They get fantastically accurate results about what they study, which is large-scale voluntary exchange. Much more so than the other social sciences. The trick is just that war isn’t voluntary exchange (although it does include it), so other disciplines become really important when it breaks out.

That said, there are many odious regimes in the world and we do not go to war with all of them.

I feel like so much of the debate misses this forest for the trees. Sure, X regime is awful. How does valued ally Saudi compare? It’s at best an often-decisive factor in whether to be nice to someone or not.

Interesting. What’s the strategy here? Just “weaken Iran”? Is there some hopium that an escalation wouldn’t see them obliterated?

I’m sure they know as well as anyone else that actually bombing them out of existence isn’t realistic.

Edit: Maybe they’re just noticing that they’ve indefinitely lost free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, if it ends now.

Goes to show, there’s such a thing as government intervention making housing getting too cheap. At least, relative to other things like cemetery plots.

I mean, the article is about France. Am I missing something?

Yup. They actually have little interest in if the Middle East is functional in any way, shape or form. If anything they’d prefer it be ruined in every way possible.

Just bombing it and then walking away serves them very well.

Orban: Yes, but have you considered there are gay people?

I mean, it was hardly the first European genocide.

This is why people don’t like the oppression Olympics. It immediately becomes about who you can make lose them.

Accept. Any war Canada fights before I’m too old is going to be for a very good reason. (Not technically Europe, but we’re trying)

If we’re doing Olympics probably, yeah. It might be top 20 but there’s a whole lot of world and a whole lot of history. The one that happened in Europe is the one European and European-like countries took notice of, though.

It’s great that we learn so much about it, and the fact that people just like us did it. Just burying ugly things is the natural tendency. It’s given us a framework to understand earlier genocides, as well as genocides in distant places like Israel or Rwanda as they happen.

but I think it’s fair to say that the transatlantic slave trade was the most cruel and inhuman form of slavery.

I can think of other contenders, actually, but Sparta and Russia are both retconned as white (before the concept existed). Maybe something in east Asia, or the Middle East. Any society with a supermajority of slaves is a good candidate to have some of the same rules in place.

I think the biggest contender for worst crime against humanity was the Native American genocide.

I mean, they also did that in Australia, for example, and there’s tons of similar events in prehistory we can see through sudden shifts in genetic makeup.

Genocides aren’t rare, and since the Americas were a bit more sparsely populated I’m not even sure that’s the biggest one.

I’m guessing afraid to contradict the US probably fits in there, too.

So is Ghana’s. Haiti was also founded by a slave rebellion.

Yeah, but it wasn’t hereditary in Rome, lots of slaves did manage to achieve freedom, anyone could end up a slave and it was always a minority of the population. It was still messed up and they still abused them really badly or fatally at times, but it wasn’t as bad as the American style of slavery. (Sparta’s style was closer, though, and there’s other examples; it’s not like the system was without precedent)

That said, this does raise the whole question of the Medieval and Arab slave trades. There isn’t really a good demarcation between them and the Atlantic trade, and of course they themselves would have roots in classical times.

Beyond slavery, there have been marauders like the Huns or the Khans, who would attack a city, and kill every single living thing, and then move on the the next one.

There’s reasonable evidence the Mongols, at least, liked to kill civilians, but you have to be careful about taking the historical accounts of their enemies at face value. Unlike many wars between agricultural civilisations, they didn’t have literature of their own for us to draw from.

Yeah, there’s more than a whiff of revisionism going on here. Not that they’re wrong about the specific issue.

It should be Haiti putting forward the motion, probably.

So it’s pretty definitionally oppression Olympics, but I feel like the slave trade is a decent contender. It lasted centuries, maybe more depending a bunch of history that’s still up in the air. The Holocaust only went on for a few years.

I’m not sure Ghana has hands as clean as they’re implying, though. The victims of the transatlantic slave trade had to (ahem) leave Africa entirely, and usually it wasn’t the Europeans catching and selling them on their own.

TBF bears are pretty great. Bears probably win over women, too.

So what ever happened to floating launchpads? Did they really work that poorly?

Necessary, no. Better, yes.

The more delta-v you require (so plus or minus that 500km/h) and the more payload you have, the more rocket you need. If you have fixed rocket size and/or a fixed budget, launching at high latitude translates into either less delta-v left over to go places or less payload.

There are partial or full exceptions if you’re launching into certain orbits. For a mapping satellite that goes straight north/south as the Earth rotates below I would guess you might even prefer a higher-latitude launch.