Chauvin Found Guilty of All Charges

[SilentPony]

There’s others worth debating here (particularly South America, their issues are more Monroe Doctrine than self-inflicted and the comparative prosperity of the 19th century attests to that), but this Rome one is transparently false. Diet quality, height, likelihood of dying violently, lifespan, and I think even child mortality all improved after the fall of the Roman Empire. Rome sucked ass to live under, it just looked nice to be powerful in.

I mean...no? That's just not true. The fall of the Roman Empire led to centuries of brutal wars through all their colony states, plague was rampant, education/literacy dropped sharply, what freedoms were had under Roman rule was curtailed, individual monarchies and city states fought over resources, the Catholic church rose to prominence, and the whole thing famously and infamously led to the Dark Ages, and they weren't called that because black was in fashion.
The whole idea of the Renaissance in the 15th century, a full millennium after the fall of the Roman Empire, was a return to Roman ideals of democracy, humanities, science, mathematics, expression, education and cleanliness.

 

[Hades]

I mean...no? That's just not true. The fall of the Roman Empire led to centuries of brutal wars through all their colony states, plague was rampant, education/literacy dropped sharply, what freedoms were had under Roman rule was curtailed, individual monarchies and city states fought over resources, the Catholic church rose to prominence, and the whole thing famously and infamously led to the Dark Ages, and they weren't called that because black was in fashion.
The whole idea of the Renaissance in the 15th century, a full millennium after the fall of the Roman Empire, was a return to Roman ideals of democracy, humanities, science, mathematics, expression, education and cleanliness.

Yes but it should be noted that this line of thinking is considered outdated. The Renaissance wasn't really a moment where *poof!* they rediscovered the ancient ways. Many of those things were more gradually introduced throughout the centuries.

 

[SilentPony]

Yes but it should be noted that this line of thinking is considered outdated. The Renaissance wasn't really a moment where *poof!* they rediscovered the ancient ways. Many of those things were more gradually introduced throughout the centuries.

Sure sure, that's all fine, but my larger point is a LOT was lost during the Fall and life wasn't inherently better. You don't have to re-introduce things that never went away.
And this all ties back to my larger point to Von Baren that dissolving the United States government isn't going to stop police brutality and abuse.

 

[MrCalavera]

The whole idea of the Renaissance in the 15th century, a full millennium after the fall of the Roman Empire, was a return to Roman ideals of democracy, humanities, science, mathematics, expression, education and cleanliness.

That idea of "Dark Ages", as in some long period of wide civilizational regress in Europe, is contested by modern historians.

 

[tstorm823]

I mean...no? That's just not true. The fall of the Roman Empire led to centuries of brutal wars through all their colony states, plague was rampant, education/literacy dropped sharply, what freedoms were had under Roman rule was curtailed, individual monarchies and city states fought over resources, the Catholic church rose to prominence, and the whole thing famously and infamously led to the Dark Ages, and they weren't called that because black was in fashion.
The whole idea of the Renaissance in the 15th century, a full millennium after the fall of the Roman Empire, was a return to Roman ideals of democracy, humanities, science, mathematics, expression, education and cleanliness.

The dark ages were called that because they were the age of the Holy Roman Empire, and the people who wrote the history you believe were furiously anti-Catholic protestants, who close their ears at the suggestion that the witch burning started after the dark ages ended.

 

[Agema]

Mexico is an all but failed state where drug lords and the Mafia has control over entire states and the Government has all but given up.

Maybe, but a large part of Mexico's problem is that its absurdly rich neighbour to the north's drugs policies ensures that Mexico's organised crime gangs have a larger budget than the Mexican military.

Diet quality, height, likelihood of dying violently, lifespan, and I think even child mortality all improved after the fall of the Roman Empire. Rome sucked ass to live under, it just looked nice to be powerful in.

I don't think there's any meaningful evidence supporting that.

There's certainly good evidence to suggest that Roman cities were beneficial because they had sanitation and decent water supplies. But then, there's not consistency across the Roman Empire either. The average height in the Eastern Empire was higher than the Western - almost certainly because the Roman East was richer, better developed and better fed. That's why when the empire was divided Diocletian he gave himself the East because it was the most valuable part and Constantine moved the capital to the East when he reunified the empire.

Towards the end, the Western Roman empire was a total mess: declining population, economic collapse, and rendered a near-permanent warzone by civil conflict and invading barbarians. I'm sure it sucked. In a sense, when it was finally dissolved it wasn't that much of a fall, because it had long since already fallen. But I'm pretty sure the Dark Ages were a substantial step down on the Roman Empire up to around 300AD, before the rot took hold.

 

[SilentPony]

The dark ages were called that because they were the age of the Holy Roman Empire, and the people who wrote the history you believe were furiously anti-Catholic protestants, who close their ears at the suggestion that the witch burning started after the dark ages ended.

Are you suggesting they made up the wars, famine and plagues? That population decline, decline of education, decline in trade, mass immigration throughout Europe as a result of instability never happened?
Hold on lemme check - Yeah no, all that still happened and if we call it the Early Middle Ages now, it was still a nightmarish time to be alive, and certainly not an improvement over the Roman way of living.

 

[Avnger]

The dark ages were called that because they were the age of the Holy Roman Empire, and the people who wrote the history you believe were furiously anti-Catholic protestants, who close their ears at the suggestion that the witch burning started after the dark ages ended.

edit: Just going to throw this out there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

The term Dark Ages was coopted by Protestant reformers, but it had existed long before that and continued to exist long after that entirely distinct from your persecution complex (a bit ironic for a Catholic to have). You're merely repeating pro-Catholic propaganda rather than actually understanding the term (again, ironic for someone complaining about propaganda).

 

[Gergar12]

Funny enough in my city this happened

More than a thousand students rave on Chittenden, flip cars, no arrests

Despite university, state, local and federal COVID-19 guidelines, about a thousand Ohio State students flocked to Chittenden Avenue Saturday for an evening that resulted in several flipped cars and Columbus Police helicopters being called in — but police made no arrests.

www.thelantern.com

But no pepper spray, rubber bullets, or police horses

BLM protests lol, lets' call the national guard.

 

[Agema]

That idea of "Dark Ages", as in some long period of wide civilizational regress in Europe, is contested by modern historians.

That's mostly because it's Western European-centric. They mean everything west of the Adriatic in Europe was "dark". Virtually everywhere else in the world, nothing much changed.

The dark ages were called that because they were the age of the Holy Roman Empire, and the people who wrote the history you believe were furiously anti-Catholic protestants, who close their ears at the suggestion that the witch burning started after the dark ages ended.

No, it's there because there was a widespread lionisation of the Roman Empire as a beacon of development and civilisation, with the patchwork of warlord states succeeding it viewed as distinctly inferior. Grand cities shrank and fell to ruin. Architecture, art, literacy, etc. couldn't achieve anything so impressive for centuries. The term "dark ages" predates Protestantism.

It also refers to the fact that there is a huge decrease in evidentiary material. The Romans wrote lots of stuff (like histories), engraved their lives and histories in stone, and so on, so we have a huge amount of information what they said and did. Who knows what the fuck half of the people in the early medieval did, even the really important ones? There's no record of much of it. Whole reigns of kings go by with little more comment than approximate dates they were born, ruled and died, and the idea they might possibly have fought some battle somewhere we can't locate which had a result we can't identify.

 

[Revnak]

I don't think there's any meaningful evidence supporting that.

There's certainly good evidence to suggest that Roman cities were beneficial because they had sanitation and decent water supplies. But then, there's not consistency across the Roman Empire either. The average height in the Eastern Empire was higher than the Western - almost certainly because the Roman East was richer, better developed and better fed. That's why when the empire was divided Diocletian he gave himself the East because it was the most valuable part and Constantine moved the capital to the East when he reunified the empire.

Towards the end, the Western Roman empire was a total mess: declining population, economic collapse, and rendered a near-permanent warzone by civil conflict and invading barbarians. I'm sure it sucked. In a sense, when it was finally dissolved it wasn't that much of a fall, because it had long since already fallen. But I'm pretty sure the Dark Ages were a substantial step down on the Roman Empire up to around 300AD, before the rot took hold.

The Western Empire had been that bad since the end of the Antonines. There’s plenty of archeological evidence to show this too to my memory, it’s not even particularly controversial. Roman cities also were still plague ridden messes, as the late Antonine period on showed. The meager sanitation efforts didn’t make up for how dumb it was to have a massive economy built on slaves and the urban poor in an agrarian mode of production.

I mean...no? That's just not true. The fall of the Roman Empire led to centuries of brutal wars through all their colony states, plague was rampant, education/literacy dropped sharply, what freedoms were had under Roman rule was curtailed, individual monarchies and city states fought over resources, the Catholic church rose to prominence, and the whole thing famously and infamously led to the Dark Ages, and they weren't called that because black was in fashion.
The whole idea of the Renaissance in the 15th century, a full millennium after the fall of the Roman Empire, was a return to Roman ideals of democracy, humanities, science, mathematics, expression, education and cleanliness.

What? The late Roman Empire was the cause of those brutal wars due to the horrors of Roman civil wars. Arguably Western Rome fell to civil wars rather than invasion, and the wars between successor states were dramatically smaller in scale (a few thousand soldiers rather than the tens to hundreds of thousands during the imperial period). Education always sucked, but was preserved and made more accessible by the Church. The divided feudal monarchies fought much smaller wars even for their size. The Dark Ages are a myth, and Roman ideals certainly put ambition, glory, and honor long before “Democracy,” which they found idiotic, “Science,” which they saw as a waste, or “Humanism,” which got in the way of all the slavery.

 

[Eacaraxe]

Except when they convince rape victims not to bother with pressing charges.

Well, somebody didn't read my post -- particularly the part about the problem lying in the very conceptual level of our criminal justice system, independent and separate from partisan issues -- or put a couple big thinks into it.

(Hint: the reason cops say that, is because of the very phenomenon I'm calling out. And it's the same reason cops default to victim blaming and apologia.

What's the prosecution and conviction rate on sexual assault again?)

 

[tstorm823]

Are you suggesting they made up the wars, famine and plagues? That population decline, decline of education, decline in trade, mass immigration throughout Europe as a result of instability never happened?
Hold on lemme check - Yeah no, all that still happened and if we call it the Early Middle Ages now, it was still a nightmarish time to be alive, and certainly not an improvement over the Roman way of living.

There was one major plague during the early middle ages. It was not exceptionally better or worse than plagues before or after. The famines were a result of extreme weather events, not a consequence of who ruled what. There was dramatically more war in Europe both before and after that period. The population decline happened during the transition into the "Dark Ages", and the period as a whole was a period of population growth. Long distance trade only truly died down when the Arab world got super violent... what does any of that have to do with "the Roman way of living", other than perhaps to blame some of the problems later on the Romans?

 

[tstorm823]

It also refers to the fact that there is a huge decrease in evidentiary material. The Romans wrote lots of stuff (like histories), engraved their lives and histories in stone, and so on, so we have a huge amount of information what they said and did. Who knows what the fuck half of the people in the early medieval did, even the really important ones? There's no record of much of it. Whole reigns of kings go by with little more comment than approximate dates they were born, ruled and died, and the idea they might possibly have fought some battle somewhere we can't locate which had a result we can't identify.

Oh, but we know a whole lot about a big list of saints and popes from the period, but that's Church history, so it doesn't count... for some reason.

 

[Avnger]

Oh, but we know a whole lot about a big list of saints and popes from the period, but that's Church history, so it doesn't count... for some reason.

Still waiting for those citations about the anti-HRE, anti-Catholic academic "Dark Ages" conspiracy

If you're going to keep referencing it, it's nice to provide evidence.

 

[SilentPony]

There was one major plague during the early middle ages. It was not exceptionally better or worse than plagues before or after. The famines were a result of extreme weather events, not a consequence of who ruled what. There was dramatically more war in Europe both before and after that period. The population decline happened during the transition into the "Dark Ages", and the period as a whole was a period of population growth. Long distance trade only truly died down when the Arab world got super violent... what does any of that have to do with "the Roman way of living", other than perhaps to blame some of the problems later on the Romans?

I'm sorry I got us off track with the apparently controversial opinion that the Middle Ages and the Renaissance happened.

So to get us back on track on police violence, we got here from Von Baron suggesting the way to curb public mistrust in local police was to abolish the US Federal government, and then citing a historical context behind the suggestion. I then pointed out a lot of collapses of Governments in history that did not immediately improve the lives of the people as evidence that historically, no a Government's collapse has not been a good thing for its citizens.

The rest on if the Hundred Years War was somehow a protestant conspiracy 150 years before the Reformation is, as they say, history.
And not to nitpick, but in terms of major plagues during the middle ages in Europe, they had a major one about every 10-20 years.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

That isn't a case of the law enforcement being unrecognized and dissolved, at least not in the way I mean. A large country cannot exist without a body that enforces the laws, if the people do not trust the body that enforces the laws or the body that makes the laws then the only option is to dissolve that large country into smaller communities that can create the kind of laws and enforcement of them that they wish.

In other words, something like dissolving the United States into individual states. The likely result would be that several states, particularly the ones with few natural resources, will join together into larger, but still smaller than the current US, countries. The alternative is that the country will descend into civil war as factions fight to seize control of the country and its power for themselves.

Bullshit. It's not like Minneapolis PD are being shipped in from Iowa. Unless you're proposing city-states smaller than most current cities, commu ity policing and local enforcement are the *problem*. In a lot of places, the PD is just the city's designated gang

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

So I pulled up twitter, and it turns out #BackTheBlue is 50% people posting things other than police that can be blue, and 49% people using the hashtag to criticize the hastag. and 1% people talking about the Columbus shooting. Blue Lives Matter doesn't seem to have trended recently. I'm not seeing a temper tantrum.

I mean, besides the Carlson freekout I posted a clip of, most conservative pundits and their schlock, and your average comments section of any politician calling for the barest of police reform?

Don't get me wrong, most people are in their own bubble. Must be nice to be that insulated

 

[Ravinoff]

If nothing changes, probably not possible. If a juror comes forward and says they convicted because they heard a politician was planning on burning their city down if they didn't convict, then it absolutely is possible.

Ignore Revnak.

Unlikely. Without a solid instance of misconduct or procedural issues within the trial to base it on, declaring a mistrial on the grounds of "the jurors could possibly have been affected by public opinion" reads too much like trying to get a mulligan on the trial because it didn't have the outcome they wanted.

I think what's going to get this at the very least some very solid grounds for an appeal isn't necessarily the jackass congress-critter or the implied threat of burning the city down, but both of those (and the pig's blood thing) in combination with the judge's utterly incomprehensible refusal to sequester the jury for the entirety of the trial. Meaning that while they were instructed not to view any media coverage of the trial, there's no proof or way to enforce that they actually did. A defense lawyer would have to be braindead to not contest the verdict on that alone.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

I'm still mulling it over but open up civil laws to allow shooting victims to sue the gun manufacturers as it'll cause a crackdown real quick.

I keep hearing this one proposed and every time I do it just sounds so stupid.

When someone gets run over by a drunk driver they don't decide to sue Ford for it. What does the manufacturer have to do with it? The gun manufacturer didn't sell the shooter the gun and didn't make the shooter use it.

Furthermore, what do you do if you get shot by a gun made by a manufacturer that doesn't exist anymore? Who do you sue if the gun that shot you was made with parts from a bunch of different manufacturers?