The book Four Lost Cities attempts to provide a counter example to the collapse narrative. I’m not sure that it succeeds completely, but it’s an interesting read nonetheless. (The four lost cities being Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Angkor and Cahokia)
From a certain point of view, Pompeii came back even stronger after the eruption.
I’ve been listening to Duncan since the early days of Rome, but I think this is the first time that I’ve ever seen his face.
It’s always weird when you’ve been listening to someone for years and then… uh, that wasn’t who I was picturing.
Except Germanic speaking regions where their conquest efforts largely failed. It created a hard limit to Roman expansion.
It’s more like “How America could fall like the Weimar Republic”, if you ask me.
We’ll soon see if the mistake of letting off putsch perpetrators with a slap on the wrist is repeated.
Good song, very ear worm, playing in head now. 
It’s kind of interesting to me that in the 20th century there was the fall of the Tsars, the Ottomans, and the new totalitarian movements in Europe, leaving for the first time a world where nobody claimed to be the heir of the Roman Empire. The first time China has been without a dynasty too.
America of course is still modelled in part after ancient Rome in its earlier phase. It’s just too bad it’s a republic not a democracy because then it wouldn’t have this same problem. (/s on that phrase, though really being more democratic would help a lot.)
A friend of mine’s habit of referring to the CCP as “The Communist Dynasty,” is probably a least as accurate as referring to the Yuan dynasty as “Chinese” since they were Mongol invaders ruling over China.
It’s not so much projection as the broken clock being right twice a day, though. Both major American parties don’t really have a consistent ideology if you look at them historically.
Stalin was called (even within the USSR, but privately), “The Red Tsar” for similar reasons.
Just build an octagon cage around the country and you wouldn’t be able tell the difference!
A couple of years ago, Putin’s lackeys promoted the idea of Moscow as the third Rome, This propaganda play has old roots.
Didn’t both have to be comprehensively defeated in war for that to happen? Not the sort of alternative @HMSGoose was looking for, I suspect.
(Or maybe you were /s and I failed to see it.)
Yes, basically every long lived empire had some period of misrule wedged in between their high points. It is only looking back that collapse is clear and inevitable. King Edward II wasn’t exactly a strong sign for the rising British empire. The Athenian coup of 411 BC was followed by the repeated collapse and restoration of democracy for a few decades.
Thanks. I really like Grendel - though that album is a bit of a departure from their earlier stuff. Harsh Generation is my favorite album. Very Harsh EBM cyberpunky. Age of the Disposable body forgoes a lot of the distorted vocals the earlier albums relied upon.
Enjoy!
Rome did not have a bunch of nuclear weapons…
America may very well fall, but it definitely won’t be like Rome.
“Which wasn’t holy, roman, or an empire.”
Keep in mind that the far-right/QAnons have their own crazy-pants version of history.
It turns out that there was no Rome, it was Byzantium all along. (And antisemitism, of course.)
Byzantium as the mighty fortress of white supremacy? smh.
The Limes Germanicus is were we get the word “limit”
We for sure get the word limit from Latin limes, plural limites, meaning a boundary, or sometimes for instance a path between fields or distinction between things. But what makes you say it comes from this particular example of that word? 
The forts were called limes, and the frontier was named for the row of limes, and this was the root of the word limit.
Whether is specifically came from the Limes Germanicus, and not the more general term, I could say. Not really my forte 
