@eisai @11112011 @FreedoingVlad @Grandtheftautism @Senator_Armstrong @animeirl @dicey @icedquinn

> Perhaps Friedman meant how Britain dealt with immediate competitors for naval dominance.

Might be.

> …That’s not how empires think.

I do not believe this to be the case. Trade is trade.

For example, the primary source of conflict between Rome and Persia as well as China and Persia was that Persia killed direct trade between the two empires by sitting in the middle and preventing any merchants from passing through. They were happy to buy Chinese goods and sell them to Rome and vice versa, but they prevented any actual communication or direct trade, because this form of rent-seeking was lucrative for the Persian empire. That is three empires behaving differently in one example.

> If one western empire gets atop several others, or remains alone, would it seem improbable to inherit common ideas?

Certainly not even unusual to learn from history, but "This idea existed" is different from "This idea is why these people are doing this".

> Hm? Like what, for example?

Well, in addition to the stuff I listed, there's that "Reset Button" thing from years back, and the response here was that Russian is a difficult language and nobody at the State Department speaks it.

> later when Putin got rid of Western owners,

This makes perfect sense. This is plausibly personal (someone loses their business ties in Russia), whereas some historical injustice is abstract.

> Hitomi Yoshizawa. *insert Yandex joke here*

Ha, I thought that was her but I remember her looking more like someone's lesbian aunt, and I wasn't sure anyone would remember some rotating cast from that far back. (I stopped paying attention to them after Dance*Man stopped doing the music; it turns out that if you take away the fresh beats, it's just a bunch of teenage girls singing vapid songs.)
dance_man--i_am_beatmania_you_are_whatmania.mp4