u/dovetc

By every indication, the people visiting the US for the World Cup are having a great experience. And why shouldn't they? We've got great venues, great night life in the host cities, great parks, great amenities, a friendly and welcoming populace, robust infrastructure to accommodate large events, great food... I could go on and on and the people who are visiting and sharing their experiences online have been going on and on.

Leading up to the World Cup, Redditors have been carrying on about how this World Cup would be a disaster, no one would come, no one would pay the ticket prices, everyone would fear INS/ICE/CBP, everyone would fear our "third world country with a Gucci belt" way of living. None of it has been true.

People love visiting the US and they always will. There are plenty of great places in this world worth traveling to and the US is and will always be one of the top destinations. The perfect place to host something like the World Cup or the Olympics.

I'm wondering when was the final time in history when traditional high medieval mounted knights fighting as shock cavalry were decisive in a large engagement.

Not merely heavy cavalry like the cuirassiers of the early modern era, but nobles and their retainers in plate armor with barding-clad horses.

I'm also happy to hear about later instances when they were deployed in large numbers even if only to be exposed as no longer being lords of the battlefield.

Bit of a niche opinion here, but here I go anyway.

History remembers the event when Cortez's men fought their way out of Tenochtitlan as "the sad night" because so many of the men of the expedition died in the fighting. Makes sense - the whole thing was a mess and it was certainly a rough time for everyone there on the ground.

500 years later in 2021 the Mexican government decided they don't like people being "triste" over the death of conquerors or something, so they officially rebrand the event to "the victorious night" attempting to frame the flight of the conquistadores and their battle losses as a victory.

Except that it wasn't victorious. Cortez and his men returned two months later with an army of natives at their backs and conquered the place. Victory would have meant actually stopping the conquistadores and nipping this whole thing in the bud. Your enemy escaping only to come back a couple of months later and topple your empire isn't victory. If they wanted to reframe it they could have called it "The happy night that the good guys were able to kill some of the baddies" but that doesn't roll off the tongue as well. However it does paint a more accurate picture of the events.

The whole thing speaks to the rather absurd historical conclusion that somehow the "good guys" lost - that history took a wrong turn. Except that there really were no good guys, and Mexico wouldn't exist if not for these events. It's idiotic to go back and moralize history from 500 years ago. It happened. History is a continuous chamber of horrors. It was horrific before the Spanish showed up, horrific while the conflict was raging, and horrific after.

Stop living in a fantasy world where the Aztecs are celebrated and the events surrounding their defeat were actually victories. You don't see the French celebrating the "victory" at Waterloo because they were able to kill some of the British.

For well over 1000 years most western medicine was based on this notion that health was a function of balance within the four humors. Obviously the whole thing has been debunked in the modern age, but do we know of things that pre-modern doctors were doing that modern medicine would recognize as being likely to produce a good result despite the basis being incorrect.

One example I had heard of was that in some effort to balance either the hot/cold or wet/dry aspect of a person's humors there was a treatment to boil a horseshoe in wine then drink the wine. The premise was false, but the effect would have been to partially help correct an iron deficiency which has actual medical value in some cases.

A court in Texas just sentenced this guy to death for the murder (among other things) of a 7 year old girl. Dead to rights. Caught on camera. Admitted it. A more evil act you will never imagine.

And yet I see people commenting on the case trying to square their anti-death penalty principles with the undeniable truth that justice demands this monster die and soon.

If you can't recognize that justice demands the harshest possible measures that society is capable of mustering for one such as this then there's something seriously not right with your moral compass.

The fact that he's still polluting the Earth with his presence in 2026 for a crime we had him dead to rights on back in 2022 is already an incredible miscarriage of justice.

It's okay to have the nuanced position that you are broadly against the use of the death penalty but recognize situations where it is appropriate, right, and good.