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Rime posted:Things have been getting pretty bad worldwide for about 17 years. Some would say that it really started as far back as the 1980's, and has only gained speed since then. I initially started this post with a huge bullet list of everything that's gone wrong in the past 40 years, and especially the past ten, lost it in a browser crash and goddamn it's just too much Your title mimmics "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" and if you want to know how Western Civilization will play out you need to look into the history of the Roman Empire. Right now we're experiencing what the Romans experienced 400-500 years before the sacking of Rome by the Vandals. It's actually quite stunning how much Roman politics and economics directly parallels what we're seeing today. -> concentration of wealth in few individuals who do not suffer negative consequences for bad economic decisions --> In Rome, this was the concentration of land holding in a few individuals and the enrichment of the 1% today. --> Wealthy Romans didn't care that grain harvests were falling, because they still ate well. Today, we have the divergence of Wall St. and Main St economies. -> preference of the capital class to use non-citizen labour for production -->Slaves were preferred as labour in Rome, today we use robots and overseas labour. -> the necessary expansion of the welfare state -->Bread and Circuses was an economic solution to the economic problem of unemployment. Today we have many welfare programs and GMI experiments. ->The unwillingness of the elite to directly defend the empire. --> Romans ended up paying mercenaries (like the Vandals) to defend the borders (guess how well that turned out). Today we have Trump et al telling NATO allies they have to increase defence spending to defend American hegemony (guess how well this will turn out).
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Aug 13, 2017 16:19
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to type again. 
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WampaLord posted:Oh, yea, it owns being poor. I'm just loving living it up on my many welfare programs and GMI experiments! What the gently caress is context? Welfare is an economic solution to an economic problem, just like Bread and Circuses was. Roman citizens were unemployable because slaves were available and didn't have those pesky rights that Roman citizens had. Hungry people with nothing to do tend to riot, so the Romans came up with a solution. Today we have the same situation where an increasing amount of our unemployment rate is attributable to automation and low wage labor overseas. Welfare is the solution to this problem, and with the problem only growing, GMI is now being experimented with. I don't know how the gently caress you got that I was somehow attacking welfare. You could have provided examples of what you meant from American history, and elaborated on your other points instead of just saying "you're wrong", but you didn't.
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Aug 13, 2017 18:34
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