Hardcore History did one too: [1] Unfortunately it's behind a paywall now, but the start of that particular series is one of the most interesting things I've ever heard on a history podcast.
If I can rant for just a moment: I must be getting old because, man I wish that video would just let me... breathe... for one second. Literally: I did not count a single full second of silence in the first two minutes. The editing is sentence after sentence with no breaks for me to digest and think about what they are saying. I guess this is the modern style of video making and it is reflective of our times, but I find it so exhausting. At least it's not as bad as TikTok.
I'll stick to my slow as molasses Ken Burns and BBC docs from the 90s where I can ooze into the atmosphere, and yell at the clouds too I suppose ;D
Many lizard-deciding-bodies or mechanisms may have chosen sortition!
And perhaps it was a bad habit or even an old charter to throw names in a hat, not without the notice of the literate or the haberdashers/milliners union(s), who sought to leverage their skills into greater advantage . . .
George Carlin would agree. Fewer idiots electing fewer charismatic despots would be a good start.
Also, I don't vote so the politicians are the responsibility of people who mistakenly believe their vote matters when they are selectively stolen, gerrymandered, and manufactured consent into futility. 45 may have tried to steal Georgia like a moron, but Bernie lost the 2016 WV primary even though every district voted for him as the consequence of that state's electors collusion with one candidate. Until there's sortition, campaign finance reform, or an emperor, NPVIC could eventually be a potential workaround for electoral mutinies.
Until then, there's not much chance of change because the only viable candidates are celebrities and career politicians willing to bend the knee to big money donors in exchange for favor$.
Problem is that despots want power, whatever system you have you will get despots wanting to be at the top, and doing what is necessary to get there. Democracy at least moves them around a bit.
One interesting fact in the article is that for the top spots at least, you did it once for a year and then you were barred from that office for like 10.
Sortition doesn't remove the idiots who vote for charismatic despots, it hands them the role of drafting legislation and directly deciding which individuals run the public services and the military...
I find it interesting to learn that the founding fathers made some explicit comparisons to ancient democracies while arguing for the US constitution, e.g.
> it seems like the anti-federalists turned out to be right about a lot of things they warned about
The US was the first experiment in a capitalist country; the American revolution was the first capitalist revolution against the tyranny of market control.
Any conservative claims that the old ways were better were likely to be true at least in some respects, just because it was so new.
I suspect that if most HN folks looked at the anti-federalists with their anti-progress, anti-free-market stances, we'd see opposition to that. For good reason, possibly.
Things don't seem entirely one-sided with regard to free trade; e.g. you have anti-federalists concerned about the federal government's ability to create monopolies:
"""monopolies in trade, granted to the favorites of government, by which the spirit of adventure will be destroyed, and the citizens subjected to the extortion of those companies who will have an exclusive right, to engross the different branches of commerce."""
(It seems one argument made by Madison and Hamilton who also supported free trade was that by centralizing regulatory authority they would have more leverage internationally to make treaties that would encourage trade.)
When I said "the anti-federalists turned out to be right about a lot of things" I was thinking more about their concerns about how the unlimited tax authority given to the federal government would lead to scope creep. Apparently anti-federalists suggested that this could even lead to a federal income tax and this was considered ridiculous at the time.
Important context to concerns about trade monopolies at the time: the East India Company.
One of the major concerns leading to the revolution was the behavior of the EIC towards the inhabitants of India and the worry that a similar institution would be unleashed upon American colonists.
The EIC was only able to grow so powerful because of the monopoly granted by the Crown.
What we think of monopolies now are a product of the gilded age and not the same as what the Founding Fathers were thinking of.
They were thinking of monopoly as "legally empowered corporation that then becomes an oppresively dominant quasi-government institution"
> was the behavior of the EIC towards the inhabitants of India
"Really? While the concerns with the EIC having the monopoly on the tea trade and I think some other stuff like saltpetre(?) were real enough, this sounds a bit like a case of populist hysteria.
And I seriously doubt many were that seriously concerned about the treatment of Indians (in India) when one of the most significant grievances the colonists had was the fact the crown severely limited the uncontrolled expansion of the west and established an Indian Reserve west of the the Appalachian Mountains (and assigned pretty much all of the territory captured from France during the French and Indian wars.
A slightly more cynical person might wonder what part did the fact the British tricked Washington (and his soldiers) - promising them land in the newly captured territories and later backtracked on this by severely limiting non Native Americans from settling there -played in inciting him to join the revolution/rebellion.
I find that extremely doubtful (I mean something like that might have been used in propaganda material of course but nobody could have seriously considered that to be a realistic threat).
The position the 13 colonies and the parts of India (that were under control/influence of the EIC) were in could had hardly been more different.
Also this possibly somewhat anachronistic because the level of control the East India Company had over India back in the 70s was quite limited and relatively indirect.
William Dalrymple's book The Anarchy has some excerpts from American pamphlets decrying the EICs treatment of Indians (particularly during the Bengal famine of 1770) and also warning that the British would attempt to re-organize the colonies in a way that matches the EIC. I don't have time to dig up the passages.
It's obviously not the singular cause but it was also very realistic. If you can manage it, try to think from their perspective: the Crown is preventing you from expanding westward to limit your power, you are hearing (distorted) reports of unimaginable atrocities being committed in the name of profit by the EIC in India, at the same time the EIC is being granted extraordinary privileges in your colonies. Fear of the Crown re-organizing your governmental structure along the lines to move to an extractive form of colonization were well founded.
Furthermore, and returning to the original topic of this thread, the colonists were very averse to monopolies on trade since the few examples they had lead to disastrous behavior by the monopolists.
> the level of control the East India Company had over India back in the 70s was quite limited and relatively indirect.
Completely false, after the battle of Plassey in 1757 led to the EIC gaining direct control over all of Bengal (the largest and richest kingdom of India at that time) and they had installed puppet governments in other kingdoms and provinces.
By the time of the American revolution their power had only grown, surpassing any of the remaining independent kingdoms.
As an aside, When the British public (and hence the American public) found out about the full extent of the atrocities committed by the EIC in India there was a very large public backlash including putting the director on trial for what we would now term Crimes against Humanity. These people were not angels, but they were not only rampaging colonial brutes. History is complex, historical people doubly so.
> Fear of the Crown re-organizing your governmental structure along the lines to move to an extractive form of colonization were well founded.
I'm not sure that's reasonable. The crown was hardly capable (nor particularly eager) to strip the American colonies of their autonomy. They were barely even able to impose new (and quite reasonable if not necessarily fair) taxes.
And anyway "selling" millions of Englishmen to EIC would be politically inconceivable both in England and in the colonies themselves.
> at the same time the EIC is being granted extraordinary privileges in your colonies
The parliament granted the company (which was on the brink of bankruptcy) the sole right to import tea to NA but they still had to really on local merchants to do that and AFAIK had no direct presence in the colonies. I'm not going to argue that was fair, especially when the colonial governments had no say on it but it's still quite a jump to what you're saying.
> to an extractive form of colonization were well founded.
That wouldn't have been feasible in the northern colonies because there wasn't much to extract. And they have already been practicing a form of extractive colonization in much of the south (which the plantation owners didn't mind). Of course to a much lesser degree than in the Caribbean which was much more suitable for growing sugar and other cash crops.
> the colonists were very averse to monopolies on trade since the few examples they had lead to disastrous behavior by the monopolists.
The EIC tea was actually cheaper (al though possibly that would've changed after some time) than the smuggled Dutch tea. So the EIC undercut many of the Boston merchants who made their money illegally importing it. I'm not defending monopolies but self-interest surely must also have paid a part
> try to think from their perspective: the Crown is preventing you from expanding westward
Yeah, if I was a rich landowner in Colonial American I would have also been pissed at the crown for not allowing me to the land (we rightfully won in a war) from the Indian Savages and would surely be enraging by it granting the freedom of worship and limited degree of self-government to the papist Frenchmen in Quebec. This is not sarcasm at all, I just think the self-interest was clearly the primary driving force behind the revolution. The politically active (i.e. well-off) colonists just felt there was more to be gained by getting rid of the British than by maintaining the status quo.
> were not only rampaging colonial brutes.
Unless you happened to not be white, then they more or less were. The thirteen colonies were the equivalent of the EIC, it's just that much lower population density in NA than in India significantly reduced the pool of people to commit atrocities against.
I never denied that various propaganda pamphlets and other material existed. Just like now, people back then tended to make all kinds of over-exaggerated claims related to politics and especially when they have very strong opinions and need to justify certain very radical actions. So what?
> assume that because you don't know about something it isn't true
Could you please elaborate on what do you mean by that? What specifically are you talking about (I agree that what I said about the situation in India in the 1770s wasn't that accurate, but it was only tangentially related to the situation in the US)?
Highly recommended, his essays about history in fantasy and pop culture are as hilarious as they are informative, and his historical deep dives are just as well written
Interesting. In popular search results you always read Pontius Pilate as a “governor” but in fact he was a Praetor? At least that makes way more sense if you read this blog and what his duties were.
> Note that the praetor in his province doesn’t take over day-to-day garden variety law and order issues; those are still handled by local governments, according to local laws.
Procurator is not quite the same as praetor, it was technically not even a public magistracy. Legally Procurators were more like personal agents of the emperor. The empire was technically split into 'senatorial' and 'imperial' provinces (the latter were generally close to the borders and had legions stationed there). The senatorial provinces were governed by ex-magistrates of senatorial rank.
IIRC it's likely that Pilate was actually a 'prefect' but this title was changed to 'procurator' several decades later which is why Tacitus used it instead.
This hints that his contemporary title was "preafectus" and the title "procurator" from Tacitus "Annales" (15,44) is not accurate. It is even disputed among experts whether the passage containing this note is a younger Christian interpolation into the "Annales" and the title itself is a backward translation of the Greek ἡγεμονεύοντος (hegemoneuontos ~ "ruler") that the gospel of Luke uses as a title for Pilate (3:1) as well as for Quirinius/Cyrenius (2:2).
Not quite, but almost. Just follow the links in my profile page to learn more about me and my projects.
My username is a literal translation of my first name into Ancient Greek.
> And the level of detail into the Tacitus/Gospel mix is quite deep.
Actually, it is not so difficult to dive a little deeper. The basic question ist: What are the sources of our knowledge? Bret Devereaux's blog is really excellent in demonstrating how it is done. If a topic catches your attention, my first advice is, to find out what the most important sources for our knowledge are. And then look at the sources. Even if you are not trained in Latin or Ancient Greek you can still dive a little deeper with the help of a dictionary or an encyclopedia. Therefore my first advice to anyone interested in ancient Mediterranean history is to learn the Greek alphabet. You should already know most of the letters from mathematics and physics anyway.
45 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kij-7DJVPkc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsR-C9WtoKg
[1] - https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-death-thr...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Rome_(podcast...
One of the best podcasts I’ve ever heard.
I'll stick to my slow as molasses Ken Burns and BBC docs from the 90s where I can ooze into the atmosphere, and yell at the clouds too I suppose ;D
Many lizard-deciding-bodies or mechanisms may have chosen sortition!
And perhaps it was a bad habit or even an old charter to throw names in a hat, not without the notice of the literate or the haberdashers/milliners union(s), who sought to leverage their skills into greater advantage . . .
Also, I don't vote so the politicians are the responsibility of people who mistakenly believe their vote matters when they are selectively stolen, gerrymandered, and manufactured consent into futility. 45 may have tried to steal Georgia like a moron, but Bernie lost the 2016 WV primary even though every district voted for him as the consequence of that state's electors collusion with one candidate. Until there's sortition, campaign finance reform, or an emperor, NPVIC could eventually be a potential workaround for electoral mutinies.
Until then, there's not much chance of change because the only viable candidates are celebrities and career politicians willing to bend the knee to big money donors in exchange for favor$.
Possibly preferable to career billionaires (which was the case in every premodern republic like Rome or Venice)
https://www.theballotboy.com/electing-the-doge
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed63.asp
(Relatedly, it seems like the anti-federalists turned out to be right about a lot of things they warned about during those debates.)
The US was the first experiment in a capitalist country; the American revolution was the first capitalist revolution against the tyranny of market control.
Any conservative claims that the old ways were better were likely to be true at least in some respects, just because it was so new.
I suspect that if most HN folks looked at the anti-federalists with their anti-progress, anti-free-market stances, we'd see opposition to that. For good reason, possibly.
https://mises.org/library/political-economy-antifederalists-...
Things don't seem entirely one-sided with regard to free trade; e.g. you have anti-federalists concerned about the federal government's ability to create monopolies:
"""monopolies in trade, granted to the favorites of government, by which the spirit of adventure will be destroyed, and the citizens subjected to the extortion of those companies who will have an exclusive right, to engross the different branches of commerce."""
(It seems one argument made by Madison and Hamilton who also supported free trade was that by centralizing regulatory authority they would have more leverage internationally to make treaties that would encourage trade.)
When I said "the anti-federalists turned out to be right about a lot of things" I was thinking more about their concerns about how the unlimited tax authority given to the federal government would lead to scope creep. Apparently anti-federalists suggested that this could even lead to a federal income tax and this was considered ridiculous at the time.
One of the major concerns leading to the revolution was the behavior of the EIC towards the inhabitants of India and the worry that a similar institution would be unleashed upon American colonists.
The EIC was only able to grow so powerful because of the monopoly granted by the Crown.
What we think of monopolies now are a product of the gilded age and not the same as what the Founding Fathers were thinking of.
They were thinking of monopoly as "legally empowered corporation that then becomes an oppresively dominant quasi-government institution"
"Really? While the concerns with the EIC having the monopoly on the tea trade and I think some other stuff like saltpetre(?) were real enough, this sounds a bit like a case of populist hysteria.
And I seriously doubt many were that seriously concerned about the treatment of Indians (in India) when one of the most significant grievances the colonists had was the fact the crown severely limited the uncontrolled expansion of the west and established an Indian Reserve west of the the Appalachian Mountains (and assigned pretty much all of the territory captured from France during the French and Indian wars.
A slightly more cynical person might wonder what part did the fact the British tricked Washington (and his soldiers) - promising them land in the newly captured territories and later backtracked on this by severely limiting non Native Americans from settling there -played in inciting him to join the revolution/rebellion.
The position the 13 colonies and the parts of India (that were under control/influence of the EIC) were in could had hardly been more different.
Also this possibly somewhat anachronistic because the level of control the East India Company had over India back in the 70s was quite limited and relatively indirect.
It's obviously not the singular cause but it was also very realistic. If you can manage it, try to think from their perspective: the Crown is preventing you from expanding westward to limit your power, you are hearing (distorted) reports of unimaginable atrocities being committed in the name of profit by the EIC in India, at the same time the EIC is being granted extraordinary privileges in your colonies. Fear of the Crown re-organizing your governmental structure along the lines to move to an extractive form of colonization were well founded.
Furthermore, and returning to the original topic of this thread, the colonists were very averse to monopolies on trade since the few examples they had lead to disastrous behavior by the monopolists.
> the level of control the East India Company had over India back in the 70s was quite limited and relatively indirect.
Completely false, after the battle of Plassey in 1757 led to the EIC gaining direct control over all of Bengal (the largest and richest kingdom of India at that time) and they had installed puppet governments in other kingdoms and provinces.
By the time of the American revolution their power had only grown, surpassing any of the remaining independent kingdoms.
As an aside, When the British public (and hence the American public) found out about the full extent of the atrocities committed by the EIC in India there was a very large public backlash including putting the director on trial for what we would now term Crimes against Humanity. These people were not angels, but they were not only rampaging colonial brutes. History is complex, historical people doubly so.
I'm not sure that's reasonable. The crown was hardly capable (nor particularly eager) to strip the American colonies of their autonomy. They were barely even able to impose new (and quite reasonable if not necessarily fair) taxes.
And anyway "selling" millions of Englishmen to EIC would be politically inconceivable both in England and in the colonies themselves.
> at the same time the EIC is being granted extraordinary privileges in your colonies
The parliament granted the company (which was on the brink of bankruptcy) the sole right to import tea to NA but they still had to really on local merchants to do that and AFAIK had no direct presence in the colonies. I'm not going to argue that was fair, especially when the colonial governments had no say on it but it's still quite a jump to what you're saying.
> to an extractive form of colonization were well founded.
That wouldn't have been feasible in the northern colonies because there wasn't much to extract. And they have already been practicing a form of extractive colonization in much of the south (which the plantation owners didn't mind). Of course to a much lesser degree than in the Caribbean which was much more suitable for growing sugar and other cash crops.
> the colonists were very averse to monopolies on trade since the few examples they had lead to disastrous behavior by the monopolists.
The EIC tea was actually cheaper (al though possibly that would've changed after some time) than the smuggled Dutch tea. So the EIC undercut many of the Boston merchants who made their money illegally importing it. I'm not defending monopolies but self-interest surely must also have paid a part
> try to think from their perspective: the Crown is preventing you from expanding westward
Yeah, if I was a rich landowner in Colonial American I would have also been pissed at the crown for not allowing me to the land (we rightfully won in a war) from the Indian Savages and would surely be enraging by it granting the freedom of worship and limited degree of self-government to the papist Frenchmen in Quebec. This is not sarcasm at all, I just think the self-interest was clearly the primary driving force behind the revolution. The politically active (i.e. well-off) colonists just felt there was more to be gained by getting rid of the British than by maintaining the status quo.
> were not only rampaging colonial brutes.
Unless you happened to not be white, then they more or less were. The thirteen colonies were the equivalent of the EIC, it's just that much lower population density in NA than in India significantly reduced the pool of people to commit atrocities against.
There are a lot of primary sources, for example, off the top of my head the pamphlets by Rusticus.
It seems like you have a fixed view of history and assume that because you don't know about something it isn't true.
> assume that because you don't know about something it isn't true
Could you please elaborate on what do you mean by that? What specifically are you talking about (I agree that what I said about the situation in India in the 1770s wasn't that accurate, but it was only tangentially related to the situation in the US)?
> Note that the praetor in his province doesn’t take over day-to-day garden variety law and order issues; those are still handled by local governments, according to local laws.
IIRC it's likely that Pilate was actually a 'prefect' but this title was changed to 'procurator' several decades later which is why Tacitus used it instead.
[1] Here an image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caesarea_maritima_BW...
Not quite, but almost. Just follow the links in my profile page to learn more about me and my projects.
My username is a literal translation of my first name into Ancient Greek.
> And the level of detail into the Tacitus/Gospel mix is quite deep.
Actually, it is not so difficult to dive a little deeper. The basic question ist: What are the sources of our knowledge? Bret Devereaux's blog is really excellent in demonstrating how it is done. If a topic catches your attention, my first advice is, to find out what the most important sources for our knowledge are. And then look at the sources. Even if you are not trained in Latin or Ancient Greek you can still dive a little deeper with the help of a dictionary or an encyclopedia. Therefore my first advice to anyone interested in ancient Mediterranean history is to learn the Greek alphabet. You should already know most of the letters from mathematics and physics anyway.