First of all, it’s beautiful you want to remember your late historian friend by learning more history. Kudos!
The fall of Rome is a deeply fascinating topic and it doesn’t disappoint in scale, complexity and nuance. Even the house-in-disrepair analogy doesn’t necessarily work, because in many places no one ever even realised something had fallen - though in other places they surely did. In 476 CE, typically the date we use for the fall of the western empire, no one at the time thought anything was more substantially wrong than anything that had happened over the preceding 200 or so years.
This podcast, also by an historian with a PhD on the topic of the fall, delves into all of it. The literature, the archeology, from the large political structures to the lives of individuals. Highly recommended, again.
Not sure what you mean by ‘this stupid’, but in general: no. It was a complex process that unfolded over centuries and in different places in different ways and at different speeds. The reasons were economic, political, climatic, cultural and military.
Phrasing matters. The US didn’t ‘get left behind’, it chose to be backward.
Others advertised loud and clear they were pulling ahead; the US slammed the brakes. Consciously and rationally. Others invited the US to lead or at least just join. Nope.
The US is too busy pulling itself apart. Power to you my friends, but the world is moving on. Without you. It will take pain and time, but we will.
In the meantime, please forgo passive aggressive phrasing like ‘getting left behind’. It’s not being done to you, it’s your own choosing.
Centrist Democrat leaders like Jeffries and Schumer are spending this moment emphasizing that the shutdown is Trump’s fault because he was inflexible about negotiating. Meanwhile, left-wing leaders like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are emphasizing that it’s already a moral obscenity that America doesn’t guarantee health care to all its people as a right, and they’ll be damned if they vote for anything that will make our health care system even more cruel than it already is.
Not really. Pharma doesn’t lower prices elsewhere because the US market is basically an all-you-can-earn bonanza. Prices elsewhere are lower because there prices are heavily regulated. They can’t just charge what they want there, nor can they just jack up prices whenever they feel like it
Also squirrel