LupineTroubles [he/him, they/them]

What’s it that you are feeling the absence of, that you think you could know or someone you feel is more historied would know? In addition, what do you have envision as the connection if this information was available to you that you feel you are missing now? I am asking this genuinely.

I feel your feeling of a lost past and the apparent melancholy of it, is more of a profound feeling about one’s ancestry than most people ever think or feel about their family history beyond maybe their grandparents.

You have connection to history as anyone else, there is nobody who is more and less historied. Moreover, even the idea of having a localized identity which may or may not be institutionally robust that used to highlight a regional socio-cultural and historical presence disintegrated in most of the world already and everyone exists in the permanent global present which has its own culture and subculture. Everyone looks for authenticity in this and some people are just more romanticized and some larp more than others, which depends entirely on their relation to permanent global present and not any genuine history that’s somehow more real than others.

Generally speaking it seems people consider being able to read a book in its own language a positive. Meanwhile much of the backlash to this seems to come from people who can read English just fine but want to specifically be catered to in their own language for what appears to me as mostly consumer concerns. Such as being a big market that has to pay relatively highly for these products but don’t get specific translations.

I’ll have to guard the yogurt I make, I don’t want any sexy mice running around.

I love to eat carobs but it genuinely is not a good substitute for cocoa for chocolate even though it feels like it should be. It’s a good substitute to just eat a whole carob when you want a chocolate bar though.

That’s because the governing politicians are complicit, it is really that simple. Only reason why France stayed out of it in 2003 was because French were even more complicit in Saddam regime with how heavily they were invested in Iraqi Oil so the reason they were staying out of it was because of conflict of interest.

I am not basing it on the online communities I interact with of course, as otherwise I’d have a much higher opinion of Americans. I am basing it on more regular Americans I met and interacted with, political developments, media, political polling and statistics in general. Americans also often have less idea about politics of rest of the world (which is natural, as US is center of global politics and people from outside of US know much more about US politics than other way around usually) and don’t realize some of the things they complain about as uniquely American just isn’t and that funnily might be another manifestation of American exceptionalism. This is not to say that there aren’t bloodthirsty warmongers in America, you are governed by such a cohort already and both parties are more or less pro-war. It is just rightwing populism, chauvinism and jingoism exists everywhere and I don’t see Americans as particularly above average in that regard and that again is despite the American government’s efforts.

That’s exactly what I am getting at, American government and media at every turn tries to evoke chauvinism and stoke jingoistic sentiments in general public of America and despite that the population isn’t significantly chauvinistuc and jingoistic proportionally and has a significant amount of people who are consistently anti-war and anti-intervention on solely humanitarian grounds.

I do appreciate and value your self-criticism however as someone not from US, it’s exactly this sentiment that one’s own country and its population is not sufficiently against senseless suffering that creates the environment that makes it impossible for a consensus to form which allows people to merely acquiesce to whatever agenda politicians want to see through. Believing we can always do better prevents apathy which is so effortlessly pervasive.

Trump is so inspirationally consistent in his disrespect of the army and soldiers.

It some ways existence of US and Israel is a moral hazard, because it can too easily validate unexamined beliefs about the world and be an obstacle to introspection about one’s moral values because it is too easy to just take for granted the fact that US and Israel are so oppressive and destructive that it overshadows everything else. This is a pitfall I see many people fall into, especially in West, where they think their moral duty done simply because they are critical of US and Israel. It is easy to criticize others (especially when we are talking about geopolitics impact and humanitarian catastrophe that is US Israel) and difficult to self-criticize with lingering national liberal sentiments that are the foundational ideology of all nation-states but one should realize the magnitude of damage US and Israel does only makes it easier to think oneself principled without ever putting those principles to test.

My perspective on this is that what are we comparing this to, exactly? If we are to see American population as exceptionally bellicose does it follow naturally that other countries (especially in the Western political order) have populations less supportive of their country’s military actions? I think in most countries a large portion of the population simply doesn’t even examine this, they just think it is the government doing government things, there is a well-known tendency to rally to flag or at best simple indifference. I can’t in good faith say that American population is more bellicose because there are politicians from other countries (who very much are the same libs as you describe here in ideology and behavior alike) who criticize American government’s actions because their politics and interests didn’t bend that way while the population of those said countries are completely indifferent about whatever their military is doing at the time. A lack of opportunity and a whole lot of untested principles doesn’t make for a better morality, especially when it is so quiet as to be internalized completely.

In that respect, the fact that I see so many Americans so starkly opposing not only their government’s actions (whether out of factionalism like liberals talking about procedure and decorum or genuine anti-war stance even if comes from weird libertarian beliefs nested in American exceptionalism) but also genuinely oppose their own state and military’s circumstances and stakes in the global order to benefit of American Empire is something that I find valuable. It is then not that America doesn’t have bloodthirsty warmongers, warhawks, outright ideological automatons lockstep with whatever their party line is or everything else, it is that those exists everywhere else as well with a larger portion of population simply existing in quiet assent or silent indifference.

It reminds me, in a roundabout way, of Westerners accusing non-Western people from war torn countries of violent radicalism when a lot of Western populations radicalized to violent rightwing regime with some of the highest standards of living in the world and having faced no conflict or violence in their lives. Simply put, the standards are not the same to say American population is simply more bloodthirsty because American government is involved in more wars with little to no input from the population, Europe was involved in basically almost all of American adventurism and in cases where it wasn’t (like France in Iraq War, they were simply too invested in Iraq to support a war and it wasn’t due to any anti-war sentiment in France and they bombed Libya more than America did when it was in their interest to do so) yet you don’t see as much of a contentious discourse as Americans get into nor as much of a principled anti-war stance even from bizarre ideological fronts.

So overall I do think America is not exceptionally warmongering as a population, certainly they are not as chauvinistic as some other states nor so easily pulled into jingoism despite the government’s efforts to keep those impulses under control.

Hot take but I don’t think America has a particularly bloodthirsty or warmongering population, that’s despite the constant consent manufacturing and propaganda. A lot of people, especially in West, have extremely uncritical acceptance and reflexive defense about their countries’ military actions in a way, it comes to them so naturally that they are not even aware that they more or less just acquiesce whatever their respective governments tell them as reason, so they default to conforming to raison d’etat consensus as nation-state ideology. Meanwhile Americans appear more zealous because American population is more polarized and inherently more outspoken about these things. It’s one of those things that becomes more visible the more contentious it is, paradoxically appearing more accepted when there isn’t actually a consensus.

Iranian AI-enriched animation reserves have been deployed.

This article serves the purpose of trying to preemptively deflect the possibility of comparing ICE to Israel, but rather to project against groups US and Israel fights.

I find oolong’s taste too complex and rich to be drinking too much all the time, it is less of a fixture compared to black and green tea.

Taking that much land inland is truly against the spirit of the nation of Venice.

I don’t think there is any hypocrisy between straddling Byzantium with debt and representing their misfortunes at the time like the Earthquake in Gallipoli or repeated civil wars with events so you have to react to them and navigate them within game mechanics and the game rewarding you doing exact same steps in exact same order with rewards that bypass game mechanics and give you bunch of free stuff so you can take everything easily once you survive the first few years.

Besides Byzantium is favorite country if every deus vulting GSG fan so they get the first DLC anyway above and before many other countries and regions both ascendant and troubled at this time so complaining about them specifically is silly too. We will likely see them given silly amount of momentum for recovery that they compete with Ottomans on expansion into Balkans and Anatolia soon enough.

That’s right little Byzantium you are in Ottoman country now, enjoy the earthquakes.

Would you have more fun if there were no obstacles?

This estimation is based on nominal GDP per capita, Turkey currently has higher GDP per capita than Malaysia but these economic predictions that extend further than 5 years are either alarmist or smug with no real basis since they barely ever do anything but extend current trends over standard models. Likely nobody was predicting in 2007 that UK would fall so far behind US in terms of GDP per capita by 2030.