They never change.

This graph is golden. How I’d long for a time machine to show this graph to every annoying redditor talking about how Zelensky would march on Moscow with their “spring counteroffensive” 8 months ago.

This other one is also a great visualization. I’ve been in small cities with less than 1 million inhabitants with more territory than that.

If anything, this makes Russia’s new gains sound very unimpressive, if one can only think of war in terms of Paradox game map painting. Clearly that’s not how it works, but I won’t opine on how the war really is going because I haven’t done enough research.

Could this war perhaps be over this year? I wonder how it’ll affect USA elections or the inevitable riot upon Confirmation Day if it ends before then.

Found a new emoji.

The United States is not Ukraine’s only ally, but it is the only one with the willingness and means to supply Ukraine’s war effort. Many European nations lack a political tradition of arming other countries. They have sent Ukraine some impressive weapons, like German tanks and Swedish shoulder-fired missiles. But “they cannot pump out munitions,” Julian said. “They cannot produce large numbers of artillery shell rounds — the No. 1 thing Ukraine needs.”

This whole paragraph is truly a piece of Yankee writing.

The USA is the leading tiktok-using country, I’ll give them that. But according to this statista page, the following three countries already double the total of USA users.

That means ByteDance stands to lose way more by divesting themselves of TikTok than losing their USA audience. Not only are they isolating themselves diplomatically and economically from the rest of the world, now they’re backing down in hubris culturally as well.

Although I really dislike the TikTok business model for obvious reasons, banning it on USA territory is going to be really nice for the whole TikTok ecosystem.

So, when poor oppressed Americans are going to start getting VPNs to escape their Great Firewall?

You know and I know it’s the toughest, most efficient, most effective border security bill this country’s ever seen

I dare you to guess which one said this.

Tfw when you want to demilitarise the police, but the civilian police also sucks.

There’s a sort of logic to having a weak military in Mexico. Their only land neighbours are the USA, Guatemala and Belize. Neither south neighbour is a threat, and despite the USA being really inefficient there’s no way Mexico could fight toe-to-toe with them if they were directly invaded.

They also don’t have any strategic overseas rival like an imperialist power would.

So not only can you save lots of budget in the military, but it also reduces the harm that a well-funded and organised military can be to the “internal enemy”, which is usually poor, indigenous, black or otherwise marginalised people. (Usually with the cover of “combatting drug trafficking”)

Bribing the military is also part of the CIA modus operandi for interfering in Latin America. Just look at the current investigation on the Bolsonaro coup attempt and how many of the relevant generals took part in the MINUSTAH.

But I also don’t think the USA will ever be able to directly attack Mexico without gigantic repercussions to themselves. They’re better off just doing another Allende.

I think Parthia counts as one of the biggest competitors during the rise period, but during the decline period they were already the replaced by the Sassanids (I’m not acquainted the internal details of how that happened).

But like Axum, neither were ever in a position where they could capitalise on the failing Roman grasp in the Northwestern Mediterranean (nowadays called “Europe”). So the pressure they applied was in the frontiers rather than the direct blows to the core of the Western Half by the Visigoths and Vandals and such.

Geography severely restricted them in a way that can’t restrict China from forming economic alliance with the USA’s plundering grounds, so that was the gist of what I was referring to.

But after the fall of the West, the Sassanid empire became the biggest imperial rival for Rome until the Muslim expansion made them look like rump states. So in a very contrived way, one could say Iran was always (Imperial) Rome’s biggest opponent, but sadly there was no Iran in Britain.

Makes sense. I didn’t quite understand what you were referring to, so the reply was a bit kneejerk. I wonder if there’ll ever be a “low pay” situation for the MIC, though. It seems to be the only thing the US ever bothers to fund.

Your point regarding BRICS makes a lot of sense too. I don’t think Rome ever had any equal competitor after Carthage like China is to the USA. Most comparable empires were too far away to “steal” Roman support. Best I can think is Axum or the Sassanid Empire, but they’re too far from the Mediterranean. Imagine the impact of something like BRI but for western Latin America.

I still think it’s risky to compress the Roman timeline when it comes for ideological and policy decisions, moreso due to how it simplifies a lot of the nuance and ebb and flow of history. It’s so much time, with so much happening and so much surviving history, that it’s easy to cherrypick specific events to create one specific narrative.

So for example, much as I agree that not being able to maintain their professional non-citizen army created the conditions for (at least) regime at multiple points in Roman history, I also think that promising citizenship for alliances during the Social War was critical for Roman victory against the rebelling tribes, and drove a wedge between them.

And it may be my Byzantophile heart speaking for me, but given the East remained fairly strong up until the 7th century (and almost retook Italy under Justinian I in the 6th), I’d say that was actually just the new core for the Empire rather than “parts of” Rome.

I remember reading something about how the Roman economy was already being redirected from Italy and Iberia to North Africa and Anatolia, but I can’t confirm it with a source right now. But a good proxy is how many post-Hadrian senators and Emperors wrote in Greek rather than Latin.

Overall though, I agree with your points and am just being pedantic.

At what point are you referring here? Rome had struggle sessions about citizenship for military service since even before the Empire, with a notable example being the Social War, which ended with the extension of citizenship to allied tribes.

Non-citizen armies were already a thing since the early Julio-Claudian period. And doling out citizenship for “good service” was a practice as long as citizenship itself in Rome.

One could hardly call that a “main factor” to the fall if it was so present during Rome’s rise in the first place, unless they severely compress the timeline. In fact it’s a common technique by modern racists to try and equate Roman non-citizens and “barbarians” with modern USA immigrants, and pin the whole fall of (Western) Rome on trying to incorporate those “migrants”.

It’s worth remembering that the entirety of Rome’s “Fall” historiographical section is usually some 250 years in length, about the same as the entire history of the USA.

And even after the dissolution of the Western Half by the Odoasser coup, Eastern Rome still kept trudging along for almost a thousand years And for most of that time they employed foreign mercenaries and soldiers, either from unincorporated regions of Anatolia, or later on from the region that eventually became the Kievan Rus’, who were given privileges. Two notable examples are the Isaurian-born emperor Zeno and the Varangian Guard.

Maybe I’m a bit over-serious when it comes to Rome, but I think it’s important to not be fall into anachronism to criticise the current Empire.

This current development could be taken as a proxy of a sign of desperation to get new recruits. It could also be an useful tool to groom loyal “good migrant” future citizens, to create more splits in migrant communities and prevent class consciousness. I would argue it worked out very well for the Roman regime in many parts of their history.

Not sure how foreign media is reporting on this, but this seems like a huge event. One of the biggest non-aligned nations (both in population, size and economy), under their most conciliatory president, is cutting ties with Israel.

USA literally biting the hand that feeds them, what could go wrong.

Third world countries will do literally anything to benefit their national sovereignity and fragile gringoes will come out of the woodwork to yell “You won’t be missed! Babe come back! It’s for your own good!”

It’s been so bad that life expectancy has been dropping since 2019, linked heavily with suicide and opioid addiction.

Best part is the only Democrat primary candidate to even mention it was Mathman Enlightened Centrist Andrew Yang of all people. Tens of thousands of people kill themselves each year, and all they get is a suicide hotline and an “I voted” sticker to “defeat Donald Trump”.

surprising reasons

It’s the material conditions of working class Statesians again. How surprising.

I hate how suicide is treated as some mysterious issue by the bourgeois media. How hard is it to think that maybe making life easier and worth living would make more people want to stay alive?

Every time a liberal politician says “we have to be practical” about implementing basic social welfare such as higher minimum wage or universal healthcare, remember that they are explicitly weighing the amount of people who will die or kill themselves without those things.

As one author puts it:

“Suicide hotline crisis numbers and efforts to help people at the individual level are all amazing and necessary, but our work shows that higher-level, institutional interventions are also critical in addressing this crisis,” said Simon. “Giving a person a job or proper health care can also be a suicide-prevention tool.”

If anybody has access to the paper, could you upload it somewhere and give me a ping? I really want to read it, but it’s not in the sci-hub yet.

Managed to get access, here’s the paper in catbox.

Putin and Xi browsing Reddit after that one.

Over the past two years, more than 250,000 migrant children have come alone to the United States. Thousands of children have ended up in punishing jobs across the country — working overnight in slaughterhouses, replacing roofs, operating machinery in factories — all in violation of child labor laws, a recent Times investigation showed. After the article’s publication in February, the White House announced policy changes and a crackdown on companies that hire children.

It’s already happening.

Literally trying to insult an Asian person by comparing them to a yellow cartoon bear is not really a good look, specially given all the homophobia you’ve also been leaking all over the place.

Given you ignored the rest of the entire comment, I assume I was right and your hate of “evil governments” only applies to foreign ones. Typical gringo.

But please, your time is way better spent defending your homeland from foreign hordes than debating silly commies on the internet. Go get 'em soldier!

I wonder how interesting would it be to actually have a bot to keep count of typical lib shit. These people think they’re so original, I think it’d be cool to automatically keep them a bit grounded.