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I've heard at least one story of one of these guys basically responding with "Oh god please don't do that to me".
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Jan 23, 2016 20:52
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Macrinus is a different example. He was the Prefect of the Praetorian Guard (commander of the imperial bodyguard and chief administrator) to Emperor Antoninus "Caracalla". As the story goes, one day a soothsayer made a prophecy that Macrinus would become Emperor. This was the worst possible news, because Caracalla was a murderous lunatic who had killed thousands for much, much less. Macrinus quickly murdered and usurped Caracalla. BravestOfTheLamps has a new favorite as of 01:26 on Jan 24, 2016 |
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Jan 23, 2016 21:08
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I too am curious as to why or in what way Jared Diamond is an rear end in a top hat.
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Jan 24, 2016 01:01
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bean_shadow posted:I too am curious as to why or in what way Jared Diamond is an rear end in a top hat. A lot of the stuff in his books is just not true. In its attempt to be a not racist explanation of history it's still pretty racist.
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Jan 24, 2016 01:02
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bean_shadow posted:I too am curious as to why or in what way Jared Diamond is an rear end in a top hat. I'm curious too. My favorite part of guns germs and steel was the animal and plant domestication stuff and that all seemed to be factually sound, at least
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Jan 24, 2016 01:06
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i haven't read any of Diamond's books, but from an overview he seems pretty into a kind of anthropcentric universe, except it's western europeans. we "won" because the world was basically encouraging it by its geography and so on. it could in theory be true, but tbh it seems a bit cheap and kindof absolves us of all colonial wrongdoings. absolution stories are always popular...
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Jan 24, 2016 01:19
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In fairness, about 90% of the Americas' population dying wasn't a deliberate action by the westerners. It's just that what they did to everybody else in every other instance was also horrifying. For that sort of discussion I'm a much bigger fan of 1491 and its implications though.
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Jan 24, 2016 01:26
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It's rarely deliberate. I think I read that during the Indian Wars, they put a bounty on killing buffalo, just to gently caress with the native americans. Somehow they didn't manage to kill all buffalo, which is kinda weird, but good. But anyway, usually extinctions aren't premeditated. They just happen. As someone else said a couple pages ago, they aren't trying to shoot the last one, they just want that one.
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Jan 24, 2016 01:51
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Snapchat A Titty posted:It's rarely deliberate. I think I read that during the Indian Wars, they put a bounty on killing buffalo, just to gently caress with the native americans. Somehow they didn't manage to kill all buffalo, which is kinda weird, but good. One of the major issues with extinction right now is poaching and trophy hunting. There are more people that want to hang a lion head on their wall than there are lions in existence. It reminds me of an old quote I like; "no drop of rain believes itself responsible for the flood."
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Jan 24, 2016 10:43
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bean_shadow posted:I too am curious as to why or in what way Jared Diamond is an rear end in a top hat. He's not. And he's also not a racist and he doesn't absolve Western countries from the things they have done, some goons just don't like him because he's popular. Everything he wrote isn't true, but Guns, Germs and Steel isn't some modern day Mein Kampf.
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Jan 24, 2016 11:09
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Snapchat A Titty posted:i haven't read any of Diamond's books, but from an overview he seems pretty into a kind of anthropcentric universe, except it's western europeans. we "won" because the world was basically encouraging it by its geography and so on. it could in theory be true, but tbh it seems a bit cheap and kindof absolves us of all colonial wrongdoings. absolution stories are always popular... He talks a lot about why this mindset is dangerous and wrong in Guns Germs and Steel, but I can see how the overview would suggest that.
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Jan 24, 2016 11:12
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Yeah its been like a decade since I read it but I remember a big part of it being that Europe got a pretty massive stroke of luck in terms of resources and domesticated animals/plants that allowed them to eventually become colonizers on a wide scale. I don't remember there being anything that sounded apologetic towards them or their actions. He contrasts it with other societies doing similar things on smaller scales because uh, yeah, all of humanity has been warlike and tribal.
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Jan 24, 2016 11:34
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I read the book recently and it begins with a long screed against racism and how even scientific attempts to justify racism are not only inappropriate but factually wrong. I have no idea how anyone could think he was a racist 
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Jan 24, 2016 22:19
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I could imagine some people might see that as a long-form "I'm not racist, but..."
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Jan 24, 2016 23:40
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I thought the entire point of the book was that the idea that Europeans dominated the world because they were somehow smarter or in any way superior was pure bullshit and it was basically pure luck beyond anyone's control.
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Jan 25, 2016 00:06
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Even there it didn't seem like it was a given that (for instance) England would have somehow risen up to become the great conqueror of the waves, and indeed the Spanish probably have a greater claim for raw world impact. It's a bit of a just-so story, of course.
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Jan 25, 2016 02:07
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In Guns, Germs & Steel, I stopped reading at the chapter on Chinese civilization, because agricultural determinism had run its course when China was still very much ascendant. He seemed to just be looking at topographical maps of China and talking out his rear end at that point. Still, he makes as good of an explanation as any about why Australian Aborigines didn't colonize Europe and Asia. I've since seems some criticisms that his data is wrong on the rate of corn cultivation's spread in the Americas, which is pretty crucial to his idea of Eurasia's East-West expanse making it superior for agricultural diversity. Compare his Figure 10.2 with this map of corn/potato expansion in America. http://www.archaeologysouthwest.org/pdf/arch-sw-v23-no1.pdf Phyzzle has a new favorite as of 03:41 on Jan 25, 2016 |
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Jan 25, 2016 03:12
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If I had to personally refine Diamond's own point in GGS it's that isolation is the civilization killer. The diffusion of new ideas, technologies, crops, domesticated animals, etc is what ultimately keeps groups of humans roughly on par with each other - independent discovery of any of those things is a much, much slower process which may not even be possible for a group whose local geography/biodiversity actually prohibits any sort of local development. Plants and animals that actually tolerate domestication are exceedingly rare, rare enough that you're totally reliant on chance blessing your local fauna with something you can work with rather than having the raw ingenuity to domesticate. Eurasia, as a distinct geographic entity with a unique biodiversity, possessed a number of advantages that allowed an easy transmission of all those things and, in general, peoples from Eurasia have been ahead of people from other continents for reasons unrelated to the genetic differences between ethnicities. These eurasian advantages, historically, never spread outward due to barriers that essentially isolated the other populations. The ultimate killer re: isolation, however, is that civilizations that achieve high population densities with a close relationship with domesticated animals tend to develop horrible contagions. Consider recent fears over Swine and Bird Flu. A new pathogen derived from an existing pathogen that attacks animal populations that, through mutation, can now attack humans is likely to be a total unknown to our immune system, making us very susceptible to illness and even death. AIDs, for example, is a recently derived pathogen that initially just targeted chimps. The conquest of the New World was achieved mainly through depopulation of the local peoples who were exposed to new pathogens the Europeans inadvertently carried with them, first unintentionally then intentionally. The local populations, thanks to isolation, had no chance develop any sort of resistance. I've read that that 90-95% of New World fell to disease. To give more weight to those abstract numbers imagine that you're on the other side and that the enemy can eliminate 95% of your army and support population just by arriving. You have next to no chance full stop. Diamond notes that equatorial areas with terrific tropical diseases have generally been resistant to colonization for similar reasons despite the technological superiority of any potential colonizers - the local peoples can tolerate tropical pathogens that easily kill Europeans leading to poor opportunities for conquest and subsequently limited, if any, colonization. IMHO the same general principle applies to the internal issue of Europe and Asia within Eurasia, a topic Diamond awkwardly struggles with, but that's amateur speculation on my part and not a historical fun fact.
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Jan 25, 2016 04:36
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Diamond lets his theories get way, way, way ahead of his data, and has a bad habit of switching scales of analysis when it's inconvenient for his ideas. His whole east-west axis theory relies on treating Eurasia as a singular entity, and arguing that Eurasian people dominated Africans, Americans, and Australiasians. Except, Eurasians didn't do anything. Europeans did. Nothing in his goony theory-crafting would preclude Khazaks from being the imperial peoples of the world, or Vietnamese, and nothing in his theory explains why Europeans in fact were. As was mentioned earlier in the thread, his whole thing about the Rapa Nui in Collapse was predicated on a history of Easter Island that wasn't even true, and his story was designed to support a pre-fab ecological morality tale. Basically his books are like laser-focused to stroke the egos of people who want to sound smart but don't want to deal with actual science. They are like the least rigorous things in the world. It's bad pop science masquerading as academic theory.
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Jan 25, 2016 07:36
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I don't see how it makes him an rear end in a top hat to base his theories on data, and then yelling at him when after he wrote said theories the data was found to be false. That just sounds like science to me. I found his books accessible and informative. Even if they extrapolate a bit it's a far better introduction and explanation of things vs "because these people were better".
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Jan 25, 2016 07:41
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Kenning posted:Diamond lets his theories get way, way, way ahead of his data, and has a bad habit of switching scales of analysis when it's inconvenient for his ideas. His whole east-west axis theory relies on treating Eurasia as a singular entity, and arguing that Eurasian people dominated Africans, Americans, and Australiasians. Except, Eurasians didn't do anything. Europeans did. Nothing in his goony theory-crafting would preclude Khazaks from being the imperial peoples of the world, or Vietnamese, and nothing in his theory explains why Europeans in fact were. As was mentioned earlier in the thread, his whole thing about the Rapa Nui in Collapse was predicated on a history of Easter Island that wasn't even true, and his story was designed to support a pre-fab ecological morality tale. Now I imagine there was plenty of complex poo poo in the Americas and Africa which was just not as well documented.
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Jan 25, 2016 07:45
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Kenning posted:Diamond lets his theories get way, way, way ahead of his data, and has a bad habit of switching scales of analysis when it's inconvenient for his ideas. His whole east-west axis theory relies on treating Eurasia as a singular entity, and arguing that Eurasian people dominated Africans, Americans, and Australiasians. Except, Eurasians didn't do anything. Europeans did. It's appropriate in this case to consider Eurasia as a single entity since its societies, however distinct, enjoyed a degree of cultural diffusion and mutual exchange unlike any links between Europe and the Americas/Asia and the Americas prior to the 15th century. Enormous trade networks allowed Asian commodities to enter European markets regardless of the distances required and things like the silk road were historically very important to the involved states/peoples. Ultimately that main point of GGS was to explain why it was going to be somebody from Eurasia, not Australia, that would become the colonizers. He extrapolates way too hard and theorizes way too widely to explain the Europe vs Asia split within Eurasian but I can appreciate why he did so. The intent was to describe the immense importance of local factors/diffusion and their affects on the grand course of civilizations over genetic/ideological explanation for the same. The Asia/Europe split would be the last bastion of someone clinging to genetic explanations. Definitely got a little pop-sciencey there though. E: For people who haven't read the book, Diamond loosely supposed that Asia was too centralized so that idiotic, idiosyncratic decisions made by a single hereditary ruler could stall the development of a whole peoples if those decisions were bad enough. Europe was centralized enough to be highly organized, but still sufficiently divided that it was both insulated from the bad decisions of a single ruler and that its various conflicts bred innovation. This was probably the section of his book that was criticized most (no real data here, just anecdotes), aside from the largely deterministic tone of the text and the older scientific data that has since become outdated. hard counter has a new favorite as of 08:50 on Jan 25, 2016 |
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Jan 25, 2016 08:09
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Snapchat A Titty posted:It's rarely deliberate. I think I read that during the Indian Wars, they put a bounty on killing buffalo, just to gently caress with the native americans. Somehow they didn't manage to kill all buffalo, which is kinda weird, but good. Well, even if the goal was not to drive them extinct, it's a horrible loving crime 
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Jan 25, 2016 08:24
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 There is a time capsule from 1878 beneath Cleopatra's needle in London. It contains copies of Bradshaw's railway guide, Whittaker's Almanac and 12 photographs of the most beautiful women in Britain. The obelisk is a genuine ancient artifact from Cairo, and was already over 1000 years old when Cleopatra was alive.
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Jan 25, 2016 09:51
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hard counter posted:The ultimate killer re: isolation, however, is that civilizations that achieve high population densities with a close relationship with domesticated animals tend to develop horrible contagions. Consider recent fears over Swine and Bird Flu. A new pathogen derived from an existing pathogen that attacks animal populations that, through mutation, can now attack humans is likely to be a total unknown to our immune system, making us very susceptible to illness and even death. AIDs, for example, is a recently derived pathogen that initially just targeted chimps. The conquest of the New World was achieved mainly through depopulation of the local peoples who were exposed to new pathogens the Europeans inadvertently carried with them, first unintentionally then intentionally. The local populations, thanks to isolation, had no chance develop any sort of resistance. I've read that that 90-95% of New World fell to disease. To give more weight to those abstract numbers imagine that you're on the other side and that the enemy can eliminate 95% of your army and support population just by arriving. You have next to no chance full stop. Diamond notes that equatorial areas with terrific tropical diseases have generally been resistant to colonization for similar reasons despite the technological superiority of any potential colonizers - the local peoples can tolerate tropical pathogens that easily kill Europeans leading to poor opportunities for conquest and subsequently limited, if any, colonization. While European diseases didn't help there were actually awful plagues that were wiping out the American indigenous people before Europeans got there. When the Vikings showed up the place was way more densely populated. In fact after Columbus rolled up the Europeans started believing the Americas were a promised land deliberately set up by God to give to them because of how welcoming the land was. They kept finding fruit trees neatly growing in rows, land that was perfect for farming, and so forth. It was almost as if there had been a civilization there before them that set things up for human civilization! Only there was apparently a set of catastrophic diseases that just flat out devastated a lot of areas so badly what Europeans were dealing with was practically a Mad Max scenario. These were the few survivors of a collapse just trying to scrape by, which is part of why they seemed primitive. Trade, travel, and complex social structures had been thoroughly destroyed by population decline. There aren't records of it partly because it apparently happened terrifyingly quickly. The theory is that millions upon millions died off before Columbus rolled up. It was easy to smash their faces in because they were scrabbling just to survive and rebuild their civilization. Generally speaking Europeans encountered American civilizations in states of massive problems and serious declines. Then the Europeans showed up and made matters worse. There are theories that the population decline in the Americas actually led to the Little Ice Age; the forests began to recover, the land became more wild, and it bound up a rather significant amount of carbon.
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Jan 25, 2016 11:10
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Generally speaking Europeans encountered American civilizations in states of massive problems and serious declines. To get back on topic, a historical fun fact. In 1810, Sweden was having some trouble with succession after deposing one king, another dying, and the third being senile and childless. Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, former marshal of France, was offered a chance at the crown by Swedish baron Karl Otto Mörner (who technically did not have the authority to make that offer). The baron was arrested for his trouble, but the Swedish Diet came around to the idea in the following weeks and made the offer official. Napoleon, who regarded the whole situation as absurd, chose not to get involved. Bernadotte accepted the offer. He arrived in Sweden later that year and became Charles XIV John of Sweden, a pretty decent end point after starting his career as a private in the French army. Three years later, Sweden joined the Sixth Coalition and Bernadotte got back at Napoleon, who he had always regarded as a bit of an rear end in a top hat.
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Jan 25, 2016 12:43
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xthetenth posted:I've heard at least one story of one of these guys basically responding with "Oh god please don't do that to me". Yeah, that'd be poor Gordian I, Emperor number 2 in the Year of the Six Emperors. (Not to be confused with the earlier Year of the Four Emperors or the Year of the Five Emperors.) Gordian was an elderly senator who'd made it to the top of his career and become governor of the province of Africa (modern Tunisia and Libya.) Unfortunately, he didn't exactly get that quiet retirement. The emperor at the time was Maximinus Thrax, a general who'd become emperor after his soldiers murdered his predecessor. Obviously, he wasn't exactly the most popular leader, and three years into his reign, several rebellions broke out against him. The rebels in Africa named Gordian as their leader. According to Gibbon, Gordian begged the rebels to leave him alone and tried to convince them he was too old, but in the end was forced to agree. Probably he realized he was a dead man either way - Maximinus wasn't going to forget about him even if he had convinced the rebels to leave him alone. He named his son, Gordian II, as co-emperor - dude was in his late seventies and knew he wasn't going to be around much longer - and sent a message to the senate letting them know what the hell was going on. Unfortunately, his son died in battle less than a month later against Maximinus' loyalists, and poor old Gordian took his own life when he heard the news. Meanwhile, back in Rome, the senate's in a bit of a panic. They'd recognized Gordian and Gordian as Emperor and thrown their support behind the rebellion against Maximinus, and can't really gracefully back out now just because their emperors are dead. They decide the only solution is more emperors! Enter Pupienus and Balbinus, emperors 4 and 5 of the year! Now, we don't know much about either of these guys, but they were both senators on the committee that was coordinating the war against Maximinus. The senate picks them as the new emperors, and they get to work dealing with Emperor number 1, who's still marching back to Rome with an army at his back and a grudge against pretty much everyone at this point. Problem is, the people of Rome at this point are wondering "Who the hell are Pupienus and Balbinus, and why are they suddenly co-emperors? Can the senate really pick two of their own to rule?" In the end, P&B have to compromise, and name Gordian's grandson, Gordian III as yet another emperor, bringing the total to three emperors in Rome, one rival emperor, and two dead. In the end, things are resolved in a typically Roman way. Maximinus's army get sick of besieging Rome, and when supplies start to run short, kill him and his son and accept P. B. and G. as emperors. Unfortunately, in the meantime, Pupienus and Balbinus have had a falling out, become paranoid that each is trying to kill the other, leading to wacky sit-com hi-jinks as they set up camp at opposite ends of the imperial palace. Eventually the Praetorian Guard get sick of them both and have them killed, leaving the thirteen year old Gordian III as last emperor standing. Gordian III will last less than six years before dying himself in battle against the Persians, and, needless to say, none of this did anything to improve the stability of the empire. Did I mention that though this is the 'Year' of six emperors, all of this, from Gordian I's rise to power until P&B's murders, was barely four months?
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Jan 25, 2016 13:19
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Jaguars! posted:
Speaking of obelisks, the one at St. Peter's Square in the Vatican City was brought to Rome by Caligula. In fact a large piece of Vatican City used to be a huge garden created by Caligula's mother, Agrippina the Elder. He started building a race track there, later completed by Nero, the Circus of Gaius and Nero.
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Jan 25, 2016 13:45
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ToxicSlurpee posted:While European diseases didn't help there were actually awful plagues that were wiping out the American indigenous people before Europeans got there. When the Vikings showed up the place was way more densely populated. In fact after Columbus rolled up the Europeans started believing the Americas were a promised land deliberately set up by God to give to them because of how welcoming the land was. They kept finding fruit trees neatly growing in rows, land that was perfect for farming, and so forth. It was almost as if there had been a civilization there before them that set things up for human civilization! Those diseases were European diseases. A lot of Americans' first contact with anything European was catching smallpox. The Inka were in the middle of a civil war because of a power vacuum brought on by their ruler dying of smallpox, and got much more favorable a welcome because they seemed like a promising pawn. Similar things happened elsewhere, the Pilgrims came into a post-apocalyptic wasteland and were approached for help because regional rivalries meant that the people where they were had gotten nearly wiped out by smallpox but their enemies didn't seem to have had an epidemic. American societies weren't sitting there in a vacuum, they had trade links that served to spread disease as well.
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Jan 25, 2016 14:46
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Speaking of how people became emperor. Claudius, who was lovingly referred to by his mother as "a monster, a man whom Mother Nature had begun work upon but then flung aside", became emperor when Caligula was assassinated. When the praetorian guard started to kill noblemen he ran and hid behind a curtain. The praetorian named Gratus pulled the curtain away and declared him emperor on the spot. When Claudius was later poisoned by mushrooms Nero made the joke that mushrooms must be the food of the gods because Claudius ate it and became a god.
Alhazred has a new favorite as of 18:50 on Jan 25, 2016 |
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Jan 25, 2016 18:44
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A large part of the death and devastation caused by the diseases wasn't directly from people catching the disease and dying, but from the knock on effects of the initial dead, ie food shortages caused by trade disruption, raiding for supplies, etc. So when people say 90-95% of the indigenous American population died because of Smallpox and the like, it doesn't mean every single one of those people, or even a majority of them, caught the disease and died, but what they did die from was a direct consequence of many other people dying to the disease.
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Jan 25, 2016 21:52
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Speaking of smallpox murdering North American Natives, here's a Historical fun fact: Many tribes in the Northeast United States, in the Lake Champlain to Lake Michigan area, had a tradition of kidnapping the children of enemy tribes in raids, and raising them as their own. It was usally done in the event that a young family member died, either from being killed by an enemy tribesman, or via disease. For example, let's say my son died. My family would go, and in the process of raiding, drag away some child. And then I would raise that child as my own. It was part of the process of ritual combat that was common to the Northeast, and that was usually very bloodless. Anyhow, smallpox arrives after Columbus makes contact. It spreads like wildfire through the Americas. Eventually, it reaches the Northeastern US and decimates the Native population there. Villages are almost completely wiped out by smallpox. Well, the process of these mourning wars kicks in, and eventually, because of this ritual replacement, you end up with weird thing.The Oneida, one of the tribes of the Iroquois, at one point were almost 2/3rds assimilated Huron and Algonquin.
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Jan 25, 2016 22:32
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Arthur D Wolfe posted:This point really bears repeating. American colonization owes a lot to our unwashed bunch of explorers bumbling onto the coast at the exact point in time when local resistance was at an all-time low. In North America the locals were the weakened survivors of their history's version of the Black Death, and in South America the Spanish toppled the Aztecs with local assistance and then caught the Inca at the end of a civil war. Had the Europeans arrived a century earlier or later, it is anyone's guess what the world would have looked like. Bernadotte had a tattoo that said "Death to kings".
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Jan 25, 2016 22:45
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Not hypocritical as long as, at some point, he actually does die.
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Jan 25, 2016 23:46
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Angry Salami posted:The emperor at the time was Maximinus Thrax Fun fact: Thrax was supposedly 8'6" tall.
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Jan 26, 2016 03:19
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Say Nothing posted:Fun fact: Thrax was supposedly 8'6" tall. Thus the "Maximus".
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Jan 26, 2016 08:54
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Say Nothing posted:Fun fact: Thrax was supposedly 8'6" tall. His entire wikipedia page is basically an attempt at calling bullshit on the legends attributed to him, which fits well with your posts and the reaction there of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximinus_Thrax
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Jan 26, 2016 12:29
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I think that may have happened, given no-one talks about the immortal french god-king of the swedes
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Jan 26, 2016 14:08
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Say Nothing posted:Fun fact: Thrax was supposedly 8'6" tall. Maximinus Thrax is a seriously metal name.  It sounds like it should belong to a Nazgul or dragon lord or something.
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Jan 26, 2016 20:34
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Khazar-khum posted:Maximinus Thrax is a seriously metal name. Naming my daughter Maximus Ann Thrax
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