More likely the former if its getting press. I'd be curious to find out how many Seals we're flinging out into the wilderness and how many we're getting back, but I doubt that's something even the President really knows.
zifnab25
joined 5 years ago
Excited to get the shakey-cam video of HBomberGuy doing a signing at a Con only to have his head spontaneously explode when he accidentally autographs a piece of the Death Note.
Playing 100 hours of Paralogic and then feeling right at home when I see the Slaughterhouse that Siphons Souls at the center of Krakow.
the alternative is more expensive, a military expedition to the steppe with the massive supply requirements was really hard to pull off
Or just don't do that. Build trade relationships and family ties, rather than launching raids across the mountains.
Customs was important to control exactly what left Chinese territory, from controlling weapons to preferentially giving allies resources over their rivals.
That's true. But, again, the wall wasn't what drove traffic quite so much as the roads that were cobbled and supplied and patrolled. Smugglers could cross the hills and mountains just as easily as raiders. But crossing that territory is dangerous and taxes that aren't going to fund this enormous vanity project can be kept at a comfortable range.
the walls were also enough to stop small-scale opportunist raids
The terrain already accomplished this, for the most part. A few key forts at major passes and trade crossings do the rest. The Romans didn't need a giant network of walls to manage Southern Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East. And the Chinese still got invaded and sacked regularly after the walls were built.
FFS, the biggest vulnerability to Chinese hegemony at the end of the day wasn't Steppe Tribes. It was the ports of trade, through which the English injected their opium traffic.
A "genocide" this however not make, no matter how much this is repeated on tiktok and co.
Israel: Kills 1000 people
Reddit: "This is not a genocide"
Israel: Kills 10,000 people
Reddit: "This is still not a genocide"
Israel: Kills 1% of the population and displaces another 85%
Reddit: "Stop saying this is a genocide. You're just on TikTok too much. Just saying it over and over again doesn't make it true. This is classic Big Lie propaganda and you are falling for the same tricks that Hitler used to invade Germany."
Russia: Fires a barrage of missiles across the border to Ukraine
Reddit: "Vladimir Putin is history's greatest monster and we must post 10x harder if we are to secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."
Exactly that. You're channeling his spirit.
It's called the NATO dating trend because it maps to the military strategy.
No it isn't. Nobody is doing this. Its purely fabricated by a newspaper notorious for exaggerating and outright inventing fake made-up bullshit.
These are the same newsies that pushed the "Condom Snorting Challenge" and "The Knock-out Game" along with a string of hoax narratives about burglary and vandalism. Not real in any material sense. Literal Fake News
Anything in the NYPost is just old people agitprop. This shit isn't real. There is no such trend. Its all just made up to get the NYP's central readership stirred up at their nieces and nephews.
Even then, there is some deep seated hostility between California and Texas on multiple levels. Like, they're major internal economic rivals. They have state leaders that are constantly sniping at one another. There's a material cultural divide. About the only thing the two can agree on is how much they hate migrants. And that extends as much to internal migration (Dallas/Houston/Austinites hating all these new big money California techies / San Fransisco and LA hating the blond bumpkins and their hick habits) as to cross border.
New Texas will be lucky to keep its hands on El Paso, much less stretch itself all the way across New Mexico and Arizona into the Baja Peninsula. San Diego sure as fuck doesn't want anything that Texas is selling.
It literally was stupid though, because it was economically ruinous to build and impossible to staff or maintain. Enemy armies (most notably the Manchus of the 1600s) would periodically cross the wall in their raids, particularly through breaches created by local farmers who would scavenge from unmanned sections of the walls.
Yes, the walls around Beijing and a few vital passes were useful. But you didn't need to build across the entire country to benefit from a few defensible choke points.
The Great Wall is probably just the most famous in a thousand year history of ill-conceived physical border security measures. They're bad. They don't work good. Don't build these stupid things.
Going to a Capitalism conference with my favorite book on Capitalism, "Das Kapital" and my second favorite book "Capitalism in the 21st Century" but getting lots of mean looks and boos when I try to get them signed.