... you cannot have that situation without at least some (perhaps unconscious) complicity from them. Females certainly have their own will and if, as a group, they were resistant to sharing a male, you better believe that they could seriously curtail that practice over time, even if they lack external trappings of power.
You might want to look further into the details of ancient concubinage. Women such as that were often times war prizes who were considered lucky to allowed to live. Given that understanding, if they didn't get in line they would just be beaten, and if their new master was impatient he would just kill one as an example to the others, and you can bet they'd line up after that. You have to remember that in the ancient world, especially prior but far from exclusively before the Greco-Roman era, patriarchal power was based on pure, naked (no pun intended) strength. Wives had decent status because they would come usually from the inside (culturally) or from important foreign families, whereas concubines came from the outside from defeated cultures and as such were fair game for any vain display of force the master might enjoy. After all, they were lucky they were allowed to live. Whole cities would be killed man, woman and child in that era.
Fascinating, and goes to show how much people's lives could be improved if humanity could shake off the millennia-old irrational moralism that's holding so many people down.
Interesting article, although it raises the question of which is more valuable, shorter but probably more valuable lives (competition does drive innovation) or longer more apathetic lives? Of course it's rather difficult to approach quantitatively, but I think that humanity has been benefited by successive generations of badasses instead of weaklings.
Polygamy only really can work in a patriarchal society. It was a very useful social construct in the pre-modern world before the population explosion, and since then only the wealthy (who were usually so through superior capacity, especially in the ancient world) could really afford a harem's worth of wives and concubines, it increased the genetic footprint of the most capable of human genes. It was almost a sort of early incidental eugenics. However, this also was only possible because until the modern era, women were in fact or in function, chattel. Given an equal choice in the matter, most women would be too jealous to share a man (just as most men would similarly be too jealous to share one woman).
This brings us to how potential health benefits could be accomplished today. The only real answer that mitigates the problem of human jealousy is polyamory. Polyamory is a grouping of men and women in an intimate long term relationship. I have no personal experience myself, but I would interested to see a study similar to this one done on polyamorous groups.
Oh no!/. has offended a whiny, oversensitive commissar of the politically correct!
He/she has ridden in on his/her redoubtable white steed to defend the honor of some random crazy person from the internet! Hail and godspeed hero crusader!
Give me a break.
Who modded the parent offtopic? This is spot on. Unexpected awesome events and tweaks are the only things people really do care about, not A to B scripted NPC storyline from the developers.
This whole issue sets a bad precedent. Trying to turn organically self-replicating and cross-pollinating things into intellectual property is retarded. The IP issue where willful copying is economically absurd enough, but when field of plants A happens by natural process to intermix with field of plants B, it should not be reasonable for whomever "owns" the genetic pattern of A to sue the owner of B for using what is the product of his own plants. That's against all common behavior in the history of land ownership. If some animals carried some fruit pits from farm A to farm B, and fruit trees sprouted on farm B, farmer A could sure as hell not sue farmer B. IP protections shouldn't exist, and if they must, they should not be applicable to organic self-replicating processes.
I don't see how this all that different from the gunners on an AC-130 who watch everything they shoot. It's not all fire and forget pushbutton in the Air Force. Sounds just like an old problem in a new role, not much worth noting. Killing people isn't supposed to be fun or normal, that's not news.
Some guy takes hostages. Police tell him he'll get cake and ice cream if he lets them go. He does and finds out OH NOES TEH POLICE LIED TO ME.
Lies are not intrinsically wrong. Moral absolutists oversimplify everything.
Your going on about this in the second half of your post like this was some happy-go-lucky dating misadventure prooves that you, like everybody else so far who has disagreed with me, has not read the original 'experiment' in its entirety. Like I keep telling everybody, there were so called 'victims' in this who either were or wanted to be criminally abusive. Not just some kinky BDSM with a safeword, CRIMINALLY ABUSIVE.
"...within legal bounds"
Another person who obviously hasn't read the whole original 'experiment'. Like I said in my first post, the only people who will disagree with me are the ones who haven't read the source of all this. I keep telling you all, there were people caught in this lulz dragnet who either were or wanted to be criminally abusive. Just keep on ignoring me and the facts and down vote me to oblivion. At least I'm informed.
Although you're right that one shouldn't expect the entire world to reflect isolated headline cases, the same logic should be applied to personal experience. So you happen to live in a area that still has some sense, that doesn't mean the rest of the world is homogeneous with your experience and that there aren't places with schools that actively discourage competition in the name of self-esteem-building-for-its-own sake numbskullery.
lol society. You don't need to tell me about society. I'm a bisexual with GID who has decided not to transition specifically because I recognize I'm too much of a coward to be disowned by my family and both actively and passively persecuted by the vast majority of society. However, I nonetheless live in a completely open and adjusted state. Most people who know me come to know these things about me, I don't hide them because I am not ashamed of my condition, I'm ashamed of society's condition. More importantly, the things about me that society considers abnormal are not harmful.
This is in stark contrast to the 'victims' of the 'experiment' who demonstrated that the were or wanted to be abusers. That is, rightfully, criminal behavior. Physical abuse is a crime that with evidence would be prosecuted, and the abuser would end up in jail. There's another term for 'outing' such people, and it's called being a witness for the prosecution. Are those people trolls? Should we shake our heads and wag our fingers at people who 'tattle' on violence? Sheesh.
As for the others who weren't potentially abusers, just pervs, I said earlier in the conversation I consider myself a perv. The key differences between them and me are a) My wife and friends know what weird stuff I get off on and accept it already because I don't hide myself, and I wouldn't associate myself meaningfully with closed minded bigots in the first place and b) I'm not stupid enough to send my hottest and weirdest pr0nz to complete strangers and expect it to not bite me in the ass.
Lastly, there's the matter of people getting bitten in the ass. If Timmy gets fired because he's attracted to horses, that's probably grounds for some kind of wrongful termination case. If Timmy gets fired because it's exposed, by whatever means, that he likes to molest kids (especially if he works with them), that's justified.
The pervs were unlucky, the abusers got what they deserved, and in neither case do I think Jason is 'the real bad guy'.
"Nothing they wanted is in any way, shape or form abusive or harming anyone."
You haven't read the whole original 'experiment' I see. Some of them were clearly looking for people to abuse. Quite coincidentally you mentioned 'To Catch a Predator' where potential abusers are caught and unmasked.
Our society is a little manic where it comes to 'consent' and 'abuse' when taken together, which is why when abuse complaints are lodged in some cases they can't be withdrawn. This is due to the nature of abused partners sometimes being so involved with the relationship that they want to gloss over that they are getting abused. Is exposing some of those potential abusers less important than exposing child molesters? Are consenting abusive relationships just not worth the same attention?
I'm not saying Jason is an altruist vigilante out to stop abuse. I'm saying that if 'To Catch a Predator' is within social norms, so is the craigslist experiment.
Perhaps Jason does deserve some comeuppance as you say, and he was banned from the Seattle LJ group among other things (ironically the NYT article is likely to be catalytic in the process of getting him unbanned that is going on right now), but does he deserve to be financially liable for exposing some jerk for who he really is? I still say no.
People should be proud of who they are as people in a way that the can display to the world. Funny enough, Jason strikes me as such a person. If all these people are embarrassed by who they really are, they shouldn't be suing, they should be changing themselves until they have something to be proud of.
Yes, I do know. However speculating on his 'stability' isn't very productive, especially since all you know comes from that one article. My wife's friend Zach (yes, the Zach briefly mentioned in the aforesaid article) has known Jason for years and trusted him enough to let him cook at his birthday party. Those burgers were delicious.
The few times I've hung out with him I've found him funny and insightful. He just doesn't care to pander to people's feelings or their frequently false sense of security. When you know him and expect it, it's amusing. When you're some wanker caught off guard by a bait and switch on the intertrons, it's more shocking. But I know a whole ton of people on the internet who rightly think this sort of thing is funny.
You would do well to look at the 'craigslist experiment' itself. These guys are at best pervs (not much of an epithet mind you, I consider myself a perv), at worst some of them are dirtbags. There is justification, not from anything that happened to Jason in his past, but intrinsically. His 'victims' got what they deserved. Anybody who argues otherwise probably didn't look at the experiment itself or probably is afraid they're the type of person who would have been caught in something similar.
Disclaimer: I know Jason F. personally and think he is a cool guy.
The whole reason that he's being sued for 'copyright violation' is that there is no real crime here. He is not a criminal and those people aren't victims. He pretended to be something he wasn't to elicit a response. People sent him nasty and embarrassing things voluntarily and what they believe about the intent or pretense of the situation is immaterial. If somebody exposes themselves to complete stranger it's their liability. I have no sympathy that a bunch of irresponsible pervs got baited into a trap because of their gullibility, lack of foresight, lack of restraint, and general idiocy. Nobody forced them to do anything, all the 'victims' did was set themselves up for failure and embarrassment.
It's silly to expect price and performance information for something that's still in the planning stages. eebra is correct, just because the development phase doesn't interest you doesn't mean it's objectively uninteresting. I myself am interested in these early decisions that, by the way, will ultimately affect what it costs and how well it performs.
Whoa. This article weirded me out so much. First, I was eating burgers cooked by Jason F. like two weeks ago. His friend Zach is my wife's friend from a decade ago. So I keep reading and get to hepkitten and weev. Holy crap. I used idle with them for hours in #insub on idlenet before its untimely demise. #insub used to be the secret base where internet 'culture' was generated (before 4chan) and spread through raids and other things. I was never in on anything big like the epilepsy thing, but this one time they found out some bug in the crappy code of Trillian, and we went to all the #trillian channels on the different IRC networks and killed all the clients. Hilarious. And served them right for using a horrible client.
moot is like the only person in that article I haven't talked to in some way. Perhaps that makes me biased, but I don't think trolling (as Jason F. trolls) is a bad thing. They're pranks, and should be appreciated as such. Different people react to them in different ways, sometimes it ends up making them look bad, like the craigslist experiment, but nobody put a gun to those guys' heads and said 'send embarrassing and nasty things to that complete stranger.' They made themselves look bad, and it doesn't matter that the catalyst was a contrivance.
Offensive speech is still free, so long as it is a matter of opinion and not fact. I can say 'John is a jerk' and be protected by the first amendment because it is not libel if it is my opinion of somebody. If I say 'John has herpes' (and he doesn't) that is libel because it's a demonstrable, objective state that can be proven to be untrue, rather than a difference of opinion.
Threats aren't protected speech either. I don't know why this is a big deal, some people made threats and were given what they were due. I'd expect the same to be done to anybody who made threats.
If it were just libel I might be more concerned, as the effects of libel on the internet are less clearly defined. Libel is more 'effective' between people in meatspace because of reasonable differences in the level of trust. I simply wouldn't trust every nasty rumor on the internet as a matter of what I would think of as common sense, but I might trust the same rumors from a close associate in person.
Although well written, you response assumes a lot of false premises, the worst of which is trying to equate the Dark Ages with Antiquity on a spectrum of literacy. First and foremost, no civilization has had a literate majority until the modern era. To impugn the literacy of a single previous era is effectively to impugn them all, and consequentially ignore all of the very real differences between eras.
Although anything analogous to the pursual of science in antiquity was done largely by bored, wealthy eccentrics, at least nobody was going to demand that Archimedes be put to death because his projects might be 'channeling the power of the devil' or some such nonsense. That's the primary difference between Antiquity and the Dark Ages, because of the ubiquitous acceptance of polytheistic concepts in the ancient world, if Roman X thought Ceres was cooler than Vesta, chances are he wouldn't kill or otherwise advocate the harm of Roman Y who thought the opposite. Whereas in the Dark Ages mobs would abuse, torture and kill people who were even rumored to harbor thoughts that ran contrary to doctrine. The Dark Ages weren't dark because of illiteracy, they were dark because the entire social order was more inimical to any kind of useful thought than any other era in the whole human progress and development, and that attitude was a direct result of the doctrine of the Catholic church.
This assumes that fragmentation is intrinsically negative. Nevermind that the 'fragmented' Greek and Anatolian states were practically the definition of civilization prior to Rome. What about the 'fragmentation' of China before the Qin dynasty? Christianity effectively neutered both Rome and eventually the Vikings. Rather than implement the constructive synthesis/syncresis of Rome, Christianity by nature employed a destructive imposition of socio-cultural concepts that would pave all of Europe into something of a bland monoculture. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that the Christianization of Europe was the first step on the road to today's modern Westernized monoculture.
Anyway, the whole point is that there was and can be very valuable and successful 'fragmented' civilizations.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah that was ment to be ironic and sarcastic in the same spirit as the praise contained in the sentence. -1 for having to explain the joke.
... you cannot have that situation without at least some (perhaps unconscious) complicity from them. Females certainly have their own will and if, as a group, they were resistant to sharing a male, you better believe that they could seriously curtail that practice over time, even if they lack external trappings of power.
You might want to look further into the details of ancient concubinage. Women such as that were often times war prizes who were considered lucky to allowed to live. Given that understanding, if they didn't get in line they would just be beaten, and if their new master was impatient he would just kill one as an example to the others, and you can bet they'd line up after that. You have to remember that in the ancient world, especially prior but far from exclusively before the Greco-Roman era, patriarchal power was based on pure, naked (no pun intended) strength. Wives had decent status because they would come usually from the inside (culturally) or from important foreign families, whereas concubines came from the outside from defeated cultures and as such were fair game for any vain display of force the master might enjoy. After all, they were lucky they were allowed to live. Whole cities would be killed man, woman and child in that era.
Fascinating, and goes to show how much people's lives could be improved if humanity could shake off the millennia-old irrational moralism that's holding so many people down.
Interesting article, although it raises the question of which is more valuable, shorter but probably more valuable lives (competition does drive innovation) or longer more apathetic lives? Of course it's rather difficult to approach quantitatively, but I think that humanity has been benefited by successive generations of badasses instead of weaklings.
Polygamy only really can work in a patriarchal society. It was a very useful social construct in the pre-modern world before the population explosion, and since then only the wealthy (who were usually so through superior capacity, especially in the ancient world) could really afford a harem's worth of wives and concubines, it increased the genetic footprint of the most capable of human genes. It was almost a sort of early incidental eugenics. However, this also was only possible because until the modern era, women were in fact or in function, chattel. Given an equal choice in the matter, most women would be too jealous to share a man (just as most men would similarly be too jealous to share one woman).
This brings us to how potential health benefits could be accomplished today. The only real answer that mitigates the problem of human jealousy is polyamory. Polyamory is a grouping of men and women in an intimate long term relationship. I have no personal experience myself, but I would interested to see a study similar to this one done on polyamorous groups.
Oh no! /. has offended a whiny, oversensitive commissar of the politically correct!
He/she has ridden in on his/her redoubtable white steed to defend the honor of some random crazy person from the internet! Hail and godspeed hero crusader!
Give me a break.
I've never said anything against GM and harbor no problems with it. I have problems with the current trends in the application of IP law.
Who modded the parent offtopic? This is spot on. Unexpected awesome events and tweaks are the only things people really do care about, not A to B scripted NPC storyline from the developers.
lol sterile organisms populated by cloning will eventually be killed by a plague. Gros Michel anybody? Oh, that's right, they're virtually extinct.
This whole issue sets a bad precedent. Trying to turn organically self-replicating and cross-pollinating things into intellectual property is retarded. The IP issue where willful copying is economically absurd enough, but when field of plants A happens by natural process to intermix with field of plants B, it should not be reasonable for whomever "owns" the genetic pattern of A to sue the owner of B for using what is the product of his own plants. That's against all common behavior in the history of land ownership. If some animals carried some fruit pits from farm A to farm B, and fruit trees sprouted on farm B, farmer A could sure as hell not sue farmer B. IP protections shouldn't exist, and if they must, they should not be applicable to organic self-replicating processes.
Doesn't this just prove that Star Trek already thought of everything? And if my reference is too obscure, perhaps somebody remembers "I am Kirok!" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradise_Syndrome
I don't see how this all that different from the gunners on an AC-130 who watch everything they shoot. It's not all fire and forget pushbutton in the Air Force. Sounds just like an old problem in a new role, not much worth noting. Killing people isn't supposed to be fun or normal, that's not news.
Some guy takes hostages. Police tell him he'll get cake and ice cream if he lets them go. He does and finds out OH NOES TEH POLICE LIED TO ME.
Lies are not intrinsically wrong. Moral absolutists oversimplify everything.
Your going on about this in the second half of your post like this was some happy-go-lucky dating misadventure prooves that you, like everybody else so far who has disagreed with me, has not read the original 'experiment' in its entirety. Like I keep telling everybody, there were so called 'victims' in this who either were or wanted to be criminally abusive. Not just some kinky BDSM with a safeword, CRIMINALLY ABUSIVE.
"...within legal bounds" Another person who obviously hasn't read the whole original 'experiment'. Like I said in my first post, the only people who will disagree with me are the ones who haven't read the source of all this. I keep telling you all, there were people caught in this lulz dragnet who either were or wanted to be criminally abusive. Just keep on ignoring me and the facts and down vote me to oblivion. At least I'm informed.
Although you're right that one shouldn't expect the entire world to reflect isolated headline cases, the same logic should be applied to personal experience. So you happen to live in a area that still has some sense, that doesn't mean the rest of the world is homogeneous with your experience and that there aren't places with schools that actively discourage competition in the name of self-esteem-building-for-its-own sake numbskullery.
lol society. You don't need to tell me about society. I'm a bisexual with GID who has decided not to transition specifically because I recognize I'm too much of a coward to be disowned by my family and both actively and passively persecuted by the vast majority of society. However, I nonetheless live in a completely open and adjusted state. Most people who know me come to know these things about me, I don't hide them because I am not ashamed of my condition, I'm ashamed of society's condition. More importantly, the things about me that society considers abnormal are not harmful.
This is in stark contrast to the 'victims' of the 'experiment' who demonstrated that the were or wanted to be abusers. That is, rightfully, criminal behavior. Physical abuse is a crime that with evidence would be prosecuted, and the abuser would end up in jail. There's another term for 'outing' such people, and it's called being a witness for the prosecution. Are those people trolls? Should we shake our heads and wag our fingers at people who 'tattle' on violence? Sheesh.
As for the others who weren't potentially abusers, just pervs, I said earlier in the conversation I consider myself a perv. The key differences between them and me are a) My wife and friends know what weird stuff I get off on and accept it already because I don't hide myself, and I wouldn't associate myself meaningfully with closed minded bigots in the first place and b) I'm not stupid enough to send my hottest and weirdest pr0nz to complete strangers and expect it to not bite me in the ass.
Lastly, there's the matter of people getting bitten in the ass. If Timmy gets fired because he's attracted to horses, that's probably grounds for some kind of wrongful termination case. If Timmy gets fired because it's exposed, by whatever means, that he likes to molest kids (especially if he works with them), that's justified.
The pervs were unlucky, the abusers got what they deserved, and in neither case do I think Jason is 'the real bad guy'.
"Nothing they wanted is in any way, shape or form abusive or harming anyone."
You haven't read the whole original 'experiment' I see. Some of them were clearly looking for people to abuse. Quite coincidentally you mentioned 'To Catch a Predator' where potential abusers are caught and unmasked.
Our society is a little manic where it comes to 'consent' and 'abuse' when taken together, which is why when abuse complaints are lodged in some cases they can't be withdrawn. This is due to the nature of abused partners sometimes being so involved with the relationship that they want to gloss over that they are getting abused. Is exposing some of those potential abusers less important than exposing child molesters? Are consenting abusive relationships just not worth the same attention?
I'm not saying Jason is an altruist vigilante out to stop abuse. I'm saying that if 'To Catch a Predator' is within social norms, so is the craigslist experiment.
Perhaps Jason does deserve some comeuppance as you say, and he was banned from the Seattle LJ group among other things (ironically the NYT article is likely to be catalytic in the process of getting him unbanned that is going on right now), but does he deserve to be financially liable for exposing some jerk for who he really is? I still say no.
People should be proud of who they are as people in a way that the can display to the world. Funny enough, Jason strikes me as such a person. If all these people are embarrassed by who they really are, they shouldn't be suing, they should be changing themselves until they have something to be proud of.
Guilt by association is a logical fallacy. I must conclude then, that you have very poor reasoning skills.
Yes, I do know. However speculating on his 'stability' isn't very productive, especially since all you know comes from that one article. My wife's friend Zach (yes, the Zach briefly mentioned in the aforesaid article) has known Jason for years and trusted him enough to let him cook at his birthday party. Those burgers were delicious.
The few times I've hung out with him I've found him funny and insightful. He just doesn't care to pander to people's feelings or their frequently false sense of security. When you know him and expect it, it's amusing. When you're some wanker caught off guard by a bait and switch on the intertrons, it's more shocking. But I know a whole ton of people on the internet who rightly think this sort of thing is funny. You would do well to look at the 'craigslist experiment' itself. These guys are at best pervs (not much of an epithet mind you, I consider myself a perv), at worst some of them are dirtbags. There is justification, not from anything that happened to Jason in his past, but intrinsically. His 'victims' got what they deserved. Anybody who argues otherwise probably didn't look at the experiment itself or probably is afraid they're the type of person who would have been caught in something similar.
Disclaimer: I know Jason F. personally and think he is a cool guy. The whole reason that he's being sued for 'copyright violation' is that there is no real crime here. He is not a criminal and those people aren't victims. He pretended to be something he wasn't to elicit a response. People sent him nasty and embarrassing things voluntarily and what they believe about the intent or pretense of the situation is immaterial. If somebody exposes themselves to complete stranger it's their liability. I have no sympathy that a bunch of irresponsible pervs got baited into a trap because of their gullibility, lack of foresight, lack of restraint, and general idiocy. Nobody forced them to do anything, all the 'victims' did was set themselves up for failure and embarrassment.
It's silly to expect price and performance information for something that's still in the planning stages. eebra is correct, just because the development phase doesn't interest you doesn't mean it's objectively uninteresting. I myself am interested in these early decisions that, by the way, will ultimately affect what it costs and how well it performs.
Whoa. This article weirded me out so much. First, I was eating burgers cooked by Jason F. like two weeks ago. His friend Zach is my wife's friend from a decade ago. So I keep reading and get to hepkitten and weev. Holy crap. I used idle with them for hours in #insub on idlenet before its untimely demise. #insub used to be the secret base where internet 'culture' was generated (before 4chan) and spread through raids and other things. I was never in on anything big like the epilepsy thing, but this one time they found out some bug in the crappy code of Trillian, and we went to all the #trillian channels on the different IRC networks and killed all the clients. Hilarious. And served them right for using a horrible client.
moot is like the only person in that article I haven't talked to in some way. Perhaps that makes me biased, but I don't think trolling (as Jason F. trolls) is a bad thing. They're pranks, and should be appreciated as such. Different people react to them in different ways, sometimes it ends up making them look bad, like the craigslist experiment, but nobody put a gun to those guys' heads and said 'send embarrassing and nasty things to that complete stranger.' They made themselves look bad, and it doesn't matter that the catalyst was a contrivance.
Offensive speech is still free, so long as it is a matter of opinion and not fact. I can say 'John is a jerk' and be protected by the first amendment because it is not libel if it is my opinion of somebody. If I say 'John has herpes' (and he doesn't) that is libel because it's a demonstrable, objective state that can be proven to be untrue, rather than a difference of opinion. Threats aren't protected speech either. I don't know why this is a big deal, some people made threats and were given what they were due. I'd expect the same to be done to anybody who made threats. If it were just libel I might be more concerned, as the effects of libel on the internet are less clearly defined. Libel is more 'effective' between people in meatspace because of reasonable differences in the level of trust. I simply wouldn't trust every nasty rumor on the internet as a matter of what I would think of as common sense, but I might trust the same rumors from a close associate in person.
Although well written, you response assumes a lot of false premises, the worst of which is trying to equate the Dark Ages with Antiquity on a spectrum of literacy. First and foremost, no civilization has had a literate majority until the modern era. To impugn the literacy of a single previous era is effectively to impugn them all, and consequentially ignore all of the very real differences between eras.
Although anything analogous to the pursual of science in antiquity was done largely by bored, wealthy eccentrics, at least nobody was going to demand that Archimedes be put to death because his projects might be 'channeling the power of the devil' or some such nonsense. That's the primary difference between Antiquity and the Dark Ages, because of the ubiquitous acceptance of polytheistic concepts in the ancient world, if Roman X thought Ceres was cooler than Vesta, chances are he wouldn't kill or otherwise advocate the harm of Roman Y who thought the opposite. Whereas in the Dark Ages mobs would abuse, torture and kill people who were even rumored to harbor thoughts that ran contrary to doctrine. The Dark Ages weren't dark because of illiteracy, they were dark because the entire social order was more inimical to any kind of useful thought than any other era in the whole human progress and development, and that attitude was a direct result of the doctrine of the Catholic church.
This assumes that fragmentation is intrinsically negative. Nevermind that the 'fragmented' Greek and Anatolian states were practically the definition of civilization prior to Rome. What about the 'fragmentation' of China before the Qin dynasty? Christianity effectively neutered both Rome and eventually the Vikings. Rather than implement the constructive synthesis/syncresis of Rome, Christianity by nature employed a destructive imposition of socio-cultural concepts that would pave all of Europe into something of a bland monoculture. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that the Christianization of Europe was the first step on the road to today's modern Westernized monoculture. Anyway, the whole point is that there was and can be very valuable and successful 'fragmented' civilizations.