That’s so strange. Very sorry about that, it should be there, I don’t know why that is.

Habermas’s wheelhouse is really a little after the period this episode was mostly looking at - he’s more concerned with nation-states than the dynastic states of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

“I’ll second mrbackhair” is a good line

Yeah, there will be two substantive episodes per month, along with an interview.

I’m so sorry about that - I was assured that it’d be in there by the time this post went up, but there was apparently a delay in reviewing it. If you check back now, it should be up, or so I’ve been told.

No, they’re not the same at all; Spruyt’s Sovereign State and its Competitors lays out the distinctions pretty well. They were structurally different in terms of the relationship of jurisdictions to governance and authority, and there are good reasons why political scientists and historians distinguish them.

I realize that’s confusing phrasing on my part - Singapore is a sovereign state, of course, and the distinction I meant to draw was between city-states and larger territorial units.

I love the Civilization games so much. They’re a big part of how I got interested in history.

I’ve generally treated them separately, but I could do a thing at some point; I wrote a piece on gladiators last year that talked a lot about crowd psychology.

Thank you - sincerely appreciate you listening. I’ll have new Fall of Rome episodes on this feed as well once you get through those.

Question for everybody: if you listened to Fall of Rome, how do you feel about the production on the new show?

“Pissed hot” = a diuretic due to a provably tainted supplement.

Romero has been tested by USADA 22 times in the past two years. He was tested for years while he was wrestling internationally. He’s never popped for an anabolic agent. He handed USADA its first L in in its time regulating the UFC by proving his diuretic positive was due to a tainted supplement.

There was a basic understanding in Justinian’s court that the west had been lost and it wasn’t coming back, that the ad hoc arrangements that the Eastern Empire had reached with the barbarian kingdoms had morphed into self-confident rule in their own right. That’s why Justinian tried to reconquer the west - you’re…

Complicated question. I think they all saw their core identity as Romans, but being Roman wasn’t necessarily tied into political loyalty to or identification with a central government.

So, this point of view - that the Roman Empire didn’t “fall” - is especially common in academic discussions of this period right now, and I think it’s dead wrong. There was an imperial court administering provinces, collecting taxes, and running a standing army in 400. In 500, there wasn’t. What in the world would you…

All of this. In terms of the structure of the deal, it’s also drastically different than anything they’ve done before; it’s not as simple as “UFC gets paid.”

These aren’t analogous situations, for a variety of more- and less-complicated reasons.

Well played.

It’s almost like A) I talked about that at some length; and B) It’s not as simple as “...getting paid dollars AND cents”, because there are complications involving the nature of their relationship in the bout. Jesus fuck, dude.