Gus Haynes

Something I love about Italy and Italians is their ability to live up to the stereotypes about them. I was looking for books about how Rome survived the Second Punic War and apparently one of the best modern arguments is by Michael Fronds - he says that the issue was that there was no regional defections to Hannibal because every town and city hated the one next to it and if one went with Carthage it's competitors/neighbors would stick with Rome in the hope that it would be punished. This is called campanilismo. Over two thousand years ago and Italians already all had murderous hatred of whatever the next town over was. Incredible.

Hasan Piker hits a wall when he tries to tell a man born in the Soviet Union that Americans are just as controlled as people under communism. Konstantin Kisin shuts down the comparison and lays out the difference. When he’s done, even Piker admits he’s right. HASAN PIKER: “A lot of people think, well, as long as I can eat a Big Mac, you know, as long as I can watch TV, as long as I can consume porn [...] then, you know, things are probably fine.” “It’s a different mechanism of control that makes you think that you are actually an active participant in this.” Kisin isn’t buying it. KONSTANTIN KISIN: “The difference between those countries is not that they can’t eat a Big Mac.” “The difference is that if they criticize the government, in Russia today even, but of course in the Soviet Union previously, you’re going to get killed, right? In America, that’s not what happens, right? In America, you don’t get put in jail.” HASAN PIKER: “We don’t know yet.” That’s his whole defense: what MIGHT happen in America. So Kisin makes it personal. KONSTANTIN KISIN: “You in China or in the Soviet Union would be killed if you were critical of that regime.” HASAN PIKER: “I would definitely be jailed, for sure.” And there it is. Piker makes Kisin’s argument for him. KONSTANTIN KISIN: “So that’s the difference between these countries and America. It’s not a Big Mac, it’s freedom.” Only in a free country can you build a career telling people they aren’t free. CONTEXT: Communist regimes don’t just jail their critics. Under Stalin, the Soviet secret police executed 681,692 people in two years, by the regime’s own records. That’s more than 900 a day. Under Mao, the Great Leap Forward killed at least 45 million people in four years, per historian Frank Dikötter. Under Pol Pot, nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s population was dead within four years.

Uno chef italiano, Davide Tamburella, è stato licenziato a Brisbane, in Australia, dopo essersi rifiutato più volte di servire pizza con l'ananas, considerandola un "insulto" alla propria cultura. Avrebbe mantenuto la sua posizione anche durante un evento da circa 10.000 euro. La Fair Work Commission, il tribunale australiano competente in materia di lavoro, ha respinto il suo ricorso, confermando la decisione del ristoratore Elliot Ingram anche alla luce di altri problemi comportamentali, tra cui insulti e scatti d'ira sul lavoro. La vicenda ha inoltre compromesso la procedura per il visto 186, che consente di risiedere stabilmente in Australia grazie alla sponsorizzazione di un datore di lavoro: Tamburella dovrà ricominciare l'iter

Proving once again that the online world created by billionaires and Russian troll farms is not the real world, tonight's Warsaw protest against the far-right.