Comment on Man Gives Himself 19th Century Psychiatric Illness After Consulting With ChatGPT
Akasazh@lemmy.world 3 days agoI think he meant later stage westen Rome before the Gothic/Vandals/Longobardic tribes conquered it. A paper tiger entirely convinced of is own superiority whilst their military power and world control slowly dwindled.
So basically what you summed up in a sentence. The eastern Roman and Seljuks need not have been brought into this, I think.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 3 days ago
Well, lacking troops due to big demographic and agricultural changes outside your control is not the same as being a paper tiger. Their internal turmoil coincided with a military threat.
Also western thalassocracies have been accused of being largely paper tigers a few times in their history, yet from Ottomans to Napoleon to German Empire to USSR no contenders managed to prove it.
OK, what matters is the OP’s point on lies. I agree with that entirely. Lies brought the USSR down, and the same has unfortunately caught up with its Cold War adversaries. It just became visible a bit earlier that this state is not going into space colonizing everything and is not building a classless society with everyone equal and free. But 40 years later, I think, we can confidently say that neither is USA fulfilling its own “cold war promise”. 30 years ago I suspect even many Americans sincerely believed that it is. Everyone thought it was one side’s defeat, while in fact it was a draw with both sides failing.