Decline of Nordic Character

Flouride in the water. It sapped thier vital essences.

Libruls, definitely libruls: Constantine banning crucifiction – vital tool in saving Roman lives, their freedoms, their way of life.

That early Christianity wasn’t muscular enough. Niall Ferguson would have straightened those pansies out.

“…,decline of Nordic character,…”

What’s this? The Germans wimped out, got tired of being cold all the time, and rampaged south for a warmer, sunnier lifestyle?

When the US was losing in Vietnam I was taught it was loss of imperial nerve.

When the prime was at 17% I was taught it was inflation.

When the Greens and left SPD were being unreasonable about Pershing II and Cruise, I was taught it was the unwisdom of relying on Germanic allies.

I expect to live long enough to be taught it was due to a lack of cheap broadband access.

The 300 years before Jesus was when Rome grew to be a super power and those 300 B.C. years of growth and conquest probably included the most “sexually disorganized” years of Rome. So Maggie Gallagher isn’t even a hobby historian as the rise of more “civilized” behavior in Rome also coincided with the schism of Rome and its eventual downfall.

Forget lead in the drinking water, the Germans, Christainity, sexual disorganisation, etc. The Roman Empire fell because, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.

The Roman Empire fell ultimately because it was the victim of two cycles which tended to tear down all empires up until the 18th century, at which point, nomads lost their military potency in comparison to settled nations:

1) The cycle of the gradual rise of nomad populations, which then puts pressure on those tribes nearest settled lands to invade them in ever greater numbers to relieve population pressure.

2) The boom / bust cycle of ancient empires: Because these states were based on agriculture, once the land filled up, they could only sustain economic growth to match their population growth by conquest of neighbors. But technology set limits on how large any empire could grow and hold together, combined with geography. So population would keep growing and as the elites got more numerous relative to wealth, they tended to become more corrupt, while the masses became more poor and angry and disorderly.

In the case of Rome, Rome needed ever fresh supplies of slaves to sustain its slave agriculture economy. The end of expansion greatly slowed the flow of slaves into the empire. The roman economy became sluggish. Even though the cycle could have been restarted by the plagues of the 2nd century, Rome had the wrong kind of economy to respond well to the chance to refill the agricultural land. Instead, the roman economy increasingly was controlled and dictated from above in rigid ways. (see Diocletian’s laws) Rome’s military strength declined and it became necessary to use less disciplined barbarian auxillaries increasingly.

At the same time, the nomad invasion cycle hit another peak in the 5th century, and the poor leadership of the early 5th century emperors led to the collapse of the western empire.

…lead plumbing…

Uh-oh: Showers ‘may damage your brain’

Washington – Traces of manganese found in household water could be sufficient to cause permanent brain damage to those who take a regular shower, according to a report published in the US journal Medical Hypotheses.

John Spangler of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina and his team suggested that breathing in vapour containing manganese salts could be dangerous over the longer term.

“Inhaling manganese, rather than eating or drinking it, is far more efficient at delivering manganese to the brain. The nerve cells involved in smell are a direct pathway for toxins to enter the brain,” Spangler wrote.

The team used animal studies aimed at showing how much a person who showered for 10 minutes a day would absorb.

The effects are dependent on the levels of manganese in household water. In the United States, a limit of 0.5 milligrams a litre of water is imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency, while in the European Union, an upper level of just a 10th of that was set only in 1998.

Spangler suggested that even levels below the US upper limit could lead to brain damage.

At the time Rome fell in the West, its sexual legislation was deeply repressive. After Constantine a series of Christian emperors imposed heavy penalties on homosexual acts. In 390. for example. Valentinian II decreed:

Cod.Theod. IX. Vii. 6: All persons who have the shameful custom of condemning a man’s body, acting the part of a woman’s to the sufferance of alien sex (for they appear not to be different from women), shall expiate a crime of this kind in avenging flames in the sight of the people.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/just-novels.html

Given Roman progress before and after the advent of Christianity, it would seem the more ‘sexual disorganisation’ the better.

OMIGOD

She didn’t!

She did?

A “Rome ‘fell’ because of [stuff I want to bitch about anyway]” argument?

How pathetic is that? Why is it that when conservatives try to go all armchair and calabash on an issue (that they’ve never bothered to study) they wind up striking only as high as the seventh-grade Asperger syndrome kid with the post-nasal drip?

Tell me when Rome “fell.” I need a good laugh!

We already have a war built on cartoonish notions of WOGs. We don’t need a social policy built on cartoons involving togas. So take your cold-fusion economics and your bone-in-the-nose creationism and kindly stay the fuck out of the way of thinking people.
.

You chaps aren’t seriously suggesting that it wasn’t the fault of the British, are you?

It was tax cuts for the richs.

DSW

“We are in the middle of a huge and only partly acknowledged crisis around marriage and family. … experiencing grave dysfunctions and disruption in the family—and precisely around this whole business of generativity.”

No, we’re in the middle of an huge and only partly acknowledged crisis in the right-wing inability to think logically, to filter out their psychosexual and racial projections, to check their assertions, and to write decent prose.

In fact, the Roman empire may have fallen due to excessively “organized” sexuality, if by that Gallagher means heterosexual reproduction. Bruce Frier, an expert on Roman demography, has advanced the argument that in the first two centuries of our era, the population increased up to carrying capacity (given constraints of ancient agriculture).

What demographers euphemistically call “demographic contraction” ensued, from a plague in the 160s (maybe smallpox), chronic civil warfare in the third century AD, and eventually the barbarian invasions (which began in the third century — Goths in the Black Sea region). The government, as said upthread, put more and more demands on a shrinking base.

The Western empire eventually couldn’t handle it. The Byzantine East, more urbanized and wealthier, remained intact much longer (it remained a political entity even after Egypt and the Near East were lost to the Arabs)

Gallagher also assumes that homosexual activities would preclude hetero reproduction, which is not the case at all; even ancient Greek pederastic lovers were expected to marry women and produce children.

Meanwhile, however, I try to evoke the gravitas of a Presidential (or Imperial?) spokesman in saying: “While the investigation is continuing, it would be premature to speculate about this matter.”

But, as Peggy Noonan once remarked, it would be irresponsible not to speculate!

Re “…your scout troop must have been very different from my scout troop”:

If you’re looking for adventure of a
new and different kind,
And you come across a Girl Scout who is
similarly inclined,
Don’t be nervous, don’t be flustered, don’t be scared.
Be prepared!