AlbigensianGhoul

[Tankies'] positioning, further to the left than subreddits like r/communism, r/socialism, and r/Anarchism

Bruh r/communism is unapologetically gonzaloist, they're even further 'left' than we are lol

The figure doesn't even imply that, that sort of graph has no concept of "intensity" for positioning. The colours being different just means that (assuming it was well done) the red communities are more similar among themselves than the orange communities.

So their "further left" is just either a massive ass-pull or they actually think that their clustering model has an implicit politicalcompass system in the position of plotted clusters.

There's a sort of logic to having a weak military in Mexico. Their only land neighbours are the USA, Guatemala and Belize. Neither south neighbour is a threat, and despite the USA being really inefficient there's no way Mexico could fight toe-to-toe with them if they were directly invaded.

They also don't have any strategic overseas rival like an imperialist power would.

So not only can you save lots of budget in the military, but it also reduces the harm that a well-funded and organised military can be to the "internal enemy", which is usually poor, indigenous, black or otherwise marginalised people. (Usually with the cover of "combatting drug trafficking")

Bribing the military is also part of the CIA modus operandi for interfering in Latin America. Just look at the current investigation on the Bolsonaro coup attempt and how many of the relevant generals took part in the MINUSTAH.

But I also don't think the USA will ever be able to directly attack Mexico without gigantic repercussions to themselves. They're better off just doing another Allende.

I think it might just be because Hexbear is "difficult to understand". If you pick random high score comments from there without context and show it to a data-driven nerd, I doubt they'd even be able to describe what's going on.

But since federation, at some point any (naïve) analysis of either forum will inevitably include a lot of posts from the other. This could be an actually interesting area for social network research (social dynamics between "native" and "foreign" users in an instance), but since there's no ready-made model for this in scikit-learn the Data-Driven bros will never risk actually doing research.

Besides being a fucking ugly graph where you can barely read the node labels, I also like that this one pretty much admits democrats are clustered along the other reactionaries.

They also don't describe how they even got that clustering (or the network itself) in the first place. I think it's safe to assume they either nicked it from the web or got an inexperienced intern to just do whatever with a Jupyter notebook.

Is it a network of "common posters"? Of links in sidebar? In cross-posts?

Data science is what happens when "programmers think they are experts in everything that deals with computers" is taken to its most extreme. This field needs a purge, for the sake of all actual statisticians.

Science is when you never show your methodology, because it came to you in ~~a dream~~ a linear regression.

It's not real, it's an edit.

It's not a real Onion article though. It's just an edit of this one about Al-Qaeda. Check the dates, it's the same one.

I think Parthia counts as one of the biggest competitors during the rise period, but during the decline period they were already the replaced by the Sassanids (I'm not acquainted the internal details of how that happened).

But like Axum, neither were ever in a position where they could capitalise on the failing Roman grasp in the Northwestern Mediterranean (nowadays called "Europe"). So the pressure they applied was in the frontiers rather than the direct blows to the core of the Western Half by the Visigoths and Vandals and such.

Geography severely restricted them in a way that can't restrict China from forming economic alliance with the USA's plundering grounds, so that was the gist of what I was referring to.

But after the fall of the West, the Sassanid empire became the biggest imperial rival for Rome until the Muslim expansion made them look like rump states. So in a very contrived way, one could say Iran was always (Imperial) Rome's biggest opponent, but sadly there was no Iran in Britain.

Makes sense. I didn't quite understand what you were referring to, so the reply was a bit kneejerk. I wonder if there'll ever be a "low pay" situation for the MIC, though. It seems to be the only thing the US ever bothers to fund.

Your point regarding BRICS makes a lot of sense too. I don't think Rome ever had any equal competitor after Carthage like China is to the USA. Most comparable empires were too far away to "steal" Roman support. Best I can think is Axum or the Sassanid Empire, but they're too far from the Mediterranean. Imagine the impact of something like BRI but for western Latin America.

I still think it's risky to compress the Roman timeline when it comes for ideological and policy decisions, moreso due to how it simplifies a lot of the nuance and ebb and flow of history. It's so much time, with so much happening and so much surviving history, that it's easy to cherrypick specific events to create one specific narrative.

So for example, much as I agree that not being able to maintain their professional non-citizen army created the conditions for (at least) regime at multiple points in Roman history, I also think that promising citizenship for alliances during the Social War was critical for Roman victory against the rebelling tribes, and drove a wedge between them.

And it may be my Byzantophile heart speaking for me, but given the East remained fairly strong up until the 7th century (and almost retook Italy under Justinian I in the 6th), I'd say that was actually just the new core for the Empire rather than "parts of" Rome.

I remember reading something about how the Roman economy was already being redirected from Italy and Iberia to North Africa and Anatolia, but I can't confirm it with a source right now. But a good proxy is how many post-Hadrian senators and Emperors wrote in Greek rather than Latin.

Overall though, I agree with your points and am just being pedantic.

At what point are you referring here? Rome had struggle sessions about citizenship for military service since even before the Empire, with a notable example being the Social War, which ended with the extension of citizenship to allied tribes.

Non-citizen armies were already a thing since the early Julio-Claudian period. And doling out citizenship for "good service" was a practice as long as citizenship itself in Rome.

One could hardly call that a "main factor" to the fall if it was so present during Rome's rise in the first place, unless they severely compress the timeline. In fact it's a common technique by modern racists to try and equate Roman non-citizens and "barbarians" with modern USA immigrants, and pin the whole fall of (Western) Rome on trying to incorporate those "migrants".

It's worth remembering that the entirety of Rome's "Fall" historiographical section is usually some 250 years in length, about the same as the entire history of the USA.

And even after the dissolution of the Western Half by the Odoasser coup, Eastern Rome still kept trudging along for almost a thousand years And for most of that time they employed foreign mercenaries and soldiers, either from unincorporated regions of Anatolia, or later on from the region that eventually became the Kievan Rus', who were given privileges. Two notable examples are the Isaurian-born emperor Zeno and the Varangian Guard.

Maybe I'm a bit over-serious when it comes to Rome, but I think it's important to not be fall into anachronism to criticise the current Empire.

This current development could be taken as a proxy of a sign of desperation to get new recruits. It could also be an useful tool to groom loyal "good migrant" future citizens, to create more splits in migrant communities and prevent class consciousness. I would argue it worked out very well for the Roman regime in many parts of their history.

Not sure how foreign media is reporting on this, but this seems like a huge event. One of the biggest non-aligned nations (both in population, size and economy), under their most conciliatory president, is cutting ties with Israel.

Que a reação da mídia burguesa seja mais um lembrete pra todos os lulistas/petistas mais esquecidos ou pra direita que nenhum desses jornais são seus (ou nossos) aliados.

Não sei o que é mais assustador, o quão rápido esses parasitas do hemisfério norte (CNN, BBC, DW) colonizaram nosso ecossistema de notícias, ou o quão indistiguíveis os nossos lambe-botas nacionais (Globo, Record, Folha) são desses invasores.

Se você quer uma experiência, busque "lula Israel" no YouTube e tente achar um resultado de qualquer cidadão brasileiro e não de uma corporação.