This comes out of Pommeranz's mangled figures in *The Great Divergence*, where he argues (ludicrously) that sugar accounted for 22% of British caloric intake (Pommeranz estimates this at 2,000 calories) by 1900. This figure has been widely panned, as I'll explain below.

Yes, similarly it's the flaw in the "India provided a captive market for British textiles" argument advanced by postcolonial scholars. The gross value of all imports to Britain from the Caribbean peaked at just 2% of GDP, while 85% of British exports went to Europe in the 18th century.

Inikori's thesis is *hotly* debated by historians of the modern period! The key raw materials for industrial growth were coal and steel - both of which were found in abundance in Britain itself. African labor went into sugar, which was profitable but unrelated.

Once again, the pop history conceptions of *both* the Spanish Inquisition and Mesoamerican human sacrifice are very, very wrong. Total executions for the Inquisition were ~1,600 over the course of over 300 years, done by *secular* authorities. This was not a mass casualty event.

I’d say it’s more accurate to say that colonialism allowed Europe to grow in relative terms by holding back progress outside of it. But this wasn’t so much a concerted and deliberate effort, just the result of colonialism and its exploitation.

I also have to push back against this because Spain executed comparatively few witches and the Inquisition explicitly after the first major Spanish witch-hunts made the punishment repentance NOT execution. Witch burning is not analogous to human Sacrifice, especially in Spain.

What makes the imperialism of the 19th century distinctive is, frankly, how *inefficient* it was. There was brutal exploitation and extraction...which mostly went straight back into paying for the exploitative system in the first place. Industrialization and not colonialism made Europe rich.

The Empire was neither the "best" colonial empire (as much as you can have a "best" of an institution that caused nearly incomprehensible pain for no good reason, rarely even breaking even on resource extraction) nor the "worst". There are many people with a vested interest in pretending otherwise.

It's reminiscent of Biden's FAFSA reform, honestly. The long-term outcome is dramatically better for everyone (including healthcare workers), in the short-term you create chaos across the entire sector.

The point of the cartel is that it creates an extremely well-connected, well-respected corps of doctors who will defend the cartel at all costs, and all of them bear the emotional scars from residency that they are compelled to inflict on the next generation.

The US is what happens when you put the world's largest petrostate on top of the world's largest agricultural power on top of the world leader in tech on top of the world finance hub on top of a manufacturing colossus larger than Japan, Germany, South Korea, and India put together.

Here’s a handy guide to remember the next time you’re wondering “how is Norway so rich?” Imagine a Nordic country like maybe Sweden and then think of a big oil producer like oh maybe Saudi Arabia. Then you just smash them together and that’s Norway.

Saw someone tweeting about the World Cup and how Norway has free healthcare cause they actually care about their citizens or whatever and I’m like their healthcare is free because they have a massive oil wealth fund with the equivalent of $400k ***per citizen*** en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governm...

I’m sorry but FIFA corruption is not some kind of Trump phenomenon. The org is basically a money-laundering and bribery operation with a sports league attached to it. America still has much to learn about being part of a global sports fandom

Unlikely you'll read about it anywhere outside Israel, because it is not about war crimes and such, but Israel is now facing the very definition of constitutional crisis as Bibi is trying to take over the media and explicitly defying court orders in doing so.

This is correct, neo-imperialism is appallingly common in Europe to say nothing of people in the developing who lionize precolonial empires (in India it's usually the Cholas or the Maurya, in Iran the conquering Ghaznavids and Safavids, etc).

this person is mad obviously but I do think this is the entirely logical endpoint of the way a lot of people online use indigenous/colonising language as simple binaries and seem to want to go back to some imagined primal era of ethnically homogenous microstates

So the important thing to note here is that presidential approval polling irrevocably broke on roughly January 20, 2009

The end of the License Raj and the fall of Indian socialism in the 1990s lifted 500 million people out of extreme poverty, the only reason it didn't exceed the figure for China was that China simply had more people impoverished. And the reason for *that* was almost entirely Maoism.

Plus, the Soviets were even more locked into resource extraction, fossil fuels, and just toxic approaches to nature and the environment. I experienced LA and Budapest air pollution at the end of the Cold War. The Capitalists were more responsive to the problem of air pollution than the Communists.

This sort of belief is not unique to Western Marxists. It is *extremely* common in the ex-Third World. I say "Third World" and not "developing" for a reason. These people did not live in a Second World developing country (for instance, Ethiopia) and thus did not experience Soviet-backed brutality.

If Soviet Russia is inevitably coming back then the war in Ukraine is just the same struggle as the Great Patriotic War, and when Russia wins it can finally have its coming out party as USSR 2 and rebuild the empire again off Ukraine’s back and then inevitably spread socialism to the world

It’s all copium huffing by people who refuse to accept that the USSR is dead from people who did not live under it or even during its existence They need to pretend 🇷🇺 is still latently socialist or else they have to come to terms with their blorbo empire not actually being on a nice farm upstate

This is arguably even sillier than the "Canada is full" people.

The latest shtick of the tech bros is to say that anyone who opposes them is an agent of the CCP. Meanwhile, they invest heavily in China, manufacture there, and pursue sycophantic relations with Xi Jinping. Thiel is no exception.

It takes 1 gallon of water to grow a single almond. If you are worried about data center water consumption, you are a fool.

The Olympics will not be enjoyable. Particularly if China trounces the US on its home soil in the medal count for the first time in history.

This is why almost all Ukrainians stopped taking Indian media hits after the first year, because they'd blindsided you with some Russian himmlerite and then the host clearly is taking the Russian's side

The Trump presidency shows no one cares about corruption but the vindictive prosecutions also show that you can do an almost nakedly partisan anti corruption persecution campaign and you won’t be disciplined for that either.

They're now at the "negotiating deals to import fuel" stage of things:

Re-upping this for no particular reason:

Russian imperialism is worse than US imperialism, and it's BS that Russia avoided decolonization post WWII because there isn't a body of water between their metropole and their conquered territories

It's every bit as obnoxious as the right-wing "Western civ" version, it's just that people in the West are exposed to it less and so they unintentionally copy RSS talking points. For that matter, China does something very similar.

In general the Western perception of Assam (the historical region, not the state) is nonexistent, Americans really only are aware of the Hindi-speaking areas in the North-Northwest. For that matter, if surveyed I'd guess most Westerners would likely say that India is monolingual.

The pre-Church Committee CIA was legitimately the stuff of nightmares. A bunch of Harvard-educated second and third sons who were given enormous black budgets to test out such stimulating ideas as "what if we bought up the entire world supply of LSD to test on prostitutes?"

I'm Indian-Canadian, so I'm well aware of how part of the global South treats the Russian state - Indian media is more or less pro-Russian in framing as a result of ties towards anti-Western actors alongside India's longstanding ties to the USSR/Russia

Right, the alternative to "going out" was always "staying in" and these days staying in sucks way less than it used to

Also, these are four weird examples (marinas? theaters aren’t even very social) but my understanding is that there has been an ongoing trend towards greater isolation, especially post-COVID, but it’s not because building restaurants is a lost art. It’s BECAUSE OF THE PHONES

Notably, we seem to have avoided those price highs by drawing down basically every kind of inventory to eye-wateringly low levels. Those inventories will need to be rebuilt and until they are, the ability to weather an additional shock is very minimal.

it is 2026, you cannot seriously be arguing that Maoists/Naxalites are why the Modi government needs to enact the FCRA

Who could have seen this coming (Beijing, actually, like I said at the beginning of the war)

Evangelicalism's more garish aspects are not dissimilar to other faiths' more "non-denominational" political incarnations. Modi's infamous Gujarat Gaurav Yatra ("Gujarat Pride Tour") in 2002 after his anti-Muslim pogrom killed thousands was a traveling roadshow circus where he endorsed mass murder.

Correct Amateurs go gaga for PLA wunderwaffe, professionals know why Causeway never happened

the short term answer to “republicans hate democracy” is probably just to stop republicans from winning as many elections by whatever means possible

To some extent, though, there's the issue that *this is part of scholarship* and the humanities have perverse incentives. Some people really do get tenure for writing inflammatory pieces of ahistorical nonsense that generate publicity. It's harder to get it for more measured and careful work.

on one hand: totally & obviously true, academia cannot be true to it's mission if it feels compelled to self-censor: on the other hand it is just true from a practical perspective that the collective credibility of the profession is a common-pool resource that I do think many are poor stewards of

Tyrannies are just alternative lifestyles now

Gold keeping up with inflation isn't necessarily unheard-of (though it was certainly less common before the gold commodity craze kicked off by Covid):

The US invented a way to run an empire without boots on the ground or rampant brutality to its subjects by convincing the entire world it wasn't an empire, which unfortunately was too clever for its own good (hence why Hegseth and Trump want the "real thing").