I still think the vast majority of white British people deserve worse for the crimes committed by the British Empire.

India should get to drop two nuclear bombs on the most Gammony parts of your country and then you should revert to pre-Kingdom of England borders. Mercia, Wessex and Danelaw shall be restored with Denmark taking over administration of Danelaw.

Finally, Ireland shall be reunified, Scotland and Wales independent and the Breton language resurrected so we can all forget even the name England.

The whole of North America has been covered in a apocalyptic haze for two months it’s extremely unsettling

There was a big one near Fallen Leaf Lake I think in the 90’s? But yeah I’ve spent a lot of time in that area there’s a lot of fuel to burn. It’s heartbreaking it’s such beautiful country.

A San Diego Hurricane is a possibility here in the new world we are busy building

So the real reason is that irrigated desert farming has higher yields than traditional farming due to fewer pests and ability to control all inputs.

It’s unsustainable but much more profitable than traditional farming.

Oh Neptune

At the same time who is going to build the infrastructure to get the mineral resources out? We all know it’s gonna be China.

Everyone likes to think that American leaders have some sort of grand strategic vision for the world. I think that they create chaos to support convince Americans they need to support the bloated defense budgets that enrich them. Personal enrichment is the ultimate strategy. They might want to make this chaos hurt China and Iran. However, it’s an open question whether or not that is achievable especially if the Taliban are interested in getting rich off of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth. I think it’s possible that we both knew this was going to happen and that we were surprised by how quickly it all fell apart.

I don’t like this attitude on the online left that everything is either incompetence or a grand conspiracy. Empires decline at the hands of leaders seeking personal enrichment above all else.

Credits roll as the Curb Your Enthusiasm Theme gets louder and louder

It’s so much worse than Vietnam we were there way longer and the South Vietnamese puppet regime lasted 3 years. The ARVN fought actually during the Spring Offensive in ‘75. The Afghan Army has offered token resistance. The lifespan of this puppet government will be measured in days not years. This is indicative of imperial degradation the US is even less capable than it was in the 70’s.

Like that cyclone on Jupiter that has been rotating for centuries

Ethiopia may break apart before this happens honestly the country is in the middle of escalating conflicts and the central government is losing control. Wouldn’t be the first time in Ethiopia’s very long history this has happened either.

They still deserve to literally hang and not dropped the old slow method of stringing them up by their necks.

The north woods of Minnesota are one moderately dry summer away from the same kind of fires. If memory serves along the I-35 corridor it happened in the 20’s it will be bigger now.

In the case of Greece thank Angela Merkel’s handling of the debt crisis refusing to print money to help out Southern Europe shredded social and emery service budgets in Greece. But of course when Germany was in trouble due to COVID the EU relaxed their monetary policy.

Most: Ancestors who were from Western Ohio where the real radical abolitionists were who fought for the Union.

Least: Ancestor who owned a Salmon canning company in the early 1900’s they were straight up Capitalist pigs. If it’s any consolation that money is no longer in the family.

Someone once said to me “history is a Madlib of horrors”

Replace the noun for leaders in our era which would be “Elected officials” with “Priest-Kings” and the ideology noun from “Neoliberal Capitalism” with “offerings to Buluc Chabtan (Mayan war god)” and you basically have the same story

So the Classical Maya collapse thing is grossly oversimplified by Jared Diamond. In recent years we have actually gained much more access to the historical record of Mayan civilization due to finding inscriptions in the ruins of cities deep in the jungle.

The cliff notes of the more detailed story:

Starting in the 700’s the two largest and most powerful Mayan city-states: Palenque and Tikal began a 100+ year war against one another. Smaller city-states joined and left alliances with one or both of the main two rivals throughout the conflict. Mayan agriculture depended on raised fields, aqueducts, wells and reservoirs in order to sustain these societies in the Central American jungle. During the war the tax paying peasants were levied every year after planting to go out and fight instead of doing much needed maintenance on the critical infrastructure that allowed Mayan civilization to exist. So you have crumbling infrastructure by the 800’s when the climate begins to shift and an intransigent elite in Palenque, Tikal and their myriad allies who refuse to make the necessary investments in shoring up these things. This is the context for the collapse of the southern Maya. It was a choice they had the ability to intervene to actually avoid collapse. It was politics and physics - not physics alone - that lead to the decline of their civilization. How do we know that the problem was political? The northern Maya city-states that had been on the fringes of Mayan civilization like Chichen Itza actually survived and thrived through the collapse because instead of fighting in the 100 year war between the two city-states they reacted to the changing climate by revamping their infrastructure. The northern Maya would go on to thrive for another 400 years after their southern cousins cities were reclaimed by the jungle. That is until the Toltecs (this is where pre-Colombian history gets fuzzy again).

Jared Diamonds story is woefully incomplete but your point is a good one.

Après Moi by Regina Spektor

Après moi le deluge, after me comes the flood.

And from Final Fantasy VII an extremely collapse centric game:

You Can Hear the Cry of the Planet

“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it” -Unknown American Army Major, 1968

The Byzantines and Sassanids had their puppet Arabs kingdoms and that did not turn out well

Curb Your Enthusiasm Theme Blaring

Or as I like to call it: Permian Mass Extinction any % speedrun

Cadillac Desert by Marc Risener was first published in 1986 predicting all of this.

As a desert rat by birth it changed my life to read. The idea that we could turn the desert green was just more imperial hubris more manifest destiny.

I know but just saying I hate the “Graveyard of Empires” thing

I’ll say it again for those in the back:

THEY ONLY CALL IT THE GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES BECAUSE THE BRITISH FAILED THERE PLENTY OF ARABS, PERSIANS AND STEPPE EMPIRES HAVE DONE VERY WELL IN AFGHANISTAN CHINA CAN TOO