US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8196

On July 26 2017 14:15 GreenHorizons wrote:


But you understand how then something like the universe being rational is foundational to "western thought" but it's not a western idea. It predates any western notion by millennia.

This isn't a unique occurrence. Where historians and people like yourself basically say that it doesn't count before the Greeks learned about it. Then you give them names like "The Father of ______" as if they weren't drop outs of Kemetic College.

I get it, you and others want to draw some arbitrary line at the Greeks and call everything they inherited "Western culture", credit them as creators, discoverers, and inventors of things that came long before them, and place them on pedestals bereft of the shoulders they stand on.

But if it makes people feel better to think their idea of "western culture" is better than whatever stands in opposition more power to them I guess. What could possibly go wrong?

On July 26 2017 14:40 Sermokala wrote:

If they're so obvious you shouldn't feel any trouble listing the reasons. Thread rule two violation.

I really don't understand the resistance to historians almost universally crediting the Greeks as being founders of this stuff

unless we're back to an irrational hatred of white people. If not the Greeks, then who?

if the question is where does Western culture start, you still haven't made anything resembling an argument as to why it should be anyone other than the Greeks.

On July 26 2017 14:46 xDaunt wrote:

Are you shitting me? Is it not obvious to you why a history of the evolution of a concept over the course of 2300+ years of western culture (from Aristotle to modern times) would not show up in an ancient Greek text? Since when did we have to start constantly pointing out the obvious in this thread?

Edit: Christ, I guess that means that people are being fooled by kwark's bullshit.

On July 26 2017 14:46 xDaunt wrote:

Are you shitting me? Is it not obvious to you why a history of the evolution of a concept over the course of 2300+ years of western culture (from Aristotle to modern times) would not show up in an ancient Greek text? Since when did we have to start constantly pointing out the obvious in this thread?

Edit: Christ, I guess that means that people are being fooled by kwark's bullshit.

On July 26 2017 14:42 xDaunt wrote:

I really don't understand the resistance to historians almost universally crediting the Greeks as being founders of this stuff unless we're back to an irrational hatred of white people. If not the Greeks, then who? There clearly were parallel tracks of development in other cultures to one degree or another, but if the question is where does Western culture start, you still haven't made anything resembling an argument as to why it should be anyone other than the Greeks.

On July 26 2017 15:00 Aquanim wrote:

Considering that (as I understand it) Kwark's point is that these ancient Greek texts are only very tenuously corrected to "Western culture" as it exists today, I'm fairly sure Sermokala hasn't followed what Kwark actually said (which would make your edit a complete non sequitur for the sole purpose of throwing shit at Sermokala and Kwark both), and I'm not at all sure that you did either.

On July 26 2017 14:35 Sermokala wrote:

But even the way you say it you don't pretend to argue that they were assimilating the locals into the "Chinese" way of doing things and that they instead forced the non Han groups into Han ways of things. Rome never had enough of its own people to simply move in with their own ethnic group and take over the area while the Chinese did. They're completely different ways of nation growing. The British were from a small island and yet were able to administer from there their whole empire by following the example from the Romans. I didn't say that the Chinese didn't invade Korea I said that they didn't plant themselves on the korean peninsula like a roman "alliance" would have.

On July 26 2017 15:14 xDaunt wrote:
No, I have followed kwark's argument and its movement quite carefully. It went from "there is no link from Christian/Roman/Greek culture to Western culture" to, upon being confronted with unequivocal evidence that there was such a link, to "yeah, but modern people would have come up with this stuff anyway." The bankruptcy there is patent.

And as for sermokala, I really don't give a shit whether he was paying attention to the whole argument or not. He took a shot at me, which deserved a response. That he may have done so without knowing what he was responding to doesn't make it less egregious.

On July 26 2017 15:14 xDaunt wrote:

No, I have followed kwark's argument and its movement quite carefully. It went from "there is no link from Christian/Roman/Greek culture to Western culture" to, upon being confronted with unequivocal evidence that there was such a link, to "yeah, but modern people would have come up with this stuff anyway." The bankruptcy there is patent.

On July 26 2017 15:14 xDaunt wrote:

No, I have followed kwark's argument and its movement quite carefully. It went from "there is no link from Christian/Roman/Greek culture to Western culture" to, upon being confronted with unequivocal evidence that there was such a link, to "yeah, but modern people would have come up with this stuff anyway." The bankruptcy there is patent.

And as for sermokala, I really don't give a shit whether he was paying attention to the whole argument or not. He took a shot at me, which deserved a response. That he may have done so without knowing what he was responding to doesn't make it less egregious.

On July 26 2017 15:24 Sermokala wrote:

I read up on the whole argument I read almost the whole thread even if I don't feel like responding most of the time. You were pulling a zeflin on your argument. My point was that if you're going to credit the Greeks you have to credit the Phoenicians because they were the ones that set up the med so that Greece could exist as it was. The Greeks never accomplished anything and their writings weren't publicly available or known until well after most of what would become western culture was created. saying the greeks were influencing the west for 2300 years is just mythos building like kwark said. You're the one whos failing to see facts as they are.

On July 26 2017 15:19 mozoku wrote:

Why does it matter that it's a separate method of nation-building? The Han belief in the their cultural/ethnic superiority is well documented. Besides, most of modern Tibet and the Uighur province today aren't majority Han. The CCP still insists on "modernizing" the people of both provinces against their will. They don't want to be ruled or "Han-ized." Which totally defeats your point that perceived cultural supremacy and forcing it on to others is something that's unique to Western culture.

xDaunt presented a number of similar examples. Your original premise just wasn't even close to true.

On July 26 2017 15:29 KwarK wrote:

If I may correct you, Alexander got shit done, he changed the world as much as an individual can. But he's very much not what people are talking about when they say "the Greeks". They're talking about a specific three decades of Athenian history. The Greeks didn't achieve much in that time, mostly just killing a lot of other Greeks. Alexander isn't really viewed as a part of the history of western civilization. Which is part of the problem too, the transition from Hellenic polis to Hellenistic kingdoms is a huge part of the evolution of states in the Eastern Mediterranean but the myth doesn't give a shit about that, it's all democracy and the film 300. Sure, all the shit he actually did was in Asia but so was everything back then, Europe hadn't really started yet.

On July 26 2017 16:01 IgnE wrote:


which three are those?

On July 26 2017 15:21 KwarK wrote:

Quite the opposite. It went from you claiming that Christian/Roman/Greek culture was the foundation to modern western culture to "well if it wasn't then how come Jefferson read a book and anyway you can't name a better start point for history".

The modern western culture is a modern western development that is as much a product of its own time and place in history as anything can be. I stand by that. Obviously there are links between different peoples at different times but the popular myth, that the Greeks invented democracy and the Olympic games and then gave them to the Romans who invented the Republic and marble and that's how we're here, that's a bedtime story that has somehow infected the public consciousness and just won't leave. Greece does not have a special or unique place in western cultural history. It's simply a part of the broader historical context. 1066 AD is as good as 490 BCE to me.

On July 26 2017 17:48 Wegandi wrote:Yeah, I don't see how you can make that argument, considering that our holiday's come from the romans/Constantine, our calendar is Christian, our laws are very much Roman influenced, we style ourselves on "Democracy" an invention of the Greeks, Liberal studies in college is a hand-down from the Roman and Greeks. They were the genesis and much of what you say is arbitrary starting dates, really isn't. The reason you don't start @ 1066AD is because much of Western society at that point was heavily influenced by Rome and Greece, plus, Byzantine was still around and was a huge influence on Eastern Europe / Russia.

Having said this, none of this talks about "superiority" or whatever. It's just cause and effect relationships. We have so many hand-me downs from the Romans and Greeks it's silly, which is why making the argument that our current civilization is not heavily influenced by these two giants of western history is remarkably dumb. By the way, I hate it when people on the "right" make that superiority argument. Indo-European culture (Sanskrit/Hinduism/etc.) and history is rich and magnificent, so is Chinese and Japanese, as well as old Civilizations like the Egyptians.

Also, did someone really make the "who taught the Romans/Greeks" jib? That's a rabbit hole. Who taught the teachers? There's something called genesis. No one taught Leibniz or Newton calculus - they discovered it on their own. That's the nature of discovery - there is generally no proceeding event. Who taught the Roman or Greek architects how to build? Where are these other European peoples architectural pieces? You don't hear about them in any historical texts of the time period, nor do any stand to do this day. All you see are stone megaliths that proceeded them. Certainly, the people who built the stone megaliths did not teach the Romans how to build the ampitheatre or the Greeks how to construct the Parthenon.

On July 26 2017 18:21 Aquanim wrote:

I would say that the holidays are purely cosmetic, and I suspect you're going to get some disagreement on the concept that "Democracy" as it's known today is an invention of the Greeks. Not sure about your other examples.

I'd venture a guess that Ancient Greece and Rome are frequently used as "starting points" because our current-day records of what preceded them are of much lower quality, not because the people before them had no good ideas.


I certainly don't understand how any of this is supposed to have anything to do with the superiority of any culture over any other. This discussion has gone well down the rabbit hole.


I don't believe anybody here is contending that other people in Europe taught the Roman/Greek architects or philosophers. Other people in Africa on the other hand is an entirely different story. I can't say I'm particularly knowledgable on that area of history, so I'll leave details to somebody who is; suffice it to say that while the Romans and Greeks did make large contributions to the sum total of human knowledge and understanding, that total did not start with them by any means.