De Nomolos posted:

More family history related to politically-charged stuff: on my dad's side, we are related to Roger Williams, founder of Providence Plantations, which Rhode Island residents should recognize as a controversial partial-name for their state (Williams was a theologian, not a plantation master, so the term's erroneous. Another fellow founder was female theologian Anne Hutchinson). I know RI has tried to change their name to eliminate the "Plantation" part in recent years due to the negative connotations.

Squalid posted:

Weber specifically rejects historical material explanations of the difference in the development between Northern and Southern colonies and instead attributes the failure of southern states to develop capitalist economies to their feudal mind-set.

Farecoal posted:

What? He was talking about the Roman empire.

Modern Day Hercules posted:

I've never heard about that in my life. Not saying that it didn't happen, but I really doubt it. There certainly were typical "barbarian clothes" and you see that in roman depictions of barbarians, but I don't think they expected non-roman people within the empire to dress that way, let alone require it. Everywhere that rome conquered and settled you see roman fashions, hairstyles, and culture come into vogue and I highly doubt that would have happened if the only people from Rome itself could dress in Roman clothing.

Negative Entropy posted:

Afghan Taliban and Pakistani Taliban are not the same thing.

Hell, it's amazing the two groups haven't fought each other to follow the general trend of chaos in the region.

Ras Het posted:

Each to their own. And I have absolutely no issue with cousin marriages either. But it's basically a truism that if you don't have a certain small town mentality, 90 - 95 % of the land mass of any given country is a pretty awful place to live. My dream in life is to write a whole loving series of novels about the stupid and trivial life in a dying factory town like my hometown, I'd romanticise the gently caress out of it, but I wouldn't want to loving live there.

esquilax posted:

I agree that Lincoln would never have chosen to let the South go, in the same way that Bush and Congress would never have chosen to leave Afghanistan alone after 9/11. I mostly view those as tautologies. As long as we recognize that wars are subject to choices, and that people's actions actually matter in history, and that we can morally judge people based on their actions, I think we're in agreement.


To bring it back to the initial cause of the derail, saying the south started the war before Lincoln came into office implies that he had no role in starting it, and that his (morally correct) actions did not matter in starting the war. I think he deserves the credit for acting to save the union, and saying it began before he came into office robs him of that. I feel a characterization that Lincoln was an actor in starting the civil war (as opposed to a passive observer or inheritor) is more generous to his legacy, more true to fact, and is a more useful/more appropriate lens to view other secession crises. I feel Lincoln's role in starting the war is mostly downplayed due to fear of supporting "War of Northern Aggression" ideas, and that the distinction between Lincoln as a proactive member in starting and continuing the war and Lincoln as a reactive inheritor of the war is not semantic or pedantic. We are doing him and ourselves a disservice when we describe his actions as "consequences" instead of "choices".

SurgicalOntologist posted:

Even more interesting, perhaps, is the distribution of the parent family, Dené-Yeniseian:

Killer robot posted:

I guess this counts as political just in the "someone's idea of what the regions of the US are":



Also, drat if Corn and Cotton don't have a bad color contrast for adjoining regions.

duckmaster posted:

Interesting fact: Tea used to be more popular in the US than coffee, and coffee was more popular in the UK. During the American revolution the tea supply to the US was interrupted to such an extent that they were forced to import far more coffee; this in turn drove up the price of coffee overall meaning that British companies began to import far more tea.

Britain had a thriving coffee shop industry at the time whilst the US had a thriving teashop industry. Within just a generation or so this had been completely reversed.

So yes, Britain is now a tea drinking country primarily due to availability in the late 18th century, and vice versa for America.

Pook Good Mook posted:

Ya this is the poo poo I'm getting at. Europeans love to tell each other how multiethnic they are because "Some people (that look pretty much the same as us and pretty much eat the same food) over there speak Russian/German/French and they still vote in our elections!" and then trash America in the next breath. Despite the fact that if we're just going by white people (which Europe almost always is) America is far more diverse and far more successful at integrating.

For Christ's sake Spanish and Italian football fans still throw bananas at their black players.

Torrannor posted:

Depends on how different Scots and Northern Irish and Welsh are from the English?

Though it's just hugely difficult to measure diversity. Are ethnically blacks who are fully assimilated into the Flemish culture more different from the white Flemish than the Walloons?

Beamed posted:

I wish I were as young and naive as you.

System Metternich posted:

There is indeed:

e: This guy has crazily detailed linguistic maps of all of Africa (and the rest of the world) if you're interested; no idea how accurate they are, though. He gives precedence to minority languages and/or those that are under pressure by a new standard (like e.g. Occitan in southern France), but there is at least one instance where he is dead wrong: him depicting Italian and Romansh as Tyrolean languages is really puzzling, as the last time Romance languages have been spoken there probably was 1000 years ago.

Freudian posted:

Maybe we could bring it into the workplace. Instead of firing people for failing a drug test, just knock them about a bit, teach them a short sharp lesson.

Phlegmish posted:

All you other language families can suck it.

cebrail posted:

If I was a cow, I'd much rather fight a dude in a funny dress or hunt tourists in a street than stand in my own poo poo while my legs break from my own fatness before I get slaughtered for meat.

Sheng-ji Yang posted:

yeah, thats why the vast majority of the best universities in the world are in the United States.

not defending the absurd amount that is spent on university athletics, but this is post is just wrong.

Sheng-ji Yang posted:

University of Texas is ranked 30th internationally and has the largest football program. but yeah, a lot of the more popular teams are larger state schools.

Guavanaut posted:

But countries with English as an official language are clearly more advanced than those without, which is why Nigeria and South Africa are below Britain

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Eh, I don't know, I think it could be justified as the modern expression of traditional tendencies towards xenophobia/favoring the in-group. Plus modernity is not exactly modern anymore.

the jizz taxi posted:

Not that it even meant all that much. Borders 500 years ago meant comparatively little in an era where nation-states, rule of law, nationalism, identity politics and mass literacy didn't exist.

Riso posted:

Still slimmer than Murica.

Squalid posted:

Carbon dioxide posted:

I dunno. Their, perhaps cowardly, strategy, caused minimal losses in their population, and most of their Jews survived.

In my country, the Netherlands, the government tried opposing the nazis, failed, and fled. And then a German puppet government was set up, and their goons were very harsh against the people. The Jews that survived, survived because resistance movements spread throughout the country hid them from the nazis.

I wonder, if the Dutch government had taken a similar strategy of seemingly allowing the Germans in without protest, while silently shipping the Jews to British safety, if things would have gone better then, and Anne Frank would be an unknown old lady living in some care home now.


I really don't know if things would've been better. In any case, I'd always choose the strategy with the most survivors over a brave but stupid strategy. And that's why I'd never be popular as a politician.

doverhog posted:

Gini index is about income distribution. Doesn't have to mean anything W/R/T absolute wealth. The metrics used might be just plain wrong, doubt that's the case tho.

And yes I admit the red red red colour of the US on this map incited me to bash it, me and the map were on the same side it seems.

fishmech posted:

Originally New York had all the land in New Jersey before it got split off, and it didn't stetch as far north or west as it does these days, due to the 1763 Proclamation Line establishing a boundary for English settlement:

fishmech posted:

Well yeah, the colonists said "gently caress that" pretty much immediately, but there still wasn't much settlement beyond it for quite some time. The colonies might as well have ended at its line.

Phlegmish posted:

Your sexual fantasies tend to get twisted when you live with your parents until you're 40.

I shouldn't be making this joke as insane housing prices are actually leading to the same phenomenon here

Population growth in Europe 2001-2011:



Blue is decline, red is growth.

Guavanaut posted:

They will have to try and attract immigrants or rely on technological improvement. The alternative, above 'replacement rate' population growth, just kicks the can down the street for another generation.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

So? What do my feelings matter? As for the point about stability not being natural, what do you mean? Of course it's not perfectly stable in the long term, but it'd probably be a great idea to dial the current instability back to natural levels. Like how extinction is a perfectly natural thing, it's just that current number of extinctions far outmatches the base level.

The Sun will destroy the Earth before it runs out, ergo it's a perfectly sustainable source of energy for an Earth-based population,

davebo posted:

Different methods work for different people, so I'm not for banning the behavioral correction of people with fear and pain across the board, but are you in favor of some teacher you may not have even met yet hitting your (on other people's) kid with a stick without even hearing everyone's story first?

never trust an elf posted:

American English are very much a democrat voting bloc

Golbez posted:

* "American" for whites in the South... Does anyone know the origin of that?

Tei posted:

It seems all the places the spanish colonized are hosed places from hell, while the places colonized by anglos are much more modern with better culture and economy.
I am sure theres a map of that somewhere.