San Marino? Iceland? Finland? New Zealand? Switzerland? Holland? Denmark? Canada? Possibly Sweden? Id give them a shot.

Funny to imagine that. Montenegro pulling the strings for once instead of being pushed away from the camera by Trump. Half the world scurrying to maps in vain, trying to find it, the other half not knowing what the fuss is about as usual. You will buy our goat milk or we will impose tariffs on your fancy gangster guns, automobiles and helicopters!

As superpowers go, the US is not too bad. Its a fairly hands-off type superpower if you compare it to say the Roman Empire or Napoleonic France. Taking a long time to even annex Puerto Rico properly.

Wondering really how China will fare. Give it 25 years. And they sure wont ask as nicely as you just did.

I kind of doubt the great battles of the roman empire took place on any particularly flat surface where a slippery substance of any kind could matter.

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.

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!

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

Three things I have to say, @bobknight33:
1. You're complaining about christianity being attacked. Ok, fine, I'll tell you something: I am tired of your religious beliefs invading my life like an middle eastern dictator a small, oily country. Oh, I have it good, I'm a straight, white middle-european man, I'm fine so far. Others are not. They're tired as well.
I can go on a meth-bender, marry one of the Kardashians in Vegas and annul the whole affair in less than a week. If I win the lottery, I can post on Craigslist and get myself a nice gold-digging whore who'll sign a certificate that makes us husband and wife if I'm willing to trade lackluster blowjobs for money. Best part, it ain 't prostitution if you're married, legally worldwide. Heck, I can even become an abusive piece of shit as long as I can beat her well enough so she won't complain to others.
Because marriage is sanctimonious.
If I was gay and would like to marry the guy of my dreams that I've been with for 20 years, that isn't possible. Because the book doesn't approve.
If my sister got raped, you people would force her to birth the child of her rapist. Her concerns don't matter, life is a holy gift from god. Care to explain to me the position of the catholic church (you know, those christians that make up the majority of christianity) on slavery during centuries slavery? How holy was life in all those european colonies back in the day with all these missionaries teaching the good book? What exactly was their statement as an organisation when millions or people were murdered during the third Reich?
All that silence but when it comes to abortion, you people show up with guns and show the value of this great gift by murdering doctors. Fuck my sisters concerns, right? It just rape, walk it off.
I'm well of, I could join the club as a full member anytime. As long as I'm not calling the cops on the pedophile priests and the self-loathing faggots can stand on their pulpits and tell little children they're broken. I could be among you.
But I have a conscience. I can't buy all that talk about love and forgiveness and ignore all that hatred and cruelty that is in the very basis of your beliefs, that wretched, old bible of yours.
I have to look that man in the mirror in the eyes.
The only way you can impose all that crap on me anymore if through the government. I believe your faith has as much place in there than Tom Cruise's. None.
The Prodigy said it best and I think the people who lived at the time the bible was written would agree: Invaders must die.
Your religion invades my rights as a human being.

2. Did he rise?
Nope, little, brown Jewish got killed. End of facts, begin of story. I don't trust the testimony of men (and I said this before) who consider a walkman witchcraft. People at that time could be convinced that they farted because they swallowed an angry spirit that wants to escape.
You book did a terrible job of explaining how the world came to be (we're golems that had so much incest that they inbred mankind), makes up the worst disastermovies (everything turns to Waterworld but we have a boat with a pair of every animal in existence [imagine all those different kinds of ants alone] and then incest till population is back up) and turns mushroomtrips/mental illness in supposedly accurate future predictions (you know it's the end of the world because none of the riders is called "Incest").
The only reason people buy into the mythology and the extended universe (where's that bible chapter about Satan ruling the Sarlac Pit and Santa being canon again? ) is because for centuries children were taught it at a young age. And then you told them not to question it as heretics get the stake. Ashes yes but not the quick Buffy way.
Don't get me wrong, I like that Jesus fellow and I'm willing to believe his basic message but let's be honest. If J.K. Rowling was born 2000 years earlier, we'd pray to Harry Potter and wear lightning shaped jewelery around our neck. You guys got big because the Roman empire made you relevant. That's it.

3. What's up with '53'? Is that the christian answer to '42'?

Jews have the old testament.
Christians have the old testament and new testament.
Muslims have the old testament, new testament, and yet a newer testament.

All 3 share the old testament.
The 'violence promoting' scriptures are found in the old testament - which all 3 have in common.

Reza is right.
If people want peace, the religious of them simply ignore the violent edicts of their religions.
If they want to be violent, the religious of them legitimize it with excuses from their religions.

He's also right about the national hypocrisy. Al-Qaeda at the time of 9/11 was a pet organization of members of the Saudi royal family.
But instead of going after the Saudis (who also today finance ISIS), we go after 2 countries that are unrelated to the attack.

Look at today's irony. Assad in Syria (who we wanted deposed because he was friendlier to Russia than the U.S., and allowed Russian bases on Syrian soil [in the middle east]) is now fighting ISIS, while we ally with the Saudis who are supporting ISIS.

We also didn't mind supporting the Mujahedin (Jihadi fighters) in Afghanistan when they were fighting our enemy. We had no problem throwing Afghanistan into the dark ages when it suited us.

Ultimately, extremist Islam is a foil, meant to rouse western people's emotions. As national policy, we don't _actually_ do anything to stop it, we just use it as an excuse to do whatever else is of national interest.
Who would be the boogey man if extremist Islam was gone? We need a boogey man if we want to keep excusing and paying for a large military. People simply don't have the foresight and patience to maintain a strong military without someone scaring them into support. Particularly now, when we don't have the manufacturing capacity to quickly build a large military.

However, Reza is ignoring Turkey's and the Pacific islander's Muslim problems. Indonesia and the Philippines have extremist Muslim organizations doing attacks home (Philippines also has Christian terrorists). Turkey is a large source of Muslim fighters pouring into Syria.



The various related religions also have historical developmental differences.

Jews were for a long time in such minorities that they did not have the political capability of waging any campaign of violence. They were either too small, or too busy being occupied by European powers (Rome, etc).

Christians did have a long period of majority, starting around 400ad when Rome decided that a good way to control/pacify any dissent within the empire was to make the empire 1 religion and make Rome the head of that religion. They elected Christianity as the state religion, forced everyone in the Roman empire to convert, and you had a continent's worth of Christians.
This included north Africa and Middle East - and is when Jews (by now called Palestinians) were forced to convert from Judaism to Christianity (**and few hundred years later forced to convert from Christianity to Islam).

Although, Christians had the benefit of the Inquisition(s) to temper their enthusiasm for Christianity. A large part of the population was killed for consorting with the devil. Once it got so bad that everyone knew someone who had been convicted and killed - and everyone was sure that those killed were innocent, it cast a large doubt on Christianity as whole. People questioned if the devil even exists, or if it's all a sham. The distrust and resentment paved the way for the eventual birth of Deism and Empiricism. A time when the scientific method and physical observation started to take over.

Islam is still a young religion. They still have to experience their religion becoming all powerful, and the inquisitions that inevitably come from absolute power. The one good thing about Islamic extremism is that it makes the people living under those conditions more likely to suffer. Once the suffering becomes so pervasive that everyone is suffering, the people will start to dislike/distrust their religion, and the extremism will resolve itself from the inside out - like it did with Christianity.

The bigger problem would be if things are 'too tolerable', and the religion grows more extreme (no one is inclined to say 'no'). The biggest problem would be if the religious leaders 'solve' the balance issue, and manage to stabilize the oppression at a level that is as extreme as it can be while still being permanently sustainable. Then the religious leaders can live the life of power without the threat of deposition.

-scheherazade

This situation is sad and ironic.

The area known as Judea was renamed Palestine during the time of Roman emperor Hadrian.
The residents of Judea/Palestine were forced to convert from Judaism to Christianity around 400 ad by the Romans, and later in the 700's ad were forced to convert to Islam.
They never left. They just changed religions. The children of the Jews of the new testament, are the Palestinians of today (now practicing Islam).

Many years passed, the Eastern Roman empire resided over much of the area, ruled out of Turkey, and the region was more or less all-right. Along the way it changed names to the Ottoman empire.

After WW1, the Ottoman empire shrank dramatically, and renamed itself to simply Turkey. However it still held some lands that were not actually Turkish (eg. ~Syria), and was still a mini-empire.
Around this general time period, Palestine became a British colony.

During WW2, there were many displaced Europeans of Jewish faith that had nowhere to go.
(*Britain didn't want them either, most places didn't. Anti-Semitism was rather common at the time. Even the Nazi eugenics policy wasn't much criticized at the time. re: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Supporters_and_critics. Actually, the Nazi's strong association with anti-semitism + all the anti-Nazi propaganda during WW2, helped cure a lot of anti-semitism in Europe.).
In the late 1940's Britain split occupied Palestine into smaller-Palestine+Israel, and assisted in relocating WW2 displaced Europeans of Jewish faith to Israel. Which at face value made sense, because "the bible says Jews are from Judea". However the area from which was established Israel was more or less ~devoid of followers of the Jewish faith in the 1940's.
And that's the irony! The British creation of Israel involved taking land from Palestinians (i.e. The children of the original Jews of Judea), and giving it to Europeans of Jewish faith (foreign immigrants).

That then resulted in middle-eastern resentment and backlash over western invasion/occupation/seisure-of-land. This resentment against immigrating European Jews caused 'Jews at large' to be discriminated against throughout the middle-east, and that in turn led to a migration wave of regional-Jews from the surrounding areas into Israel.
This resulted in a concentration of Jewish-faithed immigrants of European and middle-eastern ethnicity, all in Israel - further displacing the original residents.

Basically, in the end, the original people of Judea were kicked out of their homes and their lands given to immigrants... and they really resent it. While in the mean time the immigrants acclaim to have a god given right to be there because there is some old paper that says that people of their faith are from the area.

Ta-da.

Britain could have just sent Europeans of Jewish faith to Palestine, and made it an integrated nation.
But nope, they had to displace people and create a bunch more problems.
Gee, thanks Britain.
I pretty much face-palm when I hear "this conflict is thousands of years old" (when it's only been ~66 years).


Note :
I make the distinction between ethnically Jewish and religiously Jewish.
I use the phrase "Europeans of Jewish faith" to clarify that these were displaced Europeans, who may have had an ancestor or two way way way up the family tree that was from Judea - but were otherwise European and of Jewish faith - who may have lived in an area with little mingling with outsiders, and hence a visually distinct appearance (i.e. what made it possible to make visual caricatures of their people, such as : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eternal_Jew_%281940_film%29)
You can also play semantics with "what is ethnically Jewish, when the ethnicity is labelled after the faith", etc.

There's also the geopolitical aspect. Israel is the only "Western" nation in the middle-east. Given that the area is globally significant in terms of resources, that makes Israel a critically important ally. So the rhetoric will always lean.

Personally, I wonder if the things that European Jews suffered during WW2, didn't create some mental/emotional baggage that today plays itself out with how they treat Palestinians. Sort of a "I don't care about your suffering, because I've been through worse" kind of situation.

However, I understand how Israel does not want an open integrated society with Palestinians. The Jewish population is rather small, and in an integrated society they would be such a small proportion that they would essentially be bred out of existence within a few generations. For those who wish to preserve their culture, that's 'kind of a big deal'.

-scheherazade

Well, Sevastopol as a base for a Russian Baltic Fleet was established at a time when my neck of the woods was still part of the Holy Roman Empire. And since we also fucked the Russians over time and time again over the last 15 years, I'm inclined to not unleash the zombie plague just now.

You seem to be relying on quite a few assumptions yourself, and this doesn't really deserve a reply (and you probably don't want one anyway), but nonethless -- I've a few minutes to kill:

None of what you say explains how you justify the stupid assumption that we need a monopoly of law enforcement in order to enforce the law.

Another assumption is in thinking that people are "evil" but somehow the politicians and the bureaucrats are somehow "good" and are what maintain law and order. (Maybe you think of yourself as evil. But in any case that is irrelevant.)

The "60's hippies" comment sounds like a Faux Noise pundit!

"What EXACTLY prevents me from taking everything someone has, by force? Private security? If you can afford it? If you can't?"

Go ahead, try it. And I can afford it. If you can't, then you should maybe look into that and your own finances instead of ranting about libertarians. Seems like a better strategy.

Do you actually think police services now currently "free?" Even if you happen to be a nonproductive tax consumer, you are still paying for it in other ways.

Competing private security or insurance would be cheaper and more efficient than the police force, since it would not be the monopoly we have now. And there are also those willing and able to defend themselves on top of that.

"All of Europe was effectively ungoverned when Rome fell."

Learn your history; there was never a time where all of Europe was "effectively ungoverned" when Rome fell.

"3. The appropriate information will be available to make rational decisions."

Obviously you're making the erroneous assumption that individuals don't have the info needed to make their own decisions and yet government/central planners somehow do. This is, in fact, the opposite of what Hayek demonstrated (not to mention what common sense indicates). (Maybe you feel incompetent, but that's another issue.)

Bemoaning the end of the Roman empire is like bemoaning the end of the Nazi regime; with its constant wars, the destruction of the 2nd Jewish Temple (an earlier holocaust), its intolerances, etc. Any problems with the "dark ages" (a label that historians are increasingly abandoning as it is glaringly inaccurate) reveal what happens when a poorly run state collapses due to war and bad economics. A lesson on where we are heading, whatever you might think. Good luck to you.

Edit: "You really act as though government is the root of all evil."
Which of my actions do you mean? Posting my thoughts? Are you the thought police?

@enoch I didn't mention the Egyptian empire, for exactly the reason you mention. I was referring to the specific difference between the Western Roman empire (~30-ish something BC - 470-something AD), and the Eastern Roman empire (roughly 2000 years in length).

Past experience has lead me to expect less dickish replies from you. Considering that you and I most probably share the same ideals especially.

Regardless, you can't claim your film doesn't practice fear-mongering when it begins with several minutes of that kind of footage, with that kind of music. This is the same kind of production Fox news would create, it just happens to be from the angle that we agree with. As enlightened, open-minded individuals, we can do better than this. And we have to if we want to change anything.

My legitimacy-test for any video of this type is to look at it from the 'other sides' perspective. If it's possible from another viewpoint to see this as propaganda, then it fails at what it (purportedly) sets out to achieve.

Ultimately this is one more video, in a long line of videos, that I would otherwise wholeheartedly agree with, but by them not citing nearly any of their sources for information (6 stages of empirical collapse?), having some information factually and historically wrong (stating typical lifetime of empire equal to about 250 years, and constant comparison to Roman empires collapse while Roman Empire lasted 500 years in the shortest example, and almost 2000 years in the longest), and generally using the same tactics of manipulation for communicating with the audience that the "negative" media uses (dramatic music, dramatic directing, footage, colors and stark, "this is how things are" narrative) makes this easy for me to dismiss.

The "Mark of the Beast" may very well be an allusion to humanity's addiction to the machine, to material gain. The Whore Babylon, the system that feeds upon resources and in doing so, consumes itself. The same whore which deludes and seduces humans to blindly follow a system which may inevitably wipe out the species.

Some scholars believe the allegory refers to the Roman Empire ,or a similar one.... the NOW-

Personally, I can't wait for some bio-mods, heads-up display retinas, all of it. Plug me into Babylon, baby!!

That's not what progressive means, in this context. A progressive tax system is one where you pay a (progressively) higher rate when you have more income. What you have is a regressive tax system.

Do you happen to know what percentage of U.S. companies actually pay tax at the stated high rate? How does that compare to other countries? I know that quite a few of your companies weasel their way out of paying any tax at all, but I don't know how many overall manage this.

The ancient Roman empire also had social welfare, of a sort, increased after 122 B.C. See http://www.roman-empire.net/society/society.html for an overview. Then, as now, it was expensive to run.

The comparison is actually quite fair, except that in ancient Rome it was expected that wealthy citizens would give back to society and the idea of unbounded avarice as a virtue would have been quite foreign to them... so in a sense it's back to front.
>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

Not quite sure how comparing that to the US economy makes any sense. The US has the highest corporate tax rate on Planet Earth now. We have very high capital gains taxes (compared to global averages). Our income tax is so "Progressive" right now that the bottom 50% of taxpayers only pay 5% of the taxes. Over 75% of the Federal Government's 1.6 trillion dollar budget is dedicated to social programs for the poor.
Only way comparing it to the vid makes sense if if you contextualize it by stating that it is the GOVERNMENT that is deciding the screw the poor by the process of its own incredible incompetence, malfeasence, and mismanagement. Since only about 20 cents on the dollar comes 'out' of government versus what goes in, then yes - the U.S. Federal Government is entirely oriented around screwing the poor.
But of course, that's not what Prog-Lib-Dytes mean. To a leftist, the video means "tax breaks for the rich" ... (insert liberal talking point) et al.

>> ^Skeeve:

I think the big issue is that, now that Americans are waking up and realizing how "free" they actually are, the powers that be are acting quickly to cement their position at the top.
It brings to mind the rise and fall of the Roman Empire; the Republic was no more but Augustus let the people believe their votes meant something, let them think the republic still functioned until, after generations, the emperors were too entrenched to be removed without violence.
It may not be too late for America, but it's following a similar course.


Indeed, though, once you had Emperors at all, the dream of Rome was dead really. Most of the history of Rome that is lauded over was in the years of the Emperors; which means our death throws might be longer than one would expect.