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Ask/Tell > Roman/ancient history: nobody's trying to stick the empire into a vagina
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Dec 5, 2019 13:59
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physeter posted:Ask/Tell > Roman/ancient history: nobody's trying to stick the empire into a vagina the empire only likes the asses of men nowadays.
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Dec 5, 2019 14:19
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:the empire only likes the asses of men nowadays. cunne superbe vale
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Dec 5, 2019 14:27
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SlothfulCobra posted:I think I'm kind of confused as to what you're arguing by this point? Are you arguing against the establishment of the Republic in the first place? Are you in favor of indefinite suppression of potential subversive types by any and all means? And there's sort of a tautological aspect to a lot of things, like what is the definition of stability when there are some emperors who had a bad habit of purges. uh yeah I'm not really sure I had a coherent argument. I pretty much saw an opportunity to muse about political science and took it. Looking back I don't even really necessarily disagree with you that dictatorship is barbaric (from a modern perspective), I just want to understand why so many people tended towards adopting it. I think Arglebargle III made a good point about kings not enthroning their kids from beyond the grave, rather instead it's everyone else in the kingdom who puts the new guy in charge. It's worthwhile trying to understand why everyone would agree to that arrangement. I just find it interesting to think about how and why governments work or don't work, and why they look the way they do. I think you've made a good point about the empire not necessarily being good at meeting everyone's needs. Probably Republican institutions, as oligarchical as they were, were better at giving the people some say in government. However I think you are understating the value of stability, and just how bad instability can get for everyone. Sure you might not have access to land or debt relief, but not having marauding bands of bandits and raiders pillaging your village is actually a pretty great achievement for the classical era. War and civil war are catastrophically destructive for ordinary people. I doubt anyone is going to argue otherwise with me, but knowing that the really surprising thing is just how bad people throughout history have been at avoiding it. It's not just the physical destruction of life and property, its also the lost opportunities. The unplanted olive groves, the effort maintaining walls, the closed trade routes. Greek city states were very successful when it came to maintaining their freedom, independence, and democratic institutions, but they were terrible at protecting the physical security of their citizens. Given the choice of life in a Greek democracy or the Roman empire I know which one I'd choose.
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Dec 5, 2019 22:09
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To be honest, part of why I kept going was because late at night I lacked the energy to resist writing way too many  about my deep-seated antimonarchism, and then the real tipping point was finding a joke worth posting.Normally I fall on the side of it being dubious to really make moral judgements about history, but something about how much human perspectives have been done about the dying days of the republic really gets to me, it feels so visceral. It may be possible to do economic judgements like calculating the relative advantages of economies of scale and increased trade range vs. the inefficiencies of oppression and slavery, but at the end of the day, you'd still be asking how much output is worth how much suffering, which is a question nobody really wants to answer. I did poke at the wikipedia list of Roman civil wars, but it's pretty clearly missing some entries.
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Dec 6, 2019 01:23
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It's probably more productive to think of the King's constituency as their network of powerful elites who themselves have their own constituencies lower down the social ladder.
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Dec 6, 2019 03:22
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Squalid posted:uh yeah I'm not really sure I had a coherent argument. I pretty much saw an opportunity to muse about political science and took it. Looking back I don't even really necessarily disagree with you that dictatorship is barbaric (from a modern perspective), I just want to understand why so many people tended towards adopting it. I think Arglebargle III made a good point about kings not enthroning their kids from beyond the grave, rather instead it's everyone else in the kingdom who puts the new guy in charge. It's worthwhile trying to understand why everyone would agree to that arrangement. I just find it interesting to think about how and why governments work or don't work, and why they look the way they do.
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Dec 6, 2019 03:46
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Epicurius posted:Tiberius had Sejanus. You can see how well that worked out. I meant Tiberius was Augustus #2 in the later part of his reign, but yeah when Tiberius tried to find his own #2 guy... well yeah.
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Dec 6, 2019 06:55
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Egypt’s President/Dictator Mubarak got overthrown in part because he tried to set his son up as his successor. Another country whose name I can’t recall recently had a regime change for similar reasons. People today don’t appear to like monarchies even if they’re otherwise okay with despots.
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Dec 6, 2019 15:53
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People like jobs and food. If they have those things they aren’t going to be spending all day out in the streets starting revolutions, whether they have representative non-dynastic government or not.
skasion fucked around with this message at 16:27 on Dec 6, 2019 |
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Dec 6, 2019 16:23
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Other end of that is if people's lives are comfortable they have the mental energy to start thinking about stuff like ideology and rights. All government is unstable, it's a matter of degree.
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Dec 6, 2019 21:11
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Could I get a recommendation for a good book on celtic history? With a specific preference for pre-Saxon England and Brittany.
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Dec 6, 2019 21:18
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SlothfulCobra posted:the pope with being I think the longest existing sovereign (?) institution of Europe. San Marino makes that claim.
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Dec 6, 2019 21:48
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I like San Marino because it's a country that only exists because Garibaldi owed them a favour and they asked to be let out of unification.
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Dec 7, 2019 03:25
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:The best way to translate the Principate into modern America would be like hey you're a politician, you become a council member, then a mayor, then a senator for your state, then you get elected President, but it's all done under the aegis of some guy who is somehow Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury, and the richest dude in the entire country, and he gets to choose the Governor of every state that borders Mexico or Canada. You forgot chief and only Supreme court justice, the FBI/CIA answer only to them and spy on you and other officials/rich guys, the state of California is there personal property and no US official can entry the state on penalty of death and they control all telecommunications in the country
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Dec 7, 2019 15:33
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I guess he'd also be Fed Chairman and Commissioner of all major sports leagues.
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Dec 8, 2019 00:40
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This seems like a nice sentiment. https://twitter.com/mikeduncan/status/1203373146004439040 Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:I guess he'd also be Fed Chairman and Commissioner of all major sports leagues. Also the head of the American Meteorological Society. And has the power to add and remove calendar days at a whim, which we have no modern version of.
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Dec 8, 2019 18:01
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SlothfulCobra posted:Also the head of the American Meteorological Society.
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Dec 8, 2019 18:36
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SlothfulCobra posted:
Well, IERS can add or remove seconds at will, so it's the same thing on a different scale.
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Dec 8, 2019 18:42
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Why are Americans so fixated on comparing the USA to previous empires? Here's a quote from Paul Harvey that gets the history's of China and Rome very wrong:Paul Harvey posted:Once upon a time there was a nation great and powerful and good. Few were suffering from the aftermath of war, from a depression. And then came upon the scene a leader, an idealist, self-confident, intolerant to criticism. A wise lady limited his early activities to combating the financial depression, nobody could argue with that, but in a while he began to regulate business and establish new rules to govern commerce and finance. Some of them in diametrical disagreement with the God-Made laws of supply and demand, but anybody who disagreed with those new rules was promptly fired. The new leader saw that under the old system of free enterprise landlords prospered, so he levied new taxes to take away their profits and destroy what he called the “Monopoly of Capital”. To please laborers, he controlled prices. To win the favor of the farmers, he gave them loans and subsidies. The National Debt mounted, alarmingly. Whenever anybody tried to tell him “that governments, even as people, can go broke, when they spend beyond their incomes”, he said “They just didn’t understand deficit finance.”
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Dec 8, 2019 22:00
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Wow I wonder why a conservative radio hack was an axe grinding moron Must be because he was a loving yank
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Dec 8, 2019 22:20
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Every empire in history was obsessed with comparing itself to previous empires. It's hardly unique to americans
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Dec 8, 2019 22:29
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Would Cato the Younger have his own Fox News show?
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Dec 8, 2019 22:44
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Has there ever been an example of price controls working?
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Dec 8, 2019 22:54
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OctaviusBeaver posted:Has there ever been an example of price controls working? Price control during WW2 worked, because its intent was to limit production of certain civilian goods in order to save material for the war effort. Limiting production of a consumer good is not normally the goal of price controls, but an unintended consequence. Also I would argue that usury laws are a form of price controls that work and are good. Imagined fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Dec 8, 2019 |
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Dec 8, 2019 23:21
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SimonCat posted:Would Cato the Younger have his own Fox News show? no, a youtube channel about artisanal cabbage that lapses into ultra-conservative rants every other episode
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Dec 8, 2019 23:22
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Jazerus posted:no, a youtube channel about artisanal cabbage that lapses into ultra-conservative rants every other episode Sounds like Wranglerstar to me, only...smarter.
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Dec 8, 2019 23:23
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also he does the whole thing while cosplaying as george washington
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Dec 8, 2019 23:28
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Rent control works. Price controls are like any other tool, they have specialized application. Diocletian's attempt came from a good idea to try to fix the economic chaos but it failed because the Roman state was incapable of managing something so extensive. And that idiot's analysis of Roman creativity falling into the Dark Ages because of price controls is nonsense on every level.
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Dec 8, 2019 23:29
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Grand Fromage posted:Rent control works. Price controls are like any other tool, they have specialized application. Diocletian's attempt came from a good idea to try to fix the economic chaos but it failed because the Roman state was incapable of managing something so extensive. And that idiot's analysis of Roman creativity falling into the Dark Ages because of price controls is nonsense on every level. It also doesn't explain how the Eastern Empire continued to exist for another 1000 years. Wasn't most of the farm land owned by large estates by Diocletian's time anyway? Mr. Harvey seems to think that the Roman Empire was a homogeneous thing and that a farmer in Britain, Spain, Africa, and Italy (using modern names for convenience's sake) were all on the same page.
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Dec 8, 2019 23:37
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SimonCat posted:Wasn't most of the farm land owned by large estates by Diocletian's time anyway? Oh yeah. Land consolidation into big rich estates goes back to the 200s BCE. The tension between giant estates and the yeoman farmer was one of Rome's longest term intractable problems, there had been attempts to solve it for centuries that never really worked in any large scale, consistent way. The new innovations were the estates in Diocletian's time were much more independent entities than they had been earlier--they're closer to medieval manors by that time than the old latifundia. And the reforms that made jobs hereditary were the other big component that created the early antecedents of serfdom. So, the Diocletian era estates were different than your generic Sicilian latifundia in 100 BCE, but economically it was still one dude owning a giant tract of land and pushing out all the small farmers.
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Dec 8, 2019 23:46
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OctaviusBeaver posted:Has there ever been an example of price controls working? Removing price controls on grain was a big part of the buildup to the French Revolution. I dunno if they counted as "working" but beforehand, the regime was more stable and the peasants could afford to eat, and after, neither was true.
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Dec 9, 2019 00:23
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Public goods are the easiest things to make an argument for price controls with. Food, shelter, water, etc. Letting the market set prices for necessitates of life doesn't tend to work out in the long term. When you're enacting price controls for stuff like wine or pepper from India then you're being excessive.
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Dec 9, 2019 00:38
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Hey Guys, Welcome to my Video, Remember to Like, Comment, and Subscribe, and Further More, Carthage Must Be Destroyed
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Dec 9, 2019 00:53
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I assume whenever any conservative says something "doesn't work" their initial meaning is "it doesn't let my class, or the class I valorize, get a piece of the action."
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Dec 9, 2019 01:05
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Removing price controls on grain was a big part of the buildup to the French Revolution. Was there going to be a good answer in regards to bread and France? I was under the impression a couple of bad harvests meant there wasn't enough baguettes to go around. Removing price controls at least kept people from hoarding the bread. It also made it impossible for poor people to buy enough of it, but there wouldn't have been any bread with price controls either.
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Dec 9, 2019 01:08
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underage at the vape shop posted:Hey Guys, Welcome to my Video, Remember to Like, Comment, and Subscribe, and Further More, Carthage Must Be Destroyed Thumbnail for video is Cato making a stupid face holding a fig titled "JUST THREE DAYS AWAY BY BOAT?!?"
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Dec 9, 2019 01:25
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Grand Fromage posted:Rent control works. Price controls are like any other tool, they have specialized application. Diocletian's attempt came from a good idea to try to fix the economic chaos but it failed because the Roman state was incapable of managing something so extensive. And that idiot's analysis of Roman creativity falling into the Dark Ages because of price controls is nonsense on every level. i mean rent control "works" in exactly the way Imagined described: by limiting the market price of rent or any other good you will simultaneously end up limiting the market production of that good. If this is less obvious with rent than screws or apples it's only because housing lasts longer and is built slower, so the supply shortfall takes a long time to notice and the cause and effect is less obvious. What will happen with the supply situation of the good also depends on a lot of non-market related factors, for example if the government is providing all or most of the housing the market price may not have much significance to supply. Of course in many places people want to keep outsiders from immigrating in, so keeping them out by limiting market supply of housing while restricting access to rent controlled and government provided housing to natives might be seen as a desirable outcome. When it comes to price controls a lot of people run into trouble because they confuse the price of the good in a shop window with the ability of the community to supply that good. If there's a crop failure and there's just not enough food for everyone, you can't just make enough food for everyone appear by decreeing that it still has to be sold at an affordable price. Somebody will still have to go hungry at the end of the day. The reason policy makers in ancien regime France and the early Republic were so eager to get rid of price controls is that they had realized the only way to reduce hunger was to produce and import more food, and nobody was going to do that just for funzies without any profit for themselves.
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Dec 9, 2019 03:24
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Except due to its high price property is considered an investment not a good. There is supply far far in excess of any demand but people would rather sit on it than sell or rent it for less than they could theoretically get in the future. As a result without rent control the supply actually gets smaller as properties are renovated and taken off the market in favor of theoretical higher rents for "luxury" revamps. All arguments against rent control assume the market is efficient and that economic actors are rational. Both of which are pretty obviously not true.
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Dec 9, 2019 03:30
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| # ? May 9, 2024 23:36 |
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limit rent and the property owners start leasing properties at rates the non-turbo-rich can actually afford, and building taller apartments with affordable single units instead of deluxe luxury units at two stories each sprawling across what limited ground space is available. NYC housing isn't expensive because it's not possible to house any more people here.
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Dec 9, 2019 03:35
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