Resurgent pyramidal brain
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Recently reread A Game of Thrones and this time around it struck me that Eddard is not the hero (Andal wife leaves room) if The Ned was a wheelhouse he would need four dozen strong horses to move
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Recently reread Why Nations Fail and this time around it struck me that Shyaam is not the hero (Daron Acemoglu leaves room) if Shyaam a-Mbul was a fire truck he would be the biggest one in the Kasai basin
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Something very annoying about Why Nations Fail: it uses "absolutist" to refer to basically any exclusionary political institution. At one point he acknowledges that Poland-Lithuania had a very weak monarchy and then calls it "absolutist for the Szlachta" (paraphrasing)
Thoughts on this so far: I think the dichotomy of inclusive vs extractive institutions is very useful within a certain range of contexts, and he tries to extend it well past that range
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Obviously, this attitude helps them score easy points against China without having to look too critically at how the inclusive/extractive dichotomy maps onto East Asian political economy. But it also leads to some very sloppy work wrt pre-/early modern state building
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Second time I've seen this attitude on my tl. I am being gaslit! The book has a whole chapter which is just a Palestinian guy talking about how absolutely, peerlessly heroic the IDF was during the zombie apocalypse and how he was stupid for supporting Hamas as a teenager
No I refuse to do this. The movie took some genuinely very intriguing source material that was commentary on what humanity would be willing to sacrifice to overcome a viral outbreak and what people would do in an apocalyptic world and turned it into “Look how cool Israel is”.
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Not even getting into the bits about how China 1) causes the zombie outbreak by building the Three Gorges Dam, 2) spreads it globally because it's addicted to black market organ harvesting and 3) collapses because its entire military leadership can only think of le human waves
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🐍 retweeted
Tung tung sahur is a jinn that Yemeni merchants unintentionally brought over from hadhramout to java in the 13th century, remaining dormant until AI generators reawakened it in time for Prabowo to become president
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Thoughts on this so far: I think the dichotomy of inclusive vs extractive institutions is very useful within a certain range of contexts, and he tries to extend it well past that range
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More broadly I think the framework of "inclusive institutions" is useful to explain why many formally democratic states are actually stuck in extractive loops, but it allows the authors to avoid serious engagement with East Asia in a way that reads today as an obvious cope
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