This is patently untrue, look to Syria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khashamor

Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. Please search for Battle of Khashamor in Wikipedia to check for alternative titles or spellings.

shrug

The US is able to project power globally in a way that Russia has tried to and simply cannot counter.

Who can forget their famously successful efforts to project power into Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen.

Even Ukraine is projecting power in Sudan and Syria

In a report on Monday, the English-language Kyiv Post said it had obtained video from Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate (GUR) filmed in March

Listen, I know we’re all “Rah Rah Ukraine! Can’t wait till they’ve got boots on the ground in Moscow!” But you can’t seriously link to a fucking press briefing by the GUR as unbiased news.

The United States spends in a year, what the rest of the world spends in 1.2 years.

Yes, yes. This is why we can’t afford health care. Ye-haw.

But we spend all this money on an endless parade of Wall Street executive compensation packages. Nobody in Russia is getting paid a Boeing CEO’s salary to make aerospace equipment that strands folks on the IIS. And while Lockhead and Raytheon have made a mint selling the Pentagon loot boxes, the physical hardware we’ve produced still doesn’t seem capable of winning the fucking war.

There is no historical analogue to the power of the United States military.

There are numerous analogs. But none of them are particularly flattering.

The US has too many bases to defend simultaneously to engage with Russia directly. It would be the 18th Anglo-French Wars all over again but with the possibility of a spicy nuclear conclusion at any given moment.

Keeping the conflict contained to the Ukrainian theater means western states get to “bleed” Russia in a protracted conflict without drawing the rest of their assets into a firefight. But we’re already seeing the US/Russia conflict leak into the central African states, the Korean border, and recently the coast of Florida.

Americans don’t actually want this to become a full blown World War. That drives up our defensive costs significantly and skews the “Stupid Russians Lose Again” headlines with a bunch of “Brave NATO Soldiers Fucked By Insidious Russian Treachery” articles.

I’m waiting for these wars to finally come full circle and for Israel to start selling Russia weapons it got from the United States on the cheap.

I remember when /r/HailCorporate was a trending sub and then it just sort of got strangled to death.

Also remember the periodic waves of “Hillary is bae! Mother of dragons! Yas Queen!” and “I love Mayor Pete” and “KHive ftw!” and even a smattering of Mitt Romney fanboi-ism on /r/politics, as their campaigns rose and fell.

Nevermind the absolutely sycophantic corporate ghoul AMAs. Bill Gates, Ann Coulter, and Don Lemon all leap to mind. Just the absolute worst moderation imaginable for these guys. Then there was the Elon Musk AMA. Jesus fucking Christ.

Its been their practice since the early 90s. Bundling and defaulting all their shitty apps, then making sure everything else has compatibility issues by design.

The worst thing to happen to Microsoft was the IETF. It shattered their walled garden and forced them to integrate with a host of other internationally developed and encoded systems through a uniform protocol. They’ve spent the last 30 years trying to claw their position of OS dominance back.

Herodotus got a lot of things wrong

Show me the first hand written account from the period that refutes him.

That’s a terrible argument. That was one pharaoh and the monument would have been finished within his lifetime

That’s two pharaohs and the mega-monuments completed over 27 years that Ramses lived to see were the exception rather than the rule.

And, again, I was talking about the Jesus of the Bible

The Gospel of Mark is part of the Bible. That makes Jesus at least as historical as anyone in Herodotus’s Histories. Significantly more so in many respects, as Herodotus writes on The Trojan War, some 800 years before his birth.

If there was a real Jesus, we have absolutely no idea what, if anything, said about him in the Bible actually happened or was something we said because there is no evidence of it outside the Bible

You could say the same of the Anatolian tribes or the Achaemenid dynasty or Sparta.

there is no real physical proof that Jesus Christ ever existed

Go back far enough and there is vanishingly little biographical evidence that any singular person existed. From the Mayan Empire to the Australian Aboriginal People, you can wave your hands and dismiss them all, due to the lack of first party written accounts of their existence.

Where on Earth do you get the idea that monuments to pharaohs were not built within their lifetime?

Consider the Boy Pharaoh, Tutankhamen. He was dead at the age of 17, before the completion of his tomb. And thanks to repeated grave robberies, his tomb had to be repaired and refortified on subsequent occasions. His elderly successor and family advisor, Ay, was buried who died four years after his own ascension to the throne, effectively swapped Tutankhamen’s intended tomb and claimed it as his own, but never lived long enough to see it completed.

Numerous unfinished or partially completed tombs dot the Valley of Kings. And even the Great Pyramids have several chambers that were started but never filled out before the builders were retasked to the next Pharaoh in line.

It also misses my point.

The standards by which we hold “historical Jesus” would disqualify a litany of other historical figures of antiquity, as the bulk of our knowledge comes from reprints of reprints of surviving accounts of other accounts which are themselves often politicized documents intended to score contemporary points.

The Hellenistic Era might as well not exist, for all the first party accounts of the era that survive. Herodotus was dead before Darius the Great was even born, and yet his histories are fundamental to understanding the Achaemenid Empire during his reign. The only surviving copy is dated fifty years after the events it claims to document. That’s roughly as reliable as The Gospel of Mark, which is dated some 30 to 80 years after the death of its primary subject matter.

If you want to hold historical figures to equal standing, you’re going to write off everyone from Archidamus II to Cyrus I. Obliterating huge swaths of history with a single pen stroke, because Herodotus is an unreliable narrator.

if we did, we know nothing about him except what was written a long time after he would have died

Hardly the first instance of a historical figure with unreliable historical accounts. You could make the same criticism of Egyptian pharaohs. They were deified in their eras, too. Their monuments were not completed until many of them were long dead. I guess we should just ignore them and pretend they had no impact on the course of history.

Written while Jesus was still alive?

You could disprove the existence of Socrates with this line of reasoning.

Quite a bit has been written on the possible siblings of Jesus.

It doesn’t matter.

I’d say the “Real Historical Jesus” matters at least as much as a Real Historical Julius Caeser or a Real Historical Abraham Lincoln.

I always relate it to Ian Fleming having a schoolchum who’s father’s name was Ernst Stavro Bloefeld.

That’s different in so far as Fleming was simply borrowing a name for a totally independent character. But Fleming was, himself, a Naval Commander and intelligence officer who leveraged his own biography to inform James Bond’s personal traits. What’s more, he borrowed heavily from the reports and anecdotes of other intelligence officials both during and after WW2 to inform the behaviors and attitudes of his side characters in his original novels.

It actually is pretty interesting to talk about “The Real James Bond” from a historical standpoint, because British intelligence services were pivotal in maintaining the imperial and international financial controls necessary to run a globe-spanning empire.

In the same vein, you might be curious to read about “The Real Julius Caeser” after working through the Shakespearean play or “The Real Abraham Lincoln” after getting through the stories where he’s a Vampire Hunter. These biographies inform all sorts of cultural and economic norms of the era. And reading about historical individuals can be both entertaining and illuminating, particularly when you begin to consider how your own world ended up as it is today.

“Why is Christianity a globe-spanning religious movement going back 2000 years?” is a question worth interrogating. And you can’t really interrogate that question without asking who this Jesus guy was or how he got so popular.

Gaza has a border with Egypt as well.

Not anymore. The IDF controls the strip of land between Gaza and Egypt and has secured it against any further aid crossing the border.

Hamas has pretty much total iron first control of Gaza

I was under the impression the IDF had a bit of influence there, what with all the tanks and bombers and soldiers scouring every inch of the war-blasted landscape.

Kadyrov is literally Hamas

Because he’s Chechyan presiding over a Chechnyan government? I’d think he was more comparable to MBS or Abdullah II, whom Israelis are openly courting.

Palestine isn’t a country.

More countries recognize Palestine as an independent state than Taiwan.

It was offered statehood and turned it down.

It wasn’t offered statehood. It was offered a shell of bureaucracy under the boot of an occupying Israeli military.

Palestine isn’t a country. Lebanon isn’t a country. Excited to see Syria, Egypt, and Jordan suffer the same fate.

Doing a Blitzkreg to win some Lebensraum and no I don’t understand why this would be problematic.

Don’t make me tap the sign…

My thought was not “Get Israel to bomb all the people Russia is racist against”.