The Air Force of the Knights Hospitaller

https://twitter.com/garius/status/1151832864494903296

by apsec112 • 7 years ago

212 58 7 years ago

twitter.com

iandanforth• 7 years ago

This is fantastic. What do I have to do to get a Knights Hospitaller passport?

mxuribe• 7 years ago

I though the same thing! ...Until I noticed this: https://www.orderofmalta.int/in-the-news/order-malta-worlds-...

...So, I'm guessing whatever the requirements, they might be a little tight. ;-)

michaelt• 7 years ago

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"

[1] https://www.orderofmalta.int/sovereign-order-of-malta/faq/

arkades• 7 years ago

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 :)

decebalus14• 7 years ago

What's up with this new trend of writing long-ish form crap on Twitter?

bcraven• 7 years ago

Because there is a big audience there to read it.

Fortunately this website exists: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1151832864494903296.html

decebalus14• 7 years ago

Fortunately there is also the hyperlink. One can use Twitter to post said hyperlink to an article written on a webpage.

Rebelgecko• 7 years ago

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.

nmeofthestate• 7 years ago

Twitter is where the adoring audience lives

mothsonasloth2• 7 years ago

Hear hear, this is an inefficient medium of information sharing. Its only purpose is for karma farming.

wrs• 7 years ago

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.

m3chars• 7 years ago

I think you mistyped, it's "idempotent nerdrage" otherwise it's not nerd enough

Marsymars• 7 years ago

Yeah, I really don't get it. Scrolling with keyboard doesn't even work for me on the Twitter website.

kick• 7 years ago

You use Vi keybindings for it.

Apocryphon• 7 years ago

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.

netsharc• 7 years ago

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...

decebalus14• 7 years ago

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.

garius2• 7 years ago

Twitter thread author here!

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.

Horses for courses and all that.

Yizahi3• 7 years ago

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.

subpixel2• 7 years ago

Why not just tweet a link to a blog post?

walterbell• 7 years ago

Sentence-level data analytics?

samatman• 7 years ago

It's called a Tweetstorm, and @pmarca is generally held to have innovated the medium.

He hasn't posted on Twitter for some years now, so it's a stretch to call the format new...

1MoreThing• 7 years ago

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.

dmix• 7 years ago

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.

mothsonasloth2• 7 years ago

Here is a wiki link - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_Ma...

freeflight• 7 years ago

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].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johanniter-Unfall-Hilfe

Tomte• 7 years ago

The Johanniter are not really a branch, they are a protestant offshoot. Also, they are really young, founded in 1952.

There is also the Malteser in Germany, and that's the real branch.

HarryHirsch• 7 years ago

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.

quickthrower2• 7 years ago

I’m adding them to my country select option list. Ill assume Malta time zone.

aasasd5• 7 years ago

Import your country list from Wikidata, and you'll get the Sovereign Military Order of Malta with all the rest.

emmelaich• 7 years ago

Folks might be interested in a previous HN article

"The Last True Knight of Malta" from the BBC

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18568638

mrandish• 7 years ago

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...

Hoasi• 7 years ago

except for the whole believing in religion aspect...

I suspect this is not mandatory as long as the protocol is respected.

subpixel2• 7 years ago

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.

aasasd5• 7 years ago

Not much of a secret, considering diplomatic relations with 108 countries; 80000 volunteers, 42000 employees, and 13500 order members proper.

jascii• 7 years ago

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)..

pergadad• 7 years ago

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.

Yizahi3• 7 years ago

Malta history is very entertaining. Much more than its almost nonexistent beaches :) . I was astonished when I discovered that they defended the island for several months with basically 3 biplanes. And whole siege is insane (same as Ottoman and French previously). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Malta_(World_War_II) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloster_Gladiator#Malta

msla• 7 years ago

The Maltese language is interesting: It's fundamentally a variety of Arabic with a lot of Romance language influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_language

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.

Cyph0n• 7 years ago

I also heard that modern Maltese is closest to Tunisian Arabic, which is interesting to a Tunisian like myself.

aasasd5• 7 years ago

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.

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.

idoh• 7 years ago

The citizens thing is really weird. On investigation, the cap is three max, so one slot remains.

jessaustin• 7 years ago

They don't like to max this out; in that case they'd have to set up a three-way duel to the death whenever a higher-status person wanted to join.

aasasd5• 7 years ago

So yeah, if you ever contemplate the future Sovereign Chaebol of Samsung, I guess right here is the closest current political precedent.

walrus012• 7 years ago

Well, Samsung is already a defence contractor, they make autonomous sentry guns for the DMZ

afterburner• 7 years ago

"After the Napoleonic wars no one really wanted to bring up the whole Malta thing with the British (the Putin's Russia of the era)"

lol what? Britain was the USA of its time, not Putin. As in, global dominant superpower.

jabv• 7 years ago

My friend's dad is a Knight of Malta. I think he helps to build hospitals and assists with pilgrimages to Lourdes.

There is some recent controversy surrounding Malta in the Catholic world. To dive into that rabbit hole: https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2017/01/a-note-on-sovereig...

arminiusreturns• 7 years ago

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.

The Air Force of the Knights Hospitaller

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