Bret Devereaux

I’m an othismos literalist (this is an unpopular view). I base this on a lot of factors, including my own internality/experience in close-combat, but also on Tyrtaeus’ poetry and several battle narratives. I wrote a thread on it on here a while back, lemme see if I can find it.https://twitter.com/justsaylos/status/1225186625149448192 …

It's funny. In the scholarship, othismos-literalism seems the minority view. Actually talking to historians, I think it is actually still the orthodox position. It's just that no one gets anywhere arguing for the orthodox position when VDH's WWoW already exists.

Not that WWoW isn't without its problems, just that, accepting the othismos, the space to write an interesting book detailing WWoW's problems is small, and the incentive structure of academic publishing runs against it.

It’s hard for me to be neutral about WWoW. I know there’s scholarship there, but it’s so tangled in racism and chickenhawk chest pounding that my eye twitches whenever I consider it. Hanson is a bad dude. I can’t consider his work in a detached manner.

Would that only good people produced high quality scholarship, and that bad people produced only low quality scholarship. Alas, it is not so. I respect your stance, but don't feel, as an academic, that I can adopt it - I have to note when even the bad people have a good idea.

He has *shreds* of good ideas, scotch taped onto really really really bad ones. His work, in the aggregate, isn’t to be taken seriously, IMO. His overall impact on military intellectuals who don’t have the benefit of a real background in history is immeasurably harmful.