Sunshine
3d ago
One talented leader and nine blindly obedient followers tend to function better than ten talented leaders leading in different directions. I still think it would result in a higher quality of official.
Honestly? More money in politics. If Congressional and Senate seats were actually sold to the highest bidder I think you'd get a higher quality of official than you have now.
If that seat cost fifty million dollars then you can be sure that whoever is in it will be both willing and able to govern. And they would be willing to compromise with the other side because they're prioritizing using the office they spent money on to pass legislation, not using the office they won in a popularity contest to make money by insider trading.
Although, I think you could probably do better than Simony as a system of government. It does have certain obvious drawbacks. I'm just saying the bar is currently on the floor.
The city of Sybaris was destroyed in about 510 BC by its neighbour Kroton
Wow, 3-to-1 odds and they not only lost, their entire city was destroyed. Those Krotoniates must have been good fighters. Although maybe the 'exiling wealthy citizens and confiscating their wealth' bit didn't help, since generally speaking those wealthy citizens are the very ones you want to call up during wartime.
"We attacked them with triple their numbers and not only did we fail to take their city, but they turned around and destroyed ours," certainly sounds like the outcome a of bunch of ignorant peasants picking a fight they can't win against much wealthier (and better equipped) Greek citizen-infantry. If the Krotoniates were wealthy Phalangite soldiers like Socrates, armed with pikes and heavy armor, and the Sybarites were literally anything else, the I can completely see an army of 100,000 marching through an army of 300,000 and deciding it was so easy they might as well keep going and sack the enemy city.
...although I will say that I am deeply skeptical of these numbers. There are Roman civil wars that involved fewer than 400,000 soldiers, and this was a local fight between city-states. I'm assuming that the ancient historians added a zero or two (as they so often did) and the real numbers were a lot closer to 10,000 vs 30,000, or even 1,000 vs 3,000.
Sunshine
4d ago
IMO, the Mongols were no more badass than the British in 1800. They conquered a massive empire despite lacking numbers because they had superior technology. The fact that their superior technology consisted of high-quality bows and a new system of organizing a cavalry army (rather than rifles and clerks) doesn't change that fact.
I think people underestimate the degree to which the Mongol horse archers would have been every bit as impossible in 1,000 BC as British redcoats. The technology hadn't been invented yet. The composite bow, the new breeds of horses, the Parthian shot, the incredible logistics and social organization that allowed the Mongols to supply their armies in the field - all of these things had to be invented before the Mongols could rise to power.
The Arabs actually were Christians before the foundation of Islam. The Middle East was, to my recollection, mostly non-Orthodox Christians like Monophysites and Arians, while Iran was still practicing Zoroastrianism and/or pre-Islamic folk traditions.
Islam is a splinter of Christianity founded by the Arabs, Levantines, and Egyptians to unify them under a new religious authority independent from the existing empires. That's why Islam recognizes Jesus as a prophet, because pre-Islamic Arabs were already worshipping Jesus and it got spun into the new faith. They were already monotheist and already disinclined to listen to Rome or Constantinople. The jump to founding a 'new religion' (as opposed to a mere Christian heresy) with its holy city in Mecca, a city they actually controlled, was quite natural.
Incidentally, the five Christian Pentarchs were the bishops of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. Rome is Catholic, Constantinople was Orthodox up until the 1400's but is now Muslim (and called Istanbul), while Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem fell to the rising Arabs. In other words, 4 of the 5 original Christian holy cities are currently under Muslim control. That is not a coincidence. Those cities were Christian before Islam was founded and flipped to Islam during its rise. The area currently under Muslim control consists of a large chunk of the original territory of Christianity because the Muslims are the descendants of people who were (non-Catholic, non-Orthodox) Christian in 400 AD. The Muslims could even credibly claim to be the 'true' successors to Christ, if not for the fact that doing so would be completely meaningless because religion isn't about making sense.
Also this was not even remotely the start of the holy wars. Before Greek Christians were fighting Egyptian Muslims, it was Greek Orthodox fighting Egyptian Monophysites. Very little actually changed, except that the non-Catholic non-Orthodox Christians founded their own 'Islamic' empire as a counterweight to Constantinople and Rome.
Sunshine
4d ago
Like most Supreme Court rulings, I think this is entirely correct. I don't have anything against the concept of tariffs per se, but this nonsense about using the Executive to go around the Legislative needs to stop. Congress is supposed to govern, not shrug and let the President do whatever he wants (without even specifically authorizing him to do so).
Sunshine
7d ago
The nomads had a good run up until the Late Middle Ages. Nomad warfare as exemplified by the Mongols was more of a parallel tech tree than an earlier stage of development. The horse archer was the pinnacle of military technology right up until 100,000 guys with guns became the pinnacle of military technology.
Sunshine
7d ago
Not to mention the fact that England was not Italy. England was an absolute bitch to invade after the Royal Navy got going, so they essentially never faced direct attack. As a result there were relatively few fortifications and standing armies compared to Italy, which was invaded pretty much nonstop by the French, the Germans, the Spanish, and other Italians. I would bet that the merchants of Italy were a lot 'harder' than those of England.
I didn't say they were driven by their 'desertness'. The 'desert power' analogy is actually about how the Arabs (and the Fremen in Dune for that matter) were actually very sophisticated in military technology, not about poverty causing strength. Just as Britain dominated through its ability to attack anyone anywhere and then retreat behind their oceans to avoid counterattack, the Arabs could do the same in their deserts with their cavalry-centric armies and survival expertise.
The Arab rise to power coincided with the Eastern Roman Empire switching to a much more cavalry-centric army. At that time in military history, the vast infantry armies of antiquity were giving way to the cavalry-centric armies and armored knights of the middle ages. Infantry powers like Rome were supplanted by cavalry powers like the Arabs. Later the Arabs would sweep through Spain and only be stopped by another cavalry-centric army of Franks led by Charles Martel, which led in turn through the course of military evolution to the heavy cavalry-centric armies of France which dominated Europe. They were only supplanted in their supremacy by the Mongols, at which point cavalry peaked and went into decline with the rise of mass levies, pike-and-shot, and artillery warfare.
The Arabs were highly united and driven when doing their conquests, but that's because they had just been united by a fresh new mission-oriented religion
This is, in fact, what I am referring to when I talk about asabiyyah. A defining factor of the 'Fremen mirage' is that the barbarians are internally united by a common desire to conquer the wealthy civilized nations. This was true of both the Arabs in real life (Muslims have a notoriously us-vs-them mentality) and the Fremen in Dune (with their Green Paradise).
I think there's a motte and a bailey involved, here. Yes the Japanese lost to the Americans despite relative hardness vs. softness. In many ways the hardness of their society made them brittle, like how their army and navy were constantly lying to each other. Hard societies tend to infight with higher stakes than soft societies, with resultant consequences. However, the flipside of this is that it's pretty undeniable that pound-for-pound the Japanese got more value out of their limited resources than the Americans did. A theoretical Japan that had all of America's advantages (like sources of oil deep inside their own territory and a massive industrial output) could quite possibly have won that war.
The core concept of the Fremen 'mirage' is that a poor society can conceal deep reserves of human capital and a highly militarized society with great asabiyyah can punch far above its weight class. If anything the Japanese are a bad example; they were not poor but quite rich, not underdeveloped but the most developed of the Asian nations, and their asabiyyah was inconsistent at best.
The core example is the Arabs. They swept out of their desert, conquered the Middle East and North Africa, and pushed into Europe before ultimately being pushed back. Their apparent lack of wealth and technology belied the fact that their lifestyle had instilled them with immense martial prowess. Their horses were among the best in the world, and the Western European powers would later go out of their way to import Arabian horses to breed at home. Most of all they had such great asabiyyah that asabiyyah is, in fact, an Arabic word.
Dune is based on Lawrence of Arabia, which is a story about a British army officer supporting the Arabic revolt against the Ottoman Turks, based loosely on true events. He talks about 'desert power' as an analogy to sea power, and this same metaphor is used in Dune to compare Caladan (a water planet, like how Britain is an island) to Arrakis (a desert planet, like how Arabia is a desert). The Ottoman Sultan was called the Padishah, which is why the Emperor in Dune is called the Padishah Emperor (and why his name is Shaddam).
This is not meant to be subtle. The first point of comparison for the Fremen should be the Arabs.
Sunshine
10d ago
I think an important part of successful civil disobedience is that you have to appear sympathetic to onlookers. The fact that you're just trying to ride the bus and the cops insist on dragging you out in handcuffs makes them look deranged and you look like an innocent victim. If you're the one attacking the cops, you're the one who comes across as deranged.
Sunshine
13d ago
I'm broadly aligned with you in this regard. Bad history in historical fiction is a pet peeve of mine. I've always felt that the truth of history is more interesting than the shallow preconceptions we have of it. Writers tend to write what they know, and the result tends to be derivative. Actual history is fresh and exciting precisely because it's so rarely portrayed.
That being said, holding others to an unrealistically high standard isn't going to help you. No one who would write a black Boleyn was ever going to write an honest work of historical fiction, so complaining about what she did write is just a waste of your mental energy.
If you want accurate historical fiction you'll have to write it yourself. Be the change you want to see in the world.
Sunshine
15d ago
Those 'markets' would require nothing more than a blog or Youtube account and a well-trusted reviewer with a following.
Sunshine
16d ago
All current generation AIs rely on someone telling them what to do. ChatGPT will do what you ask it to do and no more. Telling people what to do is surprisingly hard, and telling AIs what to do has most of the same challenges plus a bigger communication barrier.
For safety and legal reasons I would be really surprised if someone made a completely autonomous robot whose job it was to give orders to the other robots. That seems like tempting fate. On some level, bossing around a flock of robots is going to be a job until we develop trustworthy strong AI. The AI we currently have is neither strong nor trustworthy.
Sunshine
16d ago
If you make more money from your book series than anyone ever has before then you must be doing something right.
Sunshine
16d ago
If the market collapses then you create demand for someone to create a new market with less crap.
Sunshine
16d ago
If your market consists of 99 derivative rip-offs and one legitimately interesting and fresh idea, the fresh idea will take half the market and the 99 rip-offs will fight over the other half. If there are 999,999 derivative rip-offs, then they'll have to split their half a lot more ways but they still won't be able to push in on the fresh idea's cut.
Art is a winner-takes-all industry. The JK Rowlings and Terry Pratchetts of the world have many thousands of times as many sales as Joe Average churning out derivative slop that's merely so-so. The addition of more slop won't change the core dynamic. Fundamentally, anyone trying to get the audience to accept a lower quality product isn't pitting themselves against the ingenuity of the artist, but the ingenuity of the audience. Trying to hide information from a crowd that has you outnumbered thousands-to-one is not easy.
I feel roughly the same. I think that AI will destroy a bunch of jobs that were the intellectual equivalent of menial labor, but create an equal or greater number of creative jobs. If you're writing formulaic grant proposals or building websites with React then AI is coming for your job, but that's not a bad thing. An LLM can replace a web designer, but only a full-blown strong AI can replace the UX designer whose job it is to tell the LLM what website to make.
LLMs won't replace the actual nerds. It'll replace the 0.5X programmers, the offshore assets, the email-senders, the box-tickers, and the bureaucrats. On a fundamental level there will still need to be someone to tell the AI what to do.
Sunshine
19d ago
Nobody needs to be deprogrammed. Behind every inflammatory internet video there is a man trying to make a living by producing internet videos. Politics drives engagement, engagement drives ad revenue. Nothing to explain.
And by the way, you're encouraging it by linking the video.
I think it's more that they were comfortable with a certain degree of age gap, but uncomfortable with an excessively large one. It was considered perfectly normal for an 18-year-old woman to marry a 35-year-old man, but abnormal if the man was in his 70s.
The reason was just that there was generally a shortage of eligible men. 18-year-old men were less likely to have a living to support a wife regardless of social class, whereas by 35 they might have a successful career. This wasn't just for artisans and farmers, either; for a younger son of the gentry this career might be as a lawyer, clergyman, or army officer, but the trend of only becoming established later in life was there.
In other words, there were a lot of 18-year-old women who preferred to marry a man who was established and able to easily support them over one who was actually their age. This has the opposite effect for a 70-year-old man who might not be able to support his wife, not least of which because he'll soon be dead.
I doubt they would put it this way, but I would expect that the rule of thumb in the olden days would be that an age gap is appropriate if the man is likely to continue to be able to impregnate his wife through her entire fertile window. Otherwise he's a dog in the manger depriving her of the opportunity to have children with a more suitable man.
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