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Notes -
If in 1814 you told a Russian soldier marching through the streets of Paris, or a French Senator signing the Acte de déchéance de l'Empereur, that 150 years hence half of Europe would be governed from Moscow, they might have find it quite conceivable. The history of the Russian Empire for decades prior had been one of constant expansion, and now they had defeated the most powerful empire in Europe. If in 1990 you told a white South African that 30 years of black rule would lead quickly to the abandonment of Mandela's professed principles, and their replacement by anarchy, national deterioration, and the codification of discrimination against non-black citizens, this too would have been quite conceivable - he had plenty of examples on the continent to consider.
These appeals to nuance and caution tend very often to be recipes for paralysis and the suspension of critical thinking, usually with the aim of avoiding drawing conclusions about the future that the appellant finds unsavory. Yes, certain radical events are impossible to predict. But it's futile to assume that some radical event is bound to happen that will make all future extrapolations suspect. Very often you can make reasonable predictions of what's going to happen in the future because you have decades or centuries of data regarding geopolitical conditions and human behavior to draw from, and I think those predictions are usually true. Obviously it gets shakier the further out into the future you go (I will never make any claims about what America is going to look like 200 years hence), but political arguments for a paltry few years or a couple of decades are perfectly fine.
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