Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d ago
O'Neill's point is not really as much "the collapse following the loss of Roman power in the West didn't exist at all" but rather that the concept of Dark Ages is overextended to basically claim the entire period from the end of the classical era to the beginning of the Renaissance as a "Dark Age", use this as a stick for beating Christianity (which didn't cause the Western Roman collapse in any case), and when this point is challenged the anti-Christian polemicists will resort to motte and baileying.
The original, invented by christians, do not steal, holiday of easter?
The Easter is obviously a continuation the Jewish Passover with the death-and-resurrection-of-the-Christ thematic superseding it yet still being symbolically in many was a part of the Passover, no Christian (or O'Neill) would deny this. The Easter myths that O'Neill criticizes are the spurious claims of pagan origin, such as the idea of an obscure British goddess that might or might not have been celebrated around this period having anything to do with the greater global Christian concept of Easter/Pascha.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3d ago
This describes approximately 0 male-female friendships I've had, though some relationships may qualify.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3d ago
Insofar as I can tell, the revealed preferences match the preferences stated in this study.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d ago
One person full of anger and violence doing something bad shouldn't invalidate all the peaceful people at the rally who didn't drive their cars into a crowd, regardless of what their political beliefs are.
...the protestors were driven but mostly peaceful?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12d ago
Yes, and the Francoist regime also repressed the liberal forces, until eventually it didn't. (Also, my understanding is that the black market was already quite considerable a force in the Soviet economy in the early 80s.)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12d ago
In the end, Franco’s Spain ended because Spain became a liberal Western European country in front of him and he didn’t care to stop it, and it became clear to everyone even before he died that the ideology upon which it was built had evaporated among the masses, the working class and the lower middle and the bourgeois alike.
Couldn't you describe the end of the Soviet Union roughly the same way, with some adjustments ("it became a market economy through black market in front of Gorbachev and he didn't care to stop it" etc., though also ideological liberalization in the form of glasnost of course), though?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12d ago
That being said, it occurs to me that there is a threshold question. Perhaps all governments and institutions have a tendency to suppress dissent and there are a few exceptions, e,g, the United States, which combine (relatively) free markets with (relatively) free speech.
It's this. More to the point, it is a human tendency to think that if someone's wrong and insists on being wrong, it's OK to solve this problem by violence. Individuals are just as prone as collective institutions to think that 'error has no rights'. The normal way to handle heresy used to be violence, the normal way to handle differences between ruling class (ie. factions fighting for kingship etc.) was violence, it was normal for the masses to use violence when they wanted to overthrow the elites and for the elites to repress the masses with violence to keep their power. In practice, premodern societies had to allow a certain leeway simply because they lacked state capacity to handle everything; modern societies have that state capacity.
It actually takes a lot of societal and governmental indoctrination to get societies to the point where people are able to live with their political and religious differences, United States certainly having the capacity to enact such indoctrination. Even then I suspect a lot of it is simple apathy, a tendency to believe that politics has been solved and society stabilized to the degree that there's no real reason to care about anything and we can allow all sorts of weird freaks to have their say. This seems to explain the congruence of the late-90s end-of-history thinking with the post-political-correctness relative cultural tolerance.
Communists, fascists, religious extremists etc., then, are more willing to continue to shut their opponents down, either through state or through individual violence, because they're the ones who actually believe that their cause is just, important, and worth it to restore the use of violence as a general principle of handling differences.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
19d ago
While my primary source here is Case Closed, my understanding is that Oswald never abandoned communism. He was disappointed with the Soviet system in practice, but it just made him flirt with Trotskyism (though without full commitment) after moving back to US.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
19d ago
Vladimir Arutyunian? The motive seems comprehensible, even if GWB appears to have been a secondary target and there's nothing to indicate that he was insane, as such.
I would also consider Lee Oswald to go to this category, if we go by the formal story. He was not completely sane, but there was enough there to allow for Oswald to attempt to assassinate an US president as an expression of his communist ideology.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
20d ago
Adding A Disturbance of Fate. Warning: heavy doses of Kennedy idolatry and boomer leftist althist wank to be expected.
edit: Also A Short History of the Future and the classic After Man and the somewhat lackluster follow-up Man After Man.
There's a fairly balanced gender ratio among younger converts in my (Finnish) parish (60-40 with men predominant, perhaps?) with several couples and marriages forming, and I've still seen women complain about the dating prospects - though not due to the beards AFAIK (which are generally well maintained), just the general levels of tism.
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