Fiat Lux

Implausible Histories (the first one to need a reboot with an update that moves us beyond the Great Human Expansion).

Forgotten Evils Series.

Forgotten Goods Series.

Bad-Ass of the Month series (will be doing another one of those shortly to commemorate the new semester).

Now the Alternate History Gripes series.

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/11/14/rnc-health-grandma/

Between the RNC plan's acceptance of abortion rights and end-of-life counseling, one almost gets the feeling that the Republicans are willingly selling a bill of goods to their followers, while themselves benefiting of what they seek to deny their supporters. Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, shame on you. Fool me all the time and I'm a Republican supporter.

This is really, really rich.

X-posted to Talk_Politics

China.

Yes, China. The existence of China itself is extremely implausible. This may come as a surprise to people who know that the PRC is a continuation of the old policy of a unified authoritarian regime in East Asia. But it is true nonetheless. China is not a "natural" entity, though if we are to be picky about it the only "natural" human method of society is hunting and gathering, and all states are various degrees of artificiality. That said, China has the distinction of being the oldest-unified state and also one of the most unique.

First, China itself managed to do what the Roman Empire never did, re-start itself repeatedly in successor empires. The Roman Empire's attempt to re-conquer Italy failed, and the Holy Roman Empire provides an admirable example of the state-that-is-not-a-state. The contemporary PRC is just a contemporary continuation of that, adopted to modern times and the challenges they face. It is perfectly plausible that the region called China today might have developed in the vein of Europe into an area composed of a single cultural history and metaculture, with the Han Empire becoming to that China what Rome has become to Europe. Instead, thanks to a ruthless and vicious Totalitarian policy followed by Qin Shi Huang, the first totalitarian back in the 3rd Century BC (China invents everything), Chinese societies were able to achieve something beyond the dreams of any other cultural region: create a unified imperial state.

Second, Chinese rule did something that Rome and Indian societies did not, as well as Muslim societies: they invented the concept, albeit in a Chinese form, of "the tree of liberty is fed by the blood of tyrants." They called it the Mandate of Heaven. The Chinese Empire in a paradoxical way was much freer than its Communist successor has ever been, as the concept existed that the Emperor's power relied on providing for the populace. If this provision became inadequate, off with the emperor's head. This also gave the Imperial Chinese system a flexibility that few other systems have ever truly possessed. Both the Euro-Christian and Islamic metacultures depended on single rulers who in the vein of Japanese Emperors gradually became attenuated in power to irrelevancy: the Caliph (which was still for all its nature as a universal leadership quite democratic, the only thing the Caliph got to show his election was a handshake). But in Europe and the expanding Islamic world, the concepts of the sovereign answering to the people in any real sense took much longer to evolve. In China it was inbuilt.

Third, China maintained for a long time the most stable and prosperous society on the planet. It was the superior of Europe for a very long time and remained equal to it up into the 19th Century. Unified rule under the Imperial structure permitted the growth of a stable system and provided a basis so that invasions of China ended up Sinifying with much less ruinous effects than invasions of Europe or the heartland of Medieval Islam. It is from this that the Chinese never really felt the need to adopt European ways, as they were equally prosperous as the richer corners of Europe until quite late. And while India itself fell into European colonial rule, China never fell completely into the orbit of Europe or Japan despite long attempts to create this effect by both powers.

Fourth, the Chinese have provided stable government that was democratic by the pre-Industrial age definition that was stable and more than equal to Europe, yet have been accused of being backward. If we are to use the term in a serious sense, Europe deserves it more as the largest European society in the overland sense was an authoritarian despotism while Europeans were not able to civilize themselves enough to divest themselves of conquering other people instead of using the more civilized method of hitting their pocketbooks. Hence I reject fully that one of the most stable societies on Earth is also one of the more backwards societies, China was no more authoritarian than most pre-Industrial states and less so than many. And China's prosperity was equal to Europe's for quite some time, even with Europe able to enrich itself from the conquest of two entire continents, which implies still more problems for the thesis that Europe was inherently superior to other societies.

This is your Implausible Histories update.

Effectively, Harry Potter's wizarding world sucks, at least to me. They're like "We can beat the muggles" but they don't even know how cars work while Muggles go to the moon and have nukes. So I wondered what would happen if they met a *real* Dark Lord. So the result is a planned HP fanfic where Sauron is ISOT in his Second-Age incarnation with the One Ring. It would start in the actual fourth book, post Voldie's Resurrection.

Voldy's giving the speech while Harry's captive, as per usual when one of the Death Eaters screams as a sword skewers him. An Orc howls as it does so, as more Orcs emerge from the shadows. The Death Eaters congregate around their master when the air becomes noticeably colder. Harry's glasses slightly frost as the Nazgul suddenly re-appear with the Fell Beasts roaring. Voldemort fires Avada Kedavra at their leader, who is completely unaffected. Then Something comes out of the shadows. A NOES-style whisper echoes through the cemetery "Azsg Naszg Durbatuluk, aszg nazg grimpatul, aszg nasgz thratukuluk agh-ishi burzum gimapatul!" And Harry's scar starts to hurt much more painfully as a gigantic man in hulking black armor steps out, with a glowing yellow ring as molten metal and Voldie and Harry both short out from the concentrated evil of Sauron, Harry in the process finding himself back in the Tournament only able to mutter over and over again "Five fingers hath he on the black hand".

The news comes that a whole host of objects have been destroyed randomly, something that concerns Dumbledore, and what would be Book 5 concerns the slow spread of the irresistible and inexorable progress of a Darkness that neither Magic nor Muggle Science can say, as well as the revival of types of evil far beyond that of the Men of the 6th Age, who have neither Elves nor Naugrim to help them this time. What would be the fifth book concludes with Voldemort's head on a pike delivered to the Ministry of Magic courtesy of a strange robed figure who gave chills to the men there.

The Sixth Book would thus concern itself with the presence of ever-growing armies of the Orcs who are proving very unfortunately adaptable and devastating to Muggle Armies, and Wizards face the dilemma of breaking the Secrecy Statue or letting this new Dark Lord Sauron Annatar take over both worlds step by step. The dilemma is irrevocably broken when Hogwarts' enchantments crack under the assault of the Witch-King of Angmar and the arrival of an army of Orcs, Hogwarts is sacked and destroyed and the Orcs have exposed wizards to the Muggles.

The Seventh Book concerns the apocalyptic downfall of the Harry Potter world as the Great Enemy triumphs over the Last Alliance of Wizards and Muggles and the new Age of Sauron begins, the entire world united under a single figure of overpowering evil, to whom nothing of the contemporary world is able to stop him.....

But what the Hell.

The next time I hear some idiot talking about capital punishment but favoring some sissy method like lethal injection or the electric chair, I'm going to be thinking that real men crucify the nasty criminals and impale the nastiest ones. Until we resurrect these two hoary old classical methods of capital punishment, even our manliest manly idiots will fail to be truly manly.

Meanwhile we decadent fops of civilized societies will enjoy the chance to live in a society that isn't rife with scum and that doesn't enjoy the kind of savage amusements places like Ye Olde Rome and Merry Olde England did.

La dee da....

In my stories, which again are all in a single multiverse, the phenomenon of the werecreature comes from Palaeolithic Shamans who delved into forbidden arts. They became the great predators of their areas, and due to the constant cellular regeneration of shifting (biology may not work  this way, but this is magic, so A Wizard Did It, literally) they are immortal. This also means that shifter Cave Bears and Marsupial Lions endure into the present day, though later generations take increasingly smaller forms as the large predators die off. Where vampire glamours hit the Uncanny Valley, appearing like Mr. Hyde to give off deformity without its actual appearance, shifters are ordinary people, albeit the oldest ones, from the age prior to the evolution of white skin do stand out, but manage to come out of hiding especially post-colonialism.

And their forms enable them to hide in two ways, first the modern ones take advantage of the inability to tell what is and isn't right for an animal on the part of modernity, while the older ones use cryptozoology to their benefit, becoming the cryptids of land and sea. The vampire as a monstrous horror exudes its evil, where the evil of the werebeasts lets them fit in with man and beast alike and prey on them both alike. And even worse, some shifters are Neanderthals, the first species to have religion, and over the passage of tens of thousands of years have become extremely brutal engines of death, in transformed and untransformed forms.

So to get the snippet of this, imagine a sociopathic serial killer in the making who's begun to torture animals near the home of a shifter who happens to be a Smilodon-shifter (remember these shifters date back into Palaeolithic times). The shifter becomes disgusted and waits until the young man has attacked his house at night with a rock. After he attempts to get into the house, he is greeted by eyes which in the light are a pale green, and a deep-sounding gurgle as the house is lived in by a Smilodon. Attempting to run, he is pounced on and dragged into the basement by the smilodon, there to be feasted on to its content. And for years the young man's parents seek to find him, only after the shifter moves a collection of gnawed-on human bones are found in his basement by the next couple which moved in, but Mr. Theodore Watkins has long-since left and is nowhere to be found, yet there are reports of a long-dead animal inexplicably present again in the next state....

First, imagine if you will that there's this woman who has always admired vampires and sought to meet them. She receives a message from someone on a social networking site who claims to be a vampire enthusiast. She meets this person in a cemetery where both agreed to meet. There is a vile smell which exudes from him and he drops his hat and takes off his cloak. Instead of Edward or Lestat, you get a horror which is an animated corpse where the flesh has holes in the cheek with maggots and black blood oozing from it and dripping off the fangs. The hair is made of maggots and the eye sockets are empty blackness. The creature extends a hand that is skeletal, then it says "Food for the stomach and the stomach for food" and then the woman finds herself compelled to come to the vampire which feasts off of her and leaves her an empty dead shell, as if even one vampire existed we'd all be vampires by now.

Then the walking corpse flies up into the air and proceeds to its next victim.

That's a vampire. Not Edward, not Lestat, and for God's sakes definitely not Alucard.

Next installment is werewolves. ^.^
 

I dedicate this post to the memory of all the dead of all the wars in human history, victor and loser alike. Societies ask too much of soldiers, whom we send into bloody and horrifying situations and then too often do we sadly ignore the needs of the veterans and the pains war inflicts. War is cruelty and we cannot refine it, and when we send our soldiers, and the enemy sends theirs, both of us choose a method which brings pain and suffering to people, for little gain. But leaving that aside, soldiers, regardless of their service or the side they serve, or whether or not they actually fire a gun in combat or are simply quartermasters and truck drivers, deserve commemoration.

This is a day to remember the young men who serve, and to honor them, regardless of cause, for the shell mangles flesh regardless of the banner the flesh marches under.

In honor of the sacrifices of all veterans, but especially those of mine own country, the United States, I do wish to extend a thanks for the deeds you do.

Namely how to take the idea of Star Wars and make Palpatine something other than a screw-up:

When Darth Plagueis takes in a young boy from Corellia named Palpatine, of a distant noble line gone into its darkest corner, killing his parents, Palpatine becomes indoctrinated into the use of the dark side of the force. Where Darth Bane had envisioned revenge against the Jedi as killing them all off, Darth Plagueis had envisioned a more subtle plague for the Jedi Order. Namely corrupting slowly the Jedi into the Sith, so that the revenge of the Sith would be that the Jedi would decay into Sith and none could know what transpired until too late. Becoming entranced into this plan, Palpatine continues to study the Dark Side, now known as Darth Sidious. He becomes a master adept, eventually taking an apprentice of his own, Darth Maul. Darth Plagueis attempts to create a perfect being by the force, and on Tatooine, the future Sith Adept Darth Vader is born.

Darth Plagueis is eventually killed by Darth Sidious, but not prior to introducing into the Jedi Order the idea of the One Force. The idea is adopted by Grand Master Yoda, and through the wiles of the Sith master Darth Sidious the Order itself begins a slow decline into a more militant organization, adopting the idea of Serenity through the Saber. This idea sees its first test in the Arkanian Revolution, in which the new Jedi Militants brutally impose order, satisfying Sidious's plans. He then begins to use Darth Maul to stir up chaos, prompting a brutal war in Naboo, a planet led by an incompetent minor on the Global Throne which utterly devastates the planet after Maul produces a Trade Federation deployment, eventually crashed down on by the Jedi Militants. Disgusted at the Republic's incompetence, Master Dooku leaves the Jedi Order, and is initiated by Maul as the first of the new Force Lords. Reviving the ancient title of Jedi Lord, Dooku proclaims himself Lord Anarchos and begins plans to create a clone army to strengthen the Republic from the threat Palpatine has discovered, an incoming alien invasion.

The Trade Federation gets wind of Darth Sidious's role in this and under a charismatic leader named Komari Vosa a coalition of disaffected leaders rebel against the Chancellor of the Republic, prompting the appointment due to deadlock in the Senate of Palpatine of the Chommel Sector as Chancellor. A Jedi adventure backfires at Geonosis, prompting the Jedi Massacre and the rescue of the survivors by a joint force led by Jedi Lord Anarchos and Grand Master Yoda, at the head of the new Grand Army of the Republic.

The vicious Clone Wars begin as the Independent Systems led by Supreme Overlord Vosa wars against the Republic led by Generalissimo Palpatine. Serenity through the Saber becomes the universal ideal of the Jedi Order, and in the climatic Outer Rim Sieges, the New Jedi Order begins, as a young man, caught in the crossfire of the Battle of Tatooine is rebuilt as a brutal new overlord, Darth Vader, and the One Force Order era begins. Jedi and Sith are one, the One Forcers.

Eventually discontented factions revive the idea of the Independent Systems, and a Rebel Alliance of Neo-Vosites lead a desperate guerilla war against the One Force Empire and its three masters, Grand Master Yoda of the former Jedi, the now-called Ashlites, and the twin Bognites Sidious and Maul. The war ends in a bloody defeat of the Rebellion in the Endor Holocaust, and later an infiltration of the Yuuzhan Vong begins, one countered in a series of Brushfire conflicts by the One Forcers, before the gigantic Vong War begins.

This war, larger than the Clone Wars, ended in a resounding victory for the clone/droid One Force Military over the Vong, as the Vong forces find themselves in gruesome sanguinary battles that end up chewing up entire Vong armies and the One Force Empire is entirely untroubled by the loss of clones and droids, where the Vong get increasingly desperate, resulting in Suicide Waves being repeatedly sent in the Battles of Blood.

The ending of my saga is roughly analogous to the Legacy Saga, in that a group of Hard-Line One Forcers deep in the Dark Side attempt to revive the Sith Order under Darth Umbrae and this triggers the Sith War that ends in another defeat of the Sith, led by General Fel of the One Force Empire.

So....thoughts? Is this a mite too geeky?

So now those of you who know I do a little personal writing will know something of what I write:

"Citizens of the Empire, heed my words and take listen to my warnings! The Regicide-Diarch shall doom us all! You have taken upon you a leader to whom that most sacred of bonds, blood and blood-kin are as nothing. The Axhamani speak of a curse when children reign over us, but you have surpassed the imagination of their sacred book, for less a child have you to reign over you than he who shall sow disaster and all of us shall reap our doom.

Our society is based on the Sacred Dicta of the Learned, so how then is it that we cannot here speak of a great breach of this? You put into power a leader whose character is seen in the callousness with which he fired on a simple Freedman-Protest. If we cannot trust one of our own leading family with the bastard children of our dead Diarch, then I ask you citizens of the Empire if we can hold to the pact we made with the House of Underlan?

Mark my words, if we tolerate this madman, who slays his father and Freedman alike, so that neither the great nor the lowly are free, then we ourselves deserve our doom. For the doom itself has been passed. In 20 years I foresee a terrifying cataclysm, for the avarice of the Regicide-Diarch and the folly of our own leaders, who adhere to this foolish idea that from birth a leader is foreordained to rule unless that leader is ruthless enough, and who mistake cruelty for virtue and savagery for justice will bring something that we have not foreseen. And the Builders of Fear themselves shall find that they are no longer in control."

The Augur H'ven Mulhani from one of my writings.

Cookies to the person who gets both the author and the book:

"This all things devours,
birds, beasts, trees, flowers,
gnaws iron, bites steel, grinds hard stones to meal,
slays king, ruins town, and beats high mountain down."

And:

"Thirty white horses on a red hill.
First they champ then they stamp,
and then they stand still."

Courtesy of the Bible:

"Adah and Zillah take heed to me, ye wives of Lamech heed my speech, for I have killed a young man for wounding me and a boy for injuring me. If Cain be avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy-sevenfold."

It is a strange one to have on the brain and I do not understand what has it on here. >.>
 

And one other thing-we in the Sumerian-Mandean Space Dinosaur Alliance for the Shiny Happy People's Democratic Republic of Commuzionist America are on to you. You can expect a visit from our men in black suits with big honky red noses who fit into ridiculously tiny shoes on April 1st. The delay is to have a suitably smiley-face fascist cell for you with plenty of schoolteachers and their fascist fascist bastard hugs.

Heh, heh.

Sad thing is the guy reading it will think I'm being serious. :(.

I have been in discussions about the evolution of science where the Graeco-Roman contribution is dismissed. Then I remember that the Graeco-Romans believed that for reasons of harmony, no more and no less that there had to be a land to the south....Terra Australis Incognita. And then centuries after Graeco-Roman culture had become subsumed into the new Western culture, three men discovered Terra Australis and ironically indicated that for once the Greeks were not entirely FOS. Fabian von Bellinghausen, Edward Branfield, and Nathaniel Palmer all discovered the mythical Southern Land.....and the last of the continents was discovered, this one really discovered since there were no humans already living there. Heh.

And in another irony, Antarctica proved to be a land of "Water, water everywhere and nor a drop to drink" as Coleridge put it. History sometimes throws these screwballs at us. The Greeks were FOS on Geocentrism and the idea of men with faces in their chests, and also with Prester John.....but they get this right. Oh, well.*shrugs.*

________________

Not directed at anyone on my FL.

"She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing."

______________________

Old Billy knew how to spin a phrase, he did.

People tend to presume that World War I was a senseless and bloody war, yet in terms of the wars of the 20th Century it is the single most important of all of them. The war shredded the modern consensus, as the prospect and sight of armies of millions of people grinding themselves into hamburger meat ended the idea of white supremacy as invulnerable, though it took World War II and the Japanese Army's defeats of the white armies in Asia to push things in that direction. World War I then led into the fall of so many of the old multiethnic monarchies, creating the modern dysfunctional post-colonial Middle East and the consequences of the fall of Imperial Russia led directly to the rise of Adolf Hitler as leader of Germany.

Too, if we are to speak of its consequences, World War I and its fueling directly into World War II ended colonial powers and ensured the temporary period of North American predominance courtesy of those two large coalition conflicts leveling what had been then the population and economic centers of the world. The consequences of World War I that still have direct relevance are US geopolitical supremacy and the potential Second Cold War with the Russian Federation, as well as the Chinese Communist regime. World War I was the defining moment of the history of the 20th Century, and without it, the century itself alters. It may have been overshadowed by the Hitler War, but the war with the Kaiser was truly deserving of the term the Great War.

IMHO, the most significant years of the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries were 1792, 1871, and 1917.

1792 saw the French abolish the monarchy, a fateful step for Europe. It also saw the Battle of Valmy, the single most critical battle in modern times. The victory of a massed conscript army against a more traditional force of European soldiers marked the beginning of the end for the transitional period prior to the New Imperialism and the first precursors of 21st Century liberal democracy. It also marked the time by which Europe finally outpaced China in both a military and an economic sense, setting up the modern world, which has seen the imposition of liberal democracy by the sword. A victory at Valmy for the invaders would have critically weakened the Revolution, instead the victory of the Revolutionaries radicalized things and led to the first totalitarian government since Qin Shi Huang died from mercury poisoning.

In 1871, the German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors. Bismarck's creation de-stabilized Europe and left a gaping hole in the Balance of Power, as a united Germany under the Hohenzollerns and its belated attempts to join the rest of Europe in colonialism led to the two world wars of the 20th Century. Because of the consequences of the two world wars, and their resulting from a unified Germany's attempt to gain what it felt was its proper place, it can be said that the doom of the colonial empires was struck before most had even reached their final forms. And the unification of the former HRE excluding Austria, Luxembourg, and Switzerland also led to a greater challenge, namely that the new Germany was both militarily powerful and a major threat to its neighbors, who in turn felt the need to form the Triple Entente, which led to again the upheavals of the first half of the 20th Century and the downfall of colonialism.

The third major date is the abdication of Nicholas II of Russia and what happened after. The tangled mess and civil war that led to the establishment of the USSR in 1922 was fateful and to a degree ominous, as the new Bolshevik government enabled a great deal of Red Baiting that led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and other fascist leaders. Bolshevik ruthlessness and organization led to the establishment of a very different kind of autocracy over one of the largest single areas led by a single government. The consequences factored into World War II very heavily, both Hitler's rise via Red-Baiting, and then his pact with the Soviet leader Stalin that heralded the coming of World War II to Europe. And at the war's end the Soviets had gone from their darkest hour to their peak, with consequences we have yet to see the end of. The potential date of this sort for the 21st Century will await its end to be deciphered, and I do not believe we have seen it yet.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601082&sid=aPdP6aS8r_lA

My only comment is that these Anglicans will no longer be Catholics, the Lite version, but instead will be Catholics, the Rite version.

And upun that note I beg your leaf.

There is a danger in a society that has encountered repeated failures in terms of dealing with the modern era. Another, and deeper problem, is the society that encounters no real failures and/or challenges and thus has no idea how to deal with that basic reality.

One of the reasons I'm skeptical about most so-called reform in the USA is that so long as Americans continue to hold to the idea that a Constitution written by ordinary men in Philadelphia is a Torah/Quran given from on high, we will continue to adhere to a doctrine written in the 18th Century to safeguard a landholding elite. Unless we are willing to strongly modify the Constitution at minimum (simply enshrining a recognition of political parties is one of the more obvious reforms, and there are many more deeply needed ones), we will retain an outmoded document that has become increasingly the source of our problems. A document written by landowners is not exactly what we of the 21st Century should conserve as necessary, because it increasingly isn't. If we are to avert the collapse of the Republic, we need at minimum to make our Constitution modern, and a 21st Century document. So long as we don't, highly-motivated minorities, minorities often backed by wealth and invested interests, will be able to run rough-shod over a majority to do actions that are contrary to the spirit if not the reality of the American Republic.

I believe a major issue of contemporary US society is that from 1789 to 1964 in parts of the USA, a tyrannical regime imposed on a population that disfranchised losers among the elite ethnicity and reducing to laboring class status the ethnicity in that in some parts was the majority population was aided and abetted by the US Federal Government. In tolerating the tyranny that was the Plantation and then the Jim Crow South, the US government allowed a society which was in large part dictatorial to exist within the broader context of a Republic which was in theory based on an egalitarian precept that all men were created equal. This in turn meant that in parts of US society (in reality in all of it, as the Black Codes of the Plantation era and the Sundown Towns and Chinese Exclusion Acts testify, to say nothing of the genocidal pattern all regions followed with the Indian Wars) especially, a society developed in which democracy is as foreign as it is in say.....Russia or any other society where democracy is slowly and painfully evolving.

And this is why it ends up that US politics is so twisted and warped, because parts of the USA are as new to democracy as Indonesia.

On this day in 1859, a brave man struck at the heart of slavery and so ensured its doom.

John Brown remains one of the primary redeeming examples of 19th Century white men, and it is as such that we should remember him.

John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
but his soul goes marching on!

I find the use of dinosaur as an insult to be rather hilarious. At one point early proto-mammals were the predominant herbivores and carnivores on the planet. Then the dinosaurs deposed our ancestors for 150 million years of being the chief herbivores and carnivores around. I mean, they were hardly inferior considering the entire history of the human race extends 150,000 years and that of human civilization is a mere 6,000 of that 150,000 years. In fact, I would even venture to state that dinosaurs were to a degree superior as a portion of the dinosaurs has in actual fact survived up to the present: the subgroup of the maniraptors known as class Aves in traditional Linnean classification. Which would mean that Aves, as the sole survivors of class Avialae, are the most successful groups of theropods ever.

And by that token, the fried chicken I had for supper tonight marks how things have changed since the order Primates decided to show our fellow mammals who's boss. *smug bastard.*

While the fall of Rome in the West was immensely devastating, the Chinese were able to have a continuous sequence of legitimate government established where Roman rule in the West primarily gifted the West with its sacred tongue of Latin and the institutions of feudalism. The question of why Roman rule was never able to be restored where the Chinese have a succession of dynasties of which the PRC is arguably a contender for the last contiguous dynasty, one run by Communist Party leaders as opposed to Mandarins but otherwise much is the same remains an interesting one.

I believe one chief reason for China retaining a hydraulic despotism intact from Neolithic times is how isolated it was, and that most neighboring peoples, like the Bai, the Chitans, or the Manchus assimilated into Chinese culture much more readily than was the case in Europe. In Europe's case, the age of migrations continually devastated societies getting back up on their feet again, a process not helped by the Roman practice of establishing occupations within families that began under Emperor Constantine I and then the practice of the new Germanic kings in sub-dividing their territories, which created the feudal system. China, by contrast, was isolated and where European culture came to reside with a bunch of feudal warlords engaged in endemic warfare, the Chinese were eventually able to recreate themselves as the Tang. By the time of Charles V, the last man who could re-unite Europe, the resulting feudalism had made re-unification impossible. And in China, Chinese culture remained an idea linked with the Guanhua, while in Europe what cultures there were rested for a long time more on nobility than monarch. Chinese landowners were subjugated to the Emperors while European landowners could make Emperors. That in my opinion is the key distinguishing feature of why the Han Dynasty became the Tang, while the Western Roman Empire became feudal anarchy.

IMHO, the fall of the Roman Empire as a single state encompassing everything from Britain to North Africa and the Middle East to Iberia has far more to do with the idea of Caesar Augustus being incapable of deciding what happened if there was no claimant to the title of Caesar. This meant in the absence of a suitably powerful claimant that civil war among the generals became the reality of succession, as opposed to the US line of succession. Civil war meant powerful military leaders could become emperors, but when no claimant could subdue the others, which meant they proliferated, the result was the Military Anarchy and the consuming of the Empire in civil war that led to the rise of Christianity and the victory of barbarians over the Roman Empire in the West, and the collapse of the Roman Empire into the hollow shell of it that was the Byzantine phase of the Empire.

There's nothing especially fancy about the collapse of a state which has no justifiable idea of how to continue itself.

Consider this a belated Columbus Day rant post:

In my view, to celebrate the grand accomplishment of Columbus that was to exterminate the Taino and the Arawak is both disgusting and immoral. To celebrate genocide implies that Aboriginal Americans are inferior, when in fact there are several occasions where they did things superior to their European cohorts. We do not honor other genocides, yet we are reluctant to condemn our own. And if we think of Aboriginals at all, their history stopped in 1890 instead of continuing on into the present as it has and will. People are not objects to be discounted and forgotten as time moves on, the legacy of the past remains. The United States cannot fix what deep problems of our society exist if we forget that we faced often-defenseless people with armed brute force. It is not right, and we cannot do what is necessary and proper by ignoring this.

And to celebrate a genocidal man who never even realized he hadn't landed in modern-day Indonesia as the discoverer of America is futile anyway. We should celebrate Indian Day, as they'd already discovered the continent long before the Vikings did. And if we celebrate a European, the Scandinavians should be celebrated, and not the Italian. This is the shadow side of our culture, we call good evil and evil good, and then wonder how we get into the fixes we do. Such has it ever been, so shall it ever be.

One more year before I get to indulge in traditional American vices like gambling and drinking. Whoopie.

On the other hand.....I've realized I'm a person who wants to study American Indian History born on Columbus Day, who was born a month before the Berlin Wall fell, and whose father was born a month before the Iron Curtain speech. It's a curious tradition, but WTFever, man, I don't give a crap. My generation doesn't have to worry that some drunk schmuck who's a Communist Party member because his daddy was is going to fall asleep on the Big Red Button anymore.