>Edit: Come to think of it, also there were also a few Roman Emperors from North Africa!
North Africa, like most of the Mediterranean, was white in Roman times. North Africa is only swarthy today in the aftermath of Arab conquest in the 7th and 8th centuries.
> What does "white" mean? Are you telling me the Romans were British? German? Nordic?
It means that the second image, showing Roman senators played by a few dozen white Italian extras, is a perfectly likely depiction, and the caption about how real Roman senators were much more swarthy ("like modern Italians", he claims) is nonsense.
(Of course, the HBO show was filmed in Italy, and almost all the extras and background characters were Italians.)
I was responding to his lengthy diversion on the commutabality of British and Italian actors, which seems to be rooted in the delusional American notion (dating back to the late 19th century, recently revived by lefties who deny the existence of white native European nations) that Italians aren't "white". In reality, Italian and British phenotype variation overlaps significantly.
The effort to paint ancient Rome as some sort of model 21st century, "diverse multicultural non-white non-European melting point" is always pretty funny. And Cleopatra was black, right?? Of course, it all falls apart the minute you look at the ancient sources. Subflavus.
P.S. I have been to Italy many times and I can report, for the benefit of all Americans, that *Italians are white*. Period.
According to the 2020 figures, national defense was 11% of federal spending. Discretionary vs. mandatory seems irrelevant here. We might as well say military spending is 100% of military spending. It's just dividing it by something to make it sound higher, usually for propaganda purposes.
Nevertheless I totally agree some part of that 11% will benefit business and commerce. But it is still a terrible deal. In any other context no one would ever buy something with a 90% "commission".
Various levels of local governments provide many services and benefits for my physical property located in their jurisdictions, so I do not oppose a reasonable property tax. But the federal government provides no services or benefits to the securities in my vault, so a general federal wealth tax on them is altogether different, and I oppose it.
> Except the uber wealthy who can afford to lose money to pay taxes for the infrastructure that has enabled their explosive asset growth.
Federal income tax almost never gets used for infrastructure. Infrastructure is mostly built by state and local governments, which receive most of their income from sales tax and property tax, and other taxes, which are already almost entirely paid by businesses. So, they are already paying for the infrastructure that enabled their growth.
Cicero was a conservative in some ways. But I don't think he was particularly prejudiced or classist, for the time. Remember that he was technically a plebeian himself, although obviously a privileged and successful one.
You are right, of course. But Rousseau made it quite clear that the sovereignty of a government is discretionary. This sort of thinking isn't convincing on an ideological or theoretical level to anyone but a medieval peasant, and it only increases my indignation.
On the contrary, those countries are extremely popular places to base your business activities or start a company or manage your finances from. Ever been to Bermuda? Or the Virgin Islands? You can't move for wealthy industrious Western expats and their business ventures. And also to a lesser extent Ireland, the Luxembourg, Singapore, Switzerland, etc. These are all some of the most popular countries to move to in the world.
But now the United States and Canada and whoever else is the G7 are trying to shut them down and force everyone to follow their hellish tax laws.
Why are governments allowed to collude like this? Isn't this the same idea as price fixing? Exploiting their monopoly (governments' monopoly on the right to do commerce) to unfairly raise prices (taxes)?
The world needs at least somewhere where you can opt-out from Western neoliberalism and socialism.
Don't be silly. Obviously the bans were not perfectly enforced and you could still find hushed conversations in the corners. This was true on all platforms. What, exactly, is your argument? Or your point? Are you really going to try to claim that the lab leak hypothesis was not widely censored in social media? "We have always been at war with Eastasia"...
I realize this is difficult and embarrassing for you, but you cannot remain in denial much longer. And your feeble attempt to be cavalier and aloof by omitting punctuation fools no one. It just makes you look like a haughty fool. The paper may "conclude" nothing but it provides strong evidence for the lab leak theory, if you understand it. As did many other things back then, some of which are alluded in the OP article. Indeed, the pure prior probability, based simply on the emergence of a novel coronavirus in the one city with the biggest coronavirus research center, is significant enough to make the hypothesis very credible.
North Africa, like most of the Mediterranean, was white in Roman times. North Africa is only swarthy today in the aftermath of Arab conquest in the 7th and 8th centuries.