I’m sure he’s screaming at us from his tower, feeling smug about how he’s always right.

How utterly bizarre.

Like, the only question of correctness in this entire argument is regarding my supposed transphobia, which you’ve had zero evidence of.

It’s the queers and brown people who are wrong to the cishet white man who doesn’t go outside.

Uh. Sorry for not matching the stereotype you made up in your head?

Also sorry for being disabled, I know ableism is one of your favorite pastimes. On top of the racism, of course.

It’s very impressive how he can be so sure of himself yet not let facts contractict himself.

It’s funny because at no point have you presented anything even vaguely resembling facts, just accusations that you can’t back up.

He’s not a transphobe, the trans people are wrong!

… by all means, quote my supposed transphobia.

Ah, wait, of course - you can’t, because this is all bullshit predicated on the standard notion that lies spread by repetition.

Bruh, who do you think I’m not talking to directly, exactly?

What is the direct address that I’m supposedly avoiding look like, in this scenario?

And Pug is still stalking this thread and replying exclusively to you and me so Ada and other Admins can’t see him.

what

Ada has me blocked, as I mentioned and you literally acknowledged. And, quite literally, I responded to several other people in this thread.

Real MAGA shit here, just a total disregard for what was said a single sentence ago.

My most pathetic fanboy here is really something else.

And still can’t,

Go ahead, sweetheart, find a comment where I refuse to use someone’s preferred pronouns. You should be able to back up what you say with evidence, after all, like I did - at least if this isn’t some bizarrely delusional obsession with me. :)

If your head wasn’t cramped with genocide apologia, it’d be a nice rent-free alternative to my current place.

and still insists Ada is evil for blocking him. Very pathetic behavior.

From “I can’t believe he won’t even correct the record where Ada can see!” to “Wow I sure am glad Ada made sure she can’t see him correct the record!”

Fascists like you do enjoy playing with words, after all. :)

Admiral Patrick and PugJeuss are the smae person effectively. Both hate actions being called out.

Sorry for providing evidence of your bullshit, lmao. I know you hate evidence.

By the way, SmugJesus replied to St Elesewere and said Ada is lying about him. He knows you and Ada can’t rebuke him, so he replies only to people who can’t read his messages to prove him wrong.

I have literally spoken directly to Ada several times on the issue, and her response was to block me. Sorry that not everyone is a coward like you. :)

Hey Pug, I thought you were leaving this place? Can’t quite let someone you hate get away with being correct?

Sorry for coming back to check on a ping, I know my constant posting is unchanged from my previous usage.

I’m also sorry that you’re assmad over being called out, with evidence, on your utter bullshit. :)

And shit, you talk about me constantly. I’m your number one obsession. If I insisted on responding every time you said stupid bullshit about me, I’d have twice the comment count I actually do, lmao.

Sorry that your obsession isn’t mutual, sweetheart.

Sorry I call out your actions, are you sure you’re not the teseract dev? You hate when people document your actions and crash out when people do.

It’s particularly amusing since I actually backed up my claim with evidence, while your claim of “stalking” amounts to a handful of downvotes over the course of a single day.

Pug couldn’t handle this basic request for decency. *shrugs

Again, I never failed to use Drag’s pronouns, nor did I object to the neopronouns used. In fact, Drag never gave me any guff about acknowledging dragons, and likewise, I never bothered Drag about it. It was always unrelated people insisting that I had to acknowledge the reality of dragons existing, or else be transphobic.

I check when I get a ping notification.

Unfortunately, Ada still to this day spreads slander that I do not respect neopronouns, despite that explicitly not being the issue and being corrected on that.

Because I, while on a non-Blahaj instance and having not used any Blahaj comms in months, opined that while I would use anyone’s neopronouns, including Drag’s, and had no interest in getting into an argument with anyone about their gender, I didn’t think dragons were real.

To Ada, that was ban-worthy.

Downvoting a handful of comments is stalking, while this is just normal non-obsessive behavior, eh?

A very simple theory of innovation/development is cultural, specifically whether your empire will make you rich for developing military applications, and control more heretical heatens.

… simple to the point of absurdity.

Motivation for the Wright brothers would simply have been great empire/government rewards for success.

Fucking what.

Eastern cultures were less expansionist driven.

I really hate the re-emergence of orientalism.

Sky lanterns require an open and continuous flame, which is considerably more troublesome to combine with cargo of any sort. Early manned hot-air balloons were filled by gas generated on the ground, which requires an understanding that it is the gas which generates lift through buoyancy.

Concept behind hot air balloon understood.

I’m not well-read on the history of Chinese scientific thought, but it could very easily fit into what I said in the comment: "If you lack the concepts behind the invention, the only way to discover it is by accident" That’s how most things were discovered before early modernity.

Knowing how to make something, especially something discovered by accident or passed on by practice rather than taught as an application of theory, is different than knowing why it works, and understanding why something works opens up a much broader range of applications and elaborations.

I wouldn’t even go that far. Having iron weaponry when your opponents have bronze is an advantage, yes … but I really doubt that it’s a decisive advantage. It’s not like a bronze-wielding army is suddenly going to become helpless against a foe with iron weapons. If the bronze-age army has better numbers, better tactics/strategy, and/or better motivation, they may very well defeat an iron-age enemy in battle.

A few times, sure, but on a historical scale, it’s a ticking time bomb. One of the advantages of iron, other than being significantly superior for usage in edged weapons (armor is a mixed case), is that it is much more plentiful and cheap, and doesn’t require distant supply lines to be maintained in war time in most cases.

“Their swords are better than our swords” is bad, but not necessarily spelling doom. “Their swords are better than our swords and they can make 5x as many for the same time and cost, and they aren’t reliant on their trade ships not being pirated or sunk by storms to continue making them” is a bit dire.

In three years, I’ve had three accounts that I’ve actually used to any serious degree.

“Power user” just means “User which uses the service significantly more than average”

Which, tbf, I was.

Being a marxist and a socialist I am not a fan of his enlightend centrism and his constant assault on leftists in general and communists in particular.

Sorry for loving Marx but hating Stalin, I guess. Peak centrism.

Is there a tendency to assume ‘everything should have been possible in antiquity’? What is that supposed to mean?

A user posited the question of why hot air balloons were not invented sooner despite the materials and tools being available.

There are plenty of examples of inventors through history with concepts and ideas that were not really practical in their time.

How is that in any way contradicting what was said?

Atomism is an another ancient concept across cultures east and west, which was conceptually used in the development of modern atomic theory.

… that’s literally a question of theory. On both ends of the equation.

I think the Turks invented the steam engine based on Hellenic Greek concepts, but it was the English put it to state-level use and implementation.

The Turks invented what is called the steam jack, which is distinctly different from the atmospheric engine used in English mines some ~150 years later. The steam jack is much closer to the aeolipile; the atmospheric engine which was instrumental in the industrial revolution was based on fundamentally different theory.

So there’s just a long history of technologies being adapted and improved for different purposes. Ballooning is a good example of something that has existed for many centuries in Asia. Lifting a person into the sky, instead of a message, is a newer concept that branched off an existing technology.

Except it didn’t branch off from an existing technology. The early European attempts at ballooning, which led to the hot-air balloon being discussed, did not originate from the East Asian practice of kiting or sky lanterns.

A great deal of technological advancements have been out of military necessity/value, such as with the balloons,

… ballooning did not start out of military necessity and was not even taken seriously by most militaries of the day. The French Aeronautic Corps lasted maybe a decade; ballooning in the US Civil War was taken seriously until internal politiking wrecked it. Very little investment in ballooning was done by or for military purposes.

but the prerequisite for innovative adaptations of technology have simply had to do with how well they were recorded and disseminated throughout populations.

That’s not a question of invention, which is what was being discussed.

Militaries have been pretty good about learning a thing and getting a group to do that thing, and then recording itnfoebthe next time.

You’re fucking kidding, right?

Militaries as standing institutions do not even date back before the 17th century in most parts of Europe, unless you want to go all the way back to Rome, and effectively many were not really created until the 18th century.

Militaries, historically, have been horrible at learning, recording, or getting people to do something specific. The modern institutionalized military that is competent at that is an extremely recent development.

According to this link those first Subsaharan bloomeries were from the 6th or 7th century BC placing them well after the Bronze age from about 1000 years before. In this way it doesn’t look like they had the technological insight to skip the Bronze Age discoveries, they were just recipients of the technological advances from other parts of the world. Iron bloomeries were already in use elsewhere in the world over 1000 years before Subsaharan bloomeries.

Bronze Ages are regional; Subsaharan Africa lacked any such distinct Bronze Age in its history. Subsaharan Africa is suspected to have begun working iron and bronze effectively simultaneously in most areas, with some suggested dates as early as the 2nd millennium BCE, and a few outliers in the 3rd millennium. Furthermore, the design of bloomeries in Subsaharan Africa is largely autochthonous to the continent, without clear links to bloomery designs of North Africa or Eurasia.

The point is entirely that there were no “Bronze Age discoveries” other than bronze; the discovery of bronze defines the Bronze Age, and very few material technologies are linked to the usage of bronze, specifically. Iron has somewhat broader uses, but in most cases other metals can be substituted, in principle if not necessarily scale. The reason why so many cultures end up with a Bronze Age and an Iron Age is because bronze and iron are incredibly useful military metals, and if any of your neighbors have bronze or iron, you will learn from them very quickly, or else be very quickly conquered by their elites.

“Bronze Age” covers an incredibly wide variety of societies, as does “Iron Age” - the only unifying factor between such societies is the discovery of bronze or iron. In fact, of the two, I would regard “Bronze Age” as much more meaningful, as widespread use of bronze usually implies long-range trade routes, which in turn imply relatively robust state structures to ensure trade routes remain viable. “Iron Age” societies run the gamut from the incredibly urbanized and developed proto-industrial Roman Empire, to early nomadic Bantu tribes which rarely numbered above the low thousands.

Again, no technologies of the Bronze Age are necessary for the discovery or development of iron. If the first viable furnace in a region that is developed can reach temperatures above not just bronze, but also above the point needed to make iron bloom, there’s no need for any form of intermediate stage - and bloomeries do not require any metal tooling to be designed or constructed.

For that matter, China, for instance, is generally considered to have skipped bloomeries entirely.

Technology is not linear.

No argument to that statement. I would argue that materials science is even more underappreciated.

Materials science is the main thing most people consider when thinking about the conditions of the past, along with engineering/design, often to the exclusion of theory and organizational technology.