BahRamYou
1d ago
Sure, but who else is like that, who writes prolifically on the internet for a general audience, in modern times? I think you'd have to either go back to much older sources, or look to some fairly obscure academics who don't even have a twitter or any sort of online presence. Academia in general just... doesn't do a good job of catering towards popular interests.
BahRamYou
1d ago
Yeah, I feel like I agree with you in principle, but in practice that would just lead to awkward cutoffs like what happened to me in this case. I wasn't necessarly looking for a lifelong friend, just one good conversation at a party. Se la vie.
BahRamYou
1d ago
I think I answered @JeSuisCharlie's question of "is he a trustworthy source?" You're now asking a different question- "is he more likely to put forward an argument in good faith?" (presumably you mean, more likely because of his political beliefs?) To that I would say no, but neither is anyone else. Like everyone, you need to read him with an eye towards his potential bias.
BahRamYou
1d ago
I dont believe any source is trustworthy in the sense of "oracle of truth." I just appreciate his perspective. He must be read in context, just like every single other human who ever dared to speak with authority. I so generally trust him about the specific factual details of life in the ancient world, but much less when it comes to editorializing or drawing broad conclusions.
BahRamYou
2d ago
I was having a nice time talking to her until this one mind-killer topic came up. Guess I'll just wait until there's a democrat in the white house until I'm allowed to talk to women.
BahRamYou
2d ago
So you just pretend like you don't know who Trump is or what the US presidential election is? how does that usually work out for you.
BahRamYou
2d ago
They just randomly bring up the Byzantines or 1990s Russia? That's... interesting. (personally I would think those subjects are way more fun to talk about than contemporary US politics, but admittedly I would't want a random person to try to lecture me about them)
BahRamYou
2d ago
I think he's just caught between a rock and a hard place.
If he wants to keep his position as "internet historian," it's essential that he has some genuine academic bona fides. Right now he's an adjunct professor, which is just barely enough to call himself "professor," even though everyone in academia knows he's not a "real" professor.
His specialty is an classics, specifically the military history of the Roman republic. That's a very old-school, white male coded, conservative interest. It's also been out of favor with the academy for, I don't know, at least 100 years. So if he bends too far towards his fan base, he'll get excommunicated by the academy and lose all of his professional bona fides. He'll become just another internet "roman statue guy." On the other hand, if he leans too far towards the academy, he'll spend all his time writing about the queer women of color in the roman republic, or whatever. He wrote a whole series about how women traditionally made clothing and he had to admit that primary sources were sparse because even the primary sources of the time thought that this was an incredibly boring topic which no one cared about. They basically just took a strand of wool or flax then "spun" in a circular motion, over and over and over, for approximately one million hours, until it resembled something like a modern dress. Neat.
In of his recent article, he did admit the contradiction- if he was a woman or Black person, writing about more academia-friendly topics, he'd probably be a full professor by now. Instead he's marginalized as basically a glorified grad student, despite having a huge internet following and way more funding than most full professors. And yet, he has to kind of look down on and despise his followers in order to maintain his standing. Truly a difficult position.
BahRamYou
2d ago
To be fair, she's not wrong. If you had put a gun to my head and forced me to pick between Trump and Harris, I would have picked Trump. She seemed intelligent and fun to talk to just... completely mind-poisoned by politics. I was really hoping we could drop the subject and talk about literally anything else. But no. No compromise, no "agree to disagree," no mercy.
I don't think I could convincingly lie and pretend to be an ultra leftist. I suppose I should have just said "Harris," and then quickly changed the subject to something else. But I suppose it would only be a matter of time until I was found out.
BahRamYou
2d ago
How do you handle it when people ask for your political opinions in real life?
I had a woman ask me suddenly, out of the blue, "who did you vote for in the last election?" We were having a nice conversation before that point (not like, a meet-cute instant love or antyhing, but at least it was a good conversation). I answered truthfully that I had just recently changed my address at that time, so I didn't vote, because I was dealing with a lot and it just wasn't worth the effort for me of updating my voter info on top of everything else. She instantly made an annoyed face and turned away, never to talk to me again. She was obviously a liberal- god help me if I had said I voted for Trump. But like, what are we supposed to do in these situations? Is it just impossible to talk to people with different political opinions now?
BahRamYou
4d ago
Even if/when there's problems, is there any indication that the war hungry empire wannabe nations are fixing any of these? Russia has been killing off hundreds of thousands of their young men trying to take even a small portion of nearby territory.
Well, I haven't done a robust statistical analysis of this, but there does seem to be a trned where the more war-hungry nations have a higher fertility rate. Africa and the Middle East most especially. Israel also, and they might be the best example of what I'm thinking of- they seem to have accepted that they'll just be at war in Gaza forever, never going full genocide but never finding a peaceful solution either. The US isn't very warlike, but we are somewhat more warlike than Europe or East Asia, and correspondingly have a higher fertility rate. Russia is admittedly an outlier, but I think they're just slowly finding their way forward after the absolute devastation of the USSR breakup in the 90s.
China is probably the only working example whatsoever and that's still because Deng Xiaoping the so called "number one capitalist roader" introduced market reform to them and allows them to actually meaningfully grow. And even then they're still fucked. Even just among the other majority chinese Nations, China is the poorest per capita. They just make up for it through sheer numbers.
China really needs to be judged on a curve. Remember they went through the century of humiliation, followed by Mao just absolutely ruining whatever was left with his retarded policies. The fact that they still exist at all is incredible, and they seem to be quickly making up lost ground.
Technology cooks your food, gets you from one place to another, brings you entertainment, saves your life and all sorts of other things.
Sure, there's obviously some good uses for technology. I just dispute that technology on its own can make people happy or give us meaning in life. As you noted, even poor people now have plenty of access to technology, so we don't need to be rich to enjoy it. This is going past what we can prove with statistics, but my impression of most poor people in the US is not that they want more technology, but a deeper meaning in their life. Put another way- they want social capital, not technological capital.
...and there's something to be said for having an actual human cook food for you or provide live entertainment, instead of a robot and a screen. Nothing I've ever watched on a screen is as memorable to me as some of the events I've seen in person from a real human.
BahRamYou
4d ago
Hmm, that's interesting. It seems like they were afraid of runaway population growth in their slaves, to the point where the entire south would just be overpopulated with slaves if they weren't allowed to expand territory. Suffice to say that kind of population growth is no longer a concern these days.
BahRamYou
4d ago
I dunno about that take. I feel pretty confident that Montgomery, Alabama did not have great public transit in the 1940s. I also think history classes should stick to teaching history instead of opining on the quality of public transit in different countries in modern times.
BahRamYou
4d ago
I think they do a decent job of teaching older history. It's just, they start at the back and work forwards, so they run out of time with the postwar 20th century stuff at the very end of the school year. Plus all the obvious culture war angles to it.
BahRamYou
5d ago
My opinion is that US schools do a really bad job of teaching the civil rights protests of the 1960s era. A lot of people unironically believe that Rosa Parks was just some random nice lady who was too tired to change seats on the bus that day, and that MLK Jr assembled a group of purely peaceful protestors who shamed the evil whites into doing the right thing. The reality is... a lot more complicated.
- Southerners had been feeling profoundly divided about segregation for a long time
- Rosa Parks was the chosen representative of the NAACP. She had a long career of activism, and carefully planned her protest to be as sympathetic as possible to the middle class whites of the area. There had been numerous failed attempts before her to do the same thing.
- MLK Jr was arrested and went to jail, something which he fully expected and was prepared for. However, he urged his supporters to act tactically and strategically, not in random mob violence. He drew a clear divide between forceful activism like the Boston Tea Party, which had a clear purpose, and random individual action, which does not. Ironically, MLK Jr is probably just too intelligent for modern political activists to understand.
BahRamYou
5d ago
Somewhere in between. I have a few strategies, but they're a bit loose and I do use some intuition. I didn't just go all in on Nvidia or any other individual stock though. Mostly I try to apply leverage plus hedges with an ear towards the news.
BahRamYou
5d ago
For what it's worth, while it may be small in the grand scheme of things, it's not small to me. I've been investing basically everything I could scrape together, and I currently have no job, just living off my investments. So it's not like I just yolo'd a few bucks on crypto or whatever. I do care a lot about risk and taxes and things like that.
I can appreciate that there are different rules for professionals managing other peoples money, I'm just surprised that the finance industry seems to hostile to career-changers. Maybe I should go back to school for a finance degree or something.
BahRamYou
5d ago
You're making the "end of history" argument ala Fukuyama. 20 years ago I would have agreed with you, but I think we're starting to see the cracks in this sort of market-focused liberal democratic model. Plumeting birth rates, rising social problems, and a general sense that people are not as good as they used to be. Technology is very good at solving market problems like "how can we target people with ads," but not so good at actually enhancing human lives. And genetic engineering has yet to overcome basic human differences, eg men and women are still different despite the best efforts of feminists and trans activists to erase those differences. Ditto the racial differences.
The British empire kept losing territory and power, not just the US but plenty of other colonies. The American South lost to the North. The USSR racked up loss after loss until it fell apart. Over and over again the empire model is filled with losers.
So what? The US has also lost lots of wars. Just a few years ago we had a humiliating retreat from Afghanistan after 20 years of failing to accomplish anything there. It doesn't matter. The nice thing about being a big, powerful military empire is that you can afford to lose wars. Losing some random territory in Africa was hardly an existential threat to the British Empire- even losing their American colonies wasn't. The southern planter caste lost their slaves, but they kept their land and went right back to their traditional way of life after the war ended, just paying the former slaves a small amount. Even now they make up a disproportionate share of US military officers. And while the USSR fell apart (due to economic reasons, not from war—it's kind of amazing that they kept their empire running as long as they did when it was so ramshackle), Russia kept its nukes, its space program, and a lot of its power. Its former KGB leader became president. Its currently at war in Ukraine to regain its lost territory, and it will probably win despite the west sending significant aid to Ukraine. It's not just some minor footnote in history!
Then of course there's China, which seems to be charting its own unique path with both centralized state control and dynamic markets. I don't even know what to say there, except that it's clearly a rebuke to the idea that liberal free-market capitalistic democracy is the only model that will work from now on.
BahRamYou
5d ago
Can I ask if you actually in the finance industry? It's OK if you don't, I just want to calibrate whether you're speaking from experience or your personal opinions.
My background is programming, where it's relatively common for people to come in without formal CS degrees, but having experience in other ways. Someone who built their own app that's "like an existing big name service, but better" would be very impressive! Even if it doesn't scale up, that's OK, we all know that scaling is a difficult problem and that's why we have huge engineering teams. Just the fact that someone could do that on a small scale is still impressive and would at least get them an interview, or possibly some funding to try a startup if they apply somewhere like YC. It's very odd to me that the big finance industry seems to take the opposite view, where first-hand experience and small startups count for nothing, it's much more about "who you know" and "where did you go to school."
BahRamYou
6d ago
As I understand it, that was mostly for political reasons. They felt outnumbered and wanted more congressional votes to survive.
BahRamYou
6d ago
Well, it's just funny to me. Growing up, it was pounded into me that it's incredibly hard to beat the market, it's all hyper-effecient to the point where almost every active investor underperforms, etc. Then it turns out that I can, in fact, outperform, but no one in the industry cares because I'm just too small. Maybe someone should offer an outperforming fund for small investors, to take advnatage of all these "speedboat" factors that apparently Wall Street doesn't care about.
This really depends on which era and episode you're talking about. They did say that the Romulans were distantly related to the Vulcans but less friendly, so some people made a vague analogy to that with Vulcans=Japanese and Romulans=Chinese... but then the crew meets the Romulans and they're just space Romans, with all sorts of references to the ancient Romans. After that they only showed up a few times in later TOS episodes, mostly sidelined behind the Klingons. Meanwhile there's Sulu and Chekov on the bridge, as an actual, literal Japanese/Russian man, showing how the humans in the future had overcome these sort of petty national conflicts.
Later, the movie Star Trek 6 made the Klingons a heavy-handed metaphor for the USSR and the end of the cold war, revolving around a complicated spy plot. But after that, TNG made them more like space Vikings who looked down on any sort of treachery, while the Romulans became the sneaky spy enemy. So I think the analogy is pretty garbled and there's room for the writers to do whatever they want.
BahRamYou
6d ago
Well you don't kill them all. Don't commit mass genocide, that's barbaric and wasteful.
(@JeSuisCharlie this is also my reply to you)
Three models I can think of in (relatively) modern times are the late Victorian British empire, the Antebellum American South, and the post-Stalin USSR.
(I feel compelled to mention at this point that I'm just offering this as a thought experiment, using all three of those plus the Klingons from Star Trek as a very loose example. All three of those have some obvious horrifying parts, and I particularly despise slavery)
The thing that all three had in common was that, although they were a heavily militarized society with many of their upper class men serving in the military, they weren't particularly interested in expanding their territory. They already had all the territory they could possibly use—arguably too much. Of course, to some extent they did go to war with other nations, but most of their normal military action was either:
(a) preparing ever greater amounts of force to make sure they never had to go to war (the best weapon is one that never has to be used) or (b) internal force against the tribute states of their empire (Czech or Afghanistan for the Soviets, India for the British, Blacks and American Indians for the Antebellum South)
Of course, the most obvious benefit of such an empire is the resourcees it provides. Natural resources like oil and minerals, but also humans to do all the work that no one else wants to do: work the farmland in harsh rural areas for example, or low-wage service work in the cities. In our capitalistic meritocracy, this leads to an endless dog-eat-dog struggle as everyone is in competition for the "good jobs," leading everyone in fear that they'll be stuck with one of those lesser jobs, and no one will offer them any sympathy—it's their fault for not doing better in school, or hustling harder, or something like that. With the empire model, things are much more clear—you're born into the lower caste, and you stay there, so there's a little more stability to build a culture there and offer some stability.
In our society, military service is usually offered as a path out of poverty for the lower class, while those in the upper class either making a token gesture of it (like the royal family in England) or skip it entirely (like Trump). In the "empire" model, it instead acts as a test of merit and one of the most respected careers, with many of the upper class choosing to make their career there. After leaving the military, they then get a huge advantage for later careers in things like law and politics, which seems a lot more fair and just than offering them to kids who got a high LSAT score and went to top law schools with no prior career experience. Or they can simply retire and live the rest of their life as a gentleman of leisure, with their military pension and discipline keeping them on a respectable path, which is much better than the aimless NEETS of today who have ample leisure time but nothing to show for it.
I would certainly not expect it to be "fun," and I'm aware there would be a heavy price paid in blood for all of this. But it might lead us back to an actually "great" society, where people have a sense that they are part of something truly grand and have an important role to play. The current vision of "you are all residents of an economic zone, go forth and maximize GDP" is somewhat... lacking in its appeal to our nobler spirits.
BahRamYou
6d ago
Well... that's an interesting post! As a fellow Star Trek nerd I'm conflicted on how to respond. You've made so many different, interesting points that I'm disoriented.
On the Enterprise series, personally I still hate it. I hate the opening theme song (trading the classy dramatic music of previous series for a cheesy pop song), I hate the way it retconned an earlier ship named Enterprise, I hate Scott Bakula as an actor, I hate how the showrunners were obviously running out of ideas, and I especially hate how they were trying to shoehorn in then-current year politicals about 9/11 into Star Trek. But I suppose it does have its place as the last of its era, and as something of a time capsule for early 2000s network TV.
I agree with you that Original Series Klingons deserve more respect. They get a lot of shit because of their appearance (which admittedly does look like a weird racial caricature of Turkish or Mongolian people, plus hilariously low-budget). But they're written as intelligent and respect-worthy adversaries. In many ways, not that different from Kirk. When they're first introduced Kirk is trying to blend in among a planet of pacifists, but the Klingons instantly sus him out as being different and more like themselves. They both share contempt for the pacifists, even when it's revealed that they're secretly a more advanced race. And the Klingons are very much a match for the Federation and a huge threat. Later series make them look cool, but act kinda goofy, just blundering around with swords and being stupid. "Samurai/vikings in space" turn out to be no match at all for hyper advanced humans.
Culture War angle: basically, I agree. But this is admittedly a spicy hot take. Most people take it for granted that the ideal utopian future is one of perpetual peace. But why should that be the case? We could openly embrace our identity as an Empire in the mold of the Roman Empire. End birthright citizenship, and make citizenship by blood only. Embrace war as a standard way of life. We will fight perpetual wars, to make ourselves stronger. Some die off, but the rest become even stronger. The reward of winning war is a continuous flow of resources and services, to make ourselves rich, instead of forcing us to have an underclass stuck doing dirty jobs that no one else wants, or an excess of unemployed unwanted men with no purpose in life. Trump's recent rhetoric on Venezuela seems to be a step in that direction- he says that he did it partially for security, but also partially just to take the oil and make us all richer. We'll see if that's actually the case, but I can appreciate the vision.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/se_la_v%C3%AC is correct in italian
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