Here is the thing about these 2015 conversations that many appear to have refused to move on from.

They should be a teachable moment. Sadly, aren't asking the right asks. Too many people from my neck of the woods (SE/SS) keep insisting on narratives that won't stand scrutiny.

I'll speak for the Igbo side, we are letting ourselves down in what should be a race to advance our agenda within #Nigeria

Yes, it is undeniable that there was an element of ethnic chauvinism in the coalition that came together against GEJ, but to attribute his loss simply to that factor is to completely miss the lessons of 2015, and as a result, set yourself up for another failure.

I'll talk about two of these:

First, Benue. In 2015, Benue state voted for Buhari.

No one within the set of people who keep shouting about ethnic jingoism ever seems to ask themselves why.

There are/were two reasons: first, Gabriel Suswam's government was unbelievably bad.

As of January 2015, Benue owed workers almost a year in salaries, and he never got as much as a reprimand from Abuja.

Instead, Suswam was mollycoddled by the GEJ govt.

Modern viewers may be horrified by medieval images of people hunting unicorns, but--to judge by medieval images of unicorns--medieval people may have seen unicorns as a little....murdery.

(BL, MS Sloane 3544, f. 4) #MedievalTwitter

When not being hunted, medieval unicorns mostly seem to be attacking other creatures, like this poor elephant.

(BL, MS Royal 2 B VII, f. 100v)

Or these bears.

(BL, MS Royal 10 E IV, f. 157)

Or this lion.

(BL, MS Royal 2 B VII, f. 190v)

Here's a whole troop of them fighting Alexander the Great.

(BL, MS Royal 15 E VI, f. 21)

So today is 260th anniversary of Third Battle of Panipat and this is a thread to commemorate it.
-Starting
It all started with the death of Aurangzeb & end of Mughal-Maratha war of 27 years. After this, Marathas started showing their power in central India.
-Then came the
1/

golden phase of Marathas under Peshwa Bajirao who spent more life in war camps than in his palace. Undefeated for 40 battles, he expanded Maratha boundaries crazily & whole India feared Maratha forces. His military formation was unparalleled & Marathas invested heavily
2/

in Artillery under him. Then after his death, his passion to expand the empire was kept alive by his sons, nephews and other Maratha Generals. The empire was now a confederation of equally powerful Maratha chiefs like Holkar, Shinde & others. They all came under banner of
3/

Maratha Chhatrapati & even expanded empire on their own in the name of Maratha king.
-Sons & Nephews of Bajirao- Elder son Balaji Bajirao became Peshwa and younger son Raghunathrao won Lahore, Delhi, Attock & most of Punjab in favour of Marathas. Muslim son of Bajirao
4/

kept in check several kingdoms from his stronghold in UP. You all have seen all these characters as kids in Bajirao Mastani. Nephew of Bajirao, Sadashivrao Bhau was a proven military strategist himself who imposed Maratha supremacy on Deccan kingdoms. Empire looked
5/

1949 - 'an inflection point in China's national history' - @SOAS_CI - Some historical significance in action here.

The key protagonists in this story.

Chiang Kai Shek playing for time in 1949 - to save his regime, to build a coalition if the Communists would play ball, to protect his assets, etc.

Mao - ‘a revolutionary man, somewhat impetuous.’ Yeah I would say so.

"They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round"

Nah, they laughed because they already knew the world was round–and his math about earth's size was incorrect.

This is a #ColumbusDay thread about how so much of what we were taught about him was wrong:

So: by popular demand (my mum) a quick guide.

The 25th amendment was ratified- i.e. became part of the US constitution in 1967. The amendment is basically about clarifying the presidential and vice presidential succession.

You see, Article 2 of the Constitution says "In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President"

But this is quite vague.

So when W.H. Harrison was the first president to die in office in 1841, it wasn't really clear what powers his VP, John Tyler, would have, nor what he would be called (president? acting president?)

Tyler took the oath and became president. This set a precedent.

Until the 1960s, convention dictated that if a president died in office, then their VP became president, was called the president, and had the powers of the president. Fine.

But this was not spelled out in law. And there were some outstanding questions:

1. If a VP becomes President, then how is the VP replaced?

2. What if the president is unwell, or unable to perform his role for some other reason? How can that be managed?

#HistoryKeThread: Mwangeka’s Blood

This first pic is of a view taken from high up in the Taita Hills.

In the late 19th century, Mekatilili’s Giriama were not the only community from present-day Coast province that rose against imposition of white rule by gun-toting Europeans. The Taita of Mwanda, too, did.

At that time, the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC) was the vessel through which Britain asserted its dominion over what would later become Kenya.

Incorporated in 1888 and chartered later the same year by the Queen of England, IBEAC was specially created to promote trade activities in territories under the control of the British.

So in the 1890s, IBEAC stepped up plans to open up the interior of East Africa by setting up administrative structures and laying down infrastructure, such as ox-cart roads (that later formed part of Nairobi-Mombasa highway that we know of today).

#Thread
Debunking Fake Narratives on Manusmriti on Women; Here Are Facts.

1.Found many antiDharma forces and confused persons using abusive language against Manusmriti.They were depicting Manu Maharishi one who gave birth to caste system and that he was biased against women nd womenhood.I found dis propaganda more sort of political rather than social.

2. So, here I debunk the various myths and fake naaratives pertaining to Manusmriti on women.

Swami Dayanand, the great Vedic scholar of the 19th Century, writes:
“I believe in that part of Manusmriti which is not interpolated (appended later) and is in accord with the Vedas.”

3.He concludes that the Manusmriti we read today is not as originally laid down by Swayambhu Manu, the first Chief of Humanity. As it now is, he found the text as self contradictory and against the values espoused in the Vedas, and hence injudicious.

4.He therefore rejects those prejudicial texts which advocate discrimination against populations with alleged inferior status. Commentaries, interpolations, and additions have demeaned the essence of the Manusmriti. This is the same with other Hindu sacred texts.

1/n Many cited this article as evidence for historicity of Md

It is work of some Ahemdiya and is full of non-scholarly arguments.

In this thread I rebut each claim one by one.

Truth: no archaeological evidence for Muhammad from around his

2/n Lies around Gospel of Mark, Mathew, Luke

3/n Lies through Thomas the Presbyter

4/n The myth of Sebeos

5/n Papyrus letter sent by Muslim Admin in Egypt

The Jewish avenger who killed an Ukrainian nationalist leader (THREAD)

The year is 1919 in the Ukrainian People's Republic ruled by president Symon Petliura.
For 3 years the Jews suffered from pogroms by the government and gangs as in 1919 they reached their peak.

In various localities throughout the republic, murders and rapes of Jews were carried out. The estimated number of Jews murdered ranges from 50,000 to about 200,000.

Following thousands of riots and pogroms, about 300,000 Jewish children became orphans. Hundreds of Jewish women experienced abuses and traumatic cruelty such as amputation of eyes, ears, and limbs.

The Jewish population in Ukraine has decreased significantly and hundreds of thousands have become refugees as they fled from Ukraine.
According to the Jews, Symon’s government did nothing to protect the Jews and actually caused some of the pogroms.

On April 12, 1922, Hitler gave a speech to a crowd in Munich proclaiming he was a Christian, “My Christian feeling directs me to my Lord and saviour as a fighter. As a Christian I have the duty for the truth and what is right.” His supporters believed him

They stated, “Hitler said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

Joseph Goebbels knew Hitler to be anti-Christian, in his diary entries, Hitler in reality wanted to destroy the churches. He saw Christianity as a symptom of decay, a strata deposited by the Jewish race.

Hitler was a deceptive politician who knew how to woo voters. He pandered to religious sensibilities. It is known that Hitler would lie if it would benefit him. In the mid 1930’s he assured people he had no aggressive intentions. Even when he annexed Austria, he assured the world

that he had no other designs whilst encouraging Germans leaders in Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland region to foment unrest in the country as a country of unrest will accept anything.

217 years ago today, on January 1, 1804, Haiti became became the first independent Black republic in the world following a 12 year revolution. It changed the trajectory of world history.

In 1893, Frederick Douglass gave a speech outlining why Haiti's revolution was so important:

"Speaking for the Negro, I can say, we owe much to Walker for his appeal; to John Brown for the blow struck at Harper's Ferry...but we owe incomparably more to Haiti than to them all. I regard her as the original pioneer emancipator of the nineteenth century."

"It was her one brave example that first of all started the Christian world into a sense of the Negro's manhood. I was she who first awoke the Christian world to a sense of 'the danger of goading too far the energy that slumbers in a black man's arm.'"

"Until Haiti struck for freedom, the conscience of the Christian world slept profoundly over slavery. It was scarcely troubled even by a dream of this crime against justice and liberty."

"The Negro was in its estimation a sheep like creature, having no rights which white men were bound to respect, a docile animal, a kind of ass, capable of bearing burdens, and receiving strips from a white master without resentment, and without resistance."

Thread: In communism poetry is a capital crime.

This poem was used as evidence by the communist prosecutors in the 1958 treason trial of Romanian poet and journalist Radu Gyr. Gyr was aligned in his youth with the nationalist movement Legion Of Archangels Michael & Gabriel.

Radu Gyr's first stint in prison lasted 1 year and happened during the pro-fascist regime of Gen. Ioan Antonescu, who aligned Romania with Nazi Germany. After one year behind bars he was freed on parole and sent to fight on the Eastern front in WWII.

Sending political dissidents on the front lines to be killed was one of the methods used by the fascist Antonescu regime government to punish former members of the Legion. Radu Gyr returned home a disabled veteran after he was wounded in battle.

In 1958 the communist authorities were in full swing with their plans to collectivize Romanian agriculture. The government was confiscating all farming land from the farmers and landowners and pushing everybody into CAPs -collective agricultural production farms.

The Greek civilization was the most influential civilization in the history of the world. All of today’s thoughts and ideas can be traced back to the Greeks. They gave us democracy, mathematics, drama, philosophy, Olympics and a whole bunch of Gods.

A THREAD

Here are some interesting facts revolving around Greek mythology.

Hercules gave us the saying “Taking the bull by its horns”:

The saying, “Taking the bull by its horns”, comes from Greek mythology. It was one of the 12 labors of Hercules that he had to perform to repent for..

..killing his own wife and children in a fit of madness caused by Hera. He saved the city of Crete from a raging bull by seizing its horns.

Athena defeated Poseidon to become the guardian of Athens:
Athena and Poseidon both wanted to become the guardian of a certain city so they decided to give a gift each to please the residents of the city. Poseidon gave them water in the form of a spring but the water was salty..

... and of no use. Athena gave them an olive tree which was much more useful as it gave food, oil and wood and so she won and since then that city has been known as Athens.

Not a slippery slope or sudden subversion: German medicine and National Socialism in 1933.
https://t.co/S5FqTYKG78

"On 29 July Deutsches Arzteblatt reprints the entire Sterilisation Act and comments:"

#vaccinatieplicht

“Since sterilisation is the only safe method to prevent the inheritance of mental diseases and serious genetic disorders, the law must be looked upon as an expression of loving care for the coming generations, and as an act of altruism."

"The elimination of defective genes is not of itself sufficient to keep our nation healthy and energetic, for this purging of the common gene pool must be complemented by positive population measures."

"On 14 July the new administration proclaims the Sterilisation Act, entitled “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Descendants.”

"Paragraph 12 instructs that the mutilating operation “must be performed even against the will of the person to be sterilised. The attending surgeon must request any necessary assistance from the police authority."

Open Letter: Our democracy is at risk. Progressivism can save us.

We’re in trouble. We have been for a long time. Hopefully, Georgia goes well and tomorrow is just noise. But what if neither happens? We can’t continue to pretend it’s all a joke. So what do we do?

First off, we need to ask how we get here?

America defeated Fascism (totalitarian rule enforced though a violent commitment to a national or racial or identity) embodied in the Nazi Party. We are not a perfect nation. We too are a nation stained by hate, apartheid . . .

slavery, Jim Crowe casteism. But there have been great moments. Defeating the Nazis was one of those moments. FDR was our leader. Like America, he wasn’t perfect. He turned away Jewish refugees. Like his counterparts in Erurope, he was also slow to recognize the Nazis as...

the danger they would become. But when economic and moral calamity threatened certain doom for all, he rose to the moment. He chose well. He led without fear. He made a promise to America. Fight this evil, and we will create a “New Deal.” Healthcare. A social safety...

net. Our soldiers carried government issued commemorative coins into Germany memorializing these sacred promises that they fought for. Sadly, not every one of these promises was fulfilled, but FDR helped rebuild America, literally. Those trails in our state parks? Many of our...