hydroacetylene
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User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
49m ago
Bit of a nitpick but the composition of town militias was mostly not merchants- it tended to be heavy on skilled tradesmen producing the things merchants traded and on medium sized farmers, not so much on merchants themselves, and use the urban poor as grunts in bulk(rowers weren't mostly galley slaves; they tended to be random poor people offered above average wages).
hydroacetylene
55m ago
What does decadence mean? I mean that unironically; nobody in this thread bothers to define it.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
who were the last warriors not to get their arses kicked by soldiers?
Probably the Mapudungu, who maintained independence from modernizing Latin American states on the pampas slightly longer than the Sioux or Commanche did vs the USA.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Europe had such an advantage because of its technological worldview stemming from the influence of Western Christianity. There's a historical pattern where technology gets invented in China or the middle east or somewhere, gets used marginally, and then is brought back to Europe by Italian traders, where the guildsmen perfect it and Europeans adopt it en masse. Your link talks about firearms, and fair, they're an immediately militarily relevant example. But it also applies to the printing press(literally perfected mostly due to the Roman Catholic Church's habit of buying every copy of relevant books they could get their hands on leading to a supply crunch- the printing press only makes sense as a technology when large clients are placing bulk orders), spinning wheels, and clocks. Spinning wheels in particular is worth paying attention to because it was work done by low-status women who weren't willing to do sex work, the cheapest labour in any society that has ever existed, including ours. Europeans just really liked new technology and mechanization.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Brett Devereaux, as usual, is correct but simply doesn't address the claims of his opponents, and claims that his- entirely correct but also entirely separate- argument leaves them vanquished.
Rome fell due to the crisis of the third century, high-GDP states beat weaker ones 90+% of the time, and Sparta really was stupid evil. However, the crisis of the third century was not due to the collapse of democracy(which after all, took place three centuries before). 'Decadence' resulting in instability in the Roman army that leads to the crisis of the third century, and as a contributing factor to the Roman fiscal woes which made it so difficult to recover from, is entirely compatible with his argument.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
That doesn’t sound like sex. Thats sounds like a teenaged girl gushing about living someplace where she’s taken care of without being told what to do.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
The last civil war was fought on a north south axis(across mostly flat), with a single imperial core(NYC running into the Great Lakes region and lower New England). The planter class was defeated due to overwhelming material and manpower superiority on the part of the northern elite; although the planter class was politically influential and individually wealthy, it didn’t hold a candle to the northeast and Great Lakes.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
The most likely end of a new American civil war is balkanization, not reconstitution. US terrain and human geography pushes towards this strongly(it's basically impossible to conquer a peer opponent over the rockies, the US defeated some primitives and religious fanatics with substantial local assistance after the territory was ceded to them by treaty ending a war fought mostly in a different theater). We have multiple imperial cores and a serious war is going to wind up with them not wanting to share power.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Germany performed respectably during the war and lost because it was facing multiple peer adversaries simultaneously+the British naval blockade.
There are also multiple contemporary examples; aside from Singapore there's Liechtenstein(the only country in the world to vote to go back to an absolute monarchy, outcomes very similar to neighboring Switzerland), the gulf monarchies(and if you insist on saying resource wealth is cheating, I will point out that the UAE does not make most of its money from oil), and partially Andorra(which is technically a Catholic theocracy, although in practice that mostly comes into play in setting its abortion policy). Monarchies generally are places to live that are pretty average for their neighborhood; life in Morocco is a lot like life in Algeria. They hate each other, but that's also pretty normal for the neighborhood. In the recent past there were a number of other examples, most notably South Korea.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
The south was poor into the late twentieth century. Not subsistence farming poor, that was over by the seventies, but still poor.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Oman are also very nice places for citizens to live, by global standards, Nevermind Arab or middle eastern ones.
As far as civil freedom goes, people don’t like horrendous oppression. It makes places a less nice place to live, and enlightened despots were seen as excellent rulers for it in their own day- but the history of enlightened despotism indicates that this is not an impossible concept(there’s currently four examples- the UAE, Singapore, Andorra, and Liechtenstein. To explain the paucity I would point to the tendency to democratize being very pronounced). It is also difficult to achieve a high income economy without economic freedom, which is in turn very difficult to maintain without economic freedom.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
The collapse of democratic legitimacy in the country is actually literally a both sides process and it wouldn’t be a problem in the counterfactual that it wasn’t, because it would fizzle.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
‘I voted for Trump’. If they’re liberals I have a canned rant about Biden’s ‘war on domestic terror’ being escalated against targets thé police officers in place kept warning political appointees were not white supremacists or a terror threat(and we do, in fact, have FBI memos about this).
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Abortion clinic protests were actually highly adaptive to their specific circumstances- local authorities that wanted to ban abortion but were prevented from doing so by their superiors. They reduced abortion access quite a bit without bloodshed.
Their success in blue states has been a lot more mixed, but they still kinda worked in mildly reducing abortion access instead of the counterfactual where a bunch of assassins and firebombers go to jail forever.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
The thing about Brett Devereaux is that his arguments tend to be right- but he likes to use them to say things his arguments don’t address. His fremen mirage series does a great job pointing out that GDP and population determines the outcomes of wars 90% of the time, but then he strongly implies this disproves all sorts of patriarchal theses. It doesn’t, he literally doesn’t address the topic. Etc, etc.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Singapore, Liechtenstein, and the UAE are not democracies and all outpace neighboring countries in being nice places to live. Notably they have more civil freedom than a typical dictatorship, but they’re still not democracies. Andorra is arguably a partial example as well.
And the typical monarchy is pretty average for its neighborhood; they do, however, seem to avoid the dumbest mistakes very reliably, like communism or retarded foreign policy. Notably thé monarchy/dictatorship distinction is pretty core to the definition of both; you can reject the distinction, but it does seem to predict real trends in the real world. You can find past examples of benevolent dictatorships, if you look. You have to do a similar degree of looking to find terrible monarchs.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Black ghetto thug culture is not markedly different from white southern trailer thrash culture, and the south invented segregation(literally; a ‘normal’ class first approach wouldn’t have done that, see eg Mexico, Brazil).
hydroacetylene
1d ago
He’s not really ‘woke’; he seems at most mildly liberal, strongly TDS but not progressive. I wouldn’t be shocked to find out he’d donated to pro-life groups or supported republicans downballot.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Anti-nuclear protestors in the US have been successfully dismantled by arresting them with a gentle touch and issuing press releases that make them sound like hippie lunatics.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Deveraux is basically right about the object level, but his severe case of TDS blinds him to quite a lot- notably the protestors have done quite a bit that a more competent regime could spin as they had it coming, for one. For another, a lot of what the protestors are doing is actually illegal. De-arrests, interfering in lawful police operations, resisting arrest, etc is all very illegal and these people have open-shut cases. It’s also a ‘page five story’ strategy that won’t generate immense amounts of controversy- he can issue warrants for US Marshall’s to go after these people once they’re identified. This is probably what the databases of protestor license plates and subpoenaing data from social media sites is all about.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
I mean, if the US government is cleansing red tribers in Alaska of all places, then it's not a civil war anymore- the blue have already won so convincingly that there's no real civil disturbance.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
Alexander to Actium(the Peter Green version). So far, slow going- I expected a more challenging read, but the cultural changes in Athens are a bit dull.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
It's unclear that hip-hop and the ghetto thug culture could only have come from African Americans, at the very least. Most modern day observers way overestimate the cultural differences between poor southern whites and blacks in the period; the white underclass often behaves in very similar ways to ghetto blacks and trailer trash could easily have invented(and arguably did) thug culture, we associate it with AADOS because that's more visible to us. Hip hop I'm less sure about but the rhythms that became rock n roll were not ethnic specific at the time.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
At the end of the day, the protestors win by making the government's enforcement arm look bad, which forces their political goal. This is non-violent protest theory 101. Dogs and waterhoses are good for the protestors, a bunch of them going to jail for things like 'obstructing police proceedings' is not, because nobody pays attention to that outside of the activist core.
So the USA didn't technically 'lose' Vietnam- it extracted a promise from North Vietnam not to invade the south if the US withdrew. They reneged on this promise as soon as the US troops were out of country, but South Vietnam actually won that round, so the US then didn't intervene when they tried again after South Vietnam removed its most capable general for political reasons.
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