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Let me demonstrate what I mean. Imagine you have two cards. With one card, you get a lethal strain and 90% of your population die. With the other it's a less dangerous strain, and also makes you immune to the other strain. The Europeans draw both cards, but in a random order. In reality they drew the less lethal version first, so they are protected from the second card. The Americans take only the second card. So they hit the dangerous, lethal strain with no prior immunity. The important thing is that the ordering of the two cards is random. There is no reason why a dangerous disease is preceded by a less lethal strain. It all comes down to random mutations, and the way this turned out to the advantage of the Europeans just comes down to the random ordering of the two cards. Thus while in reality the Europeans drew the cards in the right order and were protected, there is a very likely counterfactual that the *first strain* the Europeans encountered is the dangerous one and so Europe is the one that takes 90% deaths, while the Americans only get exposed to a less dangerous version of the disease. In fact, evolutionarily, this outcome is actually a bit *more* likely than how things turned out. Pathogens that newly make the leap over to humans are typically more dangerous. The argument that getting exposed to a lot of diseases means you have acquired immunity means that yes, encountering a new individual doesn't add much *additional* risk. But the very act of acquiring those immunities through exposure to new emerging diseases is insanely risky. You are not somehow better off living in squalor and filth. Fangz fucked around with this message at 10:49 on Sep 26, 2022 |
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Sep 26, 2022 10:40
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Fangz posted:Let me demonstrate what I mean. Imagine you have two cards. With one card, you get a lethal strain and 90% of your population die. With the other it's a less dangerous strain, and also makes you immune to the other strain. I don't think I like this new Magic: the Gathering expansion.
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Sep 26, 2022 10:50
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:For starters, the colonization of Africa begins in the 1400s, and the African states were more or less at parity with Europeans when it came to land wars until the 1800s. I thought it began in 146 BC. 
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Sep 26, 2022 11:43
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Colonization began out of Africa and going back in is always okay
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Sep 26, 2022 12:29
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Fuschia tude posted:I thought it began in 146 BC. It began some millions of years ago when our ancestors came down from trees.
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Sep 26, 2022 12:47
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Fuschia tude posted:I thought it began in 146 BC. surely you should go back at least to 305 BC if you're going to play that silly little game
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Sep 26, 2022 14:59
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:surely you should go back at least to 305 BC if you're going to play that silly little game The end of the Second Samnite War? Actually, if you want to go earlier, wouldn't 332 BC be an even better date?
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Sep 26, 2022 15:13
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mllaneza posted:How much of the difference between the Old and New Worlds levels of development can be attributed to the New World people having had to emigrate vast distances over millennia to get established ? Please, please, please do not buy into the idea that the people of the Americas were "less developed." That's racist bullshit. (Edit: I am not saying you are a racist. Rather, the contention ("less developed") is.) When the Spanish arrived in Tenochtitlan they were AWED by the scale and scope of Mexica (Aztec) civilization. The city had a population of (Cortez's estimate) 400,000, larger than Paris, Vienna, or Constantinople. (And five times larger than contemporary London.) They had hydrology-based civil engineering, cities built on artificial/man-made islands, compulsory public education regardless of social class, state-run academics with poets and philosophers ("tlamatini"), women's rights, elected rulers, and cities with government funded public sanitation. The people bathed twice daily. There was mandatory education, government sponsored poetry, you name it. These weren't primitive people. Cessna fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Sep 26, 2022 |
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Sep 26, 2022 15:33
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Fuschia tude posted:The end of the Second Samnite War? I'm taking Lagids but yeah 332 is probably better
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Sep 26, 2022 16:15
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Fangz posted:Yes, but that isn't an evolutionary survival of the fittest thing. It's a matter of the lethal strain being preceeded in a certain population by a less lethal one, *against* the usual evolutionary gradient. Fangz posted:Let me demonstrate what I mean. Imagine you have two cards. With one card, you get a lethal strain and 90% of your population die. With the other it's a less dangerous strain, and also makes you immune to the other strain. No. While new diseases do trend to become less deadly over time as they settle into a rhythm and homeostasis with their host population, that doesn't mean that all diseases start out in their deadliest forms and gradually get less deadly. Viruses and bacteria have a complex and erratic development that create constant mutations all the time, so deadly strains can randomly crop out of less deadly strains. It's actually pretty common for new epidemics to be some variant of already-known diseases. The Black Plague wasn't even the first recorded instance of Bubonic Plague. As such, there will often be populations with antibodies that may have some amount of effectiveness to newer strains, or even have developed systems that are better at responding to those specific diseases, or are at the very least can sooner adapt to newer strains than you can without. There's also a lot of diseases that are more dangerous to adults that childhood exposure somehow end up in a fairly lesser form, which is why there's traditions of intentionally infecting your kids with chickenpox or mumps or whatnot and trying to spread the disease among the population. We also get some amount of antibodies from our parents, through breastfeeding or even just physically sharing the blood in the process of the fetus developing. Often not enough for full immunity, but a nonzero amount that still helps for faster later adaptation. Our immune systems are designed to find as many shortcuts to fighting disease as possible. Some diseases develop that as part of their life cycle, just infecting and spreading in the short window before the body's built-up immunity kicks it out. Some managed to develop longer incubation cycles where they could stay hidden before presenting symptoms. Which is why it made so much difference when the New World got exposed to diseases that had spent the last few thousand years developing as part of the Old World's ecosystem. Even more minor disease strains that would otherwise get kicked out after a little while could turn deadlier if they just stuck around inside a non-immune body without anything close to the antibodies they needed to respond.
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Sep 26, 2022 17:26
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I don't see how any of that contradicts what I said.
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Sep 26, 2022 17:55
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SlothfulCobra posted:No. Other factor is there are often related families of viruses/disease (Covid-19 is one variety of coronavirus for example), and developed immunity to one relative can convey benefits to resisting the others depending on the antigens. In the case of smallpox in particular you had cowpox which was similar enough to be used for vaccination (I seem to recall Jenner even hit on the idea of using cowpox by noticing milkmaids with prior cowpox infections were more resistant to smallpox via epidemiology). So it's quite possible to build up resistance even when the disease is not actively spreading, because most diseases are actually mutations that suddenly raise an otherwise nominally benign version of a virus/bacteria to a infectious one, and depending on the antigens on the infectious one your body may have been encountering that as a target for years thanks to the benign kin. Many deadly pandemics come from sudden significant antigen changes getting the infectious agent far enough away from the "background" version to escape pre-existing immune response, either via mutation or cross-over from relatives (like the various swine/avian/etc. flu infections when antigens from those viruses get crossed into the human flu). If North Americans didn't have any of those relatives presenting immune system challenges thanks to isolation, they might very well be more susceptible to certain diseases than Europeans by having more naive immune responses to them.
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Sep 26, 2022 21:28
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:surely you should go back at least to 305 BC if you're going to play that silly little game I mean the Phoenicians set up a colonial government in Africa way back in like 800 BCE. Eventually the native Africans managed to dismantle it with a little help from some foreign mercenaries who then ended up staying for another 1000 years or so...
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Sep 26, 2022 22:59
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sullat posted:I mean the Phoenicians set up a colonial government in Africa way back in like 800 BCE. Eventually the native Africans managed to dismantle it with a little help from some foreign mercenaries who then ended up staying for another 1000 years or so... Calling Phoenicia "Europeans" feels like a bit of stretch, though.
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Sep 26, 2022 23:28
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Phonecia is very clearly part of Asia
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Sep 27, 2022 00:21
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We have always been at war with east phonecia
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Sep 27, 2022 00:31
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MadDogMike posted:Other factor is there are often related families of viruses/disease (Covid-19 is one variety of coronavirus for example), and developed immunity to one relative can convey benefits to resisting the others depending on the antigens. In the case of smallpox in particular you had cowpox which was similar enough to be used for vaccination (I seem to recall Jenner even hit on the idea of using cowpox by noticing milkmaids with prior cowpox infections were more resistant to smallpox via epidemiology). Yes, and in fact etymologically "vaccination" is essentially "encowment". It's obsolete now, but the word vaccine was the cow equivalent of equine for horses or porcine for pigs.
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Sep 27, 2022 01:35
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The Phoenician thing got me thinking about alphabets. Does the development of written language translate into greater military power or the ability to project power? Did having their writing system help Phoenicia militarily? I honestly know nothing about Phoenician history.
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Sep 27, 2022 01:37
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Saul Kain posted:The Phoenician thing got me thinking about alphabets. Does the development of written language translate into greater military power or the ability to project power? Did having their writing system help Phoenicia militarily? If I recall correctly, written language was originally developed to facilitate trade, which sure sounds to me like it could make logistics easier. And we all know how important logistics is to military operations!
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Sep 27, 2022 02:14
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^^^I’m leery of claims like “writing was for X” because I doubt you know the inventors intentions and even if you did writing has been developed multiple times. Saul Kain posted:The Phoenician thing got me thinking about alphabets. Does the development of written language translate into greater military power or the ability to project power? Did having their writing system help Phoenicia militarily? It helps the poo poo out of logistics and planning and communicating, but its development is also correlated with those so teasing apart causality is gonna be hard. Then you have the fact that societies with writing tend to be better documented for pretty obvious reasons. You’d need to have a test culture that didn’t have writing and then suddenly gained or lost it without other major changes or a lot of time passing (then subject to this being just a case study). Maybe Cherokee? A particularly violent group of novel sign language users that someone hands a writing system to? Xiahou Dun fucked around with this message at 02:22 on Sep 27, 2022 |
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Sep 27, 2022 02:20
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Xiahou Dun posted:You’d need to have a test culture that didn’t have writing and then suddenly gained or lost it without other major changes or a lot of time passing (then subject to this being just a case study). Maybe Cherokee? A particularly violent group of novel sign language users that someone hands a writing system to? Not a language expert but the Central Eurasian Steppe tribes (Xiong Nu, Scythians, Huns) were always taught to me as nomadic empires without a written language or simple script not yet developed into a full language at best. We do know some of the Xiong Nu eventually were taught Chinese script from the endless exchanges/extortion/bribes/princess brides with the Han dynasty but it appears they created their massive confederation/empire without the aid of writing. The Scythians also did quite well for themselves without writing although it can be argued that since Steppe armies were generally not bound by a logistic train that it didn't hinder them.
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Sep 27, 2022 02:43
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MikeC posted:Not a language expert but the Central Eurasian Steppe tribes (Xiong Nu, Scythians, Huns) were always taught to me as nomadic empires without a written language or simple script not yet developed into a full language at best. We do know some of the Xiong Nu eventually were taught Chinese script from the endless exchanges/extortion/bribes/princess brides with the Han dynasty but it appears they created their massive confederation/empire without the aid of writing. The Scythians also did quite well for themselves without writing although it can be argued that since Steppe armies were generally not bound by a logistic train that it didn't hinder them. I'm not an expert in that contact scenario, but my understanding is that they didn't gain writing, they usually just learned Chinese, or even more commonly, employed/"employed" people who already spoke Chinese. Which, assuming I'm not solely huffing my own farts, would make it more complicated. Also the fact that, again going by just my fallible memory, those steppe peoples tended to have already done much if not most of their conquering before this happened so if anything it's just proving that you can do a lot of sophisticated logistics without writing.
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Sep 27, 2022 02:53
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Xiahou Dun posted:^^^I’m leery of claims like “writing was for X” because I doubt you know the inventors intentions and even if you did writing has been developed multiple times. Yeah, sorry, super sloppy language on my part. The evidence we have of writing from that era involves things we're pretty sure were trade-related. Is that better?
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Sep 27, 2022 03:04
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Yeah, sorry, super sloppy language on my part. The evidence we have of writing from that era involves things we're pretty sure were trade-related. Is that better? Sure, but I think now the problem is that you've reduced "writing" to "cuneiform".
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Sep 27, 2022 03:11
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Steppe logistics can’t be easily replicated without wholesale adopting a steppe lifestyle, though, no? Like an agricultural empire can’t theoretically go “We don’t need writing to manage our logistics, we can just rely on a permanently mobile herd of animals tended by our equally mobile non-combatants and moved by vast herds of horses across constant rotating grazing lands not used for anything else, bing bong so simple.” Feels like that might be a slightly apples to oranges comparison if we’re talking about whether writing is necessary for sophisticated logistics. For that matter, don’t most steppe empires tend to be built around tribute networks rather than any real administrative control over the territories they covered? Edit: Come to think of it, that's a point - arguably writing makes taxing and administering territory much easier, and steady tax revenues make raising large armies much easier in turn, and so indirectly writing brings about military benefits by making it possible to have a larger, more sophisticated army regardless of its role on the battlefield. Tomn fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Sep 27, 2022 |
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Sep 27, 2022 04:06
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Xiahou Dun posted:Sure, but I think now the problem is that you've reduced "writing" to "cuneiform". Which is a tempting thing to do if you want to do look at how and why writing developed, since cuneiform is pretty much the only writing system we can trace the development of in detail. We know pretty well how cuneiform evolved, since we can compare thousands of different artifacts and texts from the several century long year formative period of the script and trace each step of the process. Egyptian hieroglyphs appear in our earliest texts in a fully formed system, so we are certainly missing the formative period of that script, and Mesoamerican texts are not well attested enough for us to begin to work out their process of development. I'm not as well versed in Chinese writing, but as far as I know, we only have a handful of early inscriptions to go off of for studying how the Chinese script initially developed. If you want to look at how writing initially evolved, non-cuneiform options don't give you that much to work with. That said, we of course shouldn't assume the same factors that we can observe in cuneiform's development existed elsewhere, but its also hard not to fall back on that when there is so little else to work with. TooMuchAbstraction posted:Yeah, sorry, super sloppy language on my part. The evidence we have of writing from that era involves things we're pretty sure were trade-related. Is that better? Which era are you talking about? Phoenicians are pretty late adopters of writing, they don't start producing written texts until over 2000 years after the first writing in the region appeared. By the early first millennium BC, the era of Phoenician colonial power, writing was already incredibly old, and was in use for just about every purpose imaginable.
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Sep 27, 2022 04:36
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Sure, but I think you're being much more willing to generalize from the genesis of cuneiform than I am. I think it's more than fair to give it as exemplar and of course it should be studied, but no way I'm going to even tentatively assume a causative relationship of commerce to writing. You wanna turn that into a hypothesis and use it on the earliest samples of the other writing systems hoping for evidence? Totally could be talked into that, but that's a much lower bar to clear. Also just to fill in : the earliest surviving writing samples we have for Chinese, the writing system is fully formed and already employing the same complex forms used today and we know two very important things from the texts themselves : 1) the text themselves references things much further back, including other writing we don't have and 2) they're all written on a hard surface (bone, tortoise shell, some metal) and etched/embossed/carved/etc. while the texts make it clear other writing was done with a brush, so we actually aren't sure what that writing system looks like beyond the assumption that it's hopefully not a completely distinct system.
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Sep 27, 2022 04:54
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Tomn posted:Steppe logistics can’t be easily replicated without wholesale adopting a steppe lifestyle, though, no? Like an agricultural empire can’t theoretically go “We don’t need writing to manage our logistics, we can just rely on a permanently mobile herd of animals tended by our equally mobile non-combatants and moved by vast herds of horses across constant rotating grazing lands not used for anything else, bing bong so simple.” Feels like that might be a slightly apples to oranges comparison if we’re talking about whether writing is necessary for sophisticated logistics. For that matter, don’t most steppe empires tend to be built around tribute networks rather than any real administrative control over the territories they covered? So the question originally was whether writing translated into greater military power or the ability to power projection. Without any qualifiers attached to the question, one has to point out that nomadic cultures often commanded great tracts of land and defeated agrarian-based empires in head-to-head confrontations repeatedly, and extracted great amounts of wealth via vassalage or "peace terms" otherwise known as bribing you to go raid somebody else. It should also be noted that many dynasties in agrarian-based empires were originally nomadic steppe warriors that conquered an existing agrarian society and became the ruling nobility or administrative class or the regions they came to dominate. Examples of illiterate nomadic cultures that defeated agrarian societies include the Parthian Arsacid dynasty and the aforementioned Scythians who dominated the Black Sea steppes and ruled over the settlements that rimmed the northern part of that area. We all know about the Huns who were finally turned back at the Catalaunian Plains and eventually settled on the Hungarian steppes. Certainly after the steppe nomads had won and settled down, they either conscripted the existing civil service they inherited to do the work for them or had to learn reading and writing to manage it themselves. While nomadic kingdoms and empires were often shortlived, they were extremely powerful militarily, once every few centuries whenever a steppe warlord managed to overcome the hurdles of binding the various clans into a horde and gain the first few victories needed to snowball, few civilizations managed to remain intact. The fact that this pattern persisted both before and after the widespread adoption of Turkic script in the 7th(?) CE by the nomadic central steppes suggests that they didn't need writing to go rampage across civilized lands. While the nomadic steppe peoples throughout Antiquity were not by any means homogeneous, ranging from archaic Iranian-speaking peoples of Cimmeria and Scythia to the Xiong Nu who was probably some sort of Turkic in their ethnicity, their basic military organization of massed horse archers along with sometimes conscripted infantry from vassals or subjected peoples is remarkably consistent. So much so that two military treatises, written by civilized societies on opposite ends of the Central Eurasian steppe corridor, at different periods in time, on exactly how to deal with these nomads in battle are similar. The Strategikon and the Guard the Frontiers and Protect the Borders were two different documents, one Byzantine and the other Han Chinese, which outlined similar nature of nomadic steppe warfare despite being written 500+ years apart. So with that out of the way, a poster said yes, writing does increase military power/ force projection because of logistics. If that is the case then the question has to be asked how the steppe nomads did it conquering vast swathes of civilized lands in repeated waves throughout history? Or is it the case that writing is required for centralized agrarian societies which wage war in a particular fashion and if you are able to free yourself from that constraint like the steppe nomads, then it is no longer required to be successful militarily and to project power over vast distances? If you want to say limit the hypothesis to "writing improves an agrarian society's ability to wage war" then it has to be pointed out that without writing, complex centralized agrarian societies which need logistics of the type suggested wouldn't even exist, to begin with. As Xiahou Dun notes, it is very difficult to disentangle the two.
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Sep 27, 2022 06:35
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MikeC posted:Certainly after the steppe nomads had won and settled down, they either conscripted the existing civil service they inherited to do the work for them or had to learn reading and writing to manage it themselves. I feel like this is the heart of the answer. That writing and the logistical systems it supports are not the only way to go about wars of conquest, but it is needed when it comes to actually holding what has been taken.
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Sep 27, 2022 07:14
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MikeC posted:So with that out of the way, a poster said yes, writing does increase military power/ force projection because of logistics. If that is the case then the question has to be asked how the steppe nomads did it conquering vast swathes of civilized lands in repeated waves throughout history? Or is it the case that writing is required for centralized agrarian societies which wage war in a particular fashion and if you are able to free yourself from that constraint like the steppe nomads, then it is no longer required to be successful militarily and to project power over vast distances? If you want to say limit the hypothesis to "writing improves an agrarian society's ability to wage war" then it has to be pointed out that without writing, complex centralized agrarian societies which need logistics of the type suggested wouldn't even exist, to begin with. I gotta be honest, I feel like this is basically restating what I said in my original post. We're not in D&D anymore, man, sometimes it's possible to explore different tangents without having an argument about it. The only thing I was suggesting is more or less the last bit - that steppe logistics and agrarian logistics are so different that you can't say "writing was neither necessary nor seemed to materially improve steppe war-making abilities, thus it disproves the idea that writing in general improves warmaking abilities" - it's theoretically possible for writing to have little effect on one but to significantly benefit the other. Whether it actually does or not is, as has been stated, difficult to disentangle from the development of administration in general (though one might argue, as I noted, that improving administration does indirectly improve military capabilities, at least in agrarian societies.) Come to think of it, IS it necessary to disentangle the two? If we can say that writing was a prerequisite for complex administration and complex administration is in turn a prerequisite for large, organized armies as fielded by agrarian societies, couldn't we say then that writing does indeed translate to greater military power, at least for agrarian societies? Steppe nomads are kind of their own thing, but given two agrarian societies, one with writing and one without, how are things likely to play out? ARE there any examples of large settled empires without any form of writing system at all?
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Sep 27, 2022 07:50
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Fangz posted:I don't see how any of that contradicts what I said. it's the opposite of what you said
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Sep 27, 2022 11:13
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It's not.
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Sep 27, 2022 12:06
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Whats the shelf life on ammo given a climate controlled room? Does this change when you go from talking about bullets to bigger stuff like dumb bombs or hellfire missiles?
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Sep 27, 2022 14:36
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That depends HUGELY on a lot of poo poo. For bullets that’s measured in decades. If it’s a properly climate controlled place (say an AC’d warehouse or bunker in a rich country) it can be upwards of 100 years. If it’s a non-climate controlled tin shack in a desert? Less but still a long time. If it’s a non climate controlled warehouse in a tropical swamp? Better hope it’s vacuum sealed properly and you used a lot of desiccant. Either way not too long. I mean still decades but more like 20 than 80. There are three enemies with cartridges: heat (degrades the primers), humidity (degrades everything including rusting/corroding the cases), and the gunpowder itself off gasses compounds that weaken the brass over time (nitric acid iirc but I’d have to double check my notes). Now if you’re talking rockets and explosives the general principle is the same but I don’t know specifically what helps or hinders storage there. I would assume the same general rules of “deep dry and cool” apply as well.
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Sep 27, 2022 14:47
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Defenestrategy posted:Whats the shelf life on ammo given a climate controlled room? Does this change when you go from talking about bullets to bigger stuff like dumb bombs or hellfire missiles? I can't speak to bigger stuff, but well cared for modern small arms ammunition can last nearly indefinitely if it's not subjected to heat, humidity, or rough handling; though, shooters who get to choose their ammunition are wise to avoid very old surplus because it's hard to be sure it hasn't been through bad conditions at some point in the past. People still shoot late WW2 era ammunition somewhat routinely, but it tends to be less reliable and can present dangerous pressures because of breakdown of the powder granules into smaller bits.
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Sep 27, 2022 14:56
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Even perfectly stored small arms ammo still degrades over time from offgassing. I have shot a ton of surplus and my personal cut off these days is the 70s. I’ve shot much older but don’t do that any more after a close call.
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Sep 27, 2022 15:01
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I feel like I'm a little confused about one point on this linguistics question: are people operating off of the notion that early Sumerian city-states constituted a military powerhouse either collectively or individually? Because that's...not the reputation they have to me. I tend to think of them as militarily indifferent, and generally not performing particularly well against either of their Amorite or Elamite neighbors. The first empire after all was not Sumerian but Akkadian.
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Sep 27, 2022 15:21
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Has there been any research released on MOS/position with worst casualty rate for "modern" warfare(gulfwar to now)? I'd assume it might have to be something involving either artillery or helicopters due to the proliferation of counter battery and cheap anti-air devices, and the fact helicopters lust for the blood of their operators and passengers by default.
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Sep 27, 2022 17:56
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Defenestrategy posted:Has there been any research released on MOS/position with worst casualty rate for "modern" warfare(gulfwar to now)? I'd assume it might have to be something involving either artillery or helicopters due to the proliferation of counter battery and cheap anti-air devices, and the fact helicopters lust for the blood of their operators and passengers by default. Pretty sure it would be EOD.
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Sep 27, 2022 18:25
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Cessna posted:Pretty sure it would be EOD. Or engineer route clearance patrols. I felt bad for those Husky drivers.
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Sep 27, 2022 18:37
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