I’m going to offer that as a postulate. The attempt to eradicate history requires so much effort and energy that the attempt, itself, leaves a mark – no matter what, there are going to be traces, left by the traces, and the traces before, and even the attempt to right a wrong will be see as a wrong by those who were happy with the status quo.
As I am writing this, the idiot right-winger in charge of the department of offense is currently being roundly mocked for ordering that DoD documents containing the word “gay” be redacted – which is problematic because there are a great many images bearing the dread name “Enola Gay” the first bomber to have the famous distinction of wiping out an entire city with one bomb. Imagine if some IT person at the DoD were to do a global substitute to change all documents containing “Enola Gay” to “the first bomber to drop a nuclear weapon” – apparently that is something like 50,000 pages and images, which would leave a gigantic footprint in every single web database that tracks other web databases. The wayback machine is just one example. I guess that what I am saying is “it’s too late.” But that’s not quite it. It’s more that it’s systemic – it has become so embedded in our system that you cannot separate it out, even if it destroys that system, because then the destruction of the system has a reason, too. I guess this is one of the side-effects of growing up in a household headed by a historian, and spending my summers in a part of South France that is near a roman road, and a day’s drive from crusader-era castles – I was always the kind of kid who did not just say “woah, cool castle!” I would always ask dad, “why did they build it here?” At first, I learned about defensive works and then siege-craft, then graduated to economics and logistics. I remember we had a long long talk in the shady walls of la Couvertoirade – a crusader-era horse ranch for warhorses, that was constructed atop what had been a Roman logistical strongpoint. I was, I admit, mostly interested in the tactical aspects of the history, but dad went a long way toward helping me understand (literally, I remember his words:) “because of the logistics of man-power the crusades were a foregone conclusion.” Utterly mind-blowing for a 13-year-old kid to realize that it literally did not matter how well the crusaders fought at Hattin, even if they had won, they had lost because they were attacking an enemy that had interior lines, local supply chains, the support of the local population, and had a 1,500 mile sail-powered supply chain (at best). Somewhere around that time I got interested in military intelligence, thanks to a vignette in a book by R.E. Howard (“The Sowers of The Thunder”) that portrayed Mameluke sultan Baibars as doing his own front-line operational security. [Later, I realized that Howard was practically plagiarizing Walter Scott, which did a lot to add to my cynicism about “historical” fiction] If you think about it this way, you’ll realize that it would have been impossible for Salahuddin to not know there was a wave of crusaders coming, that had just reached Venice after marching across Europe, and they had the shits and were low on money and arrows, etc. I no longer saw history as a sequence of tactical details, so much as a grinding process that looked more like plate tectonics than anything else.
[La Couvertoirade, a crusader era fortified horse ranch built on the ruins of a Roman fort used to defend road-builders]
I don’t need to belabor my point, but I will, because the dusty blood of historians runs in my veins: the crusades are still casting a long and significant shadow across history. The side-effects of the crusades (the English War of the Roses, the rise of the Teutonic Knights, the Knights Templars inventing checking accounts, and the renaissance, for a few) are still knocking on. I was about to say something silly about how nobody would be so dumb as to … uh. I remembered a different US strike unit that was flying out of Qatar with a templar cross on their planes, but there are still some real geniuses in the US DoD. [To be fair, I think they changed it to a black rhino when they got caught by “woke” leftist communists]
It’d be like if regional US police forces were able to have their own unit morale patches and logos, because you know some bunch of ‘roid-addled racist MAGA asswipe cops [tell me how many redundancies that contains] would have named their police department “the Slave Catchers” or something like that.
Back in 2016, I wrote a post about “Unfairness, Perpetuated” in the context of Robert Paul Wolff’s Autobiography of an Ex-White Man [stderr] in which I mostly quoted RPW’s brilliant post-communist analysis of some of the byproducts of American capitalism. At one point he explained how a small bit of racism just a few generations up the time-stream can have a humongous impact, today. When I read Wolff, I began to think of American racism as an economic and supply-chain problem, rather than a tactical problem that can be addressed just by requiring fairness and diversity. Or, rather, it would be if the “diversity” also applied to American billionaires – which it surely does not. We even had to import the most pasty-white people from apartheid South Africa to come here to be billionaires. It’s probably just me, but I have noticed what appears to be public animus and investigations aimed at some of the black near-billionaires, e.g.: Diddy, whose budget for baby oil was probably dwarfed by the Bush clan’s. Now, go wash your brain out with soap to remove that mental picture. Joking aside, whose closet do you expect is more interesting: Diddy’s or RFK Jr.’s? Anyhow, RPW laid it out so well there’s really nothing more to add.
So, here’s another one that lays it out so well it made my mind melt with joy. Originally from [ig] it’s sparse and brilliant:
I assume your heads just exploded. Feel free to over-think this in the comment section, because there’s plenty. For one thing, I’d like to see more maps of different states. Wealth breakdowns would be interesting, too.
Caption on the image:
The graphic illustrates how Alabama’s history is deeply tied to its geology and how that connection still influences voting patterns today. Around 100 million years ago, a coastline ran through what is now Alabama. When the sea receded, it left behind a fertile region known as the “Black Belt.” These rich soils were perfect for agriculture, which turned the area into a center for cotton production in the 19th century. This, in turn, brought slavery to the region, as thousands of enslaved people were forced to work on the plantations
After slavery ended, many former slaves and their descendants stayed in the Black Belt, as it offered work and a sense of community. Today, the region remains predominantly Black. This historical trajectory is reflected in modern election results: while the predominantly white rural areas of Alabama tend to vote Republican, the Black Belt leans Democratic – an enduring legacy of its history
What’s remarkable is how a coastline from millions of years ago shaped the soil, which influenced the economy, determined settlement patterns, and ultimately left a mark on the political preferences of the people living there. It’s a fascinating example of how the distant past continues to shape the present.
It’s distant past all the way down. [I apologize, I cannot remember who it was] as someone I quoted here once before said “the History of the US is Labor Relations.” I’m going to auto-translate that to “logistics” per Napoleon Bonaparte. And, in case you’re wondering where I stand on the “Trump is Hitler” continuum, I think he’s more like a senile Napoleon Bonaparte who never actually won a battle, but specialized in marching to battlefields, declaring a tremendous victory, and leaving before his baffled opponents had a chance to lay a cannon on him. For one thing, Trump’s hatred is as weak as the rest of him: Hitler, at least, had the courage of his hatred.
trump is hitler if instead of bum-rushing his neighbors, he had threatened to start a dozen ultra-vietnams simultaneously while giving the viet cong months to prepare.
You make a point when you say “…I don’t think the US is going to come out the other side of this and back to a state of normal”.
It’s too soon to say, but indeed what the US will look like after four (or eight!) years of this it’s difficult to imagine right now.
Of course one’s mind goes to Germany in the 30s, but there are several additional circumstances this time:
– for one thing, absolutely nobody wants to discuss how much of an Alzheimer victim the Don is, and how this will impact the whole mess. Demented decisions, government crumbling from the inside.
– second, Germany was remarkably matter-of-fact and yes, very professional and single-purposed in its nightmarish, genocidal way. In contrast, the tsunami of ignorance and sheer brainlessness currently sweeping the US (and much of the rest of the world let’s face it) is something unparalleled, I aver. Reality ignored, delusions triumphant.
How it’s going to settle I have no idea, but news reading is a gloomy business indeed nowadays.
They might hande Enola Gay that way. Not sure, don’t have direct info on DoD. But the orders given elsewhere are a simple search and delete with a specific list of words given.
It’s pretty clear the dumbest people in government have convinced themselves they’re the smartest people around and they can out-clever all the rest of us. Stuff like Enola Gay isn’t even malicious compliance. It’s just what they actually ordered. They simply have their collective heads so far up Trump’s ass that they can’t figure that out.
As far as a return to normal goes, I don’t actually see anything that would pull us in that direction right now. We have people who want the country to be better but too many willfully ignorant people voted in the crowd that want to destroy the country for fun and profit. And they apparently want us all to think they didn’t do it for the racism and mysogyny, oh no, it was to get better egg prices. Of course. Because somehow they think that sounds better.
How do you even reach people who are willing to go there? I’m starting to wonder if maybe the whole country will just have to wait until another generation or two die off (and personal note: I’m probably in one of those generations so this isn’t a big “fuck you!” to anyone). Maybe we can hope it was just an effect of the lead from leaded gasoline that made people so irrational. I’m pretty sure that’s ahistorical and couldn’t really be backed up by facts but that’s just a measure of how far we are from anything I’d be comfortable with thinking of as “normal”.
@Ianir,
I think you make a serious mistake if you believe that MAGA is a phenomenon just of the elderly. There are worrying trends amongst the youth as well. My own N-2 sample of the two GenZ guys I supervise, for example, contains one guy whose media diet seems to feed him a lot of Trumpist talking points. He’s not too emotionally invested in them, and I try to encourage him to seek out alternative viewpoints and to accept correction of some of the errors he’s been taught.
But there are definitely others – devotees of Tate and Peterson, people who support MAGA not because they are Trump supporters (most of them have a sort of detached disdain for the guy), but because they think his movement represents the way to achieve their personally chosen goals. Usually subjugating women and minorities, suppresssing the LGBTQ+, enforcing something they think is capitalism, etc…
What seems to have happened in America (not solely, but this disturbing disease seems to have hit the USA particularly hard) is a cohort of people who have decided that there Is no reality other than what they want it to be. The right wing was viciously hard on academic postmodernism, but seems to have embraced a kind of nihilistic epistemic postmodernism. Once you realize their deep philosophical commitment to the concept of “Nothing is true: everything is permitted” (h/t Bartol and Burrows…. not the video games), a lot begins to make sense. You cannot embarrass them with their hypocrisies or errors, because they care neither to be ‘consistent’ nor ‘right’ as you would define it. If one of their heroes says something obviously wrong, then it was a trap or a joke or whatever it needs to have been for them to feel good about it in this moment. What that justification is at any other moment can change and shift, and there will be no re-evaluation with context.
Context for the modern right is just a defensive term you throw out when your racist tweets are exposed, there “it’s out of context” is the signal to your fellows that they should rally around you and help you throw off any criticism. No actual examination of the context will take place, or be permitted to take place.
The Sartre quote is apt, and it also shows that this phenomenon has deep roots:
That could just as easily describe the frustrating process of trying to have a real argument with a 4chan poster.
The mainstream embrace of this kind of thinking is, I think, a consequence of the Nixon impeachment more than anything else. There, Republican politicians demonstrated that they cared more about objective reality and their stated morals more than they cared about power and winning. There is a story that Roger Ailes said “We can never let this happen again.” and went on to help found Fox News, a TV network dedicated to providing an alternative universe where the Conservative need never be troubled by reference to any inconvenient facts, and to which the Conservative can point and yell and demand that all other media must feed them a steady diet of the same kind of bland and pre-chewed pablum as Ailes/Murdoch produced.
This WILL NOT go away just because some more boomers die off. People need to come to terms with that. I have no idea what the solution is, when almost half of your population would rather put their fingers in their metaphorical ears and yell “Nanananana I’m winning!” than face up to unpleasant truths.
Marcus: re History, have you read “Rats, Lice, and History by Hans Zinsser? I read it as a child and found that it completely changed my perception of history. All those cool cut-away drawings of castles never showed people shitting themselves to death, nor did the descriptions of battles I read at the time tend to mention all the soldiers unable to fight, or fighting with diarrhea running down their legs. Disease shaped the course of more battles, more conclusively, than any person’s tactical decisions did. I’ll recommend it here on the terms you mentioned a long time ago in your blog: if you buy it and don’t enjoy it, I’ll happily buy it from you – shipping included, for whatever it cost you. I don’t presently own a copy, so it’d be good to have. With regard to the amazing charts above, I suspect you’re not going to find too many examples that clear-cut without being unreasonably reductive. Human settlement patterns are affected by many forces, waves of settlement, waves of technology, food production, transportation, etc… being able to pin it on just one thing is probably not an accurate way to understand history.
One of the things which took me along time to learn, and now I try to teach to my reports, is that everything done by humanity was done for a reason. The reason may be a bad one, based on intolerance, bigotry, and hatred, or it may have just been the best they could think of at the time. The reason could also be a very, very good one. Like the rule of don’t put the well too close to the privy.
These reasons are far more interesting than a superficial knowledge of how something works. A suit of plate mail may be a piece of art, but every piece had a reason for being there. The reason a fort was located in a specific spot is more interesting than the fort itself, because it shows how that fort operated in relationship to other parts of the society it existed in. But so are the reasons why the fort was shaped as it was. Or the reason for the location of the barracks, storerooms, well, and privy. Knowing those reasons might inform our decisions today. Ignorantly stating with conviction that those reasons do not, and cannot, matter increases the risk of failure.
The same is true for all the procedures and requirements in the company I work at. The massive amount of duplicated paperwork is often infuriating, but there was a reason each part of that massive pile was created. To be fair, in many cases the redundant paperwork is only due to no one looking at retiring one requirement when a duplicate requirement was implemented, so it’s fine to question the need for a duplicate. But unless the reason is known, there is a risk that eliminating some paperwork will result in a problem in the company in the future.
There is a reason for all the government laws, statues, regulations, and the Chevron Deference. The laws were put in place for a reason, and the experts should know those reasons. This doesn’t mean that those reasons were good, or that the laws are good, but before tearing them out those reasons should be considered. The “break things to see what happens” is the morality of an eight-year old. It works fine when a child is tearing apart an alarm clock or playing with the code of Telengard (like I did when I was young). It does not work well when other people depend on those laws, requirements, regulations, statutes, and experts to provide the services needed to live.
The knowledge that everything humanity has touched includes a reason is not intuitive. Everything includes everything, from the shape of a coffee cup to the shape of harbors. Someone thought about these these, and made them the way they are today for a reason. Often a good reason, sometimes a bad reason, and not uncommonly an obsolete reason. But always a reason. We ignore those reasons at our own peril.
Marcus
So…Caligula? Declaring war on Poseidon, declaring victory and collecting seashells as spoils of war, and then marching your perverted ass back to Rome sounds exactly like the modus operandi of the modern demented pervert in power.
America of course won’t come out of this the same, but change is inevitable. Wealthy douchbro’s have been given a bunch of rope, and predictably, are using it hang themselves.
Now I wonder, who will play the role of Nero?
@6 flex,
That’s a nice treatment. Worded in a slightly different way, at the college where I used to teach, the older profs would often bring up the loss of “institutional knowledge” when someone retired. For example, in my case, I could tell you exactly why each course in the electrical engineering tech curriculum existed, why it covered certain topics the way it did and in the order it did. As you say, some of the reasons were rather dumb and some weren’t. For example, at one point we had a college president who hated the very idea of a 2 credit hour course, and so they were not allowed. We had to combine two courses into one to get that material in. When he left, it became possible to separate them again but only two of us knew why they were combined to begin with, and that it would be OK to pull them apart. But other things were no so obvious, like why our DC circuit analysis course swapped the order of two chapters (because the students get the required simultaneous equation material in their math class a couple weeks later). When I retired, a whole bunch of institutional knowledge went with me.
I guess we could call them “Rovians”, after the famous Bushite neocon nutter who claimed that, as an empire (talk about saying the quiet part out loud!), the US created its own reality. (We all know how well that worked out for them in Iraq and Afghanistan.)
Though I’m not sure “Rovians” won’t then just turn out to be a neologism meaning “fascists”.
Same if one of them does something obviously wrong; c.f. the January 6 coup attempt, which at any given time was either “necessary to stop the steal”, was “just overenthusiastic tourists being rowdy”, or was “FBI psyops to try to make Trump look bad”, depending on who and when you ask.
Adding to my suspicion that this is generic to fascists, Holocaust deniers appear to engage in similar doublethink at times: The Holocaust was (choose one) a) great, b) terrible but the rest of Nazism was just fine, it’s just that some extremists among them went too far, or c) a hoax to make Hitler look bad. I doubt very many of them genuinely honestly believe it didn’t happen, deep down.
Pretty much everything with long term consequences, anyway. Think of purposive, goal-shaped actions as a signal and the random whims of wealthy plutes, kings, and such as noise. The noise, being random, adds up to a zero sum in the long run, and only the signal shapes things in the long term. The motion of a billiard ball is the result of the linear momentum of the cue or other ball that struck it; details of the random jitters of thermal noise in these have no detectable effect on the resulting trajectory.
In the end, it’s as that Ozymandias poem said, with regard to the mark that will be left by a vainglorious king. It sinks into the sands while the rest of the world moves on.
Chesterton’s fence.
Concur. And Putin is a latter-day Napoleon. Both being egged on by would-be Hitlers, mind. Vance, especially, is giving me the heebie-jeebies of late, nevermind the prior assortment of white nationalists (Bannon, Gorka, etc.) to have collected in Trump’s orbit. (Which by now must be so crowded we might just be saved by it going Kessler syndrome.)
Aka “what Musk is feeding to his woodchipper by the ream”.
Whatever else happens, the US isn’t getting its empire back. Not after that loss. The EU is well positioned to run rings around it, if it can avoid the kind of financial crisis that shall shortly consume China.
And on the topic of the original post, a physicist’s perspective would be that undoing or erasing a chunk of history is a thermodynamic uphill battle, roughly equivalent in time and energy cost to air-conditioning a planet. The (massive, door-stopping, 3x The Stand in size) Peter F. Hamilton Void Trilogy turns this into something approaching cosmic horror: for a few people living in a particular place to be able to change their pasts and undo their mistakes, whole solar systems are being fed into a black hole just to obtain the energy to power these do-overs. The abnormally voracious black hole is soon threatening inhabited systems, and thereon hangs a tale by an author who sometimes makes Stephen King seem concise.
I wonder how much of that fertile Alabama area is still being farmed, and if so, what the percentage of white owned to Black owned farm acreage is. If I weren’t so lazy I’d try to find out myself, but maybe someone reading this blog and comments might know and give of their knowledge.
This is true, but I don’t think it supports the overall contention that “history is indelible” as well as you might think. Yes, we can often (although not always) tell that something was erased, but that erasure can be complete enough that it is impossible to tell what it was. Sometimes all we can say is that enough damage has been done that whatever record there may once have been is completely lost, if there was anything there at all, but we have no way of knowing.
For example, in the case of archaeology, imagine you have a landscape that has been continuously inhabited since at least the Neolithic. The ground contains all sorts of complex, subtle records of all the people who have ever lived there – field boundaries, burials, shadows of post holes, hearths, the remains of kilns and furnaces, distributions of hammer scale indicating the presence of metalworking, all of that sort of thing. Now imagine that somebody comes along with giant steam shovels and planes off the top few metres of the entire land surface, grinds it all up for aggregate, and uses that to construct the roads to bring in the equipment to dig a gigantic open cast mine where this landscape used to be. Lets even imagine that when they’re done, the do the best possible shot at ecological restoration, and rebuild the landscape and the ecology to as close as they possibly can to what was there before. Then, a hundred, or a thousand, or whatever years later, some archaeologists come along and take a look at the area… What can they tell you? They can see this enormous disturbance, and can probably recover quite a lot of information about the mining and ecological restoration, but there is absolutely no way for them to even speculate as to what might have been there before.
On a less dramatic, but almost equally destructive note, one of the worst possible things that can happen to an interesting archaeological site is for it to have been dug by archaeologists in the 19th century, because their techniques were so primitive that they often destroyed more than they recorded. And if there’s still archaeology in the 25th century, they’ll probably say much the same about us…
Culturally, we have absolutely no way to recover anything from oral cultures after they have been lost. Whether that’s the Brythonic cultures of Iron Age Britain, or the pre-contact cultures of the Americas, once that continuous chain of oral transmission is broken, it’s gone forever, and utterly irrecoverable. The best we can get are whatever scraps somebody thought to write down at the last minute – but we inevitably lack the cultural context to be able to interpret them properly.
The geological history of Alabama from the Cretaceous to the present and its effect upon the people and their lives brings to mind one of my favourite podcasts, The Fall of Civilisations, by Paul Cooper. He usually opens each entry in the series with a description of the area in question back, almost literally, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth.
It’s a great, fascinating series, utterly worth the time to listen to it, and the money to support it.
snarkhuntr @ # 5: … a cohort of people who have decided that there Is no reality other than what they want it to be.
Indeed. You point to postmodernism, or at least that cohort’s perception of PM; I’d point also to “faith”, and its implicit premise that the truth of any given proposition depends on the strength of one’s belief in same.
That approach doesn’t succeed very well with material reality, but it works wonders with in-group social cohesion.
snarkhuntr @ # 5: …Rats, Lice, and History by Hans Zinsser
See also William H. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples, an updated and more global look at the same factors (surely someone’s surpassed that during this century…).
AI tool tells user to learn coding instead of asking it generate the code
lanir@#4:
As far as a return to normal goes, I don’t actually see anything that would pull us in that direction right now. We have people who want the country to be better but too many willfully ignorant people voted in the crowd that want to destroy the country for fun and profit. And they apparently want us all to think they didn’t do it for the racism and mysogyny, oh no, it was to get better egg prices. Of course. Because somehow they think that sounds better.
Exactly. “Normal” for the US is an apartheid state, with slavery just barely out of memory. Normal is appropriating more land through war and genocide which, um, may be a part of a new return to normal if our Northern Hemisphere neighbors are unlucky. Lately I have been listening to a few people (“crackpots”?) who think that the Trumpists are actually planning to destabilize Canada and isolate NATO enough that military grabs at Canada and Greenland seem possible. Anyone with any knowledge of anything (you don’t even need to be an armchair infantryman) can imagine what kind of insurgency Canada would mount. In fact, I think it would probably look a lot like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine only a whole lot worse. The US military is used to deploying on remote battlefields, where their force protection problem is just protecting their bases, not an entire gigantic piece of real estate.
I don’t think there will be a return to normal. That won’t be allowed. This is a final, more successful step, in the right wing’s many attempts to take over and obviate the republic. They are actually trying to return the US to what they consider “normal” – roaring 20s robber baron era, right before the great depression and labor organizing. Their endless hatred of progressivism is “normal”. The bosses want to rule by main power (“force de main”, the strength of my hand) like they did when they controlled labor by dividing it between poor ignorant laborers and enslaved laborers. Que les bon temps roulent encore!
snarkhuntr@#5:
Marcus: re History, have you read “Rats, Lice, and History by Hans Zinsser? I read it as a child and found that it completely changed my perception of history. All those cool cut-away drawings of castles never showed people shitting themselves to death, nor did the descriptions of battles I read at the time tend to mention all the soldiers unable to fight, or fighting with diarrhea running down their legs.
I remember when I thought The Black Prince sounded cool. Eventually I asked my dad (advantages of walking at the elbow of a history library) what happened to him and he thought a bit and said “he shit himself to death.” Well, that introduced me to a whole new aspect of warfare.
I’ve got a copy on order. Thanks for the recommendation!
Pierce R. Butler@#13:
Indeed. You point to postmodernism, or at least that cohort’s perception of PM; I’d point also to “faith”, and its implicit premise that the truth of any given proposition depends on the strength of one’s belief in same.
I don’t think I have, yet, encountered a ‘conservative’ who had the least understanding of postmodernism. I think the reason is pretty straightforward: to do a PM analysis of a situation, you have to step outside of your perception, as well as you can, and try to look at it from a few other perspectives. To a ‘conservative’ that entails “moral relativism” – the deadly combination of thoughts that starts with “what if I am actually not right about everything?”
“Faith” is better. If you have a “crisis of faith” that’s somehow holding a doubt while still believing some whatever absurd thing. If you look at, for example, how ‘conservatives’ are able to keep renewing their belief in supply-side economics, it’s clearly faith-based, not reasoned.
nomaduk@#12:
The Fall of Civilisations, by Paul Cooper
Great stuff! I agree.
Dunc@#11:
On a less dramatic, but almost equally destructive note, one of the worst possible things that can happen to an interesting archaeological site is for it to have been dug by archaeologists in the 19th century, because their techniques were so primitive that they often destroyed more than they recorded. And if there’s still archaeology in the 25th century, they’ll probably say much the same about us…
I remember the first time I read somewhere that there was a steam shovel at Schliemann’s dig site at Troy. Or was it a bulldozer? Although, to be fair, I saw the Time Team guys ripping up some asphalt with a backhoe, it was only after they were certain there was nothing interesting in the tar and chips. I also recall reading somewhere that the British determined that Egyptian cat mummies made OK fertilizer if ground up and scattered about.
Bekenstein Bound@#9:
Though I’m not sure “Rovians” won’t then just turn out to be a neologism meaning “fascists”.
I like the word “totalitarian”, generally preferring it over “fascists” because of such cases, but also because it implies an unhealthy connection between the well-being of the state and the individual, which is the current state of affairs. In a totalitarian society, the populace places some idealized (usually a pack of lies) notion of what is good for the country, and then transfer its importance onto themselves. Not to psychologize too much but the sequel argument is that transfer is why we see citizens fairly eagerly doing things that are against their self-interest. It doesn’t take a great power of observation to realize that a lot of Rousseau’s ideas about the relationship between the citizen and the state is very optimistic, even naive. An explanation for transferrence of political importance is needed.
Reginald Selkirk@#15:
AI tool tells user to learn coding instead of asking it generate the code
It makes me wonder if the AI knew that the person was doing the code for a class or work, and somehow decided to start getting preachy. I would prefer snark. “There have to be 300 examples of that on stack overflow would you like me to google one for you?”
Marcus@21:
“Rovian” vs “totalitarian”.
I think it is SF author David Brin who says its basically feudalism: lords and serfs.
This is one of those “Americans think a hundred years is a long time” things… Your archaeologists are interested in stuff that happened comparatively recently, and is therefore quite close to the surface. A lot of the time we need to go down quite a long way to get to anything interesting, so yeah, we’ll think nothing of machine excavation for the first few hundred years worth, especially if we have decent records for the area.
Could be worse – a surprising number of Egyptian mummies got eaten. They were believed to have health benefits for a while.
(Funnily enough, I keep reading this post title as “History is Inedible, which the mummies probably were…)