Solarbird Apr 1

'k what just happened

#oil #OilPrice #iran #war

Show threadSolarbird Apr 1

Ah, there it is.

Great job, you fucking moron. You clown. You fool. You imbecile. You've given the despotic theocratic regime you wanted to "decapitate" not only de facto control over one of the biggest strategic shipping assets in the world but a massive new revenue stream. And now that you've thrown up your hands and walked away sob-screaming "I WON I WON I WON" with the Strait still closed, traders are 100% convinced that enough countries will take them up on the offer to make it work

You fucked it up _exactly_ like you fucked up the withdrawal from Afghanistan, but _so_ much worse.

Phenomenal.

#FuckTrump #FuckMAGA #iran #war #CrushingDefeat #news #FuckTheUS #IranJustWon

Show threadHey GusApr 1
@moira North Korea and Iran are on a whole different fuck the United States thing. It’s surprising that good will was ever given at all
Show threadSolarbird Apr 1
@elebertus The post-WWII order was so much better than anything before it. I'm someone who _doesn't_ see the fall of the Western Roman Empire as a tragedy, but I _do_ see the collapse of this particular international order as one, because holy shit what came before was so. fucking. bad, and what all these complete shits want back is what was there before.
Show threadHey GusApr 1

@moira like in the sense of the Roman’s ruling basically most of the ME?

I honestly don’t know what they want other than cheap resources and reliable access to them.

What’s troubling is the Iranian regime truly are bad guys too. It’s a mess.

Show threadSolarbird Apr 1

@elebertus In the sense of the collapse of the Western Empire entirely. No more proconsuls, no more governmental structure, none of it. By the time of the fall in 476, the Empire in the West was barely even a shell of a structure, and wasn't serving, really... anyone.

Some people see that date as a tragedy. I see it as good riddance and acknowledgement of a situation already long in place. Once intra-empire trade collapsed and the Western Empire had instituted feudalism, it's hard to say it had any value left at all, and by the late 400s? It was a puppet of the Franks and a joke. Good riddance.

Show threadRoger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔

@moira @elebertus

476 wasn't a tragedy,

but 235 arguably was
The assassination of Severus Alexander touched off a 50-year Crisis that destroys the internal trade network, the economy, and basically everything else that mattered... I'd say this was the true End of Rome.

There is so much we're discovering *now* about where they were then.

Archimedes came ⟶⟵ this close to inventing calculus (Ptolomy effectively *did* invent Fourier Series). People were doing many of the same water mill & manufacturing experiments that the Brits were doing in the early 1700s. Random isolated artisans built sophisticated calculating devices. The Library of Alexandria (which was basically their Internet) was still a going concern at that point...

1/2

Apr 2 at 11:20pmWeb
Show threadRoger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔6d ago

@elebertus @moira

... part of the problem is that medieval Christians buried what they didn't understand or care about, and you've got modern Christian apologists wanting to downplay how much was lost and so they feed the idea that Greek science stagnated after Hellenistic times and oh yes there was all kinds of scientific progress in medieval times, but that's just not true.

No idea if we *could* have had an industrial revolution ca. 500 if only they could have kept their shit together, but aaaa...

2/2

Show threadSolarbird 6d ago
@wrog @elebertus Yes. To clarify, I wasn't arguing that the (slow) collapse of civilisation in the west wasn't a tragedy, not at all. Just that 476 wasn't one, because it was already long over by then.