So the question isn't "will America collapse?" It's "where has it already?"
This sort of thing is what really struck me when I listened to Patrick Wyman's podcasts about the Roman Empire. Patrick has a PhD in history and while he's never explicitly said so, he seems to be all about historical materialism. But he points how "collapse" in the empire unfolded slowly over many decades if not centuries and was very uneven in where it happened. When the legions pulled out of Britain it was pretty devastating. But in North Africa, things may have even gotten better or at least were about the same as the empire collapsed. And these two local "collapses" happened like decades apart. The point being collapse is never uniform and differently part of a society are impacted in different ways and to different degrees.
I mean hookworm has returned to the South (a disease of extreme poverty) which they had thought had been eradicated in US for a long time
Children playing feet away from open pools of raw sewage; drinking water pumped beside cracked pipes of untreated waste; human faeces flushed back into kitchen sinks and bathtubs whenever the rains come; people testing positive for hookworm, an intestinal parasite that thrives on extreme poverty.
These are the findings of a new study into endemic tropical diseases, not in places usually associated with them in the developing world of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, but in a corner of the richest nation on earth: Alabama.
I am a staunch 1453 partisan. And it's weirdly tragic that when the Ottomans finally showed up to kick down the doors of the last bastion of Rome they were met by a paltry few soldiers and Constantine himself. Allegedly he lead the small force he had remaining directly in to the mouth of the advancing Janissaries and died there.
that's a great fucking story. The last emperor of Rome, his empire that was one of the greatest civilizations to ever exist shrunk to little more than the city of Constantinople, and he himself the namesake of the man that made that city great, the namesake of one the greatest emperors of that great empire, dies in a pointless fight over its ruined remains and the legacy of ghosts.
Even with the "fall" of the Western half of the empire, I'd argue that, in a way, it still survived even after 395. The kingdoms of the Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Alans, and Franks all, largely, followed Roman Christianity, wrote Roman-style legal documents, and the ruling class of those "barbarian" kingdoms adopted Latin as a court language. Ethnically, the Western Roman armies had already Germanized heavily before 395, so replacing overall rule with the new "barbarians" probably wouldn't have been noticed much by the common people, if at all. Honestly, if we define "Roman civilization" as its laws, customs, and religions, then I'd argue that Justinian did more damage to Roman civilization than he "saved" by invading them from 533 to 554.
There is also the possibility that things get connected that aren't really part of the collapse as such. Rome got their asses handed to them in Parthia, lost tens of thousands of soldiers, Crassus and control over Armenia as well as causing devestating civil wars due to the power vacuum left by Marius Crassus and Caesar. And this was almost 200 years before the Roman Empire would peak, so it would be hard to connect to the collapse.
This sort of thing is what really struck me when I listened to Patrick Wyman's podcasts about the Roman Empire. Patrick has a PhD in history and while he's never explicitly said so, he seems to be all about historical materialism. But he points how "collapse" in the empire unfolded slowly over many decades if not centuries and was very uneven in where it happened. When the legions pulled out of Britain it was pretty devastating. But in North Africa, things may have even gotten better or at least were about the same as the empire collapsed. And these two local "collapses" happened like decades apart. The point being collapse is never uniform and differently part of a society are impacted in different ways and to different degrees.
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I mean hookworm has returned to the South (a disease of extreme poverty) which they had thought had been eradicated in US for a long time
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-lowndes-county-alabama-water-waste-treatment-poverty
These people are already in collapse
That's really depressing and makes me even more pissed off at the smug libs who look down on these people.
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I am a staunch 1453 partisan. And it's weirdly tragic that when the Ottomans finally showed up to kick down the doors of the last bastion of Rome they were met by a paltry few soldiers and Constantine himself. Allegedly he lead the small force he had remaining directly in to the mouth of the advancing Janissaries and died there.
that's a great fucking story. The last emperor of Rome, his empire that was one of the greatest civilizations to ever exist shrunk to little more than the city of Constantinople, and he himself the namesake of the man that made that city great, the namesake of one the greatest emperors of that great empire, dies in a pointless fight over its ruined remains and the legacy of ghosts.
Even with the "fall" of the Western half of the empire, I'd argue that, in a way, it still survived even after 395. The kingdoms of the Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Alans, and Franks all, largely, followed Roman Christianity, wrote Roman-style legal documents, and the ruling class of those "barbarian" kingdoms adopted Latin as a court language. Ethnically, the Western Roman armies had already Germanized heavily before 395, so replacing overall rule with the new "barbarians" probably wouldn't have been noticed much by the common people, if at all. Honestly, if we define "Roman civilization" as its laws, customs, and religions, then I'd argue that Justinian did more damage to Roman civilization than he "saved" by invading them from 533 to 554.
There is also the possibility that things get connected that aren't really part of the collapse as such. Rome got their asses handed to them in Parthia, lost tens of thousands of soldiers, Crassus and control over Armenia as well as causing devestating civil wars due to the power vacuum left by Marius Crassus and Caesar. And this was almost 200 years before the Roman Empire would peak, so it would be hard to connect to the collapse.