Kirk: Isegoria, I was actually thinking about that novel when I said that. I’m not sure that such a situation would play out the way Anderson had it, but… I do suspect that the Conquistadores would have managed something a lot closer to Japan’s outcome, when it came to dealing with the outsider than what went on with most of the rest of the world. Japan’s experience ought to be taken seriously as a model for how to deal with superior outside-context civilizations forcing their way...
Isegoria: Peter Frost gives his side of the story, regarding HBD Chick’s work, in his second footnote: Hbd*chick has accused me of plagiarizing her work on the Hajnal Line and the Western European Marriage Pattern. The truth is that I became interested in that subject much earlier — during the early 1990s in an exchange of letters with Kevin MacDonald in the pages of Ethology and Sociobiology. Afterwards, I intended to write a follow-up that would prove two points: 1) the Western European Marriage...
Graham: HBD Chick wrote a lot on these issues as well. The foundations of a lot that is magnificent, and I still respect it as the basis of my civilization. For that matter, I’m not temperamentally suited to a strong kinship/extended family social setup myself. But it certainly seems to have been a faustian pact in the end.
Graham: There was a period in the 70s-90s when military SF seemed often to turn to the theme of the military effectiveness of humans compared to aliens, even when less advanced. (James?) Barton had one in which an occupied Earth furnished mercenaries. There was another series in which Earth might have been a member of some alliance but all the other species were terrified of our propensity for violence and so used humans as their army against some new external threat. IIRC, the birdlike alien species...
Isegoria: Your comment about Europeans and aliens, Kirk, reminds me of Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade — which I haven’t read (yet), but have read about: England 1345, and Sir Roger de Tourneville has volunteered to help King Edward III in his war against the French. The English army, fully prepped on the eve of leaving, crushes a small alien invasion force, by dint of cunning, superior numbers, and having no EMP-susceptible equipment or depletable bullets/explosives/laser charges —...
Kirk: The performance of the Spaniards, Portuguese, and other Europeans against the rest of the world is a point a lot of the folks who decry the “primitive” nature of their opponents in the Americas manage to overlook. Yeah, the Aztec and Inca were horribly behind the times, in weapons and tactics, but… It’s not like the massively more “advanced” civilizations of the South Eurasian landmass did much better. Europe was just a better competitor. Reasons for that can be...
Bruce: In the Indian Ocean, the Egyptian Navy was bigger than the other Moslem fleets, but Egypt was a province of the Turkish Empire and the Turks weren’t about to let Egypt tool up enough to challenge the Turks. Also, the toughest Moslem warships were flamethrower ships, able to roast any ship point-blank, but suicidal to be on when Portugese cannon opened the fuel tank from a distance.
Jacob G.: It is instructive to look at what Diaz and Albuquerque did in the Indian Ocean at the same time. Their technological edge was slight — perhaps no more than a general theory of how the oceans worked. The disease gradient worked the other way. Yet the Hidalgos still generally won battles against enormous odds and imposed their will on the more populous natives. Very few would argue that these places were backwards by thousands of years. So LaFond’s theory that they had a feral wolfpack mentality...
Kirk: The point that I’m making is that it’s dangerous to write off the Inca and Aztec as “primitive and unsophisticated”. The Inca totalitarian state was something the likes of which no Western nation has ever managed to accomplish without crashing and burning as their economy self-destructed. We’ve never managed even something small, like the various utopian socialist communities of the 19th Century. And, the Inca did that without any form of alphabet. The Maya had...
Graham: There’s a need for a degree of humility in assessing any competing civilizations, especially since disease whose mechanism was unknown to Europeans basically gave them the New World for their empires. In it’s absence, the neolithic empires of Mexico and Peru probably had the numbers to swamp any early invasion and the organizational capacity to rally to do so. Even the farmer and HG tribes of eastern North America probably could. And the survivors demonstrated the ability to adapt to...
Alistair: Jim, I agree with you and Magnus, and think Kirk is a little bit off on his assessment of advanced. New World civilisations were in many ways shockingly primitive despite the scale of the cities; not just the science and engineering, but social organisation and administration, as well as art and culture. I once did a rough tech and engineering comparison between Aztec / Inca tech and its development in the old world. Best I could tell the Aztecs were at about ~2,000BC, iirc (they had some tech...
Alistair: Albion. Well, the “tend your own garden first” approach really sounds like he’s channelling Peterson. I’m warming to the idea; it bespeaks of a radical ethical humility. But I also agree on Micro vs. Macro utility.
Alrenous: Macroeconomics is actually easier than microeconomics because a lot of stuff cancels out. If you want a controlled experiment, you can’t get better than West vs. East Germany. However, the point of paid macroeconomists isn’t to predict or understand the economy. They are paid to understand that whatever their paymasters wants to do anyway is clearly a good idea. “Oh man oh geeze getting correct predictions is hard.” Yeah. Sure it is.
Aretae: I’m very fond of Scott. Typo there. Thanks for the catch and fix.
Isegoria: I’m pretty sure Aretae did mean Sumner (and I made the edit for him).
Dan Kurt: re: Scott Dumner Do you mean Scott Summer?
Aretae: Hey, I said that for 5 years. There are some real predictions out there — Scott Dumner Sumner comes to mind — but that’s a basically true position.
Jim: Magus and Kirk – Magus is correct here. New World Civilizations while extremely interesting were simply not at the level of contemporary European civilizations. Indeed even comparing them to Akkadians who had extensive use of writing, metallurgy, market economies, etc. is not really appropriate. The migration to the New World seems to have filtered out most infectious diseases so Amerindians before Columbus were probably much more disease free than Eurasians. While no doubt life was better for...
Albion: “It’s like change yourself, then maybe change your family and your neighbor before you get into abstract concepts about I’m going to change the world.” In other words, what wise people have said for centuries: you can only tend your garden. Once people stop seeing the whole business of life as changeable solely in their terms and on their say so, they can progress as individuals and that passes on the family with–if lucky–the neighbourhood following.
Bob Sykes: Once again, medical people are unaware of natural selection. Eventually, a mutation arises that allows living organisms to adapt to new selection pressures. One can safely predict that this new technique will fail, too. There is a great deal of talk about overuse of antibiotics in general. Even lowly general practitioners at walk-in clinics now mouth the mantra. But any use of antibiotics that is clinically effective eventually selects for resistant mutations. The only way to prevent this is...
