Pale Wolf wrote:Well, Merlin wasn't that evil. He was more obnoxious than anything else.
I was speaking of the guy who called up two Sabers, then ended up with Caster.
Pale Wolf wrote:Wow, now I want to meet this guy.
I sent you an email with my best answer to this.
Pale Wolf wrote:I can agree with that, though 90% of the time, the word is stolen for political purposes. By the time we reach the point where we have solid records of what's going on, the societies to whom it could be applied are almost nonexistent. They exist, existed at the time, but they're remarkably rare (one sample of a society to whom the term could be applied being the Aztecs, and even the Aztecs were much more refined in their savagery than the term usually applies).
Actually, while I'm no fan of the Aztec triple alliance, they probably don't count as what I call a typical society.
One in three, one in four men dying to violence. (When breaking even or winning.) A society gets that by expecting most if not all of its men to make human on human violence their business.
One, time spent fighting or preparing to fight is time not spent on other technical skills. Two, the people lost can take skills with them, or potential to develop a skill.
The 'civilization versus barbarism' thing is not just a matter of agricultural surpluses funding the construction of buildings. A society also needs the skills to both construct and maintain buildings to be a civilization.
The Mexica had cities, and they at least maintained them. Now, maybe they used slave labor for that. Even so, that they had cities tells me that they'd overcome some of the challenges in keeping skilled people functional. I don't like what they did, I think they were horrible to their neighbors.
Pale Wolf wrote:I have to disagree here. Military advancement and organizational skills are the equipment to win. Their tie to ethical standards or the social character of a society... vanishingly slim. You know that the society is organized in its pursuits. You do not know exactly how much butchery is involved in said pursuits.
But relative military advancement, in the case of neighbors, does correlate somewhat with the outcome of historical conflicts. If your neighbor has historically been a challenging match, it becomes harder to sell one's people on the narrative that the other guys are that much weaker.
Organizational skills will have some relationship with communication networks. If your internal communication beats their communication among your people. If your external communication with the populations of other powers beats their communication with same.
Getting away with it in the short term is a contest over who can spread and sell their story the best.
Pale Wolf wrote:The real trick to 'getting away with calling your enemies that' is 'winning and writing the history', and that's what our history shows.
Exactly. That is the long term. When their language is extinct, their society gone, when they are only spoken of inside your cultural context, when arbitrary fiction is the major source of knowledge of them, then you can say whatever you want of them. Even, 'they were wonderful folks, farmed rainbows using unicorns, never hurt a fly, and lived in a way that entirely supports my political agenda.'
EDIT: I think the argument I was putting together about the Aztecs maybe not being typical does not work that degree.
Shortly after I managed to get the stuff written down, I got to thinking about things again.
I remembered Constant Battles mentions examples of city building societies in the endemic warfare classifications that I've been calling typical.
I rather quickly concluded that I was full of it on that point.
