I always thought it was because the steppe ended in roughly where Hungary is today. Couldn’t feed their horses or create a supply line deep into Europe proper. It was also too decentralized to just sack one or two cities and have the whole continent. Realistically, it was probably due to internal politics though. They couldn’t manage an empire of that size without serious reform.
You’re half right. White people are not superior. HOWEVER… Your argument as to why is complete trash. The Mongol empire as impressive as it was didn’t touch SE Asia, India, most of Russia, the entire fucking continent of Africa, or anywhere not connected to Eurasia. Also it wasn’t the Mongols who burned the great library of Alexandria.
Where did I applaud the Mongols? Also, they burned the Library of Baghdad.
They’re just saying that many other parts of the world weren’t scourged by Mongols so the theory that Europe rose to prominence because it was spared doesn’t really hold water.
That’s if I understood them correctly.
The post is a jab at the recent controversy on Sydney Sweeney ad for American Eagle jeans, claiming there is white supremacist undertone, not about being spared from the Mongol invasion itself is what lifts societies to prominence.
You can’t really dismiss the main text of the post and claim the subtext makes it irrelevant.
Europe was considered a backwater fringe by the time the Mongols under Subutai arrived. I mean, if Europe is inherently superior, it would not have been considered as “backwater” in the first place. The more prosperous and more developed areas then were Middle East, Central Asia and the Far East. If the Mongols continued advancing and ravaged those who did not submit, Europe would have been set back a lot further or may not even have ever become the major power as it did. Being unscathed by the Mongol destruction gave them a leg up later. It is very much the same story as the USA. US was considered second or at the very least third rate by Europeans. But not being destroyed by the Second World War and one of the two remaining major economy and manufacturing country gave US it the massive advantage post-war.
A couple of things come to mind.
Didn’t the mongols ravage poland? That’s Europe. Meaning Europe did not get spared.
European philosophy and math started back with ancient greece. They were ahead of the rest of the world in geometry and math in the year 1000 B. C.
But empires come and go. The next empire took the science and further improved. The romans, Macedonians, ottomans etc. Europe is not one people.
At the time of the mongols the Catholics were in charge of most of Europe. Kingdoms were organized. “Backwater” might be a bit of a stretch?
There was war between the Christians and the Muslims at the time so Europeans might have been expecting attack. It might have been very difficult for the mongols to conquer the European territories.
Millions of Europeans preferred USA over europe for the last three centuries because the opportunities were scarce. Europeans were mainly a farmer people so land was equal to prosperity. They gave out farm land for free back then. Which one would you prefer?
Do you have any idea of how much war and destruction the European countries have committed against each other? It is not so simple as to say “peace is the only driver of prosperity and science”.
Strawman. Original Commenter (OC) didn’t say you applauded the Mongols. All we’re doing in this thread is correcting facts, not applying judgements
The Mongols couldn’t handle forests.
Didn’t they stop at russian forests where their horses became useless?
More like they got lucky they stumbled onto a land teeming with resources that saw war as an exhibition sport and not a “who can do the most genocide” competition.
How was the destruction wrought by the Mongols “incurred” - do you think they’re god’s punishment for something?
“If you had not committed such great sins, Heaven would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”
Yes
My jeans are superior because they have thick, double-stitched belt loops and deep front pockets.
My genes on the other hand are a hot mess partially responsible for my lifelong suicidal depression. Thanks Mom.
I read a theory somewhere that the Mongols use of dead bodies as weapons is major factor creating the black plague.
This theory is on Wikipedia:
Some studies indicate the Black Death, which devastated Europe in the 1340s, may have traveled from China along the trade routes of the Mongol Empire. In 1347, the Genoese possessor of Caffa, a great trade emporium on the Crimean Peninsula, came under siege by an army of Mongol warriors under the command of Janibeg. After a protracted siege during which the Mongol army was reportedly withering from disease, they decided to use the infected corpses as a biological weapon. The corpses were catapulted over the city walls, infecting the inhabitants.[142][143] The Genoese traders fled, transferring the plague via their ships into the south of Europe, from where it rapidly spread. The total number of deaths worldwide from the pandemic is estimated at 75–200 million with up to 50 million deaths in Europe alone.[103]
Plaque isn’t spread by corpses, but by fleas
https://historycollection.com/mongols-used-plague-biological-weapon/
It also is spread by the buboes on the bodies that rupture and spread infected pus and bloos. Throw a bunch of bodies over a wall and one will eventually infect someone inside, who will infect everyone else.
I mean… theorethically it could have helped spread it to the particular city, but I don’t think that would’ve influenced the epidemic spread of the disease much. Locked-in besieged cities would -in themselves- been prime locations for the disease to teke hold.
In fact, your own article basicly states as much:
However, there’s no reason to tie the biological attack at Caffa with the introduction of the disease.
My question is, where does one purchase a pair of superior jeans, and are they really as durable as the name implies?
…or is there some other aspect that makes said jeans superior?
My Jeans have an elastic waist. Do I have the superior jeans now ?
Yes, although you are now depriving yourself of having a superior belt, or; dare I say … superior suspenders!!
I’ve always considered people who wear suspenders as suspicious
I wear suspenders. Your suspicion is justified.
Now… I ponder to myself; Dost thine elastic bands of suspension have true justification, or perhaps thyself dost maketh a statement upon modern fashion?
I have some AE jeans that are made out of some kind of stretchy shit that are pretty great. Can’t speak to the durability because I mostly wear them to my office job so they’re not getting a ton of wear and tear but they’re pretty old at this point and no real signs of wear on them from that.
Superior Jeans ^(or how I wrote a poem & you learned I was da bomb)
I own a pair of stretchy jeans; they make my legs look mean
Superior jeans are an obscenity
I feel superior in my gender-indfferent-inity
Blue, gray - you always tend to fray I still love you anyway
I have Jack and Jones jeans for years and haven’t had a problem with them. They still look as new as on the day I bought them. Plus they’re more affordable.
The ‘Council of Jean Superiority’ has gathered & deliberated on the status of your jeans.
The consensus is in. Congratulations!!
Your jeans have been deemed superior
where does one purchase a pair of superior jeans
China, ironically enough.
Japan has some good jean makers
So that’s why the Mongols invaded China!!!
Bangladesh maybe
I like Edwin.
Not one race, nor any race is better, if you believe one race is above others, if you believe skin colour is predictive of anything, you are the inferior person over all others, because you are an idiot for believing bullshit. You’re not intelligent enough to get over propaganda.
“White” is sort of inferior as a concept of a race, because it’s not even a single race. Just whatever is convenient for racism. Sometimes, Jewish people are white, and sometimes they aren’t, for example.
Race isn’t actually a thing, it’s a categorical method of sorting ethnicities into groups based on variable forms of bigotry.
Jewish people come from people who follow the religion, like ethiopian jews, who are persecuted and castrated in isreal, or arabic jews. There are a lot of different people in the world, being different ethnicities. Some jewesh people are white, some aren’t, based on the parents/cultures they are brought in.
There’s a clear sense in the general populace that whiteness is better, etc, and this is perpetrated from the eurocentric point of view, made for he whole world to “achieve”, even if it’s clearly bullshit, like indians (totally not because of the british (/s)) trying literally to wash their colours.
This doesn’t even make sense, because we’re all homo sapiens sapies, but who cares, some pieces of shit indoctrinated all societies with that crap to make more money (blacks and other ethnicities were seen as better at manual labour and violent, so it would be better to put them to work as slaves, not because of profit, but because of their inhereted bullshit i just invented).
Some jewesh people are white, some aren’t, based on the parents/cultures they are brought in.
That is simply not the way that “white” is used. The skin color is a convenient excuse, but being pale skinned is not ever sufficient to actually be white. For example, if you’re an albino child of black parents, very few people will consider you to be “white”. Similarly, there have been times historically where, if you’re ethnically Jewish, no matter how pale your skin is, you will not be considered white. Other times, they get to be white.
There are incredibly pale skinned Indian and Chinese people who, despite being whiter than most “white” people, would still be excluded from being “white”.
There is no definition of “white” that you can guarantee a person will be white simply by looking at their skin color. Skin color can only exclude people from being white.
My example included black jewish people (Ethiopian jews are NOT white in any sense of the word) and white jewish people.
There is no definition of “white” that you can guarantee a person will be white simply by looking at their skin color. Skin color can only exclude people from being white.
Exactly.
The point is that you said “Some jewish people are white”, but since we’re talking about the definition of “white”, that can’t be true. They aren’t white because they cannot be defined as white by looking at their skin color. If you simply meant “Some jewish people are pale skinned”, then I’ll just say that your phrasing was unintentionally misleading.
We can look at this from several ways, I like the more societal way of it, instead of “whiteness” being whatever someone wants it to be. Is someone treated in the same way as other people from a certain ethnicity? How people perceive them in everyday life (like going to the supermarket or how a cop will see them)? This is more reasonable to argue, as society is always over whatever bullshit some racist invented. With this we can argue from a sociological standpoint, like colorism, etc.
Did Richard Feynman receive treatment like a brown latino, an indian, an asian, a black person or a white person?
This is intrinsic to the question of racism and whiteness, not some vague “pale skinned” thing, and more in line with academic work, because IT’S MORE MEASURABLE, it’s based on real things people endure, and on this sense, the “pale skin” makes a complete difference, from the middle of the pacific to Idk, the moon, not some random thing. If you want, I can recomend some very good books about this topic, because arguing based on definitions that aren’t good starting points can’t go anywhere, we need to define things not based on some common sense deffinition, but on observable and logically sound things.
Angela Davis (for an anglisized point of view) is a good starting point, because she talks about gender too, it’s all related.
Edit: good starting point to understanding race and racism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/race/
No one can claim superior jeans
My jeans are pretty awesome. They’re actually durable, like good jeans should be. IDK what happened to Levi, but they suck these days. Don’t know my brand off hand… Something Bay, or whatever.
I have worn Levi for forever, and you aren’t wrong. They used to be great, but for many years now, they’ve been garbage. I gotta find a better brand.
Rise of west is more attributed to the colonization no? They did have really good naval technology.
It is a fascinating question, isn’t it? Why specifically did the left edge of Europe, and basically no one else, take over the world?
I totally get that the New World just didn’t stand a chance because by some quirk there are basically no domesticatable animals native to the Western hemisphere. Imagine trying to bootstrap yourself to the iron age without the horse, cow, pig, chicken, sheep, goat, donkey, dog or cat. So when Cortez landed on the Yucatan with steel weapons and armor, firearms, horses etc. he encountered civilizations on par with the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt, and that was the most advanced it got in the New World.
But the Old World, AfroEurAsia, had been in contact with each other basically forever. Why was it that Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands and Great Britain became world dominating global superpowers when, say, Japan, Korea, China, Southeast Asia or India didn’t? I can understand why the coastal and island nations on the left edge of the “world” might invest in sea power and start sailing the world…why didn’t the coastal and island nations on the right edge do the same?
Yeah the Western empires grew to global supremacy via colonization which is still echoed in the present day, the United States of America, former colony of Great Britain, is still the most powerful and influential nation on Earth. Britain sailed so we could fly. Why didn’t anyone else in the world do the same?
Well, it seems that Western Europe had a lethal combination of three things that no one else in the world had:
- Vested interest in sea power. Relatively small home countries with huge amounts of coastline, boats are important.
- Knowledge of, and desire for, foreign made goods. They knew of the existence of Asia, knew of silk, porcelain, spices etc. And wanted to go get them for themselves. Meanwhile the Asians didn’t really want anything from Europe they didn’t already have.
- Extroverts. Everybody else was focusing on their own territories and consolidating internal power, maybe duking it out with neighbors. The Japanese, a race of people congenitally incapable of doing anything halfway, took their isolationism to such an extreme that travel abroad was outright illegal. Meanwhile in Britain, traveling abroad was a possible punishment for a crime.
So it turns out that in the entire world, only the Western Europeans had the means, motive and personality to travel the world by ship. Asians and Africans had the means, but not the motive or personality, and nobody in the New World had the means. Fast forward a few centuries and the result is the petrodollar.
Funny enough western Africa did have kings that attempted to sail west a good 100 years before Europe but I guess it was still too early.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Muhammad
Also reading his wikipedia page for the first time it’s kinda funny how relevant the only two other mentioned people in the article are.
One of them is Mansa Musa, the legend that donated so much during pilgrimage entire nations collapsed due to sheer inflation.
And the other one is named “Sakura.”
That sounds like Gun Germs and Steel which is a very problematic book.
Would you mind explaining whats problematic about it? Seems pretty logical from the comment you replied to no?
It’s way too neat of an answer to a complex question.
Diamond is an ophthalmologist and a bird watcher. He is in no way in any regard an anthropologist, sociologist, or historian. He’s a hack who keeps pushing his ascientific notions because it got him fame.
Reddit’s askhistorians FAQ has a whole bit about this book and its issues.
GGS’s core argument leans very heavily into environmental determinism, which is generally not regarded as a serious comprehensive argument for societal differences.
Thanks for expanding on it. Do you know what other theories bring up as the reason why it happened to be Europe that came to dominate?
One which I brought up elsewhere in the thread is an old one - that Europe discovering, plundering, and then exploiting the Americas gave them the boost they needed to extend that hegemony to the rest of the world. They ‘lucked out’ into finding a bunch of ‘easy targets’ and a massive amount of land once they were done butchering.
Noneofurbusiness brought up capitalism, which is another common explanation - capitalism, for all of its faults, gave Europe in the 17th century AD an unprecedented period of sustained growth, which not only fueled Europe’s ambitions, but also the later Industrial Revolution which would extend its advantage even further.
Makes sense but that also requires Europe to have the resources, animals and geography to encourage naval expeditions. The Americas didnt come to Europe, presumably because of the lack of large domesticated animals (?)
You’re jumping ahead a bit there, because before they stumble on the Americas, they’ve still got to have the ability and willingness to sail thousands of miles into unknown territory. Which basically no one else did.
Arabia went from the golden region a few hundred years before with trade and advancements with Asia into an isolationist and advancement-fearful society, mostly due to a shift in Islamic thought.
We are seeing a similar reaction on a much faster scale due to liberalism of the same areas and Islamic extremism. This happened to a lesser extent in the west with the Roman church and to an extent in the Near-East with the Eastern Orthodox church. Islamic and E. Orthodox thought is generally not scientificly influenced and at times anti-intelectual. Catholic thought at a macro level is scientificly minded and pro advancement, but on a micro level had to focus on more important issues such as the plague.
The Spanish in particular were rather fervent Catholics. You just couldn’t Torquemada anything.
It was the black death.
It caused wages to rise due to the reduction in available labour force, and increased social mobility (through the amount of positions it left available) and personal wealth of the survivors (through inheritance and looting), kick-starting the renaissance.
From there, it was all dominoes. More wealth allowed more commerce and innovation (here’s where the naval technology comes in), which led to the discovery and ransacking (and eventual colonisation of America) which led to more wealth and commerce and innovation and social mobility, which led to less social stability, wars, more innovation, a series of political, social, and industrial revolutions, a vicious circle of runaway capitalism devouring everything in its path, the ideal of eternal growth, and the raping to death of the only world we have.
No black death, we’d probably still be living in the middle ages (with better plows and bigger cathedrals, sure, there was still plenty of innovation back then), and complaining about the cold instead of the ever rising heat.
My Wrangler jeans are so tough they can’t even be destroyed by the NX-5 planet destroyer
I think I know how to stop white supremacy. We take all the white supremacists, we put them in one place. Then we explain to them the scientific method and how science actually supports equality.
And then, after they all listened, we take all those papers and we shove them up their ass!
Thank you Stanley.
So what about all the other racists? You might be shocked but lots of other countries are very racist and they’re not white either.
Are you “all lives matter”-ing this?
They’re an existential threat to our species so I’m totally ok with giving them their own nation as a quarantine measure. They would immediately declare war when they realize their society/economy is dysfunctional either due to global ostracization or not having access to legacy wealth accruing mechanisms created during colonial times. The question is if America would come to their rescue as they have for the worlds other “favorite” ethnostate.
Does Nazi Fascistostan have a right to exist?
My jeans are Calvin Klein. They are superior because they are mine.
