By David Futrelle
It’s a question asked over, and over, and over, and over, and over again on Tik Tok:
So why do good girls like bad guys?
I had this question for a real long time
I’ve been a bad boy and it’s plain to see
So why do good girls fall in love with me?
I guess that’s technically two questions. Sadly, despite the hundreds of excruciating Tik Tok videos devoted to the subject, these questions have ever been satisfactorily answered.
Until now, that is. And the answer comes from an old friend, the weirdo racist-who-says-he’s-not-a-racist YouTube “philosopher” Stefan Molyneux.
If you’re wondering what war he’s talking about, apparently (at least in Stef’s imagination) it’s some sort of global race war with civilized white people on one side and damn dirty immigrants on the other.
In case you haven’t noticed, Stef’s not a big fan of immigration, or immigrants, or, as far as I can tell, anyone whose skin is a bit less pale than his.
He’s much more fond of his fellow whites, or at least the minority of them who agree with his racist, xenophobic blather.
Unfortunately, as Stef sees it, a lot of white ladies out there are race traitors in the race war.
White dudes, meanwhile, are apparently destroying the cultural vitality of their race by giving in to the seductive lures of … smart phones and soy lattes.
No soy for Stef! Indeed, he seems to be preparing for the new bad boy order by trying out some bad boy looks for himself. Not sure they’re completely working.
I dunno, dude, these seem pretty low-effort to me. At least take off your shirt. The one thing I’ve learned from watching way too many of those Tik Tok videos is that bad boys just hate shirts.
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@Pie
Indeed, that was a typo I didn’t catch; I had meant to write ~2600 years.
It did, though; the Gauls and other Celtic peoples were absolutely not civilized, and objected strenuously and violently to efforts to make them civilised, the which objections persisted in some areas (notably Ireland and Scotland) well into the Renaissance, and were only ended by what amounts to genocide (The Harrowing of the Glens was very bad…).
This isn’t a criticism of the Celts, mind. Civilization sucked pretty fucking bad, and no reasonable person would be a Roman peasant if they had the option of being a barbarian Celt instead. For all they were “hair-spiking, naked-warfaring, head-taking barbarians” (every word of which is true), they had vastly more freedoms and civil rights than your average free Roman or Greek or Phonecian* going triple for those assigned female at birth (civilization usually shits on those folks pretty hard), a better diet with more protein, did a hell of a lot less work, and and a fairer and more humane approach to criminal justice. For my part, I had rather live in Celtic Ireland than anyplace else in Europe, if I were being kicked back in time to before about 1700. Which date is the time when Ireland finally had some civilization beaten into it, and doesn’t actually mean the rest of Europe got more pleasant. That wouldn’t happen for a century or so still.
*And a significant portion of those populations were slaves who hadn’t any rights whatsoever
@Bookworm:
Well, for a starting idea, how’s about if England got the steam engine about 350 years early? Plague, labor shortage, steam engine, just like our history except it’s the original Black Death and not the later iteration that prompted things. Not long afterward, they’ve built iron-hulled powered troopships, which no-one can sink with the technology of the times, and become a major naval power 300 years early, conquering down the west coast of Europe and then getting into the Mediterranean …
@Dalillama
Sorry, this was supposed to say “doesn’t necessarily mean” in a weaselly-words bet-hedging sort of way. Marseille does appear to predate Gaulish oppida, but it seems difficult to find out exactly how old they were and even harder to work out where their builders got the idea from. I do disagree with Ohlmann on “Cities can vanish without a trace” (ten thousand or more people living in one place for many years cannot help but make a huge and lasting archaeological record… you just need to dig in the correct place!), but it is clearly possible for more recent developments to obscure the history of older ones.
I don’t think you can say that all celts/gauls were uncivilized though; it certainly appears that the larger and older gaulish oppida did have the characteristics of cities, as did their equivalents elsewhere across europe.
I’d think “civilization” is a sliding scale, aside from colonialist connotations of the term. The difference between Celts/Germans and Greeks/Romans wasn’t really that big.
Also I have this impression (at least partly from reading Jared Diamond) that “markers of civilization” such as political organization, social stratification, professional specialization and concentration of trade and population in cities, are not some great innovations.
Rather, they are logical societal responses to the problems and opportunities provided by high population density, and they tend to predictably emerge wherever people have developed agricultural systems supporting dense populations.
Large, internally connected populations also develop technology more efficiently, and eventually technology allows more efficient agriculture (meaning more people) and better travel and communication, which all breeds more technology, and high technology allows the development of even higher technology with science on the side.
And here we are.
I think it’s clear that the first civilization was started by whichever player gets the first turn and has a good starting position to found a city.
Unless you’re playing one of the earlier games where you have to research agriculture, then it’s whoever pulls that off first.