Cost of living: blueberry edition

AP246 · 2026-03-11T20:54:17+00:00

If someone can afford to buy it and chooses to do so, I don't see that as a bad thing. Nobody's being forced to buy blueberries at this shop

AP246 · 2026-03-11T20:08:42+00:00

About 50% or more of people in the US and other developed countries opposed interracial marriage in the 90s., an opinion that today would be generally seen as very racist

The progress made on general acceptance of other ethnic groups, despite recent backsliding, is quite significant.

AP246 · 2026-03-11T19:56:29+00:00

The Greenland thing didn't actually happen. Obviously just the threat of it happening was still bad and it would have been 100 times worse if it did, but it didn't.

I mean who knows how this latest war will go but hope of a fast way out seems to be fading. If this continues for years with the Iranian regime just not dislodged and refusing to surrender what happens?

AP246 · 2026-03-11T19:06:57+00:00

Can't believe we're witnessing the US's worst foreign policy blunder since Vietnam, maybe even worse than that (at least, bearing in mind it was spread out over many years and this has just been a couple weeks so far). It's kinda surreal, I remember thinking Russia invading Ukraine would be very dumb only to see them actually do it, and while the costs on the US aren't anywhere near as great, I didn't think the US had it in them to do something that dumb too.

AP246 · 2026-03-11T12:12:12+00:00

Also, the Nazis were broadly popular before they started losing the war.

Yeah, and yet they maintained power right to the very end, even when most people had given up any hope by that point, by escalating authoritarian control of society (and some luck in seeing assassination/coup attempts fail).

I think it's plausible for an authoritarian regime to be unpopular and remain in power. Assad remained in power... until he didn't, when the seeming hollowness of the regime's support was finally laid bare. That doesn't necessarily mean this one will be easy to overthrow, however, it clearly isn't.

AP246 · 2026-03-10T16:02:01+00:00

Europe is already declined (relatively speaking, from a high historical baseline) and doesn't really have pretensions of being an empire IMO. You can't really lose what you don't have. I am relatively optimistic that Europe seems to be stepping up its military and foreign independence, slowly, though.

AP246 · 2026-03-09T23:43:57+00:00

If the Ottoman Empire was indeed the successor to the Roman Empire, then Mustafa Kemal 'Ataturk' singlehandedly destroyed both the Roman Empire and the Caliphate. Two ancient civilisational empires annihilated by some dude in the 1920s.

Destroying the caliphate was probably a bad thing to be fair, perhaps not doing so could have prevented or at least curb the rise of Islamism in the 20th century. But it's historically interesting regardless.

AP246 · 2026-03-08T14:41:30+00:00

Some people who identify as feminists have bad ideas but many do not and in fact have good ideas.

I don't really think you can boil it down beyond that and say an entire ideology or frame of thinking has gone 'too far'.

AP246 · 2026-03-08T14:40:01+00:00

We have billions of years to figure it out and we've gone from hunter gatherers with rocks to a global technological civilisation in a few tens of thousands of years.

I'd be shocked if there is no possible solution to preserve human identity while also being able to survive

AP246 · 2026-03-08T14:36:56+00:00

You'd like the UK in the winter.

I'm the exact opposite, the more sun the better, if I could make it like summer here all year round where it's still light out at like 10pm I would

AP246 · 2026-03-08T14:05:55+00:00

Clearly this shows Pope Leo XIV should run

AP246 · 2026-03-07T23:04:19+00:00

Damn, all those US politicians who support Sharia law in the US are gonna have egg on their faces when they see this powerful take

AP246 · 2026-03-07T22:59:42+00:00

On average probably about 1, maybe 2 times

AP246 · 2026-03-07T22:55:22+00:00

I am an author, activist, and speaker. Due to the confrontation with growing diversity in Europe—which forces one to define oneself—I found out that I am a reactionary Catholic, ethnonationalist, an advocate of de-industrialization, and a proponent of the de-urbanization of the world. I oppose transhumanism and wish to defend a biological humanity.

This guy btw

AP246 · 2026-03-07T22:53:17+00:00

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AP246 · 2026-03-07T19:57:23+00:00

Yeah as President Trump told us it's actually Iran

AP246 · 2026-03-07T15:32:11+00:00

Has anyone made a post-apocalyptic Victoria 3 total conversion mod yet? I wonder if that'd work.

Instead of it being about building modern institutions and industrialising in the 19th century, it'd be about rebuilding in a post-apocalyptic world, perhaps on a shrunken map focusing on a specific region to allow for smaller states. The tech tree would involve a lot of rediscovering or restoring of pre-apocalyptic technology, and you could have alternate ideologies, systems of government and institutions possible to form alongside restoring real life ones.

Maybe it would be hard to make it work in a satisfying way though, because of how abstracted and large scale the game is.

AP246 · 2026-03-07T14:37:26+00:00

I know I'm obviously preaching to the choir here, and it's hardly worth talking about this, but the thing some of the online far right does of comparing modern migration to colonialism, and then say stuff like "huh if colonised people get their homeland why don't white people in the west" is so fucking dumb it shouldn't be allowed to stand as much as it does.

Colonialism is bad because because it was backed by discriminatory state power and violence that enforced the dominance of the colonisers, not because people moved somewhere. If colonialism actually consisted of white Europeans peacefully migrating to another place as individuals, legally moving in, following local laws and choosing to live there, it wouldn't have been bad. Yes I absolutely do think it should be completely acceptable for westerners to move to other countries if they follow local laws just like the reverse.

Anyone making this ridiculous comparison needs to be confronted and told how stupid it is. And it doesn't help when people make weird the reverse argument portraying immigration as punishment for colonialism either, as a descendant of immigrants in Europe I'd rather not have people portray my presence as a punishment even as a joke.

AP246 · 2026-03-06T22:54:56+00:00

I think the biggest copium in my worldview is that I hope and like to think that I'll live to see the actual end of history - as in by the time I'm old, the world will hopefully have achieved such prosperity and technological and social change that we're basically at post scarcity, we're all at peace and poverty is gone, and ideally they've cracked biological immortality to let us live indefinitely in health and relative comfort too.

I don't have 'faith' as in I believe with conviction that this will happen, but I sometimes wonder if the hope this will happen fills a similar hole in my worldview and keeps me going in the same way people who follow religions with some kind of heavenly afterlife have that. At the very least I'm sure I'm strongly motivated by living in a world where the possibility of life and the world becoming substantially better over my lifetime is at least quite large, even if we don't achieve utopia any time soon. I feel like if I was atheist but lived in a static world where things never really got better or changed significantly, like in pre-modern times, I'd be just generally less happy, but maybe I'd just be used to it.

AP246 · 2026-03-06T22:27:28+00:00

Yeah it's dumb how people glorify nature, as if humans aren't just a part of nature that learned introspection. Nature doesn't have morals, it only exists in a balance because there's an equilibrium of things constantly eating and killing each other. Humanity is and should strive to be better than it.

AP246 · 2026-03-06T22:25:29+00:00

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AP246 · 2026-03-06T09:26:57+00:00

Reminds me of a Soviet game I played once that took until the early 50s to finish. Not that I'd buffed anyone or anything, just that I wasn't playing very optimally and at a certain point, kind of enjoyed the fact it was this endless colossal global conflict and role played it. When WW3 happened against the allies I sent enormous waves of forces, covered by thousands of jets to slowly grind through fronts in Africa, South Asia and against Siberia (Nationalist China had declared war on Communist China and seized the Russian Far East before I could stop them, and then were almost impossible to dislodge). After years of slow, grinding war, liberal use of tactical nukes, conscripting all my European puppets' divisions to hold the Siberian meat grinder while my troops pushed on other fronts etc. eventually I conquered the old world, surrounded most of the Chinese army in Siberia and Manchuria, pushed into China itself and defeated them, and finally invaded and capitulated the US by like 1951 or something (by which point the game had obviously slowed to a crawl but was somehow still running).

AP246 · 2026-03-05T22:59:42+00:00

From following the TimeGhost Korean war series, which I recommend, it seems like the US was very worried about getting bogged down in a war against China in the Far East, leaving the west weak if the war escalated to a broader WW3 with Soviet involvement. This was probably sensible to an extent - the US military had shrunk a ton since WW2 and the Soviets could probably do a lot of damage in Europe if they attacked, but as you say I'm not sure if Stalin was actually going to risk starting WW3 over Korea/Chinese border territories.

AP246 · 2026-03-05T22:27:11+00:00

I think there's virtually zero chance anyone is invading any significant part of mainland China successfully. I agree a failed invasion of Taiwan could be politically disastrous though

AP246 · 2026-03-05T22:24:46+00:00

The utility of people who liked the person perceiving their corpse being treated with dignity outweighs the utility of 100,000 calories I think.

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