Discussion of thr Cycle of History. (Or is America doomed to suffer under an American Ceasar?)

Bacle said:
'Guns, Germs, and Steel' shows why this is just hilariously out-of-touch with how civilizations actually develop and how environmental/geographic factors play far, far more of a role in civilizational development than any 'cycles of civilization/empire' comparisons/ideas.

The environment one lives in dictates more about morals and beliefs and success of a nation or empire than any almost anything, and the US's environmental and geographic context is much, much different than any Old World empire ever had.
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Guns, Germs, and Steel makes some pretty fundamental errors in how it perceives history. Their notion that empires always develop along lines of longitude and can't expand along latitudes is pretty obvious bunk to anyone who's noticed, say, the way Egypt happened to develop N-S along the Nile.

Civilizations develop along usable waterways, not following lines of longitude. Trade via water is around 5-20 times cheaper than trade by land so having a river basin to work with greatly increases surpluses and allows for development. Egypt developed vertically because of the Nile, the US developed horizontally because of the Mississippi Basin. Mexico and Africa have trouble developing period because both areas have precious little in the way of usable waterways.The areas in Africa that do have a halfway decent river also usually have a history of empires forming along those rivers, like the Maravi Empire forming along the Shire in the 17th century.
 
Bacle said:
We also know not to use lead as a sweetner, unlike the Romans; people forget how lead poisoning can affect the thinking and reasoning of people, and lead was everywhere in Roman society.

Shit, mass lead poisoning over generations in the leadership class explains a lot of why Rome got to the point it fell.
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2000 years from now... a post by Bacle 2.0 on the Future!Sietch:

We also know not to use plastic for storage, unlike the Americans; people forget how microplastics can affect the health and thinking of people, and plastic was everywhere in American society.

Shit, microplastic contamination over generations in the leadership class explains a lot of why America got to the point it fell.
 
Bear Ribs said:
Guns, Germs, and Steel makes some pretty fundamental errors in how it perceives history. Their notion that empires always develop along lines of longitude and can't expand along latitudes is pretty obvious bunk to anyone who's noticed, say, the way Egypt happened to develop N-S along the Nile.

Civilizations develop along usable waterways, not following lines of longitude. Trade via water is around 5-20 times cheaper than trade by land so having a river basin to work with greatly increases surpluses and allows for development. Egypt developed vertically because of the Nile, the US developed horizontally because of the Mississippi Basin. Mexico and Africa have trouble developing period because both areas have precious little in the way of usable waterways.The areas in Africa that do have a halfway decent river also usually have a history of empires forming along those rivers, like the Maravi Empire forming along the Shire in the 17th century.
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Eh, the lat/long issue is not the strongest point, though I'd point out Egypt's control south of the 1st cataract was often contested by both nomads, and Axum, which is essentially the ancestors of the Ethopians, who could have been said to have had their own empire for a while around the East African coast.

However, the environmental factors Guns, Germs, and Steel point out and correlates a lot of civilizational differences too are pretty strong.

It also shows why the US is rather unique in how we were able to develop, with much different pressures than the old world empires/nations had faced in their youth, and with tech/immunity advantage that was hard to deny compared to the 'local' nations like the Iroquois Confederation.
 
The only pattern of history is that humans are pricks and when a people view a social structure as corrupt they destroy it or hit the reset button, the form of governances which follows may vary.

Anybody claiming to be a soothsayer beyond that is a deluded grifter.
 
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Free-Stater 101 said:
The only pattern of history is that humans are pricks and when a people view a social structure as corrupt they destroy it or hit the reset button the form of governanceas follows may vary.

Anybody claiming to be a soothsayer beyond that is a deluded grifter.
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Eh, sometimes nature hits the reset button on the righteous and corrupt regimes alike, keep that in mind.


536 AD is a perfect example.





If the US falls, even as the banana republic zombie it is now, it will not be an external foe that does it, it'll be geologic or cosmological forces that do it. Yellowstone won't care what our political system is when it goes up.
 
Bacle said:
Eh, sometimes nature hits the reset button on the righteous and corrupt regimes alike, keep that in mind.


536 AD is a perfect example.





If the US falls, even as the banana republic zombie it is now, it will not be an external foe that does it, it'll be geologic or cosmological forces that do it. Yellowstone won't care what our political system is when it goes up.
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That's an outlier though that doesn't need debating. What was being discussed was less about acts of God than the alleged 'inevitably' of Caesar figures.

Needless to say both sides of this argument are wrong Ceasars only appear if people want them and when they don't they do not.

Furthermore all Caesars aren't equal nor a universaly good and in fact may be of the darkest of evil as is the case with Hitler.

In anycase I am making a new thread because this one is now hopelessly derailed.
 
Free-Stater 101 said:
That's an outlier though that doesn't need debating. What was being discussed was less about acts of God than the alleged 'inevitably' of Caesar figures.

Needless to say both sides of this argument are wrong Ceasars only appear if people want them and when they don't they do not.

Furthermore all Caesars aren't equal nor a universaly good and in fact may be of the darkest of evil as is the case with Hitler.

In anycase I am making a new thread because this one is now hopelessly derailed.
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Environmental aspects of why a Caesar may arise are something that have to be understood, if people really want to claim that historical cycles matter.

Because not just human governance or social cycles affect how civilizations rise, fall, and remake themselves.

The old civilizations had star gazers too, and often used comets as portends of disaster or signs of a god/goddesses favor, affecting political decision making on multiple scales, just because of random orbital paths of chunks of ice.

Even the Romans paid great heed to what the stars said, and calculated it as part of political movements/actions.

This ties into the US having separation of church and state as part of what makes us unique, compared to many previous empires which either were; we have no state religion or priestly class, even if we do have Hollywood.
 
Bacle said:
people forget how lead poisoning can affect the thinking and reasoning of people, and lead was everywhere in Roman society.
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The role lead poisoning had in the Roman Empire is overstated

Besides that, what do you think people in the future will see in the health of people today?

Chronic and ever pervasive obesity. An entire generation of kids who have their attention spans and memory stunted by screens. Fucked up circadian rhythms, plummeting testoserone, food that's been processed into sugary slop.

These things also wreak havoc in brain development.
 
The Immortal Watch Dog said:
I would argue that the coming of a Caesar is never a good thing because it highlights a total and complete breakdown of civilization on a very fundamental level.
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I think by the time the Casear comes the breakdown has already happened. Fact is by the time a Ceasar figure has arrived the said establishment that makes his rise envitable has killed every major reformer, has proven that they will go after and murder their political enemies if they ever reliquished power has destroyed all of the norms and broken all of the laws while acting like uprigious hippocrits the entire time.

By the Time a Casear arrives the people have hit their maximum fuck it point they want revenge, and the sad fact is by this time the elite is so corrupt, stupid and assholish that the only way to save civilization is to fucking purge them.

I don't think you can get an agustus with out a Ceasar, you need some one to remind all of the fucktards why tradition is a good thing that protects everyone.
 
Skallagrim said:
You seem to have magically forgotten all about it, since you not only raise the exact same talking points, and not only ignore the counter-arguments I posited then, but outright pretend that the whole conversation never took place.
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You mean where you ended on this?
Skallagrim said:
...when in fact, I already pointed out that you're the one claiming the present is unique and special. Which is the big deviation from what has thus far been observed. You're the one defending the equivalent of the hockey-stick graph. So it's not "up to me to prove" this. It's up to you to prove that you are right.
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Insisted on things like operating on the Neolothic scarcity model when literally any examination of the respective economies shows the bounding factors people actually make decisions based on are completely different, assuming that unrest will be similar when questioning authority and tradition has itself been the tradition for centuries at this point, claim that "The West" comprised of dozens of sovereign states with multiple formally independent but economically interdependent power blocks is at all going to be able to consolidate like the Roman Empire in the face of the issues to conquest industrial economies pose as demonstrated in the World Wars...

Literally every single structural difference I have ever stated has been dismissed with "nature has not changed", forever assuming I must prove that the society with record highs of communication, urbanization, trade dependency, population numbers, and historic lows of food insecurity, violence, and care for tradition is meaningfully different from periods that are opposite in numerous ways.

I have not once seen you explain what underlying nature is actually causing the events, only insisting that your model continues holding true without actually explaining the model of human nature that drives it. Again, "X will happen because Y historic event in the cycle", not "X will happen because Y conditions of the cycle". What I see is strictly raw pattern-matching, not causation. Demonstrate that human nature causes it, instead of dismissing me pointing at all the structural differences making the specific causation of the historic example an implausible and actively self-destructive pain in the ass.

As an aside, not recalling a conversation in detail four months later (minus four days) is not particularly unusual. You taking that as the condemnation of my faculties rather than repeating the notice of my admitted inability to "adequately discuss the matter" shows that you don't either.
 
Morphic Tide said:
You mean where you ended on this?

Insisted on things like operating on the Neolothic scarcity model when literally any examination of the respective economies shows the bounding factors people actually make decisions based on are completely different, assuming that unrest will be similar when questioning authority and tradition has itself been the tradition for centuries at this point, claim that "The West" comprised of dozens of sovereign states with multiple formally independent but economically interdependent power blocks is at all going to be able to consolidate like the Roman Empire in the face of the issues to conquest industrial economies pose as demonstrated in the World Wars...

Literally every single structural difference I have ever stated has been dismissed with "nature has not changed", forever assuming I must prove that the society with record highs of communication, urbanization, trade dependency, population numbers, and historic lows of food insecurity, violence, and care for tradition is meaningfully different from periods that are opposite in numerous ways.

I have not once seen you explain what underlying nature is actually causing the events, only insisting that your model continues holding true without actually explaining the model of human nature that drives it. Again, "X will happen because Y historic event in the cycle", not "X will happen because Y conditions of the cycle". What I see is strictly raw pattern-matching, not causation. Demonstrate that human nature causes it, instead of dismissing me pointing at all the structural differences making the specific causation of the historic example an implausible and actively self-destructive pain in the ass.

As an aside, not recalling a conversation in detail four months later (minus four days) is not particularly unusual. You taking that as the condemnation of my faculties rather than repeating the notice of my admitted inability to "adequately discuss the matter" shows that you don't either.
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Way to misrepresent matters again. The fact is that during the conversation -- much in the same manner I already see repeated in this one -- you raised various purely materialist "what-abouts", and I started out by countering the reasoning behind each one. A pattern soon emerged, where no matter what I'd say, you'd just shift the goal-posts and come up with new "what-abouts" without ever even recognising the anwers I had already provided.

Meanwhile, you happily kept it up with your own assumptions about human nature, providing little if anything in the way of evidence for your premises... thus making it a conversation where the burden of proof was entirely on me. Despite the fact that I'd gone to pretty great lengths to build the case already. At that point, it just becomes endless baiting on your part. I like a good discussion. What I don't like is when the other guy acts like he can sit in a high chair and ask infinite questions, while never acknowledging the answers already provided... and I'm somehow still obligated to forever answer those infinite questions.

Hence my conclusion, at which I arrived then, based on ample observation, and which by all evidence remains just as true now: you ignore evidence from history, you ignore every argument, you instead play a game of whataboutism forever, and you then insist that you don't have to prove shit, while I have to prove endless points to your statisfaction. And there is no agreed-upon limit of evidence that would be sufficient to convince you, so you can keep nagging forever, and can still avoid conceding the debate, no matter how many arguments I might provide...

I don't play that game, because that's not a conversation. That's you playing inquisitor, on the premise that you owe me no proof and I owe you infine answers. No dice.
 
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Polish case - our gentry tried to copy Roman Republic after 1569,and,becouse of that,they feared Ceazar taking power.
Thus they did everytching they could to ensure,that our Kings would never ever had some real power.
And they succed.
Poland ceased to exist,as result of other Kings actions - but,polish Kings NEVER get real power.


USA,when was formed,knew about Poland,saw that we are falling - and tried to avoid that.
That is why strong Presidents were made,but countered by Congress and judical system.

It worked till FDR times,now USA is banana Republic hold by banksters.
Which mean,that we NEVER would have Ceasar there - banksters would not allow it.

But,state could cease to exist,just like Poland once.
 
Cherico said:
I think by the time the Casear comes the breakdown has already happened. Fact is by the time a Ceasar figure has arrived the said establishment that makes his rise envitable has killed every major reformer, has proven that they will go after and murder their political enemies if they ever reliquished power has destroyed all of the norms and broken all of the laws while acting like uprigious hippocrits the entire time.

By the Time a Casear arrives the people have hit their maximum fuck it point they want revenge, and the sad fact is by this time the elite is so corrupt, stupid and assholish that the only way to save civilization is to fucking purge them.

I don't think you can get an agustus with out a Ceasar, you need some one to remind all of the fucktards why tradition is a good thing that protects everyone.
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Basically, to rephrase JFK: "Those who make peaceful revolution Gracchi impossible make violent revolution Caesar inevitable." :(
 
Bacle said:
Eh, the lat/long issue is not the strongest point, though I'd point out Egypt's control south of the 1st cataract was often contested by both nomads, and Axum, which is essentially the ancestors of the Ethopians, who could have been said to have had their own empire for a while around the East African coast.

However, the environmental factors Guns, Germs, and Steel point out and correlates a lot of civilizational differences too are pretty strong.

It also shows why the US is rather unique in how we were able to develop, with much different pressures than the old world empires/nations had faced in their youth, and with tech/immunity advantage that was hard to deny compared to the 'local' nations like the Iroquois Confederation.
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The immunity angle is also obviously bunk to anybody with a modicum of historical knowledge.

Animal husbandry grants super immunity and that's why the Indians died to smallpox? But the people hit worst by the smallpox were the large South American tribes, which did raise a range of animals like Alpacas, rabbits, ducks, turkeys, guinea pigs, tapirs, and a few others. Further, the magic immunity they claim animals granted sure didn't seem to help Europe during the Black Death, or the Plague of Justinian, or the Third Pandemic of 1855, or the Great Plague of Marseille in 1720. Nor did Asia, which raised many of the same animals as Europe, prove to have some magical immunity to plagues, in fact many of their plagues got exported to Europe.

The fact is it's much more reasonable to presume that Europe happened to be between plagues at the moment while the Americas were ripe for one rather than coming to the conclusion that Europeans have super-saiyan immune systems due to raising cows and chickens. The authors just massaged the data to fit their preconceived ideas and ignored that there was plenty of animal husbandry in the Americas, what they specifically lacked economically was a large draft animal to pull carts and plow, not all animals.
 
Bear Ribs said:
The immunity angle is also obviously bunk to anybody with a modicum of historical knowledge.

Animal husbandry grants super immunity and that's why the Indians died to smallpox? But the people hit worst by the smallpox were the large South American tribes, which did raise a range of animals like Alpacas, rabbits, ducks, turkeys, guinea pigs, tapirs, and a few others. Further, the magic immunity they claim animals granted sure didn't seem to help Europe during the Black Death, or the Plague of Justinian, or the Third Pandemic of 1855, or the Great Plague of Marseille in 1720. Nor did Asia, which raised many of the same animals as Europe, prove to have some magical immunity to plagues, in fact many of their plagues got exported to Europe.

The fact is it's much more reasonable to presume that Europe happened to be between plagues at the moment while the Americas were ripe for one rather than coming to the conclusion that Europeans have super-saiyan immune systems due to raising cows and chickens. The authors just massaged the data to fit their preconceived ideas and ignored that there was plenty of animal husbandry in the Americas, what they specifically lacked economically was a large draft animal to pull carts and plow, not all animals.
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Justinian's plague wasn't something that any immunity could help with.

The temp drop caused by 3 massive eruptions over about 8 years meant a decade of reduced global temps and sunlight meant the guts of the fleas that were carried into Byzantium were clogged with a parasite, and made the flees insatiably hungry. The same pattern can be found in a lot of plague events in Europe; they are often caused by cooling from a large volcanic eruption disrupting food supplies and making normally healthy people much weaker, and more susceptible to disease.

Also, the limited domestic animals in S. America did not have the same natural disease vectors in them that the Europeans were used to, aka Eurasian fleas, so the animals did not grant immunity to what the Spanish brought with them.

It's also why the Europeans had problems in Africa and S. America when they encountered tropical diseases; those the Europeans had no immunity to, and they definitely suffered for it.
 
ATP said:
Polish case - our gentry tried to copy Roman Republic after 1569,and,becouse of that,they feared Ceazar taking power.
Thus they did everytching they could to ensure,that our Kings would never ever had some real power.
And they succed.
Poland ceased to exist,as result of other Kings actions - but,polish Kings NEVER get real power.


USA,when was formed,knew about Poland,saw that we are falling - and tried to avoid that.
That is why strong Presidents were made,but countered by Congress and judical system.

It worked till FDR times,now USA is banana Republic hold by banksters.
Which mean,that we NEVER would have Ceasar there - banksters would not allow it.

But,state could cease to exist,just like Poland once.
Click to expand...

Banksters are not nearly as powerful as they like to think, there were many very wealthy people who opposed the populars and they even had success for awhile, hell they even killed ceasar...it did not save them, and they were so violently purged that romes aristocratic class had to be encouraged to have kids because so many of them (Were rightfully) purged.
 
Cherico said:
Banksters are not nearly as powerful as they like to think, there were many very wealthy people who opposed the populars and they even had success for awhile, hell they even killed ceasar...it did not save them, and they were so violently purged that romes aristocratic class had to be encouraged to have kids because so many of them (Were rightfully) purged.
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I hope,that the same would happen to western so-called elites.
Only other options are green gulag or muslim state.
 
Skallagrim said:
Way to misrepresent matters again. The fact is that during the conversation -- much in the same manner I already see repeated in this one -- you raised various purely materialist "what-abouts", and I started out by countering the reasoning behind each one.
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The "purely materialist what-abouts" are the fundamental requirements of a useful predictive model. If you cannot connect proximate causes to results, you cannot make any predictions, because you are talking a vague heuristic pattern of "how things are" rather than a viable model of "how things work". This is what you started with in counter-arguing me:

Skallagrim said:
Many changes, many forms. The underlying paradigm is the exact same still. Basic social hierarchy, with some very superficial variations, and an economy that is based on the distributen of scarce means in a way that is deemed equitable.
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You insisted that there is nothing worth mentioning to the change of output between labor-based scarcity and material-based scarcity, simply because they both vaguely resemble an underlying pattern of there being something scarce being split, as if there is no possible impact on the outcome that the bounding factor is entirely different.

Skallagrim said:
It still is. We tend to wind some cloaking fictions around it now, but that's just play-acting. A ritual more than anything. People have adopted such rituals before. Have proudly called themselves "free" before, as opposed to the lamentable subjects of far-off despots.
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You insisted that there is nothing worth mentioning to the change to layers of representation with near-universal suffrage and the limited franchise of Rome, forgetting most of your own examples of cycles never had such a thing and thinking no possible impact on the outcome that we specifically answered the particular structural faults of the Roman Republic in our own.

Skallagrim said:
I'm not sure you'll consider it as funny as I do, but Cato said much the same about the state of affairs in the Roman Republic. Of course, he was talking about the fact that all sorts of riff-raff got citizen status nowadays, and Rome was absorbing way too many foreign regions whose perfidious barbarism diluted the Romanitas, not to mention those Greeks and their depraved ways...
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You insisted that there is nothing worth mentioning to the change in scale of foreign intake being "literally every meaningful society on the planet no matter how distant or different" instead of "neighboring cultures with numerous shared premises but important differences in particulars".

It's always been this bit:

Skallagrim said:
you ignore evidence from history
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Trying to defend the theory with the premise vocally rejected. Not once have you tried to demonstrate a causal chain of any kind as holding true between them. It has always been about pattern-matching, not the conditions responsible for the decisions the actual people in the situation make.
 
Morphic Tide said:
The "purely materialist what-abouts" are the fundamental requirements of a useful predictive model. If you cannot connect proximate causes to results, you cannot make any predictions, because you are talking a vague heuristic pattern of "how things are" rather than a viable model of "how things work". This is what you started with in counter-arguing me:


You insisted that there is nothing worth mentioning to the change of output between labor-based scarcity and material-based scarcity, simply because they both vaguely resemble an underlying pattern of there being something scarce being split, as if there is no possible impact on the outcome that the bounding factor is entirely different.


You insisted that there is nothing worth mentioning to the change to layers of representation with near-universal suffrage and the limited franchise of Rome, forgetting most of your own examples of cycles never had such a thing and thinking no possible impact on the outcome that we specifically answered the particular structural faults of the Roman Republic in our own.


You insisted that there is nothing worth mentioning to the change in scale of foreign intake being "literally every meaningful society on the planet no matter how distant or different" instead of "neighboring cultures with numerous shared premises but important differences in particulars".

It's always been this bit:


Trying to defend the theory with the premise vocally rejected. Not once have you tried to demonstrate a causal chain of any kind as holding true between them. It has always been about pattern-matching, not the conditions responsible for the decisions the actual people in the situation make.
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Again, you try to flip thing to "Morphic Tide's assumptions (about what's true and relevant) are undisputed fact, require no proof, and all others have the burden of proof 100% of the time... and must answer every what-if Morphic Tide posits forever, with no end in sight".

Again, you blithely ignore everything said even in my previous posts in this thread, pick some examples that you want to focus on (now snipped out of their earlier context), and want to force me into a position where I have to prove my views (again) to your satisfaction (again), by a standard set by you (again).

And again: no, we're not playing that game. You're not the grand inquisitor who is questioning me from some position of power.

I've gone along far enough with your line of 'discussion', and it got nowhere, because you consistently move every goal-post. Even if I responded to every bit you've now referenced here... you'll just ignore the response and come up with another 'what-about'.

I'm not going to do that with you again.
 
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