Adrian Hester

Really, I don't see what the problem is. If a transsexual goes to the women's restroom made up as a woman, most likely no one will notice. If a man puts on a dress to pretend to be a transsexual so's to go into the women's room and harass women, then that fact's easily observed and can be reported to security or the police and can be brought up in trial as evidence the person's not a genuine transsexual. The majority of cases in which I can see this coming up is if a transsexual is involved in a crime in a women's room (as witness or victim) or suffers a medical emergency, in which case I see no reason to prosecute him/her for using the facilities if no one else complains.

Of course there is! With x=8 and y=8/3, you have area=x*y=64/3 and perimeter=2x+2y=16+(16/3)=(48+16)/3=64/3. I think what you meant to say is that there's no *square* with side of length 8 whose area has the same value as its perimeter.

Nope; looks like you made an error in your arithmetic somewhere. With x=8, y=8/3, so the rectangle would have an area of 64/3 (in units of L^2) and a perimeter of 64/3 (in units of L). A more convenient form of the equation for x>2 is y=2x/(x-2).

Do you mean Eratosthenes, who calculated the circumference of the Earth from observations of the Sun at different latitudes? Hipparchus did work to establish the longitudes of various cities, and he came up with estimates of the size and distance from the Earth of the Sun and Moon.

No, sorry, this goes far beyond spell-checking. You accused Lincoln of allowing Union soldiers to rape Southern women and implied this was a matter of national policy. When I showed this was nonsense, did you defend your assertion or retract it? No, you accused me of "drinking that juice," in other words, of unthinkingly and irrationally buying into a patently false position. This is no skin off my nose, since it's a pretty sad dodge and I'm optimistic about most of those reading our exchange, but you might want to consider a less obviously fallacious gambit in the future, since it is quite insulting and could get you hauled onto the carpet if you try it again. Then perhaps in the future you should not post while getting sauced up.

This would be a lot less funny if you hadn't misspelled "writes" in such a way as to say exactly the opposite of what you meant. But yes, in the case of the Civil War and slavery at least, the victor certainly did "right the books." So say the radical feminists too. And it's just as meaningless a flourish over your signature as theirs. I suspected you didn't have a valid response; I just didn't expect you to fold and admit the bankruptcy of your position so easily.

"Allowed...to rape Southern women"? This bit of pernicious nonsense is not only provably false but slanderous, offensive, and downright bigoted; it reflects very badly on you and you should retract it. Rape by Northern soldiers was explicitly prohibited and when proved was punished by death (for example, "The punishment for rape will be death, and any violence offered a female, white or colored, with the evident intent or purpose to commit rape will be considered as one and punished accordingly," Gl order N°12, may 1862 by command of gl McDowell- OR S2 vol III). Of course, Southern soldiers raped Southern women too and were put to death for it (fewer cases are known of this because many CSA army records were destroyed in the war), suggesting that your beloved Southern patriots would have done exactly the same damn thing you accuse Northerners of doing as a matter of national policy (which last is provably false, by the way) if they'd marched north of the Mason-Dixon line more. Rape is fairly common in all wars, and the War of Southern Bullheadedness in the Name of a Middle Finger Raised to Civilization is considered a low-rape war, in great part because military units north and south enrolled as groups from the same towns and the men knew each other since childhood, which restrained anti-social impulses a great deal. In any case, I'm very suspicious of Southern white men going on about the horror of (either black or Northern) violations of the sanctity and chastity of white Southern women--that was an excuse for all sorts of murderous fiendishness for decades. But then given how dead-set you are on demonizing Lincoln as a calculatingly cold-blooded and callous wanna-be tyrant and Union soldiers as mostly uncivilized foreigners recruited straight off the boat and untouched by the civilizing influences of Southern womanhood and aristocratic slave society, it's no wonder you'd accuse the Northern armies of just letting their soldiers rape women without restraint. For shame. (Hint: If these last sentences seem a bit unfair to your heroes and their cause, then perhaps you should consider peddling a less hysterical ascription of base and evil motives to their opponents. The war ended a century and a half ago; there's no call for you to keep spewing their gall.)

From what I know of it, Bohmian mechanics, for one.

Okay, I agree it's incomplete. I also agree that the standard interpretation (and quite a few of the non-standard ones) disagrees with the axioms. This does not make the physical theory itself meaningless, however--when it does make predictions, they've been borne out spectacularly by experiment. Calling it "meaningless" is an exaggeration; incomplete and philosophically unfounded, yes, but meaningless, no.

Sounds to me like the typical creationist fallacies about the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics combined with the special definitions of information and entropy in information theory to make an even more potent brew of codswallop for the unwary. First, entropy can decrese in open systems if there's net energy flow into the system, a bit of thermodynamics that's been perfectly clear at least since 1931, when Lars Onsager pulished his work on reciprocal relations (he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1968 for that), and especially after the development of non-equilibrium thermodynamics--for example, Ilya Prigogine's work on dissipative systems, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977, work that is basic in the study of self-organizing systems: chemical systems (chemicals in a flask, which is I assume what "raw chemistry" means) in which there is an increase in complexity and decrease in local entropy so long as there is energy flow into the system. (So yeah, the claim that the "new information" has to come from somewhere, and the implication that that "somewhere" has to be an intelligent designer and not something in nature or the surroundings, is false--experimentally proven to be so--for "raw chemistry," and is equally so for life, which is, after all, simply one special subclass of not-so-raw chemical systems.) This includes the Earth, because of that big bright thing in the sky pumping out vast quantities of radiant energy. But of course creationists are too stupid (or, in the case of the handful of actual scientists who publish creationist tracts, too dishonest) to realize their thermodynamical arguments have been obviously false for well over seventy years now. Second, "information" and "entropy" in information theory are defined in terms of the number of bits (binary choices) necessary to specify a signal; the latter is only mathematically similar to thermodynamic entropy (more precisely, entropy in statistical thermodynamics), and the former is only named "information" because it's similar to what information in an intuitive sense would consist of in that specialized context. It's a basic error of which at least some textbooks on information theory make a point of disabusing you early on that "information" is actually information in the usual, informal sense; it's not. So what you're saying actually comes down to misunderstood thermodynamics combined with a basic misunderstanding of information theory, with your terms chosen in the way most attractive to intelligent designists and other cruder creationists. Impressive--just not favorably so.

I'll preface my comments below by saying I agree with most of your posting. The questions below are to see if we see completely eye to eye. Judging from what you have said elsewhere in this thread (and indeed in your post), I assume here "value-difference" means a difference in fundamental values--valuing contradictory things or adhering to opposite philosophical ideas or political ideologies, say. You say going off to war rather than staying at home is not a value-difference, and I assume you'd say the same would be true of a significant age difference, a difference in careers, or a difference in wanting children or not (to choose the three most obvious examples). Again, "incompatible" as it stands is a bit vague for me. I take it here as meaning having incompatible fundamental values, not the little incompatibilities like differences in your senses of humor or artistic tastes, or even different energy levels or ways of expressing emotions, all the little differences in sense of life and personality and such that can play havoc with relationships.

Sex is a proper response to a person you value highly--you needn't be convinced that she's "the one" for it to be moral and a great value to sleep with her, only that she is of great enough value to you and there's no one available whom you love more. (And how much is "great enough"? There has to be a commonality in values and virtues to a substantial degree--one could probably make a case that the exact degree is a reflection of personal values that vary somewhat among rational men.) First, you mean, gain and/or keep. Second, what is the value you gain from a sexual relationship? It's primarily the emotional connection, bonding, sharing, and mutual pleasure in a situation of mutual respect and admiration of which sex is the natural expression. Even if you know a relationship is not permanent, you still will have gained lasting value from it. Perhaps you mean only a situation in which you know that it's a one-off deal, a one-night stand or a one-week menage, if you like--something entered into with a definite foreseen limit to it as opposed to a situation in which you're pretty sure the relationship will end but not after a definite span of time, say when you two have grown further apart or one of you finds someone greater or you eventually reach a point in your lives where your careers take you different ways. Even if you know there's a definite term to the relationship, I'd say there are some cases in which it's moral--some came up in the thread you linked to, so I don't see the need to rehash them here. You're begging the question. The issue under discussion is whether it's moral to have a sexual relationship with someone you love (to whatever degree, not only the level you seem to have implicitly set it at, the highest level of romantic love) but know you are unable or unwilling to have a permanent relationship with; whether it's long-term or short-term is probably not that important. In any case, the metaphors you use are misleading: "giving yourself," "someone you don't think you belong to," "discard." The question is not whether it's moral to pick up a lover like a toy you know you'll discard, but whether it's moral to join yourself with another sexually when you know fairly clearly that you'll eventually separate again. I'd say that for a man of integrity, an act declaring someone to be a great or a supreme value most certainly can coexist with a recognition that the two of them might eventually separate. --And in any case, I'd say the act declaring someone to be your highest or truly supreme value is marriage, not sex. You shouldn't get married with the intent of divorcing later, but it's begging the question to say that the same must then be true of all proper sexual relationships.

And if I'm not mistaken, according to Ayn Rand "value" is that currency. But value is an "abstract concept" (assuming I'm taking your meaning of that phrase correctly): A value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The nature of the value is abstracted away, whether productive activity or sexual pleasure or anything else. And presumably a person who pursues one of them but not the other finds greater value in pursuing that activity than the value he would have obtained from the time and effort spent in the other. It's on the basis of the respective values of various benefits that a rational man chooses which to pursue, not because he has a quota of a given type of benefit to meet.

I have to disagree with Software Nerd: This is a poor analogy. It breaks down once you try to introduce the idea of monogamy into it. You can read the great and the not-so-great writers at the same time and value them for their respective merits, and you can even go back and re-read pernicious authors for their merits, or at least to learn from the ways they wrote. I doubt anyone here is claiming anything like that would be moral in your sexual relationships. (In any case, I disagree with you about Faulkner, and some Joyce I like, some of The Dubliners for example. But I think we're agreed on his big two and on Kafka.) I don't get the comparison myself. There's usually a climax in both, but apart from that...

But are they actually arguing that? I'd have said they were arguing that there's some point in the middle of the range of possibilities between sex with your ideal life partner and sex with a commie tree-hugging unwashed granola grubber where sex stops being moral and becomes immoral. This value might vary a good deal between any of them and might be a good deal lower than Inspector's (and certainly differs from Capitalism Forever's). Edited to add: Though I might be misinterpreting your phrase "all manner of points along that heirarchy." What do you mean by "all manner of points"?

I think you've misunderstood her here. She wrote "even more restricted," which implies that she fully recognizes her writing as having severe restrictions on it. The implication for me is that as long as she's produced solid, valuable writing, she doesn't feel guilty for not having written her life's masterwork.

Eh, come again? Did you mean gauche? Or do you have something against gouache? 'Cause, ya know, I quite like gouache.

Why? I read all of the thread you posted that in. You didn't convince me there and your bait's unappetizing--if you seriously believe that sex between two people who value each other highly but not enough to marry is tantamount to casual sex and therefore immoral even after the lengthy discussion over there, then there's no point to arguing with you.

False. The last legitimate Great Khan of the entire Mongol Empire was Khubilai's younger brother Arigh Boke, who was elected in 1260; Khubilai claimed the title Great Khan despite the election and made good on it by success on the battlefield. However, after that bit of ugliness, there were no more elections of a Great Khan by all the leading Mongols of the empire because none of his rivals considered Khubilai or his successors to have been validly elected; instead, the title was taken as a matter of course by all the Mongol leaders. Nonetheless, his successors thought of themselves as the rightful rulers of an empire that included China, Tibet, and the Mongolian heartland. No, not even among the emperors. Not one of the Mongol emperors spoke Chinese as his mother tongue. Religiously they were initiates and specialists in certain forms of Tibetan Buddhism, especially the Tantric mystical stuff that seemed quite foreign to Chinese of the time, and besdies combining Chinese and Buddhist ideals of statecraft (hardly a feature of Chinese culture) retained any number of traditional Mongol religious and political customs. I mean, hell, think of the claim by Ming scholars that the downfall of the Yuan dynasty came when the last Yuan emperor was considering how best to get his Han Chinese subjects to consume more dairy products! You call that sinicized? I certainly wouldn't. And so on--see the many examples below. Here you show the same misunderstandings of the history of the Mongol Empire as you do of Byzantine history. The Mongol Empire started falling apart when Khubilai declared himself Great Khan in 1260, two decades before the Mongol conquest of the Southern Song dynasty (South China) in 1279, because of rivalries between the rulers of its major branches. Khubilai kept this smoothed over somewhat, but the peace among them fell apart with his death. The details: Khubilai was accused of being too sinicized when his oldest brother Mongke was Great Khan, it is true, apparently by the party around his younger brother Arigh Boke to help their man get the title; I believe this charge was also used as a rallying cry at times by another rival, Khaidu, grandson of the second Great Khan, Ogedei. Khubilai did adopt Chinese methods of statecraft to rule his empire; his adoption of the rest of Chinese culture was much more tentative. But it was the fact that his younger brother Arigh Boke had been elected by the other Mongol leaders as Great Khan in 1260 that was seen by Khubilai's opponents as discrediting his title of Great Khan, not because he was too Chinese. This is a perfect example of your uncritically sinocentric view of the subject--seeing Chinese influence in everything, even the family squabbles and power politics of the Mongol world. And you're utterly ignoring one of the most important causes of the instability of the Yuan dynasty--any emperor who was seen as too sinicized was killed by a rival faction at court that insisted on the Mongols remaining Mongols and not becoming Chinese in culture. In other words, any of Khubilai Khan's successors who did become "thoroughly sinicized" also became dead in very short order! Even the Classics Mats, the discussions of the Chinese classics in the presence of the Mongol emperors, were conducted in Mongolian, not in Chinese. If the emperors had been sinicized, you can be damned sure these discussions would have been the first to be conducted in Chinese. More than that (yes, there's a lot more you've ignored), the Yuan dynasty in fact did extend quite a ways beyond the borders of the Middle Kingdom--in particular, they continued to rule the heartland of Mongolia proper until they retreated there in 1368, and once they moved there they were still seen by the Mongols already there as legitimate successors of Chinggis Khan and as true Mongols, not sinicized Mongol wanna-bes. They also ruled Tibet and other areas to the south of China; guesstimating from a map of the empire in the time of Khubilai, South China (taking the Southern Song as showing the limits of Chinese cultural regions at the time) and the North China Plain south of the course of the Great Wall made up maybe a third, maybe two-fifths, of the land area of the empire. Really, your historical errors are pretty serious on this score. And I think it's fair to say that the great majority of Mongols in China remained alien to Chinese culture throughout the ninety years of Mongol rule; certainly that's how their Chinese contemporaries saw them at the time. The proof of the pudding is quite simple. Where did the last Mongol emperor in China and his court go when the Ming deposed them in 1368? They returned to Mongolia, of course. Some Mongol battalions did take service under the Ming dynasty, true, but then some Han Chinese populations took up loyal service with the Manchus long before their conquest of China in 1644. A hard and fast distinction? Maybe not. A useful distinction? Most certainly. I tend to take "civilization" as referring to all the intellectual, or better, considered aspects of a society and its ideals, "culture" the entire body of learned behavior, whether considered or unconscious (such as age-old customs). And I consider enlightenment to be marked by a progressive increase in the amount of civilization in a culture.

Since that's what you were doing, never mind then; it was frustrating as all get-out trying to figure out what definition you were using of culture.

In that case I agree with you. No, the 5,000 years is a traditional exaggeration, but the Zhou dynasty was traditionally founded about 1122 BC; judging from the archeological record (which is partly historical, since an important part of its archeology consists of bronze sacrificial implements given as rewards for service by the Zhou emperors that contain inscriptions), this is probably quite close to the actual figure. (But the Zhou emperors only reigned and did not really rule after about 771 BC, which was the beginning of the period of Chinese history that really can be fruitfully compared to European feudalism--but even then it was a system of feudal rulers, many related distantly to the Zhou imperial house, competing for the most part within a mutually understood political system and culture. This culture evolved over time, of course, especially after the aristocracy essentially killed and enslaved itself in centuries of wars--whenever a state was conquered, its ruler and his nobles would usually be enslaved. This made the way for scholars of common stock to come into political influence; this was Confucius's background and influenced his thought.) The earlier Shang dynasty is much sketchier, and very little can be said about it.

So why then do you fail to admit that at the very least the exact same thing is true of Chinese culture? That Roman culture continued for centuries (!) after the fragmentation of the Roman state, but that in some vague, unspecified way the fragmentation of the Chinese state means that Chinese culture must have somehow been severed--and anyone who knows better is probably a revisionist? More than that, Chinese culture was always literate and prized scholarly attainment, particularly in the traditional books that held up a model of state and society that was never lost from Chinese culture even under the Mongols (Confucian scholars were not recruited for rule throughout much of the 90 years of Mongol rule of South China, but they continued to teach students of the younger generations with the same books and methods in the same ideas and ideals, and these students were there to be recruited by the founder of the Ming dynasty). There were local variations in the rest of Chinese culture, but this uniformity in education and outlook prevented the fragmentation of Chinese culture--Chinese scholars drew from the same body of ideas and aimed for pretty much the same social and political ideals. This is quite different from the situation in the former provinces of the Roman Empire. Again, I ask you, what do you mean by culture? If language is an inessential part of culture, then what is the essential part of culture? If you restrict it to, say, a body of political and social ideals, then in Chinese culture those social and political ideals were explicitly stated from the time of Confucius, formed the fundamental part of the education of anyone who became literate, and were taken as the basis of legitimacy by every Chinese state. But me, I'd take those as essentially synonymous with civilization, and prefer to use culture to include such things as language. That's not what I'm claiming; I'll let Moebius answer for himself. Which would these be? What term(s) do they use instead? And do you mean "better" as in standard works for scholars, or do you just mean the ones that you agree with? They also make clear that there was an ideal view of Chinese society and state that Chinese people aimed for throughout history. The details might have changed, but you can't understand the dynamics of Chinese history without recognizing this ideal. After you, Alphonse. False--it refers to the culture of a particular people (the Han) of that part of the world. (In the original sense of the word, in fact, it does refer to a nation but not necessarily to a state.) The Chinese state included other peoples, but they were not Han Chinese. They could be assimilated, however, and elements of Chinese culture did spread to other peoples (the Koreans especially, the Japanese, Vietnamese, and others to lesser extents). And the Han Chinese were devoted to a particular model of imperial government that they erected time and again over the millennia. But to be even more accurate, they had a single unified written language that was the basis of education and the common currency of administration regardless of which province an official was stationed in or from whence he came. More precisely, there were simply distinct Germanic peoples (note the plural!). They did not see themselves as one single people who by their common ideals should be unified under a particular type of state that they had all been unified under in the past. The Chinese did. Nor was the structure of Chinese society or the state comparable in any sense more rigorous than Marxist abuse to feudalism after about the Warring States period.

In many cases, it was rival states ruled by Han Chinese dynasties fighting to conquer their rivals; in some cases it was a simple coup (the Xin dynasty in 9 AD, for example, or the change of the Western Wei to the Northern Zhou in 557 AD). "Dynasty" is a catch-all term and changes in dynasty subsume a wide variety of vastly different situations, and both you and Inspector are greatly oversimplifying things by taking only one of the different implications of a change of dynasty as the predominant one (though you're closer to historical usefulness than he is). The changes from Capetian to Valois to Bourbon hardly marked and most certainly did not cause fundamental changes in French culture, for example, and many of Inspector's examples are just as insignificant in a cultural sense. But there are more of the ones he's somewhat right about than you allow. No, this is wrong. First, there were other non-Han dynasties who ruled great parts of China--the Toba Wei, for example, and the Liao and Jin, all of whom ruled the North China Plain, the traditional home of Chinese culture, for several centuries (though they did not rule Southern China), and had important effects on Chinese culture. Second, the Mongols most certainly did not adopt Chinese culture and customs, even under Khubilai, who at least had some familiarity with Chinese culture. It's largely true of the Manchus, however. To take these in turn: (1) What do you mean by the "identity" of China? (2) Chinese culture evolved throughout its history and it was influenced, sometimes a good deal, by non-Chinese cultures, including some of the cultures who ruled parts of China (though probably just as much in the long run by the peopes of South China that the Han Chinese assimilated from the later Zhou dynasty onwards). You want either to argue that the culture of China was not fundamentally changed by foreign rule (and you'd have to define what that means), or that the significant changes in Chinese culture that did occur over history were largely internally driven--changes seeping throughout Chinese culture from native sources in response to internal events. This latter is a more natural view of things, but unless you take some perverse standard of fundamental change for the former, it's lso quite defensible. (3) The language of China was not lost, but it most assuredly did change over time just like any other human language. The changes in the spoken language are masked by the uniformity in literary Chinese, which is itself an important factor in the continuity of Chinese culture. (4) The concept of a unified Chinese state, and for all but the last century and a little more under an emperor having certain common characteristics throughout Chinese history (accession through the Mandate of Heaven, succoring and fathering the people, aided by wise advisors, governing through a bureaucracy based on uniform codified laws, and so on), is common throughout much of Chinese history. However, whenever China was disunited, there was no single name for an empire that itself did not exist in fact. (5) This is a significant factor in the continuity of Chinese culture--the fact that there were so many Chinese who stayed even in the lands conquered by outsiders, and who saw themselves as a single people at a higher cultural level than their non-Han rulers, holding through generation after generation of highly literate study to the same basic beliefs and view of society and the state as had won out at the end of the Zhou dynasty and codified under the Han. How do you distinguish civilization and culture? Bad examples, again because of the wide variety of situations grouped together under a change of dynasty. Some dynastic changes accompanied foreign conquest; others marked the rise of one family and its displacement of the ruling house. Again, I think this is a serious misunderstanding of a great deal of Egyptian history, and is not fully true of Roman culture in Italy or imperial Roman culture in its Greek guise in Byzantium.

Perhaps, perhaps not. How do you define civilization? How is it different from culture? Actually, there has been a conception of China since at least the Zhou dynasty; the modern term in Chinese, Zhongguo, has been in use since around the time of Confucius and has referred to China in something like the western sense since the fall of the Han dynasty. Changes in ruling dynasties also don't mean that there's a change in culture; in many cases the In any case, the fact of political conquest does not imply that the culture is changed; that's a separate fact depending on the relative numbers of rulers and ruled and their respective cultural levels. It's a simple fact that most of the foreign invaders of China who established states that ruled large numbers of Han Chinese quite rapidly assimilated to Chinese culture. First, I assume you mean Qin China; the Xin was a very short-lived dynasty between the two halves of the Han. In any case, there's little difference in the long view between the Qin, (Former and Latter) Han, and Xin, which were essentially the same state with different ruling houses. Three Kingdoms China was essentially a continuation of the Latter Han Dynasty after its splintering; it's the period of disunion after that and the reunification of the Sui that presents a real example of major changes in Chinese culture. Second, you neglected the Shang and Zhou dynasties, which predated the Han by a millennium and a half or so, and you also neglected the extremely important Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties (581-1279), another significant stretch of time--again, the Sui and Tang were essentially the same state with different ruling houses, and the Song was much like the Tang after a few decades of disunion in culture, though quite a bit smaller in extent. I agree, and I'm still eager to know just what your conditions of comparison are.

It depends on what you mean by culture (and by civilization). For one thing, the word has two common meanings, (1) "the totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought" (AHD), whether for humanity as a whole or for a particular group of people over the generations, and (2) intellectual and artistic achievements of a particular people. The former is the anthropological definition, the latter the intellectual. In both cases, however, there was significant continuity in culture throughout Chinese history. Certainly there was a great deal of change throughout history, but the intellectual and religious basis of the state and the education of the elite remained largely unchanged. Here you're equating a culture and a state. Even when native Chinese dynasties were overthrown by non-Chinese invaders, that certainly doesn't imply that the culture of the Chinese people simply vanished; the Chinese were far more numerous than semi-nomadic invaders from the steppes. They had some influence on Chinese culture, certainly, particularly on the Chinese of the North China Plain between the Han and Sui dynasties, who adopted certain aspects of Turkic culture (greater independence of women, for example). However, you had rather greater changes in Chinese culture under the native dynasties--the decline of the "big families" starting with the Tang Dynasty, for example, as examination instead of recommendation by current officials was made the dominant form of recruitment. That's a pretty lousy comparison, actually. If it's the one that you implicitly have in mind, however, I can see why you've pretty much been calling anyone who'd disagree with you names (revisionists) even before one word of reply had been written to you. The Holy Roman Empire was founded by people of an entirely different ethnicity (Germanic), cultural background (a warrior aristocracy in personal attendance on a king ruling an illiterate people) and language (the Franks) on what had been border Roman provinces and on non-Roman territory, and who established an empire with a quite different political structure and no historical ties to the political traditions they claimed as their own. A better comparison would be of China to the Byzantine Empire, which was the direct continuation of the Roman Empire and saw itself as so. The Holy Roman Empire would compare better to the various states on the border of China that used time-honored Chinese political forms as a pretty gloss for their non-Chinese cultures, languages, and political systems. That's a dubious undertaking. Seems to me you'd make for a much more fruitful discussion if you actually made some concrete claims, or at the very least defined what you actually mean by "culture" in the first place, rather than asking people to box with your shadowy suspicions.