implicitly carries with it the idea of the Nietzschean overman.

I'd like to add that "great man" history is still in use in the journalistic field where the job is basically to make you believe that "this person is the worst/best thing to happen". Storytelling begs the great man.
#14
(05-05-2022, 06:21 AM)Pendinelli Wrote:
(02-21-2022, 04:01 AM)cats Wrote: The third unmentioned school here is the "Great Man" school, hardly existent outside of the strawmen of perturbed academics. Where it does exist, it's mostly used to put negroes on impossibly high pedestals, i.e. Toussaint l'Ouverture. Nonetheless, it frustrates academics and Norwoods alike because it is impossible to disprove, and implicitly carries with it the idea of the Nietzschean overman.

I'd like to add that "great man" history is still in use in the journalistic field where the job is basically to make you believe that "this person is the worst/best thing to happen". Storytelling begs the great man.

I've recently seen a favorable shift back towards Great Man history in a lot of biographies. Ullrich, Simms, Stolfi's Hitler biographies but also of men like Robespierre.
#15
There's a certain soy fascination with setting the record straight about how good the Mongols were, usually by praising everything they did that generally European colonists are demonized for doing. The thread title "soy history" conjures up in my mind vivid imagery of a fierce Mongol horde galloping across the vast steppe in order to facilitate trade relations, allow their conquests to rule themselves with some degree of autonomy and bestow rudimentary rights to women.
#16
"Yes, the Mongols were good and based."

"Because they set up trade relations and helped eurasian technological advancement?"

"No, because they killed people like you in industrial quantities, faggot."
#17
(05-06-2022, 01:32 AM)Hardcore Happiness Wrote: There's a certain soy fascination with setting the record straight about how good the Mongols were, usually by praising everything they did that generally European colonists are demonized for doing. The thread title "soy history" conjures up in my mind vivid imagery of a fierce Mongol horde galloping across the vast steppe in order to facilitate trade relations, allow their conquests to rule themselves with some degree of autonomy and bestow rudimentary rights to women.

There's a libtard journalist I know of who does this very thing. He made a long thread paralleling the Mongol Empire and European colonists:
https://nitter.net/Noahpinion/status/1015269974812721153
His conclusion ends up being that like the Mongols, the age of European dominance (and implicitly American as well) has come to and end, this end is reversible, and the nations of the global south are going to rise up and 'rule.' He ends with this quote:
Quote:I think there's a great chance that in the centuries to come, India and Africa - denigrated as hopeless backwaters in the early days of the European conquests - will become home to the world's most powerful civilizations. Will there ever be another wave of global conquest? I hope not. Maybe the world economy has moved on, so that future domination will be of the peaceful cultural variety instead of genocide and enslavement. But in any case, Europe's glory, like the Mongols', is done.

In another thread he expressed the view that the Mongols, not the Romans, Greeks, etc were the empire most conducive to technological progress in the Pre-1500AD period:
https://nitter.net/Noahpinion/status/148...0464685061
#18
>India
>denigrated as a hopeless backwater

Are these people fucking retarded? I mean it's that faggot, Noah, so yes.



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