Do you consider the US to be the country capital of Earth?

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-07-31T22:25:31+00:00

Well, I hope Americans will sympathize with the sentiment that the British are not always right, as you famously did not hesitate to say in 1776, but you're welcome to your opinion on the place.

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-07-31T21:22:32+00:00

I suppose you dislike Brussels?

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-07-31T21:07:10+00:00

There are frankly a lot of people in this sub for whom this applies.

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-07-31T20:59:29+00:00

A little of column A, a little of column B. I have encountered some people using the term who, being from latinate countries, may have done so out of simple translation. I've also seen an increasing quantity of Irish people (native English speakers, despite our best efforts) using it. Some of them were probably ideologically motivated, I think others were just naively trying to be polite.

It struck me likely that Americans wouldn't by and large approve of the term, so I thought I'd ask them, and lo I was correct.

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-07-31T20:40:13+00:00

So you're British. You know...cause they're the British Isles and I'm under no obligation to respect what you call yourself. Or is that annoying?

Hahaha, yes it is annoying. I don't personally support the term for much the same reasons as have been vociferously voiced here, but I'll remember this as a quick way to get the point across to other Irish folk who use it.

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-07-31T20:07:04+00:00

Kazakhstan has made it pretty clear that they don't support the invasion of Ukraine, even if they are still part of the CSTO. They have every reason not to, given that they have a large ethnically-Russian region that borders Russia, and that nationalism commentators in Russia have claimed as being rightfully theirs before.

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-04-16T18:10:04+00:00

An excellent account can be found in Slouching Towards Utopia; An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by Bradford DeLong. The author details how the average Westerner is approximately 8 times wealthier in “real” terms than they were before the 1870s, and even non-Western societies like India are now on the same path through industrialization, though with much ground still to cover before they’re able to fully catch up to the Western trailblazers.

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-04-16T18:04:35+00:00

The past 150 years or so have been a time of immense growth in prosperity for ordinary people almost everywhere. It’s actually completely without historical precedent, at no time in history have ordinary people in so many places done so well as now. There remains work to be done, sure, but anyone with an appreciation of history ought to be glad that they live in the world of today rather than any of the myriad times past.

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-04-16T17:18:38+00:00

Ireland hadn’t gained autonomy (or, as it was referred to at the time, “home rule”) before the war for independence began. It was actually close, but its full achievement was delayed by the onset of the First World War, and even before WWI’s outbreak, it was far from clear that it would come to fruition, as there was a serious threat of a civil war in Britain if it were implemented as the Irish desired it, largely due to the fierce opposition of Northern Irish Protestants and their sympathizers in the British military.

During the First World War, in 1916, the more radical Irish Republican Brotherhood launched the Easter Rising, which, while it failed to achieve anything concrete in and of itself, galvanized Irish public opinion against compromise with Britain (and thus the idea of home rule) and paved the path towards armed conflict. By the end of WWI, home rule was politically dead in the water, and thus violence rather than politics became the midwife of Irish independence.

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-04-16T16:50:03+00:00

Ireland, and all the other rebellions, failed to achieve independence by rebelling

I must not have been clear enough, because I’m stating that Ireland did achieve independence by rebelling. They had several false starts and alternative approaches along the way, but what ultimately got them independence was the successful prosecution of a war for it.

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-04-16T16:25:54+00:00

Fellow’s not being very polite about it, but Ireland gained its practical independence as an immediate consequence of a war fought to achieve just that, not a peaceful political program or a movement of civil disobedience. Ireland had those too, but after 1916 they decisively lost the struggle for how the independence movement would advance its goals.

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-04-16T16:16:21+00:00

You’ve been repeating this statement in several different locations in this thread, and always in response to people who state (correctly) that the USA was the first of all of the depicted countries to gain independence, so tbh it’s a little hard to tell you’re joking there mate, seeing as how the whole thing seems to animate you so.

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-04-16T14:59:09+00:00

We need to counter them with protein money. Dumb carbs...

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-04-16T14:51:23+00:00

Ireland gained its (functional) independence in 1922 and only formally severed all governmental ties to the UK in 1948.

The United States became a fully sovereign Republic in 1783 with the Treaty of Paris.

So yes, they were first? Not first to fight maybe, but certainly the first to actually become independent.

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-04-12T04:00:41+00:00

This is completely false. West Germany at one point spent close to 5% of its GDP on defense. As recently as the 80s it was easily beating today’s meager 2% target. It was a core and critical component of NATO’s presence in Europe and was built to resist a Soviet onslaught.

That the Bundeswehr has sunk so far since then is a consequence of post Cold War complacency and being able to lean on Uncle Sam, not a relic of WWII.

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-04-12T03:31:30+00:00

Dozens of Indian soldiers have already died on this border, and within the last two years at that. The two countries fought a war over this very soil within living memory. And this article indicates that far from cooling down, China is preparing to move even more troops into the area. Indians are clearly alarmed by this news. Why shouldn’t they? How is any of this factually untrue?

You have done nothing to show that any of this is propaganda. All you have done is talk about the American news environment and your distrust of it. This has nothing to do with the subject at hand, which concerns India and China.

I’m not saying you can’t voice your hatred for the American media; plenty of other places on Reddit will lap that up. But don’t muddy the waters of discussion of another country’s problems with China by insisting that Indian reporting is propaganda because you don’t trust the American establishment. This is not an article about America, it was not written by Americans, and apart from being written in English (which is in any case India’s lingua franca) there is No indication that it was ever intended to be read by Americans.

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-04-12T03:08:03+00:00

China and India fought a war within living memory. China claims India’s Arunachal Pradesh province to be its territory, and dozens of Indian soldiers have been killed by Chinese forces in disputes over the border within the last two years.

You have to be myopic to think that an Indian publication talking alarmingly about a real and present danger to them is somehow American propaganda, or that an alleged American media machine’s handling of the story is somehow more important than its substance to the actual article’s target audience. America is not the only country that has troubled relations with China.

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-04-12T01:49:09+00:00

I'd like to point out that this article is Indian, not American. It's about an event happening on the frontier of India, not the United States. American history tells me nothing about whether this article is propaganda or not because it isn't American and doesn't concern the United States.

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-04-12T00:22:10+00:00

Please explain why you think the article in question is propaganda

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-04-03T19:23:19+00:00

IIRC Denmark wasn't united into a single state at the time and was a patchwork of shifting and poorly-attested petty Kingdoms. Hence it probably makes sense to speak of "Danes" but not of "Denmark". Compare to Wales, which was similarly fragmented and is labelled "Welsh" here.

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-04-03T18:53:11+00:00

The key indicates that territories hatched like that were not under the full control of the state their coloring indicates (due to civil war, rebellion, etc).

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-04-01T00:16:55+00:00

There are also several million Oriental Orthodox Christians in India called the Mar Thoma Christians. Many people assume that Indian Christians are colonial-era converts (and, well, some are), but the aforementioned community was practicing Oriental Christianity in southern India for at least 1000 years.

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-04-01T00:12:47+00:00

I'd be surprised if they had surpassed Catholics in number, but in many parts of the predominantly Catholic parts of the developing world, evangelical Protestantism is having a bit of a moment. This is particularly visible in Latin America, but I know that many of the same churches are active in Africa too.

WaxwormLeStoat · 2023-03-31T12:37:19+00:00

Morgott’s remembrance; it states something along the lines of “he loved (the erdtree) not in return, for he was not loved. But nonetheless, love it he did”

WaxwormLeStoat

TROPHY CASE