“When the Roman Empire fell, it was largely as a result of uncontrolled immigration. The empire could no longer control its borders, people came in… and Europe went into a dark ages that lasted a very long time. The point is that it can happen again”
Hrm. He seems a smart guy. This totally isn’t just a dog whistle for racist right-wingers worked up about swarthy foreign types. I wonder if the history holds up.

So, in the late 4th century, the Visigoths were running away from the Huns. (Don’t feel like this reflects badly on them. EVERYONE ran away from the Huns. Or died.) They petitioned the Roman Emperor, Valens, to give them land to settle and protection, in return for which they would help defend Rome.

Valens at first thought this was a good idea (being the later Roman Empire, so-called “barbarians” were better fighters and more technologically advanced than Rome at this point) so agreed, and the Visigoths prepared to settle in northern Dacia (what is now Romania, in Eastern Europe). But then famine broke out (a frequent occurance) and Valens decided Rome needed Dacia’s farmland for themselves, not newcomers. The Visigoths were told to go… somewhere else.

Angry at what they justifiably saw as a betrayal, the Visigoths got mad and said “nah, we’re staying, bro.” So, once again, the Roman legions made ready for war. Seven of the Empire’s finest legions, under the personal command of Valens himself, marched on the Visigoths’ encampment at Adrianople.

It… didn’t go well for the Romans. Outmaneuvered and outfought (the Visigoth’s small but decisive light cavalry a precursor to the armored knights that would rule the battlefield for the next thousand years or so), the Romans lost 75% of their forces, in the most crushing and decisive defeat Rome had suffered since Varus lost a similar number of legions in a futile march on Germany hundreds of years prior. Among the losses – Emperor Valens himself, who fell in battle leading his legions (his body was never recovered).

The Visigoths were later stopped by desperate Roman defenders on the Danube, but Rome never recovered from Adrianople, in 378. And from that point on, the Western Roman Empire was sacked and looted by invasion and invasion, until the final boy-Emperor Romulus Augustus was a mere footnote to be disposed of by the Ostrogoth king of Italy, a hundred years later.

So… the Roman Empire fell because of immigration, all right. They fell because they tried to stop it.

Now my generation dyes their hair (to hide the grey), sneers at the camera, and exhorts you to let your parents die for their stock options.

We have become evil.

TNO = The New Order, and it’s probably the second most ambitious mod for HOI4 (Kaiserreich is a close first just on sheer content). The lead developer wrote it as a visceral reaction to “wehraboo” Nazi fanboys in strategy gaming; the mod is set in 1962 after an Axis victory, and shows in rigorous detail how the inherent contradictions of fascism lead to its collapse, even after conquering half the known world. It’s really an incredible achievement just for that alone.

You are NOT going to win as Germany; your choices are the manic SS leader Heydrich (who promptly begins a nuclear war destroying the world), the bureaucratic Bormann who watches helplessly as Germany’s economy melts into slag, the amateurish Goering who figures there’s no problem that can’t be solved by MORE INVASIONS, until the money runs out, and finally, and most comprehensively, the reformer Speer who attempts to enact a Chinese-style economically rationalized “Nazism with a human face” only to fail completely as slave revolts break out and militarist holdouts fight back. No, you don’t get to do “Nazism with a human face”. Bad authoritarian, no cookie.

So, the latest update has to do with the Russian survivor states; instead of piloting Nazi Germany into the ground you can play in the wreckage of the shattered Soviet Union (one of the historical departure points being Bukharin instead of Stalin leading the USSR in the 1930s and badly losing the war – another plot point that seems intentionally designed to infuriate a certain type of Internet poster) as a Russian warlord in a Mad Max landscape. Luftwaffe terror bombers droning overhead, you raid your neighbors for food and wait for opportunities to expand. The writers went absolutely manic with the choices on display – ranging from the almost cloyingly good Valery Sablin (a naval officer who lead a mutiny against Soviet repression in our timeline) and his libertarian socialism, to a cargo cult of Nazi fanboys who think they can be real Aryans if they just try hard enough, to a literally insane monarchist, Sergey Taboritsky, who is convinced Czar Nicholas’ hemophiliac child Alexei survived the Russian Civil War and is waiting to return as a savior on the wings of angels. To pave said path to heaven, Taboritsky kills everyone in the way. With poison gas.

Gamers being who they are, Taboritsky’s doomed path became enormously popular (despite, or more probably because it is without a doubt the most tragic and evil outcome for the Russian survivor states) so the latest update adds…. 15 MORE successor states that Taboritsky’s empire shatters into after his death. Which range from desperate refugees to literal Satanists. There’s a lot here to unpack, you could say.

Anyway, it took me a while to find this update on Steam, because the old version is, uh, still there, unupdated. Apparently there was a LOT of drama involving Russophobia and transphobia and Reddit, and the mod underwent a change of ownership. I spent about 2 hours on the mod’s Reddit trying to figure out what happened and I still got nothin’.

So to save you hours of drama spelunking, here’s the link to the latest version. There’s a LOT of content here – I haven’t even touched upon the various ways the US is doomed in this mod, and you should fire off a nuclear war at least once (it breaks the entire game. Quite literally.)

The New Order – Last Days of Europe on Steam Workshop

I find this interesting as well. It’s from a wargame — “Minuteman”, by James Dunnigan, and published by SPI over 40 years ago (in 1976) about the fanciful prospect of a revolution in the US in the far distant 2020s.

The problem many Americans have with mask wearing is proof of the grocery cart dilemma – and it doesn’t speak well of us.

The grocery cart dilemma is the simplest philosophy question we run into in daily life.

To wit –

• returning a grocery cart is a simple way of helping others (the grocery workers who have to maintain the area)
• no one is watching to see if you actually do it
• there is no penalty for not doing it

It’s a simple test – are you a good person? Yes or no. Are you willing to impose a very minor inconvenience upon yourself for the greater good of others, with no reward for doing so?

Mask wearing in 2020-2021 is identical – and there are a lot of people who fail.

The same can not be said for most of Austin. There are attempts to evacuate hospitals in progress, but there are nowhere for the patients to go as pretty much every hospital is in the same situation. The lack of potable water is far more crippling than power. Austin went on a boil water notice last night and remains under one, thanks to a key water treatment plant shutting down due to lack of power. For most Austin residents it’s irrelevant as they cannot draw water, potable or otherwise, due to lack of water pressure in the system.

Grocery stores that can open are mostly sold out of everything thanks to transport being down. This will most likely persist for a while, along with the aftereffects of the water system breaking down. A city block in downtown Austin was shut down overnight thanks to a water main break and the water freezing immediately.

Basically, we are living in a third world country on the brink of total collapse, and our state leadership is utterly feckless and incompetent, reduced to running away (Cruz) or appearing on national right-wing media to nonsensically point the blame at Trump-hated wind power (Abbott). Every last one of them needs to resign but of course won’t, and every last one of them will be re-elected.

Pretty sure this is as low as it’s going to get, and as low as it’s ever gotten.

Plus: furnace is still running, keeping the house overall at 69-70.

Minus: our home office is distinctly colder.

I’m gonna start mining bitcoins just to generate some heat up in this.

Or maybe I’ll just get impotently angry at the Internet. I’ve seen one too many memes from leftists laughing it up that Texas doesn’t have snow shovels or reliable heat. I’m going to fucking go off.

Yeah, it’s goddamn HYSTERICAL that there is going to be a quantifiable death toll from this infrastructure mismanagement, which of course is completely fucking alien to New York and California. It’s a ROLY POLY BOX OF FUCKING JOLLIES that you now have an opportunity to show your classist biases safely during a natural disaster that primarily hit the poor and homeless of a state you cheer against. But by all means, don’t actually do the hard unfashionable work of connecting the dots between underfunded systems and corrupt politicians entrenched by an iron chain of gerrymandering. No, it’s MORE FUN to point and laugh at fucking DISASTER DECLARATIONS.

A lot of people are going to die. Homeless trapped outside, elderly on home health care whose oxygen gives out, infants who can’t handle two nights in a row of an unheated subzero home.

But no, just fucking LAUGH IT UP! Forward on those memes, they’re HYSTERICAL! People in red states deserve to freeze and die, am I right?

Solidarity forever MY ASS.