What is the US up to with regard to Iran?

[Lexicus]

So how did the Roman Empire diminish prosperity among the people they conquered?

I dunno, maybe by killing and enslaving millions of them? Julius Caesar was said to have killed one million and enslaved anther one million during the conquest of Gaul alone.

 

[Socrates99]

I dunno, maybe by killing and enslaving millions of them? Julius Caesar was said to have killed one million and enslaved anther one million during the conquest of Gaul alone.

I think people often get "Roman citizen" confused with "someone who resided in the Roman Empire." Those two things are not the same and people couldn't just immigrate to Rome to get sweet perks.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Trump's a symptom, not the cause.

not exactly, I keep hearing people repeat this. Trump is not a "symptom".

Trump is the manifestation of the complete erosion of truth and sincerity. "Fake news", for example, is symptomatic.

Simple analogy: An individual act of sin is symptomatic. The devil is the manifestation of evil in Christian culture. Evil is the underlying cause.

Every day after reading Baudrilliard I feel I get more paranoid.

 

[Lexicus]

not exactly, I keep hearing people repeat this. Trump is not a "symptom".

Trump is a symptom, not the disease. That is all people who are repeating this mean. It is a counterpoint to those who believe that the main problem in the US currently is that Trump is President, and without Trump being President things would be pretty much fine.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Disagree, trump is not the disease. He is the manifestation of the disease.

The disease is HIV, the concept, all cases of HIV, or rather, every HI virus in existance.
The manifestation is the HIV in a certain patient.
The symptoms are ... [symptoms of aids]

In Trumps case:

The disease is the erosion of truth, the political spectacle, and rebranded authoritanism (and millions of other factors). Those are primarily ideas, or ways of thinking. (They're the virus.)
The manifestation is Trump. (A patient taken over by a virus)
The symptons are tweets, fake news, etc. The actions taken by an infected person and the observable results of the manifestation.

We're both saying that Trump is not the root cause, that's not where our disagreement is. We're also both saying that without Trump, things would not instantly be better. The disagreement lies elsewhere

HIV is completely harmless in a vacuum, it can only thrive in an environment full of hosts. Exactly like a destructive idea or ideology, which can only thrive if there are fertile minds. Trump is not authoritarianism in itself or the erosion of truth in itself, he is the real life manifestation of those. His tweets are symptomatic.

 

[Lexicus]

His ascension to the Presidency is a metaphorical symptom of the disease afflicting the body politic.

 

[Patine]

Disagree, trump is not the disease. He is the manifestation of the disease.

The disease is HIV, the concept, all cases of HIV, or rather, every HI virus in existance.
The manifestation is the HIV in a certain patient.
The symptoms are ... [symptoms of aids]

In Trumps case:

The disease is the erosion of truth, the political spectacle, and rebranded authoritanism (and millions of other factors). Those are primarily ideas, or ways of thinking. (They're the virus.)
The manifestation is Trump. (A patient taken over by a virus)
The symptons are tweets, fake news, etc. The actions taken by an infected person and the observable results of the manifestation.

We're both saying that Trump is not the root cause, that's not where our disagreement is. We're also both saying that without Trump, things would not instantly be better. The disagreement lies elsewhere

HIV is completely harmless in a vacuum, it can only thrive in an environment full of hosts. Exactly like a destructive idea or ideology, which can only thrive if there are fertile minds. Trump is not authoritarianism in itself or the erosion of truth in itself, he is the real life manifestation of those. His tweets are symptomatic.

His ascension to the Presidency is a metaphorical symptom of the disease afflicting the body politic.

I think you two are putting too much poetry and symbolism into the simple fact that a showman, con artist, and vitriolic loudmouth with a poor grip on honesty or reality and an oversized ego won a U.S. Presidential election through a massive hoodwink and telling frustrated people exactly what they wanted to hear.

 

[red_elk]

"I'm sorry, you have 3-rd stage of Trump. Prognosis is poor."

 

[yung.carl.jung]

I think you two are putting too much poetry and symbolism into the simple fact that a showman, con artist, and vitriolic loudmouth with a poor grip on honesty or reality and an oversized ego won a U.S. Presidential election through a massive hoodwink and telling frustrated people exactly what they wanted to hear.

I think simplyfying it doesn't help anyone and instead shuts down discussion.

what I said also wasn't poetic nor very complex, all I meant was that Trump could only work in a world such as ours, where the erosion of truth happens on a daily basis and with great frequency. Reagan could not have been Trump, neither could have Nixon or even Bush Junior. Even Trump can only be like he currently is (and get through with it) because the world is as it currently is. We can pinpoint reasons for that, as you do: "a massive hoodwink", "preying on frustrated peopel" (which I think are all legit by the way). you could list more symptomatic causes: echo chambers, the open collaboration with white nationalists, Trumps open denial of science and reason and so forth. But at the root is the way we (or in this case Americans) think and act collectively. our mindset has changed a lot since the end of the cold war, it's an entirely different time now.

"I'm sorry, you have 3-rd stage of Trump. Prognosis is poor."

nah, not quite. rather "I have been diagnosed with 3rd stage late authoritorianism" (and the "I", is Trump, in this case). close though

His ascension to the Presidency is a metaphorical symptom of the disease afflicting the body politic.

not sure if you're making fun of me or not. Trumps ascension to presidency would also be a symptom: the way he thinks and act in this case (Trump the person) would be the concrete case of disease in my analogy.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I dunno, maybe by killing and enslaving millions of them? Julius Caesar was said to have killed one million and enslaved anther one million during the conquest of Gaul alone.

Ancient numbers are notoriously unreliable. Just so you know I will be paying less attention to political threads for a while. responding often takes a lot of energy and atm, PoE is foremost in my attention.

 

[Lexicus]

Ancient numbers are notoriously unreliable. Just so you know I will be paying less attention to political threads for a while. responding often takes a lot of energy and atm, PoE is foremost in my attention.

Granted of course, but do you think that the number of people the Romans enslaved and killed was small?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Granted of course, but do you think that the number of people the Romans enslaved and killed was small?

Conquest was the way the world worked back then and it could be bloody. People were killed and enslaved. Lots of them. But, those who did live under the Roman yoke did live in a more prosperous world and if they earned citizenship they were even better off. Were Roman slaves better off than the Picts? Idk, but some certainly were and others were not.

 

[AmazonQueen]

Still no evidence of who was responsible for the oil tanker attack

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/07/uae-tanker-attacks-un-iran-norway-saudi-arabia

 

[Patine]

Conquest was the way the world worked back then and it could be bloody. People were killed and enslaved. Lots of them. But, those who did live under the Roman yoke did live in a more prosperous world and if they earned citizenship they were even better off. Were Roman slaves better off than the Picts? Idk, but some certainly were and others were not.

And corporate exploitation on a horrid level and meddling in smaller nation's governments in a paternalistic manner to install bloody-handed tyrants lest "evil ideologies take root" has been the way of the last almost 85 years. Are either morally justified or humane, do either make friends or present a benevolent image to the world, and do either smack of anything other than monstrous hypocrisy?

 

[r16]

Still no evidence of who was responsible for the oil tanker attack

bolton said it was not the Nepalese , so it's obvious that the Nepalese did it .

 

[innonimatu]

Conquest was the way the world worked back then and it could be bloody. People were killed and enslaved. Lots of them. But, those who did live under the Roman yoke did live in a more prosperous world and if they earned citizenship they were even better off. Were Roman slaves better off than the Picts? Idk, but some certainly were and others were not.

But apart from the wine, the aqueducts, the roads, the peace, the justice system, and whatever, what did the romans do for them?

 

[Patine]

But apart from the wine, the aqueducts, the roads, the peace, the justice system, and whatever, what did the romans do for them?

The only reliable path for a non-Roman man (and his direct, nuclear family), to citizenship, other than adoption or patronage by a wealthy Roman, was for that man to serve in the Roman Legions. In fact, the was Robert A. Heinlein's inspiration for "Starship Troopers." So, they got plenty of opportunity to die horribly on the field for the Caesar and Augustus, and maybe even get to fight their former ethnic countrymen.

 

[Hrothbern]

From this working paper:
https://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/scheidel/110509.pdf page 10
It looks like that "normal" mortality rate of Roman soldiers was so high (approx 40% over the 25 years) that the added mortality from fighting was not that big:

Life expectancy
The average life expectancy of Roman soldiers is much more difficult to ascertain. We know that in antiquity many lives were short. Occasional quantifiable data and comparative evidence suggest that mean life at birth expectancy normally fluctuated within a band from twenty to thirty years. In the near-absence of reliable primary data, ancient historians have begun to fall back on model life tables, which are modern extrapolations from known to unknown mortality regimes that project probable age distributions for different levels of life expectancy at birth. These models predict that in high-mortality regimes, a large percentage of all fatalities are concentrated in the first few years of life. Thus, we may assume that between one-third and onehalf of all newborns were dead by age five. Adult mortality rates were less extreme but nonetheless very high by modern standards. For instance, a simple model life table for adult males suggests that of 100 soldiers who enlisted at age twenty, seventy-eight would have survived to age thirty-five, sixty-nine to age forty, and sixty to age forty-five.10 For legionaries, this implies a baseline rate of attrition of roughly one-third for twenty to twenty-five years of service. In reality, violent death, camp-related disease, and early discharge would have raised overall attrition by a potentially significant margin. Empirical information that would permit us to improve on this generic assumption is rare. In an earlier study, I made use of epigraphic rosters that list the number of soldiers who were discharged from a particular legion in a given year.11 In three out of seven surviving documents from the second century AD, anomalies caused by military events forestall further analysis. The other four rosters (from the lower Danube, North Africa and Egypt) all point to annual rates of between 100+ and c.125 discharges, and in fact mostly to 120-125 cases per year. The underlying median of 120 annual discharges per legion needs to be related to the typical size of a legion and the length of service in order to calculate the rate of attrition during active service. Reckoning with an effective troop strength of slightly under 5,000, twenty-five years of service, and an average enlistment age of twenty, we may project an annual intake of 250-260 recruits and an annual discharge of 120 veterans per legion. In this scenario, slightly more than one-half of all recruits would not complete a full term of active duty. If correct, this estimate suggests that even in peacetime, the imperial legions lost approximately one-and-a-third times as many soldiers as predicted by mortality models alone (say, 50-55% instead of 40% over twenty-five years). Due to the probable margins of error, it is impossible to be more precise. Even so, this apparent discrepancy between predicted and observed attrition rates may readily be explained with reference to early discharge – either dishonorable (missio ignominiosa) or, perhaps more often, for medical reasons (missio causaria). Desertion and transfers to elite units would have added to the drain. Hence, in the absence of major combat operations, actual mortality in the legions need not have been dramatically (or at all) higher than in the civilian population. This notion is easy to reconcile with what we know about the ancient disease environment in general, and more specifically with the range of amenities provided in permanent legionary camps that I discuss in the penultimate section of this chapter.

 

[innonimatu]

The only reliable path for a non-Roman man (and his direct, nuclear family), to citizenship, other than adoption or patronage by a wealthy Roman, was for that man to serve in the Roman Legions. In fact, the was Robert A. Heinlein's inspiration for "Starship Troopers." So, they got plenty of opportunity to die horribly on the field for the Caesar and Augustus, and maybe even get to fight their former ethnic countrymen.

There was also this guy called Caracalla who did edicts.

I was joking but, taking Gaul that was mentioned as an example, the celts were not exactly hobbits busy peacefully tending their gardens before the romans showed up.
They were already busy fighting both their neighbors and their ethnic countrymen before the romans came up.

@Hrothbern It would be nice if aversion to war casualties is tied to long life expectancies. It seems to be.

 

[Birdjaguar]

But apart from the wine, the aqueducts, the roads, the peace, the justice system, and whatever, what did the romans do for them?

Provided them the opportunity to learn Latin.