User:SpartHawg948

About Me
My name is William, I am 25, and I am a Staff Sergeant (SSgt) in the US Air Force Reserve. I live in Santa Clara, California, and I LOVE Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2!!! I aim to do whatever I can to improve this site, as I feel it's a great resource. Also, I am an admin, so if anyone has any questions or needs help with anything, please just let me know!

Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but I have no patience whatsoever with crybabies, whiners, speculators, and boors. If you are going to be rude to someone else, plant purely speculative info, or insult others but then start crying when someone calls you on it, you WILL be hearing from me.

Now that the seriousness is taken care of, it's my goal to make this the most informative site possible, while also keeping it a nice, friendly environment for users. Any assistance in furthering that goal is, of course, greatly appreciated, and I try to acknowledge people for their efforts as much as possible. So I hope you all enjoy the site, and hopefully you'll be hearing from me (for something good, of course!)

Big Project
Ok... not that big, but User:SpartHawg948/Sandbox/Entertainment- a sandbox of a proposed Entertainment page.

Words to live by

 * "Let him who desires peace prepare for war"- Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus (more commonly known as Vegetius) from De Re Militari
 * "An armed society is a polite society"- Robert A. Heinlein
 * "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent vice of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries"- Winston Churchill
 * "Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity- in short, of tyranny- and is committed to making tyranny universal."- Adlai Stevenson
 * "The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage."- Alexis de Tocqueville
 * "The world is not going to be saved by legislation."- William Howard Taft
 * "A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company."- Charles Evans Hughes

Featured Quote
This section will just be for quotes I like that aren't necessarily as concise and pithy as the ones featured above. They don't even necessarily have to be relevant to anything, I may just choose quotes from sources I like (such as George S. Patton, who provides the first of these) or works I like (such as the Anabasis by Xenophon). Good times!


 * "I studied the Koran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. So far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself. " -- Alexis de Tocqueville, 19th century French philosopher, political thinker, and historian, and a big-time fan of the U.S. of A.!

Featured Bio
So, this one is almost as old-school as the previous bio, and unlike Lycurgus of Sparta, this guy did exist, no ifs, ands, or buts. In fact, he's one of the guys who chronicled the story of Lycurgus. So, I'm sure all of you have heard of the so-called 'warrior-poet', right? Well, this next guy was a warrior-historian. So without further ado, I give you... Xenophon!

Xenophon was born in approximately 431 B.C. (right around the time the Peloponnesian War began), in Athenian territory (though not in Athens itself, somewhere in the countryside near the city). He was born into the aristocracy, and as such would have been better educated than many Athenians of the time, and had more access to the luminaries of the day. Around 401 B.C. (3 years after the Peloponnesian War ended), Xenophon heard that Cyrus the Younger was in Greece attempting to hire Greek mercenaries to join his army as he attempted to overthrow his older brother, King Artaxerxes II of Persia. After consulting both the legendary philosopher Socrates and the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, Xenophon signed on as a hoplite. Cyrus and his forces (including ten thousand Greek mercenaries, including Xenophon, commanded by the Spartan general Clearchus) clashed with the Persian Imperial army under Artaxerxes at the Battle of Cunaxa. The Greek forces, which comprised Cyrus' right wing in the battle, were responsible for Cyrus' troops crushing the Persian army. However, in a classic example of 'snatching defeat from the jaws of victory', the impetuous Cyrus attempted to ride down and kill his older brother, became separated from his bodyguards, and was killed.

With the death of Cyrus, the majority of his army, being Persian, immediately switched sides and joined Artaxerxes. Finding themselves cut off hundreds of miles from the nearest friendly port (and passage back to Greece), the Greek generals decided to sue for peace. Artaxerxes agreed to meet with them, but betrayed and murdered all the Greek generals, including Clearchus. When they learned of this, the 10,000 Greek mercenaries held an election on the spot to appoint new leaders. Xenophon was one of those elected to lead the army. At Xenophon's behest, the army turned north and began an epic march to the sea. They crossed through hundreds of miles of hostile territory, encountering and fighting many enemies, both Persians and natives of the regions they passed through, before finally reaching the Black Sea port of Trabzon. This epic journey was immortalized by Xenophon in his best-known work, the Anabasis ('The March Up-Country', often mistranslated simply as 'going up').

Xenophon returned to Greece, but was later exiled from his native Athens, due in large part to the fact that he fought for the Spartans during the Corinthian War. This was due in no small part to the fact that Xenophon appears to have been an oligarch, favoring the more restrictive republican government of Sparta and other oligarchies over the more expanisve democratic republics such as Athens (Xenophon himself expressed his love of Athens but his disbelief in its political morals), as well as the fact that his primary patron was Spartan King Agesilaus II. After his exile, Xenophon was granted properties near Olympia (home of the ancient Olympics) by the Spartans, where he wrote many of his works, including the Anabasis. Some time later, his son Gryllus fought for the Athenians against the Spartans at the Battle of Mantinea and was killed. As a result, the Athenian government appears to have revoked Xenophon's banishment. He died twelve years later, either in Athens or Corinth.

Xenophon lives on in his writings, which have been very highly regarded since his death. The most well known is, of course, the epic tale of the Ten Thousand contained in the Anabasis (Alexander the Great himself used the Anabasis as a field guide during the early phase of his invasion of Persia), but Xenophon also branched out into the fields of politics and philosophy. Xenophon wrote several 'dialogues' on Socrates, a friend and mentor of his, including works describing Socrates' trial and last days and a work (entitled Memorabilia) in which he defended Socrates' philosophic teachings. He also wrote several biographies, including one on Cyrus the Younger, and a history of Greece that picks up where Thucydides' history leaves off. He was one of the first to posit that the ordered world as we know it was created by a God or gods, and also wrote a piece on horsemanship (Xenophon has been referred to as the 'first horse-whisperer' for extolling the virtues of 'sympathetic horsemanship' in his work, 'On Horsemanship'). Truly, Xenophon was a jack-of-all-trades, and the world is a far better (and more interesting) place for his having been in it!

Tongue-in cheek thought of the, ah, who am I kidding? I'm not gonna change this daily...

 * I was wondering how long it would be till someone called me mean, or a jerk, or something to that effect. Only made it two days into the month this time. And all I did was offer and opinion and some supporting facts, and call some specious reasoning into question, at the request of another user. What a jerk I was, right? :P SpartHawg948 02:20, June 3, 2010 (UTC)
 * Wowee! Just got done writing a rather lengthy paper on why democracies are superior to Communist states, focusing primarily on how Communist states are much more likely to commit atrocities, and also examining the Democratic peace theory ad how there is no equivalent 'Communist Peace theory'. Interesting facts:
 * In 234 years, I could find maybe 2-5 million deaths that can be chalked up to US-committed atrocities (and most of those are Japanese civilians during World War II). Likewise, in 102 years, I could find maybe 2-3 million killed due to British atrocities, mostly German civilians during WWII. (Note to Brits- I didn't start counting the UK as a true democracy till 1908, when the House of Lords finally lost the power to veto legislation passed by the House of Commons. If you think this is BS, I'd honestly love to hear it, and hear why, on my talk page. That wasn't sarcasm. Please, of you think I'm wrong, let me know!) On the other hand, in the 69 years that the Soviet Union existed, it's estimated to have murdered over 20 million civilians and POWs (which was my general definition of atrocity, the killing of civilians and POWs by gov't forces), and in the 61 years the People's Republic of China has existed, they are estimated to have killed over 65 million people. Pretty big disparity, eh?
 * On a related note, in over 3,000 years, there hasn't been one recorded case of a war that violates the Democratic peace theory (i.e. a war that was between two mature, democratic republics), but just in the past 41 years, there have been four major wars or conflicts between Communist states (a series of major border skirmishes between the Soviet Union and China, a war between China and Vietnam, a war between Vietnam and Cambodia, and a war between Somalia and Ethiopia). Again, a pretty big disparity. With facts like these, my paper practically wrote itself! SpartHawg948 03:34, June 5, 2010 (UTC)
 * Quick note- just because you call something 'hate mail', that doesn't automatically make it hate mail. In order for something to be hate mail, there are two requirements: 1) It needs to be mail, of either the print or electronic varieties. If it isn't mail, it can't be hate mail. 2) It needs to express and/or demonstrate hate towards the subject, with hate being commonly defined as intense dislike and/or extreme aversion or hostility towards the subject. If it doesn't display an intense dislike, aversion, or hostility on the part of the author towards the subject, or in more simple terms, if it doesn't contain hate, it's not hate mail. Funny how an item has to contain hate and be mail in order to qualify as hate mail. And attempting to stifle differing opinions by branding them as 'hate mail' when they obviously are not? Well, that's censorship. And a pretty vile form of censorship at that. It is also (especially when someone starts out by saying something like ", I can feel the hate mail coming my way already", thereby presupposing that any response will be hate mail), an example of Poisoning the well, a logical fallacy in which one tries to negate the arguments of a presumed opponent by preemptively spreading adverse or negative information about the other person in an attempt to discredit anything that other person may say. And that is also just plain wrong. SpartHawg948 10:55, June 5, 2010 (UTC)