What surprises me is that they (people in the past) didn’t have past examples about similar things happening with very bad consequences, we do.
You would think the knowledge would make a difference…
I’m sure they had some knowledge. It’s just that the priests foretold victory in the course chosen by the leaders, the gods are with them! So off they go to war and conquest or whatever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historian
Systematic historical thought emerged in ancient Greece, a development that became an important influence on the writing of history elsewhere around the Mediterranean region. The earliest known critical historical works were The Histories, composed by Herodotus of Halicarnassus (484 – c. 425 BCE) who later became known as the “father of history” (Cicero).
Now how many people had access to this knowledge is another matter, but studying history and learning from it was an important aspect in the education and training of leaders to be since more than a thousand years at the very least.
If we look at Moses and the Pharaoh as well as ancient Greek democracies, we can conclude that the principles of politics have not changed all that much in the past 3000-4000 years of human history. The knowledge was always there and the same mistakes are always repeated, with some very incremental progresses and regressions in between.
Herodatus wrote narratives more than he wrote histories.
The definitive ‘beginning of history’ is “The History of the Peloponesian War” by Thucydides, highly recommend, well written and accessible even now and spells out the politics very clearly and explicitly.
If we look at Moses
Ah, that one was warped somewhere between Atrahasis and Gilgamesch epos and then again to bible. Might not be historically accurate (it’s unlikely that he existed).
They so often did though, how many massive fires broke out in London before the great fire finally convinced them to stop building overlapping thatched rooves.
Even during The Plague of Justinian scholars wrote about what was essentially ancient social distancing practices, 2000 years ago later we still can’t do it properly.
How many times did they have to put up with rat plagues and stinking open cess pits, followed by a big town clean up, and then nothing change in infrastructure or waste management practices, only to do the whole clean up again …until the Great Stink got to close enough to the windows of parliament that those in power decided maybe they should address the root problem instead of applying bandaids every few years.
(I don’t have a history degree so I’m pulling these details out of the memory depths of my dusty documentary viewings, and I’m probably wrong.)
It does feel a bit 1930s at the moment doesn’t it
the decent thing to do for WW3 is to start it on the 100th anniversary of WW2.
i can only hope that the '39s would serve as a reminder each century to just fucking stop. (but more importantly, i hope to be naturally dead by then)
geopolitics included?
cries in enviro. sci
history degrees bell curve :
idiot end : I don’t use my history degree
middle : history degree is useless
genius end : I am the MP for Gloucestershire and the cabinet minister for business
I’ve been working through a few biographies of the top brass of Nazidom, and even with the rather perfunctory understanding I’ve gained from these books of Hitler’s seizure of power and all that followed in Nazi Germany, my ears are pricking up in horror every day as I listen to the latest news from around the world. And I’m not even going so far as the Holocaust. If the Holocaust and WWII never happened, the Nazi regime would still have been an unmitigated nightmare.
The language certain politicians are using is plucked directly from the mouths of Goebbels’ and Himmler’s rotting corpses. How can they not see what lies ahead if they continue with this shit? We know how this story ends. We have examples of it from recent memory, we don’t even need to cast our minds back to the 1930s 🤷
Some of them see it, and approve.
Others are old and mentally ill, and care only for what power they can gain in their remaining few years, regardless of what that will bring later.
Others are merely useful, and go along with whoever is currently in power.
Others are afraid, so they do not oppose the changes, for fear of losing what they have, and desperately cling to hope that something else will stop the worst from happening.
Others…
and on and on it goes, just as it did before, just as it ever was, and quite frankly, now I see that so will it ever be.
I am not familiar with this, would you share what country you are talking about?
Germany for example. The AfD is gaining more and more support by using phrases like “This development that is happening right now, creation of mixed populations to destroy the national identity and thus give our autonomy to the EU - that is simply not bearable!”, “Such humans we should of course dispose of”, “When a [n-word] in my neighborhood coughs at me, I have to know if he is sick or is he not sick.” or “The reason why we are being flooded with culturally foreign people like Arabs, Sinti and Roma is the systematic destruction of civil society.” https://www.volksverpetzer.de/analyse/10-rechtsextreme-zitate-der-afd/
The language certain politicians are using is plucked directly from the mouths of Goebbels’ and Himmler’s rotting corpses. How can they not see what lies ahead if they continue with this shit?
What’s even more infuriating is that when you try to point this out to others, they act like you’re insane/exaggerating.
…because most don’t study the rise and causes of what happened. They only study the result. “Never again” refers to the holocaust, but nobody puts that sign on the the road that led to it.
- Wealth disparity and inflation
- Fear of “others” taking what little people have
- Traumatized populations from decades of war
With populations scared and desperate, they’ll latch on to any demigogue that appears.
But it’s not literally the Holocaust again, so it’s fine /s
I’m trans, god help me…
Not literally the Holocaust again yet.
poland better not be the epicentre again - signed a Polish trans person
It is emotionally and intellectually painful using critical thinking while those around you are calling the other side Nazis.
1 Nazis are bad 2 The other side are bad 3 The other side are Nazis Optional: add an example that confirms bias
Both sides calling the others Nazis doesn’t imply that centrists are using critical thinking. It just means that one side is lying. Nazism is a far right ideology.
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
Nazis and tankies are both totalitarian - people just seem to have forgotten the term.
What is it “Tankies” advocate for that is “totalitarian?”
Weird, that’s also the only thing my Politic Science degree has ever gotten me!
Boy I sure do love living through historical events that will likely end up in textbooks in the future
May you live in interesting times…
Edit: Ah, was done below, great minds…
Bold of you to presume that people will be allowed to read about these times, in the future:-).
That’s why I said they’ll likely be in textbooks, no guarantee lol
Fair enough!:-)
My history teacher said that the greatest curse you can give someone is telling them “May you live in interesting times” and boy do I feel that now.
History majors rise up
I really have begun to believe that politicians should employ historians to give advice on certain political events by drawing comparisons to previous situations.
That only really works in a benevolent dictatorship. In a democracy, the masses can vote for reality-rejection candidates.
It’s a pity democracy seems to be better than all the alternatives in practice, cause in principle there should be ways to improve things more. Inevitably though all other forms turn into draconian crap. Well, democracy does sometimes too, but less often.
“The Official Committee of Learning From Previous Blunders” lol what-if.
What’s odd about today’s “democracy” is how increasingly little government itself matters, next to corporations that are stronger than nations.
Because corporations are not democratic
Sure, we have democratic political systems, but the economic systems are very much not. Since when can you vote un your workplace? It your boss tells you to do something, you do it, or risk losing your livelihood, the thing that you depend upon for survival
That’s not very democratic
In the past, let’s use the USA as an example, we’ve had both “business” side-by-side with “government”, with the role of the latter often thought of as to balance and foster the true spirit of the former. Keeping the worst excesses of business at bay, and doing things like scientific research that spurs innovation within the realm of business, were both considered the realm of government.
But times change, and now the role of government is getting smaller and smaller, while the roles of corporations are looming larger and larger - there are even businesses that provide a place to live for their employees!
Anyway, businesses were never democratic, but it used to not matter so much when business was merely the place where you worked, while government took care of you at home. Whereas now, they are taking on increasing prominence in people’s lives in terms of dictating every single aspect of life - e.g. government healthcare (Medicare & Medicaid) is dying (being killed) off, leaving only business as the provider of “healthcare” available to people - which is what ObamaCare was trying to fight against.
So we still “have” democracy… technically, it’s just that it matters less and less as the role of government is continually diminished, and powerful corporations greedily take all the power available unto themselves.
The Neoliberal ideology, with its core principle of making Money the greatest Power, above the State which is the Power controlled by the vote of citizens, was always meant to destroy Democracy.
Whilst the theatre used to distract us has been different, we’ve been going in the same direction as Russia when it comes to the vote: making it a meaningless act whilst we’re told it’s “democratic”.
Unsurprisingly as people felt more and more powerless, pushed around, exploited and unfairly treated all the while being told this is Democracy, they turned more and more to those selling something else than Democracy.
It seems the natural end state of Neoliberal Capitalism is Fascism.
Government could choose to reign these corporations in, but the money the give officials makes them choose not too
“It’s okay, I’ll enjoy my retirement long before corporations start buying literal states, springing up company towns, employing workers younger than my current children, and buying and selling people via contracts, whilst waging open war with drones and wageslave conscripts.” –Most Politicians as they watch their green line go up, probably
Right, so whether they “can’t” or simply “won’t”, either way they don’t, and the problem just grows and grows with no bounds.
It’s like democracy is the least bad system…
A well crafted political system is one that stays uncorrupted the longest (or can recover less violently from corruption).
Cyberpunk was supposed to be fiction, not a blueprint :(
Just wait for the cyberpunk crossover with The Handmaid’s Tale. This is the worst timeline.
Hegel remarks somewhere[*] that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce
Something something heglian dialectics, something something new vegas, something something “Fuck caesar,blow his ass away, and Legate Lanius too”
This fantastic opening quote must have also been Marx’s weirdest flex.
As someone who consumes a lot of ancient history, it can also make you like “Ah yes, another city rises, another is displaced by climate disaster, and another falls due to land mismanagement. ‘Tis the way of things.”
It’s true. I wonder how many ancient Babylonians, Greeks, Chinese, Egyptians, Persians, Romans thought:
“Surely, this empire will last forever! Look upon our works, ye mighty, and despair!” (EDIT: LOL It appears we’re all of one mind remembering this poem. We must be doing something right. XD)
Especially in modern times it’s insanely difficult to imagine the geopolitics shifting drastically, but it’s happened before, it’s happening now. The difference being that the rest of the globe is now much more invested in your shenanigans with your neighbors, but it’s still happening.
What does one do amidst a regime change?
I’m glad I’ve never had to seriously consider it until now. …but it unnerves me that I probably need to start.
You forgot an important difference between ancient history and now. Now, when the empire falls it has the power to take the biosphere with it.
how does one consume ancient history? do you eat the source documents?
That’s unrealistic— some of them are etched into stone
You need some papurus dust to sprinkle on those, like a lick-a-stick.
Civilizations of a heirarchal centralized type definitely feel like temporary abberations, after reading Graeber and Wengrow
Nonsense, I look on Ozymandias, king of kings’ works daily and despair!
I was literally thinking about this poem moments ago.
It’s one of the greats.
If you think it hasn’t happend before, check again, nothing in history is new
When have we had AI so good the turing test lost it’s whole meaning overnight?
The mechanical turk. Like the mechanical turk LLMs have the same flaw, it’s really just a human behind the best implementations.
I’ve checked my PC looking for the tiny man managing my local llm, no luck yet but perhaps they’re smaller than I thought…
That’s nice dear, the amount of human hours tuning your model to not be complete gibberish definitely don’t count, and the fact all live service LLMs employ at least a few dozen third world workers to check results and change outputs disagree with your under powered rng.
They sure put a ton of money into sweeping it under the rug that exploiting workers at near-slavery wages is always what makes these “technological revolutionary marvels” actually tick.
Whether it’s new FoxConn chips, EV batteries, “free shipping”, or LLMs.
Every. Time.
Be a better person. Less ignorant, more useful.
Feel free to take your own advice, not a single AI product operates commercially without underpaid workers in foreign countries constantly monitoring it. Take Amazon’s cashier less store as the biggest example of this that has been exposed.
Is ai learning training data it got from itself?
Uh… No.
Same. I haven’t used my history degree at all. It has just enabled the “oh, fuck” overdrive in my brain over the last several years. I hate it.
