Nobody mentions the amount of diversity present in America when compared to other homegeneous cultures like China. You will lose if you bet against diversity!
Remarks on the Decline of American Empire
71–76 of 76 posts
Re: Remarks on the Decline of American Empire
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
One hopes neoconservatism is good and dead. It was an ambitious ideology which presumed everyone in the world shared western values or wanted them. I think the American public tired of this neocon hawkishness and I'm hopeful we see a change in our foreign policy.
> One hopes neoconservatism is good and dead. It was an ambitious ideology which presumed everyone in the world shared western values or wanted them. I dunno, seemed to last well into Obama's tenure in practice if not in rhetoric, from what I can tell, and Syria may well be a bigger disaster than Afghanistan and Iraq combined by any measure, including realpolitik (see: its effects on European politics, maybe also on…
Syria is a huge mess, but the U.S. isn't the one paying most of the costs there (for good or ill). It's closer to the proxy wars great powers fight all of the time while the U.S. was and is on the front lines for Iraq and Afghanistan.
Most of the U.S. response has been to ISIS in Iraq, which is winding down but can be seen more as more fallout from the Iraq war than anything else.
Re: Remarks on the Decline of American Empire
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Syria is inseparable from Iraq (it's ISIS for a reason) and almost certainly would not have happened, and happened at the scale it did if it wasn't for Iraq.
Sure, but Syria would have burnt out before that got started if we hadn't half-assedly propped up the opposition, just enough to ensure they couldn't be defeated but not enough to actually make them win. Year after year. Iraq was really bad and contributed to all this significantly, but in no way did it force us to turn the brief fire in Syria into a years-persisting human misery factory and radicalization engine of…
We don't actually know that. From what I've seen, the Syrian government faction was maybe a third of the fighting force, but they had air power and the other factions were never able to unite for various reasons. The arms from the U.S. didn't make that much difference, and the war dragged on because the government didn't have a good way to end it without losing alot of soldiers in the cities (and massacring even more civilians). That left siege warfare and massive bombing as their only options, and both of those are slow and ineffective.
Re: Remarks on the Decline of American Empire
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s you’re point? Do you point out that the BBC is owned/paid by the British government when someone posts BBC? (or NPR for that matter)
I guess that depends on how much you trust a government news source when that government is headed by a guy that murders journalists that disagree with him.
What a load of self rightous BS.
The russkies are pricks. So are we.
Re: Remarks on the Decline of American Empire
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s you’re point? Do you point out that the BBC is owned/paid by the British government when someone posts BBC? (or NPR for that matter)
They’re very different. The BBC is an independent organization funded directly by license fees paid by television owners. Unlike RT, it is independent from direct government intervention, and it doesn’t attempt to advance the interests whichever party is in power. The BBC primarily exists to serve people living in Britain. RT is directly funded by the Russian government, and is targeted primarily at other countries o…
Jee, here I thought the World Service (the only BBC I can get) was targeted at me :S
Radio liberty was forbidden from transmitting in the US by Congress.
Re: Remarks on the Decline of American Empire
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s you’re point? Do you point out that the BBC is owned/paid by the British government when someone posts BBC? (or NPR for that matter)
In the context of a nation the UK had an adversarial relationship with, yes, that would be a prudent thing to point out.
Every day I drive through the counties that handed Trump his victory. Trust me the decline is real.
Must be nice to worry about the messenger. I’ll worry about the toxins DuPont dumped in the local water or the lead leeching from my tap.
But hey, I can afford to boil pasta with bottled water, so who cares?