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THE POET AS SCIENTIST

THE POET AS SCIENTIST, THE POET AS SCIENTIST

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The Geek's Raven
[An excerpt, with thanks to Marcus Bales]

Once upon a midnight dreary,
fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bedsheets,
Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets:
Having reached the bottom line,
I took a floppy from the drawer.
Typing with a steady hand, I then invoked the SAVE command
But got instead a reprimand: it read "Abort, Retry, Ignore".

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Form input - by Günter Born

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

British concentration camps in South Africa

[QUOTE="jsb, post: 17010077, member: 72349"]Why would it have any effect? Did the Germans not effectively discount GB actions when they decided that going via Belgium was worth the risk of the small British forces trying to help the French? GB will still not want Germany dominating Europe so I don't see much change outside SA?[/QUOTE] I think that's precisely my point. Germany DID discount British actions when they invaded Belgium in 1914. Would they really have done that without the Boer War? And, from a German point of view, wouldn't the most degraded, disgraceful and immoral thing the British did during that war, have been the starvation of Dutch/Boer women and children, probably quite unnecessarily, even from the standpoint of winning the war, in concentration camps? I think it's significant that German Communist writer Bertolt Brecht wrote his Threepenny Opera in 1928, based on John Gay's Beggar's Opera, he sets it just before the Boer War, and ends it with the commencement of said War. Thus, the gangster Macheath, "Mac the Knife", is very much equated to the British Government as a whole in the Boer War. Because, at least to the German people, the Boer War was simply an act of gangsterism start to finish. Now, gangsters are violent and greedy, they have little discipline or foresight. So, effectively, in terms of the British actions in using concentration camps particularly, Germany may have seen very little reason to take Britain seriously anymore, at all. Britain had no discipline to fight real wars, they had no principles to cause them to adhere to treaties like the inviolability of Belgium, maintained for a century, since the fall of Napoleon. So, I think it's actually conceivable, that the reason the Kaiser sold Britain short, and confidently went to war against France and Russia in 1914, was because the British had behaved so very inappropriately in South Africa. He may simply have dismissed the British, because of those concentration camps in South Africa!

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