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Cake day: February 7th, 2025

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  • Eurydike I was a boss bitch. Not only was she unusually prominent in politics for a queen, she also engaged in foreign policy on her own, successfully negotiationg with a foreign general to have him protect her late husband’s throne against a pretender, apparently without any participation from her son-in-law, who served as regent at the time.

    The youngest of her sons, Phillip II, would go on to reform the military and secure hegemony over Greece, laying the groundwork for the invasion of Persia that he never got to carry out. After his assassination, that invasion was instead performed by his son, Alexander III, later dubbed “The Great” for this feat.

    It should be noted that, with Alexander being on campaign for basically all of his reign and generally not too interested in domestic rulership, his mother Olympias of Epirus was the de facto ruler of Macedonia. Behind the successful general are two powerful women that first protected his father’s throne, then took care of the actual ruling so that he would be free to hunt glory.








  • The detailed and nuanced answer would take into account the exact crime, but the short answer: No.

    A democracy must guard itself against usurpation by demagogues that rally people through deceitful rhetorics and appeals to passion with the intent to break the order of that democracy. That order, among other things, contains laws restraining what politicians are and aren’t allowed to do. A candidate with clear disregard for these laws is a threat to that order, such that this democracy must protect itself by not allowing them to hold powers they are likely to use irresponsibly.

    Put differently, someone who shows clear contempt for democratic rules is no longer entitled to democratic rights either. Note the distinction: democratic rights doesn’t mean human rights.






  • I want Russian civilians to suffer a bit because they need to fucking get the hint and do something it they want to survive

    Morale Bombing has never, ever, ever worked. It has been tried: Nazi Germany bombed the UK, the UK and US bombed Germany, the US leaned on it during the cold war in Korea and Vietnam, Russia did it to Ukraine. By and large the results have been the same: Civilians hate being bombed. They’ll hate you for bombing them. They’ll rally against you.

    Bombing can influence the leadership decisions, if it damages target of value to the high and powerful, but the historical record on bombing civilians to make them oppose the war isn’t just bad, is terribly one-sided. And it makes sense: If Russia were to bomb your hometown, would that make you want to surrender or fight back?

    (And in case anyone thinks that Japan was defeated just by the nukes, nothing is ever that simple in war and Japan was on the back foot already. What the nukes achieved was that the political leadership, already distressed by the way the war was going, saw the sheer and unprecedented destructive power and opted to surrender. The civilians’ will had little to do with it.)