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god I hate twitter
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Apr 3, 2023 00:15
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| # ? Jun 10, 2024 12:39 |
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that tweet thread is highly anti-eunuch
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Apr 3, 2023 00:17
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Faust, a man to be emulated.
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Apr 3, 2023 00:18
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Real hurthling! posted:that tweet thread is highly anti-eunuch right-wing history is always anti-eunuch without exception. not sure what it is about a dude with no balls that fucks em up so bad
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Apr 3, 2023 00:19
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Ming dynasty gets culture science and gold for each pop in cities above 10 so it was in their best interest to build tall, not wide
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Apr 3, 2023 00:22
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it's just that thing which constantly dominates modern discourse - an aversion to vitality. which is defined here as the desire to go overseas and take their things, which is somehow prevented by another major feature of modern discourse - materialism. please ignore that the entire colonial project was dominated by the bureaucratic establishment of overseas farming, manufacturing, and trade in a pragmatic pursuit to enrich the host country materially.
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Apr 3, 2023 00:25
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its really funny that the two ends of eurasia were ruled by different massive imperial bureaucracies of castrati kings
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Apr 3, 2023 00:30
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the synchronistic development of dickless rulers is an instinctual attempt by the human race to return society to a matriarchal structure.
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Apr 3, 2023 00:37
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Apr 3, 2023 00:59
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did the chinese have any way to calculate longitude? thats a pretty important prerequisite to cross ocean travel to the point its probably not worth dicking around in the ocean looking for random crap without it
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Apr 3, 2023 01:06
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Some Guy TT posted:did the chinese have any way to calculate longitude? thats a pretty important prerequisite to cross ocean travel to the point its probably not worth dicking around in the ocean looking for random crap without it europeans didnt until a precise enough clock motion was invented in the early 18th century
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Apr 3, 2023 01:09
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oh that reminds me i saw in an old nato propaganda video that the portuguese actually had a working route to the americas only a few years after colombus had a route that kind of sucked anyone know anything about any of that of why the portuguese were such hot poo poo in the sixteenth century with their boats the video kind of made it sound like it colombus hadnt found america the portuguese were just about to
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Apr 3, 2023 01:13
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They had settled the Cape Verde islands and the trade winds there blow in the direction of the Americas pretty consistently. Seems like from there isn't only a matter of time until someone realizes that they could sail west on prevailing winds from Cape Verde and come back on the winds from up by Portugal. Also makes sense on a geopolitical level since kinda like the Dutch, they weren't gonna have a land empire, so if they wanted their own slice of the mercantilist pie it was gonna be finding poo poo elsewhere.
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Apr 3, 2023 01:25
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vasco de gama made it to india just a couple years after colombus failed to do so
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Apr 3, 2023 01:30
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sounds like kind of a rad idea for a series some pirate or whoever makes a run for it from cape verde heading west with the wind no one follows because its a death sentence then they run into land and dont necessarily have to die
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Apr 3, 2023 01:31
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Some Guy TT posted:oh that reminds me i saw in an old nato propaganda video that the portuguese actually had a working route to the americas only a few years after colombus had a route that kind of sucked people knew that columbus was underestimating the size of the earth and that he would run out of food before hitting "India" by sailing west. guy kept on making a nuisance of himself so he was paid and told to go ahead and find it if he thought the could, with the expectation that he was just going to die but who knows, he might be right? he wasn't right but being wrong didn't kill him, just a lot of other people
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Apr 3, 2023 01:45
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https://twitter.com/len0killer/status/1642728130434547712
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Apr 3, 2023 05:07
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The Treasure fleets were fundamentally different in a lot of ways, and the various sorts of people who obsess over them as a lost opportunity for China to recreate the West's creation of capitalism are too up their own asses to see it. The most basic difference is that the Treasure Fleets weren't sailing into the unknown, they were visiting well-established trade routes, most of which had seen plenty of Chinese civil traffic. But what was new was that the Chinese state was sending official representatives. It's must be too confusing for the free enterprise and vitality types, who otherwise wouldn't be caught dead praising a huge state-owned enterprise ran by a bunch of (literally) castrated civil servants. btw the eunuchs were pro-treasure fleet and twitter dumbass just doesn't know that Some Guy TT posted:oh that reminds me i saw in an old nato propaganda video that the portuguese actually had a working route to the americas only a few years after colombus had a route that kind of sucked Some random guy on the internet once pointed me at a conspiracy involving the Portuguese discovering Brazil before it's official discovery date of 1500, and sneakily signing the Treaty of Tordesillas knowing that it gave them half of Brazil without Spain's knowledge. Anyways Portugal was a maritime society with a lot of fishers for centuries, and after the Reconquista they were left as a fairly isolated kingdom, with nothing but a more powerful Spain and water surrounding them. The one thing driving the early age of exploration was a desire for cash. The reason is so stupidly simple that people will make up idiotic abstract reasons like "adventurer vitality" to explain it, because the truth is too unromantic. Generating cash via taxation in a premodern society is just too hard, because a rural agrarian society is not well-monetized, it's spread-out, and its populated by surly peasants and sly nobles that will straight up kill tax collectors if they feel like it. What is easy to tax is trade, because cargo needs to be offloaded somewhere, merchants have to carry money, and are more amenable to negotiation. The Portuguese understood that there was a lot of trade going on in the Mediterranean, but Portugal's geography made it difficult for them to take advantage of it. Even Spain couldn't even participate too much, it was really just dominated by Italians. The Iberians took some coastal towns in Morocco to try and tap into the trans-Saharan routes, but the Africans just started avoiding those unfortunate towns. They started thinking about sailing around the Saharan coast, but this was understood to be impossible because of the prevailing winds. Spain could go faff about elsewhere, but Portugal had nothing to do but sail, and their state started funding voyages. They worked out over the course of like 30 years that you could comfortable return back from sailing around Africa by taking a long circle in the Atlantic, then spent another 30 slowly making small outposts on the African coast and holding up in there with cannons if anybody tried to kick them out. For the most part, it was swampy and unproductive land that major African states didn't care about, so they could stick around. They eventually found a small gold mine in modern Ghana that really set them off. The model for funding these voyages was basically like a loan, and its sort of the beginning of capitalism because it's financializing several things at once. A guy collects capital to go on a voyage, various loaners get a share of the profits, and the dream is that you find another gold mine, or some villagers to enslave or Prester John gives you a billion kisses or whatever. Once the Portuguese get to the Indian Ocean, their rate of profit explodes because they've actually completely circumvented like 3 set of middlemen and can now trade nutmeg and other stuff directly. They start raking in the profits, and doom it by also getting aggro as gently caress. They sailed in on high-walled ships and I guess was a real military problem for everybody because the local naval tactics were all based on boarding.The Portuguese take this advantage to be an opportunity to start loving with everybody, and for a while they are on top of the world because they fend off the Ottoman Indian Ocean fleet and a bizarre Mameluke fleet bought from Venetians and dragged across the Suez. But they also piss off the Indians enough that they get mired in a century of slapfighting with some coastal city-states. They stop really accomplishing much else, setting up trade posts here or there but mostly getting punked by either the established local powers or the Dutch or the Spanish (or all three). Still, the trickle of income they got from transoceanic trade was enough to sustain some luxury for the Portuguese ruling class, it only truly collapsed when Lisbon was vaporized by an earthquake in 1755.
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Apr 3, 2023 06:53
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:But what was new was that the Chinese state was sending official representatives. i feel like we really dont acknowledge as much as we should that the conquistadors werent official representatives of spain and that if they had failed which is what everyone was expecting spain had been planning to go uhhh yeah we dont know those guys they sound like real assholes most of the actual conquistadors died horribly and your typical survivor didnt get to keep a lot of the loot for the same "we specifically told you not to do this" reasoning so its wild how so much modern culture frames the idea as being a slam dunk from the purely galtian perspective its the bureaucrats who came afterward that made out gangbusters not the guys who did the actual work
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Apr 3, 2023 07:02
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They kinda were official, in the absence of anybody more official to send. Western courts in the 1500s were still practically Medieval, it was the monarch and the boys (maybe a girl if she's cool and can chug a beer). It's part of why it's proto-capitalistic, and why 300 years afterwards the British are planting the flag in the middle of a jungle just so that the French can't. I don't think diplomatic responsibility was particularly a concern, it was mostly about financing. Expeditions were expensive, and the crown didn't want to raise money for them. It was much better to leave most fundraising to the kook who actually wanted to go out. Columbus was an outlier here, because he basically got gambled on by the Spanish crown, which funded 2/3rds of his expedition (the other 3rd was his own). The wild success of Portugal no doubt influenced this decision. Spain would go on to bully Portugal anyways, nibbling away at its colonies until the Treaty of Tordesillas settled things down for a while.
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Apr 3, 2023 07:32
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Tulip posted:New entry in "making up a guy to get mad at:" Hey leave the Federalist Society out of this!
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Apr 6, 2023 21:03
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The Treasure fleets were fundamentally different in a lot of ways, and the various sorts of people who obsess over them as a lost opportunity for China to recreate the West's creation of capitalism are too up their own asses to see it. The most basic difference is that the Treasure Fleets weren't sailing into the unknown, they were visiting well-established trade routes, most of which had seen plenty of Chinese civil traffic. But what was new was that the Chinese state was sending official representatives. It's must be too confusing for the free enterprise and vitality types, who otherwise wouldn't be caught dead praising a huge state-owned enterprise ran by a bunch of (literally) castrated civil servants. They're placed into a weird position because Ming and Qing China absolutely did have private sector mercantile corporate concerns, and if anything they conform to what weird trad fucks would like, which is that they were patriarchal family operations, but they don't want to look at ways in which early modern China was similar to other early modern societies, they want to talk about an irreducible cultural difference that also justifies whatever they want to do today.
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Apr 6, 2023 22:37
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Real hurthling! posted:its really funny that the two ends of eurasia were ruled by different massive imperial bureaucracies of castrati kings the common denominator here is constantly fighting steppe nomads but it does seem like there's a missing link somewhere
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Apr 6, 2023 22:57
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Both Byzantine and Jin Emperors can relate to Chinese Restaurant Guy from South Park
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Apr 6, 2023 23:36
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Sorry but it is well established that China discovered America in 1421 so sounds like a bunch of racist erasure itt
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Apr 7, 2023 10:44
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the chinese discovered america, did some divination to see how the place would turn out in a couple hundred years and promptly turned around and sailed right back
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Apr 7, 2023 11:49
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Kitchen herbs went extinct in Britain after the Roman state collapsed there... perhaps "spice politics" goes much deeper than we thought.
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Apr 7, 2023 21:10
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The collapse of British society in the immediate post-Roman period is super interesting. It wasn't just the supply of imported goods that disappeared, but basically all industry and urban living. It's the one place in Europe where it's still appropriate to refer to that period of time as the 'Dark Ages'.
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Apr 8, 2023 02:50
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Endman posted:The collapse of British society in the immediate post-Roman period is super interesting. It wasn't just the supply of imported goods that disappeared, but basically all industry and urban living. It's the one place in Europe where it's still appropriate to refer to that period of time as the 'Dark Ages'. A 2000 year Dark Age, amirite?
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Apr 8, 2023 04:19
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Endman posted:The collapse of British society in the immediate post-Roman period is super interesting. It wasn't just the supply of imported goods that disappeared, but basically all industry and urban living. It's the one place in Europe where it's still appropriate to refer to that period of time as the 'Dark Ages'. And they're still recovering to this day
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Apr 8, 2023 05:08
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The collapse of British society in the immediate post-EU period is super interesting. It wasn't just the supply of imported goods that disappeared, but basically all industry and urban living. It's the one place in Europe where it's still appropriate to refer to that period of time as the 'Dark Ages'. e: poo poo, wrong history thread.
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Apr 8, 2023 09:43
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Posting in the post-apocalyptic Agora
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Apr 8, 2023 09:56
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Endman posted:Posting in the post-apocalyptic Agora It's generally a good place to rase hogs and not just for the poignant symbolism
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Apr 8, 2023 13:25
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raising his hog in the agora got diogenes some criticism
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Apr 9, 2023 21:36
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pidan posted:raising his hog in the agora got diogenes some criticism He never believed in the tragedy of the commons.
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Apr 9, 2023 22:06
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Diogenes: lived in a pot, masturbated with his dogs while trolling all day. millennial goon: lives on pot, masturbates with his dogs while trolling all day. stark differences
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Apr 10, 2023 00:54
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Real hurthling! posted:Diogenes: lived in a pot, masturbated with his dogs while trolling all day. Diogenes: get out of my loving sunlight Goon: make the tweet orange bish I think you're onto something!
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Apr 10, 2023 03:03
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sorry but theres no way a goon has ever been to the marketplace irl let alone lived there
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Apr 10, 2023 03:15
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gooning in the marketplace
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Apr 10, 2023 03:16
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diogenes lived an ascetic life. every single goon obsessively collects pop-culture figurines
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Apr 11, 2023 14:59
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