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The last Romans are still around

signoregalilei.com

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Re: The last Romans are still around

#241

Post by pjio »

empath75 wrote: post #222
pjio wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that the "Heiliges Römisches Reich" (literal translation "Holy Roman Realm") considered itself the successor of the Roman Republic. The English referred to the Roman Republic by what it was in the modern sense: an empire. Therefore its self-proclaimed successor got translated as "Holy Roman Empire", which, unlike the original, it is not.

Almost every single statement in this sentence was wrong. It was founded as the Sacrum Imperium -- literally the Holy Empire. "Heiliges Römisches Reich" was a later German translation of the Latin term for it. Charlemagne explicitly had himself crowned as the emperor. It was never in any sense a republic and it never pretended to be.

In the Latin phrasing, which they likely used, the word "Imperium" appears. Good point. Still, the original meaning of "Imperium" was slightly different than what it is today. So my point goes more like this: The Germans didn't claim to found an empire in the modern sense, so it's not that surprising that Voltaire pointed out, it isn't one.

Re: The last Romans are still around

#242

Post by Amezarak »

derdi wrote: post #239
Amezarak wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtually nobody really uses that definition of species because it’s totally untenable in practice - you’d put every species of wolf, dog, and coyote in the same bucket, for a simple example, but it gets much worse than this. Ligers are sometimes fertile, are lions and tigers the same species? Are vast swaths of the current catalogue of hominids the same species? When you get into fish and birds this becomes even mor…

OK. You don't agree with the OP's "arbitrary lines", I don't agree with the OP's arbitrary lines, I still don't understand why you felt you needed to attack me for this. But I hope you have a lovely day.

No, I have no problem with OP's arbitrary lines - they are meaningful even though reality necessitates any such lines of this type (categorizing individuals) be drawn arbitrarily. What I have a problem with is people moralizing about science - we shouldn't even think about things because they make you uncomfortable.

There is an is-ought distinction. We can reason, investigate, and speculate about the ancient Roman people and their distinctiveness and what populations today have the closest genetic distance without there being any implication whatsoever socially or legally.

Re: The last Romans are still around

#243

Post by bloppe »

carlosjobim wrote: post #177
rodric wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I can appreciate this, it was not the historical point of view of the people calling themselves Americans. “What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman,…

Does it matter much if they called themselves American? The tribes and nations on the continent were certainly more related to each other than to the arrivals from other continents. Just as European tribes and nations were more related to each other than to faraway peoples. And African tribes and nations. The "American" described in your quote there by Crevecoeur is not an American in any ethnic sense. Any modern non…

There is far more human genetic diversity within Africa then there is in the rest of the world combined.

Also, your notion that certain people are inherently tied to certain places is only true if you accept arbitrary cutoffs for arrival time. The Lakota migrated from the Great lakes to the western planes in the 1700s, but it's hard to imagine them without their horses (which came from the old world) and bison (which they never would have hunted in ~Michigan). More time has passed since the arrival of the Spanish in Tenochtitlan, than between the arrival of the Aztecs (who probably migrated there from ~Arizona) and the Spanish. And of course, All the Native Americans descended from tribes that crossed the Bering straight from Russia, and every human's ancestors lived exclusively in Africa for a very long time. Anglo Saxons, Gaels, Norse, etc were constantly on the move within Europe before any of them crossed the Atlantic. Israelites displaced Canaanites before being displaced by Romans, then Arabs, then "coming back" after WW2. At any point in time, in any location on earth, the ethnic groups considered "native" almost certainly descended from people who were not considered native within at most a couple hundred years. Many white people can trace over 2 hundred years of ancestry in the new world. To say that's not enough to qualify as "native" is to have an incoherent conception of nativeness.

English doesn't help. I realize I myself used the term "Native American" while trying to argue that the term is out of date, but our language just was never equipped to describe these kinds of long term, highly chaotic processes.

Re: The last Romans are still around

#244

Post by carlosjobim »

bloppe wrote: post #243
carlosjobim wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter much if they called themselves American? The tribes and nations on the continent were certainly more related to each other than to the arrivals from other continents. Just as European tribes and nations were more related to each other than to faraway peoples. And African tribes and nations. The "American" described in your quote there by Crevecoeur is not an American in any ethnic sense. Any modern non…

There is far more human genetic diversity within Africa then there is in the rest of the world combined. Also, your notion that certain people are inherently tied to certain places is only true if you accept arbitrary cutoffs for arrival time. The Lakota migrated from the Great lakes to the western planes in the 1700s, but it's hard to imagine them without their horses (which came from the old world) and bison (which…

This is exactly the kind of interesting and wonderful discussions which people loose out on when they claim that the entire world is a melting pot and no ethnicities exist etc etc. Which you still do, even though you have good knowledge of anthropology.

There is nothing arbitrary about making cutoffs. It is difficult and undefined and subject to splendid complexity. After all its people we're dealing with here, so of course it is complex. But there are obvious external differences and similarities between people, and denying this takes a level of warping one's mind which would permanently damage the mind. For no benefit to anybody. There's also history, archeological evidence and genetic evidence.

What I notice in this discussion is people demanding exact limits everywhere, and throwing everything away when there isn't any. But there are some very exact limits, and the discovery of the New World is one of those. The people who were there before were more related to each other than they were to the arrivals.

> Many white people can trace over 2 hundred years of ancestry in the new world. To say that's not enough to qualify as "native" is to have an incoherent conception of nativeness.

"Native" isn't any badge of honour. Saying somebody is native to the land while the other is not doesn't mean anything to their qualities.

With the research into people's heritage and history, the goal is to go as far as you can before the mists of time become too thick. Beyond that, there's not much we can do but speculate blindly.

> There is far more human genetic diversity within Africa then there is in the rest of the world combined.

I've heard this before, but it just doesn't match up with what we can see and experience in physical reality. So they've measured in the wrong way quite frankly. The difference between people (everybody in the world) is in their genes, but you can probably not measure just quantitively. Especially since humans share an astonishing amount of DNA with beasts and with plants.

I can paint a house red and a house blue, and then a scientist will say that they are more similar in colour to each other than the red house is to a rose, because he just measures the chemicals in the paint.

Or, to loop back to the core of this conversation. There is no exact definition and clear boundary as to what is a boat and what is not a boat. There is no exact limit possible to define between a person being beautiful or not, but you can still point out a lot of measurements of all kinds, and most importantly everybody knows it when they see and experience it.

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