Ukraine's European Revolution?

[Barrister]

I'm aware that the area has been considered a breakbasket. I'm not an expert on agricultural production, but again, it isn't just about what is happening in a specific place--in the general area, production is less. And for what its worth, the Ukraine is sparsely populated in comparison to Western Europe.

There are 45,000,000 people living in Ukraine.

[Ed Anger]

45 million too many.

[Queequeg]

And that's despite a middling birth rate after a civil war and two successive attempts at extermination. 

[Neil]

I'm aware that the area has been considered a breakbasket. I'm not an expert on agricultural production, but again, it isn't just about what is happening in a specific place--in the general area, production is less. And for what its worth, the Ukraine is sparsely populated in comparison to Western Europe.

There are 45,000,000 people living in Ukraine.

That's sparse by European standards, for a country that size.

Still, agricultural production isn't really relevant in regards to prosperity.

[Queequeg]

Like I said, Ukraine was probably hit as hard as any nation in Europe in the 20th Century.

[alfred russel]

I'm aware that the area has been considered a breakbasket. I'm not an expert on agricultural production, but again, it isn't just about what is happening in a specific place--in the general area, production is less. And for what its worth, the Ukraine is sparsely populated in comparison to Western Europe.

There are 45,000,000 people living in Ukraine.

According to Wikipedia, that puts that at 115th in population density, and below basically everyone in western europe.

[alfred russel]

Subsaharan Africa wasn't part of the Mediterranean world, but to act like they didn't have frequent contact with Eurasia is bizarre and impossible to justify.

Parts of it did, most of it didn't.

We can start a big discussion into why a bunch of technological ideas were very late in taking hold throughout Africa, but whether it was relative isolation (what I would argue) or something else, the bulk of the continent severely lagged before colonialization.

[garbon]

Or we could just continue to laugh at your "theory". I pick that option.

[jimmy olsen]

I still don't your line of argument here. 

Of course not.

Just because people get to learn two disparate languages due to living in a bilingual environment doesn't in any way connect these two languages.  People are capable of understanding multiple languages at the same time.

Okay, forget the bilingual part.  I'm just saying that geographical proximity combined with a certain degree of similarity between two languages can make them somewhat mutually intelligible.

I think I gave the example where Portuguese and Spanish have a decent bit of similarity but despite that similarity Portuguese sometimes sounds like gibberish to me.  Yet my wife, who lived close to Brazil for a good portion of her life (and was therefore exposed to Brazilian media) can understand pretty much everything a Portuguese speaker says.

My dad has had a lot of contact with Portuguese speaking immigrants and can understand it pretty well.

[Savonarola]

I saw this on BBC online and immediately thought of this thread:

Russian poetry-lover 'stabs' prose champion

A drunken row over the merits of literary forms in Russia ended in a poetry-lover stabbing a champion of prose to death, investigators say.

A 53-year-old man in Irbit, a town in the Sverdlovsk region of the Urals, has been charged with the murder of another man, 67, said to have been a friend.

They were drinking spirits in the friend's flat when he reportedly said only prose was "real literature".

The accused, a former teacher, allegedly stabbed him before fleeing.

Police found him hiding at an acquaintance's house in a nearby village.

According to a local police report, the accused has confessed to the murder and faces a sentence of up to 15 years in prison.

The victim of the attack, which took place on 20 January, had had pieces of his own prose published in a local newspaper.

He was described as someone who had led an "anti-social lifestyle and abused spirits".

The alleged killer had apparently been lodging with him for several months before the fatal dispute.

In September, in the south Russian town of Rostov-on-Don, a reported argument about the philosopher Immanuel Kant ended in an air pistol being fired and one man being injured.

Russia is more like Languish than I had thought...

[derspiess]

[MadImmortalMan]

the bulk of the continent severely lagged before colonialization.

Same with the Americas.

[Sheilbh]

Speaking of geography though isn't there an argument that I've read somewhere that Russia's problem is that she's the wrong shape. Tsars and Commissars alike were too interested in developing Siberia so spent their resources there which would have been better used on areas more naturally able to sustain humans. Something like that anyway.

[Grinning_Colossus]

Like how in EU2 I'd go full narrowminded so I could build cities throughout Siberia and the Pacific coast and end up hopelessly behind in tech.

[Neil]

Subsaharan Africa wasn't part of the Mediterranean world, but to act like they didn't have frequent contact with Eurasia is bizarre and impossible to justify.

Parts of it did, most of it didn't.

We can start a big discussion into why a bunch of technological ideas were very late in taking hold throughout Africa, but whether it was relative isolation (what I would argue) or something else, the bulk of the continent severely lagged before colonialization.

The coast of east Africa was pretty well-known by all kinds of mariners in the Indian Ocean.  But it wasn't run over by the continental conquerors that bound Eurasia together (not that they would have been able to engage in a long campaign of conquest in Africa anyways).  Not isolated, but distant.