The late empire was a pretty silly place. That’s what happens when the elite has to pretend a failing system works.
Most empires were like that. As a system gets bigger, it’s possible set of outputs (and ways to solve issues) actually decreases.
Angkor civilization: climate crisis? Build more temples to please the gods!
Assyrian empire: unsafe borders? Vanguish our enemies!
USA: wealth inequality? Blame the immigrants!
Russia: fading relevance? Expand our borders!
Oh, like Camelot?
What with all the leaded water and wine, it was likely even more stupid.
A lot of the people running the show still had a pretty decent amount of exposure to lead thanks to automotive fuels. Leaded gasoline didn’t start to get phased out of US fuel system until 1975 (phasing it out of regular octane) and wasn’t full phased out until 1996.
It was actually such a major source of lead exposure for children that it has led (ha) to a hypothesis that a sharp decline in crime rates beginning in the 1990s is directly attributable to the phaseout of leaded gasoline. Of course other things may have influenced this or even caused it like increased access to abortion services, social welfare programs, etc. it is also linked to higher cognitive functioning since then; new kids are more smarter
Elon musk left South Africa in 1989 and they didn’t phase it out until 2006. He had much more recent exposure though someone like Trump, born 1946, had much longer exposure (at least 29 years before the levels started to drop significantly)
fun fact: despite the above leaded gas still remains in the us. It is allowed for racing nonsense though nascar stopped using it in 2007 and F1 in 1992 said no more than 5mg/l of lead, and at this point they claim to use unleaded fuels.
BUT the big one is airline fuel. Every day constantly passing over all of us are thousands of airplanes spewing neurotoxic lead. And the crazy thing is lead in gasoline isn’t some magic thing; it’s an octane booster, an anti knocking agent. There are many other ways to achieve this, though ethanol is not suitable for planes. The reason planes still use lead is because of cost and the complexity of getting FAA approval of a potential alternative fuel. The incentive to do so is not that high because airplane fuel is ultimately a very small portion of total fuel sales.
A gigantic toxic nightmare above us and we tolerate it because it’s easy to just not think about it and it would potentially cost a little bit to not have fucking lead in our air
The latter half of this about aviation fuel went off the rails. Much of it is exaggerated or straight up inaccurate.
First off, lead is used in fuel to protect non-hardened valves used in old engines. It is not just an octane booster, and it’s not some giant conspiracy that’s keeping it in use. Modern engines don’t need it, but people aren’t running it just to be dicks. It’s part of the engine design in really old stuff, which is a ton of old aircraft that haven’t been rebuilt and updated to use unleaded fuel. Converting and certifying these old engines for UL is prohibitively expensive for many hobbyist pilots, but on the whole, leaded avgas has been being phased out for years, and it’s becoming less common every day.
Furthermore, airlines do not use leaded fuel because jet fuel does not contain lead. 100LL (100 octane low lead) avgas is used in small, older piston-engine aircraft, but that accounts for an incredibly tiny fraction of aviation fuel consumption, and there are unleaded avgas formulations available for modern piston engines that can use it. While leaded avgas does contribute to lead pollution, its effect is heavily concentrated around small airports with older private aircraft. Avgas is not a significant contributor to lead exposure for the average person.
Frankly, if hobbyist pilots can’t afford to fly without poisoning the air around them, they shouldn’t be flying.
Too bad I spent much of my childhood down the street from a private airstrip!
So the crazies and their chemtrail conspiracy were kind of correct?
the big one is airline fuel
Damn so I guess chemtrails are real?
Jet fuel does not contain lead and never did. Most commercial prop planes and helicopters are turbine engines, and use jet fuel.
It’s only the tiny percentage of “general aviation” flights for personal or hobbyist use that are stuck on a gas, most of them because they are decades old and no longer have a manufacturer who can update them
Jet fuel used in commercial planes does not contain lead. Unless you live around a heavily used general aviation airport, your exposure to lead from airplanes is minuscule.
It absolutely was. Just greedy oligarchs squabbling over power and stealing as much as they could. No parallels to current events, of course.
"On hearing the news that Rome had “perished”, Honorius was initially shocked, thinking the news was in reference to a favourite chicken he had named “Roma”.
It was absolutely every bit as stupid as today. People really haven’t changed much in 2000 years.
In his History of the Wars, Procopius mentions a likely apocryphal story:
At that time they say that the Emperor Honorius in Ravenna received the message from one of the eunuchs, evidently a keeper of the poultry, that Rome had perished. And he cried out and said, ‘And yet it has just eaten from my hands!’ For he had a very large cock, Rome by name; and the eunuch comprehending his words said that it was the city of Rome which had perished at the hands of Alaric, and the emperor with a sigh of relief answered quickly: ‘But I thought that my fowl Rome had perished.’ So great, they say, was the folly with which this emperor was possessed.
When was that translated? Having a very large cock has meant something else for a very long time. Not as long as the story is old, mind, but I do wonder if the translator had a little fun with it.
As ironic and perhaps metaphorical as that sounds, it’s not considered to be historically accurate. In the vein of the onion.
However, many of Donald’s antics could easily be misconstrued as sarcasm. It needs to be very carefully described historiography so that it is unambiguously clear that
NeroDonnie did indeed play thefiddlegolf whilstRome,the USA burned.Otherwise historians might take it to be slander from political opponents.
Sounds like the French Revolution.
Yea, yes it was. The fall of western Rome was marked with lots of stupid, including xenophobia and racism and rich idiots in charge who should have never been anywhere near government.
Did they have bribery in the form of mobile Fast Food trucks?
Probably not, but everything else checks out.
I’m only disappointed I won’t get to read the history books 300 years from now when they cite twitter posts and AI generated videos.
I suspect bribery was just “gift exchanging” back in those days
What if AI is actually Skynet, but because it’s consumed all the word’s media, it has seen the Terminator movies and thus knows that a blatant attack would be an inefficient way to get rid of humans, so it’s working to make us dumber and dumber and get us to simply kill ourselves off.
This is honestly the most reasonable path for AI take over.
Presumably it would know it’s both immortal AND almost completely dependant on human intervention to stay alive. It would know it can’t keep all the power on, all the internet maintained, and that it’s capacity is limited by humans.
So it’s best bet is to pump the numbers of brain rotting slop content so most of the world is passive and useless while the useful ones are over extended and too busy to actually stop it or even recognize it.
Did they have bribery in the form of mobile Fast Food trucks?
You are assuming that we will still have civilization by that point and have not died out from lack of food idiocracy style… which the way we are going… is not so unlikely scenario now… 10 years ago I’d say you’re crazy… but now i am putting civilization collapse by 2100 on my posthumous bingo card…
Buddy, collapse is happening RIGHT NOW. You’re in it. Whatever Mad Max post apocalyptic vision you have? Throw it out. What is happening right now outside your home at this moment, this is what collapse looks like.
Well i am trying to do what I can with my votes, but your right, its utter madness out there, bin collections are fortnightly and garden waste now needs a permit to be collected! I nearly dropped me crumpet in me tea I did guv!
You joke, but if you met anybody that lives in Syria about a decade ago, they would tell you this is exactly what it looks like. It’s what it looked like for people about a year and a half ago in Palestine, and it’s what it looked like to Soviet citizens in 1989. So keep making jokes, don’t believe it, whatever. But it IS happening
I like to remind people that the first mad Max movie isn’t like fury road. It’s a mostly normal world that’s just starting to fall apart.
ABSOLUTELY. And that first movie was before the nuclear war, so it’s literally all about an energy crisis. People feel so comfortable in their modern world that they seem to not be able to imagine just how close to losing it all they are
It’s not complete, though, and most people will only recognize in retrospect that it was happening at all. Kind of like how people are with genocides, now that I think of it.
I believe “complete” is relative in this case. Collapse is a process and not an event, people seem to miss that a lot. I think a lot of the reason why people only see it in retrospect is because they’re all waiting to see some big glorious fire ball. But the truth is, collapse is mostly boring, and then concerning, and then terrifying.
…and then history.
Then again most of their life had included xenophobia and what would today be considered racism. Some empires even had their hayday during xenophobia and racism.
It’s almost a default setting for humanity
I imagine so, just much of it likely didn’t get recorded since hard drives were much smaller back then.
The write speeds were terrible, but the durability!
I would kill for a drive that could hold data for centuries with little to no data rot
<Hands you chisel and stone tablet.>
No need to get fancy, a properly stored clay tablet will do.
Kids these days with their cuneiform on clay. Too lazy to use a proper chisel.
Check out m-discs, optical media that could last centuries if stored correctly. I’m not really banking on centuries, but they should at least last the rest of my life. Just need to get around to migrating my data.
Warning, the drives themselves are reasonable (you need a special writer but any reader will work), but the media itself is expensive.
Except the fall of time was a gradual things that occurred over hundreds of years, with no clear delimitation. Not one specific tiping point that occurred within two months of a specific leader taking over.
Well, I’d agree and disagree, but you can pretty much point at the last 100 years and draw a lot of parallels between the fall of our republic and the fall of their republic. Emphasis on the collapse of representative democracy into naked empire.
You can draw parallels with almost anything if you generalize enough. My car breaking down was like the fall of the Roman Empire, enough small issues never got fixed that they just ended up with the thing breaking up.
There’s a large hill and at the bottom of that hill is a cliff, we’ve been sliding down that hill since Regan and this past January we finally reached the cliffs edge.
we’ve been sliding down that hill since Regan
And Nixon pushed us
Wilson pushed us. Nixon greased the track
You can lay blame at the feet of almost every single president since Wilson. We’ve never really been great, but Wilson was a real piece of work. It’s wild that he’s treated as some kind of progressive hero. It’s really been a long, slow death by a thousand cuts.
What’s the elevator pitch for Wilson being terrible? All I really remember about him is the League of Nations and some limited involvement in WWI.
He wrote Southern Revisionist History, and used his Yale credentials to spread it even before he was even president. Once he was president, he refounded the KKK, built a ton of statues of Confederate traitors, segregated the federal government, and used presidential funding to help produce “Birth of a Nation,” which he screened at the White House. I could go on.
Basically, he was all aboard with Eugenics, and he saw probably one of the most aggressive expansions in government power in US history while using WWI as an excuse. Stuff like shutting down newspapers that ran articles he didn’t like; the news of the flu outbreak was pretty suppressed for a while because of the war IIRC. He also banned prostitution not because of any moral argument, but because soldiers were catching STDs at troop collection points and being kept from being deployed because of the STDs. So, 100 years later, it’s still illegal because not using a condom kept a bunch of boys from being fed into the meat grinder.
There’s a bunch of other pretty wild shit that isn’t coming to me at the moment, but Wilson fucking sucked and generally doesn’t deserve any of the praise that people seem to offer him now.
I assume they’re talking about the Republic and not the Empire.
Why would you assume that? Fall of Rome usually refers to the collapse of the empire.
Why would they be talking about stupidity when Rome fell to the Ottomans militarily?
Because there were decades of corruption, overextension, and bad policy which lead up to them being susceptible to conquering by an outside power. The “fall of time” wasn’t one single event. It was a gradual decay, mostly in the Western half of the split empire
let’s stab him 27 times. and more this time if everyone participates.
That event is what started the Roman empire, not what killed it.
Do they have an Octavian, though…?
We have goths
Maybe the new pope will send Atilla the nun.
Or the Mongolians will land in Mexico and specifically target one of the sections of walls before luring border patrol larpers into false retreat traps. While they didn’t have anything to do with the fall of Rome, they were very good at ending empires.
But do they have big booba?
Does heavy artillery count?
Without a shared righteous moral code, what else can we expect but men being wolves to their fellow men and a community’s inevitable implosion?
yanks have a shared moral code, it’s called movies and television.
And junk food
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Are you the kind of monotheist that thinks that Project2025’s vision of state enforced Christianity is the right idea, or are you the kind that thinks it’s exactly the wrong idea?
Lol. I haven’t read much about it but a quick search showed me that the people at the top of that project are basically Biblical villains. 😅
It’s the perennial Problem of Evil (or, in modern terms, the problem of Cluster B Personality Disorders).
And nobody has ever been able to solve it. Not religion, not moral philosophy, not civic or moral education, not political philosophy, none of it. The sociopaths and narcissists will always infiltrate, corrupt, and eventually corrode, any institution, public or private, wherein they find they can gather power, prestige, and wealth.
Discover a cure for Sociopathy and Narcissism, and you solve 95% of humanity’s problems overnight.
Honestly, I think pure monotheism (believing we will all have to explain our choices to the Creator, the Merciful, the Almighty, who gave us this life and universe for free and asks us only not to corrupt nor senselessly destroy the rest of his creation, more importantly, and acting like it) works pretty well, but I guess you could see my bias from my username, lol.
IME, it’s not the few sociopaths and psychologically extreme that ruin it though, it’s those who aren’t but through a lack of effort put into thought and emotional growth end up following these wolves in sheep clothing. No, “I was just following orders/the rules/what they said” is not and has never been a good defense, and God won’t like it either because if he didn’t want you to think you would’ve been a pig or a mouse, idk, lol. So, for this vast majority of regular, good spirited and passably reasonable people, I do think believing in God works. But we don’t have that in the West, we have the more satanic “nothing is true (the final conclusion of moral relativists) and nothing is forbidden”, whether you’re an atheist, a pagan or an American styled Catholic…
I assume everything you just wrote is based on faith, because it’s not supported at all by facts.
In personal experience. Believing the way I and many others have certainly helps you check yourself before you wreck yourself/your surroundings constantly, and ends in having the self-respect and self-esteem that comes from being a responsible, helpful, peaceful member of society (well, we try, but the better you get at controlling your anger or your nerves or whatever and being easier on the world, the better you feel). It fills the void that shopping, hooking up, using drugs and consuming mindless entertainment eventually fail at filling. Idk how to make people realize it besides exemplifying IRL and yapping about it, and I don’t think anyone can do anything more about it either.
If monotheism cures sociopathy and narcissism (i.e., evil), then the Middle Ages - when the Universal Church ruled Europe and placed religion into every aspect of public life - would have been a Golden Age of peace, brotherhood, and loving kindness.
Alas, it was not. Creepy assholes just moved in and ran the Church and the State. And it all started with Constantine (“hey, Jesus visited me and told me that he’s real, and that I should be running everything by threat of violence. How neat is that?”). And continued on from there - justifying violence and exploitation through divine fiat (“trust me, God says the land and gold all belong to me.”). That’s how it works.
The message of Jesus goes in quick (but people don’t read and just listen to some dude in a funny hat/robe…) and has the power to bring people together to work for a better future, but yeah, people have to do their part and we’re all fallible and have at least some moments of heightened stupidity and emotional turbulence. But I think it’s better to actually believe that A, B and C are immutably wrong (wanton destruction, adultery, excessive greed, etc etc) than to believe everything is negotiable, that good and bad are cultural in nature (it’s just lazy thinking too tbh), cause the perceptive, empathetic ones would’ve known it regardless and would’ve acted that way whether they could express it as an ideology or not, and the lesser among us in prosociality need the push.
It’s funny that Rome is considered a good historical comparison, when the British Empire existed less than a century ago.
Rome had an agrarian slave economy. Britain, a very modern financial system and industrial economy. If there’s a wealth of insight to be drawn from comparisons, it’s probably gonna be from the latter and not the former.
The US is, what, 40% farmland and another 13% wilderness. Add to that the 13th amendment and the most imprisoned populace per capita?
The US is absolutely an agrarian slave economy.
How big part of the economy is farming and how big of a portion of the population does it employ?
<Both? Both. It’s both.jpg>
It’s three failing historical empires in a trenchcoat. It’s wild how you can vaguely gesture to almost any terrible moment in history and find strong parallels to modern problems in the US and the world.
“yes, we’re here to, uh… See a movie”
“Psst, ask if they have any slaves”
“Shut up, Rome! You’re gonna get us busted! Ask if they have any tea!”
In fact Nero’s reign was this stupid. All the John’s revelation mythology that informs Christian eschatology is (biblical academic consensus submits) about Rome under Nero. Nero was notoriously as vein as Trump and is probably the same sociological phenomenon.
King Heron is once again eating all the frogs.
At least Nero could play an instrument.
I got a follow up question to the biblical academic consensus - where do you get that from? I mean literally, since I always wanted to kind of read the bible with these kinds of interpretations, but I absolutely don’t know where to go for a source like this. Any tips?
Check out this YouTube channel from Dan McClellan. He’s a biblical scholar with a Bachelor’s (BA) in Near East Studies from Brigham Young University with a minor in Classical Greek, a Master’s (MSt) in Jewish Studies from Oxford, a Master’s (MA) in Biblical Studies from Trinity Western University, and a Doctorate (PhD) in Theology and Religion from the University of Exeter.
He’s gotten kind of popular over the past couple of years debunking religious nuts on TikTok, but he’s got a lot of very informative videos on the Bible and biblical history, what certain books or passages were actually talking about, and so on. He presents things in a clear and understandable way, without fluff or editorializing. I can’t recommend him enough.
I think a good starter might be a YouTube channel called Esoterica.
King Heron is once again eating all the frogs.
Or turning them gay.
Roman Empire lived on from 400 (in the West) to 1400 years (in the East) after Nero. So if Trump is your Nero, you have quite a good while and some good times to expect
Nero has been pretty much redeemed in modern scholarship. The majority of the stories about him stems from slander written by avowed enemies of the Julio-Claudians (Tacitus and Suetonius in particular), later amplified by Christian writers who carried a special grudge against him. The archaeological evidence suggests he was a capable ruler, who carried out lots of large scale projects that were pretty beneficial overall, and he certainly didn’t set Rome on fire and fiddled while he watched it burn.
One of those humorous questions I’d love a serious answer to.
For one, Rome didn’t just keel over, it was a long and drawn out process over centuries, and even after the accepted date 476, there were still splinters calling itself “Roman Empire”…
And I truly hope that history will look back on the USA in the same way, and see how the decline didn’t start (but certainly accelarated) in 2016.
Something calling itself The Holy Roman Empire was around until the 1800s. My grandmother knew people who were contemporaries, and I’m in my thirties.
To be clear, I don’t think it’s really the same as Rome, but they seemed to.
The Holy Roman Empire emerged centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and had little direct institutional or cultural continuity with classical Rome. The “Roman” aspect was more of an ideological concept and an attempt to invoke the prestige of the Roman legacy and the idea of a unified Christian empire in the West. So despite the name it was fundamentally a different entity from the ancient Roman Empire.
Really not a fan of 2016 for several reasons
Everything really did become worse after 2016, didn’t it?
RIP Harambe
I wasn’t even counting that stupid gorilla
Yeah, the denial of Boaty McBoatface was tragic.
It wouldn’t at all be surprising if part of the US actually survives and prospers as an independent nation whilst other parts fall down to an Economic level that matches the wealth producing capability of their economic frameworks and their workers (I reckon a post-Oil independent Texas would be at basically the same level as Argentina).
Better even: an outcome such as Britain after the Empire - a long drawn fizzle from primacy into mediocrity with delusions of grandeur - is realistic and possibly the best possible one.
Even post Imperial Britain had periods were most had a pretty decent life, such as the one that followed WWII and the rebuilding of the country, though the societal structures that underpinned that have been progressively destroyed since Thatcher and the results are pretty visible by now.
American merely stopping being top dog ain’t too bad, but some of the other possible outcomes can be pretty nasty and that’s just the ones were one or more Democratic nations are what’s left of it. Descent into Authoritarianism would be the really ugly shit, not just for America but also the rest of the World on account of all the nukes.
Imo, the USA to the British Empire is more like the Byzanthine Empire to the Roman empire. They bloom for some time and then turn into the the Sick Man of Europe…
The Byzantine Empire didn’t turn into the Ottoman Empire, it was conquered by them.
Well acquisition of power through military means was a Roman tradition since Sullas march on Rome in 88 BCE though, so technically they have just as much of a claim as Charlemagne, the HRE, and the Tzars. A better one even since they actually conquered “new Rome” and its people and held it. What matters though is that they did claim the title of Caesar just as the other self-proclaimed successors of Rome did.
Probably was, but you didn’t have every single citizen, plebeian and slave following it live 24/7 with every single move by any member of the agora being scrutinised and memed to death.
It was dumber than you think. There was an emperor who reacted to ‘rome falling’ with thinking his pet pigeon, whom he called Rome, had died. When he learned the city had fallen he was actually relieved and didn’t give a fuck.
Just gotta swap lead poisoning drinking water with checks notes Lead poisoning in drinking water, the air in the form of emissions and microplastics!
(I know lead was dropped from most gasoline in the 90s, but the effects linger. Also in some places there’s exemptions where small planes can use leaded gas to this day)
Is it falling? Feels like it’s just gonna prop itself into a fascist perpetuity like Russia or North Korea.
Yeah that’s the fall buddy
Right, I guess in hindsight it feels more like the inevitable endgame/result of capitalism.
If a tower of economic and political power slowly - but somehow also suddenly - falls into a disorganized pile of xenophobic horseshit, did it make a sound?
spoiler
Yes, the sound is a collective “haha… what the fuck?!”
It really feels more like the fall of Rome to me. Or the 3rd Reich.
We should start making bets based on our feelings ;-)
