ZOMBIE FORUMS

That's not always how it works out. Yeah, we invented the tractor, combine harvester, etc. to replace manual labor, but those were areas where mostly the farmers themselves or hired hands worked the fields. Slaves were generally restricted to cotton, which we didn't find a mechanized way to harvest until AFTER slavery was forcibly abolished.

Yes, and it isn't the least bit unusual for both kinds of labor to exist in the same culture with the same technology. For instance, hi-tech harvesting and quasi-serf labor have co-existed on large California farms for more than a century. Likewise, some of our high-level technologies---electronics, for instance---are prepared for consumer use in assembly factories that are basically contract bound labor, with all the attendent abuses.

There is always going to be a part of the production process that doesn't require education or literate skills. Humans being a hierarchal species, there will always be humans willing to coerce their percieved social inferiors into doing that part of the job.

I'm pretty sure that the steam-driven tractor as a widespread farm implement post-dates the American Civil War and the abolishment of slavery.

The equipment that replaced hand-tools in the fields of the non-slave states was horse-drawn. I'm not sure when mechanical cotton harvesters were invented, but bound labor (white and black sharecroppers) still worked southern fields into the 1960s. The labor was cheap, the legal system supported the labor system, and the land-owners lived a lot better than anyone else around, so they were content---power and wealth competed for their attention and power was winning. They didn't have incentive to invest capital in machinery until the civli rights movement freed whites and blacks from the established social order.

You'll find similar systems in effect all around the world. Local elites are not inclined to change the social system to give themselves more wealth unless they also get to remain the elite.

Wide-spread use of the steam-driven tractor actually post-dates the 19th Century.

They have a wonderful "threshing bee" each September in Sycamore, IL, that brings together old tractors, threshers, donkey engines, and equipment from the 1880s to the 1960s. One of its fascinations is that you can look over all these devices and understand the process of invention and development over the decades. In the beginning, you have a steam engine to provide power to a thresher, pump, or saw mill, then you have a steam engine on wheeled platform with a gear to power the wheels, then you have a purpose-built steam "tractor" where all the components are bolted together by original design. Gradually through the decades you evolve a machine that is sleek, integrated, every component tested and modified to the concept of a tractor, the engineers obviously adding to a century of design knowledge.

A good display of old guns shows the same process, from a concept of powder burning in a tube to push out a bullet (Captain Kirk vs The Gorn) to something made out of hand forged parts, to the revolver and bolt action weapons of the mid to late 19th Century. Both of the latter items represent high-end metallurgy and precision machining from c. 1880. That is, if severely broken, they can't be fixed by a village blacksmith. Anyone who uses them has to stay on good terms with the industrialized culture that makes them. Or one of its competitors.

and there you have the industrial robber barons. Since the local smith can'y fix it, you can charge like buggery for spare parts. It's called a proprietary market lock and everyone did it ;)

The good thing about slaves is that you have to do remarkably little to keep them alive and in working order. Food is dead cheap. A few sacks of grain and beans and the occasional strip of meat to keep them from getting enemia. You don't even have to buy most of it, just setting aside a strip of excess land for the slaves to grow their own food.

A good tractor probably costs more to operate and service than a fair number of slaves. It needs a constant stream of liquid hydrocarbons every day, parts need to be replaced, the whole thing becomes worthless after a decade or two, you need to stick a moderately well paid farmer on top of it to get it to do anything, and you can't stick two tractors together in the barn and have them breed more tractors. They also have a bad habit of rolling over and squishing unsuspecting farmers and assorted other farm machines have their own nasty ways of killing you.

I just wonder why America was such a dumbass when it came to slavery. I am not talking ethics. We just seem to have done the entire process wrong. We should have taken a page from the Romans.

Who were actually not so bad. They actually tended to lower the prices of their various commodities and open up things to the common man that were previously exclusive to the filthy rich. Railroads, steelwork buildings, anything transmitted over a copper wire.

The classic text on this is White on Black by Winthrop D. Jordan, written in 1968, back before social history got overrun by pomos and political activists. He traced the evolution of the concept of slavery in the Americas through the centuries and showed how the rationalizations behind it remain part of American racism and racial definitions today.

There is a basic irony in the process. In ancient miiddle-eastern and Roman cultures, slavery was an integral part of the class structure. That is, being a slave was lowly, but so was being a peasant, townsman, etc. They were varying degrees of lowliness, which all humans might be born into or fall into.

This kind of slavery was incompatible with the more egalitarian view of humanity and the human soul held by early Christians and the Germanic barbarians. Consequently, slavery died out in much of Europe and, where it was practiced, restricted to pagans in some areas and Moslems in others. When the English founded their colonies in Virginia and the Caribbean, they found the disease attrition rate among field hands was so horrible that they could not get enough Europeans to voluntarily immigrate. Economic pressure--greed, that is--led them to ship in Africans, morally eligible to be slaves because they were pagan. Eventually, many of the Africans began converted to Christianity. In addistion, European culture, as a whole, was integrating reformed Christianity and Greek philosophy into a new humanism, deliberately trying to create a more sophisticated, less brutal culture. One of the things they talked themselves out of was slavery based on religious difference.

The slave owners now had to redifine their economic system to maintain their wealth and status. Essentially, they created "chattel slavery" by rationalizing traditional ethnic prejudice into a formal defiinition of race that included the inferiority of the "Negro" race. They thereby created a cultural meme that, in some ways, was more brutal than the older memes they were trying to improve on.

As Sarine noted, we've all "got a little hypocricy on us."

Sorry, that ran on a bit long. Issues like these are usually ducked wholesale in fantasy literature. There may be commoners and kings, aristocrats and peasants, but mostly everyone talks to everyone like class and racial distinctions were just a formality. One of the things I had to keep repeating to the players in my fantasy campaigns was along the lines of "Yes, you killed the Nazgul, but that does not make the King your buddy. You're heroic peasant mercenaries, nothing more. You get to talk to his servants."

You have absolutely nothing to apologise about. Your post was as clear and concise as they come; its just that you had one hell of a lot to say. And its a good fragment of thought for us to touch on as we attempt to carve into the meat of the world Poe draws for us.

Mhmmmm, I'm proud when a thread I start get this kinda posts (and glad that people didn't focus on my splatter-gun comment).

I wonder if the N.C. has got slaves.

So... was it circles that are hard to build? I don't think glass hemispheres are that difficult but it does show a society of luxury. The streets they're running through look more dirty and pragmatic tho'.

And in whole, drunkards in the NC seem reasonably fast-talking if not cultured and intelligent on a whole. It seems the men have been to school and know the basics of their society, they certainly recognize the type and usage of a gun.

The bloody defeat of the Veracian army, sounds like some sort of Desert Storm event. Artillery and repeating rifles on divine magic and a hybrid army.


So divine magic is neutered arcane magic? That sounds likely, but the magic of the elven Gods seem to be much more powerful, it is perhaps 'divine' magic?

divine magic = outsourced from a personality rather then universal laws
I don't get how the elven Gods are divine if they're not almighty though, someone isn't almight if the... hmmm, better cut it here, people in the west don't like opinions on religion.

It would be 'divine' inasmuch as it's being used by a god, but not qualitatively different from the 'arcane' magic used by other magic users.



So what if you ARE the god? Is the magic you're using outsourced?



Maybe some people don't. The way I see it it all hinges on what you're willing to call a God. There are:

(1) really, extremely, perhaps indefinitely power beings within the universe who are capable of doing almost or perhaps even anything physically possible for a physical being to do (which includes "arcane magic" if your world's "physics" includes such things). There could be many such beings with no contradictions; they're indefinitely powerful but can still interfere with each other's power and such.

(2) Beings identical with the universe, of which there can thus be only one, and whose powers precisely are those of the universe and the laws of nature; everything that happens, happens at their (perhaps subconscious) whim, and physically impossible things are so impossible precisely because they refuse to allow them to happen. This is the god of pantheism and (by some theories) some early forms of monotheism that later developed into...

(3) Beings which transcend the universe and exist entirely without it, and precede it, who created the laws of nature and can suspend them at whim, and create or destroy or otherwise change things as they please; and in some versions of this, created the laws of logic and mathematics and can suspend them at whim too, making it true that both P and not P, or that 2 + 2 = 5. I honestly can't quite grasp this as an intelligible concept so I'm gonna say no such thing is possible, but I put it out there cause lots of people ostensibly claim to believe in such a being.

It seems that in ES, as in most fantasy stories and in ancient mythologies, we're dealing with beings of type 1. Since all known beings of that sort are dormant, nobody can really ask one of them to work magic through them, as your D&D style "divine magic" requires. If one of them was awake, and chose to work magic by proxy of a lesser being, you could say that that lesser being was working divine magic; but the god itself would still be working 'arcane' magic, just by proxy.

The big computer manufacturers still do it, especially with laptops, and especially Dell on all their computers. Dell even changes around the pinout for the connection from the power supply to the motherboard so that using a normal board or PSU will fry both the board and the PSU.

Not to mention all the shennanigans involving printers and ink cartridges.

True enough. All eight of my great grandparents were (white) sharecroppers in Edgecombe County, North Carolina. My mother used to go to her grandparents' farm and help loop tobacco during the harvest.

Why do I think that Poe has either read this or needs to?

Nitpick: soldiers used some armor well before the Romans, and the ancient Greeks were just one of the contemporary cultures to make use of armors of various sorts.

Men died by the thousands in a single day of war long before the rise of the gun.

However, I still like the quote.

Thanks Forrest.
I think nr. 3 is the only thing I'd be willing to call a God personally.

Spheres... spheres are hard to build, not circles. Hehe. ;^_=

God's have their magic outsources? Well... it'd add a lot of interesting theories and maybe explain a few things or I'm wrong. There's got to be some reason why they're so powerful even if it operates on the same laws if it does. Maybe real divine magic in Poeverse is ultrapowerful arcane magic?

Wtm., what you say would be true within the Poervers about it still being arcane magic, but in D&D divine spells are inherantly different although there is some overlapping and in certain modules and homebrew more narrow specifications of arcane and divine domains can overlap as well. By and large though, clerics do healing and less offensive magic and are not able to cast 'Timestop' or 'Meteor Swarm' and arcane magic can not 'Turn Undead'.
This of course, does not seem to apply for the Poerverse, I was quite surprised when I saw Sarine heal for the first time.

Wonderful quote, btw. the Egyptians had some splendid heavy bronze armour reserved for Kings and superior warriors.

Wait which part for Poe Brain food?

Because the Christians are just being used as a conveniant scapegoat for enterprising minds looking for new ways to slaughter. It wasn't religious practice or agenda that Guns became so universally used and effective. It was just the most universally conveniant method for Joe Shmuck who could point a round tube in the right direction.

Particularly since European gun technology didn't become a decisive factor in world power politics until after the Wars of Religion, when monarchialism and nationalism became the driving force behind wars around the world.

GB Shaw liked to throw barbs at the establishment's perception of themselves. There was always some truth behind it, but he was a man of his times and took a very Eurocentric view of things.

Not knowing when that quote is from, but guessing based on the tone, I'd say it's a safe bet to say that in contemporary speech at the time of writing "Christian civilization" was synonymous with "Western civilization". Thus the latest atrocities are not being attributed to Christians in the sense that we would now distinguish them from white European Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and atheists - rather, they're being attributed to white Europeans and their modern civilization, a large common denominator of which was at that time the Christian religion.