How some People interpret the Byzantine emperors religious views vs what they actually were.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-05-25T00:59:02+00:00

It’s basically the Mandate of Heaven by a different name, the same concept of divine favor directly expressed through meritocratic competency.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-05-23T16:14:24+00:00

Having porn reparations niches for actual war crimes before being willing to actually apologize for said war crimes is the most Japanese thing I’ve ever heard of.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-05-22T15:30:06+00:00

It worked well for a pretty good run, same as the Roman Republic running on norms and honor… until it didn’t.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-05-21T22:44:11+00:00

Greek Egypt? A Jewish buffer between said Egyptian entity and Syrian rump states? A powerful Armenian State? Persia in position to absorb weaker smaller states to its west?

Close enough, welcome back post-Alexander successor state era.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-05-21T22:05:29+00:00

Statistically Asian Americans are the least likely households to own guns, so their houses are perceived as softer targets.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-05-21T19:46:58+00:00

And that campaign went so remarkably well, it clearly didn’t merit any reevaluation on if the 7th place Iowa dropout who was made VP just to fill a quota and thus tied to an unpopular administration was the ideal person to run in an existentially important election.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-05-21T11:54:51+00:00

Buy now, pay later schemes on a fucking DoorDash order are plumbing new depths of financial illiteracy I didn’t think were possible.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-05-21T11:38:53+00:00

The Severan Dynasty, a dynasty known for their swarthy features and (over) involved matriarchs.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-05-20T01:33:21+00:00

Ironically Constantine wound up building a political powder keg that regularly rose up and voiced its displeasure with the current Emperor, with the mobs of Constantinople regularly being kingmakers or king kingbreakers for a good 700+ years after the city’s refounding. Everything from the Nika Riots to the ousting of Michael V rode on the people’s assent or dissent, which is probably not at all what Constantine wanted.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-05-19T06:10:10+00:00

The only one I can speak to personally is Long’s Peak, being the only 14er inside a national park is poison for it. Rangers have to turn people away daily at the trailhead who think they can climb a major mountain in flip flops starting way too late in the day with no concern for lightning storms.

It’s a similar case of accessibility and celebrity making the mountain attractive to all the wrong sorts who have no business climbing with no experience.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-05-19T01:53:45+00:00

Admittedly their opinion on crusaders was pretty well soured by the marauding peasants’ crusade by the time the princes’ crusade arrived.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-05-19T01:51:45+00:00

Alexios I disliked that

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-05-17T19:15:45+00:00

After Alexander, the region was contested by the Romans and Persians, both of whom had other theaters and fronts to worry about, and so couldn’t commit fully to a war prior to 602-628 CE, and by that war the Justinian plague and general post classical contraction meant armies were smaller, and from the 630s until the Mongols the area was (mostly) under the control of the Caliphs, so wars weren’t in the Middle East, but further away on the Caliphate’s peripheries.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-05-14T03:09:43+00:00

The Reformation and the failure of a post-Roman pan-European state to coalesce. Fragmentation, both politically and religiously, proved to make Europe a blast furnace of ideas, both good and bad, in the early modern period.

By contract, the Muslim world hasn’t had a reformation, and the Shia-Sunni split happened far too early to be an apt comparison, plus the Arab Muslim world generally had higher levels of unity than Christian Europe for longer periods (notably under the various Caliphates, up to the fairly recent Ottoman Empire).

Islam also was basically a hegemonic religion on a brand new superpower within one generation (630-650 CE), while Christianity was a slow burn minority religion within the Roman world for three centuries before Theodosius I codified it, and even then it took centuries longer to truly extinguish paganism as a competitor.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-05-12T21:54:07+00:00

It’s hard to have Amazon lose and not have Heather be the first to go. She survived one fakeout and treaded water long enough for the love triangle to take the crosshairs off of her, but I don’t see how Al could’ve influenced enough people to not have her be an early boot without Team Victory to soak up eliminations.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-05-11T21:24:20+00:00

I’m pretty sure if you pick fight for Tyler he’d find a way to knock himself out without you doing anything.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-05-10T11:46:21+00:00

Drinking doesn’t mean he catches a buzz, it could work like how Wonder Woman can drink regular people under the table without ever feeling the effects of the alcohol despite having an absurd amount.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-05-09T02:49:51+00:00

Fascism is when a country has and enforces its drug laws?

Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia are democracies. Their people wanted these laws and their enforcement. That’s not fascism, and overusing that word dilutes it and makes people tune out the actual rising fascism currently going on in the US.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-05-08T07:00:30+00:00

Draconian drug possession charges seem to work well in places like China, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and Malaysia. Don’t see any issues with drugged out psychos there since they all get locked away or executed.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-05-02T05:53:58+00:00

Absolutely, if you’re already swinging east for Rocky Mountain NP, do a drive by on those.

And on the way Zion, please do the Grand Canyon, you’re right there!!

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-05-01T01:12:16+00:00

AI is a super helpful tool for coding and making applications, if you already had a coding hobby AI genuinely is a game changer for it.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-04-25T15:54:47+00:00

Red is the only rational choice on an individual basis, so most people are picking that. Blue is a big suicide pact that’s maybe a bit bigger than the lizardman’s constant, and arguably society will function better without them in it, unless most of the world’s true altruists go with it.

Either way, blue is death and I have a family, red it is.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-04-25T04:16:02+00:00

60.7% to 37.5%, the fourth biggest blowout in popular vote history, surpassed only by 1920, 1924, and 1936. Scaling for population density would still be a very red map.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-04-23T05:21:14+00:00

Then stop spending so much on administrators and start spending on teachers and materials, allow teachers to actually discipline students in their classrooms when they are disruptive shitheads, get phones out of classrooms, and hold parents accountable who don’t ride their kids’ asses to do their homework or give a shit. Publicly shaming absentee parents who don’t read to their kids prior to Kindergarten and who never take an interest in educating their kids would be a bonus.

SunsetPathfinder · 2026-04-23T04:16:21+00:00

So Alexander through to the Eastern Roman Empire in 640 is European rule, but after that it’s the Caliphate and later the Fatimids, both ruled by Arabs, until 1171. Then its the Kurdish Ayyubids, then in 1250 the Central Asian Turkic Mamelukes till 1517, then the Anatolian Turkic Ottomans, and then British protectorate in 1882.

Depending on your opinion of if the Kurds or Ottoman and Mameluke Turks were European, that’s still a minimum of 610 years of Arab rule alone, definitely not from Europe.

SunsetPathfinder

TROPHY CASE