ArkyBeagle

ArkyBeagle t1_iuj9mfm wrote

Reply to Revealed: TE Lawrence felt ‘bitter shame’ over UK’s false promises of Arab self rule by Aboveground_Plush

This ( that the promise was false ) was inevitable. The fall of the Ottoman Empire was simply too great of a power vacuum . I'd also posit that since Saudi Arabia contains the two most holy places in Islam, and that there is a requirement to take a Haj in Islam, it's all but contradictory, at the very least extremely difficult.

Fromkin's "A Peace to End All Peace" ( ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0805088090 ) has a remarkable capacity to provide context and is still written as a middlebrow/popular/non-specialist work. Remarkable book.

0

ArkyBeagle t1_iua5nc2 wrote

Reply to Eli5: Infinity ♾️ by [deleted]

Closest I can get is:

"Infinity is only a figure of speech, meaning a limit to which certain ratios may approach as closely as desired, when others are permitted to increase indefinitely."

Carl Friedrich Gauss

0

ArkyBeagle t1_iu4iqja wrote

Reply to comment by goldenkicksbook in Fall of the East India Company by Vailhem

India looked more like a continental empire than a nation. The "nation" description was glued on in an "if all you have is a hammer" fashion. Given that, no wonder it had such momentum. How the Mughals came to such a power vacuum has to be a fascinating story.

I'd also modify the Maslow to "if all you have is logistics...." for India.

There's a quote from John Robert Seely - "We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind". I always took that as "we really didn't know what we were doing."

2

ArkyBeagle t1_itrtd92 wrote

Reply to Eli5: I don't understand why there seems to be a general consensus that gdp will continue a trend of growth, and why this would be beneficial, considering the cyclical nature of economies and empires rising and falling. Isn't economic downturn on some level unavoidable or even beneficial? by candymannequin

GDP increasingly represents abstract activities, stuff that barely has any physical presence. For that reason, there's no physical reason that those activities it should ever really hit a limit. Watching four Netflix movies doesn't cost anyone that much more than watching two.

Demand may hit limits before supply does. Economists assume this isn't true but we don't really know.

Whether there's growth or not is really more about planning how we're going to set up governments to run. A government over the same land for a non-growth society looks very different from one in which there is growth.

One thing that caused the Great Depression was a decline in the supply of money relative to what it "should" have been. That caused deflation.

In that case, there was unnecessary material hardship purely because of basically an error. We live with the memory of the Depression and try to avoid that.

1