esquilax posted:

If you think I missed your point then you missed mine. When confronted with the fact that the vast majority of violence is between ethnicities inside a state rather than between states, the conclusion should not be that the current lines are in the wrong spots, it should be that there are not enough lines.

Raenir Salazar posted:

How? More nations mean more votes in the General Assembly, meaning more representation. Their collective interests are already better handled by regional organizations not nation-state governance. I.E: The USSR have 3 Votes from having Belarus and Ukraine as members of the United Nations giving it 2 extra votes.

As having a more 'powerful' nation under any neorealist metric doesn't directly translate to a correlation to greater representation because the only nations whose individual votes matter is the top Five of the UNSC by virtue of their singular nation hood.

Hence the USSR only really have real politcal clout is by virtue of the Warsaw Pact/Comintern and the the Veto at the UNSC. Having *enough votes* in the General Assembly only mattered with decolonialization which shifted the Third World into the USSR's camp.

Kegluneq posted:

The Tabula Peutingeriana is a visual version of a more common Roman system of terrestrial navigation, which was to use itineraries - lists of names and their distances from specific points. Where places were in physical space/geography was of much less importance to Roman travellers than how long it would take them to get to particular locations (think of us using pre-satnav route planners, basically the same thing). Unfortunately this meant that the Romans were constrained by the need to build clear road networks wherever they went, and often had precious little knowledge of geography away from these. Julius Caesar famously had to rely on guides to get through northern Italy, his own back yard essentially.

The political significance of that approach to maps ties into Roman attitudes towards foreign lands. Rather than think in terms of areas of land as we do, the Romans focused on specific peoples, based in specific towns connected by specific roads; non-urban western/northern Europe was a total mindfuck for them, even if the prehistoric road system was more developed than is usually realised. When it came to conquests of new lands without towns, the priority was to establish these, so that they could be incorporated into the Roman political system.

Amused to Death posted:

Sometimes in war you just need to occasionally inflict a few casualties on your allies to prove a point

Bensa posted:

Content!


The Fergana Valley is a fertile valley in an arid region with multiple countries bordering it. Increased exploitation of water supplies, several enclaves shown on the map, and disputes over rights to pastureland give rise to tensions in the region.

Red_Mage posted:

Yeah. Not to deny Climate Change, but it isn't what shrank the Aral Sea. I think humanity's track record in terms of creating and draining lakes comes out pretty close to even. Not that that is necessarily good for the Earth either way.

LP97S posted:

To play devil's advocate, the Aral Sea was especially destroyed by a series of poorly built canals. It's actually a good case of poorly thought-out geo-engineering for the plan of squeezing out some money (Soviet export of cotton).

withak posted:

I think American soldiers in England during WW2 were somewhat resented too. They were paid far better than everyone around them and hadn't been living under strict rationing for five years so they seemed like filthy rich, wasteful assholes to the common english person.

GreenCard78 posted:

You mean the country that still has 10-20% of its population enslaved?

GreenCard78 posted:

You can google more if you like but that's really just the tip of the iceberg. You know there are still many places with people in bondage today, April 3 the year of our lord 2013?

Konstantin posted:

A lot of European-Americans try to make an active effort to understand and preserve their heritage. If you're British or French or whatever you probably know in a general sense where your ancestors came from, but many Americans have no idea where they came from beyond "I'm white, and all my grandparents were born here". People want to know where they came from and want to preserve that heritage, and when you are far away from where your ancestors were, you need to make an active effort to do that. A corollary issue is the fact that it's almost impossible to trace the heritage of an African-American beyond "Well, your ancestor may have been owned by John Smith, who ran a plantation in South Carolina."

KernelSlanders posted:

We have a split system. The FDA does some things in metric. Liquor is sold in metric volumes (although we of course use different metric sizes than everyone else). The UK is also on a split system. For example their speed limits are in miles per hour.

shiffty posted:

If anyone wants me to take pictures of other regions, or other parts of the books, as well as try getting better pictures, just let me know. I'd just scan them but I'm worried of doing more damage to them

Elim Garak posted:

Maybe this is unrealistic, but I hope a lot, even if they couldn't find it on a map.

XMNN posted:

Identifying anything below about Birmingham is basically beyond me, but helpfully it's largely unnecessary as it all might as well be London.

PittTheElder posted:

Yeah, I assumed that's why the Arab countries swung that way. I am surprised at the level of solidarity though; places like Egypt I would think would have been rather removed from any of the American flailing in the time since 9/11.

HookShot posted:

I can't... even...

Grand Fromage posted:

Unfortunately there are no Roman records and the Chinese records haven't been translated, and I don't read Classical Chinese, so I've never seen full texts. Summaries only.

KernelSlanders posted:

the vast majority of human genetic diversity exists within Africa

Squalid posted:

It doesn't seem right because it depicts what people say about themselves rather than how people actually act, which you might think it portrays if you didn't think very hard.

Personally I want to know how "race" translates in different languages, it being a western concept that probably gets equated with various local ideas that only approximate its western definition. Like I assume indians hates living next to other races so much because race is translated into caste, or maybe caste/religion/language? Whatever it is I doubt their prejudice is about skin color.

Badger of Basra posted:

Why do the lights down the center line up in a grid pattern? It doesn't seem to happen further west or in more populated areas, so I'm not really sure what's going on.

AlexG posted:

PittTheElder posted:

drat, really? I kinda want that now.

Squalid posted:

Why, is there something wrong with those identities? Also African-Americans all over the country self identified as negro or colored prior to the adoption as black/African-American beginning in the 1960s, including many civil rights leaders, the terms were not restricted to the south.

Squalid posted:

What is derogatory about those terms? They're a bit old-fashioned yeah, but they were never slurs. Do you think the NAACP should change its name?

QVC Drinking Game posted:

Unless I missed the memo those terms aren't inherently derogatory like n----r is, they're just dated. Yes, it would probably be uncool if you went around talking about "those drat Negroes" but given that the terms still exist in the names of old institutions -- the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the United Negro College Fund -- and no one's raring to change those, it's pretty clear that they're not derogatory in and of themselves.

AndreTheGiantBoned posted:

I think that you're referring to my post. This is a very interesting thread and I don't want to derail it with bigotry or racism. Is a new thread about this subject worth it?

A Buttery Pastry posted:

See, that would be an ethnic controversy. The racial controversy is about Upper Egypt being inhabited by Nubians, who are dark skinned, and Lower Egypt being inhabited by lighter skinned people, and the question of where the source of the Ancient Egyptian civilization is. At least that's my understanding. I get why African-Americans would want the source to be black African though, given the prevailing narrative of black Africa just being a bunch of savages in loincloths until Europeans showed up in the 19th century, but it only really become a big deal within the context of a society that makes such a big deal about skin color.

made of bees posted:

Also, Ancient Egypt existed for about 3000 years and was invaded by foreign nations multiple times, so the question of what ethnicity they were is complicated because they probably weren't one thing throughout their existence. There was at least one Nubian dynasty, who I don't think anyone would argue weren't black, and for the last few centuries of its existence, starting with Alexander the Great, the pharaohs were Macedonian.

Lawman 0 posted:

So I wanted to get some sorta feel for what the practical level of multilingualism is in Europe.

the jizz taxi posted:

For example, I've known several British people who smugly said that there's no need for them to learn any other language because many people speak theirs, and then proceeded to make fun of foreign accents.