By 1066, not quite. That was an invading army led by the King of Norway to press his claim on the throne of England. I’m sure many of the soldiers in that army had been Vikings but at that time they were soldiers of a Christian king, which would have been considered much more legitimate than being a heathen raider.
I guess the Normans were also of Nordic descent but they had given up the Viking way of life a century before.
Much like pirates and gangsters, Vikings are cool if you consider them from an aesthetic as opposed to moralistic perspective. Everyone has evil ancestors, but some of them were cool.
One of our big exports. Germans were obsessed with American outlaws (Karl May). And I am of the opinion that this is what the Nazi's were thinking when they invaded Poland and Russia. They wanted to create and settle their own variation of the "wild west". Hard to explain to people in 2025 how captivating the American frontier was to a European in 1910.
This piece seems a little confused about what it’s actually reporting on.
It’s well known, to the point of near-cliche, that the word “Viking” didn’t refer to a nationality or ethnicity. It meant something akin to “raider”. The ethnic group is usually referred to as the Norse, at least until they start differentiating into the modern nationalities of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese.
The actual finding here seems to be the discovery of the remains of some Viking raiders who weren’t ethnically Norse. Fair enough. There are also examples of Norse populations assimilating into other cultures, such as the Normans and Rus. Likewise, the traditionally Norse Varangian Guard accepted many Anglo-Saxon warriors whose lords didn’t survive the Norman conquest. So it’s not too surprising that someone of non-Nordic descent might be accepted into a Viking warband.
Iran occasionally attacks Americans in the region or abroad generally, but they don't attack Americans in America despite all of their "death to America" rhetoric (which they are more than entitled to.) If you add up who's fucking with who and who's being fucked with, the imbalance between America and Iran is enormous.
Wikipedia describes it as a “a short-lived Kurdish self-governing unrecognized state in present-day Iran” and “a puppet state of the Soviet Union”. Doesn’t really count as a free and independent state.
This works against relatively liberal governments. It didn’t work for the Tiananmen Square protestors in 1989 or for the intermittent Iranian protestors of the past couple decades because those regimes were willing to suppress those protests with overwhelming force. Fortunately, the Iranian protestors are likely to have some overwhelming force on their side soon.
Fair. I think a better way of putting it is that they lacked the unity to agree to just keep firing on people until they won. A relatively liberal culture is one reason government forces won't do that; in the case of someone like Ceausescu it was more that the generals tended to think his last few years had been a disaster and the rebels had a point.
From my naive observation, the regimes of Eastern Europe had lost their will to perpetuate. (Everybody saw, including party apparatchiks, that the people in the west have better lives. Or at least better goods. :-) )
The cynical take would be that the (smarter) communists in power prepared themselves for the transition, positioning themselves to benefit after the change.
I’m glad it didn’t work in 1989 because China would not have become the technical behemoth it is now if those protests had succeeded. At the same time I don’t want China to succeed and export its brand of capitofascism purely because I don’t think most other countries can find their benevolent dictator. The cognitive dissonance is wild right now.
> because China would not have become the technical behemoth it is now if those protests had succeeded
Taiwan's GDP/capita is 2.6x China's [1]. It grew faster, for longer, in large part through high technology.
Counterfactuals are always hard in history. But we literally have the nationalist government's democratic, capitalist successor kicking in way above its weight class economically and technologically. It's fair to say that if the '89 protest hadn't been massacred, the 21st century would currently be undoubtedly China's to rule. (I'd also put even odds on Taiwan having peacefully reunified by now.)
It’s much easier to increase the GDP per capita for 20 million people compared to 1.4 billion especially when Taiwan started with a 10x higher GDP per capita. If anything they have lost a significant percentage of their lead. I don’t think what worked in Taiwan would work in China because the scale is astounding.
Is that true? The whole point of per capita is to cancel out the linear benefit of 100 million workers being able to outproduce 10 million workers. There are ways for small countries to have a per capita GDP higher than would be feasible for a larger country, but Taiwan doesn’t really do any of those. They don’t have oil or any other particularly valuable natural resources, and they aren’t a tax shelter like Ireland or a microstate with workers commuting across the border like Luxembourg. They have to create wealth the hard way, through labor productivity, just like the mainland. And between the two, the mainland has the potential to realize greater economies of scale.
First, note that Taiwan was initially not democracy, the liberalization started by lifting of martial law in 1987, first parliamentary elections in 1992, first presidential elections in 1996 (this is widely considered the point at which Taiwan became a consolidated democracy)
From your link:
1987: Taiwan 5325, China 300
1996: Taiwan 13588, China 710
---
2024 Taiwan 34060, China 13314
Whatever starting point you choose, China has risen faster than Taiwan.
In fact, there is non-zero chance that if China had a regime change and heeded west's economic 'advice', it would have gone through equivalent of what Russia went in the 90's.
They are doing fine, thank you, doing it their commie way, despite Zeihan and others preaching China's immminent collapse for decades.
That's actually a related issue. European governments routinely and sometimes illegally attempt to enforce their laws against American websites, so if you run a website it's easier to just block the entire continent than to deal with that.
You won't be able to in the future unless you are very wealthy.
Countries cannot afford the benefits and healthcare promised to retirees. So governments are getting more grabby. That pattern seems to be occurring in many countries.
Netherlands example: new capital tax 36% rate. A capital growth tax (vermogensaanwasbelasting) applies to stocks, bonds, savings, and cryptocurrencies. A separate capital gains tax applies to real estate and startup shares, taxing only upon sale.
US: see medical debts.
Articles usually talk about savings as though you can bank some funds while working, earn interest, and withdraw the savings later.
Don't deceive yourself thinking like that.
"Savings" cannot work in the future due to demographic issues (especially due to people living longer) even if you saw it work in the past.
Look at how many workers support one retiree. In New Zealand it used to be 7 workers to one retiree, and in the future it looks like 2 workers to 1 retiree.
This is a core issue for anyone below retirement age. Not only do we deceive ourselves about solutions, we are deceived by articles and history.
I have no intention of spending my childrens' inheritance selfishly extending my own life, and I'm grateful to live somewhere I still have that choice. The people of New Zealand and the Netherlands have my sympathy and I hope they one day have the same freedom of choice.
Plenty of people say that - but in my experience people often change their minds when faced with hard choices.
Fortunately in New Zealand we have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_Life_Choice_Act_2019 if you've got a terminal illness. We also have Advance Directives for making your own choices about your health should your health go South.
If you follow the fairly common path of "various expensive, intermittent medical problems for a couple decades, a handful of years of very-bad medical problems, nursing home, then hospice care" in the US, and you don't have a shitload of money, you don't really have a savings of your own, you're just temporarily taking care of the medical and end-of-life-care industries' money. There's not going to be much to pass down.
This becomes more true by the year, as those costs keep rising faster than broader inflation.
This isn’t an argument against saving. It sounds like an argument for saving more. Unless the message is to live it up while you’re young, then don’t bother treating anything when you get old… just let go.
That's one of the biggest takeaways - if you're an average American with average retirement, you will die in your 70s and 80s and your children will inherit ... just before their retirement, likely.
So instead of waiting to die, give it earlier when it helps more; or give to grandchildren.
I guess the Normans were also of Nordic descent but they had given up the Viking way of life a century before.
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