Do you think spheres of influence would be better? A different hegemon? Buddy, I have terrible news for you.

Say what you will about American hegemony, it was way better than every system that had existed before it and the basically all the alternatives you can come up with are way worse because we’ve tried them.

I am really struggling to see what the problem is here and I think it might be that there’s a subset of people who are dangerously naive about how messy of a business international relations is. There isn’t one weird trick to make it not like that, and so many ways it can get worse.

“i would rather die than vote for gavin newsom in the 2028 election” good news? since you live in scotland, you cannot vote in the 2028 election

every day we see some account saying “the democrats don’t represent me!” well of course they don’t, you live in australia

this is not a “job that americans won’t do,” like difficult agricultural labor that attracts immigrant farmhands. it is a job that *too many americans do*. we do not need foreigners doing it

america already has a rich bumper crop of dumb people whose sole personality is perpetually — in some shape or form — re-litigating the 2016 democratic primary

i think i would settle for “moratorium on re-litigating the 2016 primary” which is really what so many foreigners on this site want to do.

And it also led to chronic underinvestment in human capital and physical capital because slaveowners solved their problems by getting more slaves (ie by raping enslaved women) and whipping the slaves they already had harder.

For some reason IG has been serving me a lot of Nordic neopagan content and I am sorry but a lot of those people are Nazi-adjacent even if they don't realize it.

I can assure you that you do not in fact want that.

The true champion of killing Communists:

sadly the world Communist killing record continues to be held by Communist countries by a long, long distance.

Olmstead and Rhode explicitly point this out. They argue that by relying so heavily on planter diaries and boasts, he uncritically adopted the Confederate worldview that their system was an invincible, modern juggernaut rather than a fragile bubble.

yeah, i read it and got to the end and was like, "wait, is this just the King Cotton thesis but woke"

He rejected the counterfactual, assumed the entire industrial revolution would vanish without slave cotton, and therefore credited the entire value of the industrial economy back to the plantation. He confused a necessary input with total economic output.

i mean, my understanding is that he essentially took the idea that you could get agricultural products elsewhere as an inappropriate counterfactual and attributed the final value of every production chain to the relative costs of its inputs?

Baptist's book is important but unfortunately hasn't withstood the criticisms posed by other historians and economic historians. He claims slavery drove 50% of the US economy, but economists found this to be the result of double and triple counting. The real contribution was ~5-6%, not 50%. 1/

"the elite of the antebellum South were degenerate gamblers who financed their lifestyles with industrialized rape and would kill you for pointing this out" is a straightforwardly accurate statement

sometimes you'll learn that, like, Napoleon did legal reforms which are the basis for many countries legal systems today. with slavery you learn that men would rape people and enslave their own children

slavery is one of the rare things historically where the more you learn about it the more you realize your initial assessment was correct and it was in fact one of the most evil things ever to occur

there was a surge of bad scholarship in the last ten years which took triumphalist or exculpatory propaganda for societies generally agreed to be evil and used them to tar their opponents

I also think there are chunks of Trump voters who are 1st or 2nd generation Americans and thought they were in a club that they weren’t. Had a real “‘the enemy’ is us” moment. It’s fine if you want to dunk on them, the internet is free, but: it’s not worth dismissing the momentum.

1000% and to put a finer point on it, a number of Latin and Asian American voters made a bad vote in 2024, and I’m keenly interested in getting every one of them we can. They don’t need my ass telling them it was dumb, just get em over here!

Yeah I mean the very basic thing is that in November 2024 the fascists had more numbers and we’ve got to find them somewhere and getting a convert counts double.

Yeah, there is very much a strain of anti-forgiveness on the left, like not just “you shouldn’t have to forgive” but “you shouldn’t forgive,” and it suck’s.

Your average farmer makes $175,000 a year, has high speed Internet & uses an array of sophisticated software & hardware to operate the business. But, you are right about them not being on Bluesky.

They like the idea of gay. They hate, they absolutely loathe, actual men who prefer men

You know who also posed as somebody having car trouble in order to lure victims, serial killer Ted Bundy

roses are red cherenkov is blue just use a screwdriver what's the worst it could do

Well, this headline and framing rather buries the lede. It's not that two Latvians in the stands held up the flag of Greenland at a US vs Denmark match, in an arena full of US flags. It's that security told them to quit it for "safety reasons, because there could be American aggressive people."

We’ll see if he tries to illegally yank EAC funds or something like that, but his decree alone isn’t even something states have to sue over. They can just ignore it.

If you’re wondering what effect this will have on how the states run their elections, the bottom line is they’ll wipe their ass with it.

Che was captured & executed because he pissed off Bolivian peasants. I can see that for Piker.

It doesn’t say it as directly, but at its core all of this stuff is Calhounism and Dred Scott: An assertion that the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were conceived in purely racial terms and to include exclusively the white race.

God it must blow so much to be PLANMC when it comes to keeping your vehicles clean, dirt must stand out like crazy on that camo

goofy ah ah SPAAG

This is your regular reminder that the idea that Christianity is a thing uniform beliefs that everyone within “Western Civilization” believed and agreed on is a fiction that just ignores centuries of Christians killing each other and fighting literal wars over their different beliefs.

Yeah they loved it when my Christian ancestors arrived Pic unrelated

Not the point but also, she's retiring at 25 and talking about the end of her 21 years of effort and holy fuck is "started working towards a tennis career at age 4" ever a horrible thing in its own right

Ofelia Torres, the teenage Chicago Public Schools student whose fight against cancer while her father was detained by ICE came to represent the federal government's overreach during Operation Midway Blitz, has died. Brave young woman. I will never forget her. RIP.

The "short" 20th century (Russo-Japanese War in 1905 to Desert Storm in 1991) is the tale of indirect fires absolutely drowning everything else.

We went from only direct fire arty to fire and forget from BVR guided missiles from heavier than air-craft in less than 90 years.

Like, if anything, wouldn’t small arms have been the thing that defined the 18/19th century? The 20th century was very notably the century of ‘industrialised warfare is the worst thing ever’, at least as far as its interaction with traditional infantry goes

The 20th century is best thought of militarily as the period when artillery made field guns and cavalry useless and in order to get tactical flexibility back you had to create an entire zoo of weird part field gun part cavalry Frankenstein monsters.

The entire fucking 20th C. was the age of increasingly absurdly long-range and appallingly destructive fires (and secondarily of motorized and mechanized warfare).

So our BGs think the 20th century was defined by small arms…we’re gonna lose the next war bad.

@aelkus.bsky.social we're this close to an AI unironically recommending you have cigs and heroin for lunch.

This is probably ok