Recent content by Skallagrim

  1. Skallagrim

    Russian Invasion of Ukraine 2022

    Humans are carbon-based, so we might say that his products.... neutralise... some of that carbon with every hit. :cool:
  2. Skallagrim

    History Western Civilization, Rome and Cyclical History

    They were, in their own way, derailed much earlier than that. As I wrote, somewhat tangentially, when we discussed Alexander recently: The obvious model for comparison [when it comes to an ATL triumph of Alexander] would be the Maurya monarchy in India, which was founded around the same time...
  3. Skallagrim

    How advanced can you make the world?

    He didn't condemn the scientific method, and couldn't possibly have, because the concept hadn't yet been expressed or formalised in his day. It's like saying he condemned the combustion engine or something. :p But in fact, Aristotle was one of the few Greek philosophers who was reasonably...
  4. Skallagrim

    History Western Civilization, Rome and Cyclical History

    My own contention has long been that the Mongols derailed Chinese history, rather in the way that they also derailed Russian history, and Alexander derailed Persian history. These respective "targets" were hit at different stages in their cultural development, and that affects the precise...
  5. Skallagrim

    How advanced can you make the world?

    Not that long ago, when we were talking about the "best case scenario" for Christianity, I wrote up an outline for my interpretation of that idea. That ATL scenario would also double quite effectively as a decent stab at answering this challenge here. (Interestingly, my starting point is quite...
  6. Skallagrim

    History Western Civilization, Rome and Cyclical History

    As far as the shape of things is concerned, I certainly do agree the Spanish Civil War is fairly decent model for what the coming escalation of the wider social conflict across the West will look like. Not some relatively neatly divided territorial schism, but a messy struggle with...
  7. Skallagrim

    Hamas Launches Offensive Against Southern Israel

    Imagine if your country had well-guarded borders and no swarms of millions of illegals, many draining public funds through criminality, and the bulk of the rest doing black market jobs at exploitation wages, thus pricing honest workers out of the market... Then the government wouldn't need to...
  8. Skallagrim

    History Western Civilization, Rome and Cyclical History

    Certainly. I admire Alexander very much. He sought to be Akhilles reborn, and he succeeded. A mythical hero- figure for the ages. And like his Homeric idol, he didn't live to see old age. Such men rarely do. ‐---‐-------------------- My thinking is that Alexander's march into India would...
  9. Skallagrim

    History Western Civilization, Rome and Cyclical History

    Yes, Alexander was (on average) a fairly noble figure, albeit with considerable temper issues. For his time and place, he definitely qualified as a virtuous ruler. Most within his empire regarded him as a liberator, which is always telling. The main issue is that he was a batshit crazy...
  10. Skallagrim

    Russia(gate/bot) Russia-Ukraine War Politics Thread Mk. 2

    This is getting a bit worrisome, you know.... -- Bacle -- almost literally Dmitry Medvedev ...something something he who fights monsters, something something the abyss also stares into you. :p (And I make a joke of it here, but it's important to keep that in mind. It's so easy to lose your...
  11. Skallagrim

    Imperium of Man vs Galactic Empire

    I think the official gloss-over for this discrepancy (which encompasses a few other figures from other sources as well) is that there is the number for worlds that actually count for representation in the senate, and then there is the far larger number that includes all sorts of colonies, which...
  12. Skallagrim

    AHC: Haiti is a functional country

    This is the core problem. They kept importing people from Africa, who in turn had been snatched from the interior by the coastal slave-traders. Total inland primitives, ripped from their world and dropped into... basically hell. And never any investment in them; no attempts to turn them into...
  13. Skallagrim

    Meme Thread for Both Posting and Discussing Memes

    Dutchman here. Can confirm. :p
  14. Skallagrim

    History Western Civilization, Rome and Cyclical History

    You're missing the point here. (In the thing about nuclear weapons, too, by not actually reading what I wrote about human perception and how it impacts our behaviour-- but I'm not going to repeat myself on that. I'm convinced that what I said was clear enough, and should be intelligible.) The...
  15. Skallagrim

    History Western Civilization, Rome and Cyclical History

    As you said: the Qin regime was never sustainable. China derives its name from Qin (just for anyone unclear on this: the 'q' is pronounced like 'ch'), but that's sort of comparable to the way every Roman emperor was 'Caesar'. Goazu of Han was to China what Augustus was to Rome. The man who spent...
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