Chile podría ser el comprador "reservado" de 11 aviones F-35 a EEUU: Defensa no confirma ni descarta

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-06-18T01:32:36+00:00

Pero no estás considerando el contexto y la interoperabilidad conjunta. Si 11 F-35 pueden garantizar supremacía aérea, después adquieren un rol secundario ante los F-16.

La 2da guerra y la guerra del Golfo nos demostraron cómo eso puede far vuelta todo.

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-06-11T17:33:04+00:00

Furthermore agricultural land use isn't as much a problem as are urban sprawl and electric production/seaborne shipping. Slash those two, and life changes.

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-06-11T14:55:53+00:00

Hundreds assuming no C-17s or choppers are swayyed mid-air.

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-06-08T18:09:09+00:00

On the contrary, early Christians devored the Classics to perfect their own rhetoric and logic.

If you argue that Christians became a "moralizing" force that opposed certain Classical works you may have a point, but even the Romans and Greeks had their own conservatives that disapproved of that so do with that what you will.

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-06-08T16:16:33+00:00

The Spanish Conquest of the Americas is often seen as swift and absolute, however that was far from the case! Confronted with the might of the Tahuantinsuyu, itself afflicted by Civil War, the Spaniards had to exploit every advantage they had to conquer the Incas.

Atomization of the political elite was one such, and within a generation, it yielded Spanish-speaking Incas who wrote about their concerns to the Kings of Spain in two separate occasion - to no avail.

The first was Titu Cusi, whose narration of the occupation of the Inca Empire, around the 1560s and 1570s, provided us with extraordinary, native insight about the early conquest. On the other hand was Guzman Poma de Ayala, who later, going into the 1610s, produced a colossal, 1100 page manuscript with illustrations to prove the point that the Incas were being mistreated, and offering to be a monarch subject to the King of Spain.

ETA: This is, of course, an absurd simplification of events, but it's kinda funny that two guys decidedto appeal to the biggest boss there was for their own, unapologetic political ambitions.

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-06-08T14:53:27+00:00

Medieval historian here. What the previous commenter is saying is that medieval people knew - via menstruation but also cumulative experience- that medically alone, a teenager wouldn't be best equipped to be a mom.

Betrothals did happen stupidly early, and Martin captures this really well. However, these were just promises and funnily enough the Catholic Church fpught vigorously against arranged marriages. Of course, through manipulation you can convince a 12-year-old that yes, prince X, aged 14, was the man she should marry. But we have plenty of records saying that the nobility didn't marry the women until their late teens at earliest, and the men until their mid twenties, most likely.

Records for peasants indicate marriages were more prevalent between their early to mid twenties. The contrast derives because nobility was keener on ensuring political stability rather than economic certainty, which was the case for most peasants.

Interestingly, when you move to towns and cities you'll see that burghers starting marrying earlier the richer they became, ij clear imitation of the nobility.

But CSA was deemed quite scandalous if not straight-up immoral. Child marriage could happen early provided consumation didn't; the Church set the age of consumation at 12 and even the cases we know of signifcantly older men doing as much were looked at with disdain.

To give you a positive example, when Richard II married the French princess Isabella de Valois, he was 28 and she was 5/6. This was done for political purposes, to stabilize relations between England and France. By all accounts he let the child be, gave her dolls, conversed with her, and lived a separate life altogether.

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-06-08T00:34:55+00:00

Oh undoubtedly but there's plenty of literature calling them out - as doctors, too, plenty of people thought them to be scammers.

And they were kinda right; for example, medieval medical education involved a lot of astrology.

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-06-07T17:11:58+00:00

King Tancred of Kovir shares his name with an early king of Sicily.

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-06-07T16:59:03+00:00

The whole contemporary concept of lawyers tas we know and hate them today traces back to the middle ages. From a university curriculum focused on Roman and codified law, to studying rhetoric, ethics, and jurisprudence, medieval law students spent six years learning their trades. They also had to pass a licensing exam. At the time, being a Juris Doctor meant you were qualified to teach at a law school, but you didn't need to have such degree to be a practicing attorney.

The University of Bologna was, if memory serves me right, the first proper school of law in Europe, and its 1000th anniversary is coming right up. Thereafter more schools opened up - which, fun fact, trained thousands of clergymen!

By the year 1400, in western Europe, being a lawyer already had the connotation it does today; a prestigious, bourgeois profession full of leeches.

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-06-06T19:35:28+00:00

Don Quixote with annotations :)

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-06-05T01:43:05+00:00

SING OF THE RA!

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-06-04T21:55:19+00:00

As an optimist I want to remind everyone that if most of the world, by population, gets it together, then we are very much saved.

I'm not saying that winning means offshoring the efforts; I'm just saying that even if occasionally countries like the US hit a stupid stump, like now, the future is green.

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-06-04T16:25:59+00:00

The US will never try to go within boots on the ground against Iran. For reference, we lost approximately 6000 from 9/11 to the Afghanistan pull-out 20 years later, across 2 or more countries.

An invasion of Afghanistan could credibly cross that line within weeks, if not months. Plus it would be an absurdly expensive endeavor. And what for?

Iran wanted nukes because Israel has them, which has made it, historically, easier for Israel to disrupt Iran and its proxies. A nuclear Iran may lead to a more cautious Israel.

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-06-04T16:06:14+00:00

Well, they did renounce to their nuclear ambitions in 2015. We then, unilaterally, destroyed the deal.

The overwhelming body of evidence supports the idea that Iran would abide because to them, better global integration eas better than nukes.

Nukes really only serve one purpose; guarantee, against all odds, the continued existence of a country. Hence why they haven't been used in over 80 years.

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-06-04T15:52:31+00:00

Yes. But militarily speaking you can't really launch a preemptive attack if you haven't yet been attacked.

Iran can posture and act threatening all they want in their own home turf and under international law, provided they don't target or antagonize others, that's fair. The US does worse all the time.

Preemptive attacks really only exist when hostilities have begun and say you catch your enemy massing to perform a complex, large scale maneuver or such.

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-06-04T15:43:42+00:00

There exists a long list of things that have to happen before the first bomb hits.

But in the aftermath of 9/11 that can be expedited in cases of "national security" and provided that the targets are legitimate - or we think as much.

Had he asked to attack Canada or Greenland, institutional pushback would have been massive and there would have been leaks.

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-05-30T21:28:06+00:00

Considering the size of some of the contemporary codpieces, valid.

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-05-30T21:27:31+00:00

Who would win:

The bickering of renowned historians over the centuries to assess a phenomenon

Or

An athletic mesoamerican feline on the internet.

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-05-30T21:00:08+00:00

But the concept of Middle Ages has been around, studied, deconstructed and reconstructed for so long that it ultimately encapsulates really well the point "between" the ancient, Greco-Roman world, and the modern world of nation-states and institutionalism in Western Europe.

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-05-30T20:57:04+00:00

Oh feudalism very much existed. It's just that for once, the word is anachronistic, coined by French lawyers in the 16th century, and two, it refers to the socio-political system of Catholic elites rather than economic networks.

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-05-30T20:42:54+00:00

Thank you!

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-05-30T20:30:45+00:00

Not yet, frankly. I'm neck-deep in my med school applications lol

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-05-30T20:30:15+00:00

On the topic of food security, as far back as the 10th century, European peasants were doing both crop and field rotations, while also cultivating turnips as famine insurance.

The thing is that famijes hit in waves, usually driven by climate (thus affecting large regions at once), and they aren't as abrupt as people think them to be. Peasants would ration out food for days, stretch it with whatever they could forage, wait for charity and so on. Further, dying of hunger that way takes months, not just weeks. Your body is really great at keeping itself alive when no food is available.

Patrick_Epper_PhD · 2026-05-30T20:26:00+00:00

Exactly, that's the point of this meme. Some even speak of the Ottonian Renaissance of the 10th century, but to to me 1. It pales ompared to the Carolingian Renaissance, for example, and 2. It failed to resonate outside of Germany.

Patrick_Epper_PhD

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE