I drove through Wyoming once and it was all grass and prairie dust on the side of the road except for a sign that said “Little America 100 miles” and further advertising every 20 miles until one that said “next exit”.

So what is the “Little America” they hyped up? It’s a rest stop with a gift shop and a Sinclair fuel station 🥴

“No, man. I’m Edward Schmitt, but I get told that a lot, so I took up doing Biden impersonations. Wanna see some? Sad what happened to the real Biden though.”

The first choice for me would obviously be to send them to the Hague, but we gotta realise that we can’t always get what we want 100% of the time, so I think quiet retirement is better than staying in power.

This should be an option for all politicians. You can fake your own death, then you get put in to Witness Protection and can retire to a quiet, peaceful life on a ranch in Wyoming. Quit without having to deal with slack from party leaders.

Biden has a clear successor. Trump doesn’t. The assassination of a head of state would draw sympathy worldwide. The state funeral would be huge. Right now, Trump is still just some politician running for office.

With Napoleon specifically, they didn’t want to set a precedent that leaders of defeated countries should be executed.

Then you can get permanent access for 165 USD (one-off payment)

Bring back the Septuagint! It has a cool name.

Unless that dictionary is Wiktionary.

Wiktionary is part of the same project as Wikipedia. It provides dictionary-style definitions for basically all slang terms whereas Urban Dictionary is actually terrible if you want to find the meaning of words because half the definitions are jokes while the other half define slang in terms of other slang.

ATTENTION ALL NINES: FOOD IS TO BE CONSUMED, NOT HOARDED

Where have I heard this one before?

You’re entirely correct, but we didn’t have the Internet, a misinformation super-spreader, nor did we have Russian or Chinese disinformation agents.

I really wish there was a way to kick countries out of the EU.

There are no entirely peaceful mass protests any more. It’s impossible to get a large procession of angry people in this day and age to stay peaceful. As soon as one person acts out, then the police go and squash the protest, which causes chaos and more violence. Then people post videos of the incident claiming that it was a riot to begin with.

The lack of availability of legal channels to obtain media does not generally stop the availability of said media to the average consumer, especially in a country with high tech permeance.

Your definition of “state” is different from what most people consider a state to be.

No, that’s not true. The concept of Westphalian sovereignty was laid down and (somewhat) universally applied after the Peace of Westphalia. But there were plenty of states before that. The doctrine of Westphalian sovereignty amounts to nothing more than a statement that “each state should mind its own business”.

By your definition, most of medieval Europe and imperial China were not states. The Roman Empire and the Roman Republic were not states, nor the Greek city-states, nor the Sumerian ones, nor Ancient Egypt, and many more. Even a cursory look at human history is incompatible with the notion that the concept of a state materialised after the Peace of Westphalia.

I disagree vehemently with the assertion that the state is a modern invention. Humans have organised themselves into states for the vast majority of human history. The earliest examples of writing were state records. In fact, to my knowledge, there are no ancient civilisations who (1) have developed writing and (2) did not organise themselves into states. Ancient Egypt, Sumner and Mesopotamia, Ancient China—all of the earliest known civilisations in recorded history—had states, the basic function of which has remained unchanged throughout history. They had rulers or bodies that created laws, collected taxes, raised armies to maintain their power and fight other states, and enforced their laws on their subjects.

While the Great Law of Peace of the Iroquois Confederacy was certainly known to the writers of the US Constitution, we know for a fact what their inspirations were, without needing to speculate, because they produced a large body of essays defending and explaining their reasoning. These are the Federalist Papers. You may have heard of them. We know that the writers draw inspiration from primarily European sources, such as the English Bill of Rights, the operation of the Roman Republic and of Athenian democracy, and of documents like the Magna Carta.

Do you believe we are at or past that point?

It is not, but I think that discussion about democracy in cultures that don’t organise themselves into states is very informative because those societies basically have to be democratic. A state apparatus that can enforce its will is what allows a state to be non-democratic in the first place. If there is no state, people who don’t like it can just leave.