Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 30
Sep. 8th, 2021 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnIn which, despite the title, I would like to be told about the English Revolution, which is yet another casualty of my extremely poor history education :P :)
Also, this is probably the place to say that RMSE opened with three Fritz-fics, all of which I think are readable with minimum canon knowledge:
The Boy Who Lived - if you knew about the doomed escape-from-Prussia-that-didn't happen and tragic death of Fritz's boyfriend Hans Hermann von Katte, you may not have known about Peter Keith, the third young man who conspired to escape Prussia -- and the only one who actually did. This is his story. I think readable without canon knowledge except what I just said here.
Challenge Yourself to Relax - My gift, I posted about this before! Corporate AU with my problematic fave, Fritz' brother Heinrich, who's still Fritz's l'autre moi-meme even in corporate AU. Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with the corporate world and the dysfunctions thereof.
The Rise and Fall of the RendezvousWithFame Exchange - Fandom AU with BNF fanfic writer Voltaire, exchange mod Fritz, and the inevitable meltdown. (I wrote this one and am quite proud of the terrible physics-adjacent pun contained within.) Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with fandom and the dysfunctions thereof :P
Also, this is probably the place to say that RMSE opened with three Fritz-fics, all of which I think are readable with minimum canon knowledge:
The Boy Who Lived - if you knew about the doomed escape-from-Prussia-that-didn't happen and tragic death of Fritz's boyfriend Hans Hermann von Katte, you may not have known about Peter Keith, the third young man who conspired to escape Prussia -- and the only one who actually did. This is his story. I think readable without canon knowledge except what I just said here.
Challenge Yourself to Relax - My gift, I posted about this before! Corporate AU with my problematic fave, Fritz' brother Heinrich, who's still Fritz's l'autre moi-meme even in corporate AU. Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with the corporate world and the dysfunctions thereof.
The Rise and Fall of the RendezvousWithFame Exchange - Fandom AU with BNF fanfic writer Voltaire, exchange mod Fritz, and the inevitable meltdown. (I wrote this one and am quite proud of the terrible physics-adjacent pun contained within.) Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with fandom and the dysfunctions thereof :P
Re: Goldstone is wrong, chapters 2 and 3
Date: 2021-09-27 05:16 am (UTC)Well, fair, but I don't think any of us were expecting Maupertuis to show up as the source of that (rather telephone-game-twisted by the time it got to Goldstone) particular unjustified comment!
What the ... WHAT??? Man. I can't even simply call that shoddy reasoning anymore.
Yeah, I don't even know what to do with that.
Yeah, I saw that, was ??!?, and didn't even mention it in my comment because... what do you even DO with that. Also I feel like there must be some clause of Godwin's Law that applies here :P
I think I speak on behalf of [personal profile] cahn when I say that if you wanted to research the historicity of this claim, we would be very grateful!
You do! Gossipy sensationalism at its finest!
Re: Goldstone is wrong, chapters 2 and 3
Date: 2021-09-27 01:18 pm (UTC)I realized last night that I *do* know what to do with this kind of reasoning: I've seen it before.
One component of the grad school program I attended was comparative mythology, and I can tell you that this kind of reasoning is endemic in that field. For example: Homer has his heroes being cremated. Second-millenium Mycenaeans did not cremate their dead. Proto-Indo-Europeans in the steppes of Kazakhstan at some point in the third or fourth millennium did. Therefore Homer is revealing that the tradition of a super archaic practice was preserved through millennia of oral poetry!
Except that many Greeks of Homer's time practiced cremation. Why don't we assume that Homer was describing a practice familiar to him and his listeners from their own time and place?
This is the Wishful Thinking Aetiology Fallacy, according to the name that I just made up, and Goldstone isn't the only one guilty of it. (But with a dose of Godwin's Law that makes it extra special, in this case.)