Saying 'No' to Internationalism

amacachi

Wibbs wrote: »

Well then you also need to read up more on that period. You're saying there was tiny progress from the first century AD until the Renaissance? Not even from the fall of Rome until the Renaissance? Eh no. Quite a bit happened in that latter period.

The first universities as we would recognise them today. The first degrees handed out. The first mechanical clocks(12th century, maybe before). Music annotation was invented and improved. Major innovations and output in agriculture. EG The heavy plough and horse collars to till fields more efficently(6th century). Spurs(11th) Horseshoes(9th), Preservation of beer with hops(9th) artesian wells which require no pumps (12th).No famines for a very long period of time.

While roman law was lost for a time, the birth of modern law was well on the way by the 9th century(Merchant law/Germanic law/Breton law/anglo saxon law). Monumental architecture in the mass building of huge cathedrals and the science behind doing so. Before the crusades kicked off Europe had a generally peaceful time. They were pretty much united under one religious doctrine.

The births of the nation states as we think of them today. The Byzantines continued to grow in many aspects of science law and culture. The carolingian Renaissance under Charlemagne was in full flow in the 9th century. Science and philosophy grew steadily in this time period. The Muslim influence added greatly to it. While the Chinese invented paper, Europe took to it with gusto and built paper mills that outputted it in large volume. Other stuff? The blast furnace(12th) Tidal mills(9th), glass mirrors, Astronomical compass, the horizontal loom, grindstones, distilation of alcohol. Its not a short list.

Of course there was progress, and over that kind of timeframe you'll be able to find thousands of improvements and "inventions", but that isn't the point. For the amount of time covered there was quite little improvement in a lot of areas thanks to, mainly, the church. They had no problem with improving food growing techniques or building techniques, but how many great buildings went up that weren't for the Church?
Until their power started to dilute there was miniscule progress in maths and science for centuries, and little in the way of social change. Maths and science are the important things, the things that have caused the acceleration of civilisation and progress and discovery in the last ~500 years. I'm sure you'll find some bits and pieces of mathematical discoveries in those years but it wasn't til later that it really started, and when they rediscovered and reused systems and rules developed by the Greeks and Byzantines a thousand or more years earlier, which were held back once again by the Church of the time and/or state.
Yes, the universities started, for whom? For the people in the Church and whoever owned everything else. The universities were more of a hobby for rich kids before they inherited businesses and land than anything else. Everytime I read or hear about scientific (mathematical) discoveries from 1000 AD onwards it tends to be stuff based on Ptolemy and the other lads whose work was pretty much left alone for almost a millennium.

Hardly milennia ago. Movable metal type? About 100 years before gutenburg. And his was a more innovative way to do it and changes the world. Gunpowder? the first accurate reference in China is in the 8th century. Europe gets it by the 13th. Again europe does more with it(for good and ill).

Way to miss my point. I wasn't claiming that China invented absolutely everything.

HavingCrack

The Pope is being exposed to After Hours after being sheltered in the kiddies pool of US politics....poor troll doesn't know what he's letting himself in for.


Oh dear, I didn't actually intend that pun, oh well !

Amhran Nua

rovert wrote: »

Youve consider them for years and your solution is to go back to Medieval times? Sorry but I reject that wholesale too.

No, lets run with it, there was no internet back in medieval times so I propose he embrace them as quickly as possible.

peasant

I particularly like the way nutcases always insist on dotting their posts with lots of underscores and italics ...makes them so much easier to spot and avoid

InTheTrees

turns out the pope is a nazi.

who'd have thought it?

sponsoredwalk

Wibbs wrote: »

Broad strokes hed, broad strokes. Some seem to think the dark ages was the 15th century so....

The only mention I've made of the 15th century is that a few of the dates in my links go beyond the year 1400...

If we want a second opinion we can pull out professor wikipedia:

Professor Wikipedia wrote:

Dark Ages?
In the 19th century, the entire Middle Ages were called the "Dark Ages", expressing contempt for an anti-scientific, priest-ridden, superstitious time.
However, a radical reevaluation occurred in the early 20th century, based on the wealth of information from the High and Late Middle Ages.
When historians now use the term "Dark Ages" to refer to the Early Middle Ages,
it is intended to express the idea that the period seems "dark" only because of the shortage of historical records compared with later times.
The stereotype of the entire Middle Ages as a "Dark Age" supposedly caused by the Christian Church for allegedly
"placing the word of religious authorities over personal experience and rational activity" is called a caricature by the contemporary historians
of science David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers,[49] who say
"the late medieval scholar rarely experienced the coercive power of the church and would have regarded himself as free
(particularly in the natural sciences) to follow reason and observation wherever they led.

There was no warfare between science and the church".[50] Historian Edward Grant writes:
"If revolutionary rational thoughts were expressed in the Age of Reason [the 18th century], they were only made possible because of the long
medieval tradition that established the use of reason as one of the most important of human activities".[51]
For example, the claim that people of the Middle Ages widely believed that the Earth was flat was first propagated in the 19th century[52]
and is still very common in popular culture. This claim is mistaken, as Lindberg and Numbers write:
"there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference."[52][53]
Dante Alighieri's 14th century religious poem, the Divine Comedy, included a number of scientific themes,[54] such as a spherical earth, and the importance of the experimental method.
Misconceptions such as: "the Church prohibited autopsies and dissections during the Middle Ages", "the rise of Christianity killed off ancient science",
and "the medieval Christian church suppressed the growth of the natural sciences", are all reported by Numbers as examples of widely popular myths
that still pass as historical truth, even though they are not supported by current historical research.[55]
link

&

Professor Wikipedia wrote:

The word is derived from Latin saeculum obscurum (dark age), a phrase first recorded in 1602.[3]
The label employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the "darkness" of the period with earlier and later periods of "light".
Originally, the term characterized the bulk of the Middle Ages as a period of intellectual darkness between the extinguishing of the light of Rome,
and the Renaissance or rebirth from the 14th century onwards.[4]
This definition is still found in popular usage,[1][2][5] but increased recognition of the accomplishments of the Middle Ages since the 19th
century has led to the label being restricted in application.
Today it is frequently applied only to the earlier part of the era, the Early Middle Ages.
However, most modern scholars who study the era tend to avoid the term altogether for its negative connotations,
finding it misleading and inaccurate for any part of the Middle Ages

Basically I'm just using the older classification, I guess I've just got it from older books
So we can restate the "dark" ages as "middle" ages & still come up with a pretty grim period in humanity compared to today.
All my links point to humanity still in it's infancy (I don't claim we're exactly responsible adults) and almost powerless with respect to authoritarian rule & nature.
It ay not be the scholarly classification, i.e. a term to describe the lack of documentation of the period, but it is the common meaning when the word is used &
as I've shown through all those links it's not without reason.

Wibbs wrote: »

I think you're being way too subjective. You can say that now because its the 21st century and with all the received knowledge that entails at your disposal. If you had been alive in the 10 century there's an overwhelming chance you would have been huddled in the church pew, decrying the new as ungodly and in thrall to the clergy. It would have taken a real kick in the breeches to get you to think "eh hang on?"

No, I'm not really speaking subjectively/anachronistically from a 21st century perspective I was trying to speak from the perspective's of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Vesalius, Galileo, Newton etc... in that their work has historically done so much to advance humanity and show people the virtue of reason.
You can argue for the lasting effect of people making cathedrals from before the gothic period & how that advanced humanity but it wasn't until
Newton that the serious concepts of center of mass etc... were adequately defined/understood so that buildings could be made with serious precision.
I'm sure we can go down the list & tick off the boxes like this.

My point here is that nobody needed to die for humanity to acquire this knowledge (except in the case of Vesalius lol! )
and especially not 30-60% of the European population. Seeing as you mention parts outside of Europe,
did Muslim countries need mass death to come up with their mathematical and scientific advances?
The only good thing I can see behind this mass depopulation is that
a) workers became more valuable
b) people questioned the validity of religious beliefs
This mass death causing people to "live for the moment" didn't exactly advance humanity, it was just something we as a species had to deal with.
I think it's obvious that people aren't questioning the churches validity today because of the bubonic plague &
that most atheists would profess a scientific viewpoint to have contributed
to their worldview.
Had we come to many of our scientific conclusions 500 years ago who knows where we'd be now...?

Also, I was talking about the plague as mentioned in my first link where it says the 30-60% depopulation occurred in the 1300's.

Mike 1972

rovert wrote: »

^ Says the man who is typing this on a Irish message board on the internet.

Theres some guy in a cave in Afghanistan/Pakistan who isint big into this modernity thing either.

I saw him saying so on a digital satellite TV channel

Killer Pigeon

PopeUrbanII wrote: »

I say, 'no', to Internationalism. I say. 'hell no', to its every component. Today I start my crusade by condemning one such component-doctrine -- multi-culturalism.

Multi-culturalism is the death knell of Western Christian Civilization. Once the oppressive, thought-control regime of Political Correctness has declared war, in the name of multi-culturalism, European Christians instantly find themselves under attack. If they don't rally and resist, the death of their entire way of life is all but guaranteed.

That's precisely what's killing the West today. In America, for example, Liberal decadence produced the mendacious Obama Regime. Islamic-Sympathizer and Marxist Obama, in turn, is doing his level-best to cripple Western Christian America, such that it'll never recover. Despite the obvious nature of this struggle, millions of Euro-Americans, usually deluded by Marxist thought, support Obama, and have joined his quest to kill the Western Christian culture that built their country, from the ground up.

JUST SAY 'NO'

SUPPORT THE UNITED ATHEIST ALLIANCE!!!

sponsoredwalk

Killer Pigeon wrote: »

SUPPORT THE UNITED ATHEIST ALLIANCE!!!

Yes! Then you must read The Communist Manifesto and then bathe yourself in slaughtered sheep's blood :cool:

Join us....

JOIN US!!!!!

Wibbs

amacachi wrote: »

Of course there was progress, and over that kind of timeframe you'll be able to find thousands of improvements and "inventions", but that isn't the point. For the amount of time covered there was quite little improvement in a lot of areas thanks to, mainly, the church. They had no problem with improving food growing techniques or building techniques, but how many great buildings went up that weren't for the Church?

Quite a number. The most obvious being castles and other fortifications and the towns that sprung up around them. The design of housing across all classes changed the great hall style being an obvious one. A helluva of modern great cities in Europe were founded in the dark ages.

Until their power started to dilute there was miniscule progress in maths and science for centuries,

Wrong again. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_the_Middle_Ages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_technology

and little in the way of social change.

There were huge social changes in the middle ages. The nation state being the kickoff point for much of it. Higher urbanisation following the initial move to the country following Romes fall. The first factories as we would recognise them. A newly emerging merchant class. Military changes , better nutrition. The nation states alone stand as a huge social change.

I'm sure you'll find some bits and pieces of mathematical discoveries in those years but it wasn't til later that it really started, and when they rediscovered and reused systems and rules developed by the Greeks and Byzantines a thousand or more years earlier, which were held back once again by the Church of the time and/or state.

Eh Byzantium was at the same time. It emerged with a new Greek identity out of the eastern Roman empire. It wasn't "a thousand or more years earlier". Greek and Roman thought was of course reused as every culture reuses the past. It was also improved upon when the flood of the older greek texts came in from Islamic lands and the latin texts made there way across Europe. That lot was going on by the 9th century.

Yes, the universities started, for whom? For the people in the Church and whoever owned everything else. The universities were more of a hobby for rich kids before they inherited businesses and land than anything else.

Which is how one could describe universities up to 100 years ago or even less. Very few college kids reading this today had college going great great grandparents. So that point is moot. Historically universities, even anything beyond basic schooling was up until very recently the preserve of the elite and very rarely otherwise.

Everytime I read or hear about scientific (mathematical) discoveries from 1000 AD onwards it tends to be stuff based on Ptolemy and the other lads whose work was pretty much left alone for almost a millennium.

Certainly that was the case up to the retaking of Andalus and the subsequent translations from the Greek and Arabic books(though it had been happening before that), but by the high middle ages scientific and mathematical progress was rapidly gaining ground.

Way to miss my point. I wasn't claiming that China invented absolutely everything.

I didnt suggest you were. I pointed out your millennium level errors in the timelines.

sponsoredwalk wrote:

Basically I'm just using the older classification, I guess I've just got it from older books
So we can restate the "dark" ages as "middle" ages & still come up with a pretty grim period in humanity compared to today.

But if you read your professor Wiki, you'll see that it wasnt the stagnant dark ages you originally posited and that there was much progress in that time. Of coures you can call it a grim period compared to today. You could say the same of urbanisation in the early part of the industrial revolution. Pretty much any time was a grim period when compared to the western world today.

All my links point to humanity still in it's infancy (I don't claim we're exactly responsible adults) and almost powerless with respect to authoritarian rule & nature.
It ay not be the scholarly classification, i.e. a term to describe the lack of documentation of the period, but it is the common meaning when the word is used &
as I've shown through all those links it's not without reason.

Maybe you should actually read what you quote?

No, I'm not really speaking subjectively/anachronistically from a 21st century perspective I was trying to speak from the perspective's of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Vesalius, Galileo, Newton etc... in that their work has historically done so much to advance humanity and show people the virtue of reason.

And they didnt spring out of the thin air. Reason was alive and well in many a medieval mind. Our own John Scottus alone is a good read on that front.

You can argue for the lasting effect of people making cathedrals from before the gothic period & how that advanced humanity but it wasn't until
Newton that the serious concepts of center of mass etc... were adequately defined/understood so that buildings could be made with serious precision.
I'm sure we can go down the list & tick off the boxes like this.

So chartres cathedral and others weren't serious precision? Taller and more airy than anything Rome had come up with and they were no slouches and didnt have Newtonian mechanics to help. Neither did the Greeks. Or the Arabs. The great pyramid at 4000 odd years old varies by barely an inch across its entire base. It's sides vary about the same. Considering it's still the most massive stone building ever made, thats pretty high precision.

My point here is that nobody needed to die for humanity to acquire this knowledge (except in the case of Vesalius lol! )
and especially not 30-60% of the European population. Seeing as you mention parts outside of Europe,
did Muslim countries need mass death to come up with their mathematical and scientific advances?

No but it was the large scale social change and mobility that stemed from that depopulation that allowed more and more people to think. To explore to take advantage of that thinking. Look at the Islamic world that didnt suffer nearly the same losses. They stayed a feudal state for far longer. China a country with great advancements who when Europeans marched into it in the 18th and 19th century was still a late medieval state in many ways. Ditto with Russia in many ways until Peter the great.

The only good thing I can see behind this mass depopulation is that
a) workers became more valuable
b) people questioned the validity of religious beliefs

Which led to social mobility, the birth of modern banking, the birth of the middle classes, the birth of industry, the death of slavery(though that had started in Europe before).

This mass death causing people to "live for the moment" didn't exactly advance humanity, it was just something we as a species had to deal with.

It was little to do with living for the moment.

I think it's obvious that people aren't questioning the churches validity today because of the bubonic plague &
that most atheists would profess a scientific viewpoint to have contributed
to their worldview.

Not today they don't, but like I pointed out those very same ardent atheists of today would not be so in the 10th century. They would simply not have come to the same conclusions. After all the vast majority of people back then didnt. Even the well educated ones.

Had we come to many of our scientific conclusions 500 years ago who knows where we'd be now...?

Scientific conclusions require (among other things,) a particular social climate to be effective as far as moving things forward. The Chinese had amazing discoveries under their belts. As did the Indians. Both were ahead of Europe and the Islamic world in so many ways. Closer to home the Greeks had amazing scientific knowledge for the time and on a practical level. They had accurate sun dials, gears and even steam engines of a sort. Yet even they didnt come up to enlightenment or even renassiance europe.

IMHO No heavily feudal or slave built society would have landed on the moon. They have a glass ceiling to their endeavours, even if those endeavours can be impressive. And that glass ceiling was smashed to pieces in the wake of the plagues and subsequent depopulation. That was my point.

Rented Mule

PopeUrbanII wrote: »

I say to Hell with the Herd. I'M A WESTERN CHRISTIAN AMERICAN, AND I'M DAMNED PROUD OF THAT FACT. I won't join the Herd.

Uhm .....You ARE the herd.

Rented Mule

InTheTrees wrote: »

turns out the pope is a nazi.

who'd have thought it?

Six million Jews ?

bnt

PopeUrbanII wrote: »

I say, 'no', to Internationalism. I say. 'hell no', to its every component. Today I start my crusade by condemning one such component-doctrine -- multi-culturalism.

I don't know which possibility is scarier: that the OP doesn't know the meaning of the word "crusade", or that he does. :eek:

Of course, in the agrarian Feudal age to which he aspires, he would likely have been dead decades ago, given that the median life expectancy was somewhere in the 30s. The OP needs to read Atlas Shrugged, I think: the author might be beloved of Conservatives, but she was a bit better at the "big picture" than Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck ever will be. :rolleyes:

eightyfish

The OP hasn't contributed in nearly 70 posts but the thread rumbles on. Successful troll is indeed successful.

HavingCrack

eightyfish wrote: »

The OP hasn't contributed in nearly 70 posts but the thread rumbles on. Successful troll is indeed successful.

The Pope stops contributing the moment people put up any form of logical argument that he has no reply to.

Mjollnir

PopeUrbanII wrote: »

'Context'........'talking points'........'specific arguments' -- all code for 'suppression of anti-Obama speech'. Sorry, M. A huge number of us loathe everything Obama stands for. THAT's our 'context'. Deal with it.

Who's 'suppressing' your speech? Certainly not I. I'm pointing and laughing at you and your predictable, frothy ravings. This makes you uncomfy.

Deal with it.