Is there any era in the past you find so fascinating that you

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No, the past was generally a shit.

No. The past is a nice place to visit via books and museums, but I kinda like the idea of penicillin, clean water and dental surgery with anaesthetic too much.

Post wwII america up until the 80s. My grandpa bought two houses just from plating meals in a restaurant. He had an eight grade education. Fuck that faggot I swear.

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>>2844026
I can think of one...

>>2844073
Why do faggots shit up every favorite era thread with
>muh disease
>muh child death
Fuck off and let the thread happen without your fence sitting retardation.

>wanting to live in a time of homophobia, racism, sexism, transmisogyny, fatism, etc

back to >>>/pol/

>>2844077
This is the only acceptable answer.

>>2844109
>>2844137
Fucking homophobic dinosaurs

>>2844137

1/10

>>2844065
>>2844073

>hey guys I've always loved X, i think it'd be really cool to go back then
>hurr durr faggot no iPhones muh disease no 4chan

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>>2844026
60's
God tier music
Drugs
As long as I don't have to go to Vietnam, it's a paradise.

>>2844026
I'd like to be a wealthy lord in medieval times, but not a commoner. I'd be fine with living in pre-history Western Europe.

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Roman empire under Trajan.

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>>2844160
>he doesn't want to go to Vietnam to kill Vietnam fucking shits in between fucking viet whores and smoking Thai marijuana and shooting Thai dope
Shiggy diggity

>>2844160

>going back to help ruin the country

Off yourself, Kent State best day of my life

>>2844123
>fence-sitting
It is objectively better right now, on this side of the fence. I'm happy here. Sorry you hate yourself and your life.

>>2844191
>being a statist in the USA

>>2844026
Depends. Do I get to live in what would be considered comfortable for the time? Because the late 1800s would probably be it for me. That or mid-18th century Berlin.

>>2844123
>>2844157

>please don't shatter my rose-tinted fantasy of what the past was like

>>2844330
Wanting to experience the past doesn't mean you hate your life, it just means someone has a great interest in history. That's the fucking point of this board faggot.

>>2844077
How come this isn't possible anymore?
Is it because of immigration bringing down the price of labour? Is something to do with fiat currency?

>>2844160
t. 16 year old

>>2844350
There's plenty of other reasons and this may be veering into /pol/ territory, but remember that women also didn't work nearly as much as they do now. This has expanded the labor pool by a lot.

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>>2844337

>being a subversive
>literally ruining utopia

>>2844350
It shouldn't have been possible in the first place, t b h.

>>2844109
>a dark, dangerous jungle filled with gigantic reptilian carnivores who would snack on you, and giant reptilian herbivores which were probably so ornery that they made hippopotamus seem pleasant.

Sounds like a lovely place to live.

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>>2844357

I can't even imagine how good the average middle class guy had it 100 years ago

>women didn't work
>didn't vote
>dressed modestly
>literally taught by the church to obey men
>knew their place as wives/baby machines
>dependent on their man

We should've just shot the suffragettes tbqh

>>2844362

Yeah we get it Chaim, we should all work 18 hr days for $1/day

>>2844374
Yeah but you would have been some dingy coal miner who makes less money than what the commissary charges you for meal tickets at the company store, putting you hopelessly in debt and making it so that none of those cutey little waifus want anything more to do with you than they do with you as some sweaty, obese tech-dweeb in 2017, and you probably still would have married within your league.

romanticizing the past is retarded. Get over yourself and lift more if you are that desperate for a qt3.14 waifu

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>>2844026
Ottoman Empire at any time

>>2844388
I make a lot of money now relative to the common person, so if we got our current social status I'd be pretty well off. Probably a higher clerk or something.

>>2844137
>fatism
LOL
>trans misogyny
Shouldn't it just be misogyny, chauvinism, or sexism? WTF with all this special snowflake crap?
~t. BiGuy

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>>2844388

>if you want to live in a more socially conservative time you are le neckbeard fatty xDD

Why is it this is literally the only retort liberals have?

Genderoles aside,
> tfw gril so anytime period
before modern medicine that made child birth safe and less painful, is basically shit.
Not even the 1920s (which fascinates me a lot).

>>2844447

Teehee I'm a girl btw

>>2844447
post feet

>>2844359
>implying utopia can exist in a society that values liberty over safety

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>>2844435
Because if you right-wingers had an ounce of willpower and work ethic, you wouldn't be bitching about wanting to live in socially conservative areas. You'd go live in them.

If you *really* wanted a sweet, innocent cutie of a waifu, you wouldn't be sitting around shitting up message boards, you'd be in a gym, giving them what they want: someone who matches their commitment to physical effort.

But we all know the truth: you just want your birth-privilege back, and unfortunately for you the direction of history is towards meritocracy, and away from being ruled by the guy who crawled out of the right vagina

>>2844435
Your "perfect conservative waifu" had to put a shit ton of effort in order to be that way and not "fall victim to degeneracy". She is entitled to high standards because she is an extremely limited resource with high demand. You want access? You will have to pay your own way by making six figures and being physically strong and attractive.

>>2844400
>>2844400
Do you know what eternal recurrence means? It means that no matter how many lives you might have lived, they all would have been the same life lived over and over again.

Are you some middle-manager at a Office Max somewhere in Indiana? Or maybe the IT guy at a paper factory in Michigan? The 100 year ago equivalent to that would have seemed as equally appealing to those waifus you're fantasizing about. Being from the countryside, those sweet little farmers daughters probably would have idealized men who are outdoorsmen, men in uniforms, that kind of life, and could not have cared less about your fancy city-slicker desk-jockey job, which in practice was probably crap paying because income inequality was very high in those days.

They would have been married at 15 - 16 to another boy in her farming community, around 17 - 18. So maybe if you were a gentlemen farmer you would have gotten your waifu, but only as her rough equal in terms of age. Marrying older men would have been an even more rare exception back then than it is today, because these small communities were very, very insular, and those kind of age discrepancies only happened among the very wealthy

Your only bet for a qt3.14 would have been to go full Edgar Allen Poe: marry one of your cousins. But have fun peeing in your own gene pool.

>>2844479

Your post is so full of fallacies and stupid shit, it made my brain hurt.

>>2844539
Solid retort my man, you sure showed her!

>>2844026

end of the 19th century / beginning of the 20th century

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>>2844539
I know sweetie, I know. Critical thinking doesn't come natural to right-wingers, they like penis measuring contests and living by the seat of their intuition.

One day, if you study history long enough, you'll come to the conclusion that most people do: that the past was the bad old days, romanticizing it just demonstrates a profound inability to empathize with other humans, because your vision of the past is based on what you feel it was like, without having done any research into how things actually were for most people.

Keep plugging away, and take an ibuprofen if your brain still hurts from all that thinking I'm trying to make you do.

Before the big bang.

>>2844479

t. r/history

>>2844479
> you wouldn't be sitting around shitting up message boards
so why are you shitting up 4chan instead of creating a commie utopia or whatever

>>2844553

>muh current year

>>2844553

I'm not that guy, you are replying to my first post in this thread. I have no particular opinion regarding the subject at hand. I just wanted to note that your post was shit.

America 1960s-1970s

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>>2844558
>>>r/The_Donald/
It's where you should go. It's where you should stay
>>2844572
cool answer, bro
>>2844577
Of course it was. I'd much rather be discussing the facts in a logical, impersonal manner. But I play tit for tat, and I'm not about to let all these pigeons shit all over the chess board.

>>2844584
t. /R/history

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>>2844584

Your argument is simple Whig history and leftypol macros. There is nothing inherently better about modern society just because it's chronologically later

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>>2844592
You know, repeating it doesn't make you seem any more intelligent, it just makes you seem like you've run out of ideas.

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>>2844594
And I see that rather than have any actual rebuttal, you post memes. Good job.

Life in the past was the bad old days. There was once even a reality show which tried to make people live like they did 100 years ago, and they had to cancel it because each of the contestants found living conditions intolerable and had to stop.

>inherently better
this is where you blew it.

I never said inherently better.

I said relatively better.

Your perception of what life should be is a reflection of the life you already lived. If you tried to undo so many of the minor conveniences that you have taken for granted your whole life, you would find life intolerable once the novelty of living in another time period wore off.

Because people who actually want the simple life, rather than delude themselves into thinking they want it, have a way of finding it. There are plenty of places in the world where you could live as a subsistence farmer, or even a hunter-gatherer, if there was truly something about that life which calls you. But don't disparage the fact that people want other choices which you might personally not have made for yourself.

>>2844515
I'm not fantasizing about waifus. I just have an interest in history and society in the past. Stop projecting your fetishes you fucking creep.

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>>2844626

>meaningless assumptions and anecdotes,personal opinion and #I'mwithHer smugness

W/e comrade, you showed those Nazis on 4chan. Better luck in 2020.

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>>2844026
>Is there any era in the past you find so fascinating that you would unironically be ok living in it?
The 1980's

I'd invest in Microsoft, Apple, Starbucks, Google, Paypal, Intel, Walmart, Disney, and any other company which turned into a colossal megacorp by 2017 and would have made me disgustingly wealthy relative to the population. No need to work, unless I wanted to, just sit on my tail waiting for the dividend check to arrive.

Going any further back than that would be retarded.

>>2844479
Jokes on you faggot. I am a rightwinger with a waifu. (I go to the gym though.)

>>2844667
>#I'mwithHer
Fuck Hillary. Wall-street sell-out who cheated to win the primaries and promised "more of the same." I'm fucking glad Donald Trump taught the Democrats a lesson in humility in 2016.

and I am only reflecting the smugness shown to me, and showing all you right-wingers how it feels when your opponent would rather shit on the chess board than make the next move.

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>>2844672
Whoa, I totally believe you, bruh

>>2844682
All those people who vote conservative must consist out of 100% single men right? Thats probably how drumpf got elected too!

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>>2844675

>I was pretending to be retarded

See you next time keyboard warrior

>>2844026
France 1799. If I can avoid being beheaded then I can enjoy the glory of the revolution and napoleons reign. Make a shit ton of money with my future knowledge, then move to Russia in the 1950s to kick it with their aristocracy. Tell all my kids to move to the US in about 1895. Die of TB. Kids probably dont listen and get killed by commies. Worth it.

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>>2844689
>All those people
Only a sith deals in absolutes. But right-wingers do have a way of embellishing their own accomplishments, especially anonymously over the internet, which is probably why they voted for someone who is like, the king of self-embellishment.

>>2844693
>pretending
I never once pretended to be doing anything but flinging the shit back at morons who flung it at me, first.
>See you next time keyboard warrior
don't let the door hit you on the way out, bruh. Thanks for playing, you'll do better next time, I'm sure.

>>2844703
>right-wingers do have a way of embellishing their own accomplishments, especially anonymously over the internet, which is probably why they voted for someone who is like, the king of self-embellishment.

Source for this claim? Its seems to me you have nothing but your own prejudice to support your belief that right wingers do this more than left wingers.

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La Belle Epoque, or as you might call it in English, the Gilded era. From 1870 to 1914.

I've ranted about it before, but to reiterate my points:
>Paris, Berlin, Warsaw and Saint Petersbourg at their most beautiful, London being the only one better maybe these days
>booming economies across Europe, with about everything to invest in: finance in France thanks to Napoleon's III reforms, a thriving coal and iron market in Germany, easy loans from the Russian government who sought to industrialize by any means
>dopest fashion in Europe ever
>possibility to make a name for yourself thrpugh an easy military career of being sent to an outpost of your country's colonies, where you can take a rest from busy European lifestyle
>fascinating times if you want to enter politics (what will you do for your country in the Balkans, what will be your stance towards Banana republics, etc...)

And then you die in WWI laughing your ass off because you know it happens again thirty years later.

Classical Greece Athens or any other polis desu
>No homo

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>>2844714
>Source for this claim?
It's in a time-posted nude picture of your waifu, mr. perfect conservative.

I'd much rather post something like these
https://outrunchange.com/improvements-in-our-standard-of-living-and-the-price-of-everything/
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/StandardsofLivingandModernEconomicGrowth.html
>Before that, most of the world not only took poverty for granted, but also assumed that little could be done about it. Even the most optimistic early writers could not imagine that more than a few percent of the population would ever be well off
enjoy your shitty old days

>>2844735
What the fuck is your obsession with "waifus"? I don't think you have made a post without using that term.

>>2844750
It's just a bit of sport, making fun of right-wingers who think that life was better when women were subjugated, not realizing that so were the men, and their chances of scoring that perfect wife were even less likely than they were today.

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>>2844394
Fuck off

>>2844759
It's time for you to leave this thread, one man one wife was a cornerstone of civilization and all but the severely disfigured and mentally ill were guaranteed a wife. I get you're a chick or whatever and consider the idea of being a baby making machine stuck in the kitchen abhorrent or whatever but don't go spouting falsehoods.

>>2844759
Don't make autistic sweeping generalizations about right-wingers and then act like you're above the rest of the retards in this thread.

>>2844777
doesn't mean your wife would be pretty or good in any way, but basically everyone got married young. Today the majority of people still get married but it's much later and there's less chance of having kids.

>>2844801
Most men and women are perfectly average. The majority of arranged marriages throughout history weren't some guy being stuck with an absolute uggo.

>>2844157
>muh disease
What kind of fucked up objection is this lol

>>2844626
The middle ages are not all of history. Almost every slave holding society could provide more comfort than modern first world countries.

>>2844777
>It's time for you to leave this thread,
Says the fox to the hound. Let me guess: like you've done so much winning that you're sick of winning so much, right?

>all but the severely disfigured and mentally ill were guaranteed a wife
That door swung both ways: enjoy your mentally unstable wife who henpecks you, and you really wish you could get a divorce and move on with your life but society says that would be a "sin", so you waste your time and your paycheck in some sleazy, run down peep show as a coping mechanism.

> I get you're a chick
Nigga, if I was a chick, would I really be trying to score nudes of some random asshole's (supposedly hot) wife?

>>2844797
I know, it sucks when people do that to do, doesn't it? Keep that in mind in the next thread you decide to post in

>>2844703
How dare you use Dylan you pathetic liberal scum

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>>2844026
1920s-late 30s, late 40s - early 50s

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>>2844818
Thanks for not responding like a dick. No sarcasm.
>Almost every slave holding society could provide more comfort than modern first world countries.
If you crawled out of the right vagina? Possibly.

I mean, just to be honest, it would be pretty awesome to be some Roman patrician living it up in his palace of eternal pleasures, being fed grapes and cooled down by slaves waving palm fronds, allowed to rape or kill without consequence. But then again ancient Roman conformity culture was insanely, lethally stifling, it would be an existence like Damocles' sword: you're one hurt feeling and subsequent conspiracy away from being compelled to commit suicide, so you just wallow in luxury until your inevitable doom, hoping that you can pass your DNA along with enough time without having your entire family massacred because you accidentally brought shame to the city

And lets consider the human side of living in a place like ancient Rome
-It's hot as shit most of the year and you have to wear a giant wool toga every where you go.
-You live in an uninsulated brick building. If you're wealthy you have a summer retreat in the countryside where you can escape the god awful heat and stench of the city
--Literal pots for people to piss in on the side of the road, left sitting there to ferment so that the ammonia separates, and this is what people use to clean their clothes
-uncoded buildings and complete lack of centralized defense means the possibility of a fire coming along and devastating everything you know and care about
-equally devastating plagues periodically sweeping through the city
-Extremely limited cuisine (by our standards). Many Romans were totally dependent on state-provided bread just to avoid starving. You might get some olive oil, occasionally, you're always drinking tepid water or extremely weak (by modern standards) wine. Meat would have been an occasional treat, and even for the wealthy, most "exotic" meat would just taste like unseasoned chicken

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>>2844026

Only if I could renounce all memory of life in the modern world. Anything earlier than the late 19th century would be awful by today's standards. All the hygiene/medical necessities we take for granted would be sorely missed, and you would very likely be too poor to afford basic necessities for long periods of time. You had to conform to a rigid cultural and religious norm or risk anything from being shunned to killed. Since the middle ages in the Western world (and most of the world at large), limitations on expression, sexuality, and behavioral individuality would mean no fun allowed.

Life after the agricultural revolution means you're 99% likely to be a dirt-poor farmer scrounging a living under threadbare conditions. Life after the industrial revolution but before the modern era means an even more wretched existence, where unsafe work conditions will maim or kill you while you toil as a wretch.

I think living in the early bronze age Aegean would be awesome though. Protected from invasion for over 1000 years by its mighty fleet, and with access to goods and cultures of the Mediterranean through a sprawling trade network. It must have been a beautiful, lush life, full of metaphysical wonder about the world around them.

sorry for the essay

>>2844871
Music doesn't "belong" to anyone, swine
https://www.thoughtco.com/bob-dylan-and-civil-rights-movement-1322012
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/the-politics-of-bob-dylan/

>>2844882
>>2844820
>>2844703


Imagine being such a pretentious pseud that you unironically talked like this all the time

>>2844892
good post.

>I think living in the early bronze age Aegean would be awesome though
I recall reading somewhere that low class Spaniards often abandoned their posts at their colonies to go live as one of the indigenous in new world villages, adopted their language, and their customs and way of life, and totally renouncing western life.

There may be something worth saying about a simple existence which is totally isolated from the rest of the world, where there is enough food in abundance that you're not constantly on the verge of survival, and you don't have the tax man or the bank breathing down your neck. I'm fairly confidence that's why most Caribbean islands never really developed: when you live in paradise, how ambitious could you realistically be to go live another lifestyle?

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>>2844137
>>2844157
>>2844123
>>2844191
>>2844330
>>2844337
>>2844346
>>2844352
>>2844374
>>2844350
>>2844435
>>2844407
>>2844467
>>2844471
>>2844479
>>2844506
>>2844539
>>2844546
>>2844553
>>2844558
>>2844560
>>2844572
>>2844584
>>2844592
>>2844667
>>2844672
>>2844675
>>2844693
>>2844703
>>2844714
>>2844735
>>2844750
>>2844759
>>2844765
>>2844777
>>2844797
>>2844801
>>2844820
>>2844871

these posts are all trash and don't add anything to the discussion. Please don't get tricked into replying to the hare-brained interlopers who come here to shitpost and memedrop so they can have a gigglefit and piddle in their tights with glee when someone starts arguing with them.

>>2844939
Imagine being too dumb to respond in a logical and consistent manner so you just hurl insults like a simpleton?

>>2844947
>these posts are all trash and don't add anything to the discussion
That's what I've been telling them all along. I'm glad I at least got through to some body.

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>>2844026
>tfw you will never conquer territory after melee combat, advancing in ranks as your army wins more and more
>tfw you will never be an aquilifer

Colonial/Georgian new england
Comfy Aesthetics

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>>2844941
I agree man, I'm pretty confident the agricultural revolution kept happening in different places out of necessity, when the hunter-gatherer lifestyle wasn't being productive enough. The same can be said for the copper revolution, where there's evidence of stone tools being produced out of lower-quality stone leading up to the emergence of copper in axes etc. This pic really made me think

>>2844975
Good point.

I think the agricultural revolution was an extremely gradual process: when you're a hunter gatherer you depend on every possible resource you can get your hands on, and what might have once been harvested wild grains might have over time been cultivated into modern grains like wheat.

But life on the Eurasian continent was one of ever larger populations spurring ever larger movements of people, and someone living an idyllic lifestyle in an area with lots of food should better hope that the horsemen didn't come, or else they might take his lifestyle for themselves. The post bronze age Aegean had the advantage of being extremely rocky, and therefore not the kind of place that horsemen go very often.

>The same can be said for the copper revolution,
The same thing happened during the collapse of the bronze age: when they could finally build smelters hot enough to work the stuff, they couldn't quite make it as good as bronze, but good enough to field levy armies, each with his own iron weapon, as opposed to being totally dependent on a small warrior-elite class which went into battle riding chariots and were the only members of society wealthy enough to afford a bronze panoply.

In both cases, necessity spurred them on to work with an inferior product in the name of efficiency.

The trade off of this long, painful slog through history, though, has been the past 100 years: the great "undying" where a large fraction of people were no longer impoverished and dead of infection by their 5th birthday.

>>2844960

Upboted

>>2845021
got any links for interesting lectures/documentaries on this topic? I've been watching a lot of Penn Museum and CARTA videos on youtube about stone age through bronze age the past few months after discovering I was interested in the topic and I'd love to keep learning about the human experience in this time period

1870s-1900s or Rome as a patrician. I would really like to live in a society where I can basically do anything I want and have slaves to tend to my whims. London in the time period specified seems comfy as shit and it's one of my favorite time periods to read about. I also like the fashion a lot.

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>>2845040
desu I probably would have gone to the same sources that you do, but if you like that period of history one work of fiction that I highly recommend is Eric Shanower's graphic novel series, Age of Bronze.

The art style is admittedly humble, but it was made with an eye for historical accuracy: costumes are period accurate and characters are maturely written and nuanced.

>>2845021
I think one of the main theories about what drove people to shift from living in small subsistence farming communities to cities is the need for safety from invaders (often believed to be horsemen from the steppe, which might explain the emergence of the huge settlements between the balkans and the Dnepr in the copper age, the largest in the world at that time). Those were apparently only inhabited for a couple of generations (like 100 years or less) before being abandoned and the population resettled elsewhere, which suggests that these large-scale urban experiments were less about developing sustainable food sources, and more about cooperating in the interest of security.

>>2845061
right on, I'll check it out, thanks mate

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>>2845086
True, but what else is interesting is the emergence of Ziggurat culture all over the world, even in far flung places out of contact with one another.

Local strongmen would announce their grandeur to their neighbors by building as big of a building as they could. The Egyptians had a unique take on Ziggurat culture in that they built gigantic Ziggurat-like tombs, and were among some of the largest public works projects ever built in the pre-modern world.

We not only see it in those areas you suggested, we see it in Mesopotamia, the new world, anywhere we got large urban centers we got symbols of centralized power.

But perhaps it was because they were less about developing sustainable food sources that they all eventually fell, sometimes quite spectacularly, to the point where there was an almost measurable rhythm to history.

>>2845089
cheers, m8. I'm grateful at least somebody felt like being civilized in this thread

>>2844109
you'd die the day you got there, pretty gruesomely aswell

>>2845124
definitely true, urbanization was usually accompanied by social stratification (where hunter gatherers usually seemed to live in egalitarian groups based on the idea of equal spoils for equal work). It's almost like chicken and egg idiom though, where it's hard to tell which thing facilitated which. The people who organized the building of monumental works must have had an abundance of resources (food/water/shelter from hostile conditions) to leverage to be able to convince people to follow. Maybe population increases in the subsistence farming communities created a surplus of labor which authority figures (which situationally could have been the leaders of warrior bands, or likely more commonly, religious leaders like in pre-inca andean civilizations) could have social-contracted to build religious works.

>>2844160
>God tier music
hah

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>>2845127
right back atcha friendo

>>2844026
Anarchist Aragon and Catalonia, desu.
Would have to be a 2-year time bubble, though.

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>>2845205
not too familiar with the time period and its pros, care to give a quick rundown

>>2844026
Belle Époque. As an upper class jewish or white straight man. Things would suck otherwise.
>ywn be part of the central european intelligentsia
>ywn gather with your intellectual social circle to discuss the deep matters of existence, consciousness and logic

And the 60s too, but I don't really know why.

>>2845212
>anarchists and syndicalists take over territories in northeastern Spain
>disown industrials and other capitalists
>communalize everything
>run an almost perfectly free and equal society for almost three years
>productivity surges by up to 50%
>money is replaced by vouchers in some places
>George Orwell comes down as a journalists, immediately picks up a weapon and joins the militia to protect this paradise
>in 1939, Spanish nationalists backed by Nazis and others destroy everything
>cue 39 years of nationalist dictatorship under Franco

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>>2844721
>>2845231

that does sound fascinating, it was probably the cultural and intellectual peak of western civilization. People back then probably thought they had entered an era of perpetual refinement and humanist resurgence in all aspects of society. And then the German invasion of France punctuated this beautiful dream of innocent wonder

>>2845248
wow, what a shame. sounds a lot like >>2845257. Maybe we're doomed to an eternity of envy, hate, and greed against our neighbors through all eternity, no matter how advanced we become and how civilized we think ourselves

>>2845248
>horsemen: different age, same jealousy

some things about history just don't change

>>2845269
If there's one thing we can take comfort in, it's the fact that war in an industrial age is more of a game of who can grow the fastest, and that means investing in your civilian population and not letting military spending take up too big of a chunk of your GDP (or you'll learn the lesson that Adolf Hitler learned: if you didn't put all those military investments to good use, your bills will start piling up past your ability to pay them).

Every attempt at creating a militarized autocratic conquest empire in the modern age has been met with the world uniting to stop it.

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>>2845289
I think humans evolved biologically-driven behavioral traits that allow us to live in groups of a certain size (probably 10-20 people, like hunter gatherer groups).

Over many hundreds of thousands of years, through a us-versus-them mentality, hominids with these social traits prevailed over less-cooperative hominids, and these social genes still guide human behaviors today.

However, in the last few thousand years (a tiny fleck of time compared to our development as tribal individuals), we started living in much larger, more complex social structures, which would have us greatly broaden our "us" identifications (cultures, religions, nations). These test the biological limits of our genetic predisposition for socialization.

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>>2844026
Me on the right

>>2844594
4u

>>2845335
it feels like the era of state actors is ending, and more and more conflicts are being "fought" and arbitrated by non-state actors, who enact a different kind of conquest. Maybe we'll see a continental unification by those who control access to water or energy in the future.

This might sound ridiculous to us now, since companies are still very limited and subservient to governments. But the general worldwide trend since the French revolution has been to strip states of domestic authority (except with communist and fascist revolutions, which can be explained as doomed reactions to this trend).

You're exactly right. The world is learning that economic prosperity depends on cooperation. The idea of conventional war is already antiquated and impractical. Maybe not too far in the future, people will find their best interests aligned with elements of the private sector more than with the public sector, and a new kind of governance (centered around fighting global warming or scarcity) will develop. It's probably very far removed from the political realities of today, though.

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>>2845336
But even 10,000 years is a meaningful amount of time on an evolutionary scale, for example we've physiologically evolved to digest lactose and to incorporate far more grain into our diets than we had in the paleolithic, and we've changed behaviorally, as well.

Some have even gone as far as to suggest that the bronze age collapse was caused by humans suddenly realizing that the voice in their head was their own running inner monologue, and not external gods telling them what to do, and that they were at the moment of achieving true self-consciousness, being a function of language complexity, and before this event language was simply too crude for concepts like "I, the individual" to exist. I'm not sure if I believe it, extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence, but it's an interesting thought nonetheless.

And I think when we look at history at its grandest scales, we see a gradual movement towards cooperative forms, which rise in spite of our more primal natures which remind us that the easiest way to make a living is to steal it from the guy next to you. It's been a blind groping towards game theory, and what John Nash discovered about cooperative behavior yielding vastly superior long term fruit but only if everybody is a good faith participant. It's a balancing act: more sophisticated technology allows for more complex social structures which allow for ever larger numbers of humans living and working in close proximity to one another.

From a behavioral perspective, ancients would have seemed by our standards, "autistic manlets". They would have been shriveled from extremely limited diets, with not even close to the amount of socialization that modern people enjoy, and they would have had the bad attitudes to match.They may have been even objectively smarter than us, but they would not have expressed this intelligence as social intelligence. Hence ancient despots living in rape palaces and collapsing horribly towards the end of their lives.

>>2844350
In order to understand why it ended, you have to understand why it started.

Basically, economic prosperity comes down to three things: increasing innovation, increasing population, and an increasing industry. Each part of the cycle drives the other: a growing population leads to a growing demand for innovative goods, which is supplied by a growing industrial base, which is staffed by the population. If one increases, it eventually boosts the others, and if one decreases, it eventually hurts the others.

After the Second World War, America basically had a head start over every other world power in terms of development. Their civilian population was unharmed by war, their industry was unscathed by bombing, and they also had access to some of the best and brightest minds in the world (in both the military & civilian sectors). Thanks to programs like the G.I. Bill, millions of soldiers were able to raise families they otherwise couldn't have afforded (population), while the following decades saw astronomical development of new consumer & military products (innovation). This, naturally, led to an increase in the amount of resulting industry. And all this increase meant other industries appearing to support it.

And then everyone else caught up industrially & started taking slices of the economic pie. Now, America was no longer the only country innovating & producing high-end consumer goods, thanks to Europe, South Korea, and Japan. And we weren't the best option for low-end goods either, thanks to China, India, Bangladesh, etc. Combine that with the end of the baby boom, and our economy's growth rate plateaued.

Eh, it was nice while it lasted.

TL;DR we were technological hegemons, but now the rest of the world has an industrial base.

>>2845437
>Some have even gone as far as to suggest that the bronze age collapse was caused by humans suddenly realizing that the voice in their head was their own running inner monologue, and not external gods telling them what to do, and that they were at the moment of achieving true self-consciousness, being a function of language complexity, and before this event language was simply too crude for concepts like "I, the individual" to exist. I'm not sure if I believe it, extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence, but it's an interesting thought nonetheless.
Julia Jaynes is a fucking crackpot on the same level as that Russian guy who thinks the Pope, the Chinese Emperor, space aliens, Hitler, the Caliph, the Mayan emperor, all of the kings of India and SEA, and the Queen of France got together to move the calendar forward 109 years so the pope could say "IT'S 1066!" for entirely arbitrary reasons.

>>2845422
As much time as I had to waste ITT picking on right-wingers, I do concede that they have a really good point about the so called "New World Order". Maybe they get a lot of the details wrong, but what they are describing is a technocratic elite of transnational institutions (not just corporations, but the IMF, the World Bank, etc) forming it's own 'supra-state' which really isn't answerable to anyone but their own shareholders, and is slowly coagulating into the type of oligarchy which inspired communist and nationalist uprisings in the past. Left-wingers are apt to fixate on the megacorporations, but many of these problems comes from state institutions as well.

In many ways, its sort of an inverted Roman Empire: the empire was a militarized autocracy masquerading as a democracy which fueled itself through outright conquest and subjugation of less-developed peoples. This is a oligarchy masquerading as an alliance of nationalized states which fuels itself through economic exploitation rather than militarist conquest

>>2845462
That's why I was cautious to endorse the idea. I listed it an example of the way that history can seem to flow, in the direction of greater complexity and cooperative behavior.

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i would enlist in the German army during Bismark's wars of unification. It'd be really interesting to experience warfare on the cusp of wwi, with bolt action dreyse rifles, napoleonic charges and the like. It'd also be bliss to enjoy the next 30 years in a European golden age.

>>2844479
>"I think it would be cool to be a noble/rich/anything in x time"
>How DARE you wish for privilege! Go work you fat scum!

Why does single one of these threads needs to have one of these pieces of trash?

>>2844467
>>2844471
>>2844947
tfw wasn't trolling because that was actually a valid point. If you were a woman at least 100 years, giving birth, which was something women did alot, would be pretty dangerous.

>>2844026
Yes, I would unironically like to live in the middle ages whatever period in the middle ages would be fine, althought I would prefer to live during the times of Charlemagne or the Great Heathen invasion, preferably in Central Europe or England.

I don't know why but the middle ages have always facinated me since I was a child, probably because of the romantization of knights and heroic tales

>>2844109
the Anzu looks like a Casoary, Casoaries confirmed to be dinosaurs

>>2844026

When Golden Yrnë ruled, before the reign of the Continuum made all men slaves.

>>2844479
>unfortunately for you the direction of history is towards meritocracy

if anything is moving towards a place without it, if we were in a meritocratic society or something akin people like the Kardashians or all those instagram sluts would not be revered as gods

>>2845949
Holy fucking shit this so fucking hard. Meritocracy died years ago and we are now living in the attentionwhoreocracy. No I don't care that I just made that word up, it's still an accurate description.

>>2844820
Piss off you stupid cuntrag. Nobody likes you and you're shitting up this thread.

>>2845184
what I find amazing is how many cultures across the world came up with Ziggurats/piramidal structures, same with their mithology, every culture in the world has some sort of Dragon-like creature I mean that is fascinating.

Are there some anthropoligal studies about how this came to be? something so common around the ancient world sure raises some concerns right?

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>>2844026
80s and 90s

>>2846306
Pyramids are the most obvious way to build a really tall building.

>>2844176
I dont think rome was that clean, white people only fantasize about rome because they think it was clean and pristine, it was a dirty shitty place with bent and twisted roads and no planning. The place used to be really cool back before they were gauled in 396 BC. Livy literally states that the city was all screwed up and crooked in the end of the 5th book of History of Rome.

>>2845437
Thanks for taking time to type this out, i find the part about the effect of written language on consciousness fascinating. I agree with other anon that it's hard to confirm, but some aspects of the bronze age collapse, like the looting and burning of the palace complexes on knossos while surrounding housing was spared suggests popular revolt.

I think the ability to invoke words through your senses (by seeing them) may have given people evidence that the voice they hear is their own, and rippled through societies, servering a long-held belief at the core of peoples' spirituality.

There's accounts of earthquakes, climate pattern changes in the east mediterranean, vague accounts of invaders from the sea recorded in Egyptian records, and a general boom in piracy attributed as contributors of the collapse. It's not unreasonable to suppose that environmental factors started a chain of events that resulted in a collapse of trade in the Mediterranean, and provided the instability for populations with ready access to then-abundant bronze weaponry to rebel against the existing religious political and social orders in the region for several hundred years

>>2844820
Just ignore nitwits like this, they only say provocative nonsense because they gauge the worth of their opinions by how many people acknowledge them.

>>2845896
Hate to break it to you, but up until the start of the crusades, knights were primarily thugs on horses who terrorized the countryside for their lord's benefit. The church was constantly at odds with upstart nobles and their retinues of psychopaths. The crusades were largely a clever political maneuver to bring them to heel and redirect this military capability for the gain of the church. The chivalry code was another effort to curb this growing social strata, this time by rulers with similar fears

>>2845798
Why does every "what period in history would you live in" have right-wingers bitching about the good ole days when women and colored folk knew their place, like it was some golden age for anyone but a privileged minority that we should all go back too?

>>2845949
>people like the Kardashians or all those instagram sluts would not be revered as gods
There were plenty of talentless attention whores in ancient Rome. Celebrities/children of aristocrats have always acted like that.

>>2845983
>Piss off you
lol no u

>>2846691
>that we should all go back to
No, that is not the purpose of this thread.
You're just a faggot.

>>2846701
>No, that is not the purpose of this thread.
I agree, they're retarded and needed to be shamed into leaving

>You're just a faggot.
I see that characteristic right-wing intellect, firing at maximum capacity.

>>2846710
i also enjoy spending my time on /his/ OWNING right wing RETARDS haha. I'm witty!

>>2846738
I see you still have absolutely nothing of substance to say.

Thanks for being a self-fulfilling stereotype

>>2846765
this has been my second post the entire thread, which you've made even better with your epic snappy retorts.

>>2845866
I think being a woman in genral was dangerous by todays standard, literally property.

I wonder if that was the best way???

>>2844026
Mid/late 70s Yugoslavia.

>comfy socialism (chill employment, no gulags)
>access to all countries
>Can buy Western shit and Soviet shit
>Thriving music scene, some amazing rock bands (and then later on more experimental stuff)
>virtually no political drama, country is run relatively smoothly and the propaganda is positive and hopeful
>Assertive and competent women who consider themselves equal to men but still have a family-oriented flavor and avoid the excesses of feminism
>countercultures are on the rise and are exciting
>general feeling of naivete, about the world and future, everything is possible
>live a comfy life with a girl I met at a sock-hop and our two kids in an apartment I got for free for working at my low-effort office job
>drive a car I got at ridiculously low prices and take vacations every year to our beaches, mountains, rural areas, historical sites...
>Literally not a care in the world (except knowing it's all going to end 15 years from now)

>>2846925
Sounds pretty tight senpai.

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>>2844026
i eish i was a Roman qt girl or trap during the fall of Rome

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>>2844372
>North America 65.5 million years ago
>a dark jungle

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>>2844160
>He doesn't want the opportunity to go to the 'Nam

>>2846430
>bringing race in to everything
fucking americans

>>2846430
Rome was still cleaner than anything before or since. At least until the 20th century. People today take basic hygiene for granted.

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Pax Britannica
>Ywn land in an undiscovered island in the pacific and claim it for your chosen monarch or republic including the tan skinned women
>You will never discover new lands filled with new wildlife.
>Ywn gun down hoards of savages in the noble quest of bringing civilization to bumfuck nowhere and phat stackz to your motherland along with ebony babes
>Ywn be a diplomat captured by some sultan only for your homeland to dispatch a fleet that is made of steel causing him to grovel at your feet
>Ywn go hunting for tigers in India and sip a Gin and tonic in the sun
>Ywn just draw lines on a map for the bantz and ruin a whole tribes and cultures just because you want the line straight with Pierre
>Ywn never ride the plains of the west or fight in the civil war for the Confederates, begging Lee to let you charge up that hill once more
>Ywn read a letter sent from your conservative wife back home telling you about some trivial bourgeois politics and how she misses you inside her whilst you get fanned and entertained by an Indian servant girl.
>Ywn ride down injuns who have attacked a village with the 7th or capture an outlaw for a bounty
>Ywn retire to sunny place away from trouble and live like a king among the subjugated natives
>Ywn never have your father tell you about the horrors of the Napoleonic wars or your sons ask about the savagery of the Maori
Instead you will shitpost on 4chins. Such is life.

>>2844476
>Implying any society that values safety over liberty isn't a dystopia

I'm black, so no not really. Every point of history before the last twenty years or so has been pretty fucking shit to live in.

>>2849602
Kinda interesting how people have these fantasies where they just abuse the fuck out of people, makes one wonder what made them so fucked in the head.

>>2844479
stop telling the truth these autists don't want to face it

>>2846306
not as surprising or coincidental as you believe, a piled form is the basic-est and dragoons can be inspired from iguanas, gators, dino bones, sneks and the like.

>>2844554
But, Anon, we all currently exist before the big bang. You're already there.

>>2844137
>uuuh wow bad things happened in the past wtf???

>>2849662
I dunno, North Africa was pretty baller at points.