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Critical Moments (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Please don't panic.

History will trundle on. Civilization is safe. You can continue to sit on your arse, fatty. National Service doesn't beckon after all

Unless it all goes Pete Tong. Whoops. If only we had handled it differently. We missed the sign, we didn't act at the Critical Moment. We didn't read the runes. We didn't spot the omens.

If we had only known what we were looking at, or listened to those that knew better, we would have acted differently, but we didn't. History will record our stupidity.

What makes it worse is that storytellers have been signalling out these critical moments, but we remained deaf.

What we need is an idiot's guide to Crtical Moments
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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Sounds an excellent wheeze. Shall we stick for the moment to Brexit -- otherwise we'll go all over the place (I've got a doozy about the English Civil War)? If we assume that Brexit is a critical moment -- we can argue whether a big one or a small one -- then the first thing to point out is that, in Ishmael's famous words, it crept up like a thief in the night.

Nobody was much exercised about Brexit (except the usual malcontents) until Cameron dreamt up the Referendum in order to solve a fairly minor problem he was having with Tory indiscipline. Is that the first rule of Critical Moments: we make 'em, but we don't know we're making 'em?
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Mick Harper wrote:
Sounds an excellent wheeze. Shall we stick for the moment to Brexit -- otherwise we'll go all over the place (I've got a doozy about the English Civil War)? If we assume that Brexit is a critical moment -- we can argue whether a big one or a small one -- then the first thing to point out is that, in Ishmael's famous words, it crept up like a thief in the night.

Nobody was much exercised about Brexit (except the usual malcontents) until Cameron dreamt up the Referendum in order to solve a fairly minor problem he was having with Tory indiscipline. Is that the first rule of Critical Moments: we make 'em, but we don't know we're making 'em?


I am giving this some thought as I was going to do a introduction and then tackle some diverse examples. My thinking about Brexit is that this is not a Critical moment it is a choice..

History trundles on. Often folks worry that choices are critical when they are not.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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I am your follower in this. We are perhaps both followers of Mr Karl Marx and his division of all things into base and superstructure. Marxists of course are always criticised for claiming the Crisis of Capitalism has arrived when the Bank of England raises interest rates by a point but they have been strangely quiet about Brexit -- so you are probably right in seeing it as but a tableau in the passing cavalcade.

It's all yours! Sorry I interrupted.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Mick Harper wrote:
I am your follower in this. We are perhaps both followers of Mr Karl Marx and his division of all things into base and superstructure.


It's difficult to avoid not being a student of Marx because, as Ish never tires of pointing out, we are surrounded by them. There is, of course, a very good reason for that ie Marxism is a highly successful paradigm. It is so successful (mainly in its Leninist form) it is used both by left, right, and centre.

As far as Critical moments goes we note that Marx employed both linear (base, progressive ) and circular (superstructure, revolutionary) thinking to generate Critical Moments.

Is that what you are thinking?
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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We start at the end. The end (the here and now) is a very good place to start, we know a bit about what is going on. Coyote refuses to start in the future, as the future lasts a long time. Wiley will never get there. No, Coyote will start at the end.

Orthodoxy disagrees https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RW3nDRmu6k
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Ok Julie, we will start at the beginning, it is after all a very good place to start. It is just that when we go back in history, we find that ancient scribes (or their modern imposters) are always doing exactly what Wiley wanted to do all along.......these ancient scribes are recording how folks arrived in their ancient here and now, from an earlier past. They are trying to understand what was critical to their here and now.

Just saying.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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How might this work? Let's take an imaginary look.

Queen Soso wants to capture a trading centre, she heads off to the oracle, 300 parasangs away, (this is after all a critical moment for the Sosoians) for an opinon on such a critical decision. Soso gets the go ahead, alerts the infantry and a new trading centre is added to the empire. It's called Divination.

The ancient scribes (in their hear and now) will record this after the event, often after a long period of time after the actual event occurred.

It's the year 45 (after the founding of Sosonia), it is recorded that Queen Soso, in year 32, consulted an oracle and captured a trading centre.

You are looking at an inscription in 45, AFS (after the Founding of Sosonia), that records an event in 32 AFS that shows a critical moment that was predicted by an oracle.

You know it was a critical moment, because the scribes tell us, and Queen Soso felt the need to go to an Oracle.

You might have worked out that History and Divination are two sides of the same coin.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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Queen Soso wants to capture a trading centre, she heads off to the oracle, 300 parasangs away (this is after all a critical moment for the Sosoians), for an opinon on such a critical decision. Soso gets the go ahead, alerts the infantry and a new trading centre is added to the empire. It's called Divination.

The process or the trading centre? Your attitude to dangling participles, Wiley, is positively dyslexic (though we've found that is often a good sign). But this idea of post-factoring Critical Moments is a very important business, I agree. And topical because of course the evidence for the event has to be forged too. Queen Sosa holding a trident on their coins, that sort of thing. Though the wider point is that nobody knows what a critical point will be until it's been. Who knew Carthage would be so big?

But, in theory, once you go public with your version, it is open to everyone else to exploit it for their version. When the Romans wanted a founding myth that was both anti-Greek and anti-Carthage, what better way than for a Trojan to dally with Dido?
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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So far so simple.

We also notice we have some critical dates of which both the most or least (according to your view) is 1 AFS (the Sosonians date their foundation to their first year, they have no year zero).

"In the first year of Sosonia" ...."The First King" "The First Queen". It's the starting point we have already rejected.

It's simply a critical date because it marks out the chronos of the Ancient Scribe, which the Modern Scribe then converts into his or her Chronology (invariably CE). The fact that the Ancient scribe has different notions of time and space is often overlooked, or rather it is acknowledged, before the Modern Scribe proceeds with an account based on linear notions of time, with its obsession on dating (that is years Mr H, not girls) and placing.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Sosonia is a agrarian community. Traditionally every 7th year, the fields lie fallow. After 7 cycles of 7 years, a Jubilee is held and land is redistributed. 1+(7x7) = 50 heralding a new era. The new era can come early or late according to the oracles.

If Year 1 is a critical date for the ancient scribes to map out their chronos, Year 50 is also a critical date as it is the start of a new era. It is associated with a critical moment a redistribution of land and power.

You might wonder like Wiley whether Herald=Harold, and that the death of Harold is a critical moment that marks the end of the old cycles' and the beginning of a new era.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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That's not bad though you should show your working. What is neato is that since we can look around and see that non-Haroldian lands have subsequently adopted the same year-system we would have to show that that year-system was foisted on (most of) the world by the Normans. This is in fact perfectly feasible.
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Mick Harper
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There is no doubt that English sovereigns have adopted 1066 as Year Zero for their own numeration, so we might look at the moment when that became an issue i.e. when a king with a pre-Haroldian name came to the throne. There are no pre-Haroldian Williams, Henries, Stephens, Richards or Johns so that moment only arrived with Edward the First. Since even the post-Haroldians accept the legitimacy of Edward the Confessor, why wasn't he Edward II? Such a long run of non-pre-Haroldian names might be significant.

In the most radical case we might look at the names of allegedly pre-Haroldian king lists, Bretweldas and stuff like that. Then extend the principle to, say, Danish kings. We only recently learned, on one of the forgery threads, that the Swedes got up to some hanky-panky with their throne-name enumeration as late as the sixteenth/seventeenth century.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Wile E. Coyote wrote:
You might have worked out that History and Divination are two sides of the same coin.


I have a feeling that you and I are headed to the same point (though your posts are as esoteric as the subject matter).

I appear to have detected something like this in British chronology. Dates for key events are chosen by the historians for numerological reasons. Those events did not actually occur in those years (if they occurred at all). The association of such "critical events" with numerologically-significant dates is meant to be seen, by the reader of these histories, as auspicious or ominous, depending on the nature of the event. The reader then interprets contemporary events accordingly.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Mick Harper wrote:
That's not bad though you should show your working.


For Wiles the ideas come first, the working out comes later.

Still I appreciate folks like a taster.

Let's take a look.

On Line wrote:


Herald (n.)
"messenger, envoy," late 13c. (in Anglo-Latin); c. 1200 as a surname, from Anglo-French heraud, Old French heraut, hiraut (12c.), from Frankish *hariwald "commander of an army" or a similar Germanic source, from Proto-Germanic *harja "army" (from PIE root *koro- "war;" see harry) + *waldaz "to command, rule" (see wield). The form fits, but the sense evolution is difficult to explain, unless it is in reference to the chief officer of a tournament, who introduced knights and made decisions on rules (which was one of the early senses, often as heraud of armes, though not the earliest in English).

herald (v.)

late 14c., "to sound the praises of," from herald (n.)


Hark the Herald Angels Sing. Glory to the new born King. The death of any commander/messenger and the introduction of a new lineage.

It is a critical moment
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