91–100 of 252 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We hit Hitler comparisons fast on this thread, eh god forbid people bring up hitler in a thread about history/world politics In fact, let's just scrub history of any references to Germany so we can make internet threads marginally less annoying
You probably know as well as I do that Godwin's law is almost as old as the internet itself.
It will be interesting to see how the next 400 years will go. For a long time the US could just keep growing into new territories and absorb a lot of ambitious immigrants that way. It seems this phase is over. The US is now a grown up country where everything is owned already so it will be much harder to grow. The Trump success seems a symptom of this. Instead of just growing as the US had always done Trump's message…
Your premise isn't very well supported by the facts. The US added $5 trillion to its GDP in the last ten years, despite the great recession - a time in which the most powerful economies of Europe didn't grow at all, nor did Japan. US wages routinely grow three to five times faster than those in Japan, Germany, France or Britain. Where's the lack of growth? GDP per capita went from $46,000x to $57,000x over those ten…
Edit: Based on this the US is not really outperforming: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-europe-outperf...
When will this myth stop? Until the UK has left, the EU is the biggest economy in the world, not the US. Edit: damn, hit a painful nerve here apparently. For the tired old '28 countries vs 1 country', America its states and the EU its countries are very comparable in economic size.
Strange so much arguing with no data presented or sourced. IMF US 18.6 EU 16.4 China 11.2 World Bank US 18.6 EU 16.4 China 11.2 UN US 18.0 EU 16.8 China 11.2 All figures nominal GDP, US$, trillions, 2016, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... __ Things are a bit different when switching to PPP though. IMF (2017) China 23.2 EU 20.9 US 19.4 World Bank (2016) China 21.4 EU 19.7 US 18.6 CIA…
China: 1.4 billion
EU: 743 million
US: 323 million
Stop calling it america, it's north america..
Hey can someone explain this position? You see it a lot on the internet - we all know it's just short for the mouthful of "The United States of America", right? Is it just garden variety anti-Americanism, or is it based on something else? You also see the form "American means anyone from both continents," which is off in exactly the same way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You probably know as well as I do that Godwin's law is almost as old as the internet itself.
Hackneyed phrases are as old as time, kid; doesn't mean you have a point.
Let's call it as it is, an entire continent was usurped, a gigantic fertile landmass rich in resources was stolen along with unlimited slave labour and IP from Europe. The consequence is predictable. Using jingoism to spin this into some sort of exceptionalism celebrates the loot and plunder without a hint of self consciousness or remorse, and cements a barbaric ideology that fuels more indiscriminate global plunder…
The sweet smell of presentism. You can perhaps fault the US for the interlude between British outlawing of slavery and the civil war/abolition, which covers a few decades. But you can't seriously claim that slavery wasn't the global norm in the 17th and 18th centuries. It certainly wasn't "unlimited." Onto the next bit, "stolen...IP from Europe" is a modern characterization of what was in fact a healthy exchange of r…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
It took a long time, and a lot of treaties and individual countries to act to abolish slavery.
Let's call it as it is, an entire continent was usurped, a gigantic fertile landmass rich in resources was stolen along with unlimited slave labour and IP from Europe. The consequence is predictable. Using jingoism to spin this into some sort of exceptionalism celebrates the loot and plunder without a hint of self consciousness or remorse, and cements a barbaric ideology that fuels more indiscriminate global plunder…
Slavery actually held the USA back. It kept the south rural, whereas the north was far wealthier without slaves because it industrialized. Furthermore, the civil war was incredibly destructive and without slavery would not have occurred. Lastly the USA was not the biggest economy in 1850. As for a “usurped continent”, the land was very sparsely populated by the natives compared to the people who came in, and disease…
By that argument, it's just not right to say that multi-millionaires should control so much wealth just because they were born into privileged conditions. Wouldn't fairness require a forced redistribution of those resources?
Let's call it as it is, an entire continent was usurped, a gigantic fertile landmass rich in resources was stolen along with unlimited slave labour and IP from Europe. The consequence is predictable. Using jingoism to spin this into some sort of exceptionalism celebrates the loot and plunder without a hint of self consciousness or remorse, and cements a barbaric ideology that fuels more indiscriminate global plunder…
Slavery actually held the USA back. It kept the south rural, whereas the north was far wealthier without slaves because it industrialized. Furthermore, the civil war was incredibly destructive and without slavery would not have occurred. Lastly the USA was not the biggest economy in 1850. As for a “usurped continent”, the land was very sparsely populated by the natives compared to the people who came in, and disease…
According to your logic integrating successfully into a different society and culture, is the same as arriving with superior weaponry and slaughtering the natives over 149 years. (1775-1924)
Your attempt at comparison and equivalence is pitiful and cruel.
Let's call it as it is, an entire continent was usurped, a gigantic fertile landmass rich in resources was stolen along with unlimited slave labour and IP from Europe. The consequence is predictable. Using jingoism to spin this into some sort of exceptionalism celebrates the loot and plunder without a hint of self consciousness or remorse, and cements a barbaric ideology that fuels more indiscriminate global plunder…
The sweet smell of presentism. You can perhaps fault the US for the interlude between British outlawing of slavery and the civil war/abolition, which covers a few decades. But you can't seriously claim that slavery wasn't the global norm in the 17th and 18th centuries. It certainly wasn't "unlimited." Onto the next bit, "stolen...IP from Europe" is a modern characterization of what was in fact a healthy exchange of r…
(Referring to parent of this comment chain.) Something Zizek himself says is evil is not what makes bad people do bad things, but instead what makes good people do bad things. People doing something 'evil' will typically be distressed about it personally. But they would always see it like "I must be fully willing to destroy my own humanity so that I can protect the humanity of my people". They preserve their efficiency and ruthlessness in spite of the further fragmentation of their psyche and conscience.
Brutality relies upon limiting the aesthetic dissonance between the aesthetics of the greater good and the ugliness of violence.
> "In early 20th-century France, the Nobel laureate Romain Rolland declared [Beethoven's Ode To Joy] to be the great humanist ode to the brotherhood of all people, and it came to be called “the Marseillaise of humanity.” In 1938, it was performed as the high point of the Reichsmusiktage, the Nazi music festival, and was later used to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. In China during the Cultural Revolution, in an atmosphere of total rejection of European classics, it was redeemed by some as a piece of progressive class struggle.
> In the 1950s and ’60s, when the West German and East German Olympic squads were forced to compete as a single team, gold medals were handed out to the strains of the “Ode to Joy” in lieu of a national anthem. It served as the anthem, too, for the Rhodesian white supremacist regime of Ian Smith. One can imagine a fictional performance at which all sworn enemies — Hitler and Stalin, Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush — for a moment forget their adversities and participate in the same magic moment of ecstatic musical brotherhood." [0]
But what is there even to conclude from this?
Suppose we are 100% aware that we actively cause harm to people but our moral calculus says we must do it because it is for "the greater good". The more we are uncertain about the uncertainty of net social gain, the more we have reason to avoid doing it.
But this is the opposite of the commonly held belief. People say "we can't judge the people in the past, it's too easy to be certain an idea that was defeated was evil when looking from the future. Before it was defeated they could not have known that the pain they (knew they) were causing for the sake of helping out their own people, wouldn't have triumphed and raised real total benefit instead -- so that it hypothetically was moral".
Here I disagree vehemently. We must, in the strongest terms, condemn any rationalization of the actions of a gambler who bets he'll reach the greater good if he puts his children up for collateral.
edit: forgot link
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/opinion/24zizek.html?mcubz...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't really explain Argentina to nearly the same degree as e.g. Brazil-/which The Economist has written about at length over the past couple of years.
Argentina is a great place for ranching and certain crops, but it has very little mineral wealth. I would hazard that the two most likely reasons for South America's slow progress are that its colonies were attached to ailing empires, and that a rugged and challenging geography made unification difficult to unimaginable. American history has no analog to the horrific War of Triple Alliance, a historical microcosm of…