Posted on 10/30/2005 1:05:06 AM PDT by nickcarraway
ping
I don't know? Indoor plumbing maybe, the spread of Christianity?
rome also gave us the form of govt known as the republic. basically, america is truly romes grandchild. america inherited well, lets just hope she quits squandering her inheritance before its too late.
Yeah, I know. But I figured indoor plumbing and Christianity would be trivial to them. The leftists hate Christians, and have no problem wallowing in crap, seeing as they are so full of it.
Our language, and most of our law.
I suppose the endless fascination with the Romans stems from the fact that we are their descendants in terms of civilization and culture. Despite our manifest differences, many ideas crucial to the Romans are likewise crucial to us -- distributed, non-centralized power in government, the rule of law, peace through strength, and big engineering projects in serivce of the public good. They didn't always live up to their ideals (as neither do we), but the net impact of Roman presence on the world and the sum total of human culture was positive, as is ours.
Dormice. Just the treat for dorcats.
"American viewers in the 1970s certainly took the seedy court politics on display in the BBC adaptation of Robert Graves's I Claudius as an allegory of Nixon's White House - a parallel which may possibly have been in the mind of the film-makers"......and was definitely in the mind of the writer of this article. No one else drew such a ridiculous parallel.
I watched the series with fascination. There was essentially no parallel to the Nixon admiistration. There were more parallels to the Kennedy administration.
I also bought and read Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire during the Jimmy Carter presidency. I realized that any nation that would elect a moron like that, and let him serve out four years and make foreign and domestic policy, was likely headed for a fall, and I wanted to know how such a collapse would come about.
It is obvious that the Left today represents Decadence--the same kind of Decay that brought about the fall of Rome and all its horrors.
The Clinton administration and the complicity and interference run by the press to all its corruption, the mendacity of the press and our universities and their service to propaganda, the corruption in the press and the Democrat Party--all are unmistakable signs of Decadence (as though the free fall of American cultural standards were not evidence enough).
It is the American Heartland that is vibrant, energetic, optimistic, and ascendant. It has everything to offer.
The Left has nothing to offer but mendacity, asassination of the characters of its opponents, and a ruthless grasp for power--just like Livia, Tiberias, Poppea, Nero, Caligula--the list goes on and on.
The Left is Decadence.
The Marxists said religion was the opiate of the people, but I've often thought there was much to the phrase, "Bread and circuses" to keep the populace quiet.
Toga parties!
What did the Romans do for us?
Not sure of everything they did, but I see a lot of cool movies with glad he ate her's and stuff, and I refuse to buy a watch or clock without them new-fangled roman numerals on them.
Irrelevent..
Slavery was a world-wide practice..
Likewise, the first encoded laws, by Hammurabi, included an entire section dealing specifically with slavery, both voluntary and involuntary, and including the rights of slaves..
Among Roman contributions don't forget the arch, modern concrete, the modern highway of which many are still in use in Europe and the British Isles.
The Decadence of the West parallels the Decadence of Rome. The Left is its contemporary manifestation. Leftist propaganda organs such as The Guardian feed it.
The closest she can come to comprehending what's occurring is the irrelevant and unlikely Nixon Administration, hardly an example of Decadence at all.
She--and those who produce The Guardian--are obviously oblivious to the implications of the Carter, Clinton, and Kennedy Administrations, the absurdity of the election of the likes of Jacques Chirac and Gerhardt Schroeder, and the nomination of a man such as John Kerry to the U.S. Presidency; the paralysis of Europe in preventing a Muslim conquest; ubiquitous abuse of addictive drugs in the West; the decline of Christianity and the rise of crypto-atheisim; the persistence of Marxism though it has failed consistently and killed more than 100 million people; the suicidal loss of the will to survive in many nations of Western Europe; the glorification of sexual promiscuity even as the HIV plague mushrooms; the decline of the family; the replacement of the old morality with the new morality, i.e. permissiveness; the sacrifice of the values of Western Civilization before silly phantom of Diversity; the abandonment of truth and its quest, notably in academia and journalism, in favor of propaganda and political expediency... The list goes on and on.
All of this must have escaped Mary--and has certainly escaped the producers of The Guardian, judging from their past publications.
They evidently have no comprehension whatsoever of Decadence and how it has infected contemporary Western Civilization and how it brought about the slow and horrifying fall of Rome, its ultimate collapse, and the thousand-years darkness that folowed.
They also evidently have no understanding that the fall of the West--as much as they may dispise it--would be followed by the rise of something far worse, even than their jaded vision of Western Civilization, ignominious as it undoubtedly must be.
You forgot sanitation. The romans had good sewage systems and organized garbage pickup. Also, they had good public water systems.
It is a priceless gift to the world.
It must be preserved, cherished, and encouraged to florish.
Nobody has mentioned the Roman Military and the concept of the Fighting Engineers.
Our military practically rebuilds a country as we go, much the same as the Romans did.
Although Ike admired the German Autobahns, the idea of military roads was entirely Roman. So Ike built our Interstate highway system. Look on th U.S. map and you can see that every I-state connects military bases.
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