In Reply to: Turns out the Roman Empire came to the verge of collapse at least posted by blindness on March 04, 2026 at 15:27:13
Man, did i get a lot of shiit for expressing that same opinion 20+ years ago.
all it took was just a "little nudge" to drive our administrative costs through the roof, our distrust levels through the roof, our conspiracy theory mindset up the wazoo, etc.
(9/11 was horrific. I've never been more afraid than I was watching the towers burn and then fall. But relative to the 100 MM people who died in the Spanish (misnomer) Influenza epic of 1918-1920, it was a self-contained event. And pretty low tech. Hence the "little" adjective.)
just one (relatively) little grain of sand in the hyper-complex machine, and the gears started gnashing and smashing together. Our maintenance workers are working on it like Knox and Juliette in the Down Deep...with about as great prospect of long term success as those characters. Prognosis not great.
Paging the American Aurelian...
(Another opinion I got a lot of grief for was the one promulgated by Chalmers Johnson: that America is the broadest empire in human history, and that a major source of our problems is the blowback (title of his book) that the mainstream media pick up from US propaganda efforts. The question is, should we be an empire?)