Wacky news Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity

Jovialis

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https://phys.org/news/2019-10-fall-rome-europe-lucky.html

This is coming from Stanford.

Honestly, I fail to see his point. Is this just some excuse to make money, with an edgy-title?

So apparently, it is good that Rome fell, because it created a power-vacuum in Europe of people that were trying to re-create it. He mentions all of the war and suffering leading up to WWII, and vaguely says it is fine, because it lead to the modern world. Okay! How does he know what the world would have been like if it didn't fall? Perhaps it would have been even more advanced, since we wouldn't have had the Dark ages. I recall reading that technological innovations of the Romans were not matched until Britain in the 19th century!
 
Moron publishes book, see here:

https://phys.org/news/2019-10-fall-rome-europe-lucky.html

This is coming from Stanford.

Honestly, I fail to see his point. Is this just some excuse to make money, with an edgy-title?

So apparently, it is good that Rome fell, because it created a power-vacuum in Europe of people that were trying to re-create it. He mentions all of the war and suffering leading up to WWII, and vaguely says it is fine, because it lead to the modern world. Okay! How does he know what the world would have been like if it didn't fall? Perhaps it would have been even more advanced, since we wouldn't have had the Dark ages. I recall reading that technological innovations of the Romans were not matched until Britain in the 19th century!

so basically if we apply his "logic" it would be great if all the engineering firms and labs (as well as anyone capable of advancing civilization) disappeared into thin air, plunging humanity back to the Stone Age and going back to where we already are thousands of years later.

Brilliant!
 
We live in a modern world that can come to a violent end at any moment, with weapons of mass destruction. That is tenuously held together by a global system, that ultimately benefits a murderous totalitarian regime (China); poised to become the world's most powerful state within a decade. All it took was the death of countless people to achieve!
 
https://phys.org/news/2019-10-fall-rome-europe-lucky.html

This is coming from Stanford.

Honestly, I fail to see his point. Is this just some excuse to make money, with an edgy-title?

So apparently, it is good that Rome fell, because it created a power-vacuum in Europe of people that were trying to re-create it. He mentions all of the war and suffering leading up to WWII, and vaguely says it is fine, because it lead to the modern world. Okay! How does he know what the world would have been like if it didn't fall? Perhaps it would have been even more advanced, since we wouldn't have had the Dark ages. I recall reading that technological innovations of the Romans were not matched until Britain in the 19th century!

Couldn't agree more. Yes, all Empires fail eventually to some degree, and there's some re-grouping necessary, but who could seriously posit that it's a good thing that Europe was visited by climate change, pestilence, invasion, mass blood shed, the extinction of huge percentages of the population, the total disruption of society, and a plunge intellectually into the dark ages.

The man suffers from a huge deficit of imagination and, it has to be said, humanity.
 
lots of book burning towards the end, they would have surely burned his book too.


Something very bad must have happened at the end, to the point that they even forgot how to make Concrete.


imo There's nothing positive about it.
 
lots of book burning towards the end, they would have surely burned his book too.


Something very bad must have happened at the end, to the point that they even forgot how to make Concrete.


imo There's nothing positive about it.

The British archaeologists working around Luna have stated that the local people didn't reach the same standard of living until the 19th century.

It took hundreds of years of darkness, until the pre-Renaissance in Italy, in fact, for any innovations to start appearing again.

What stupidity. Anything to sell a few books.

Pardon me if I don't clap.
 
so basically if we apply his "logic" it would be great if all the engineering firms and labs (as well as anyone capable of advancing civilization) disappeared into thin air, plunging humanity back to the Stone Age and going back to where we already are thousands of years later.

Brilliant!

I think that is exactly what happens.
If not, coal mines and railroad companies would still dominate the economy.
 
How on earth is that an apt analogy?

We're talking about someone saying it's good that civilization crashed with the fall of Rome because that meant other, smaller states could arise...after hundreds and hundreds of years, of course. So the Bronze Age Collapse was a good thing, and the Neolithic Collapse.

Did I miss something in history classes? Did Western Civilization collapse without my having heard about it?

It may happen, indeed, between Islamic Fundamentalism and the rise of an authoritarian China, but it hasn't happened yet.

Would that be good too? Give everybody else a chance?
 
This is not historical research or analysis. It's more like a 12-year old's time travel imagining . . . if you could go back in time, what would you change? Crush a butterfly and the Nazis win the 20th century (that's a literary reference). Yeah, if the western Roman Empire had stayed in place things today would be different, but so what, that didn't happen. Yes, I can imagine all sorts of things, but in general you shouldn't wish that hundreds of thousands (hundreds of millions?) of people died or lived horrible lives so a stable government could be destroyed to create your idea of paradise.

Now, when it comes to day dreaming about time travel, I've always felt that if you're happy with your present life, you shouldn't want to change anything in your past that got you to that point. No matter how embarrassing or negative your experiences may have been (I've had a few), they led you to your present position. I'm damn glad they did.
 
Escape from Rome The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity

I should tidy up and publish my drag racing simulator, it does the same thing, but with other parameters also gives you performance numbers :-Fred.
 
Let's keep in mind that if anything in the history of world had turned out differently as it did, the world would be different today and we wouldn't be here today. Even the slightest chance could mean that some of our great-...-great-grand-parents at some point might not have met or would have conceived the child who would become our ancestor at a different time, which means that a different ovum and sperm would have created their baby, who would not therefore be the same person, changing all that follows. So from a strictly personal point of view, we shouldn't wish anything in history had happened any other way it did. We exist solely because everything in history happened the way it did.
 
This is not historical research or analysis. It's more like a 12-year old's time travel imagining . . . if you could go back in time, what would you change? Crush a butterfly and the Nazis win the 20th century (that's a literary reference). Yeah, if the western Roman Empire had stayed in place things today would be different, but so what, that didn't happen. Yes, I can imagine all sorts of things, but in general you shouldn't wish that hundreds of thousands (hundreds of millions?) of people died or lived horrible lives so a stable government could be destroyed to create your idea of paradise.
Now, when it comes to day dreaming about time travel, I've always felt that if you're happy with your present life, you shouldn't want to change anything in your past that got you to that point. No matter how embarrassing or negative your experiences may have been (I've had a few), they led you to your present position. I'm damn glad they did.
Likewise, this life has been very good to me, despite some hiccups here and there (we all have them).
 
It may happen, indeed, between Islamic Fundamentalism and the rise of an authoritarian China, but it hasn't happened yet.

Would that be good too? Give everybody else a chance?

It may happen indeed, but not only because of the forces you mention, which will undermine our culture from the outside. No, it will happen because we are repeating the same mistakes Rome made. Giving up our old virtues, giving lazy masses "panem and circenses" for free (welfare money and cellphone apps, basically), relying on imported manpower to do the backbreaking or supposedly demeaning tasks we are too idle or lazy to do ourselves. Letting obscurantism flood our streets. Stooping to suburban violence, and to socio-cultural demands that run exactly counter to the values upon which our civilization was built. Letting - out of intellectual laziness, or out of sheer cowardice - a so-called élite dictate to us what to think and whom to vote for. Forgetting our forbears and everything they fought for.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, rise from the grave and lift the torch!
 
It may happen indeed, but not only because of the forces you mention, which will undermine our culture from the outside. No, it will happen because we are repeating the same mistakes Rome made. Giving up our old virtues, giving lazy masses "panem and circenses" for free (welfare money and cellphone apps, basically), relying on imported manpower to do the backbreaking or supposedly demeaning tasks we are too idle or lazy to do ourselves. Letting obscurantism flood our streets. Stooping to suburban violence, and to socio-cultural demands that run exactly counter to the values upon which our civilization was built. Letting - out of intellectual laziness, or out of sheer cowardice - a so-called élite dictate to us what to think and whom to vote for. Forgetting our forbears and everything they fought for.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, rise from the grave and lift the torch!

I'd drink to that! :)
 
It may happen indeed, but not only because of the forces you mention, which will undermine our culture from the outside. No, it will happen because we are repeating the same mistakes Rome made. Giving up our old virtues, giving lazy masses "panem and circenses" for free (welfare money and cellphone apps, basically), relying on imported manpower to do the backbreaking or supposedly demeaning tasks we are too idle or lazy to do ourselves. Letting obscurantism flood our streets. Stooping to suburban violence, and to socio-cultural demands that run exactly counter to the values upon which our civilization was built. Letting - out of intellectual laziness, or out of sheer cowardice - a so-called élite dictate to us what to think and whom to vote for. Forgetting our forbears and everything they fought for.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, rise from the grave and lift the torch!


islamization is far, far away. the growing influence of china could be a problem but that influence is there because we have always been running after money and continue to do so. projects like the european union are important to give europe some economic weight.
and we aren't too lazy to do the hard work imo. but usually those jobs have low wages and noone wants to do it because of it, so we need someone else to do it. more and more people chose to study or do further education and you are stupid if you don't. because otherwise you are just sitting in the same shitty position your whole life, you have little options. many of the migrants will do so too, because they also don't want to stay on the bottom.
a lot of our wealth is based on this. to import low wage personnel or other necessary personnel into the country or to export work to other countries, china for example.
i don't see our culture in danger in the near future. certainly not because of islam or importet manpower.
 
The tragedy is the Roman Empire could have been far more powerful if they didn't stop Germanicus and his army from conquering Germania. The army during this period was entirely Southern European with 65% of recruits coming from Italy and the rest were from other parts of Southern Europe.

In a similar vein, don't rely too much on foreign mercenaries. They'll stab you in the back.
 
In a similar vein, don't rely too much on foreign mercenaries. They'll stab you in the back.

Particularly if they're in the praetorian guard. Also look out for your wives and your son(s) :).
 

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