291–300 of 545 posts
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Apart from the Suez crisis and the Rhodesian embargo was there any serious British attempt to maintain the empire after the second World War?
Mau Mau, Malaya, Kenya
There was no effort to keep either Kenya or Malaysia as British. In Malaysia, the war continued after independence.
I’ve read the book. It’s genuinely interesting. It’s very interesting to see how people misremember the post-war years. It also contains a) passages that are very much quoted out of context and b) an awful lot of stuff about “national character” that is… questionable. I highly recommend actually reading it and understanding what it is and isn’t. Mostly I learned that there’s no simple answers, but also that people an…
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The number of different national and international situations that get compared to Nazi Germany seems to reflect a paucity of historical imagination and desire to collapse every conflict into an manichaean analogy with modern civilization's foundational battle of good vs. evil. It might make at least as much sense to compare to Erdoğan's Turkey, Orban's Hungary, Syria's Assad and al-Julani, Chile with Allende and Pin…
Some of it reminds me of the CCP, which I think is openly considered a model by some neo-authoritarians. Ubiquitous mass surveillance, social credit, and state capitalism with heavy control though regulatory pressure. I assume we will eventually see party men installed on boards of major companies, especially in media, tech, and entertainment. The “tech right” is a major player here and a lot of those folks idolize C…
>Why did everyone across the entire political spectrum abandon individualism in the 20-teens
IMO they didn't - at least not explicitly. Individualism has been somewhat illusionary since the progressive era it is just finally coming home to roost. What happened is that the internet finally out ran the ability of the traditional media consensus methods at the national level as the internet generation aged in. So we are sort of in unknown territory where it is not clear any "expert" can play the designated role to drive the consensus required in the neoliberal system.
Where to go from there is an open question but her thesis is that the neoliberal system needs to be adapted in someway. Anyway that is largely the picture of the problem she paints. I'm not doing it justice but it is worth a read to at least place a lot of the problems people are observing in a mental and historical framework.
I think a good step is moving towards federating into smaller communities. The best of those ideas will get adopted by other communities. Basically the fediverse model applied to society. People already have this feeling intuitively and it is playing out with the push back against globalization.
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Excerpts from this have popped up in Reddit comments quite a bit the last few years. At first it did feel out of place, but now I'm going going back and listening to Dan Carlin talk about the headspace of society before something like Nazi Germany happens. With all the Executive Orders and lawlessness from the Executive Branch and throughout our federal government with this new regime, it's pretty clear they're attem…
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Stop paying that much attention to people, they mostly do not matter. Think instead about the circumstances.
What matter is that the USA in 2025 is not Germany of 100 years ago, today economics is not the same as the great depression, there is no threatening civil unrest due to a massive neighboring country which just went through a social revolution, nor due to decomposing colonial empires.
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Excerpts from this have popped up in Reddit comments quite a bit the last few years. At first it did feel out of place, but now I'm going going back and listening to Dan Carlin talk about the headspace of society before something like Nazi Germany happens. With all the Executive Orders and lawlessness from the Executive Branch and throughout our federal government with this new regime, it's pretty clear they're attem…
The number of different national and international situations that get compared to Nazi Germany seems to reflect a paucity of historical imagination and desire to collapse every conflict into an manichaean analogy with modern civilization's foundational battle of good vs. evil. It might make at least as much sense to compare to Erdoğan's Turkey, Orban's Hungary, Syria's Assad and al-Julani, Chile with Allende and Pin…
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Excerpts from this have popped up in Reddit comments quite a bit the last few years. At first it did feel out of place, but now I'm going going back and listening to Dan Carlin talk about the headspace of society before something like Nazi Germany happens. With all the Executive Orders and lawlessness from the Executive Branch and throughout our federal government with this new regime, it's pretty clear they're attem…
Wasnt Germany better off in the decades following WW2 than the British that defeated them?
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This line of reason is actually becoming more frequently used to justify things. For years, the right wing propaganda machine has been establishing the concept that conservatism and America as a whole is besieged by authoritarian leftists and their smug out-of-outch enablers the liberals. THEY are the authoritarians and they are seeking to destroy America. WE are its defenders, and in the face of existential threat,…
Are you just going to ignore the 2016-2024 state-directed viewpoint censorship on social media?
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> and who knows what it will look like if we have some kind of civil war out of this. I don't understand mentions of "civil war" in the public lately (there's even a Hollywood movie about it). There is only one party controlling the armed forces. I also doubt that any high-ranking officers would take the troops they command out of the command structure and then even order them to attack the government and other troop…
> Armed civilians with their puny little guns and little organization are right out as soon as any part of the military joins a fight In the 1940s, the DoD published a field manual on how folk with "puny little guns" - or no guns at all - can fight.
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I think the reality of what has gone on has several faces which are all worth thinking about: 1. A group of people that want to be different without harming anyone and be left alone 2. A group of people demanding certain specific and new legal rights with respect to how they are different 3. A group of people advocating for new social and linguistic norms around said difference 3. A group of people socially shaming p…
Given the overall rancor around topics like this, I feel it’s necessary to say I’m approaching this as a discussion, and am open to evidence that I’m wrong. In my opinion your item 2 is mostly a conflation of “people want to enjoy the same rights that others have enjoyed” and a recognition that “separate but equal” doesn’t actually work. A prime example is gay marriage, where we went from “don’t ask don’t tell” to a…
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Well, I think you did a pretty good job of describing the resources that they are consolidating into that one party that controls the military. For now it's just the National Guard going into cities, but didn't they float the idea of sending Marines to LA? There's so much it's impossible to keep track of what's actually going on. I've always been of the idea that 100 guys with guns gets wiped out with 1 bomb nowadays…
He already sent active duty marines to Los Angeles, and it was ruled illegal by a judge (after the fact) but it doesn't matter because no one with any real power cares what laws or judges say: https://time.com/7313929/trump-national-guard-la-los-angeles...
