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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30112 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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It was not uncommon for swords to be banned in urban areas or when walking around in public. Sometimes broader attempts were made: the Qin dynasty (ever the innovator in methods of social control) mass confiscated weapons more generally and only allowed agents of the state to own arms. That was comparatively rare, even in China: if you have hordes of barbarians always testing the reach and authority of your state, you need peasants to be able to defend themselves.

on the grounds that new technologies, by lowing skill floors, allow ordinary people to break unwritten [rules]

I’m not seeing any suggestion that those bans arose from technological instability. Link?

Arguably the Japanese policy mentioned in @Ioper’s link, where relics and art pieces are allowed, but mall ninja shit is banned…except that comes at it from the complete other direction. We disarmed Japan at gunpoint, and they kept to it after we left, but added an exception for cool artifacts.

technological instability

Driving down the cost of something that used to be expensive to near-zero is itself a destabilizing force- you make iron working cheap, you make swords cheap, and the distribution of swords is the definition of "balance of power". It's why the usual suspects are also terrified of 3D printers (because you could create scary guns with them) and drones (see Ukraine), though they seem to be more distracted by the fact that blasphemous imagery is now cheap as free at the moment.

Which doesn't appear to have happened with swords.

The timing is all off. Western Europe didn't have the state capacity to ban La Tene weapons, and I haven't seen evidence they tried. Qin China may have done so, but they existed right as iron supplanted bronze; hardly a too-cheap-to-meter situation. Then the Japanese sword hunts are centuries after their metallurgy developed.

Those are all bad examples for someone trying to argue that elites are Luddites.

Arms control is quite common and not inherently or even generally a response to new technology.

"Sword hunts" was a fairly common occurrence in Japan as well.

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