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You never think you’ll say: “why is there rice in the bathroom sink.”
Then you have a two year old and you say: “Honestly, I’m surprised there isn’t more rice in the bathroom sink.”
-Confucius.
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Dead Men Tell Tall Tales
226 posts
Dead Men Tell Tall Tales
@DeadMen92
Telling the Tall Tales of Dead Men to help explain this strange world we’re sleep walking into.
Katılım Ocak 2026
228 Takip Edilen17 Takipçiler
@LeonardProctor This is an absolute banger of a protest song? Where can we get it?
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One of the most beautiful sights you have seen in a long long time in Dublin glorious this government is finished
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Thank you. This needs to be discussed more.
Tbh, you don’t even have to go all the way back to Napoleon.
In WW1, the French held their lines for years. Took jaw dropping casulities. It’s difficult for the American mind to comprehend. But, Verdun did something to the French soul. They held that line. Verdun did not fall. But the French never really recovered from that one.
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France suffers from this because of their poor performance in WW2. To be fair, if not for the Channel, Britain would absolutely have been overrun as well.
As the "history guy" at Ensemble Studios I had to constantly fight against the "haw haw France always surrenders" jokesters. It helped that France before the Crimean War was pretty redoubtable. I'd point out that France fought all of Europe for 20 years under Napoleon, and for 14 years under Louix XIV. So that's obviously not a wimp.
I insisted that we do Joan of Arc in Age 2, in part as an antidote to the fact that Americans who've heard of the Hundred Years War usually only hear about Crecy and Agincourt because Britain harps endlessly about those, rather than Castillon, Patay, or Formigny which were disasters for the British.
But yeah there's a reasy why for almost 200 years every single war in Europe was based on stopping France from conquering everyone else.
Morgoth@MorgothsReview
The trope that France has a poor history of fighting wars is complete rubbish.
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Huh? That’s…not what any of them think regarding America’s power and wealth.
Their thesis is essentially America became powerful because its geography functionally guranteed it. Which it did.
The international systems created after ww2 to counter and contain the Soviets did their job but now actively work against Americas prosperity and power. So they want an entire systems update accross the board.
That’s what they think about in an over simplistic way. What you’re talking about is just dumbass memes of rural Americans.
Also, they don’t give a fuck about anything not in the western hemisphere. That’s kinda key.
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@geogvma Pretty sure we've had this convo to because I say it everywhere. They think America was just awesome because it was more white or Christian and then somewhere we got woke and gay so if they just tear up everything we'll go back to the 50's ad world for some reason.
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Just had this conversation with colleagues at Taras Shevchenko National University: Americans largely do not understand from whence their prosperity comes, and the MAGA gang is actively, and blindly, demolishing the foundations of that prosperity.
But there’s no going back…
Бианка@BiankaB12
MAGA doesn’t seem to grasp what’s happening to them - or what they’re doing to America. Their movement is systematically dismantling the foundations of American power: its alliance system, its supply chains, the dollar’s reserve currency status, and the global trust in its institutions. That’s the very infrastructure that made America the dominant power of the last 80 years. So, unless MAGA is totally and irreversibly destroyed and deep structural reforms prevent another rogue president from taking office, there is no way back. History taught us that this is how empires fall - not from external invasion, but from within. I don't think that institutional resistance to MAGA is coming through impeachment or prosecution. The only cards left to play are engineered failure and manufactured consequences: > Trump promised a booming economy and low inflation. What Americans will get is crushing inflation and an unaffordable life - turning his own voters, especially independents, against him. > Trump promised to end wars. What Americans will get is proliferation of wars, higher military spending, and compounding misery. He promised everything to everyone and the only strategy left on the table is to weaponise those promises against him. With that said, the rest of the world will suffer collateral damage - that’s unavoidable. But the calculus is brutal and I think in 20-30 years, we will realise it was the least worst option: MAGA has become an existential threat to the Western order, and the only way to save said order is to destroy them politically - completely, and permanently. The people that chose to die on that hill - for whatever personal or ideological reason - will have a very tough life regardless of the outcome. Their lives would be shit whether or not Trump & MAGA are destroyed or prevail.
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Can we demonetize vague posting? Is that viable to do? It’s getting bad. Really bad.
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@illnevercallitx @gtlpguanthwei You use in the same way teenage American girls use it. Which is generally considered extremely feminine and ditzy here.
Don’t do that if you want to be taken seriously.
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@gtlpguanthwei We Germans use the word in a different context as well. You wouldn't get it.
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Twitter posters doing more to increase foreign demand for American beef in a week than the Beef Checkoff has done in 30 years. Amazing.
Lane@thecookinglane
アメリカからの投稿をご覧になっている、日本の皆さんに挨拶です。皆さんは、アメリカらしい分厚い肉の塊がお好きだと聞きましたよ。
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@ballpointdisco @TMTLongShort This is more accurate yeah.
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@TMTLongShort Parenting isnt as smooth as option 1 sounds. Its more like a sudden heart attack: GET AWAY FROM THERE and then trying to explain the severity for the hundreth time while thanking heaven you escaped a trip to the hospital for the 101st time
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I’m in my early 30s and still haven’t raised a kid. But I’d imagine as a parent you have two options when it comes to a toddler who keeps trying to touch a hot stove.
Option one you sit the child down and explain patiently why touching something hot is bad and detrimental to your health. Option two is you let the child touch the stove and stand ready to pull its hand away before they are burned irreparably.
Every president since Bush Sr. has defaulted to option one. Trump has decided that option two is the only rational path forward.
But he can’t wait for the toddler to bumble around the kitchen for too long since he has elections coming up so he purposefully turned up the stove to max heat and then grabbed the kids hand and slammed it onto the stove.
Child abuse? Probably. Effective lesson? It’s about to be. Europe needs pain. It needs to be reminded why it relies on our overwatch.
Either that or we turn isolationist. There is no in between.
The toddler was born retarded unfortunately and reasoning with it just doesn’t work.
Open Source Intel@Osint613
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz: “This is not a NATO war. There would have to be procedures, within NATO there are established processes, and none of them were followed.”
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I swear the rest of the world just does not understand us at all.
If bombs ever drop on US cities, there would be a bill in the senate the next day titled: “The Total Annhilation Act: an act to authorize the US military to delete the entire nation of (insert country here). And provide unlimited funding to it.
It would pass unanimously.
POTUS would sign it the same day and authorize Operation: Fuck (insert country) in the same speech.
Lindsey Graham would be giving speeches that make Ghengis Khan’s diplomatic messages to kings sound cute and friendly.
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@ishaantharoor I think that is a key reason the US engages in so many wars. If missiles were dropping on US cities, politicians would be more restrained. The only impact on Americans seems to be about gas prices. The people in the theater have their lives and livelihoods to protect. Unfair.
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Having just seen long lines for cooking gas cylinders on the streets of cities in India — one of many bystanders to the conflict whose population has been seriously impacted—I’m struck yet again by how relatively insulated the U.S. is from the wars it unleashes
Jesse Watters@JesseBWatters
Spring Break goes WILD☀️ 🍺🤪 and the students have NO IDEA what’s going on🤣 “The BIGGEST issue in America is what BIKINI I’m wearing tomorrow”👙 “We’re going to war with IRAQ that’s been crazy”🤔 “I’ve NEVER heard the word Ayatollah in my life”🫢 “Is Venezuela in SPAIN?”😬😬😬
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@romanhelmetguy Implement flags next to posters handle like it is on /pol/
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I don’t think we should wall off our internet like China. That’s not the American way. As an American I demand more information, not less.
But we can’t have a healthy political debate between Americans on X when (1) only 15% of this site’s users are Americans, (2) much of the other 85% are rooting for us to fail, and (3) users can’t tell where the support for an idea is coming from.
Displaying a poster’s country was a good start. But X should also let users see a post’s likes broken down by country. There are tons of American creators who make a living catering primarily to a hostile foreign audience. An audience that would cheer if every American died. But because their posts get 100k’s of likes, Americans are tricked into believing their enemies’ opinions are actually those of their neighbors.
Expose them. Let users see likes by country. It’s the only way to bring sanity back to American discourse. @nikitabier @elonmusk
Roman Helmet Guy@romanhelmetguy
Imagine if the Athenians, when debating what to do about the Persian invasion, had allowed millions of Persians to dress up as Greeks and speak and cheer in the assembly. That's what discussing American politics is like on X.
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@BonifaceOption So with the Israelis right now it’s hard to look at this as anything other than a “tail wagging the dog” type of situation.
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I am trying to keep a level head about this, but there really is no way to read these events, even as charitably as possible, other than very misaligned objectives between Trump and the Israelis, where he wants to limit the damage done to the oil and gas infrastructure of Iran to prevent reprisals against the Gulf States and have leverage; whereas the Israelis have every incentive to escalate further.
Just as in the initial attack, there is one country that has ultimate decision-making power and it is not the United States.
Even if I were supportive of this conflict, it would give me pause that they can escalate and there is apparently nothing we can do about it.
Annmarie Hordern@annmarie
WSJ: Arab governments were furious about Israel’s attack and the U.S. failure to head it off, officials said. They had aggressively lobbied the Trump administration to stop U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure and now feel a target has been put on their backs, they said… America’s Arab allies are now fuming that they don’t seem to have any influence with the Trump administration despite heavy investments of time and money.
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It’s a global market only as long as the shipping and shipping lanes exist to transport it and cash in on the arbitrage.
With 1000 tankers penned up on the gulf and
The US saying shipping lanes aren’t free anymore. The shipping doesn’t exist.
It turns into regional markets pretty quick. Spot prices around the world could vary dramatically.
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@ContrarianSense @interstatejuche It's a million percent the point. You guys want to pretend like we'll be fine just because we produce oil. It's a global market. You can't impose restrictions during a crisis without severe knock on effects.
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Not only are we a net petroleum exporter, most of our oil imports are from Canada and Mexico.
Battle Beagle@HarmlessYardDog
We're talking weeks, not months, of floating oil storage before it all hits the fan. The clock is ticking.
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@Sam_Schulman @LFlies69 @pegobry_en Before the autumn leaves fell actually. Exactly as the Kaiser predicted.
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@LFlies69 @pegobry_en Yes! After all, in WWI the Tommies and Poilus were home by Christmas 1914, if I remember correctly.
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I don’t know, but I assume this is what happened:
- Israeli/US intelligence presented Trump with the opportunity to do a decapitation strike against the leadership of the Iranian regime
- It seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and he went for it
- He’s now finding out why countries don’t generally do this, which is that if you haven’t taken the time to build a coalition, you end up on your own
- I supose it’s a lesson on tactics vs strategy. I sincerely hope that America is not learning the eternal lesson that no amount of tactical success can compensate for strategic error.
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The distinction here is that for 4950 of those 5000 years China was a preindustrial, traditionalist agrarian society.
Once you industrialize. You need inputs to keep the factories going. Markets to sell your goods to. So that you can pay wages and buy more inputs etc. industrialized economies are machines that can’t be shut off. Or everyone dies.
Pistachio 🇮🇷 🇵🇸@HarleyShah
"China will lose the US market-" "We don't care. China has been here for 5000 years and most of the time, there was no United States" 😭😭😭
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This can’t be serious.
The Arabs were so discontent with ottoman rule they rebelled like five minutes after the Brits said they would maybe back them up.
The ottomans attempted to delete the Armenians.
The ottomans had a centuries long tradition of enslaving Balkan Christian’s.
The Barbary states existed under ottoman protection.
The list goes on.
Those guys took empire VERY seriously. And they were good at it.
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@HyperbolicDisco @SantiagoAuFund It was the most tolerant modern empire without question - more of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious confederation than an imperial power center.
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This is a bad take. If the US stops manufacturing wars, the rest of the world will simply cooperate together. They will form a land-based trading bloc across the Eurasian continent - precisely what the last 500yrs of naval-based hegemons have worked so hard to obstruct.
Craig Fuller 🛩🚛🚂⚓️@FreightAlley
If you wanted to reindustrialize the US, while wiping out global manufacturing, this is the way to make that happen.
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It was the Ukraine war the really messed up his credibility. He had correctly predicted conflict occurring in that region. So then everyone wanted to get his opinions on the conflict.
He let himself get drawn away from what he’s skilled at. Long term trends, big picture stuff. And started daily commentating on the conflict at a tactical level. Except he doesn’t know anything about on the ground tactical stuff. Which became apparent very quickly as almost every prediction around the conflict turned out deadass wrong.
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@pbiondich @nic_carter Correct. Made great points in his books which are def worth a read. Went off the deep end into Trump election and never recovered
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it's uncanny how the Straits crisis and its reverberations was completely anticipated by peter zeihan in this 2020 book
core thesis:
- the US as a reluctant increasingly isolationist hegemon unwilling or unable to maintain food energy security for the whole planet
- the US able to weather this transition as it has the continental resources it needs, but its erstwhile freeloader allies totally hung out to dry in the new order
- no hegemon willing or able to fill the gap; no one else post '45 has the blue water navy and power projection ability that the US had; trade becomes more disordered and more expensive
- trade becomes more regionalized, countries dependent on seamlessly functioning global food/fertilizer/energy trade are big big losers, globalization retreats
haven't seen any good counter arguments to this thesis. the realignment is happening in real time. listen to what the Euros are saying about the Strait and their energy security and see what Trump is saying about Europe. (not saying anyone is "right" or "morally justified" just calling balls and strikes)
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@calvinfroedge I’m about as deep as you can get into deep red farming country.
This is simply not true.
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All the farmers turned on Trump last year after he f*cked them with the tariffs, made China stop buying US ag
Seriously, go to any deep red farming county and say something nice about Trump, see if you get spit in your eye
Bloomberg@business
US farmers, long one of Donald Trump’s most loyal constituencies, are increasingly worried by the Iran war as soaring fertilizer and fuel prices hammer them just as they are about to start planting crops for the year. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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@JRev231 @DefenseAnalyses If you hate stability and your goal is to instigate some type of political revolution. Yeah I suppose that would be the meta.
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Paradox has run one of the most ambitious civil service training programs of the past century. Each map-game autist that by happenstance ends up at State or White House will do so with an intuitive sense of regional history matched only previously by British colonial operators.
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@Historycourses @_Plac3_hold3r A lot of map games model this just fine.
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@JRev231 @DefenseAnalyses Forming protectorate/puppet governments throughout your sphere of influence while birth rate maxing your core territory is the meta.
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@DefenseAnalyses Paradox just casually explaining that conquered foreign cultures and wrong religion create unrest and are less economically viable for your state. And if the foreigners outnumber the states culture/religion its better to switch to the foreigners
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Dude. These people (not OP) just want to be pedantic to try and get points of the non-west while ignoring that the world was dramatically different ~2000 years ago. North Africa and the Near East are all part of western cannon prior to the Islamic/arabic expansion in the 8th century. Jfc.
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Yeah no. Hannibal was Carthaginian, a cosmopolitan city that welcomed many ethnic groups from the Mediterranean. And I did not start from the misconception that Tunisia is a modern nation and construction. In ancient times, the closest thing to that was the town of Tunis, an irrelevant town subjected to Carthage.
Tanirt 🇹🇳@tanirt32
Hannibal basic Tunisian actor < Then they cast a Black actor in the role>
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