I read somewhere that the Vikings died off in Greenland because they wouldn’t eat fish. I don’t know if that’s true, so this is not intended to be a factual statement. It’s a hypothetical, not a statistic. It could even be technically true but collectively nonsense.
I believe that our nation is now in irreversible decline. I can accept that, it happens to every country sooner or later, and as commenters have pointed out, we had a lot of good years. When I compare our plight to that of the possibly mythical non-fish eating Vikings in Greenland, though, I think we’ve got certain things a lot worse. Were there elite Viking media types, living in mcmansions in the Bethesdas of Middle Age Greenland, savagely mocking those who suggested they should eat fish, that everything would be fine if they all gave into the belt-tightening austerity of mass starvation, that anyone who does start eating fish is a fraud because they should have started eating fish earlier?
I realize this is the wrong thing to focus on, that the real tragedy is the ruined lives of millions of Americans, not the comfortable lives of David Brooks and David Von Drehle, but it is what bothers me most. I just can’t get past it.
polyorchnid octopunch
ObPedanticNit: the last line should read “I just can’t get past it.”
We now return you to your regularly scheduled flamage.
Josie
And yet I am probably safer in my little two bedroom house than they are in their macmansions. I wonder if they ever think of the pitchforks.
Grammar nazi note: past instead of passed in the last sentence.
Edit: My old fingers are just too slow.
clone12
That Vikings died out while the Inuits survived on fish was mentioned in Jared Diamond’s Collapse.
Comrade DougJ
@polyorchnid octopunch:
Thanks, fixed it.
Comrade DougJ
@polyorchnid octopunch:
Sorry, the site went nuts on me and I couldn’t edit for a minute. Thanks.
jibeaux
You could always have kids. Then, like me, you’d worry about them instead of Bobo. As bleak a situation as the future looks for my job security, benefits, pension, Medicare, Social Security, opportunities for advancement, etc., my kids are going to have to be strikingly, unusually mediocre — like Bobo-league mediocre — if they’re going to make it in the future. And instead they’re smart, beautiful, thoughtful, good people, so their future in this country is headed nowhere good.
jl
Soon we will be at the stage where our cars will be os small that we park them in our recreation rooms downstairs.
Just as the Vikings in Greenland brought their midget cows into their houses, before the colony died out.
Midget cars parked in impoverished dens around the country, that will be The Sign.
JPL
The tea party leaders and the policies of the repubs are hurting the middle class, yet the middle class continues to vote for them. Maybe Tapper and the like will discuss that. Yeah, right… hahahaha
Martin
Welcome to the 300 million participant season of Survivor. Bobo has the Villager immunity idol and is voting everyone off the island.
srv
Survival of the fittest, Doug, and Bobo is on the right side of Darwinism.
Either way you take it.
Comrade Misfit
I don’t think it was a matter of they wouldn’t eat fish (they probably ate lukefisk). If I remember rightly, the Vikings lived as they did in Scandinavia, relying on cattle and sheep. As the climate cooled for the Little Ice Age, Greenland could not support such large herivores.
The Vikings would have had to leave because they couldn’t adapt to the cooler climate. Whether or not they also were pushed out by the Inuit is another question.
Southern Beale
I’m quite certain the Vikings did NOT die off because they wouldn’t eat fish. Fish is a staple of the Scandinavian diet, always has been. I’d say the Vikings died off in Greenland because IT’S FUCKING GREENLAND have you ever been there? It’s like 99% glacier and permafrost with a growing season of about 2 weeks.
Just sayin’.
freelancer
I thought that was Richard Belzer as Det. John Munch in the first season of Homicide, talking about the Irish:
Amir_Khalid
If I recall correctly, a commenter here (don’t remember who, sorry) said not long ago that they had to spend time in class explaining to students that Diamond’s pronouncements on such matters are often not supported (or even flat-out contradicted) by the evidence. So he should be taken with at least a pinch of salt.
FoxinSocks
@DougJ
Do you need a hug? I think you could use one. I can also visualize a healing blue energy for you.
stuckinred
We conquered the world, took and look at it, and said “fuck it” you can have it.
Zifnab
You know, everyone talks about the collapse of the American Empire like its a bad thing. But look at England, or German, or Japan. They’re all former empires, and somehow they get by.
What are we really afraid of when we talk about a decline? Are we worried standard of living will collapse? :-p It already did.
Are we worried we won’t be able to engage in any more WW2 Normandy re-enactments in oil-rich Middle Eastern countries? I’m ok with that.
Are we worried the US Dollar won’t be the de facto world currency? I could see that as being a problem for international trade, but not an insurmountable one.
Are we worried Silicon Valley will collapse and Hollywood will go bankrupt while surfing and football go out of style? I doubt it. Culturally, we’ll be the same as we ever were. This isn’t the end of jazz music or apple pie. It’s the final collapse of the post-WW2 economic boom not the collapse of the Union as a whole.
America isn’t going anywhere.
Nellcote
DougJ,
Paint It Black, dude.
slag
You’re giving me whiplash here, DougJ. What happened to the demographic cavalry?
BGinCHI
Diamond is full of shit on this one. The evidence flatly contradicts him. Read around.
And look, we may be in decline, but we’ve got HBO and Showtime and the Giro d’Italia is coming up.
Chris
@Zifnab:
One can only hope we don’t have to go through the pure hell that Germany and Japan had to go through (both in terms of what foreigners did to them, and what they did to themselves) before we can reach that kind of point.
Tom Levenson
I hate to pull the old,”I wrote the book on this” card, but in 1989 (back when I was still using my number two chisel and only the finest Welsh slate to inscribe my prose) I published a book with the terrible title, Ice Time: Climate Science and Life on Earth and talked about the end of the Viking settlements on Greenland in the context of discussing the Little Ice Age.
Short form: not refusing to eat fish, but ignoring a lot of Inuit technology/customs as useful to survival, retaining to the end a slightly torqued European approach to the problem of making a living. (Think the use of skin-covered kayaks vs. heavy wood boats in the context of an expanding sea-ice cover in wintertime.) That was compounded by the constraints on communication with the mainland that longer periods of colder weather (and more ice) produced.
For a contemporary analogy — how about continuing to build and expand cities like Houston as we approach/pass peak oil.
There’s a pretty good chance that I was then as full of shit as Diamond — but I was so first, and I was, in fact, much more modest in my claims (and deferent to the then-available professional literature).
MaximusNYC
In fact, the Vikings were originally lured to Greenland by false rumors of an Applebee’s salad bar.
Comrade DougJ
@slag:
They will slow the decline but not reverse it.
Tom Levenson
@MaximusNYC: Not far off. Consider the name given to the place by its first (European) discoverers.
gex
There’s just no social cohesion, largely because of the fact that there are a wide range of skin tones in this melting pot. We kept it together when the blacks, women, and gays were kept down. But letting them fully join society has “ruined” it for everyone else, just like gays getting married will “ruin” marriage.
However, the future is my Chinese-German brother who is having a baby with a Jamaican-Irish woman. And I think that is what they are ultimately worried about. Brown skin won’t go away. White skin could.
danimal
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
BGinCHI
Another bright spot. I hadn’t thought of Ben Nelson for like 6 months until I read his name in passing over at Benen’s.
Sorry to be reminded of that dwarfish asshole, but at least no one is waiting to see how he’ll vote on anything.
This, too, is progress.
gex
@Zifnab: Seconded. If half our problem is the belief in American Exceptionalism, becoming one of many rather the one on top would probably be a good thing.
kindness
But wait….Cows can swim. Can’t I still eat my cow if I throw him in the river once in a while? I’d throw him in the pool, but I don’t have one.
Zifnab
@JPL:
The “middle class” is a big group of people. Come down to Texas, where the districts are a Byzantine mess of gerrymandering and Mayor White could win 80% of Houston voters to support him running to lead the city but barely get 50% of Houston to support him running to lead the state.
That’s not to say the state isn’t flush with GOP voters. I’ve done enough block walking to meet my fair share. But there’s an equal fair share of independents and progressives and general level heads. And there’s not a whole lot of options.
A combination of money, overt political gamesmanship, constant media pressure, and a dysfunctional two-party system are not factors you can just wave away. The middle class is boxed in and scrambles to get by every way it knows how. These are not perfect people, and they’re hard pressed in a game that’s stacked against them.
slag
@Comrade DougJ: Sadness. Cavalries these days just ain’t what they used to be. I blame the…
OK, I can’t even complete that sentence.
But seriously, I’m this close to sliding into the emobyss with you. Whatever strategy we’ve been using for the last two+ years has been less than successful. From a purely liberal perspective, that is. We need to regroup. Though I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
gene108
I do hope Americans realize that part of the life style post-World War II Americans enjoyed was due to the fact that in 1950, the U.S. accounted for 80% of the world’s manufacturing capacity.
Countries that had industrialized in the 19th century had their industrial base blown back to the stone age, i.e. Japan and Germany.
It’s not hard to decline, when you became king of the mountain because everyone else took a fall. In some ways, some sort of relative decline would’ve been inevitable, as other nations caught up, i.e. if you stay in the same place and everybody else moves up, your position above them isn’t as big as it used to be.
There have been some policy decisions that have hurt some people more than others, but I don’t believe sort of domination the U.S. had in the 1950’s and 1960’s shouuld’ve been sustainable; it was too dependent on the economic weakness of other countries, including Third World countries, who were kept from industrializing and had just started obtaining or seeking their independence.
JGabriel
@danimal:
Q: What an Inuit said as the last Viking in Greenland died?
.
Chris
@gex:
Worse. White skin could stop mattering. You could still be as white as a Klansman’s sheets and no one would care. Isn’t that horrible? Much like being Anglo-Saxon hasn’t mattered for a long time, and even being Protestant matters less and less. That might just be an even more terrifying thought for them than it fading away.
And kudos to your brother, his wife and their future baby.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
if the vikings die out it will be due to their failure to adapt to the climate, playing in a bubble top dome, as much as their inability to groom a decent young qb.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
If you want there to be a future for this country, then you are going to have to stop bemoaning the actions of others, and start preparing for one. That is one thing I do respect about the hippies. No matter what the crazy right-wingers did, they built their little organic farms, walkable communities, etc. The trick is to figure out what you want the future to look like. Come up with a plan for what you can do to move things in that direction. Then work on it, locally.
Chris
@gene108:
Perhaps, but I’d say the power of the union movement and the welfare state – IOW the New Deal’s achievements – are what made it trickle down like never before. There were good economic times after WW1 as well, but that was never shared in the way that the post-WW2 economy was. We may not go back to the level of supreme global awesomeness that we had back then, but we could also be doing a lot better if we hadn’t done away with so much of that era’s norms.
gene108
@gex:
I disagree.
My sister-in-law is white and niece and nephew could pass for white, even though me and my brother are as brown as brown can be.
gex
@Chris: Yeah, I can’t wait to be an aunt. Also, I tend to find the more hyphens in the parents’ heritage, the cuter the kid. Not that I don’t like white people. Some of my best friends are white.
gex
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal: This is a serious misreading of the environment. The Minnesota environment has been consistently proven to be unable to support a successful football program.
slag
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Really? I thought the trick was learning how to make balloon animals. But that shit’s hard! Your way sounds so much easier.
gex
@gene108: You disagree with “could”, a conditional? I didn’t say it will, I said it could. Several generations down, when white isn’t 1/2 or 1/4 of the heritage of a person, things could be different.
Norwonk
Norwegians have always loved fish, so that’s definitely not a factual statement. But as the Norwegian humorist/singer Odd Børretzen has pointed out, the real lesson from the story of the Norse colonization of Greenland has to do with the power of marketing.
Just think about it: Eric the Red discovers an island which is covered almost entirely by glaciers, and he names it “Greenland”! He then returns to Iceland (which actually has far less ice) and convinces a whole bunch of people to come with him to “Greenland” to build farms there (pause for a minute and read that sentence one more time).
As Børretzen concluded, the fact that they didn’t lynch Eric upon arrival in their new homeland proves that he must have been the greatest salesman ever. Imagine what a man with such powers of persuasion could have done with the Canary Islands.
mclaren
There. Fixed that for you.
Scientists predict that all aquatic life will be fished out of the oceans within 50 years. Meanwhile, the dead belt of desertification will expand until most of the earth’s surface cannot support crops due to runaway global warming.
Game, set, match. Homo sapiens had a good run, but not as good as the horseshoe crab or the termite. And now it’s over. Perhaps the next species to evolve a large forebrain will do a better job.
Matt
In a similar vein, it’s hard to read about the situation with permafrost (the very real possibility that it melting will start an exponentially self-reinforcing methane release) and with ocean acidification without thinking about the guy who cut down the last tree on Easter Island…
brian gister
I’ll second Tom Levenson’s account of the failure of the Viking colonies in Greenland, albeit with evidence that was current in 1987-1988.
I was finishing my B.A. at Hunter College (CUNY) in anthropology at that time and one of the archaeologists on the faculty (Thomas McGovern seems like the name) did his primary research on Viking settlements in Greenland. Tom Levenson’s statement seems to be a good synopsis of what McGovern said about why the Norse settlements in Greenland failed — generally, cultural factors leading to adverse selection in the Viking’s competition with the Inuit.
As it was not in my field of interest, I have no idea where the literature has gone since then.
dweomer
@slag: hah, regroup. premise assumes facts not in evidence.
Jay C
@gex:
“The future”? Minus the “having a baby” bit, it sounds like the Borough of Queens, today. Although, I’m sure that in Queens, all those hyphens in the mix wouldn’t be particularly remarkable.
What they might worry about is when he meets (and wants to marry) a nice Orthodox Jewish girl from the East Side of Manhattan: who is an ethnic Han Chinese. Woody Allan should only be around to film it…
BGinCHI
Still trying to stay optimistic, it’s also salutary that the birther shit is drowning out the awful Royal Wedding bullshit.
Prolly not on Bravo though.
They should have Mike Meyers back on SNL to do a Scots old man piss take on the whole thing. He could work in “The Pentaverate.”
brian gister
To restate the summary with greater precision: cultural factors leading to adverse selection in the Viking’s competition with the Inuit in a changing climate. Apparently, Greenland did support Norse farming for some hundreds of years; so, it was warmer than it has been recently.
Elia Isquire
Assuming our decline is just a decline and not a “bottom-dropping-out,” I’d say it’s good news. Being far and away the only power in the world was very bad for this country: many of the ill effects of the Cold War were put into hyper-drive, and we became even more hubristic than we were prior (which is a remarkable feat in and of itself). Also we got soft: not having legit competition led us to rest on our laurels when it comes to education, research, and other commie libtard concerns.Plus it’s a big world out there and I’d say some of the 6.7 billion other people should have equivalently-proportioned seats at the table.
So yeah assuming it doesn’t result in plutocracy and insecure war-making (and one could certainly argue that it has and will), American Decline is a net-plus.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@slag:
My future involves a lot of balloon animals, so yes. It is going to be hard. After all, we need some sort of repository for all the excess green house gases.
a geek named Bob
Strangely enough, many people seem to forget that this country IS exceptional. (Aircraft, civil rights, rocketry, FDR, and good pizza come to mind…)
I figure that getting this country to go clean from the Oil habit would go a long way to reversing the “inevitable decline.”
slag
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: I like your style.
Delia
This thread is very full of win. I suggest it be immortalized, perhaps in a column of lutefisk somewhere in Greenland, or else at the Applebee’s salad bar.
stickler
@gene108: Gen — I keep hearing and seeing this:
… and it drives me nuts. The most recent economic history of Nazi Germany (Adam Tooze) points out that the Nazis poured resources into modernizing German plant, equipment, and production processes before and during the war. The destruction of industry wasn’t nearly as bad as it looked (housing stock: different story), so by 1950 Germany was on a path to recovery, in the West.
And, to the OP: what does “decline” even mean in the 21st century? That we don’t get to play Global Policeman anymore? That we have to get our movies from Bollywood, or our cars from Korea? American manufacturing hasn’t gone away, and our culture isn’t really much stupider than it was in the 1950s. If “decline” means the Chinese get a chance to police the Middle East, I say let them. (if the locals think they have it bad now with Uncle Sam fiddling around in their neighborhood, wait till it’s the People’s Liberation Army. Should be fun to watch.)
Cerberus
I was commenting on ED’s thread that the media has graduated in the recent debates and indeed the recent years from merely overprivileged, compromised by the wealthy, genuinely worthless, and fated to a welcome death to being wholly toxic and actively evil.
Our media used to cheerlead the evils of others as long as it benefitted the world-views of their wealthy owners and bury liberal representation. It chased he-said, she-said into meaninglessness and gave spit shines to indefensible worldviews because “controversy would bring ratings”. And it always always focused on white people’s problems, usually specifically the concern of rich white DC socialites.
It was bad, tragic, and an unmitigated failure.
But now, they are simply evil.
People are actually less informed and worse, are filled with misinformation, the more media they consume. One knows less about the world if one listens to the news than if one lived in a hole and talked to a stuffed cat instead. Worse yet, our media has decided that they’re tired simply being the water-carriers for sociopaths and has decided to try being the sociopaths themselves (or at least the sociopaths who own the media have decided to skip the middleman of co-opting a politician to sell their diseased crap). We have the media keeping the birther shit alive by pretending that it’d be too hard to demonstrate how Obama has had his birth records in easy public access for years.
Worse, we had the media inventing a new mask for the movement conservatives and covering nothing else but them in order to make them somewhat real. A complete media invention at a time when real issues, including dramatic shocking real issues that make good copy were everywhere.
Again, we saw this with the Ryan plan, where no one outside the media loop really thought this plan was at all a) good, b) what was important. But the media burst into government and hard-sold the fuck out of the plan, urging the teabaggers they installed to go even farther in “being serious” and “tackling the urgent debt problem”.
And that’s before you include the various stories they’ve published that are essentially attempts at stymying a revolution by claiming that rich people have it rough too and that their pain matters more than anyone else’s and since that’s all that is focused on, rich pain seems more real and poor pain seems more illusory.
What’s going on has graduated from simple incompetence/corruption, into being an active tool to shape how we see the world and to actively sell as popular ideas that have no real popular support. Open and naked propaganda to create “real” fictions that dominate all discourse leaving us powerless to affect any real positive change over the real world.
Our media is not only a failed experiment, it is an experiment that must fail. And soon. If we are to survive this.
a geek named Bob
How about we stop buying Oil from other countries, use the open source maker model for manufactured goods (local green manufacture!) and encourage grameem banks/local currencies?
The combination of these ought to help stave off or reverse that “inevitable decline…”
gene108
@Chris:
The Social Safety net wasn’t as pronounced as it later became, with the Great Society and LBJ’s “War on Poverty”, i.e. what we think of the welfare state still had plenty of holes to fill, such as free or reduced school lunch programs, Head Start, more emphasis on rural infrastructure including electrification, etc.
Part of the reason corporations shared the wealth was due to New Deal reforms. I don’t think you can discount the job security people enjoyed back then, without looking at the lack of competitive pressures corporations faced due to the destruction of industrialized countries caused by World War II.
devtob
The Vikings had problems in Greenland, and in North America, for a variety of reasons — few colonists, unconquered natives, bitter cold weather, etc. — but not eating fish was not one of them.
Vikings were successful colonists in more temperate, nearby places — France, England, Ireland, Russia, etc.
And the analogy does not hold for other reasons — a post-hyperpower USA will still be one of the world’s couple three leading nations, and not a foresaken colony.
That said, the radical Republican/corporate Galtian campaign to destroy the great middle class will not help matters for most people.
gene108
@gex: You said “brown skin won’t go away”. I disagree with that statement. Depending on the mix of ethnicity you can dilute the brown to the point they will effectively become white.
Phoenix
I have wiggled on this…tried to help convince a friend of mine we aren’t truly doomed while half believing it myself.
But I agree it seems to be happening.
I just need to figure out if we are in a nigh or definitely inescapable decline, what we do.
That is pretty dependent on what kind of fallen society we have in the next fifty years. Will we slide deeper into a banana republic with all society fellating galtian overlords or will the current destruction of our physical and creative infrastructure cause the bottom to fall out and cause a massive shock to the nation?
I can see the appeal of survivalist nuts because pontificating how to rebuild society after the others fuck it up is quite self indulgent and fun, but it can remain a serious question in the right context.
rob in dc
@Zifnab:
America’s decline is not something to poo-poo. The golden age of humanity was for the most part the post world war 2 era where record amounts of people managed to climb out of poverty and improve their standards of living. It’s not ok that we end up becoming one of many powers, our contenders are basically chinese autocracy and Islam as a political ideology. Both of these forms of society are vastly inferior to even the sad America that exists today, let alone America in its prime.
Decline is not inevitable, and its a terrible and unnecessary outcome. I agree Americans are going to be ok as we turn into Britain of the early 20th century, but the whole third world is basically screwed as they are subsumed into regional spheres of influence. South America will be alright, but Africa and South-East Asia will doomed to crap until the next status quo upheaves. That’s not cool. I see a lot of things wrong with this country, but we still stand far above the up and comers. Europe and Australia refuse to lead and never will with their nonexistent militaries, and Japan has been neutered after 50 years of forced infantilism as a foreign affairs player.
We need to turn things around, starting with a back to the basics understanding of what this countries found high ideals were. We are supposed to be a nation of laws, not men, and no one should be above the sword of justice. Start with sustained efforts to root out and punish powerful people and much of our societies ills can eventually be cured. Then we can get technocratic and end the war on drugs and set up single payer healthcare and (insert other liberal causes that are doubtlessly correct and would improve society).
rob in dc
@Zifnab:
America’s decline is not something to poo-poo. The golden age of humanity was for the most part the post world war 2 era where record amounts of people managed to climb out of poverty and improve their standards of living. It’s not ok that we end up becoming one of many powers, our contenders are basically chinese autocracy and Islam as a political ideology. Both of these forms of society are vastly inferior to even the sad America that exists today, let alone America in its prime.
Decline is not inevitable, and its a terrible and unnecessary outcome. I agree Americans are going to be ok as we turn into Britain of the early 20th century, but the whole third world is basically screwed as they are subsumed into regional spheres of influence. South America will be alright, but Africa and South-East Asia will doomed to crap until the next status quo upheaves. That’s not cool. I see a lot of things wrong with this country, but we still stand far above the up and comers. Europe and Australia refuse to lead and never will with their nonexistent militaries, and Japan has been neutered after 50 years of forced infantilism as a foreign affairs player.
We need to turn things around, starting with a back to the basics understanding of what this countries founding high ideals were. We are supposed to be a nation of laws, not men, and no one should be above the sword of justice. Start with sustained efforts to root out and punish powerful people and much of our societies ills can eventually be cured. Then we can get technocratic and end the war on drugs and set up single payer healthcare and (insert other liberal causes that are doubtlessly correct and would improve society).
Joe
I thought bone analysis has shown the Viking intake of marine protein increasingly approached that of the Inuit as the Little Ice Age unfolded.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Comrade DougJ: No problemo, dude. Figured you’d appreciate the chance to fix it up.
For everyone that’s feeling emo about progressivism in the US, I’d like to suggest taking a look at what the NDP have managed to do during our election campaign up here in the Great White North. Layton, the party leader, basically turned it around during the French language debate on TV. He did it by talking straight to the Quebecois during an exchange with Gilles Duceppe, the leader of the Bloc Quebecois. When he said it, I certainly sat up and took notice, and it sure looks like a lot of Quebecois did too.
If you understand French, I’d recommend you go watch it, or if not, go watch the one with the translators. You can find them both on the CBC website (http://www.cbc.ca). The tl;dr version is somewhat like this:
——–88——–
This is not an exact translation, but it completely gets the gist across. The change in fortunes for the truly progressive Canadian party has been astounding; the Liberals are trailing badly in third for the first time in their history, the NDP are on the verge of doubling or more their best election result and ending up as Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, while peeling seats away from all three of the other major parties (Conservatives in the prairies and BC, Liberals in Ontario and the Maritimes, and BQ in Quebec), while seeing the Conservative seat count decline by about thirty. If it comes out this way on election day, it will mean the end of both Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff’s leadership careers.
polyorchnid octopunch
@polyorchnid octopunch: Firstly, FYWP.
Secondly, let me try getting that exchange in again.
——–
Gilles Duceppe: But of course, only the Bloc can truly represent the interests of the Quebecois.
Jack Layton: I’d like to take exception to that. (crosstalk) Seriously, this needs to be said. (turns to face the camera) There are many of us in English Canada that agree with you about the kinds of policies you’d like to see enacted in Ottawa. However, the Bloc won’t run candidates in English Canada as a matter of principle. This means that the kinds of policies they advocate can never be voted for by English Canadians. We, on the other hand, run candidates in Quebec as a matter of principle. As long as we follow the politics of division we will never be able to unite to change the way things are done in this country. Join us so that we can be stronger together.
——–
He basically said it straight… a real rarity among politicians. It sure seems to have worked; the NDP are on the verge of a historical electoral breakthrough.
celticdragonchick
@clone12:
Yep. Fish bones do not show up in any Viking garbage middens. They were eating seals and continued to try and support cattle in a climate where that is insane…but they didn’t eat any fish. They refused to make certain adjustments to the reality of Greenland…and Greenland won.
gex
@Jay C: We live in flyover land. The future, racially, is somewhere in the 1970’s.
gex
@gene108: I guess I’m using our current culture’s definition of white. Any amount of brown, now matter how dilute, excludes you from being white.
polyorchnid octopunch
@mclaren: You know, a few tens of thousands of years ago a supervolcano in Indonesia went off. It nearly killed off human beings… but didn’t. It was winter for several years after that event, but people muddled through somehow.
Now, our civilization… that’s different. No way it can survive that kind of stress. But I suspect that our arctic and greenland could end up being some good places for people to survive in while the earth puts its climate back in shape.
mazareth
@gex “Any amount of brown, now matter how dilute, excludes you from being white.”
Are you sure on that? I’m 1/16th Lakota Sioux. That’s not enough to enroll in the tribe as a voting member. I also look white.
Re the Greenland Vikings – The fish are too damn high!
Mjaum
Let us assume that what we think we know about the US population’s resource use is correct (the average american consumes many times as much as the average human).
Let us further assume that americans are not much smarter than germans.
Given a situation in which the average american must manage on – let’s say half – as much of everything as he does today, and given a reasonably glib right-wing politician blaming the sudden cut in living-standards on …well, I am sure he will think of a suitable minority group and/or foreign state.
Given this. And this isn’t even close to the worst-case scenario, nor is it without precedent. Will the US survive “pretty much as today”?
The answer is left open as an exercise for the reader.
PS: Price of gas in Norway at this time: Eight dollars per gallon.
PPS: Viking settlers left Greenland because “it’s too bloody cold these days” and went somewhere else.
Wolfdaughter
@clone12:
Somebody else has probably already posted to this effect, but as I recall, Jared Diamond speculated that Eric the Red was allergic to fish, and therefore believed that fish were bad to eat, a prejudice that he passed to his descendants.
As far as the decline of our country goes, it probably is irreversible at this point. What galls me is that the decline didn’t have to happen. What further galls me is that those in positions of power, with money, could do so much better with their power and money. They don’t seem to realize that they are screwing themselves over while they’re reaming the rest of us.
Bruce Webb
“I read somewhere that the Vikings died off in Greenland because they wouldn’t eat fish. I don’t know if that’s true, so this is not intended to be a factual statement. It’s a hypothetical, not a statistic. It could even be technically true but collectively nonsense.”
Jared Diamond is a great economist but he knows fuck-all about Vikings. Scandinavians then and now largely subsisted on all kinds of sea-food, ever heard of Norwegian Lutefisk or Icelandic Salted Cod, or for that matter a Danish Smorgesbord today. They did prefer a mixed diet including grains (see Lefse) and alchoholic products derived from it, and the advance of ice at the end of the Medieval Warming period pushed production of those crops down below subsistence as perceived by the Scandinavian inhabitants so mostly they moved on to (literally) greener passages.
Vikings from their emergence in history to the end were travelling people. And fishermen. What else do you think they ate in those Longboats when they went a Viking-ing from Norway and Denmark to raid England and France as well as any number of places in the Mediterranean.
We do have this from Wiki (yes I know): “One intriguing fact is that we find very few fish remains among their middens. This has led to much speculation and argument. Most archeologists reject any decisive judgment based on this one fact, however, as fish bones decompose more quickly than other remains, and may have been disposed of in a different manner. Isotope analysis of the bones of inhabitants shows that marine food sources in fact supplied more and more of the diet of the Norse Greenlanders, making up between 50% and 80% of their diet by the 14th century”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dried_and_salted_cod This would indicate that much modern dried cod is filleted before drying and salting, which would probably lead to the majority of bones being left to the gulls rather than added to the larder to end up in the kitchen midden.
In any event I don’t think one Chieftain’s allergy would change a millenium long culture’s eating pattern in one swoop.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Amir_Khalid:
That’s true concerning Collapse. Guns, Germs and Steel got it right, imo.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Tom Levenson:
@Bruce Webb:
I’m sorry that I can’t remember which of his Ishmael books it’s in, but Daniel Quinn uses the Inuit as an example of recent evolution in homo sapiens because they can survive on a low Vitamin D (iirc it’s Vitamin D) diet. That is, their bodies can efficiently maximize scant amounts of certain nutrients that humans need to survive to the child-bearing age.
Makes me wonder if the Greenland Vikings, after losing their herbivores and gardens to glaciation, just didn’t have the time to evolve further.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
Following up on that, here’s Quinn at Ishmael.org:
williamc
DougJ,
I used to think that this hatred of David Brooks was unhealthy, that you spent too much time reading and mocking this dull, uninspiring writer when there were so many other worthy targets out there, and then earlier tonight I got into an argument with one of my friends, a dyed-in-the-wool Jewish shiska lesbian liberal who loves her some Jimmy Carter (that’s how liberal she is, she’s always LOVED Jimmy!), who tried to convince me that Brooks wasn’t so bad, that Brooks would never support something like the Ryan budget plan, and that Brooks also seems to think that the Republicans aren’t being serious right now and how he usually agrees with the Dem position on most life-or-death issues, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She says that he is reasonable on NPR, and he is smart enough to know that what his people are proposing is dangerous, and I just couldn’t understand, as I read him and am not lulled by his boring radio patter so much.
THIS is why its important to call this fool out and be on his case about this stuff, because people who should know better respect him as a thinker just because he’s on NPR and isn’t Bachmann level stupid.
Corner Stone
@Mjaum: Man. I’m kind of in love with you.
John Arbuthnot Fisher
Much as we may decline, we still have an opportunity to swing out of early 20th century Britain phase (as rightly referenced by an earlier commenter), if only because our relative position remains so superior to the rest of the world.
The calculus of European involvement in Libya seemed to rely on a quick power play as rebels + NATO would quickly overrun Qaddafi, but the clear failure of this plan (not to mention Afghanistan) illustrates European and Canadian military limitations. The sovereign debt crisis and euro currency stability and integrity will also distract existing and compromise overall European political strength.
China is undergoing an “industrial” revolution at a dot com pace, which is unsustainable. The world economy between 1830 and 1930 experienced many bubbles, but China has achieved unbelievable compounded growth relative to this period with little distress – this is bound to change, sooner rather than later.
India experienced massive forced deindustrialization and decline at the hands of Britain, from which it has still not fully recovered. Domestic political tensions as well as regional politics with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kashmir will continue to weaken India.
Russia is ultimately a non-entity politically. Divided and ruled by oligarchs for personal interest rather than national political gain a la Soviet Union or early Putin.
Brazil may actually be our biggest threat (and biggest opportunity for mutually beneficial cooperation?).
+4 (2 doubles equals 4, right?)
DPirate
If there is a tragedy involved, it isn’t what happens to Americans. We Americans made our bed, and we get to lie in it. It is everyone who gets destroyed as we thrash about in our throes, like we’ve been doing in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq.
Cheryl from Maryland
Sorry I came so late to this thread. You know, the Vikings also conquered and ruled Sicily. Not to mention France (heard of the Normans?) and then England. So they are still around. Giving up on Greenland and taking lands with a warmer climate might not have been diplomatic, but it settled the too cold to live issue. Now the Vikings also morphed into the mob in Sicily, that’s a concern for the US if we are following the Viking model.
Chris
@rob in dc:
Yes to the first, no to the second. Islam as a political ideology is a regional identity politics movement (one with many meanings, btw – “political Islam” in Morocco isn’t precisely what it is in Saudi Arabia), but it is not a global “contender” and it never will be.
China, of course, is. Personally though, I’m interested in seeing what other third world powerhouses, especially the democratic ones like India, Brazil or South Africa, are going to give the world. I’d like to think they’ll go far.
Paul in KY
@MaximusNYC: I just like the 9th Century marketing: “Aye Orgo, it is named Greenland. With a name like that how canest thou go wrong?”