US US Politics General - Discussion of President Biden and other politicians

 

[More AWS-8Q Than You]

That’s because he was a retard and his work was bad.

Show how he's retarded and his work is bad. That's all I'm asking.

What is his definition than? I've looked a little at the essay and he doesn't seem to give a clear definition of what an empire is. Only that there is a period of expansion, defense (or stabilization) and eventually decline. The stages are roughly age of pioneers, conquest, commerce, affluence, intellect, and finally decadence. Even by these stages I still don't see how America follows this pattern. Pioneering (take over of the natives) didn't finish till about the 1900s. Which at that point America had fought three major powers (some several times), and fought other new world nations. Maybe I'm trying to find a hard definition, when it simply isn't what he's talking about.

I'm rereading, but I don't know that he gives a simple, one line answer, it's more the cycle and the shared characteristics. Not every state is an empire. The Swiss, for example.

V Characteristics of the outburst
These sudden outbursts are usually characterised by an extraordinary display of energy and courage. The new conquerors are normally poor, hardy and enterprising and above all aggressive.

Doesn't really fit for them. Rome, Macedonia, America. Compare the US and Canada, or to break down further, Quebec. Similar situations and opportunities, but the US took them.

Spoiler: And as for America

IX U.S.A. in the stage of the pioneers
In the case of the United States of America, the pioneering period did not consist of a barbarian conquest of an effete civilisation, but of the conquest of barbarian peoples. Thus, viewed from the outside, every example seems to be different. But viewed from the standpoint of the great nation, every example seems to be similar. The United States arose suddenly as a new nation, and its period of pioneering was spent in the conquest of a vast continent, not an ancient empire. Yet the subsequent life history of the United States has followed the standard pattern which we shall attempt to trace—the periods of the pioneers, of commerce, of affluence, of intellectualism and of decadence.

We may not have finished off the Indians until the 1900s, but we'd effectively controlled the land much earlier.

XIII The Age of Commerce
Let us now, however, return to the lifestory of our typical empire. We have already considered the age of outburst, when a littleregarded people suddenly bursts on to the world stage with a wild courage and energy. Let us call it the Age of the Pioneers. Then we saw that these new conquerors acquired the sophisticated weapons of the old empires, and adopted their regular systems of military organisation and training. A great period of military expansion ensued, which we may call the Age of Conquests. The conquests resulted in the acquisition of vast territories under one government, thereby automatically giving rise to commercial prosperity. We may call this the Age of Commerce. The Age of Conquests, of course, overlaps the Age of Commerce. The proud military traditions still hold sway and the great armies guard the frontiers, but gradually the desire to make money seems to gain hold of the public. During the military period, glory and honour were the principal objects of ambition. To the merchant, such ideas are but empty words, which add nothing to the bank balance.

We were using the rivers and building the transcontinental railway well before we'd beaten the Indians, but also during conquering them.

XV The Age of Affluence
There does not appear to be any doubt that money is the agent which causes the decline of this strong, brave and self-confident people. The decline in courage, enterprise and a sense of duty is, however, gradual. The first direction in which wealth injures the nation is a moral one. Money replaces honour and adventure as the objective of the best young men. Moreover, men do not normally seek to make money for their country or their community, but for themselves. Gradually, and almost imperceptibly, the Age of Affluence silences the voice of duty. The object of the young and the ambitious is no longer fame, honour or service, but cash. Education undergoes the same gradual transformation. No longer do schools aim at producing brave patriots ready to serve their country. Parents and students alike seek the educational qualifications which will command the highest salaries. The Arab moralist, Ghazali (1058-1111), complains in these very same words of the lowering of objectives in the declining Arab world of his time. Students, he says, no longer attend college to acquire learning and virtue, but to obtain those qualifications which will enable them to grow rich. The same situation is everywhere evident among us in the West today.

XVIII The Age of Intellect
We have now, perhaps arbitrarily, divided the life-story of our great nation into four ages. The Age of the Pioneers (or the Outburst), the Age of Conquests, the Age of Commerce, and the Age of Affluence. The great wealth of the nation is no longer needed to supply the mere necessities, or even the luxuries of life. Ample funds are available also for the pursuit of knowledge. The merchant princes of the Age of Commerce seek fame and praise, not only by endowing works of art or patronising music and literature. They also found and endow colleges and universities. It is remarkable with what regularity this phase follows on that of wealth, in empire after empire, divided by many centuries. In the eleventh century, the former Arab Empire, then in complete political decline, was ruled by the Seljuk sultan, Malik Shah. The Arabs, no longer soldiers, were still the intellectual leaders of the world. During the reign of Malik Shah, the building of universities and colleges became a passion. Whereas a small number of universities in the great cities had sufficed the years of Arab glory, now a university sprang up in every town. In our own lifetime, we have witnessed the same phenomenon in the U.S.A. and Britain. When these nations were at the height of their glory, Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge seemed to meet their needs. Now almost every city has its university. The ambition of the young, once engaged in the pursuit of adventure and military glory, and then in the desire for the accumulation of wealth, now turns to the acquisition of academic honours. It is useful here to take note that almost all the pursuits followed with such passion throughout the ages were in themselves good. The manly cult of hardihood, frankness and truthfulness, which characterised the Age of Conquests, produced many really splendid heroes. The opening up of natural resources, and the peaceful accumulation of wealth, which marked the age of commercialism, appeared to introduce new triumphs in civilisation, in culture and in the arts. In the same way, the vast expansion of the field of knowledge achieved by the Age of Intellect seemed to mark a new high-water mark of human progress. We cannot say that any of these changes were ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The striking features in the pageant of empire are:
(a) the extraordinary exactitude with which these stages have followed one another, in empire after empire, over centuries or even millennia;

and
(b) the fact that the successive changes seem to represent mere changes in popular fashion—new fads and fancies which sweep away public opinion without logical reason.

At first, popular enthusiasm is devoted to military glory, then to the accumulation of wealth and later to the acquisition of academic fame. Why could not all these legitimate, and indeed beneficent, activities be carried on simultaneously, each of them in due moderation? Yet this never seemed to happen.

If you're going to accuse me of essay writing, there's some sections. Glubb's noticing patterns in how great states rise and fall, the sections after the Age of Intellect are a bit much to directly link, but they're worth reading, especially as they relate to our current political situation. Section XX on. Tell me if all of that doesn't start sounding a lot like what we're seeing these days.

One of his points is that while the lives of Empires rhyme, if you will, no two empires fall is the same. There's no reason to doom about the fate of America, even if we collapsed we're in an absolutely fantastic position to weather it. We love are Rome parallels, it pays to remember that Rome continued on much as it had when it transitioned from Republic to Empire. After all, it was still SPQR, they still had their senate, Augustus was merely First Citizen. It didn't end in fire, America isn't likely to either. It just changes.

 

[LiquidKid]

Show how he's retarded and his work is bad. That's all I'm asking.

Read the thread, I not only did it, I managed to define his work better than you did and posted it before you did.
Go back to your shitty college professor who couldn’t make it as a real “intellectual” and decided to teach philosophy instead

 

[Betonhaus]

Plus it's possible for a collapse to be largely invisible to the common people, as no more then a period of time where life is difficult.

You can argue that America has collapsed, as it no longer holds the power it used to and its operations are imploding - it's just sheer momentum keeping things going.

 

[More AWS-8Q Than You]

Read the thread, I not only did it, I managed to define his work better than you did and posted it before you did.
Go back to your shitty college professor who couldn’t make it as a real “intellectual” and decided to teach philosophy instead

What with this?

he problem is this whole system doesn’t really apply to any of the empires that had existed before Glubb and didn’t apply to the few after.

Glubb's essay is full of examples from history, especially from the Eastern Med, which would be his area of expertise.

Spoiler: Have one

XXVI The Mameluke Empire
The empire of the Mamelukes of Egypt provides a case in point, for it was one of the most exotic ever to be recorded in history. It is also exceptional in that it began on one fixed day and ended on another, leaving no doubt of its precise duration, which was 267 years. In the first part of the thirteenth century, Egypt and Syria were ruled by the Ayoubid sultans, the descendants of the family of Saladin. Their army consisted of Mamelukes, slaves imported as boys from the Steppes and trained as professional soldiers. On 1st May 1250, the Mamelukes mutinied, murdered Turan Shah, the Ayoubid sultan, and became the rulers of his empire. The first fifty years of the Mameluke Empire were marked by desperate fighting with the hitherto invincible Mongols, the descendants of Genghis Khan, who invaded Syria. By defeating the Mongols and driving them out of Syria, the Mamelukes saved the Mediterranean from the terrible fate which had overtaken Persia. In 1291, the Mamelukes captured Acre, and put an end to the Crusades. From 1309 to 1341, the Mameluke Empire was everywhere victorious and possessed the finest army in the world. For the ensuing hundred years the wealth of the Mameluke Empire was fabulous, slowly leading to luxury, the relaxation of discipline and to decline, with ever more bitter internal political rivalries. Finally the empire collapsed in 1517, as the result of military defeat by the Ottomans. The Mameluke government appears to us utterly illogical and fantastic. The ruling class was entirely recruited from young boys, born in what is now Southern Russia. Every one of them was enlisted as a private soldier. Even the sultans had begun life as private soldiers and had risen from the ranks. Yet this extraordinary political system resulted in an empire which passed through all the normal stages of conquest, commercialism, affluence and decline and which lasted approximately the usual period of time.

Not entirely sure why you're all so damn butthurt about Glubb.

 

[LiquidKid]

Glubb's essay is full of examples from history, especially from the Eastern Med, which would be his area of expertise.

They’re not correct examples and don’t even fit his own logic when looked at with any a scrutiny.

I’m not butthurt about a literal nobody from history. I’m tired of you shitting up the thread with your liberal arts degree take on politics

 

[More AWS-8Q Than You]

They’re not correct examples and don’t even fit his own logic when looked at with any a scrutiny.

Explain how the Mameluke example doesn't fit.

I’m not butthurt about a literal nobody from history. I’m tired of you shitting up the thread with your liberal arts degree take on politics

Given that politics and history would fall under the liberal arts, which kind of degree should I have?

 

[Betonhaus]

 

[King Metalia]

You niggas need to stop dooming about America. The libshits are a dying breed they are just throwing death spasms right now.

Hopefully it's not just America's liberals that are the dying breed.

A cornered animal is at its most dangerous. Until they accept reality they will resort to anything. And they have no intention of accepting reality.

I'm very nervous about 2028. Donald Trump is a tough act to follow, especially considering his political heir has yet to be decided.

 

[draggs]

Not entirely sure why you're all so damn butthurt about Glubb.

Because he was mediocre in every way and his theory is mediocre generalist bullshit that doesn't match literally dozens of empires throughout history, his definition of empire is retarded, and you're fucking obsessed with this mediocre British officer and his mediocre theory

 

[World Famous Quasi Payer]

What do you mean by speed limit liberal exactly?

The "I was left behind" types. The Trumps, the Gabbards, the Kennedy Jrs, the Vances of the world. This is a large group of people mind you. With varying degrees of beliefs, but they all amount to yesterday's liberals. When yesterday was: 2010s, 2000s, 1990s, 1980s, so on, is a matter for them to express. Some of these people may even be yesterday's progressives. The types who express support for gay marriage, but are concerned with teaching gay sex-ed to middle schoolers, while they refuse to admit the one inevitably leads to the other, for example. A type that favors their preferred end of history. For Donald J. Trump, that was the 1990s. A period of global peace and prosperity. The cold war was officially over. America was at the height of its power. Of course, what came after in the 2000s, 2010s and now the 2020s was only possible from the fruits sowed in the 90s or before. I support Trump, I've voted for him three times now. I prefer 90s over now even if I didn't exist then. However I also understand the fault/issues of the 90s. All the SJW shit we deal with now, the racial stuff, the gay stuff, the illegal stuff, the communism stuff was all present and growing then. Going back without getting rid of that is just going to bring us right back here.

Tell me if all of that doesn't start sounding a lot like what we're seeing these days.

I agree this is all maps really well onto America. I disagree we are at that stage. Maybe I'm just too optimistic of a motherfucker. Or I'm old stock American whose willing to sacrifice to keep it all going. I'm not sure.

View attachment 6728277

Imagine trying to stiff people out of money for a killer of a bastard everyone cheered on getting killed. Lmao, Petal needs to clean house bad.

 

[More AWS-8Q Than You]

Because he was mediocre in every way and his theory is mediocre generalist bullshit that doesn't match literally dozens of empires throughout history, his definition of empire is retarded, and you're fucking obsessed with this mediocre British officer and his mediocre theory

Mediocre British Officer. It's going to be generalist and broad because it's rather short essay and because it's meant to be, it was never meant as a rigorous academic analysis. It's not hard and fast holy writ or anything, it's just a slightly higher level of the Strong Men -> Good Times -> Weak Men -> Bad Times -> Strong Men cycle. Historians of all stripes have noticed that things are cyclical and history rhymes since at least the classical Greeks, so someone noticing cycles and patterns is about the least controversial thing in the field. Not sure why you're all autistically fixated on the definition of Empire anyways, since it tends to be a loose definition best summed up as a multi-ethnic state held together by force. Often autocratic, but doesn't have to be, the United States is technically one, just ask Dixie.

I agree this is all maps really well onto America. I disagree we are at that stage. Maybe I'm just too optimistic of a motherfucker. Or I'm old stock American whose willing to sacrifice to keep it all going. I'm not sure.

No, I feel you, plenty of heritage American blood flowing through my veins. I think it's separating America as a nation, the people, from America the state. The people are fine, the stock is still good, if we can get the illegals of various stripes out, we'll be fine. We're in a unique position where we don't have to seriously worry about threats from the states that border us. A "collapse" is probably just dealing with our system of government and tweaking it to deal with all the things that have popped into existence that the Founders couldn't have thought of. I'm bearish on the current state of the Republic, I'm bullish on Americans, if that makes sense.

 

[draggs]

Yes that's right mediocre. Glubb's WWI career was fine, and then he was sent to the second-most backwaterest backwater command for Britain interwar and during the war - the Levant/Mesopatamia. Where he spent several years failing to stop Bedouin bandit raids until he basically gave in to their demands at the negotiating table to get them to stop. Then he went on to train the Arab Legion (Jordanian Army), which despite a huge advantage in materiel, the best training any Arab army had, and British officers commanding it in 1948 (not him, he was in overall command but not field command), couldn't defeat a much less well-equipped and much less experienced bunch of Jews. It marched into the West Bank before the Jews could organize forces to move in first, then failed to push them out of Jerusalem, and finally found a victory because the Jews didn't have the stuff to break the fortifications at Latrun. This was after 10 years of him commanding and training it, and their results were decidedly meh. Like the results of his post-WWI military career in general

And now of course no his theory is just a fun thing to think about don't take it too seriously. Dude did you forget where you're posting, fun things to think about and not take too seriously are the absolute worst things to post on the internet and especially the parts of it more filled with political autists than usual

I'm not going to go through the entirety of his essay but I am going to quote most of the introduction, because it's emblematic of what's wrong with his analysis:

The experiences of the human race have been recorded, in more or less detail, for some four thousand years. If we attempt to study such a period of time in as many countries as possible, we seem to discover the same patterns constantly repeated under widely differing conditions of climate, culture and religion. Surely, we ask ourselves, if we studied calmly and impartially the history of human institutions and development over these four thousand years, should we not reach conclusions which would assist to solve our problems today? For everything that is occurring around us has happened again and again before. No such conception ever appears to have entered into the minds of our historians.

In general, historical teaching in schools is imited to this small island. We endlessly mull over the Tudors and the Stewarts, the Battle of Crecy, and Guy Fawkes. Perhaps this narrowness is due to our examination system, which necessitates the careful definition of a syllabus which all children must observe. I remember once visiting a school for mentally handicapped children. “Our children do not have to take examinations," the headmaster told me,” and so we are able to teach them things which will be really useful to them in life." However this may be, the thesis which I wish to propound is that priceless lessons could be learned if the history of the past four thousand years could be thoroughly and impartially studied.

For an autodidact (surely that's the only way he could have acquired his knowledge of these historical empires, since he asserts they just didn't teach it in British schools!), he comes off very poorly with this statement. It ignores that at the time he wrote the two essays that were combined into the one titled Fate of Empires and Search For Survival, we had Gibbon's Decline and Fall, we had Britain dominating the field of Egyptology, we had Britain dominating the field of Mesopotamian studies, we had numerous commentaries like this one, all part of a Western European archaeological and historiographical tradition that started with the Renaissance and exploded in the 19th century. Glubb's conceit that you know we here in Britain just really don't study anything but our own history is plain wrong, and the essay doesn't improve much from there

 

[Candlelight Desolation]

And this is why I made comments about people not reading the essay. Glubb defines what he means by empire in the essay and if people are not going to read the essay and use that definition then there's no point in discussing this, because we're comparing apples to screwdrivers. If you're going to criticize Glubb's views of the lifecycles of Empires, then use his definition. If you're not going to do that, there's no point to this.

I'm a little late, but I'd like to point out that the Age of Conquest is what is the majority of an empire's life cycle according to Glubb's observations (in the example of the US, that would be Manifest Destiny), and many figures from this time become historical "heroes" people look back on later on (this would be like Grant and Lee to us). Yeah, Glubb's eyes were mainly on Europe and the Muslim world (he himself was an admirer of Islamic cultures).

Would also briefly like to talk about other "empires" that did not go through the full cycle, such as the Aztecs as well as the Japanese Empire during WW2 and possibly add on to Glubb's work here. These could have possibly been in their own Age of Conquests (or a little beyond that like the Aztecs), and they were growing regional powers in their parts of the world, but they got taken out by other more powerful empires (the Aztecs by the Spanish and the Japanese by the Americans).

 

[close]

if you haven't read the essay and don't understand how Glubb is using the term empire, I wouldn't comment on it,

If you want people to engage with the whole work rather than a zingy snippet, perhaps posting only a zingy snippet isn't the best way to do that.

If his critics aren't willing to actually engage with his work, use his defined terms and the like, why should anyone give a single fuck what you think of it?

Would you do the same for troons? You get roped into a gay definition war where they win because nothing makes sense. "What is a woman?"

Doomers should throw themselves off a bridge or shut up.

You should stop double posting.

which kind of degree should I have?

Fourth degree.

Can we talk about AMERICAN politics, not ancient Assyrian politics, please? I'm sure there's a history sperging thread for you reprobates.

 

[Space Faring Marsupial]

Can we talk about AMERICAN politics, not ancient Assyrian politics, please? I'm sure there's a history sperging thread for you reprobates.

Seconded.

 

[X Prime]

Can we talk about AMERICAN politics, not ancient Assyrian politics, please? I'm sure there's a history sperging thread for you reprobates.

But sir, the world belongs to America. Therefore, all of history on planet Earth prior to 1776 is relevant to the thread because it culminated in the only thing that matters, which is the USA.

It makes sense if you think about it.

 

[Terrifik]

i guess this why people were syrian posting

https://x.com/BNONews/status/1865634052721492435

 

[LiquidKid]

But why do you think I give people here shit about definitions and misusing them

The irony is that you, and by extension Glubb? Are the only one miss using them. You can’t create your own definition of a word just to win an argument, which is exactly what Glubb did and exactly what trannies do. So no, not apples to screw drivers. It’s calling a spade a spade

 

[Rome's rightful successor]

And here are some unfunny "comedians" still coping about Trump.

 

[Non-breath oblige]

Anyone notice gas prices dropping lately and what it might be related to? Both me and a friend of mine noticed 20-30 cent drop per gallon on gas when it's remained stable or climbed before the election.
Its possible it's happened before and I just didn't notice but curious if I missed something.

Could be wrong, but if I recall it usually goes down on average during winter due to lower demand from less people driving on snowy roads.