Your reliance on hostility, bad-faith caricatures, and aggressive profanity to “win” a performance is why I blocked you in the first place. By setting up a false binary where any attempt to discuss specific historical structures is automatically labeled a “noble savage” trope, you created a framework that leaves no room for actual historical specificity or nuance. There was never room for a genuine conversation.

“By setting up a false binary”

Excuse me, but you were the one who fucking opened up with

What ever intertribal conflicts happened, they never reached the level of disease spread, displacement, and systematic violence aimed at cultural erasure

Which is utterly and completely wrong on its face, and doubled down on it by vaguely asserting ‘culture’ as a reason why it didn’t happen, despite the ample evidence of intertribal displacement and systematic violence aimed at cultural erasure.

I’m sorry that you’re still clinging to notions of a ‘noble savage’ that dehumanize Native Americans in the hopes of providing a neat and comfortable foil to colonialist atrocities. I’m also sorry that you don’t know a single goddamn thing about Native American cultures beyond this noble savage caricature.

You never attempted to discuss specific historical structures, you dismissed a vast amount of historical evidence that any student of the Americas beyond the high school level would be aware of. And, on top of that, you blithely regarded the position as fundamentally not culturally chauvinist to insist that a particular culture engendered pure and noble virtue, unlike those other, evil, colonialist cultures.

Thinkers who argue that culture is not merely a passive byproduct of an economic base, but an active, creative force that shapes human behavior and historical outcomes on its own terms.

Which does not actually address the issue that your assertions had, nor my objections. Since my objection wasn’t “Culture doesn’t affect anything” but rather “These are all things that quite verifiably happened, and the core reason for them not happening on a larger scale is material, not moral or cultural,” especially as your incredibly unserious assertion was on a vague ‘Native American’ culture, as if there was such a monolith, even just within the continental US, wherein the only real commonality was a chalcolithic or pre-chalcolithic level of material technology. India and fucking pre-Iron Age Germania had more in common than that.

I have a lot of rage, tbf, but it’s not why I wound down participation. I wasn’t tired of arguing or overwhelmed by shitheads on the Fediverse - I’d mostly kept to places that shitheads didn’t congregate at by the time I left Piefed.

It was basically just a policy disagreement with Rimu over admin/coding stuff that affected my experience as a user. That’s all.

When my user experience got more irritating on a technical level and promised to stay that way, I decided that I didn’t want to deal with it and couldn’t move all my communities again. It was just exhaustion.

On the Old Place I was never more than a lurker and occasional commenter. I only ran the comms I did because the Threadiverse lacked alternatives, and I didn’t want the only topics I cared to comment on to wither for lack of activity.

I’m sorry that you took so much offense to being called out for an argument that blatantly contradicted its own premise?

Ok, but this is good actually, there’s a lot more accounts voting a dozen times a minute for hours than people actually reading a thousand comments a day and responding accordingly.

By Rimu’s own data, there were about five users who were above the ‘cap’ of 240 a day. None of which he suspected of being bots.

Sorry that you can’t do basic math, or understand that an upvote is precisely so one doesn’t have to type a response.

A very simple theory of innovation/development is cultural, specifically whether your empire will make you rich for developing military applications, and control more heretical heatens.

… simple to the point of absurdity.

Motivation for the Wright brothers would simply have been great empire/government rewards for success.

Fucking what.

Eastern cultures were less expansionist driven.

I really hate the re-emergence of orientalism.

Sky lanterns require an open and continuous flame, which is considerably more troublesome to combine with cargo of any sort. Early manned hot-air balloons were filled by gas generated on the ground, which requires an understanding that it is the gas which generates lift through buoyancy.

Concept behind hot air balloon understood.

I’m not well-read on the history of Chinese scientific thought, but it could very easily fit into what I said in the comment: "If you lack the concepts behind the invention, the only way to discover it is by accident" That’s how most things were discovered before early modernity.

Knowing how to make something, especially something discovered by accident or passed on by practice rather than taught as an application of theory, is different than knowing why it works, and understanding why something works opens up a much broader range of applications and elaborations.

I wouldn’t even go that far. Having iron weaponry when your opponents have bronze is an advantage, yes … but I really doubt that it’s a decisive advantage. It’s not like a bronze-wielding army is suddenly going to become helpless against a foe with iron weapons. If the bronze-age army has better numbers, better tactics/strategy, and/or better motivation, they may very well defeat an iron-age enemy in battle.

A few times, sure, but on a historical scale, it’s a ticking time bomb. One of the advantages of iron, other than being significantly superior for usage in edged weapons (armor is a mixed case), is that it is much more plentiful and cheap, and doesn’t require distant supply lines to be maintained in war time in most cases.

“Their swords are better than our swords” is bad, but not necessarily spelling doom. “Their swords are better than our swords and they can make 5x as many for the same time and cost, and they aren’t reliant on their trade ships not being pirated or sunk by storms to continue making them” is a bit dire.

In three years, I’ve had three accounts that I’ve actually used to any serious degree.

“Power user” just means “User which uses the service significantly more than average”

Which, tbf, I was.

Being a marxist and a socialist I am not a fan of his enlightend centrism and his constant assault on leftists in general and communists in particular.

Sorry for loving Marx but hating Stalin, I guess. Peak centrism.

Is there a tendency to assume ‘everything should have been possible in antiquity’? What is that supposed to mean?

A user posited the question of why hot air balloons were not invented sooner despite the materials and tools being available.

There are plenty of examples of inventors through history with concepts and ideas that were not really practical in their time.

How is that in any way contradicting what was said?

Atomism is an another ancient concept across cultures east and west, which was conceptually used in the development of modern atomic theory.

… that’s literally a question of theory. On both ends of the equation.

I think the Turks invented the steam engine based on Hellenic Greek concepts, but it was the English put it to state-level use and implementation.

The Turks invented what is called the steam jack, which is distinctly different from the atmospheric engine used in English mines some ~150 years later. The steam jack is much closer to the aeolipile; the atmospheric engine which was instrumental in the industrial revolution was based on fundamentally different theory.

So there’s just a long history of technologies being adapted and improved for different purposes. Ballooning is a good example of something that has existed for many centuries in Asia. Lifting a person into the sky, instead of a message, is a newer concept that branched off an existing technology.

Except it didn’t branch off from an existing technology. The early European attempts at ballooning, which led to the hot-air balloon being discussed, did not originate from the East Asian practice of kiting or sky lanterns.

A great deal of technological advancements have been out of military necessity/value, such as with the balloons,

… ballooning did not start out of military necessity and was not even taken seriously by most militaries of the day. The French Aeronautic Corps lasted maybe a decade; ballooning in the US Civil War was taken seriously until internal politiking wrecked it. Very little investment in ballooning was done by or for military purposes.

but the prerequisite for innovative adaptations of technology have simply had to do with how well they were recorded and disseminated throughout populations.

That’s not a question of invention, which is what was being discussed.

Militaries have been pretty good about learning a thing and getting a group to do that thing, and then recording itnfoebthe next time.

You’re fucking kidding, right?

Militaries as standing institutions do not even date back before the 17th century in most parts of Europe, unless you want to go all the way back to Rome, and effectively many were not really created until the 18th century.

Militaries, historically, have been horrible at learning, recording, or getting people to do something specific. The modern institutionalized military that is competent at that is an extremely recent development.

According to this link those first Subsaharan bloomeries were from the 6th or 7th century BC placing them well after the Bronze age from about 1000 years before. In this way it doesn’t look like they had the technological insight to skip the Bronze Age discoveries, they were just recipients of the technological advances from other parts of the world. Iron bloomeries were already in use elsewhere in the world over 1000 years before Subsaharan bloomeries.

Bronze Ages are regional; Subsaharan Africa lacked any such distinct Bronze Age in its history. Subsaharan Africa is suspected to have begun working iron and bronze effectively simultaneously in most areas, with some suggested dates as early as the 2nd millennium BCE, and a few outliers in the 3rd millennium. Furthermore, the design of bloomeries in Subsaharan Africa is largely autochthonous to the continent, without clear links to bloomery designs of North Africa or Eurasia.

The point is entirely that there were no “Bronze Age discoveries” other than bronze; the discovery of bronze defines the Bronze Age, and very few material technologies are linked to the usage of bronze, specifically. Iron has somewhat broader uses, but in most cases other metals can be substituted, in principle if not necessarily scale. The reason why so many cultures end up with a Bronze Age and an Iron Age is because bronze and iron are incredibly useful military metals, and if any of your neighbors have bronze or iron, you will learn from them very quickly, or else be very quickly conquered by their elites.

“Bronze Age” covers an incredibly wide variety of societies, as does “Iron Age” - the only unifying factor between such societies is the discovery of bronze or iron. In fact, of the two, I would regard “Bronze Age” as much more meaningful, as widespread use of bronze usually implies long-range trade routes, which in turn imply relatively robust state structures to ensure trade routes remain viable. “Iron Age” societies run the gamut from the incredibly urbanized and developed proto-industrial Roman Empire, to early nomadic Bantu tribes which rarely numbered above the low thousands.

Again, no technologies of the Bronze Age are necessary for the discovery or development of iron. If the first viable furnace in a region that is developed can reach temperatures above not just bronze, but also above the point needed to make iron bloom, there’s no need for any form of intermediate stage - and bloomeries do not require any metal tooling to be designed or constructed.

For that matter, China, for instance, is generally considered to have skipped bloomeries entirely.

Technology is not linear.

No argument to that statement. I would argue that materials science is even more underappreciated.

Materials science is the main thing most people consider when thinking about the conditions of the past, along with engineering/design, often to the exclusion of theory and organizational technology.

But the Bronze and Iron Age did not lead to one another. In fact, much of Subsaharan Africa lacks a Bronze Age entirely, precisely because they don’t lead to each other - the forms of furnaces (bloomeries) that spread in Subsaharan Africa were efficient enough to smelt iron from the start. Bronze is not needed to smelt iron - bronze or iron tools (though obviously you still need the iron itself) are not even needed to smelt high-quality steel, if you really know what you’re doing - all you would need are earthen furnaces, clay crucibles, coke (processable, if you know that it can be, in earthen kilns), and flux.

Theory does a lot of lifting that we often don’t appreciate.

Similarly, the De Havilland Mosquito was made mostly out of wood in part because of material shortages, but also in part because it was realized that in the UK’s total war situation, woodworkers, including furniture makers, were an undertapped labor source.

You’re the one who claims you “opposed” them by voting for them in the general election.

Feel free to quote me, unless you’re making shit up because you don’t actually have an argument. :)

Not only that, in another comment you’re bewildered why it’s taken so long for Democratic politicians support of Israel to weaken.

Your literacy is remarkably low. I expressed exhausted enthusiasm that Dem voters finally began to change their opinion on Israel in polling, despite there being multiple escalations of the genocide in the past decade-and-a-half alone that didn’t move the fucking needle.

You vote for them in the general election and you work to suppress people calling them out for supporting genocide. 🤷‍♂️ You are literally the problem.

lmao

Sorry that you think licking Trump’s boots is a preferable alternative to voting for a dreaded shitlib, who literally won the majority of the less conservative third of this fucking country in their primaries in 2016 and 2020.

I’m sure the Palestinians in the West Bank and Jordanians and Syrians being annexed by Israeli genocidaires are thrilled by your ‘principled’ stance.

Lol so like I said, you “opposed” them by voting for them.

This you, buddy?

Maybe if you went after dipshits who vote for people like Biden, Cuomo and Clinton in Democratic primaries you wouldn’t have to hear about what pieces of shit Democratic politicians are. 🤷‍♂️

Or did you forget what a primary was?

Oh, who am I kidding? Fascists don’t believe words have meanings.

Harris, because I had the terrible curse of prophecy, and predicted a good 50% of the bullshit we’re currently living through should Trump win.

Made a protest vote. Not proud of it, honestly, but I thought Hillary was going to win handily, and I could afford to voice displeasure with her fuckwit candidacy, especially after the coronal tone that was pushed by the DNC during the 2016 primary.

I lived in a safe state at the time and it went Dem anyway, but I still have flashbacks to that morning, watching the results come in.

The only one of those three I ever voted for was Biden, in 2020, in the general election, because I’m not a dipshit fascist. I voted Bernie in the 2020 primary.

Maybe if you went after dipshits who vote for people like Biden, Cuomo and Clinton in Democratic primaries you wouldn’t have to hear about what pieces of shit Democratic politicians are. 🤷‍♂️

Cute considering that I opposed all three. But that doesn’t match your narrative, so of course, you do the only thing your tiny fascist mind can think of, and make shit up. :)