Darboshanski opened this issue on Apr 15, 2008 · 24 posts
XENOPHONZ posted Tue, 15 April 2008 at 6:50 PM
I don't watch much TV, so I don't know what y'all are talking about.
Well.......let me amend that by saying that I did have the History International channel going last night, as background while I worked on my PC. They were playing an interesting series on the Dark Ages.
The Dark Ages were a perfect time for liberalism to flourish -- the power of the government to dictate how the people lived their lives was absolute; and most all property was either confiscated for taxes or else owned outright by the Central Authority of the Sacred State. That is to say: everything that wasn't destroyed or carried off by the invading barbarians of various stripes -- barbarians from whom the Central Authority couldn't protect the hapless serfs.......the stupid rabble of serfs who expended their lives in futile labors working for the government, so that the government could then dole bare-survival rations back out to them & earn the serf's eternal gratitude & support in doing so. In other words: such money & property as the serfs were allowed to keep was regarded as charity by the government -- which had so graciously permitted the serfs to retain. The serfs should have been properly thankful for that sort of treatment.
The governments back then couldn't have those serfs getting too uppity, ya know. If they weren't taxed to the point where they were forced to depend upon the government for everything -- including the bare essentials of life -- then that rabble might have started gettin' ideas. Like maybe that they were free, and that they didn't need the government to run their lives for them. Couldn't have that.
And those bloody-minded, invading barbarians? They were all just a myth. The barbarians didn't exist -- so there was no need for the serfs to worry about silly stuff like that. Any news reports that the serfs heard to the contrary which talked about invading hordes, bent on killing all of them, were just so much right-wing propaganda.
Ah......it was so wonderful living in the Dark Ages. So simple. All that was required was for you to keep your head down & do precisely as you were told to by the government. The beginning of the end for the Dark Ages came when the serfs started to own their own property & make their own money -- which they then kept. Ugh. What a radical thought. Sure made things tough on the parasitic government types, though.
Jericho was a city in ancient Canaan. Beyond that: I haven't heard of the TV series.