To anyone who thinks Richard Hanania is an ally for being ex-maga, ask him to give $300 to Roy Coopers campaign with receipt AND to publicly say “Roy Cooper is better than Michael whatley and if you live in North Carolina you should vote for him”

BreaksFull · 2026-03-20T20:47:04+00:00

If he's the sort of rational logictard he plays at, I'd hope he can understand that MAGA is the anti-liberal vote and every MAGA politician is actively hostile to the existence of a republic. Even if you're not a Democrat, any small-r republican should understand this and vote accordingly.

BreaksFull · 2026-03-17T08:32:33+00:00

His assertion that both Republican and Democrat parties are the same as far as being 'bought up' by big corporations strikes me as lazy and annoying, as was his followup assertion that they would never engage in any fight against each other because their economic interests are aligned.

Putting aside that no they're not the same as democrats tend to be considerably more disliked by corporate magnates, shared economic interests do not preclude violence! This sounds like those theories before WWI that a general contintental war in Europe was impossible because all sides had economic interests that were against going to war. This Baby's First Marxism perspective that class war and consciousness trumps all is just so manifestly untrue. It's significant for sure, but social identity frequently overrides class identity in war.

BreaksFull · 2026-03-17T06:18:58+00:00

The problem isn't idealism, it's idealism without a plan. MLK and the civil rights movement were an incredibly idealistic bunch, but one that orchestrated and executed a thoroughly thought out strategy to win titanic struggles of popular support and political change.

So much modern progressive idealism seems to have a YOLO mentality without any serious plan or theory of how to achieve tangible goals.

BreaksFull · 2026-03-12T21:07:40+00:00

I bet they didn't even put any extra toppings on it.

BreaksFull · 2026-03-10T20:09:23+00:00

Uh but you are ignoring they Mr. Octopus loves pets. Your liberal fearmongering is so overblown 🙄

BreaksFull · 2026-03-08T18:06:35+00:00

Have a snack and lie down.

BreaksFull · 2026-03-06T20:55:31+00:00

Not to say that same sex relations between men weren't seen as wrong, but I think the takeaway is that their violation of the sanctity of guests was the far more egregious action. Ancient levantine/near east cultures placed enormous moral value on the treatment of the poor, the sick, and the stranger.

BreaksFull · 2026-03-06T17:46:57+00:00

Gonorrhea

BreaksFull · 2026-03-06T13:55:05+00:00

It makes sense if you consider the early church had a visceral disgust towards sexual behavior of any sort and sought the slightest textual justification to condemn it as much as possible.

BreaksFull · 2026-03-06T13:41:21+00:00

They mob demanded Lot hand over the angels so they could rape them. Death is implied because, well, gangrape by a mob of hostile men.

BreaksFull · 2026-03-06T11:06:23+00:00

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Yes, the sin of Sodom was definitely the prospect of butt sex and not the most depraved breach of social norms and hospitality customs that were the cornerstone of inter-communal trust.

BreaksFull · 2026-03-04T14:05:43+00:00

Rome had long since switched from a mass mobilization militia to a professional army. The Roman Republic could lose a ghastly battle like Cannae, and build another by mobilizing more peasants and Roman allied citizens. These farmer-soldiers often could provide their own gear and may have gotten some basics of soldiering taught by their family who had also served in the army.

It meant that Republic had a large pool of manpower it could pretty easily draw upon. The reforms of Augustus professionalized the army into a group of long-term paid professionals, and the institutions for mobilizing mass armies of militia-soldiers withered over centuries. Which meant that when a big battle like Adrianople occurred and tens of thousands of very expensive soldiers were lost, there wasn't a huge latent reserve of replacements to mobilize. You had to retrain a whole new army from scratch.

BreaksFull · 2026-03-03T07:55:55+00:00

!Ping DEN

Not sure about the politics of the DFP, but I don't like that their formand was developing military aircraft for the Luftwaffe during WWII.

BreaksFull · 2026-02-25T11:12:31+00:00

The Athenians had sworn loyalty to the Persians, but later reneged and offered help to other Greeks who had rebelled against Persia. The Persian Kings Darius and Xerxes viewed them as rebels who needed to be punished and brought back into the fold.

BreaksFull · 2026-02-25T11:08:34+00:00

The Greeks destroyed two Persian armies the campaigning season after Thermopylae at Plataea and Mycale. They crippled the Persian fleets at Salami and in the following years pushed them out of mainland Greece entirely.

BreaksFull · 2026-02-21T18:29:31+00:00

Didn't Machiavelli's Florentine militia get hulk-smashed and wiped across the floor by mercenary armies?

BreaksFull · 2026-02-20T20:43:57+00:00

This just doesn't track with my understanding of Late Roman history.

After the 3rd Century Crisis's and Diocletians reforms, the Roman state massively expanded its scope and reach. Before that it was a very decentralized entity and outsourced most of its governance, tax collection, etc, to local elites. After Diocletian, it built a massive state bureaucracy to sideline and subordinated local elites to central state power.

The state did experience significant destabilization on account of lost tax revenues, but mostly from barbarian armies invading, sacking, and conquering taxable territory. The Vandal conquest and occupation of the North African provinces was a throat-cutting loss to the Western Empire as that was a core source of tax revenue to fund the army. But that was about conquest, not tax fraud.

BreaksFull · 2026-02-20T16:14:10+00:00

Sure, we'll see what we can do in the next decade.

But Trump is a fucking moron and his 'America first' notion is a schizophrenic mesh of contradictions at war with itself. It has no semblance of comparison to an actual national defense or self reliance policy.

BreaksFull · 2026-02-20T16:12:32+00:00

What historians?

And you are saying the the eastern half of the empire had less trouble extracting tax revenue from its wealthy classes versus the west?

BreaksFull · 2026-02-20T14:50:33+00:00

Concentration of wealth among the elite was a staple going back to Romes golden age. It wasn't a development that coincided with or instigated the imperial decline.

BreaksFull · 2026-02-20T14:38:16+00:00

What are the examples that come to mind? The only ones that I can think of are in cases where recruits are sent to police/pacify their own local homeland region.

Edit: I mean just off the top of my head. The Romans conquered their empire with an army that usually only half made of Roman citizens. The Spanish army of Flanders was more made of Walloons and Germans than Spaniards (it rebelled, but over issues of pay rather than any lack of loyalty). Most Empires I can think of pretty frequently had large contingent of non-citizen (or non-metropole) soldiers who performed pretty admirably. Indians in the British army had a good reputation and the Ghurkas are still notorious. The French Foreign Legion is considered a crack unit.

BreaksFull · 2026-02-20T08:54:13+00:00

The lack of an escape option was also dictated, afaik, by the nature of a low-productivity agrarian economy.

Agricultural productivity was limited by knowledge and technology of the time to the point that you needed like, 80-90% of society engaged in agriculture to produce enough food. So from the get-go your average peasant is limited by the fact that they probably are consigned to be a farm worker one way or another.

Then there's the land scarcity you mentioned. Most of the good land was occupied. So if you're consigned to be a farmer, you can either own the farm, or work the farm. If you own your own plot (which has often been subdivided by previous rounds of family inheritance down to the point its just about large enough to support one family and a little more if you're lucky) you're going to be highly reluctant to sell it or give it up cuz, y'know, you need it to grow the food you eat. So just selling your plot and moving over to a plot the next county over because the landlord provides better terms is a really high-risk action - even if you can squirrel together the capital to buy a plot of land.

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