• 6 Posts
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • acargitz@lemmy.catoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 months ago

    One of the most interesting explanations I’ve seen is that Western Europe was politically fragmented just enough so that big enough entities were competing with each other for dominance. So there was no central authority strong enough to pacify it, and the individual states were powerful enough to mobilize resources, creating a competitive power race. It was in trying to beat each other that they reached out and colonized the rest of the world.

    Edit: I’m thinking now how during the apex of pax Americana, space exploration really subsided for example. When the US and the USSR were competing it was on. Now that US hegemony is declining, it’s seems to be on again. Too strong of a political unification keeps the centrifugal forces in check.











  • Yes, however scientific papers aren’t always linearly formatted PDFs (eg 2-columns), so pdftotext tends to be brittle.

    If you only mean reading a file from a specific selection of text, I’ve never seen something that,

    Okular actually does that, and with Pied I can use nice Piper voices, but the controls are very basic (start at the stop of the page, pause, stop).








  • OP talked about “glaring character defects”.

    These are policy failures and state crimes, arguably attributed to the American state as a whole, and the long term US imperialist policies, rather to the singular person of the president.

    You might have noticed that I added Frederick the Great in the list, which tells you exactly what my understanding of the challenge was.


  • acargitz@lemmy.catoMemes@lemmy.mlUSA’s presidents have all been awful humans
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    10 months ago

    I dunno Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, seem to have been personally good people. That’s two recent US presidents. Then I guess I would add some super low hanging fruit like Nelson Mandela, Frederick the Great, John II Komnenos, any of the Five Good Emperors, Cyrus the Great, Ashoka, and one could keep going.

    EDIT: To all those pestering me about how US presidents presided over criminal imperialist policies, here is my answer from down below:

    OP talked about “glaring character defects”.

    These are policy failures and state crimes, arguably attributed to the American state as a whole, and the long term US imperialist policies, rather to the singular person of the president.

    You might have noticed that I added Frederick the Great in the list, which tells you exactly what my understanding of the challenge was.

    I’m not here to defend US imperialism, don’t @ me.