The global power that hasn’t participated in numerous atrocities does not exist.

Almost as though power is accrued at the expense of the vulnerable.

The difference here is the loss of domestic law and order and its cascading downstream effects for global cooperation and trade

The only countries that the US has alienated are ones it is explicitly sanctioning. Nobody else is actually cutting ties.

China is the obvious beneficiary.

China’s the trade-alternative for countries under US sanctions, precisely because Trump’s done a ham-fisted job of diplomacizing with his counterparts overseas. But a future Pete Buttigieg administration can patch that up if he chooses. There is more to be gained by doing business with the US than with Venezuela or Iran or Cuba. Chinese leaders know that and act accordingly.

But could get a whole lot worse a whole lot faster

Sure. Or it could come to a grinding halt if Trump loses control of Congress and falls into lame duck status three years early. Already, we’re seeing sharp divides even inside the GOP, which already operates on thin margins in the face of a Dem election wave.

Plenty of precedent for an unpopular President to get sidelined by skilled and ambitious legislators. And the US has demonstrated time and time again that it has the manpower and the infrastructure to rebound quickly under strong, competent leadership.

We’re almost certainly going to face a nasty recession going into the next few years. But we’re still a massive, hugely populated, highly technical, heavily industrialized economy. Losing unipolar status isn’t the end of the empire. A bad few years of economic contraction isn’t the end of the world.

Now… the long tail of climate change… that’s another story. If the Colorado River dries up before it reaches Arizona, we’re going to see some shit flying.

The American brand is permanently tarnished

I wish this were true. But after Iraq? After Vietnam? A Cold War that nearly wiped out the entire human race? After CIA sponsored coups from Brazil to Guatamala? Henry Ford was passing out copies of “The International Jew” all over Germany during the 1920s. Roosevelt forced the Platt Amendment down Cuba’s throat. McKinley oversaw a genocide in the Philippines. Polk gave us the Annexation of Texas and the revitalization of the North American slave trade. Anyone ask Andrew Jackson what happened to all the Cherokee down in Florida?

America is a country with unlimited do-overs. Our brand is never tarnished. We are always and forever a Shining City On A Hill even as Ronnie fucking Raygun is sponsoring nun rape down in Nicaragua.

The point is if there is a god the dude has bigger concerns.

The clock-maker is not concerned exclusively with the largest gears.

We’re on our own, there’s no sign that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

“God doesn’t care about small things” is the antithesis of Biblical teaching. Both the Old and the New Testaments go through great pains to convey how the most humble individuals in the most basic circumstances still receive Divine Attention.

If you’re arguing with a Christian on these terms, you’re queuing yourself up for an ass kicking. They’ve got much better poetry than a grainy photo of a galaxy that isn’t even the Milky Way, btw.

• Evaporated Milk

• Condensed Milk

• Whole Milk

• A Secret Fourth Thing

A lot of the early stigmas and taboos about diet, clothing, and hygiene emerged from ritualized practices intended to prevent disease and promote human health. The lack of understanding meant the ritual divorced itself from the real best practices over time. But prohibitions on eating shellfish and chopping off the foreskin of your dick and keeping menstruating women out of the house were ultimately primitive efforts at avoiding food poisoning, curbing the spread of STIs, and managing the bloody mess of periodic period flow.

There’s entire branches of theology undermining every major world religion that dedicate themselves to rationalizing the Divine Bureaucracy. “God doesn’t care, because he is big and I am small” is as true as “The American President doesn’t care what I’m up to in Venezuela, because he’s very far away and I’m not that important in the grand scheme of geopolitics”.

What zealots are inclined to believe in is the Angelic Delta Force and its capacity to inflict sudden, horrifying, and indiscriminate violence on the wrong kind of person. If you study the history of Cargo Cults you’ll discover people who experience traumatizing, inexplainable phenomena can often build up superstitious rituals in an effort to control things that are fundamentally beyond their grasp.

It isn’t that “space is fake” nearly so much as “There are things beyond my grasp that bother me, so I’m changing my personal behavior in the vain hope it will protect me from these anxiety-inducing events”.

Setting aside the ins and outs of religious-based sexual morality, the galaxy being very big does not negate the consequences of your behaviors on your immediate neighbors, your peers, or your descendants.

Epstein was still a bad dude, despite the vastness of the universe.

Found another flat earther

The Lich system was pretty close to the mark. Possible that developers gave the underlying features of SoM a wide berth out of caution, but so much of this seems to boil down to “we don’t want to risk the possibility of a lawsuit” rather than “we can’t just do our thing and see if WB’s lawyers care enough”.

So long as you’re not directly ripping off the code from another system, patent courts have been pretty generous in interpreting overlapping abstract concepts.

But any kind of suit is scary, particularly for studios that aren’t geared up to fight them.

Millions of fake IDs have been leaked.

But it’s just vanilla combats with predictable outcomes.

So they invented… the first dozen seasons of the Pokemon cartoon?

They patented a very specific algorithm for a very specific kind of game. You can still do knock-offs of the system in the same way you can make RTS games without asking Blizzard’s permission or platformers without asking Nintendo’s.

I would suspect that SoM’s system is complex enough that nobody’s been eager to try and replicate it. But they high level concept of randomized enemy generation isn’t something you can patent. Neither is randomizing story elements between NPCs.

Why did the Romans fail?

I remember learning that the Romans fell because they were too gay and debauched and woke, so they lost their manly vigors.

Nevermind, history doesn’t like copypasta

I suppose its worth noting that the Roman Empire lasted centuries (millennia, if you see the Byzantine/Ottoman Empire as a continuation of Roman history). The UK is more comparable than the US, which flourished after WW1 and made it barely a century before fumbling.

But also, the book is hardly closed on the US as an empire. China, India, Persia, Rome, France… they all had their ups and downs.

The US writes the history books, runs the universities, and manages the international media networks.

Class solidarity. The bourgeois defend one another while the proletariat are easily divided.

One of the more novel takes I’ve heard recently is to describe the current Trump ICE beef up as a war of the Unemployed against the Working Class. He’s literally vacuuming up jobless white men and turning them into an armed force against the migrant labor force.

I am so fucking disgusted in the 88 million idiots who voted for Trump…

Trump won 2024 with 77M votes to Harris’s 75M. Where you are finding the extra 11M?

Traitorous scum, every last one of them.

Liberals call them Terrorists

Conservatives call them Freedom Fighters

Here at CBS, you can get the facts and think for yourself. Join us as Bari Weiss sits down for tea and biscuits with a very enthusiastic meth addict and two used car dealer salesmen as they explain what really happened five years ago today. Then come back later for the debate, as we invite a blue haired college student and the world’s oldest man to explain why their radical left-wing views can no longer win elections. At CBS, every angle is covered. We Report, You Decide.

How much TrumpCoin did the host country buy in advance?

Forming an agreement to protect Poland at all costs and calling it the Warsaw Pact.

What? No? Is that one taken?

In fairness, this would be both a more accurate and more German style name.