History topic for me to rabbit hole

[Fizzzzle]

I didn't do the last one because no matter how hard I try, I find Roman history boring as shit. i don't have a good reason for that given the amount of espionage, subterfuge, and assassination that was rampant during the empire period of Western Rome, but I just can't give two shits about it. I've tried and I can't. Maybe someday I'll write a biography of Diocletian or something.

 

Give me something juicy. I'm not working right now because I can't use my right arm. I actually have formulated a biography of Thomas Jefferson and how big of a hypocrite he was, which I feel like mirrors a lot of modern politics, but I'm not doing that yet.

 

I know hardly anyone read my recounting of the time the US almost annexed the Dominican Republic. That's fine. I do it for me, not for you.

[unogueen]

For something surreal and tangentially history related, there's The Book of the Damned. You can find it here:

 

ISTA - Internet Sacred Text Archive Home

WWW.SACRED-TEXTS.COM

---

This is a quiet place in cyberspace devoted to religious tolerance and scholarship

 

 

That place was a wild rabbit for a while for me.

[gamer.tv]

I found the Ottoman’s an interesting bunch. 

[SuperSpreader]

https://a.co/d/4CWlyKI

 

[Keyser_Soze]

1 hour ago, gamer.tv said:

I found the Ottoman’s an interesting bunch. 

 

Very comfortable too

[Jwheel86]

Dude's a no shit fascist, but, his podcast on the origins of the Israeli Palestinian conflict is really good. Wade recommended it years ago and I finally got to it few weeks ago. 

 

 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

@Fizzzzle - I've come up with a topic for your history deep dive!

 

Research and report on a situation where climate change resulted in an overall net benefit to a particular human society.

[Fizzzzle]

19 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

@Fizzzzle - I've come up with a topic for your history deep dive!

 

Research and report on a situation where climate change resulted in an overall net benefit to a particular human society.

Oh, that could be fun. I've thought about that. Agriculture, certainly, was developed as a result of climate change. However, while WE benefit from that development today, it's fair to say the people back then probably didn't see it that way. Judging by the state of peoples' teeth and that people in early agricultural societies got a lot shorter on average, it's safe to say that lives of most people did not improve upon the development of mass agriculture (I say "mass agriculture" because almost every civilization on Earth has practiced some form of agriculture as far back as we can see, just mostly family-level subsistence farming). That tells us that mass, communal, state-controlled agriculture was not something people *chose* to do, but something they *had* to do. 

 

So one could argue that we have all benefited from climate change at the end of the last ice age (technically we're still in an ice age, but that's another story) at the expense of the people who actually went through it.

 

I bet someone who isn't Jared Diamond has probalby written a book about this that's worth reading...

 

I've also been getting into the Younger Dryas Event since I watched the utter atrocity that is "Ancient Apocalypse" on Netflix. While Graham Hancock is full of complete horseshit, I do think there is something to the idea that human civilization 12,000 years ago was probably far more advanced than we realize (when I say "advanced" I don't mean "Atlantis," I mean something possibly close to, like, 4,000 BCE). It's just that so much of the lives of those people got swallowed up by the ocean that we'll never really know because it's all gone.

 

There's also the fact that, as of 2007, due to rising ocean temperatures, the Northwest Passage opened up. At least seasonally. We haven't fully felt the effects of that yet, but imagine a Northwest Passage that is ice-free year-round. Great news for Russia, shitty news for Panama.