You're kidding, right?
Do I have to make a list? On every continent white people visited (if you can call showing up and not really leaving a visit) we fucked up the lives of a good portion of the people living there.
Sure, mankind has always been cruel, in every corner of the earth. However, white people are to murder, theft and slavery what Coca Cola is to refreshing diabeeetus (yes, that's how it's spelled). A fucking international enterprise whose traces can be found everywhere. On every fucking continent.
I hope we can agree on that. Otherwise, here's a short list: Gippsland Massacres, Nagasaki, Opium Wars, My Lai Massacre, fucking Iraq, Crusades, Apartheid, Herero and Namaqua genocide, that whole Columbus mess, Trail Of Tears and transatlantic slave trade (because why the fuck not?). Oh, my bad, I forgot the freaking Holocaust and starting 2 World Wars.
Who does this? Who? White people, that's who. Europeans and their descendants.
Would you like to argue that level of evil is genetic? I won't.
It's cultural. We europeans (and later our emigrated offspring) always thought we're better than everybody else, we had god on our side (and the Pope agreed!). Probably a leftover from the Roman Empire. And that's why everywhere we go, we steal, murder or occupy the shit out of every place. No other collection of ethnic groups has so much blood on their hands and it's not because we're worse DNA constructs than the others. All humans are capable of evil, it just takes a certain way of thinking to go that far.
Thankfully, we wrecked our own continent so badly during WW2, that we finally started to improve our ways. But here's the problem: we just started. We're far from being done.
Orban, LePen, Farage, Putin, Petry and last but not least Trump.

Funny, I was just thinking of this movie not long ago and thinking "Man. If he had shown just ONE goddamn thing to Herod, Pilate, basically, anyone that could.. you know, do something. He would've converted all of the Romans, Jews, and non-believers on the spot.

He wouldn't have ruined his life, Judas' life, and Pilates life (The latter two going down in history for basically being the ones who betrayed Jesus, even though Pilate basically does nothing but try to help him, and Judas just wanted them to help out more goddamn poor people)

..Basically, if this was all part of 'Gods plan', he planned that REALLY fucking poorly."

It's funny that a kind of religious movie is the thing to re-affirm my Atheism.

For most of our "civilized history", homosexuals have been attacked and murdered by people like him, not loved and encouraged. For most of our "civilized history" men have had the option to rape women with impunity.
If only, for most of our "civilized history", people like this were shunned when they could not be educated, we would be far more civilized.

Actually, Gohmert, what the founders said clearly was....."As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion;" This statement was ratified unanimously by congress in 1797. The constitution was based on English Common Law, which existed in England long before the Romans brought Christianity, so if we are founded on a religious doctrine, it's PAGANISM, you fucking moron.

*promote the *fail

Forced Fighting to the death for entertainment. Just Like the Romans.

At thirteen i did this with bees in a bucket of water. At fourteen i realized I was being fucking lame.

OK---logical question---why isn't this a reality show?
I mean---forget American football; just send guys into the arena in armor with real swords---then TV would have gone the full Roman!

I noticed at the end of the video it briefly came up with Romans 14:19. I wonder if he'll do a "Smarter Every Day" on the absurdity of religion.

The funny thing about that passage is that, like most religious passages can mean almost anything you want it to. To me it ironically means to give up religion, yet to someone else it could justify a nuclear war.

As someone has already sifted the sketch this was based on, I'll just leave this here... http://videosift.com/video/Life-of-Brian-What-have-the-Romans-done-for-us

It reminds me of the ancient Roman surveying device, the Hodometer, which used pebbles dropped into a bowl to count the number of Roman (~1500m) miles travelled.

http://johns-spot112948.blogspot.com.au/2010/05/ancient-roman-pedometer-called.html

Uhm, hold on a minute there... just remember where @JustSaying is from. Remember the Varian disaster of 89AD? The treachery of Arminius in the swamps of the Teutoberg Forest?

I was quite sure there was a video here on the subject, but haven't been able to find it. Here is a very brief overview of the way the battle went (although it doesn't describe the treachery involved in Arminius leading the trusting Romans into the trap):

Aside from annexing your lands and turning them into leisure worlds for retired Legionnaires, they also brought central heating, exotic goods, plumbing, roads, law, order, popular clothing styles -- but only for the wealthy -- and at the cost of maybe raping your children to teach your village a lesson to obey Roman rule.

Generations later hardly anyone even remembers and you're now part of the empire. And when you're invaded by other "barbarians" your ancestors will protect their Roman culture as if it were always theirs to enjoy. Fight the other barbarians for us, you barbarian!!

You almost get the feeling they defined the entire future of western civilization. Every nasty bit; confusingly superior customs that are required otherwise you become a slave -- and maybe you'll become a slave anyway, even if you follow the rules. After all, once a bitch, always a bitch and so an entire legion slowly blots out your cultural and genetic existence.

Yay, Roman Empire!

Fuck the romans! First christianity, now this? That's it folks, you're on my shitlist!

I think it's a matter of degree. Prior to WW1 (Or to say, around the turn of that century), the Jewish faithed presence was quite small. Roughly ~90% of the population was non-Jewish faithed. There was very little conflict prior to WW2, because prior to that, the immigrants purchased their land from the locals. As per the nature of humanity, the only conflict-free methods for transfer of property are : inheritance, trade/sale, or gift.

The League of Nations was inconsequential. As a result of WW1 Britain captured the territory of Palestine from its previous occupiers (Turks, by one title or another, dating back to the Roman empire), and by right of conquest could do as it pleases with it.

I refer to religious insularity, not genetic.
Yes, they are quite accepting of anyone with Jewish faith. Almost the entire Jewish faithed population in Israel, regarding this last century, is either immigrant, or born of said immigrants. The Jewish faithed population rose from around ~600k to ~7 million between 1947 and today. Even taking into account the rule of thumb 'population doubles every ~40 years', that would leave the population roughly 85% immigrant or children thereof.

Which in turn elucidates many of the issues at hand in modern times. Land prices are extreme, with more people than there is room for, so expanding for living room is a necessity. Hence colonial expansion into greater Palestine is inevitable. Further, the dramatic division in income equality puts a lot of social pressure on the government, which the government can further alleviate by expansion. A, because it can relocate those that can't afford to live in more expensive areas, and gives those people a place to busy themselves taking care of, and B, because the inevitable tensions that come from displacing the previous residents causes the government to serve as a protector from those unfortunates that were offended, which serves as a good distraction from other problems that the government isn't doing well to fix. Essentially, the same formula that nations have followed throughout history (Heck, Australia can thank its current existence for similar policies in Britain).

-scheherazade

That's in part to do with how during WW2 Europe had the bulk population of Jewish faithed people.

Outside of Europe, the population of Jewish faithed persons was scattered throughout little towns and ghettos (in the social sense, eg. like NY's Chinatown for the Chinese).

There was a small-ish population of Jewish Poles (called the Zionists) that had in the WW1 era moved to Palestine and bought land together to form their own communities.

Basically, the high concentration of Jewish faithed persons in Europe in the WW2 era made it easy to target a large percentage of their overall population.

Judea (Referred to as "Palestine" by the Romans - hence why in modern times Judea was called Palestine) had converted from Judaism to Christianity around 300 ish AD (under the influence of Rome), and then to Islam around 700 ish AD (Under the influence of the Islamic expansions). By WW2, Judaism was an archaic religion in the middle east. Similar to Zoroastrianism, where small pockets still can be found, but its otherwise not represented.

It's not till after WW2 (1948) when Britain carved out the nation of Israel from [at the time British colonial] Palestine, and surviving Jewish Europeans immigrated there from Europe, and subsequently Jewish faithed Arabs/Burburs immigrated there from around the middle east, that there was another major concentration of Jewish faithed persons to be found.

(This is when the Arab vs Israel conflict(s) began. A fun irony is that much of Israel's military in 1948 was German equipment (bf109s, etc), and much of the Arab equipment was British (spitfires, etc).)

(The Nazi government did a lot of killing, tho. The Soviet Union alone lost ~10 million soldiers, ~14-17 million civilians, and ~1-2 million Jewish persons.)

One of the reasons why Israel is so insular in regards to non-Jews, is because their overall population is small enough that they would be bred out of existence in a few generations.

-scheherazade

*dead

"File not found or deleted!" <== IN TIMES NEW ROMAN!!!

There is something innately fascinating in finding technical, biological and economical explanations of historical developments, and it's definitely so much more satisfying than having to resort to nationalism, racism, or religion to explain one region or another's successes.

The risk, I guess, in treating human history as a set of engineering problems, is that the human mind is so attuned to finding cause and effect that it might make us a little blind to situations where the answer is actually more blind chance than anything else.

One of my favorite of these explanations is when China's 'failure' to colonize the world is attributed to the success of porcelain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0OhXxx7cQg

It seems almost too neat to be true - like the false etymology of Marie est malade - so does anyone know if there are scholars who poke holes in the Porcelain vs Glass explanation?

Edit: Improving my googling shows that this explanation remains reasonable but still also involves a bit of blind historical chance. Colored glass was available in ancient Greece, and the Romans and Egyptians used manganese oxide to decolor it, which led to transparent glass and the basis for lens-grinding... that decolorization process apparently didn't pass on to China or wasn't valued by their culture, perhaps due to the clear competitive advantages of porcelain.