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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   33531 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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First, this looks suspiciously like textbook "How to lose your empire in five easy steps" guide:

The historians write "Decline and fall of the $EMPIRE"

I feel like most people who cite "Hard Times stronk men..." memes haven't actually read Gibbon. Because something they miss: It's an INCREDIBLY long fucking book, 795 pages in a Penguin edition on Amazon.

Barbarian recruitment started in earnest under Hadrian, who was definitely a top-10 Emperor. I don't recall exact dates for when barbarian recruitment began within his reign, but certainly by the end of his reign in 138 AD much of the border defense was handled by barbarian immigrants resettled in the Empire.

Depending where you lived, this was somewhere between 250 and 1200 years from the final end of the Roman Empire. Maximinius Thrax, who iirc was the first barbarian Emperor, ruled in 235 AD.

Barbarian recruitment still puts the US Empire potentially hundreds of years from collapse if you are lucky enough to live in the imperial core. Unless you live in the imperial core at a time of civil war, in which case you're more likely to get murdered in a power struggle anyway. And if you live in Armenia, you're likely to get traded back and forth to the Persians a dozen times regardless of how Rome is doing.

When we talk about historical cycles, we need to take account of what a reasonable career for an empire looks like. The majority of the Roman Imperial era was one of decline. If you go through and rank all the emperors, there weren't more than twenty good ones out of about 70 who held the title in Rome. Hell, out of the biblical kings of Israel, there were like four who (according to the bible) weren't complete shit, the Jews are still riding on that Saul-David-Solomon run of decent kings. Same story for France, HRE, Romanovs, Han, Ming, Qing, Ottomans. Competency is the exception. Human history is built off brief periods of empire building, followed by long periods of decline.

As an aside, I don't think we can call NATO seriously desperate in Ukraine until they start recruiting African legions on promises of EU visas for up to four members of their families if they serve a 3 year spell in Ukraine. Forget manpower problems. How many applications from 18-25 year old men do you think they could get if they opened up recruitment?

Judging by the general competence of the elites and how poorly correlated success in politics and competence are, I don’t hold us in much higher regard than the worst of the emperors. Given the crises that we simply cannot possibly deal with as responsible people, I don’t think the cliff is as far away as we think it is.

I didn't say it will happen tomorrow. But also, things tend to happen much faster in the modern era. I personally hope to be dead before the empire begins to collapse in an obvious way. But I do think we're somewhere in the "decline" path already.

I don't think we can call NATO seriously desperate in Ukraine until they start recruiting African legions on promises of EU visas

NATO is doing its very best to avoid being a side of the conflict, for now (their explicit words, not mine) so I don't think this tells us much. But I don't want to get too deep into Ukraine matters here, it would be very distracting from the main points.

NATO is doing its very best to avoid being a side of the conflict, for now (their explicit words, not mine) so I don't think this tells us much.

It seems such an obvious, and from the perspective of neoliberal elites cost-free, method to achieve the goal that to leave it on the table tells us something about seriousness. The EU accepts that a certain number of migrants from third world countries will arrive each year, and most EU elites seem to view this as a broadly good thing for the countries involved. Why not kill two birds with one stone?

The major difference here is that the barbarians that constituted the ranks of the late Roman army were Germanic, so barbarian recruitment resulted in the Germanization of the Roman army in contrast with the increasingly multi-racialized Roman empire. Earlier writers, in a non-PC manner, have described the Germanization of the Roman army and subsequent barbarian invasions as having a cleansing effect on the decaying empire. Contrary to popular conception, there is basically no non-European genetic contribution to modern Italians today despite the multi-racial character of the late Roman Empire.

The operative characteristic here is that barbarian recruitment preceded what was essentially the barbarian expulsion of non-European people on the continent vis-a-vis the destruction of the multi-racial Roman empire, whereas today the US military increasingly being made up of non-Europeans is the culmination of a demographic replacement that you can't really recover from in the same way. Political systems come and go, when a people change they change.

barbarian recruitment preceded what was essentially the barbarian expulsion of non-European people on the continent vis-a-vis the destruction of the multi-racial Roman empire

I wasn't aware of any expulsion of non-Europeans on the part of the post-Roman Germanic kings. My impression was that the multiethnic urban Romans simply died out on their own due to below-replacement fertility rates, repeated sackings of major cities during Justinian's wars of reconquest, and the subsequent plague. Their replacement by peasants from the countryside with a more traditional conservative culture was the most likely source of any moral "cleansing" of the former empire, rather than the influence of the small and soon assimilated Germanic minority that ruled them for a time.

I mean the multi-racial project, which was Imperial Rome, was destroyed by the barbarians. It was the destruction of those institutions and subsequent gene flow from Europe, not actual deportation policies by the barbarians, that removed the genetic legacy of non-Europeans from the imperial age in Italy. Although the population of Rome collapsed due to violence, epidemics, etc.

no non-European genetic contribution to modern Italians today

What about the Arab conquest of Southern Italy? IMO, that's the moment when Southern and Northern Italy began to be distinguished. In the North, Renaissance, industry, glass, cloth, Ferrari, Fiat. In the South, backwardness, corruption, mafia, clannishness. There was nothing like that back in Roman times, Syracuse (and Alexandria for that matter) were great centres of learning and highly developed.

North African admixture is 0-2% of Italy depending on the location, with the exception of Sicily where the DNA contribution is highest and maxes out around 6% overall. The largest non-Italian genetic legacy in Italy is the Greeks in Sicily.

The Bell-Beaker tribes that conquered the Italian peninsula emerged from the North. As you move North to South, you get relatively less Indo-European admixture and relatively more admixture from Early European Farmers. The outliers are the Sardinians who have almost no Indo-European admixture and are ~95% genetically identical to the EEF of Neolithic Italy. Sardinians provide a good illustration for how Southern European phenotype is derived from European populations and not Arab admixture.

There is somewhat a lack of DNA samples from Latin Romans since they practiced cremation, but Wikipedia has a pretty good description:

Latin samples from Latium in the Iron Age and early Roman Republican period were generally found to genetically cluster closest to modern Northern and Central Italians (four out of six were closest to Northern and Central Italians, while the other two were closest to Southern Italians).[16] DNA analysis demonstrates that ancient Greek colonization had a significant lasting effect on the local genetic landscape of Southern Italy and Sicily (Magna Graecia), with modern people from that region having significant Greek admixture.[17][18] Overall, the genetic differentiation between the Latins, Etruscans and the preceding proto-Villanovan population of Italy was found to be insignificant.[19] In 2019, aDNA analysis of Roman fossils detected substantial genetic ancestry shift towards Central and Northern European ancestry in the inhabitants of the city of Rome in late antiquity and the medieval era. The authors tentatively link the origin of this ancestry with Visigoths and Lombards.[2][20] A 2020 analysis of maternal haplogroups from ancient and modern samples indicates a substantial genetic similarity and continuity between the modern inhabitants of Umbria in central Italy and ancient inhabitants of the region belonging to the Italic-speaking Umbrian culture.

The barbarians, ironically, brought the genetic profile of Rome back to be more in line with the Iron Age / Early Roman Republic and reversed the massive changes in the Imperial Age with almost no genetic legacy of non-Europeans from that time:

In the Medieval and early modern periods (n = 28 individuals), we observe an ancestry shift toward central and northern Europe in PCA (Fig. 3E), as well as a further increase in the European cluster (C7) and loss of the Near Eastern and eastern Mediterranean clusters (C4 and C5) in ChromoPainter (Fig. 4C). The Medieval population is roughly centered on modern-day central Italians (Fig. 3F). It can be modeled as a two-way combination of Rome’s Late Antique population and a European donor population, with potential sources including many ancient and modern populations in central and northern Europe: Lombards from Hungary, Saxons from England, and Vikings from Sweden, among others (table S26)... This shift is consistent with the growing ties between Medieval Rome and mainland Europe.

... Huh?

Germanic people stepping in to fill a warrior-caste type arrangement with Rome is very different than white people being demographically displaced.

How is it different for people who don’t care about skin color?

If you remove the assumption that genes matter then there's no limits to the imagination to be honest. But if we want to talk about two instances of demographic change, it's highly relevant that the case of the Barbarians in Rome represents a reversion from the multi-racial Imperial Roman project back towards a European population type, whereas this project in the United States represents... something else.

I mean aside from the fact that pretty much everyone in the Roman Empire was white-ish(the only province with a large population that didn’t have a predominately euro appearance was Egypt, and even that wasn’t universal) that’s an argument that has to be made, which you haven’t done.

‘Guatemalans are ruing our HBD potential’ is semi plausible, but it hasn’t been made as an argument(and anyways Hispanic tfr tends to decline very fast once north of the border while red tribe tfr is stable at replacement, so it’s not as if the HBD argument is undefeatable).

I mean aside from the fact that pretty much everyone in the Roman Empire was white-ish(the only province with a large population that didn’t have a predominately euro appearance was Egypt, and even that wasn’t universal) that’s an argument that has to be made, which you haven’t done.

That was true until Imperial Rome gave everyone citizenship. This was observed in a paper I linked in a different comment.

Look at the radical shift in the genetic profile from the Roman Republic to Imperial Rome. Granted, this may likely be exaggerated as non-Latin citizens would have been less likely to have been cremated than Latin Romans, so they may be oversampled in this analysis.

Late Antiquity and Fall of Rome:

The average ancestry of the Late Antique individuals (n = 24) shifts away from the Near East and toward modern central European populations in PCA (Fig. 3D)... This ancestry shift is also reflected in ChromoPainter results by the drastic shrinkage of the Near Eastern cluster (C4), maintenance of the two Mediterranean clusters (C5 and C6), and marked expansion of the European cluster (C7) (Fig. 4C).

Medieval Period:

In the Medieval and early modern periods (n = 28 individuals), we observe an ancestry shift toward central and northern Europe in PCA (Fig. 3E), as well as a further increase in the European cluster (C7) and loss of the Near Eastern and eastern Mediterranean clusters (C4 and C5) in ChromoPainter (Fig. 4C). The Medieval population is roughly centered on modern-day central Italians (Fig. 3F). It can be modeled as a two-way combination of Rome’s Late Antique population and a European donor population, with potential sources including many ancient and modern populations in central and northern Europe: Lombards from Hungary, Saxons from England, and Vikings from Sweden, among others (table S26).

So non-European clusters emerged during Imperial Rome, and then disappeared by the Medieval period.

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