The Roman Empire and the Barbarians

@izzythepush,

I'd also like to point out that I don't call people uninformed or dim as an insult. It's what I think. There are two right wing posters on A2K who I do not get on with at all, Finn daBuzz and Georgebob, we disagree on most things. I've never called either of them stupid or ignorant, because they're not. They're both reasonably intelligent and well informed, they're just wrong that's all.

I can't say that about you.

1 Reply

@izzythepush,

izzythepush wrote:

Your response to my point about gerrymandering was to talk about the Democrats. That implies you think I'm a democrat, otherwise why bring it up.

Because it is the reason gerrymandering is an issue these days. The Democrats wouldn't be complaining about gerrymandering if resolving it in a given district would favor Republicans.

Quote:

I know what I'm talking about which is why I know you're talking a load of old bollocks. There's no evidence of 'deep' or any other thinking, just a load of assumptions, ignorance and inane questioning.

If you understood what I meant, you could speak to what I am saying making reference to what you know and think. The fact that you simply discard what I say tells me that you aren't able to connect what I am saying on a general level to what you understand in a more historically-specific framework.

Quote:

And you're off your head, Trump is riding roughshod over democracy not anyone else.

I just tune out anti-Trump sentiments because all I can see in them at this point is the witch-hunt that's been going on against him and Republicans generally since before the election. Democrats simply don't respect Republicans as part of multi-party democracy. They only want to control democratic institutions in order to exercise single-party rule, the way the communist party in China works.

Quote:

You may be daft enough to believe the Fox News bollocks, but I'm not.

You mean 'deft enough,' I think.

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@izzythepush,

izzythepush wrote:

I'd also like to point out that I don't call people uninformed or dim as an insult. It's what I think. There are two right wing posters on A2K who I do not get on with at all, Finn daBuzz and Georgebob, we disagree on most things. I've never called either of them stupid or ignorant, because they're not. They're both reasonably intelligent and well informed, they're just wrong that's all.

I can't say that about you.

Well then you don't understand my posts, and that only reflects on your intelligence.

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@livinglava,

If your posts are unintelligible it's down your inability to use language correctly.

You're the one who needs to keep asking questions because you don't know all the facts, and you're full of half baked ill considered solutions like a kid.

You're right about one thing though, I do question my intelligence wasting so much time on a buffoon like you.

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@izzythepush,

izzythepush wrote:

If your posts are unintelligible it's down your inability to use language correctly.

You're the one who needs to keep asking questions because you don't know all the facts, and you're full of half baked ill considered solutions like a kid.

You're right about one thing though, I do question my intelligence wasting so much time on a buffoon like you.

I feel the same about you, though I can actually admit that you have strengths as well as weaknesses. Either way it doesn't matter because the point isn't to evaluate each other's posts and/or minds, even if you seem to think it is.

I was actually quite surprised we exchanged a few constructive posts before you returned to insulting me for my political views. I guess once you cross that anti-Trump picket line, you have to cross back to avoid becoming one of the scapegoats in the witchhunt.

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@livinglava,

Anti Trump picket line!

That's a load of old bollocks, anyone with principles would be opposed to Trump.

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@izzythepush,

izzythepush wrote:

Anti Trump picket line!

That's a load of old bollocks, anyone with principles would be opposed to Trump.

The principle of not daring to step into the line of socialist ridicule-fire?

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@livinglava,

You don't know what Socialism is.

And there's precious little of it on A2K.

You do ridiculous pretty well on your own without help from anyone else.

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@izzythepush,

izzythepush wrote:

You don't know what Socialism is.

And there's precious little of it on A2K.

You do ridiculous pretty well on your own without help from anyone else.

Nothing you say about socialism will reflect a POV outside of its influence and your support of it.

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I'm not reading any more of your posts, I don't think there's any point.

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@izzythepush,

izzythepush wrote:

I'm not reading any more of your posts, I don't think there's any point.

If you only eat red poop, you will only poop red and that will increase the amount of red poop in the world, thus helping you take over the world with it.

If, on the other hand, you eat other colors of poop, your poop will get browner and the others who only eat and poop red will kick you out of their club for being an independent thinker.

Independent thinking is scary if you feel it important to always increase the power one one faction lest some other faction(s) outnumber you.

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@izzythepush,

izzythepush wrote:

As is the electoral college, other democracies go for the popular vote.

Oh nonsense. When was the last time the UK elected a prime minister via direct popular vote instead of having him chosen by MPs?

Half past never?

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@livinglava,

livinglava wrote:

I watched a documentary about some locality somewhere in Europe that flourished under the Roman Empire, but they had to pay taxes or else they would be invaded by Barbarians.

It occurs to me that this is a phenomenon not limited to the ancient Roman Empire. If you are caught between two forces and you have to pay one for military protection against the other, you are basically stuck between a rock and a hard place in terms of taxes.

You either pay taxes to the one for protection, or you lose protection and the other comes in and plunders/pillages you and extracts value from you that way, ultimately causing you to flee so your land can be repurposed, for example.

I don't want to get into specific politics of specific localities, but it just strikes me that this is a timeless narrative insofar as people in this world don't simply respect each others' liberty without trying to bully others into (economic/political) submission in one way or another.

That's the way life works.

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@livinglava,

livinglava wrote:

Let's say you live in an area where there is commercial activity going on. You need police or else thieves will take advantage of your wealth. If your land is worth stealing, people can invade and plunder/pillage until you die off or leave, at which point your land will be vacated so that someone else can take it over who will pay more taxes than you.
It's a simple, yet treacherous, logic of bullying people into economic submission.

It is true that protection is a necessary part of life, but I don't see the treachery in making people pay taxes to support this necessary function.

1 Reply

@oralloy,

oralloy wrote:

livinglava wrote:
Let's say you live in an area where there is commercial activity going on. You need police or else thieves will take advantage of your wealth. If your land is worth stealing, people can invade and plunder/pillage until you die off or leave, at which point your land will be vacated so that someone else can take it over who will pay more taxes than you.
It's a simple, yet treacherous, logic of bullying people into economic submission.

It is true that protection is a necessary part of life, but I don't see the treachery in making people pay taxes to support this necessary function.

Taxation is legitimate when it's reasonable and taxes are approved democratically, i.e. with consent of the governed.

In short, reasonable people are supposed to be able to consent to reasonable taxes.

The problem comes when unreasonable people are in either the position of being governed or governing. In that case, the unreasonable governing class will tax the governed exploitatively in various ways; and/or the unreasonable governed class will shirk even the most basic responsibilities of contributing to a reasonable democratically agreed upon set of public goods/services.

If you think about it, unreasonability on either side breeds it in the other. E.g. if you are burdened with unreasonable taxation, you may come to a point where you no longer trust government and taxation at all.

Likewise, if you are dealing with unreasonable people who refuse to govern themselves properly, you lose faith in the fundamental principle that people should be free to govern themselves.

This is how society breaks down in war and/or authoritarian rule (or both).

People have to strive for reasonability and seek to democratically resolve conflicts in order to avert worse natural consequences.

Oh, and it doesn't help that many aspects of government and taxation are now built into corporate structuring of the economy, which taxes and regulates us in ways that we have no say in or liberty to negotiate on the basis of reason except to quit and look for a new job and/or businesses to patronize.

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@livinglava,

How do we not have a say? We vote in elections don't we?

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@livinglava,

Ah, yet another subject about which you shoot your mouth off without reference to anything other than a simplistic and misleading popular narrative. The empire co-opted so-called barbarians for centuries by federating them on terms of public lands in exchange for military service. The sack of Rome in 410 CE was the second time the city had been sacked by so-called barbarians, the first being about 390 BCE. Alaric, who lead the Visigoths who sacked Rome was a federated chieftain who believed the Visigoths had been cheated. The Roman authority in the west lasted more than two centuries after that event, and the empire in the east lasted for more than a thousand years after the second sack of Rome.

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The Roman Empire and the Barbarians

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