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Comment by labster | Hacker News Reader

If it is the “fall of Rome moment”, I’m not exactly worried. It took nearly a millennium for Rome to fall — and even that depends on whether or not you consider the Holy Roman Empire or the Ottoman Empire to be true successor states.

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I think the Ottoman Empire cannot be considered a successor of Rome - did you mean the Byzantine Empire? (aka Eastern Roman Empire)

Russia, France, Spanish crown, Ottoman, HRE all claimed to be successors of Rome at some point.

As did America

As did the Nazi's.

America surely uses a lot of symbolism from the Roman Republic but I am not so sure they have ever claimed to be the successors to the throne once held by Julius Caesar, as all the other ones mentioned above have.

Ah yes, the early middle ages that everyone agrees was a wonderful time, full of peace, economic prosperity, and progress /s.

In the west nobody seriously thinks that. But Constantinople was the cosmopolitan city for a very long time.

Im not denying that the eastern part of the Roman Empire continued to flourish, but you can’t ignore that Western Europe stagnated for almost 1000 years.

The Soviet Union went down pretty fast

So basically you dont care what happens when you die? Sounds like boomer logic.

"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit."

> Sounds like boomer logic.

A little ageist, are we?

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again; but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Boomers were the ones who started the recent environmental movement, so your quote is rather ironic.

Those boomers were rare and spat on, though. In the current younger generations, enviromentalism is generally accepted as a good idea.

This makes their work all the more precious.

It is not particularly courageous to take a position that is generally accepted as good in your society. It comes with zero personal risk.

In theory, not so much in practice. It's easy to have an opinion. Changing one's habits and lifestyle is more difficult.

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