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Gaul would probably get some strong cultural overlaps with Germanic people, and, due to the climactic shifts, would probably still get hit by heavy disruptions. Constantinople OTOH, is the cultural center with Greece nearby, is heavily defended and has access to both Crimean and Egyptian wheat...

I don't believe XVI was actually dumb. I was listening to a video about his naval policy and that was fairly solid. Just, very naïve on love making...

Og Oh no worries, I fully believe you, especially since this is a fairly well known thing, although I didn't know he was penetrating her and not doing anything afterwards. I thought he just didn't know where to put it. Somehow it makes it even worse. I mean, sorry to be crude, but did he...

If this were a TL you'd have been flat banned from the forum for writing such stupid trash as a king of France not knowing how to have sex. This is simply insane.

First off, very interesting analysis. Second, I'm starting to think it's not that XVI was a bad king, his foreign policy was hardly bad. However he was coming after a TERRIBLE king. The real culprit is XV here. Dupleix was the architect of European power in India with his system of local troups...

I mean, if you're a Capet, anything good to fuck with the Habsbourg

So, it's interesting to see what was happening in the French overseas interest at the time! Specifically, the Vietnamese dynasty had been dethroned. The claimant, future Gia Long, got the help of a French missionary, Pigneau de Behaine, who presented his case to the king. It didn't go through...

It'd be interesting, all other things being equal, to have a French claim, however vague, when Sebastián dies in 1578. It'd be an interesting theater of war against Philipp II

That's a very interesting analysis, also a good analysis as to why feudalism took up in the west. A great victory would restore trust, especially if Venice then falls. With some nice diplomatic skills, you could get Venice destroyed as an example

Especially since it didn't need dysentery, just for Dandolo to be less of a badass or to slip and break his pelvis. He was 90 and blind after all. On top of that, Romania would be on better terms with the Pope who was really against the Crusade in the first place Yup, even without "the...

Don't think I agree, there were many times where the Empire seemed doomed. Justinian plague, the Muslim conquest... And yet it bounced back to live another day

Hi folks, So I'm reading "City of Fortune" by Roger Crowley, and I cannot recommend it enough. I love this historian, and he writes so well. But anyway. It's about the rise of Venice and the pivotal role of the sack of 1204. Now, reading his book, it seems like the sack of Constantinople was...

IOTL was a bit short, but we do find examples in France's empire. The most obvious being Gabon which voted to remain French in the 1950's. You also have more individual example like Leopold Senghor, and that's not even taking people from the first Empire, like the bunch of French politicians...

I will point out there's an exploration of this in the book Fatherland. The author posits knowledge of it would be suppressed and a State Secret. I can see it becoming another conspiracy theory

I feel like at this point, he didn't have a real claim to much as a Bourbon had been restored anyway. Could he end up with even less? The 100 Days showed Napoléon was still dangerous, so might be logical to try and mollify his son in law

Life better and safer are two different things, both distinct from GDP per capita. All I'm saying here is that the field of economy, which I've studied, is, at its very core, a battle of ideology. A technocracy would crash on this, it is not possible to be objective and there is no best...

How do you solve the trolley problem then?

Saying GDP per capita is a goal is already EXTREMELY politically biased. And I know math, thank you for asking, but trickle down economics and the classical model both have equations but do not work in real life. It's nice to have your macro economic models, but they are underpinned by ideology...

Come to Europe then ;) Joke aside, France is close enough to a technocracy. We have the ENA, which trains all high level public servant (Prefects, ambassadors...) and most of the elite comes from this or other state schools (Polytechnique or Science Po). So all elites are run through a similar...

Indeed! Also, arking back to "Economy is a hard science". That's utter bullshit. Economy is a soft science, with lots in common with philosophy, that just parades as hard with tons of non sense equations (on the theoretical side anyway). For example, say we can devise a "most efficient" model...