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Rules by which a great empire may be reduced to a small one (1773)
- sebast_bake 1y agoTimeless rules… They can be applied generally to large organisations, and serve as an excellent summary of symptoms of elite blindness
- SwtCyber 1y agoMakes you wonder if it's elite blindness or just the gravitational pull of power structures repeating themselves
- burnt-resistor 1y agoBecause most people will silently endure abuse for far too long that teach billionaires, politicians, and celebrities that there are no boundaries. They can be pedophiles and pederasts, shoot people in the street, and lawlessly disband food aid organizations (killing 13M+) without consequences. (And receive more investment because they've wired their lairs for video and audio recording to collect Kompromat.)
- pstuart 1y agoIt's all powered by hate, which itself is powered by ignorance and lack of critical reasoning skills.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoYep. It's the insulated, disconnected insouciance and unbounded selfishness that comes with a distinct lack of consideration, vulnerability, and theory of mind. To restore survival and decency, redistribution of wealth above $200 million needs to happen in all nations to put the morbidly rich on "GLP-1" and an incremental tax to prevent excessive wealth hoarding. Of course, this also requires the political coercion or overthrowing of corrupt regimes that won't allow fair, democratic elections.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y agoLet's not forget the monarch at the time had serious mental health issues.
- lc9er 1y agoSeems to be common at the extreme levels of wealth
- doitLP 1y agoTrue but he wasn’t ruling like the kings of old. Parliament was the governing body and was very powerful even if the king still retain more power of redress and authority than he does today
- jjk166 1y agoKing George III didn't start really start showing symptoms of mental illness until 1788, and it was only during temporary periods until 1810. There had been a brief episode in 1765, but it was poorly documented, and is described more like a depressive episode than the mania he suffered later in life. All the same, during the period leading up to and during the American Revolution, he was his regular self. It's also worth noting that by this point in time the monarch was not really the decision maker for most affairs of state. While he was likely the most politically powerful monarch after the Glorious Revolution, Parliament was nevertheless still calling the shots.
- hellojimbo 1y agoIs this like the prince or art of war where we are supposed to draw some lesson from very specific critiques and extrapolate it to every scenario.
- skybrian 1y agoYeah, historical analogies are good mostly for suggesting possibilities you hadn't thought of. They don't prove anything.
- bigDinosaur 1y agoEmpires having a rise and fall or increase/decrease in power/land is probably the most evidence supported grand narrative of history there is, although the specifics are always going to be different the general problems are perhaps universal (see also: The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph A. Tainter)
- skybrian 1y agoMaybe I'm missing what you're saying, but I think that by itself, the bare statement that "sometimes empires get larger and sometimes they get smaller" is about as useless as saying that stock markets fluctuate? But the reasons why it happened in various cases are often worth reading about. That's why we read history.
- bigDinosaur 1y agoThe trend is secular, so fluctuations are not the point.
- majormajor 1y ago"Things change" is unconvincing to me as a "grand narrative." More an evidence-supported obvious fact.
- bigDinosaur 1y ago
- unit149 1y ago[dead]
- croemer 1y agoInteresting that all nouns are capitalized, like in modern German and unlike in most other modern languages that use the Latin alphabet.
- linguae 1y agoThe Declaration of Independence and the original US Constitution (the main portion plus the Bill of Rights) are also written in this style, though not all nouns are consistently capitalized.
- analog31 1y agoI was curious, so in case anybody else was, the first printed versions of these documents also retain this style. It wasn't just a habit of handwriting.
- Telemakhos 1y agoSatire, Piece, and Virtues are the first Nouns that I find not capitalized. They occur within the first few Sentences, and I trust that my Observation and Diligence in this Matter might not go without Recognition.
- alexchamberlain 1y agoThose are part of the modern day commentary, rather than the historic document that starts later in the article. The historic document itself seems to use capitalised nouns fairly consistently, though I haven't tried to find exceptions.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoNow, we can't even get people to capitalize proper nouns to disambiguate soil from a planet.
- prpl 1y agoor engineers from Engineers
- tonyhart7 1y agoexcept china, china for some reason always unite despite many civil war and unrest like imagine at some point roman empire and china is co-exist together and 2000 years later only 1 survive
- didibus 1y agoIt's true, China went through a ton of unification -> division -> reunification phases in history. There's even a famous quote for this: "what is long divided must unite, what is long united must divide" I think one possible reason is that the Qin Dynasty really managed to assimilate everyone into the same shared values, religion, language, writing, and so on. Other empires didn't succeed to that level, and the people in them always had strong differences, language, values, religion, beliefs, writing, philosophy, and so on.
- jjmarr 1y agoIn Western tradition, an "empire" is definitionally unassimilated in that there are multiple groups/territories ruled centrally from a metropole. A state would no longer be an empire once it assimilates disparate territories.
- thaumasiotes 1y agoNo, there is an alternative (and far, far more traditional) definition in which an emperor outranks a king, which is how China is termed an "empire".
- thaumasiotes 1y ago> I think one possible reason is that the Qin Dynasty really managed to assimilate everyone into the same shared values, religion, language, writing, and so on. Other empires didn't succeed to that level Qin conquered the other Chinese states and the ensuing dynasty flamed out immediately. The work of creating an empire was done by the following Han dynasty. > There's even a famous quote for this: "what is long divided must unite, what is long united must divide" 分久必合，合久必分 https://ctext.org/sanguo-yanyi/ch1 https://ctext.org/sanguo-yanyi/ch1 Often given as "the empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide", but your translation is much closer to the text, which doesn't mention empires except in that it follows this statement ["They say that across the course of history, what has long been divided must unite, and what has long been united must divide"] with a discussion of Chinese governments schisming and unifying.
- chrisco255 1y agoFor context, Franklin had already been in Britain for 13 years by this point trying to lobby Parliament and the King about various grievances with the Crown's governance over the colonies. He would spend another 2 years trying in vain to get them to listen, before finally sailing back to America in March 1775.
- wpm 1y agoIf anyone is ever in London and looking for a fun two-hour diversion, the Ben Franklin museum is an interesting look at this time in his life
- m463 1y agoI loved the Franklin Institute, but (lol) it was in philadelphia.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- begueradj 1y agoHe was a Freemason :)
- mplewis9z 1y agoThey're talking about the Benjamin Franklin House, which is in fact in London.
- m463 1y agoI realize that. He's like the colossus of rhodes with his feet on two continents.
- amy_petrik 1y agoHe founded the frankling institute in philly and declared it shall have a giant heart, he founded the university of pennsylvania state university, he invented electricity, the very pipes series that the internet interconnected, he invented glasses (that you wear, not drinking glasses those were Jefferson's invention), he invented karate, he invented the public library, he invented volunteer firefighters, he invented doggystyle position, he invented viral books and meme books, he invented french fries, he invented swimming fins, he invented swimming snorkel, he invented the wood stove (cooking AND heat), he invented urinary catheters, he invented the cotton gin, he invented an early type of musical synthesizer called the arm-monica, he invented the odometer, he invented oil pressure gauge, he invented the limbo dance, but most of all, he definitely founded the franklin institute and it definitely wasn't named after him after the fact
- nelox 1y ago[flagged]
- physicles 1y agoIndeed. As an American, I found The Rest Is History’s four part series on the American war for independence particularly enlightening.
- hyperion2010 1y agoWhat you have written (copied from an llm?) is utter nonsense. The publication date for this is 1773, nearly two years before battles in Lexington and Concord start in 1775.
- somenameforme 1y agoAnd yeah I think he's having himself a bit of an LLM experiment. [1] Didn't expect that in a history thread. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44820586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44820586
- somenameforme 1y agoSkillfully diplomatic? He's overtly mocking the behaviors of the British Empire. You're also off on your timeline. The 'shot heard round the world' would happen in 1775, not 1773, years after this letter was written. Even the Boston Tea Party hadn't yet happened. His overall complaint, and its solution are also rather plain. Britain was trying to impose their authority like a foreign occupation, rather than treating the colonies as an equal and integrated part of the Empire. There's probably no timeline where Britain holds onto the colonies simply because of the distance involved - people don't like being ruled by those who don't represent themselves in any meaningful way. But they almost certainly accelerated the end through hubris. They were the Mighty and Civilized British Empire, and the colonies were just uncultured backwoods vagrants who's existence was only at the leisure of the Crown.
- 0xbadcafebee 1y ago> Britain was trying to impose their authority like a foreign occupation, rather than treating the colonies as an equal and integrated part of the Empire. ...to be fair, Brits back at home paid way, way more tax than Colonials did, and also had to pay market rate for tea, among other things. If Britain treated the Colonies like the rest of Britain, it wouldn't have taken until 1775 for them to revolt. Didn't have to be that way, though. Treat the Colonies more like the Persian Empire treated its conquered states, and the USA today would just be "lower Canada".
- thadk 1y agoSometimes the original typesetting is helpful to understand these kinds of artifacts: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_rules-for-reducing-a-gre_franklin-benjamin_1793/page/n3/mode/2up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_rules-for...
- phi-go 1y agoThis reads like the author has a lisp, with the letter s looking like an f.
- Aloha 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
- kuschku 1y agoFun fact: That long s accidentally lead to a new character being created. In German, we've got words like "dass". Back in the day, every s that wasn't at the end of a word was written as long s, so "dass" would've been written like "daſs", which got turned into ß. That's why until the recent orthographic reforms of 1996 and 2006 "dass" was written as "daß". Aside: in some regions, "dass" would've been written like "dasz" / "daſz". That's why the letter is called Eszett (S-Z) even though it's capitalised as two consecutive "s".
- BeFlatXIII 1y agoWhat was the impetus of the orthographic reforms? Is there still a sizable contingent of Germans who use the old orthography?
- majewsky 1y agoTo make the language easier to learn. Lots of languages go through orthographic reforms from time to time, English being one of the notable exceptions because there is no central authority that could impose rule changes in a way that would ensure that most language users eventually fall in line. I entered school in Germany the very same year that the orthographic reform came into force, so I never learned the legacy spelling, but I certainly found it weird how much adult people at the time detested the rules that six-year-old me considered to be very reasonable (esp. the ss/ß reordering and the ban on fusing tripled consonants in compound words). This is my very personal perspective. If you're interested in a more complete picture, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_der_deutschen_Rechtschreibung_von_1996/Pro_und_Kontra https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_der_deutschen_Rechtschr... looks like a good summary (through translation if necessary).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- SwtCyber 1y agoWild how he predicted that satire would do more to polarize than persuade
- hopelite 1y ago> The substance behind the “Rules” was scarcely new… It reminds me of something my grandfather would say “You can tell people a lot of things… you just can’t tell them the truth!” The introduction also explores this theme with the explanation of how it was only the “biting” nature of the satire he was aware would not persuade, but would outrage in different ways… possibly intentional ways. I tell people this a lot, because especially regarding historical events, the actual start dates of those events far precede the recorded date that is usually associated with martial actions. The American Revolution had its origins starting in 1730. The American “Civil War” had its origins starting in 1820. The dates of the starts of most historical events don’t just happen on that day. It’s always bothered me immensely, because it’s so myopic and rather stupid in many ways. The lead up to and the planning of anything is always the far more important part than the execution, and if you don’t know that, you will fail under anything but the most advantageous circumstances.
- potato3732842 1y agoI greatly dislike this reductive sort of pop culture history. Where does it end? The Religion act of 1592? Henry VIII deciding that boats 'n' hoes are more important than being Catholic? Some field in East Sussex in 1066? A bridge outside Rome? Some uppity carpenter? A bunch of jews sick of building pyramids? Some apes that stood up? Some rat-like things that managed to not get eaten by dinosaurs just long enough for a space rock to hit our planet? The first identifiable steps of the assembly of the myriad (and exponentially increasing the further back you go) of necessary key preconditions that come together to result in a thing that happened does not mean that that's when that thing started happening. We are all sitting at the tail end of an incomprehensibly long line of specific events that were in no way pre-ordained and ultimately depend upon a lot of chance and individual whims. The american revolution could have been prevented in the 1770s and maybe we'd have turned out like Canada or Northern Ireland. The civil war could have been prevented as late as 1860 and we'd have probably got rid of slavery in the 1870s or 80s like Brazil.
- brookst 1y agoOdd take on causality. It’s perfectly reasonable to say that an event was caused by earlier events and also that different actions in the intervening years could have produced different outcomes. The ceramic bits on the floor were caused when I dropped the bowl, even though they could have been prevented had I managed to catch it.