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Surely this isn't the first time you've encountered this idea? Britain explicitly held this policy for hundreds of years with regards to continental Europe (mak
by Armisael16 11y ago
Surely this isn't the first time you've encountered this idea? Britain explicitly held this policy for hundreds of years with regards to continental Europe (make sure neither France nor Germany could take over the whole continent).
- danbruc 11y agoSo we should go back to slavery because slavery was thought of as a good idea for a couple thousand years?
- SFLemonade 11y agoWoah! Massive logical jump there!
- danbruc 11y agoWhere is the jump? Something was done in the past, why shouldn't we continue doing so? I of course assumed that the initial comment expressed some degree of endorsement and did not just state facts.
- Malician 11y agoI read no form of endorsement in the comment, but rather a sense that this is a very common tactic in realpolitik throughout history and should not be surprising.
- danbruc 11y agoSo because slavery was common in the past I should not be surprised if someone thinks about slavery today? This makes absolutely no sense. My point doesn't really depend on the endorsement.
- cyorir 11y agoArmisael's comment is not optative; he is not saying that we should be doing something because it has been done in the past, but providing an example of when something was done in the past.
- douche 11y agoDivide an conquer is the oldest trick in the book (except maybe knock them on the head with a bigger rock than they can hit you on the head with). Imperial China repeatedly followed the same policy of trying to keep the outlying nomadic peoples fractured and prevented from uniting under a single leader. The results for the Chinese state were not good when Turkish, Mongol, or Manchu leaders were able to unite the disparate clans under a single banner, to give another example.