Calliope

There were literal Class B war criminals hung at Sugamo Prison in 1949 who had better defenses for their actions than Cotton is providing.

"Colonel Kurutaro, why did you order those American PoWs on Bataan shot?"

"They were sitting down by the side of the road after being bayoneted, and they were trying to stand up so they could stay in the fight. They weren't lying down helplessly in the jungle."

At this point Elon Musk is at least as much of a security threat to the EU as Meng Wanzhou was to the US. For that matter, he's arguably as much of a security threat to the *US itself* as Meng Wanzhou was.

This sort of bigotry might have been popular in the post-9/11 era, but it is nothing short of civilizational suicide. From the most dead-eyed nationalistic perspective imaginable: this will destroy the United States.

And should you actually happen to have a soul, it's *also* a moral abomination.

Of all the destructive and ruinous policies aimed at the heart of the US republic, few can compete with "deliberately crashing the country's population and destroying the lives of hardworking taxpayers because it was rad cool at rich Santa Monica high schools in 2002 to hate brown people."

So lots of European societies simply began less ethnically diverse (this is also true in much of East Asia, for what it's worth) and that was further consolidated by the massive ethnic cleansing of the mid-20th century and the descent of the Iron Curtain (again, mirrored in East Asia).

A big chunk of this is that every country in the Western hemisphere has had to grapple with the legacy of indigenous integration and African slavery in some fashion. These are multiracial democracies by demographic default.

But European immigration has historically been from other parts of Europe.

It's broadly true across the Americas, yes. As is immigration as a key policy. There's a reason there are around 2 million Brazilians with Japanese ancestry, and around 1 million Peruvians with Chinese ancestry.

So much of latter Qing history is downstream of the loss in 1894. The Boxer Rebellion was quite explicitly a rejection of the modernization that had demonstrably "failed" at the Treaty of Shimonoseki. That in turn further humiliated the Qing, and set the stage for their demise a decade later.

The general consensus you will typically find in the field is that the Qing had certain structural hurdles that they did their best to overcome, and gave modernization their best effort but it wasn't enough. 1894 really was the hinge of fate for Great Qing, and it happened to swing the wrong way.

It's not, albeit with some caveats. The reforms weren't far-reaching enough and China had the bad luck to be situated right next to Meiji Japan, which also modernized but much faster and more successfully.

The loss of the First Sino-Japanese War fundamentally delegitimized the entire reform process

A future D Secretary of Defense - should one ever come - will need to suspend the clearance of every last person affiliated with a16z, 8VC, Founders, & Sequoia and pull clearances from every portfolio company pending comprehensive drug testing, financial review, & CI screening.

It’s going to hurt.

In fairness, Apple has operated at a greater than 20% margin for decades, and has managed to survive all competitors during that time.

Honestly the real answer is that the right hand has no idea what the left is doing and Rubio is running his own foreign policy, but Hegseth neither realizes this nor is he intelligent enough to articulate it even if he did know.

Yeah your carbine's beloved upgrade is going to have approximately as much impact on a Taiwan contingency as the German V3 giant cannon did on WW2. There's a reason Ukraine is still using Maxim guns.

What actually matters is upgrading all the 90s SAM and ASM and ramping production lines.

Japan and China got so fed up with NIMBYism that eventually local bureaucrats just started hiring local yakuza and triad bosses to "persuade" them to sell.

This is part of why I'm bearish on if there will be much of an ongoing cult of Trump after he's gone. They'll keep invoking him for a while only to bitterly bicker amongst themselves about who gets to claim him, which is incompatible with him continuing to be any kind of unified rallying point.

the Nazis were exactly like this by the way which is one of the reasons the gossip from that period is so unreliable; it was much more behind closed doors but they were always accusing party rivals of being gay, Jewish, secretly into poop, whatever.

Even as late as 1940 when war had already erupted in Europe, Charlie Chaplin was still mercilessly lampooning the Führer ("the Fooey!") as a madcap dummy who ranted that the German people must "make sauerkraut out of the Jews!"

Nobody believed the Holocaust was possible until it was actually done.

This is something a century of media that makes fascists into the ultimate villains has obscured. Hitler was once a joke. Mussolini even more so. It is only because we know how both regimes ended (in bloody horror) they're not still funny.

Consider that in 1933 articles like this were being run:

I also think the BJP and the Sangh Parivar ecosystem is something that there simply isn't an analogue for in the West, the closest thing is in fact the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates in the Middle East

Or the ever-popular "actually, they deserved it." The thing I'll never be able to unsee was someone arguing that Saddam Hussein in 1991 was the victim of imperialist aggression and that his gassing of the Iraqi Kurdish minority was self-defense against Western subversives.

Meanwhile, needless to say, things that Russia did within the last 10 years (like bombing Syria) do not count, since after all they are long-forgotten ancient history that has no bearing on the modern Russian state (and probably never happened anyway).

The converse of this is also pretty common, namely "the US occupied the Philippines in 1899, and you want me to believe that Americans aren't imperialist pigs?"

Everyone involved in that occupation is dead. So are all of their children and most of their grandchildren.

It's the equivalent of someone in 1931 saying that the Mukden Incident had already kicked off a world war and that it would be impossible for things to get worse after Japan withdrew from the League of Nations.

Rich countries usually don't have civil wars, and so there's an impression that conflicts like the Sudanese Civil War are as hideous as they are because they're *Sudanese* rather than because they are *civil wars.*

But if you look at Libya, it becomes all too clear that rich countries do this too.

It's impossible to overstate what vaccination did for humanity.

Smallpox alone killed more people from 1900 to 1978 (~300 million people) than every war, famine, and genocide in recorded history.

Of course, the actual objective here is to de-naturalize all immigrants who even appear non-white and deport them, and legitimize it via a fig leaf of law. But:

a) That is not remotely legal
b) That would be impossible even if ICE were ten times its current size and confronted no opposition

Now consider that Nazi Germany contained around 400,000 Jews in 1935 (0.6% of the population) whereas the US contains around 20 million second generation immigrants (5.8%) and the vast scale of the problem becomes clear. This is far less well-documented but also an order of magnitude larger.

A (surprisingly unfavorable) comparison here would actually be the early Third Reich. Germany actually *did* keep records re: religious affiliation going back to the 18th century.

In spite of that fact, the rollout of the Nuremberg Laws was a trainwreck riddled with exceptions and carveouts.