I am not an expert in this space, so hopefully an actual expert will come by and clarify, but I am pretty sure that "The current consensus [...] is that there was no such thing as ‘the sea peoples’" is just flat out untrue. (IIUC, what is the current consensus is that they did not "cause" the late bronze age collapse). That colors how I read the rest of the review.
Edit: Personally, I enjoyed that particular addition to the plotline, as unrealistic as it is.
This may blow your mind, but what if the "People From the Sea" are Odysseus, his family, and his crew?
* It was Penelope herself who voiced her fear of the People From the Sea. Did anyone outside of this group mention the People From the Sea? Was anyone outside of the group anticipating, terrified, or already terrorized by some other group?
* Ithaca is an island kingdom; anyone who lives there is a sailor by experience, and all of Greece is a region of islands and archipelagos
* Odysseus and his crew had not seen them or found them, because they are not sufficiently self-aware or spiritual
* They violated the Law of Zeus. All of them.
* That's why the Trojan Horse didn't have wheels. It was terrible to drag across dry land, but it was made of buoyant wood. It was a seahorse.
* Everyone they met, from the Trojans to Circe to Calypso and the Cyclopes, obesrved them to approach from the sea, land on the shore, and leave the same way
* They (Odysseus and his family) ultimately attacked Ithaca (the suitors)
* Odysseus, his wife and son go into exile by boat, and sail west, [beyond Gibraltar], thus permanently becoming People Of The Sea
* The Odyssey is a myth, fiction, legendary, and none of its characters actually existed
* The People From the Sea are not mentioned in Homer's text. They're extra-canonical. They were hypothesized, starting in the 19th century.
The term "Sea People" or "People of the Sea" has been taken from Egyptian documents that described a series of battles for defending Egypt against them.
Egypt succeeded to repel them, but other regions were not so lucky, because around the same time a lot of cities were destroyed. Because of the coincidence in time, it is assumed that the Egyptians have fought against the same people who destroyed the other cities.
There are also documents from Ugarit, written immediately before that city was destroyed, which requested help because they expected an imminent attack, but it was too late and the city was destroyed before receiving any help.
The documents do not contain enough information to identify who were the attackers, but there is no doubt that attacks existed and they destroyed many cities in Greece, Crete, Anatolia and in the territory of modern Syria.
Yes, while I agree with most of the criticism about the movie, that sentence has also stricken me as incorrect.
It is not known who the "sea people" were, e.g. whether they were invaders coming from far away or they were just some poorer local populations that had revolted in a time of famine, but what is known for sure is that a lot of cities around the Eastern Mediterranean have been destroyed and burned during several decades, and this has resulted in the disappearance of several centralized kingdoms, leaving only a few surviving big states, i.e. Egypt, Babylonia and Assyria, while everywhere else no central authorities remained and the territories were fragmented into small independent parts, consisting mostly of a city and its neighborhoods.
[1] is a nice intro into what the current scientific consensus in what caused the Bronze Age collapse is, written by historian Bret Devereaux. The view he paints pretty much aligns with what Wilson wrote about there being no such thing as the "sea people".
I've read that article too, and never got the impression it quite went that far. That there wasn't some unified group, sure, but I never heard anyone claim that (maybe reflecting when I first learned about them?). Maybe that's what Wilson meant, but if so it isn't very clear - it sounded to me like she's claiming that all those constituent groups the Egyptians wrote about, that Bret Devereaux touched upon, didn't actually exist (and worse, that this is the consensus position).
Edit: It occured to me, perhaps Wilson is thinking about this subject primarily from the Greek perspective, when most of what we know comes from others.
That article's TL;DR is bad theories "external invasion" and "volcanoes", and sets against it the current historian consensus: "climate" and "internal instability".
I thought she would be, but apparently classicist and historian have less overlap than I'd have assumed. I don't know how else to explain this one, I was shocked when I read that line.
Edit: Charitably, it could be awkward phrasing - not that the sea peoples didn't exist, but that the whole hypothesis around them is believed to be off.
Suddenly started happening to me out of nowhere while browsing. Really does feel like one of the last pillars of the old internet just toppled - that reading is open to anyone. New Reddit is basically unusable.
Edit: I still am a strong believer in anonymous usage of the internet. Increasingly it feels like we've become an endangered species.
It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for political/ideological/nationalistic battle, which is not what the site is for. We ban accounts that do this, regardless of what they're battling for or against.
I'm not going to ban your account right now because I noticed at least one comment in your recent history which was on an unrelated topic, but if you'd please fix this, we'd appreciate it. HN is supposed to be for intellectual curiosity, random-access style, not pre-existing agendas, ongoing political battles, or single-purpose accounts.
Is it? Don't know about other countries, but I am pretty sure the constitutional bedrock of the United States is to limit the federal government's ability to be malignant, even at the cost of some benefit. Whether that has been achieved is a separate question.
Not to defend Amazon here, but I think this is talking about the already severely limited streaming benefit of Prime, not the dedicated Amazon Music paid subscription. The former is not really comparable to a actual paid music subscription service.
Yep, this is the same thing they did with the video streaming.
The video thing actually made me cancel prime. The shipping isn't a big deal anymore and I was able to justify the prime as a bonus to the streaming service.
I just want shipping-only again, like it originally was. I never wanted any of the extra slop on the side, and I lost the main benefit I needed of fast shipping.
Now even "prime" shipping is a weeks' promise out to deliver, but boy will they not stop slamming Prime Video and all this extra crap down my throat to try to make it sound like it's such a great value I didn't ask for. (Also: the nerve of the letters in the mail to remind me I haven't opened any of Prime Video?)
I've only placed ~2 orders in all of 2026 so far on Amazon because of the slow shipping garbage, and it took me forever to finally give in and buy it there because every time I sourced elsewhere (like eBay, for small goods like electronics adapters etc) I'd end up with an even slower Amazon dropship to my door.
When you constantly get villainized for being involved, that makes it a lot harder to justify to the populace that these things are worth doing. People actually do listen, but not always in the way one intended. At this point, is it any wonder that much of the populace is now convinced that non-involvement is the moral choice? (And I say this as someone who fears this state of affairs)
>When you constantly get villainized for being involved
The vagueness of "being involved" is doing a lot of work in your comment. How often is the US vilified for these humanitarian programs and why should we pay attention to anyone who vilifies something that is obviously doing good in the world?
It is doing a lot of work. People who vilify the US rarely bother to make the distinction, to acknowledge the good (and the ones who do get crowded out). Human nature is not that forgiving.
I remember that the alternative has also unleashed hell on Earth for countless innocent people.
At some point, you have to take the path that offers at least some hope for the future. To turn into something that has lost all hope - there is no fixing that.
While this is a minor point; whether or not it was an Iranian misfire doesn't move the moral responsibility away from the invaders. Unless the IRGC took advantage of the chaos to purposefully hit the school (seems unlikely) then the entire situation was teed up by the external aggression and can still pretty reasonably be blamed on them.
If you try to shield your armed forces using children, and then accidentally kill them because you used them as a shield, you can't blame someone else.
... I'm just going of Wikipedia here but it seems to have been a standard small city [0]. Attempting to educate Iranians in Iranian cities isn't really trying to shield armed forces. Is the expectation here that Iran should send their students out into the wilderness to make it more politically convenient for US/Israeli to launch unannounced strikes on them?
Apart from the fact that Iran is a bad place to be right now it actually looks like a pleasant city to visit. Sounds like they have lots of fruit, warm weather and have some interesting history vis a vis the Mongols. Very middle eastern.
Instead of looking at the entire city, just look at the google maps data for proximity of their armed forces to their school.
Look, maybe it was a school specifically for the children of army personnel, but that's a long shot. From the geolocation data, the school was right at their missile launch site.
They had choices.
Locate the school or the launch site elsewhere, for one.
Evacuate the school before they tried to launch munitions, for another.
Why does that seem unlikely? It makes people argue that the price is not worth it. After killing thousands of protesters you think they would shy away from killing some dozens of kids?
Weird that you're so delighted to shift the blame for the tragedy of children being blown up in school, even more so that you're relying on unsubstantiated claims to do it.
Since you know more than the rest of the world about this, please update Wikipedia with a reliable source for your claim as has already been requested by admins here[1].
> Weird that you're so delighted to shift the blame for the tragedy of children being blown up in school, even more so that you're relying on unsubstantiated claims to do it.
Where in my message does it seem that I am delighted?
No doubt the truth will eventually come out, what I have seen is that the school was sited unusually close to an Iran launch site.
You can judge me all you want for "being delighted", whatever the hell that means, but I'm not advocating that schools be used as shields for rocket launchers, am I?
Okay, I get it - for you this is a laughing matter; your goal is something other than discussion.
But I gotta know - you are talking about a regime that had no problem gunning down thousands of innocent citizens in the streets just a month ago, why are you so sure that they won't use other innocents as shields for their soldiers?
Going after the monsters that murdered thousands of Americans was entirely justified.
Russia's problem is that all their reasons for invading Ukraine, they made up. The very people Russia claims to have been 'saving', are the ones that they are disproportionately killing.
So the only thing you're actually interested in is arguing "Trump bad."
Iran's religious leadership has been sponsoring terror throughout the world for the last 40 years. Jimmy Carter was duped by the British into causing the rise of Shia Islam there. Khamenei and his leadership had escape locations prepared in Venezuela. The U.S. rolled those up first, nabbing the leader of a criminal cartel (Maduro) in the process. Now Israel and the U.S. have taken out Iran's oppressive "supreme leader" at a moment in history when the Iranian people are struggling for their own freedom.
Khamenei was a bad guy. Maduro is a bad guy. They've put evil and harm out into the world and you're wringing your hands about it because it was Trump that stopped them?
"By G'Quan, I can't recall the last time I was in a fight like that. No moral ambiguity, no .. hopeless battle against ancient and overwhelming forces. They were the bad guys, as you say, we were the good guys. And they made a very satisfying thump when they hit the floor." -- G'Kar
As big as this is, the Russia-Ukraine war pretty much marked the end of the post-WW2 era and redefined global relations between the powers. In that sense, this is yet another major shift within this new era. But also, the series of events that led to this point does connect to the Russia-Ukraine war, and maybe doesn't happen without it.
You would be wrong. This happens to have been a propaganda campaign invented decades earlier in the Soviet Union. In fact, it is quite stunning how similar all this is to the modern propaganda Russia uses.
Well, looks like Leibowitz did not coin the term (much to his chagrin perhaps?), but I guess he was one of the more prominent Israelis to never apologize for using it.
May be Leibowitz spoke truth to power; may be he was a Soviet asset.
> quite stunning how similar all this is
Hm.
Michael S: Aren't you exaggerating when you use the term "Judeo- Nazi?" Do you truly believe that we are liable to decline to the level of the Nazis?
Yeshayahu L: When the nation (or in Nazi terminology, the race) and the power of its state become supreme values, human action is no longer inhibited. This mentality is also widespread among us. In the territories under our occupation in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Lebanon, we are already behaving as the Nazis behaved in the territories under their occupation in Czechoslovakia and the west.
I thought for a bit whether I should reply to this or not. But I noticed one point in here I felt obligated to correct.
If your idea of the Nazis is their occupation in the west, then you are missing most of the picture. Their atrocities in the east are far beyond anything that has ever taken place on this Earth before or since. There is no comparison whatsoever.
> I noticed one point in here I felt obligated to correct ... If your idea of the Nazis is their occupation in the west, then you are missing most of the picture ...
You'd be correcting Mr. Leibowitz, not me.
> no comparison whatsoever
It is not up for debate that there isn't any comparison to be made. That said, we can choose to live in our bubbles, yeah; but on the flip side, interactions with the outside world might come as a rude shock.
Given the track record of knowledge of the eastern front beyond the iron curtain, maybe he didn't. I don't know how anyone can read about Operation Barbarossa, the full scope of the plans to wipe out half of the continent, and come away with the impression that anything else, let alone a regional conflict, is even in the same universe.
But this isn't about Leibowitz, who isn't here to try to explain himself. This is about the idea that a falsity is "not up for debate".
> This is about the idea that a falsity is "not up for debate".
Your assertion that there's "no comparison whatsoever" is of course not, when there's ample.
> who isn't here to try to explain himself
Lets just say that social norms & experiences drive much of what people believe in. One of Leibowitz's student goes:
"I hated the notion of occupation since the very beginning. My first memories from after the 67 war are traveling with my children in the occupied territories. There were awnings over groceries stores with Hebrew lettering advertising Osem noodles. I couldn't bear it. I thought that was dreadful because I remembered German lettering in France. I have very strong feelings about Israel as an occupier."
We can guess what their "very strong feelings" might have been having experienced Nazi occupation of France during WW2.
What is ample? Can you provide any evidence that Gaza can be put in the same breath as Leningrad? Russia calls all the West "Nazis", should we just listen to them?
I think you really need to learn more about the eastern front, if you're going to keep making or supporting comparisons based on incomplete knowledge. There is no comparison between the experiences in France and the experiences in Ukraine during WW2. There is a reason why historian Timothy Snyder titled one of his books "Bloodlands".
> making or supporting comparisons based on incomplete knowledge
Comparisons needn't be limited to one event or one atrocity.
> Russia calls all the West "Nazis", should we just listen to them?
All? I doubt that. Even then, unfortunately for you, like Leibowitz, Kahneman (perhaps world's foremost & finest thinker) isn't alive either to explain himself.
> Comparisons needn't be limited to one event or one atrocity.
You can't openly call a group Nazis and then claim you only meant in terms of their behavior on the western front. It misses the whole point, not to mention it makes people forget what the Nazis did.
> You can't openly call a group Nazis and then claim you only meant in terms of their behavior on the western front
Me? As before, in this context, your argument is with Kanheman & Leibowitz. And possibly other prominent Israelis (present or past) who may hold such views.
Then Liebowitz was wrong (and Kanheman, though it seems to me he wasn't trying to make a reasoned argument in that interview). And thus, those who cite him would presumably do better to read other, more historical sources.
Edit: Personally, I enjoyed that particular addition to the plotline, as unrealistic as it is.