w0de0

Because I think Russia’s project has far more to do with their internal politics than with geopolitics. The Chechen wars foreshadowed Ukraine, and were enitrely, as with Ukraine, a response to the fall of the Soviet empire.

(Perhaps a Marshall Plan-esque foreign policy could have forestalled their revanchism. Perhaps - chauvinism is hard to break. But abandoning the eastern former subject states would not alone have been enough.)

You’re absolutely right. Poor frugality is why we should be ok with “22% of seniors trying to survive on an income of less than $15,000 a year.” They’ve only themselves to blame. It’s their own moral failing, not society’s, really.

All that is is for the best. If there is a volcano at Lisbon it cannot be elsewhere. It is impossible that things should be other than they are; for everything is right.

No need for a launch boat. Just light the fuse and eject it from your balloon. Think subsurface missle launch by an Ohio-class sub.

It’s worked out in as much as no NATO country in the east has been yet as tacked - despite all of them being smaller prey than Ukraine.

(I find it difficult to believe that Russia wouldn’t have embarked on an expansionist project if NATO had just kept out of its traditional sphere of influence after the fall of the USSR. Russia would still have rebounded from the vicious 90s with a desire for near-abroad dominance - and would have found many more avenues of advance.)

“…and I am therefore justified in demanding the surrender of the city of Savannah, and its dependent forts, and shall wait a reasonable time for your answer, before opening with heavy ordnance.

“Should you entertain the proposition, I am prepared to grant liberal terms to the inhabitants and garrison; but should I be forced to resort to assault, or the slower and surer process of starvation, I shall then feel justified in resorting to the harshest measures, and shall make little effort to restrain my army—burning to avenge the national wrong which they attach to Savannah…”

- W. Tecumseh Sherman’s ultimatum to the garrison of this city, December 1864

Sherman’s March to the Sea was an apotheosis of political violence. It deliberately targeted non-military infrastructure.

How long would American slavery have persisted without the march (the war to which it belongs)?

How could non-violence have triumphed in the same crusade?

They’re detected now. Right now. Front page of the NY Times. The murders didn’t do shit.

Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, 1961 (in which he coined the term “military-industrial complex”): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CWiIYW_fBfY

Do you also plan to take the sea journey?

It’s fixed. There were a few weeks in which I noticed this as well. No longer.

Every party system in the United States - there have been several [0] - has been a duopoly. This is a natural outcome of a first past the post, single representative per district electoral system (see also: the UK).

The extremity in current politics - and among elected politicians wielding power, such is to be found much more on the right - is in part a function of two trends: the gerrymandering of those districts, and the tendency for states and areas to become more ideologically homogenous. (I’m not sure of the latter’s root cause - perhaps internal migration or new media consumption patterns.)

Both of these trends tend to shift the political competition in those districts, be they states or house districts, towards purity tests over compromise. One wins a primary by being the most extreme; if the primary matters more than the general, extremity increases generally.

If you want to reduce extremity, fight partisan redistricting.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_parties_in_the_Unite...

“Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does it matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”

Bad for our present (grotesque?) ecology - not bad for the Earth, nor bad for her resident life.

(If humanity decimated itself via overpopulation, Earth & her life - likely even class Mammalia - would be rather better for it, by any metric besides net intelligence.)

This is treated as a whimsical absurdity, but it has a practical purpose that’s hardly obviated by the antiquity of the law.

I’m a sailor myself - I’d certainly want a warning that a bridge is lower than its charted height. The signal is clearly listed in the relevant Port of London notice to mariners [0]. Moreover, the signal also shows the height of the restriction (and in a neat, safe way - nudge the straw and you’ll know you’re too tall):

“Where the headroom is reduced this will be signalled in accordance with the Port of London Authority Thames Byelaw 36.1 namely:

“By Day – A bundle of straw large enough to be easily visible and displayed at the height of restricted headroom”

0 - https://pla.co.uk/notices/M63-25

There is no shortage of the downtrodden and dispossessed in the USA, if you seek them. The problem in this hypothetical would rather be that acknowledging and prioritizing such people in America is likely to be, for many fellow first worlders (to include parts of the American Catholic hierarchy) an inherently radical, polarizing, and political act. I doubt such a priest would be so rapidly promoted as was Leo XIV.

Acknowledging and prioritizing similarly marginalized people in poor countries, or at least in countries less tetchy about their failings and political pieties, carries less political risk. (Which is not to claim Prevost cynically avoided American ministry to the poor.)

That said, that such ministry is qualification at all seems to me more a product of Francis’s remaking of the college of cardinals with a notably Franciscan philosophy. The majority of post-WW2 popes have been European, of the first or second world. Benedict was German and John Paul Polish.

Give Twitter another 24 hours to stew over his past ministry and his Peruvian citizenship, and one will find our modern Know Nothings making similar hullabaloo.

To the other respondent’s point about Noriega, a central american autocrat cannot “shakedown” the American government. The balance of force is entirely in the gringos’ favor - if they choose to use it. If Bukele refuses, it’s simply because this is what Trump wishes him to do. Bush I _invaded_ Panama to enforce a district court’s arrest warrant.

It seems to me that “refugia” would be more apposite word for this phenomenon than “oases.”

The Victorians found it very hard to see contemporary humans as anything other than archetypes or moral exemplars. In this way they are quite similar to us moderns.

With the right photo, this could be an Onion headline poking fun at lonely math nerds.

The only functioning large-scale Odonian syndic, after all the promise of the early valley. It provides immense value to dispossessed peoples across our world. Of course the propertarians wish to discredit and destroy it!

> the UK's is very clustered (I've forgotten the right term) on the median.

Normal (Gaussian) distribution?

> Constitutional stasis

Tickles me to see “stasis” so used - not incorrectly, ofc, but nonetheless as a perfect contranym of the original Greek.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasis_(ancient_Greece)]

That’s one hypothesis for one component of the Sea Peoples. Like all the hypotheses, it’s very weakly evidenced - iirc correctly (from Eric Cline), in this case, there’s a possible philological link with the Egyptian exonym ‘Sherden’ and one possible representation of a nurhag.

There’s also a ‘Carthage of the Indies’ (Cartagena de Indias) in Colombia.

In some sense it never died. Lebanese people are largely their descendants, and their diaspora is extremely mercantile. Tyre is yet inhabited, as are many of the ancient metropoles of Phoenicia.

Hundreds of years! A feat for a nation only 250 years old. Particularly considering the panic about Chinese immigration - the first real anti-China event in US history - dates to the latter half of the 1800s.

Also, the “yellow” in “yellow journalism” != the slur “yellow” as in “yellow peril.”

And finally, your conclusion - “[Americans] are ready to accept anything to stop the ‘bad guys’” - would still be a parochial ignorance, as well as ironically biased, even were it not so shakily premised.

You perhaps overestimate the utility of writing outside urban civilization - and underestimate the immense difficulty of its invention. Not only is symbolic thought required, but so too a cultural substrate which can find use for, agree upon, and preserve written works. One man may invent the wheel; only a people can invent writing.

Arabic is an adjad, so of course not. The "combination" you're thinking of is akin to cursive - stylistic.

I believe you mean the Ugarites, Phoenicians, & other northwest Semitic peoples. They developed from cuneiform syllabaries the abjad which the Greeks subsequently adopted (being their language's second written form, preceded by Linear B before an interlude of illiteracy). The Greeks added only non-diacritic vowels.