tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post2364934469040545546..comments2024-03-28T21:56:51.675-04:00Comments on Face to Face: Scandinavian trust and cooperation due to absence of imperial historyagnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-36426917018621166982021-08-30T22:51:17.412-04:002021-08-30T22:51:17.412-04:00>Some places, like France, truly have been the ...>Some places, like France, truly have been the source of empires going back thousands of years. But Spain has only been an expanding empire once, Italy only once (the Romans), Britain only after the Hundred Years War (and ending with WWI), the Russians only after the Golden Horde, and so on and so forth. On the other hand there's the ignorance about former empires in eastern Europe aside from the ancient Macedonians and the Russians — i.e., the Byzantines, Bulgaria, the Ottomans, and Poland-Lithuania.<br /><br />After having read Robert Tombs two books - The English & Their History - That Sweet Enemy: The History of a Love-Hate Relationship - I would argue that the 'metaethnic frontier' was the Reformation & the Civil Wars leading to a first age of Empire that ended in the 1720s/1730s & started unraveling until a second 'frontier' in the American Insurrection/French Revolutionary wars/Napoleonic wars caused a second age of Empire with an entirely different 'mood' (Federalism became the English ideology against the Sovereignty of the Mother Parliament, Free Trade against mercantilism, anti-slavery/labour standards against the 'industriousness' revolution, religiously missionary against religiously exclusivist in the colonies, the defender of tradition against the beacon of modernity). This mood ran out in the 1870s with the cross-ideological label for the decade being the Age of Decadence but limped along until the bubble burst in wwi.Brit Anonhttp://www.somebullshit.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-83874836382681841412021-07-30T00:31:53.665-04:002021-07-30T00:31:53.665-04:00How has no one re-written the Aladdin song to be &...How has no one re-written the Aladdin song to be "A Cold Brew World"? Plays up the idea that cold brew is a fantastic new experience for coffee drinkers, hits at Millennial nostalgia, and it's a nearly perfect rhyme of the original song title and refrain.agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-21464621788869424012021-07-25T03:40:36.261-04:002021-07-25T03:40:36.261-04:00To clarify on the degree of trust, I'd say Sca...To clarify on the degree of trust, I'd say Scandinavians are not so much *high* in trust, but *normal* in trust. They only seem so high to most other Westerners because "the West" is the remnants of collapsed early modern empires, and are suffering from a hangover in cooperation.<br /><br />Until recently, Americans never envied the Scandinavians for their trust and civic spirit -- we had that, and even more. We were an expanding empire, with soaring asabiya. That's what truly *high* levels of trust and cooperation look like.<br /><br />As in an excitable system, if you stimulate it to the point where it takes off on a soaring high, it is destined to plunge into a crashing low, before slowly coming back to a normal resting level.<br /><br />Scandinavia is a region where they have never been stimulated into the high in the first place, and so where they have never suffered at the low level. They have fallen within a more-or-less normal range the whole time.agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com