I made me a script to load country data from Wikidata. And what do I see in the output? Weird numbers linked to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. It has zero land, two citizens but 13500 order members, 80000 volunteers, 42000 employees. And it has diplomatic relations with 108 countries—which, according to analysis by experts in whatever field this is, exhibit the signs that the order is indeed a de-facto recognized sovereign entity even though this recognition is not so firm as that of a full-blown state.
BTW, if we consider just the members and volunteers, the order would rank twelfth least-populous country, between Andorra and Antigua-and-Barbuda. And its population would be almost 1/5th that of the current population of Malta.
However, if the territory dispute breaks out, Hanwha may have to fight it out with Hyundai's tanks and artillery. Notably, the same Hyundai's division also produces most of South Korea's train cars and locomotives.
This was a fun read. That old-timey secret orders of knights actually still exist is awesome. I'd totally want to be in such a secret cabal, except for the whole believing in religion aspect...
A lot of secular-minded people stay in religious organizations and communities for the perks. That said, I don't think groups like the Knights of Malta are recruiting.
Some would argue that it doesn't "still exist" but was disbanded with Napoleon's takeover of Malta in 1798 and that the "Sovereign Military Order of Malta" of 1947 was nothing but the result of some creative bookkeeping (with strong political backing)..
Its just that they are not secret. Never were. Like the freemasons - 100% in the open, but people go wild in conspiracy just because these guys' clubs keep up some funny rituals and have over time accumulated significant wealth.
I never realized there is so much interesting history behind the "Knights Hospitaller" which is kinda funny considering I've donated to a German branch of them in the past [0].
You are mixing up Johanniter-Unfallhilfe and Johanniterorden. The Catholic counterpart to the Unfallhilfe is the Malteser-Hilfsdienst, founded in 1953. The St John's branch of the Order was established 1538.
> Although the original vocabulary of the language was Siculo-Arabic, it has incorporated a large number of borrowings from Romance sources of influence (Sicilian, Italian, and French), and more recently Germanic ones (from English).[45]
> The historical source of modern Maltese vocabulary is 52% Italian/Sicilian, 32% Siculo-Arabic, and 6% English, with some of the remainder being French.[10][46] Today, most function words are Semitic. In this way, it is similar to English, which is a Germanic language that had large influence from Norman French. As a result of this, Romance language-speakers may easily be able to comprehend conceptual ideas expressed in Maltese, such as "Ġeografikament, l-Ewropa hi parti tas-superkontinent ta' l-Ewrasja" (Geographically, Europe is part of the Supercontinent of Eurasia), while not understanding a single word of a functional sentence such as "Ir-raġel qiegħed fid-dar" (The man is in the house), which would be easily understood by any Arabic speaker.
According to [1] first, you must become a member by invitation, and you need "undoubted Catholic morality and practice" and to show "merit over the years with regard to the Order of Malta, its institutions and its humanitarian works"
They only issue passports to people in charge of specific projects. Of about 13k members there are about 500 passports, almost entirely held by their diplomats or their governance members.
Also, they’re still an order of catholic knights :)
There is so much more the KoM than meets the eye. For example, the relatively recent hubub between them and the papacy. The fact that so many heads of CIA and other countries intel agencies are KoM. That you don't have to be Catholic to join. The old connections to the templars and to masonry. It's permanent observer status at the UN. The connections of Elizabeth II to it (she was queen of Malta until 74)... the list goes on and on.
Because, as others have said, you go where the people are, otherwise you're just howling into the void, and what's the point of doing it? If I only wrote on Medium, or for niche magazines, or newspapers, then there's a whole lot of people who would never discover interesting stuff.
So I do both, depending on when the mood takes me, or if the subject can work in a Twitter format (not everything can) or needs the full longform treatment. If it's the latter, then I stick it up on Medium.
There is so much visual garbage on Twitter, please add links to a normal text if possible. Twitter is borderline unreadable and god forbid accidentally clicking anywhere on the page - everything just instantly closes and you get thrown somewhere randomly. Truly horrible UX/UI.
I do this mostly for fun. So tbh the alternative here was "not tell people something interesting at all" rather than "write a longform piece about the Hospitallers".
I DO have plans for the latter. Eventually. But it requires lots of research and time, and I don't have a lot of either to spare these days.
That's something I would suggest that is always worth remembering, I would gently suggest. Writing isn't a free action. It takes time and mental energy/effort. I'd love it if we lived in a world where people would magically give me money to do that, just as I suspect artists and musicians would say the same, but that doesn't happen unfortunately!
I didn't propose to you doing anything for free or additionally inconvenience yourself. But in case if you don't have any preference for media type and if you already have a text you want to publish for free/ads, then it would be nice to duplicate it to other more sane platform, whatever - medium, lj (dreamwidth) or anything else. It was just a suggestion. And if, hypothetically, the only concern is that normal text need more time to be prepared - you can just dump all these tweets as is as a single post and it will still be more readable than in Twitter.
There is a certain immediacy and satisfaction to having bite-sized segments of your work praised and re-posted that not even Medium can fulfill.
That, and atrophied attention spans can only handle bite-sized readings at a time. If this thread was in blog form it would get a fraction of the viewership.
Gah, it was too wordy for Twitter, I scrolled to the end and back up to see that "They got an air force to circumvent Italy's limit of planes set after Italy lost WW2, but the allies/US had to circumvent because of the cold war".
That's 1 tweet. I fucking hate Twitter longforms, because my eyes have to keep hunting for the next part of the content...
If `a certain immediacy and satisfaction` is an incentive so important to dictate the medium, then the content is pedestrian, lacking substance and posted just for personal gain.
This looks nice, but when you're combining a bunch of tweets it just helps you notice how choppy and disjointed the writing is— it still feels like a bunch of tweets stuck together.
So this is clickbait 2.0? Basically instead of incentivizing someone to click on a link to learn more, just shit out the 'more' in mediocre form right in your face.
It's the same reason that people write slide decks instead of documents. Because it works.
Small chunks of information that piece together into a larger whole along a narrative timeline is the go-to document method of pretty much all of tech.
Slides work when there's like 20 of them which highlight important information. Not 200 slides each with a paragraph of text that sometimes connects with the previous statement and sometimes not.
The latter makes more sense as an blog post or article.
It’s not a new trend at all, and it fills me with impotent nerdrage. Because sure, why wouldn’t you write a blog post in a form that encourages people to respond to individual paragraphs out of context? Makes total sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_Ma...
BTW, if we consider just the members and volunteers, the order would rank twelfth least-populous country, between Andorra and Antigua-and-Barbuda. And its population would be almost 1/5th that of the current population of Malta.
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