"The high-water mark of America’s influence over the world has come and gone. All empires are transitory, right? If you rise, you’re inevitably going to stagnate and fall," says American political history author and podcaster @mikeduncan.bsky.social.
Interview: www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult…— Rolling Stone (@rollingstone.com) September 22, 2025 at 9:48 AM
Well, maybe the Empire will last out our time…
Mike Duncan knows how empires fall. He’s covered history’s most defining collapses, upheavals, and regime changes through the Revolutions and History of Rome podcasts — the latter being a 179 episode, 73 hour long behemoth exploring the trajectory of the Roman Republic and Empire from conception to collapse. He knows what it looks like when things go wrong.
In 2025, it’s clear to Duncan that the American empire, which has dominated global geopolitics for the last century, has passed its zenith. Under the Trump administration, the devolution of the American ideal has accelerated in some ways that could only exist in the unique context of the current moment, and others that mirror the predictable, centuries old ouroboros of political power and decline…
So how does the slow unraveling of the American experiment compare to the great declines and revolutionary periods of global history? No one is better positioned to read the room than Duncan.
Let’s start with Rome. We can’t talk about all 179 episodes but let’s do a quick recap of the fall of the Republic and then the Empire.
The fall of the Republic feels more like what we’re dealing with right now. It really has to do with the Roman Republic, emerging, for the first time, as the dominant power in the Mediterranean. And that kicks off like the cycle of economic inequality starts to grow between the very richest Romans and the poorest Romans, and that leads to all kinds of social conflict.There is a civil war on the peninsula of Italy, between Italians who just want citizenship in order to participate in the society they’re a part of, and the Roman old guard who are trying to resist it. As these conflicts are starting to get heated up, the politicians themselves lose track of any kind of propriety or bounds about what can and should be done in order to pursue your own political agenda.
If you lose a vote or you lose an election, how do you respond? There used to be a very stable consensus that you basically accepted defeat. In the Roman world, the political leaders and the military leaders are identical. So now you have political leaders who are in charge of entire armies, and they are now going to start throwing those armies at each other, and that’s really what leads to the breakdown of the Roman Republic.
In the 21st century, in America, we have huge disparities of wealth and income inequality, and we have fights over citizenship and who gets to participate in our polity right now, and how that’s sort of tearing us apart. And we have politicians who were like, “Oh, did I lose an election? Let’s stage an armed insurrection inside the Capitol on January the sixth.”
And after the Republic collapses, the empire continues to exist for another 500 years.
When the Republic became the Empire, it’s not like Augustus said, “I am the Emperor now, and this is an empire.” There were still elections every year, there was still jockeying among the senatorial classes to get these offices and win these elections. The entire apparatus of the Republic was maintained in place as a facade. It was just that all power was ultimately absorbed into this person…
If I’m trying to bring this back to the U.S., there was a moment right in the aftermath of Jan. 6 where it almost felt like the Republican elite were willing to break with Trump, and he managed to exert authority and pull everyone back in. How does party capture — the subservience of entire systems — factor into this?
It’s just a very prototypical cult of personality. Part political party, part extension of one person that we’ve seen all throughout history.It will be very interesting to see what happens when Trump finally dies, and what will happen to this movement, how much of it is truly beholden to his unique celebrity status, which he has over any of the other members of this movement. If you remove that, what happens to the movement? Does somebody else manage to come in and replace him and be the new focal point of the cult of personality? I don’t know that any of them have the juice for that…
Was the fall of Rome this dumb? This is very serious stuff, but sometimes it feels deeply stupid.
I don’t think it was this dumb. I’ve really given thought to this. First, dumb to who? Because most people back in Roman times were illiterate and totally disconnected from the news of the World. Ninety percent of the people were just peasants, illiterate peasants, living in their little villages and so they didn’t know what was going on…Maybe it was that stupid, but nobody would have known. Our curse these days is that because of mass literacy, mass education, mass communications, we are subjected to every stupid thing that these people do, and we’re all highly aware of all the stupid things that they are doing to dismantle the perfectly, basically, perfectly functional society that we had going on.
The big point that I wanted to make, though, is that there’s a certain type of person in history, they’re called the court favorite. You’ve got a king or a queen who’s taken a shine to some stable boy, or an actor, or some woman that they’ve decided to sleep with, or some man. And because they’re the court favorite they’re suddenly made the Secretary of State, and all the other nobles in the kingdom are like, “Why is that guy a secretary? Why is he going to negotiate with the Hapsburgs?” And the guy’s an idiot and he’s stupid, and he usually winds up either thrown out, or assassinated, or beheaded because they’re way over their heads.
What our government currently presupposes is, “What if everyone running the government was a court favorite?” At the level of court favorite: ability, intelligence, awareness of what’s going on, like, actually good ideas, they have none of these things. Our entire government is run by the court favorites. Instead of just having it be like one person who’s messing things up, it’s literally everybody…
Is the U.S. past the point of no return?
I don’t know. I will tell you I am congenitally an optimist. I have a Pascal’s Wager thing going with hope and optimism, that it’s probably better to act as if hope can possibly exist than to just say there is none and we’re doomed. So my official answer is, we’re not doomed, and there are ways out of this, because there’s ways out of anything. We’re ingenious little creative monkeys, we can get out of scrapes. We’ve gotten out of scrapes before. Maybe we can get out of this scrape.I would hate for the takeaway to be that things are hopeless and that we’re just doomed. That just because things look like they’re very bad, and they will end badly, that means that they’re going to end badly. That’s not actually the case and there are always ways to fight and turn things back.
Belafon
There are groups in this country that have suffered through worse than right now (right now, I’m not saying things won’t get worse) and kept pushing for things to get better. I’m not going to give up either.
Gin & Tonic
Yes.
Mike E
@Gin & Tonic: to wit: politico.com/news/2025/09/26/north-carolina-elections-board-republican-control-00583096
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
I feel like this analysis fails to take into account that much of the rest of the world is facing the same political and societal issues the US is.
There’s a commenter here who lives in China and has they have observed that this is a global phenomenon, that people are dissatisfied with the status quo, where ever they are
ETA: Found it, it’s by YY_Sima Qian:
Ishiyama
You want a crystal ball?
“Actual evidence I have none, but my aunt’s charwoman’s sister’s son heard a policemen on his beat say to a housemaid in Downing Street, that he has a brother, who has a friend, who knows when the War is going to end.”
schrodingers_cat
Why does everything have to be compared to Rome? Failure of imagination? Too much Eurocentrism?
Betty Cracker
I’m somewhat familiar with Duncan’s podcasts via my husband, so thanks for flagging this! I have wondered what Duncan would say to those very questions!
FWIW, I don’t think the U.S. will recover the cultural power and the global influence it wielded (for good and ill) in the second half of the 20th century, at least not in our lifetimes, and there will be distinct downsides to that for all of us. But that’s not to say we’re dooooomed.
If we can defeat oligarchy and fascism (which will eventually require addressing the root causes), there’s no reason we can’t make the U.S. a pleasant, productive country that isn’t a menace to its own citizens and neighbors.
Kirklin
My opinion is that it’ll be different from Rome because of all the interested parties who know what’s happening and have the power – and communications to support the power – to say no.
It won’t be fun going through it, and I don’t think we’ll ever go back to the norms of the early 2000’s much less earlier. But I don’t think they have the numbers provided those saying “no” don’t give up.
iKropoclast
@schrodingers_cat: Well, in this instance, the subject of the interview is an expert on Rome.
Deputinize America
“Don’t you dare lecture me about the Supreme Court! My vote is MINE, and I expect it to be earned!”
Ishiyama
@iKropoclast: I think that Thucydides wrote the definitive story on the fall of empires.
iKropoclast
@Ishiyama: Great. Is Thucydides available for an interview?
rikyrah
the answer to the question is YES YES YES YES YES
WE are indeed watching the fall of the American Empire
Omnes Omnibus
What exactly constitutes the fall of an empire? We are living through these events. We really can’t judge their historical significance. Is this a stumble? Does it continue? Do the people who could do something about it say “whatever” or “we’re doomed” or even “we’ll be fine once Trump is gone”?
Belafon
@Deputinize America: And if you don’t save me from my vote, I won’t vote for you.
iKropoclast
@Deputinize America: I demand your vote but don’t dare ask me to consider your opinion.
Seems more apt.
Deputinize America
@Belafon:
“Fight harder, goddamn you! Democrats are worthless – if you can’t make it all better immediately, I won’t vote for you in the future, either! Now give me my binkie!”
Harrison Wesley
@schrodingers_cat: It’s the way history is taught in Euroland. Doesn’t mean it’s right.
laura
I worry about the silicon valley (and other locales) visigoths and their plans for a panopticonical, bitcoin fueled broligarchal utopia.
Some days it’s hard to not wake up and immediately want to cut a bitch or two.
hrprogressive
All part of the broader global dissolution of humanity, since all countries have given up on mitigating the climate collapse in a meaningful way, and if humanity still exists in it’s current form in 75 years, I’d be shocked, were I to witness it.
Another Scott
@Omnes Omnibus: +1
Didn’t it take a few hundred years for Rome to “fall”? And didn’t it not fall in the East but rather last another 1000 years or so?
[edit:] All that said, history does rhyme and it’s important to learn from it.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Paul in KY
@Omnes Omnibus: Chou En Lai said 250 years was too short a time period to evaluate the American Revolution.
ColoradoGuy
One thing is certain: all the foolish talk about American Exceptionalism is gone forever, unless you’re talking about the fever swamps of the Claremont Institute (no relation to the Claremont Colleges) or similar propaganda factories.
The rest of the world has seen the Ku Klux Klan take over the Federal Government, with the willing collusion of the mass media and a significant proportion of the oligarch class. That alone is a searing indictment of the dysfunction in US society. President Jefferson Davis is naturally a friend of oligarchs and dictators all over the world, since he had no interest in democracy or popular representation.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Average city of Rome resident, June 455 AD: “The Vandals will be the death of us all.”
Many US residents circa now: “Techbros will be the death of us all.”
Good piece on each time Rome (the city) was sacked:
militaryhistorynow.com/2024/12/17/the-sackings-of-rome-eight-times-the-eternal-city-was-captured-and…
That’s very different than looking at the proverbial “decline and fall” of the *western* Roman empire. The eastern (Byzantine) Empire survived, in many instances in a technical/rump sense (in terms of territory) until the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453 although that long-standing decline started with the sack in 1204 during the 4th Crusades.
The Justinian Plague (541 AD) had long lasting effects as well in terms of killing off people in the western empire when it had already effectively splintered while in the East, there’s been lots of academic ink spilled on how it so weakened the Byzantine Empire that it couldn’t effectively counter the Muslim campaigns less than 100 years later.
schrodingers_cat
@Harrison Wesley: It is just one POV, not the objective truth.
Jeffro
I’m good with fighting and turning things back.
But I’m even better with fighting, and…dare I even say it…building back better.
Or just “building anew”, if you will. Because it is sorely needed.
Deputinize America
@iKropoclast:
The BernieBots, Steiniacs (circa 2016) and the “Genocide Joe”/Killer Kamala” shouters (circa 2024) were all warned about the consequences of constantly trashing the nominees, but they refused to fucking listen.
This isn’t a parliamentary system where multiple parties can form a government along a list of leftish priorities, and they refused to FUCKING LISTEN.
The harm is, at this point, immeasurable. Tens of thousands of dedicated, smart public servants who understood and were good at their jobs are now jobless, and hundreds of thousands of other employees are getting ready to get canned. Life has gotten far more expensive, public health efforts are going to be a joke, corporations will bleed us dry, free expression is to be put down by the military, and women have no say about their reproductive rights in large swaths of the country, and that little category is going to get even worse.
I’m personally only a little to the right of Trotsky, and see little hope for any solution that doesn’t involve massive violence thanks to those dedicated and very misguided voices of discontent at critical points in time.
Deputinize America
@Another Scott:
I find it interesting that the roots of Rome’s civilization were essentially Greek – the Eastern Empire represented power returning home…..
iKropoclast
@Deputinize America: Maybe Democrats should have listened over several decades of not wanting genocide or police abusing American communities or dumb interventions abroad that aren’t any of our business. I could go on.
Maybe there is no party for people with those priorities, but then why should Democrats just assume they get those votes? Because D politicians leave just enough rhetorical space for reformists to wish cast their agenda onto the D party? And because barbarians are at the gates (barbarians whom the Ds assure us are worth negotiating with in good faith and even have some reasonable ideas)?
I’ve been falling for that trick for years. Time for a bit more discernment.
bbleh
Concur with several comments upthread — not sure what exactly is “doomed,” but there’s no question we’re past our peak — but one observation based on the OP: there’s a difference between there being *A* court favorite who’s put in a position of power for which s/he’s utterly unqualified and a whole COURT of unqualified people. In the former case, there are still competent people running a bunch of things. I think this was more the case in Trump I: you had several idiots, but you also had, eg, competent Chiefs of Staff, some competent Cabinet secretaries, etc. Now we don’t really have any, unless you count maybe the string-pullers like Miller and Vought, but even they are more competent at managing Trump and executing a few pet agenda items than keeping the whole enterprise running. IOW, under the current model, the enterprise is almost bound to fail, critically &/or in several places at once, and there ain’t gonna be no way not to notice, even for Normies whose noses are buried in their phones. (They even noticed the cancellation of a late-night comedian.) That, I think bodes well for the ultimate collapse of broad Trumpist control (though certainly not of MAGA-ism, which after all is just the current and inevitable extension of contemporary Republicanism).
Geminid
@schrodingers_cat: Eurocentrism, I think. Or more like Western European-centrism. The Western Roman Empire was becoming a backwater by the time Rome finally fell for good. The Eastern Empire based in Constantinople was the center of gravity in the Mediterranean world by then, and it continued to be for most of the next thousand years.
But for the English, Rome was the center of Classical civilization, and Americans largely get their history from them. At least, I think I did.
Princess
What the US has going for it that makes it unique in the developed world is a) its continued population growth and c) its intellectual (read: university system) and cultural capital, which favour and support innovation and growth. But they’re deporting all the people who have babies, cutting immigration to nothing, destroying the universities, and muzzling the “elites” who create culture. In my view, the empire is not ending; it has ended. You’re not going back to the days of USAID and global leadership, the land of opportunity where everyone wants to live. What will become of America in its place? I dunno. Could be a hard landing; could be a soft landing. Best case would be something like Japan but the US is so different from Japan.
Deputinize America
@iKropoclast:
Clap harder. That’ll make the fairies appear, I’m sure.
Your side has blown it on four critical elections – 2010, 2014, 2016 and 2024 – deliberately. Incremental positive change was in fact happening, and your chumps got bought out by Putin/GOP/NRA money.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Princess:
And how do you know that?
Harrison Wesley
@schrodingers_cat: Exactly. Perhaps education that looked a bit further afield than the Western Hemisphere might produce a better polity. Unfortunately I’m a natural pessimist so I think Planet Earth and its inhabitants are hosed.
artem1s
I think the larger problem with historians is they tend to write about ‘falls of empires’ as if they have a distinct date of birth and date of death. Early “Roman” is barely indistinguishable from the Etruscan empire. Rome’s government actually grew out of the Greek city states. The Ptolmaic rulers in Greece were descendants of Eqyptian kings and queens. Augustus went to war with the remenants of the Egyptian empire. They all overlapped and they all influenced one another. The Holy Roman Empire was seated in Constanitinople and then Augsberg after Rome fell. Hitler’s Reich was the third German Reich as in Holy Roman Empire – First Reich, Weimer Republic – Second Reich. So did the Roman Empire end when the Visogoth’s sacked Rome or did it end when Hitler put a bullet in his brain?
The only reason the US can say we’re 250 years old next year (if we can keep it that long) is becasue we have a birth date on a document that we can point to. The only times we came close to having a date we could use on a death certificate would be April 12, 1961 and January 6, 2020. Even when Nixon resigned there were no troops or tanks on the WH lawn.
The other distinction that make comparing us to Rome anachronistic is that if the incompetent boob currently in the WH gets offended it won’t take the US Airforce three months to fly to an offending vassal state and drop a nuke on their ass. We won’t know until it’s too late if there is anyone left in this clown show that would stop Orangemandius or JV or the Muskrats from trying a ‘limited’ nuclear war.
So if we do survive this Nero/Caligula mashup of an administration it still likely there isn’t going to be death certificate with a date of death we can point to. It’s more likely going to be a slow decline and economic and cultural collapse into becoming more and more obsolete on the world stage as a country that no longer produces anything of value, like education and research, not sportball players or influencers. Our empire will end eventually, not with a bang but a whimper.
Princess
@laura: Hey, I study the Visigoths and I’ll take the Visigoths any day over the tech broligarchy.
iKropoclast
I voted a full D slate every one of those years.
Therefore, you’re right, my side did blow it.
Baud
I’ll channel the good Professor and say it’s more of a murder/suicide than a fall.
Baud
@Princess:
I recently learned that many Spanish surnames are derived from the Visigoths.
rikyrah
@ColoradoGuy:
THIS.
Talk about DEI, but, eliminating college requirement for FBI agents, so that they can hire mediocre, unqualified YT men.
Getting rid of the FOREIGN SERVICE EXAM, because too many mediocre YT men couldn’t score high enough to pass.
The so-called ‘ Masters of the Universe’, who have bent over and given in – without a phucking fight – to this monstrosity of an Administration.
Princess
@ColoradoGuy: A lot of America’s might and influence post WW2 has been because of the global view that its much-vaunted checks and balances and inherent conservatism in the old sense means that its foreign policy will be consistent, its currency will be reliable and its economy fundamentally stable. That was its exceptionalism.
rikyrah
Palestinian Professor After an Israeli Student’s Discrimination Complaint
Dr. Eric Cheyfitz, who has taught at Cornell for more than two decades, claims the university is attempting to silence him as part of a broader crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism.
Gabe Levin
Dr. Eric Cheyfitz, a professor of American studies at Cornell, said the university has canceled the two classes he was set to teach this semester. It comes as the provost is recommending that he be suspended for two semesters without pay on the grounds that he violated federal antidiscrimination laws, The Nation has learned.
Cheyfitz’s lawyer, Luna Droubi, said it’s the latest turn in months of investigations—carried out by different university bodies—into whether Cheyfitz, 84, told a graduate student last semester to drop a class he was teaching about Gaza because the student is Israeli. Cheyfitz, who is Jewish and whose daughter and grandchildren live in Israel, denies the allegation.
The class, titled “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance,” had come under fire from politicians, activists, alumni, and even Cornell’s president, who criticized the course description as “radical” and “biased” in a leaked e-mail last year.
Cheyfitz—who is tenured and holds an endowed chair as the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters—is an outspoken advocate for Palestinians and has taught at Cornell for more than two decades. Cheyfitz claimed that the university is attempting to silence him as part of a broader crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism. “It’s pretty clear at this point that this is an attempt to get rid of me and the kind of material I teach, particularly material I taught on Gaza,” Cheyfitz said.
thenation.com/article/society/cornell-pro-palestinian-professor-classes-cancelled/
SpaceUnit
At least I have an HOA that will limit the raping and pillaging to reasonable hours.
Trivia Man
@artem1s: April 12? Yuri Gagarin?
sab
@SpaceUnit: First positive thing I have ever heard from anyone under an HOA.
iKropoclast
@rikyrah: Much more typical of the assault on academic freedom than others may lead you to believe.
Princess
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): You’re not going back. It’s gone. Now, you could become, in some different and new configuration, a place that holds that role. You still have a large population and lots of resources. But it will be something new and it will have to be built. The post war order and the US’s place in it, it the way it wielded the power it had before, is gone. It’s gone like the Ottoman and Austrian-Hungarian and German Empires were gone after WWI.
Deputinize America
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Rome was a slow collapse. In Western Europe, the assimilating invaders kept a great deal of the form of local governance intact, and in a number of pockets, the populace remained Roman in culture and practices.
Betty Cracker
@Deputinize America: Heard, and I share your exasperation and disgust with people who couldn’t be bothered to vote for the one candidate in either of those elections who could prevent the horrors currently unfolding daily.
That said, the frequently idiot electorate is all we have to work with, and they aren’t likely to become smarter or more reasonable, so we have to figure out how to corral a larger share of eligible voters who aren’t actively pro-fascist.
Addressing sclerotic elements in our politics that don’t serve us well and pushing for reforms that more directly connect votes to outcomes might help restore faith in democracy. Or not. Worth a shot maybe.
Peke Daddy
@artem1s: I believe you mean April 12, 1861. The first man in orbit, while important, is not empire ending.
dm
Rather than Rome, I think the decline of the British Empire in the first half of the Twentieth Century might be a better comparison. Though the Trumpish cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face seems unique.
iKropoclast
It is. And I wouldn’t even worry. I’d much rather see the US find a future as a good relatively coequal neighbor than King of the World.
iKropoclast
Brexit has entered the chat…
Deputinize America
@rikyrah:
For me, a significant part of this story is why an 84 year old infests a professorship – it is how scholarship ossifies.
Stand the fuck down. We need a little age discrimination.
Professor Bigfoot
Late to the thread but all of this. Every word of this.
iKropoclast
Gross.
And we need more educators. We should see to their training and employment and maybe not be so worried about age.
Belafon
@iKropoclast: I won’t miss that. I will miss us being democratic equals with other democratic countries.
Professor Bigfoot
@Omnes Omnibus: Begs the question: does the US constitute an empire in the classical sense?
sab
@Geminid: Eurocentrism: I am very white, british ancestry etc etc.
I look at us as like that Japanese poodle that won Westminster Kennel Show a few years back.
A cute dog, but …. a small poodle. Difficult hair to groom. White: white dogs genetically tend towards deafness. Inbred? Professional show dog.
As a white person in North America i saw that show and thought why is this dog so special? Only thing I could come up with is connections.
Baud
Two things
YMMV
Betty
Pritzker is holding a press conference alarmed by finding ICE has asked for 100 military troops to defend them from protesters. As usual, he is making a great speech, detailing ICE misbehavior and restating the need to hold strong. Record everything, he advised.
trollhattan
@SpaceUnit:
“I was saved from roving bandits due to the 15-minute limit on open garage doors. Thanks, HOA!”
sab
@Professor Bigfoot: This hasn’t been some military fall of empire. Just extremely stupid voting. Same result, different explanation.
iKropoclast
@Betty: We need protection to do within our own country what the Geneva conventions wouldn’t allow abroad…
SpaceUnit
@trollhattan:
Federal, state, county, and municipal governments may fall but the HOA’s ain’t going anywhere.
Belafon
@SpaceUnit: I believe the first part of Parable of the Sower addressed the problems with that.
Melancholy Jaques
This might be off-topic, if it is I ‘pologize, but I think it’s something.
Ariana Grande reposted an Instagram post originally posted by podcast host Matt Bernstein, who I never heard of, but Ariana Grande has 374 million followers.
The post reads:
I love it and would like more of this from all quarters. MAGAs will never change, but normies voted for that asshole and they need to be confronted with the error of their ways or they will never change.
Melancholy Jaques
@Deputinize America:
You left out the “Al Gore is not the environmentalist he makes himself out to be” Naderites who got this whole thing rolling in 2000.
Soprano2
@iKropoclast: That’s bullshit, and you know it. I’m not one to hold grudges (truly I’m not), but I’ll never forget how Bernie’s people booed Hillary Clinton at the Democratic Convention in 2016. I don’t blame Bernie for that – he told his supporters to vote for her, but some of them were too “pure” to listen to him. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face…..that’s part of how we got here, people who were too pure to vote for the best of two options.
Ishiyama
This is going to be a shock to Paul Campos at LGM:
lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/04/the-ariana-grande-theory-of-politics
sab
I think we are in a political blip, like the McCarthy era. When all the normies focus, as they sometimes do, they will go Yike! This ain’t normal!
iKropoclast
@Soprano2: Clamoring for attention is pretty typical of people who don’t perceive they’re being heard, isn’t it?
Baud
@Ishiyama:
Heh.
Baud
Via Reddit
Deputinize America
@iKropoclast:
Septuagenarians are way overrepresented in tenured positions in academia, particularly white male ones. It’s a mighty steep slope for younger scholars to climb, particularly when these dudes are infesting chairs for 50 years.
Marc
The Masters of the Universe knew exactly what they were buying with this Administration, they are getting what they wanted.
Deputinize America
@Melancholy Jaques:
“Algore is fat and owns a big house.”
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Princess:
Like, iKropoclast, I don’t want to necessarily be the World’s Policeman anymore. I’d rather the US be a nation that works collaboratively through multilateral global institutions, uses soft power/diplomacy, etc, more than military force.
I just don’t see why we couldn’t have something like USAID again that could be a positive influence.
I also get a sense from your comment, and maybe I’m wrong, an assumption that the world is still like it was in 2005, and the rest of the world is sane, but not the US; that’s just simply not true. Far-right politics have risen practically everywhere. Trump and MAGA are simply the American expression of a global phenomenon that’s happening right now. Seemingly everywhere, what is perceived as the “Establishment” has lost support and credibility, as well as it’s ability to govern, as YY_Sima Qian observed in a comment I quoted at #4
The same forces and pressures, income inequality, polarization, etc, that are afflicting the US are also degrading and damaging other democracies as well
JustRuss
That, and the fact that most of the industrialized world got pulverized in WW2, making the US the only man standing. Once the rest of the world got put back together the US-centric world order was firmly in place, it worked fairly well, and inertia did its thing. But you can only coast for so long, and with the current regime actively tearing down international standards and norms…here we are.
Matt McIrvin
@artem1s: The Ottoman Empire claimed succession from the Eastern Roman Empire, so going by that, Rome finally fell in the 1920s to Kemal Ataturk.
trollhattan
@SpaceUnit:
As it is written and shall be: An Army of Karens shall lead them to the promised land. And also any paint color so long as it’s Tuscan Putty or Desert Sand.
Baud
I wonder if regulators will approve the deal.
CaseyL
Deputinize America: Don’t forget the Ralph Nadirites in 2000. They started us on this merry path.
The salient point I keep coming back to is that the US electorate cannot be trusted to make sane decisions. Quite a few global leaders asked Biden what would happen if Trump took power again, and all Biden would say is “He won’t.”
Well, he did.
We The People do not have an agreed-upon code of values, we do not have a shared reality, we do not know how to prioritize anything, our critical thinking and decision making abilities suck… I’m fairly sure this is true of any large political entity (cf the UK), but we have built a national culture and economy that rewards the dumbest, most ignorant, most corrupt, most sadistic and sociopathic people to ever sponsor a political campaign.
CaseyL
OMG, sorry for the double posts. BJ stopped responding to me and I kept trying… not sure what was going on
ETA: And it should be Naderites. Trying to correct that is what put me in a feedback loop of some kind.
iKropoclast
@Deputinize America: The man is Jewish and it says he had his position over twenty years. Not that long considering his age, maybe he got a late start.
The real question is “can he do the job?” Controversy aside, if he can, he should be allowed to keep it. It’s not like there’s any cap on the number of professors we hire, especially if the mission of the institution is education rather than simple profit.
Him keeping his job doesn’t have to mean less opportunity for someone else. That is a choice.
Marc
@Baud: Why not approve it? The right people are buying. Just don’t be surprised when anti-DEI and anti-non-white-immigrant ads start showing up in Madden and The Sims.
sab
OT I woke up in the middle of the night a few nights ago, staggered to the bathroom and crashed into a doorframe and then the floor.
My Mom (and her mom) had a hereditory ataxia that kicked in at about my age.
I have a very big bruise on me arm (major artery was there) and an obviousp but less dangerous bruise on my face where the glasses hit the wall.
Everyone worries about dementia in old age. What about collapsing coordination? Not just being out of shape, but basic coordination that used to work but no longer does?
Spouses condemn, but what if it is not weak character but just biology?
SpaceUnit
@trollhattan:
And semi-gloss dammit.
Deputinize America
LOL
bsky.app/profile/ad1nf1n1tum.bsky.social/post/3lzybregdbk2m
iKropoclast
I hope it won’t affect EA’s industry leader status in making increasingly boring games with increasingly good graphics at increasingly high prices.
The indie space is where 90 percent of good gaming is developed these days, by my estimation.
Harrison Wesley
@CaseyL: So basically what we need is a benevolent dictatorship. Which we sure as the shit on your shirttail don’t have now .
iKropoclast
We certainly can. But we’ll have to rebuild it. Not just the institution, we’ll have to rebuild an understanding in the electorate that investment and cooperation abroad benefit us, immensely. It’s worth far more than we spend on it and we never spent enough, actually.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Deputinize America:
Wtf? Why did they chase after that guy? All it looked like he did was stop to pick something off the ground and the ICE dipshits go apeshit.
Also: these supposedly physically fit LEOs couldn’t keep up with him even when he was still on foot and not on the bike lol
sab
@sab: I was trying to do minor yardwork today, and basic minor balancing was a challenge. Trying to reach for a beam beliwow while on a tiny overhang was a stretch.
My eleven year old granddaughter could have done this easily but I couldn’t.
JaySinWa
Apparently we are distracting the media to the detriment of science reporting. Stop it. Stop it right now. /s
bsky.app/profile/ironspike.bsky.social/post/3lzytoxha422m
CaseyL
@Harrison Wesley: It’s a real conundrum. You know what Winston Churchill said about democracy as a governing model, right? The worst one, except for all the others?
I keep going back and forth myself over whether “democracy” is suited to polities above a certain size.
Maybe have a pure democracy on a local and state level, then a more representative/republican form for the national level? But that was pretty much what the US was, until the 17th Amendment – and the 17th Amendment was introduced and ratified for a reason.
Increasingly, I think the liberal ascendancy of the latter half of the 20th Century was the anomaly, and what we have now is the norm.
Until Teddy Roosevelt decided to “bust the trusts,” the US was an oligarchy.
Until the US experienced four world-shattering collective traumas within a 30-year period – WWI, the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, and WWII – there just wasn’t enough of a national consensus to support more egalitarian policies on the federal level.
I hate to think something similar will be needed before we reach that kind of national consensus again, but what other era of US history compares to that period?
Eyeroller
@iKropoclast: Tenured positions are extremely limited and highly competitive, especially at a place like Cornell. They are not going to hire more professors into this person’s department without a surge in majors. They would generally replace him if he retires. So yes, he has been keeping a younger person out of the job for about a decade now. (Tenured faculty typically retire in their early 70s.)
He could very likely take emeritus status and teach courses on an adjunct basis, but if he’s still holding up a chaired position, he obviously doesn’t want to do that.
The attacks on him do sound chilling, however. His age is irrelevant to that issue.
Baud
@JaySinWa:
It’s my moral obligation to nominate that.
Old School
Baud
@Old School:
More bribes.
CaseyL
@Old School:
That pisses me off a LOT.
YouTube is the one social media outlet that I honestly don’t think I could give up.
Hoodie
It’s impossible to know if we’re a declining empire considering how difficult that is to define and how long such a process tends to take. For example, the British Empire arguably started declining after American independence but was quite robust for a considerable time thereafter. The more relevant question to me is whether we’re heading towards an insoluble sectarianism, along the lines seen in places like Lebanon, the Balkans, etc. I don’t think we’re heading there but a good chunk of the self-identified white electorate seems to be hellbent on making that the case. What they don’t seem to understand is that they’re not a majority, so gaining power for them by necessity would involve large-scale force and/or cheating. The one mitigating factor is a lot of that demographic is aging out. There are sectarian elements in some younger cohorts but they seem to be a minority. That doesn’t mean that we won’t go through a painful transition as all that plays out.
Deputinize America
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Someone on Bluesky said that all he did was say “Fuck Trump”. Of course, SCOTUS has given these clowns a pass on anything, and their Personal Lord ‘n Savior Donald Trump has a pardon pen ready to scribble, so of course they were going to plant a beatdown on anybody darker than a paper bag.
JaySinWa
More complete video indicates some verbal interaction here
bsky.app/profile/davidjbier.bsky.social/post/3lzyjgaagbk2f
Eyeroller
@iKropoclast: He would have been hired from another university into the chaired position as a senior hire (that term refers to status, not age specifically). If he was in his mid 60s at that point it would be a little late in his career, but not all that unusual. Usually a faculty member is brought in from the outside for such a position to increase the prestige of the department and/or build up an area in which the department is lacking.
Endowed chairs are the absolute top of the heap for faculty. Nobody will get one from a “late start.”
And yes, I do know a lot about faculty hiring.
Edit: there absolutely are caps on faculty hiring. Departments are generally only able to expand if their number of majors increases. Otherwise they stay fixed at best, or shrink by attrition. Budgets don’t keep expanding.
It’s actually very difficult to get a tenure-stream faculty position in most areas of the world, particularly at the higher-ranked universities.
iKropoclast
This, very much so. And I find ageism particularly triggering lately.
Baud
@CaseyL:
Don’t worry. None of the other bribe payers are facing blowback.
satby
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I would bet folding money that most of them weren’t actually LEOs but recent ICE hires from the pool of J6 pardonees, CBP desk jockeys, and Proud Boy feeder groups.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@iKropoclast:
Definitely. It will take time, but I think it can be done
Melancholy Jaques
@sab:
The McCarthy Era ended in 1954, but “soft on communism” continued to be an effective campaign charge for 30 more years, at least.
iKropoclast
Baud
Via Reddit
Me
@Old School: Is Google still looking to get rid of the antitrust suit that they already lost?
NotMax
@Baud
It’s a smaller world after all.
;)
Baud
@Me:
I haven’t seen the Trump fee schedule, but this bribe seems too small to accomplish that.
Geminid
@sab: Is there someone giving Tai Chi lessons near you? That would be a good way to improve and maintain balance. It’s something you could practice at home, once you got started.
rikyrah
@Betty:
They need to be defended against protesters…what He-Men.
The local media has been very good, pointing out all the times they have abused regular citizens and the media at that facility in Broadview.
Matt McIrvin
@CaseyL: If the US electorate had been able to directly elect the President, we wouldn’t have elected Bush in 2000 or Trump in 2016. In both cases, the brain rot that led to their getting majority support came later as a result of the fait accompli, and the voters did come to regret it. I think that in balance we’d still be better off with more democracy than less.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Deputinize America:
@JaySinWa:
Thanks.
Apparently, there’s a longer video (warning it’s a YT video by the New York Post), where the cyclist taunts the ICE guys, claiming he’s not a US citizen. The ICE guys appear to laugh it off, but the cyclist drops his phone, and then the ICE chodes take that as a signal to chase him.
He was probably just trolling them
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@satby:
I think that’s a sound bet
Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
It produced a funny video, but now I hope that he cyclists was just some Instagram influencer looking to create content for clicks.
Oh well.
NotMax
@sab
Community senior center near Mom’s place offers exercise classes to improve balance. Maybe one near you does as well.
iKropoclast
@Baud: Note to self, become a proficient cyclist before harassing ICE..
That was a comedy gold, until/unless you find out he’s in detention.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
While you’re not wrong, you always have to keep in mind that a different election method would result in different campaign strategies.
JML
@Eyeroller: faculty never being willing to retire is a complicated issue for a lot of campuses. While some long-time faculty stay engaged in their discipline and evolve with their students…others don’t. You can end up with faculty that are in their 70’s and 80’s who become the professor that advisors tell students to stay away from.
You don’t want to push out the ones who still love their students and are good teachers & researchers, and administrators will abuse the eff out of changes to the tenure rules and LIFO policies…so what do you do?
I’ve literally worked with faculty who thought it was their personal job to weed out any student from the university that didn’t meet their personal standard of what a student should know/do. Who kept teaching after 70 and spent their last 10 years complaining and opposing any change anyone wanted to make to “their” university.
And I’ve worked with the ones on the other side of the ledger, who had 50 years of teaching and people begged them to stay because they were still the best in the department, showed up for every commencement, and had a horde of students all trying to introduce them to their parents at the same time, etc.
High Ed has no ability to sort the wheat from the chaff at any age, really.
Deputinize America
@Old School:
The tech assholes were never our friends, and the nerds in Revenge of the Nerds were villains.
Karen Gail
I think the reason we tend to look at the Roman Empire’s fall is because we see that it has ended; while what has happened with the British Empire might be a better example it is still an ongoing process. The monarchy has managed to keep it clutches on power simply by how much power they amassed and from the level of their wealth. There is also the fact that the royal family has a whole brings in money, tourist money; there is a debate on just how much money George, Caroline and Louis bring in each year.
Personally, I agree with one history professor that I heard lecture that the US has been failing since the beginning of the “Grand Experiment” you can have a successful country when built on slavery and refusal to treat freed slaves as people. To this day black parents have to give their children “the talk” about how dangerous the color of their skin can make their lives. The professor also commented that half the white population is considered lessor because of failure to be born with “second head.”
We can see just where the military is headed with the focus on white males to the exclusions of well qualified nonwhite and non-male.
We are watching this country self-destruct at the same time many of those skills and talents needed to recover from this destruction are fleeing the country; it will take generations to repair the damage if it can be repaired.
Chief Oshkosh
@Ishiyama:
youtu.be/DUHEql1lXAs?si=YSutU0awjobpyI5F&t=41
My mother’s, brother’s, sister’s, cousin’s, auntie’s, Uncle Barney’s, father’s, brother had a cousin from Killarney
Deputinize America
@iKropoclast:
Meh – I’m in my 60s, and am sick of seeing 70 and 80 somethings holding senior leadership positions in government, business and nonprofits long past their “sell by” dates.
Lots of talented 40-50 somethings aren’t getting positions due to nearly dead hands clutching reins that really can’t take them anywhere in the future.
iKropoclast
@Deputinize America: And I want no part of a future led by people who completely rule out the possibility that older people have meaningful things still to contribute.
Like there aren’t also young sociopaths…
Chief Oshkosh
@Deputinize America: Maybe he’s good at what he does? Maybe he’s an originally thinker, still generating great ideas and arguing their merits well? Your stance that he a priori isn’t any of that because he’s 84 is…unimpressive.
marklar
@iKropoclast: “Clamoring for attention is pretty typical of people who don’t perceive they’re being heard, isn’t it?”
Oh trust me, we hear you. But keep in mind that clamoring for attention frequently results in people stopping to listen to you, and not just passively.
Omnes Omnibus
@Deputinize America: At what age should you be put on an ice floe? Soon, right?
Eyeroller
@JML: I don’t want to dox myself, and the knowledge I have didn’t come from my own direct experiences, but I am all too familiar with this problem. The only way to terminate a tenured faculty member at most institutions is with a post-tenure review, which is nearly always resisted by the faculty and is considered humiliating for the professor, so it’s rare and would be especially rare for a chaired professor. But for the cases of people who would not retire of which I was aware, most of them were not performing and some were a detriment to the department and had been for years. There was only one of that group who was still getting grants, supervising students, etc. into old age, and he finally hung it up at about the same age (84-85). Of course one reason I was aware of these codgers was that they were a problem.
So they apply pressure in other ways. It did occur to me that the administration may have seized on this as a way to get the guy to retire, but that would be unusually scummy. I suspect this was mostly due to donor pressure with perhaps concern about withholding of grant funding.
JiveTurkin
A world power that would elect Donald Trump twice should not be a world power, we are a danger to the world.
Shalimar
Tesla, Inc (TSLA)’s “No Longer A Car Company,’ Says Jim Cramer
My understanding is that Musk has been sabotaging Tesla’s AI program because he wants the major successes to be by X, which he owns a lot higher percentage of and is also spending a ton on AI. Other people who understand this more deeply can speak to whether my very shallow impressions are accurate. It is not a field I am that knowledgeable about. But I do feel like I apparently know more than Jim Cramer, or he’s just lying and betting the other way from how he tells his viewers to invest, which is a long-term pattern for him.
sab
@Karen Gail: Roman empire is the only empire in the west that we saw rise from not much, thrive, then fail. Shocked us.
China has three thousand years of such ups and downs. And a good handle on what works. But actual everyone votes democracy is new to them and they are very skeptical.
Booger
@sab: Well, ataxia is no big thing. When you start having several taxias, that’s a problem.
Sorry.
Karen Gail
@sab:
I ended up with half my body numb, it took three years and many, many tests and specialists before someone suggested that taken all together it might be shingles. It took another two years before had any eruptions which are sign of shingles. (This was back in early 2000’s, today most of my symptoms are written up as signs of shingles in a woman.) It has been 25 years and there are still days when I can’t find my balance, which I have to walk up the stairs by holding on to rail and wall. There are also times when if I turn too quickly I will lose by balance.
Honestly, I tried everything and ended up learning that there are some days when the best thing is to spend the day sitting and getting up slowly. Then there are days when exercising helps, bowling helped for a while but it was more learning to compensate for lack of proper balance.
Eyeroller
@Shalimar: Musk himself has declared that Tesla isn’t a car company. They will transition to a robot/AI/robotaxi company going forward. I don’t really know exactly how they intend to accomplish this, but that’s what he says.
sab
Dobby the sort of reformed demon cat is sitting on my lap at the moment. I am scritching his ears and he is blissful.
But I know my little boy. At some point he will decide I don’t mean the scritches and am just a hypocritical bitch.
Five minites in yes Feline outrage and he bites my hand HARD. This is my weird little guy. Doesn’t trust anyone!
Eyeroller
@JML: PS please keep in mind that faculty at research universities, of which Cornell is definitely one, are not generally judged on their undergraduate teaching but on scholarship/research, even in non-grant fields like humanities and to a lesser extent social studies (they have more opportunities for grants). In these situations a faculty member can be a fantastic teacher but, if occupying a tenure-stream position that could go to a better/younger researcher, they’ll want him/her to retire.
Though I do know of at least one case who was a terrible teacher, had been for decades, hated the students, resented his teaching load (because he didn’t get grants), and it was still hard to push him to retire.
sab
@Eyeroller: Useful for kids applying to schools to know.
My tiny college had excellent teachers. Limited choices of majors, but what we taught we taughr well.
My sister’ uiniversity doesn’t care about anyone but rhe graduate students, and them just as grad students.
sab
@Geminid: That is an excellent idea. My mother’s PT didn’t do much.
Deputinize America
@Omnes Omnibus:
Probably.
My presence in decisionmaking is not indispensable.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@sab: he’s probably a cat who gets overstimulated easily and then lashes out because he is overwhelmed. Watch for subtle signs with the ears, tail, and other body language for stress while petting him and stop before he has reached his limit. Easier said than done, of course, but tuning in more closely to your cat can be rewarding.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Geminid: @sab: [Tai Chi]
Let me second Geminid’s suggestion. I have been in a class for a year now. Although I had pretty good balance even before there’s no doubt mine has improved.
Ohio Mom
@sab: It’s all biology. Our bodies work until they start going haywire. Ask me how I know (on second thought, don’t ask).
Nowhere in your comments did I see these sentences: “I contacted my internist/PCP through my patient portal and shared my symptoms and concerns, including a reminder about my mother’s medical history. I asked for a referral to a neurologist.”
(Picture me with one arm on my hip, the other shaking a finger at you.)
Socolofi
There’s this interesting assumption in the headline that there is such a thing as the American Empire.
I don’t see the USA going away anytime soon, or even breaking up.
It’s not clear to me that a lot of the global pathways that run through America are also wanting to move out… for example, finance still flows heavily through New York, as does global politics (the UN). The dollar is still the reserve currency. Really the only possible successor to that is the Euro, but I don’t see that happening.
As for American influence… neither Democrats nor Republicans have been able to do anything to Netanyahu nor willing to do anything to Putin. Houthis still shoot rockets at passing ships. China still Chinas.
There’s this belief out there, which I think is largely only shared by Americans, that America has this outsides influence and can make other people do things. But it turns out that other people are largely a lot more concerned about stuff near them and not so much the shenanigans of whomever is in charge of America. Oh sure, there’s always a degree of deference to the world’s biggest military and economy. But in today’s world, it’s not at all clear that anyone outside looks at America as a leader able to get others to follow.
2liberal
I’ve had some balance issues and Chat GPT gave me a workout program which was helpful. I don’t know if that would help in your situation however
sab
One of the more brilliant jackals labelled slightly disgruntled cats (eyes wide forward and alert, ears slghtly back but not flat against their heads). Cats not happy but not yet furious.
She called that owl eyes. Ears back like owl ears.
That is so muxh like my cats when they are angry bit don’t want to committ to their outrage.
Baud
prostratedragon
@sab: Also, Rome had a fairly advanced republic dating from before its empire. As the podcadter said, the empire can be seen as the decay of the republic. That sounds more like us than most othe empires or maybe all, though who knows how much the process from here could speed up.
Ohio Mom
@sab: Medicine, including PT, may have advanced since your mother’s time.
Though I wouldn’t be surprised if a PT suggested T’ai Chi, Ohio Son had a PT who suggested Taewondo, which he did for a few years. I think it did straighten out his posture.
JoyceH
I’m less concerned with losing the “American Empire” than with losing the American Republic. If we can stay a Republic, I would be okay with us no longer bestriding the world like a colossus. The UK is no longer the British Empire, but they seem to be doing okay.
As for remaining a Republic, here’s a cheering thought – everyone knows the quote when Benjamin Franklin leaving the constitutional convention was asked what he’d given us, and he replied, ‘A republic, if you can keep it.’ A few years ago, I read a biography of Franklin, and it turns out that when he said that, he didn’t really believe that we could keep it. He estimated the United States in the form set out in the Constitution might at best last a few generations. So we’ve bested old Ben’s estimate by a couple centuries, maybe we can go even further. Hey, Americans are smarter and more civic-minded than Ben Franklin thought we are!
And personally, I think empires or authoritarian regimes don’t have the life expectancy they used to have. Imagine Rome under one of their more awful emperors, but in this version, every single peasant and slave and soldier and senator from one end of the empire to the other had immediate instant notification of the emperor’s latest insane rant or bizarre stunt, in his own words. Imagine that they could see with their own eyes the gaudy gold dreck he was vomiting all over the walls and doors of his palace, while taking food from starving children and ripping parents from their children and sending hard working peasants to be brutalized in detention camps. I don’t think that emperor would last very long.
sab
@Ohio Mom: My mom’s young neuorologist says no. I am stuck.
JoyceH
@Karen Gail:
Have they checked your B12? My sister was falling a lot and she takes a weekly B12 shot that helps. Has to be the shot apparently because her body wasn’t metabolizing the B in pill form. And of course there are all sorts of exercise programs to improve balance – I keep saying I need to do those.
sab
@Ohio Mom: I have been expecting this since forever. Grandmother and Mom had it.
Wish I could convince spouse that this is just my unfixable future. Denial won’t work. Work around it healthy guy.
Jackie
No surprise; the shutdown is still on.
Eyeroller
@sab: Most research universities do care about undergraduate education, but it is seldom make-or-break for tenure decisions. So they try to hire people who at least seem committed to the cause, and they provide teaching resources and mentoring and feedback, and it is taken into consideration for promotions and raises. But it is still not the top criterion in evaluations.
Faculty at research universities actually care a lot about grad students, but mostly in terms of productivity, from what I’ve seen.
iKropoclast
So, you get the budget you want that you can’t get your own majority to vote for so you’re entitled to D votes?
I find myself wondering what a Senator JD Vance had to say about any high-stakes budget negotiations during his tenure, perhaps with Democrats in the majority?
I know that tenure was short.
2liberal
I don’t think the Brexit has been good to them..
Geminid
@sab: Maybe your spouse would take up Tai Chi with you. Then you and he could go dancing Chi to Chi!
sab
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): That is indeed him.
prostratedragon
@JoyceH: Top of my list of accelerating factors. They’re dumbing down the population as furiously as they can, with that very thing in mind, but not likely to get dumb enough fast enough.
iKropoclast
@prostratedragon: Idiocracy as the goal?
sab
@Geminid: Dream on guy. He wouldn’t because he couldn’t. His back is a huge mess. Always painful. Co-opts most of his attention. He is not a monster.
What with that nobody notices my balance, but I have two generations of worry.
Karen Gail
@JoyceH:
At this point I am just thankful that half my body is no longer numb, I tried everything and I mean everything. It took three years before the doctors stopped saying it is all in your mind, thankfully my eye doctor was more aware. I told her there were times when my right eye didn’t focus properly; her first question was “did you have chicken pox?” Then why didn’t all the specialists check to see if the herpes virus in my body had reactivated?”
The kicker was that I was female and my eye doctor was the first female doctor that took me seriously, when I said was tripping over nothing on bare floors while barefoot.
I went to primary physician that insurance covered and after explaining everything she complained that I had used up the time she could have spent seeing three other patients. The other specialists and doctors I saw were as “nice” about me not having textbook symptoms for something they could diagnosis.
Everything I have read tells me that the nerve damage is usually permanent; that my body has healed from that sever level of damage is unusual.
Eyeroller
@JoyceH: If one needs B12 injections that’s pernicious anemia. It is usually due to an autoimmune disease that destroys the cells in the stomach that secrete what’s called intrinsic factor, which is necessary to metabolize B12. (My grandmother had this disease and probably died of complications thereof, in a time when the cause was unknown.)
Many older people do need B12 supplements since our ability to absorb it decreases with age. Methylcobalamine is more readily absorbed than the more typical cyanocobalamine, but it is more expensive.
Vegetarians and especially vegans also need B12 supplements at any age because there are almost no vegetable sources (I think tempeh has some).
sab
@sab: Spouse knew my mom and saw her decline.
Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.
princess leia
@sab:
Glad you have an idea what to expect,but wish it wasn’t such a hard diagnosis. Hope there are some supports for you.
prostratedragon
“It’s The Village People!!!“
Shalimar
@Eyeroller: I understand Musk’s ambition, but I do not get how anyone else believes him. He took over a company that had a huge technological advantage over everyone else in that field and held it for a long time because other companies did not see that small share of the car market justifying major investment. IMO, he squandered all of that by wasting so much time on the cybertruck instead of continuing to innovate with cars. The Chinese companies are way ahead of Tesla now.
Musk’s other fields of interest have competitors who are either even with him or (in the case of Waymo) way ahead in development. Musk will never dominate a market again like the stock valuations of Tesla require him to.
Gvg
@rikyrah: America should not be an empire anyway. We are a democracy and a republic. What we were at our best was a leader of mostly free countries, who mostly preferred free trade, and we had a big budget we were willing to spend on influence and being proactive in imagining threats and trying to disarm them especially in a nuclear armed world.
The dirty side was forgetting our roots and supporting colonialism, or over reacting to prospective speculative future threats and trying to overthrow other counties elected government. Shah of Iran, Latin America, and the communist Domino theory that led to Vietnam etc. We should not forget our own roots. Sometimes other people have to be allowed to choose, even if it is a mistake.
Eyeroller
@Shalimar: It’s a meme stock so <shrug>. I have no idea why Tesla has such a lofty price to earnings ratio. It doesn’t make any sense if one just considers economic fundamentals. But apparently there are plenty of fanboys who keep the stock elevated, and professionals who try to take advantage of them.
He has a big advantage in SpaceX due to NASA contracts, but that company is privately held.
JML
@Eyeroller: yeah, it’s a real problem in dealing with the tenured faculty that are uninterested in retiring even after they’ve stopped really performing. I’m convinced that with some of them it’s because they simply have no idea what to do with themselves if they lost their routine. It’s a particular challenge at enrollment-dependent universities, because bad/indifferent/inaccessible faculty drive students out very easily. It’s a shame.
Gvg
@schrodingers_cat: we don’t know enough about other histories to make useful comparisons. Even those who do can only talk to others with a similar education. Almost everyone here has been exposed to quite a bit of Roman history and it speeds up the conversation because less needs to be explained, people have thought about some of this before. We have some basic knowledge in common from the start.
Yes we should know more about other histories, but kids today already have a lot more homework than I did.
Geminid
@sab: I was kidding. Chronic back pain is debilitating; I’ve only had acute back pain but I can extrapolate.
But you could handle Tai Chi, I think. If you did it a little it might help a lot. And if you did it long enough you could send a mugger flying head over heels with one good push.
Karen Gail
Did some addition of “Rise and Fall of Roman Empire” become a best seller? I remember a time when it seemed like everyone was reading it and talking about it. (No clue when that was.)
Ohio Mom
@sab: Go to a different one. You are allowed to switch doctors.
JoyceH
@2liberal: No, Brexit was a stupid idea. But membership in the EU isn’t exactly imperial. I’d put the height of the British Empire as the Victorian era. They even dubbed Victoria the Empress of India and gave her enormous jewels.
Socolofi
@Shalimar: Musk is a very, very good visionary – he does see potential for something, he’s really good at hyping it up and getting people to follow him, and he’s technical enough to both see how to do something as well as push other smart people to deliver something awesome. People like Bezos and Jobs also fall into this category in recent years.
His problem, like Jobs and Bezos, is that he’s a horrible operator. He’s always after the new shiny, not after boring repeatable process. And as near as I can tell, hasn’t really got a reliable operator ala Tim Cook or Jeff Wilke (who built and ran Amazon Retail for years). So existing model refreshes, which are already hard, don’t happen, and Tesla wastes huge cycles and $$ on turds like the CyberTruck, the Semi (remember that?), Robovan (sure), etc.
People still believe him now more so because (a) some past huge successes, and (b) he still has a ton of cash, so “believing him” is more like, “signing up to get paid.”
WTFGhost
To answer the question in the title, “yes.” We’ve entered a post-truth political stage, and that means our citizenry is no longer able to judge if one party, or the other, is
a) stupid
b) evil
c) thoughtless, or more likely,
d) all of the above
Without that information, how can a nation, an empire, endure? Once reality is no longer the defining principle, everything is fucked up.
TONYG
@Betty Cracker: I agree. I think that the primary reason for the economic, political and cultural power of the United States during the decades after 1945 was the fact that (except for Pearl Harbor and the Aleutians) the U.S. homeland was not touched by the destruction of World War Two. At least since the Vietnam War, our country has been pissing away those advantages. With lunatics in charge now, the rest of the world has just about had it with us.
RevRick
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): @schrodingers_cat: @Kirklin: @iKropoclast:
There are empires, such as the Sumerian, or Aztec, or Mongolian, and there is imperialism, which has an incredible ability to morph and remake itself. Empires crumble for all sorts of predictable reasons, but imperialism lasts, because it resides in human brains and is handed down as “the way things are.”
A minor nitpick with one assertion that the mass of people in the Roman Empire was illiterate, because, as evidenced by Pompeii, there was an awful lot of advertising and graffiti going on. And that empire was heavily urbanized and had enormous trade and administrative activities. Heck, the tiny first and second century Christian community had at least twelve authors of the current canonical books and a bunch of others who wrote non canonical texts.
RevRick
@Omnes Omnibus: The day Trump dies, the most toxic environment in the world will be the Internet. Every opinion will be hurled and become increasingly hostile, ugly, and hateful. If anything triggers a civil war, it will be that.
Uncle Cosmo
Nor a mountain in Dyslaska.
Paul in KY
@artem1s: 2nd Reich was German Empire that ended in 1918 (Hohenzollerns, etc.). Otherwise pretty good writeup.
Paul in KY
@Betty: Those roving gangs of 1 bicyclist! The horrors those boys must endure…
Paul in KY
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): That was his phone that he dropped while slagging them. Great job by him to grab it and stay out of their cheeto stained hands.
Paul in KY
@sab: I’m mid 60s and balance not what it was 15 years ago. Just have to understand that’s how it is and compensate.
Paul in KY
@CaseyL: Remember that Pres. T.R. Roosevelt had been parked in the vice presidency to keep him from doing any of that. The POTUS being the vigorous and young William McKinley. Then something happened…
Paul in KY
@Baud: That cyclist will never have to buy another drink in Chicago!
Paul in KY
@Karen Gail: Book originally came out around 1900. Was a huge seller back then.