A lot of the Ivy grad pmc centrists don't know shit about shit, they just know the style choices, catchphrases, and speaking cadences that will get them clocked as thoughtful and competent by the layperson, while letting them ward off questions from smart people that actually probe their depth of knowledge.
See: Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt
I've actually run in local elections and won a few of them but I decided to quit when I found myself surrounded by either nazis or their liberal enablers. I don't have the firepower or organization to protect myself or my family from those kinds of people sadly.
The choice is simple.
Biden wins and you can have genocide.
Trump wins and you can also have genocide.
Wow, this is incredibly inspiring. Please direct me to the polls right now!
edit: Also, the USA has never been a democracy. Project 2025, more like Project 1492, am I right?
also edit: if I were president, and the SCOTUS just declared that I am an emperor immune to all prosecution, I would simply imprison my political opponents (plus all landlords and business owners and police officers and soldiers, except those vouched for by workers), I would free everyone currently in prison, establish universal health care, education, and housing, forgive all debt, close all military bases, withdraw the US military from around the planet, return all indigenous land and sovereignty to indigenous people, expropriate all millionaires and billionaires and use their stolen money to pay the current value of forty acres and a mule plus interest to all descendants of slaves (and also pay reparations to every country harmed by the USA (so, every country outside the western bloc)), connect the country with a national bullet train network, dismantle all nuclear weapons, reintroduce covid precautions (deporting to europe anyone who even raises an eyebrow in response), nationalize all corporate and social media and use it to relentlessly bombard the populace with Marxist history and amerikkka bad communist propaganda 24/7, and, as my final act, pull down the American flag that's on top of the White House and declare that the USA has been dissolved and no longer exists
I hope you can find this clip you mentioned. Norwich was an early gateway for me as a teenager. It didn't hurt that people are always impressed for some reason when they see you reading about Byzantium. Norwich is a good writer but not the best historian. I also read and enjoyed his histories of Venice and the Normans. Obolensky I've read a little of. The one I was really avidly consuming while writing this trilogy was Anthony Kaldellis, who has a fantastic podcast about everything Byzantium. He also just released a new one-volume history of Byzantium maybe six months ago. I exchanged a few emails with him and learned so much from his research and the people he interviewed. However, I have my criticisms. The guy is not a Marxist, and if any mention of class struggle comes up in his work, he invariably attacks it. I read maybe ten or twenty percent of his newest book (I've read similar portions of his other books, all of which are interesting), and discovered, much to my horror, that he had adopted Ezra Klein's theory of history: namely, that people just sort of attach themselves to identities for some reason (don't ask why), and then proceed to mindlessly fight over these identities for centuries. It's depressing for me to see this kind of reactionary and superficial viewpoint, one pushed by an Iraq War supporter, especially because Kaldellis has specifically complained about how neoliberalism is destroying his entire field (Byzantium doesn't really fit into STEM). You hate neoliberalism, yet you deploy neoliberal methods to explain the rise and fall of your beloved Byzantium. Hmm, interesting.
Thank you, I hope you like it! Yeah, I got into Byzantium thanks to Medieval: Total War when it first came out. It was just this huge thing that no one had ever told me about, and I wondered (ignorant liberal that I was) how it was possible that an entire civilization could just be totally ignored in the American public school curriculum. Another obvious question is: why was/is it ignored? (The short answer I would venture is that Byzantium, like the medieval Muslim world, medieval China, and plenty of other medieval places, complicates the liberal view of the medieval world as a time of backwardness and barbarism (as well as the fascist idea that medieval Europe was racially "pure"), and therefore calls a lot into question about Western civilization's supposed progress.) Unfortunately, asking these sorts of questions and researching Byzantium isn't a guaranteed path toward communism; plenty of reactionary people are obsessed with Byzantium, and so far as I know, Marxist historians haven't really paid it much attention for decades, since they tend to have bigger fish to fry.
I think it also has something to do with the bourgeoisie wanting an escape from bourgeois problems. This is one reason why stories like Game of Thrones or even Dune (space feudalism) are so popular. Capitalist class struggle infuriates the bourgeoisie, since they are so obviously the bad guys, which means that they prefer to escape to simpler times, when the bourgeoisie was the underdog, and the evil, petty, but entertaining feudal ruling class was running things.
I recommend an obscure, fun, bonkers SF novel called The Killing Star, which features accelerating metal slugs to 90% c before flinging them into planets. There's also a chapter that takes place on the Titanic. And TNG makes an appearance toward the end. Supposedly the ships in this novel inspired the interstellar vehicles we see in the Avatar movies. There's also an earlier book in this series which features wooden spaceships piloted by kangaroos (though it's all hard SF, I assure you!).
Feel like I should post a link to the first chapter of my fantasy novel, Byzantine Wars, which defies all or nearly all of these annoying tropes. You can read the whole thing there for free, although that website is kind of not my favorite. I can also just send an epub to those who message me. All I ask is that if you like it, please share it with other people who might be interested. The story is basically Jumanji in Byzantium, plus slave revolt, with a magic system mostly inspired by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
The tropes I countered were:
@spacecorps_writer
@hexbear.net