31–40 of 76 posts
I think the bigger risk is internal strife. When half or your citizens hate the other half, that's a recipe for disaster.
Combined with widespread gun ownership and ethnic enclaves...
I thought historians abandoned "moral decline" arguments with the 19th century.
What I find funny about them is they're always characterized as a decline in morals particularly important to the observing historian. And of course, no empirical measure of moral decline is ever given or even suggested.
So what arguments like this really amount to are a feeling. A feeling felt by curmudgeonly historians throughout time. Nostalgia. And most likely, nostaligia for a time they themselves never inhabited. All the better because there are no negative memories to sour the nostalgia.
America in my opinion is not in moral decline. We are reaching for a moral high point actually (but just barely). But that's just my feeling, so it's about as valuable as the ideas on offer here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Combined with widespread gun ownership and ethnic enclaves...
Machetes work just as well, if that is all you have (see Rwanda). I imagine rocks and sticks could be used if your civilization has not got to the universal machete ownership level.
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> 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 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.
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Not Germany waging two world wars? Germany in 1910 was dynamic, and due to those wars they lost multiple generations and at least a third of their land. Germany recovered from that within 40 years. The Iraq war was a disaster, but there's nothing especially trying about recovering from that given time.
Germany was rebuilt from that, first through a brutal dictatorship and then, after that, with enormous assistance from the largest and strongest economies in the world, powered by a demographic boom in the richest parts of the world. And no matter how much progress has been made between 1950 and 2017, there's so little comfort in drawing a parallel between our present situation and the trajectory Germany from 1910 to…
https://infogram.com/share-of-world-gdp-throughout-history-1...
>>>1. US foreign policy over the last decades has been disastrous -- trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended on middle eastern wars, culminating in utter defeat. Lost me in the first paragraph. It hasn't been "thousands" but tens or hundreds of thousands dead. Thousands may be how many american military lives have been lost but that is certainly nowhere near the actual cost of any war. Such little assump…
> Such little assumptions belittle the value of non-american lives
...and american lives as well: I'm always surprised at how in some cultures it's considered acceptable mixing money and human lives in the same sentence as if they were somewhat comparable items.
On top of that, human lives are often listed after money, yet nobody seems to take notice of this.
"oh it's just semantics"...
To me the lynchpin is the monumental catastrophe represented by Iraq War II and the entire decades-long Middle East quagmire in general. It's been nothing short of national suicide, especially when one considers what else might have been done with all that money. We almost literally set the surplus of an entire American generation on fire and watched it burn. The neocons are the worst villains but not the only ones.…
Not only was the disaster entirely predictable, they themselves predicted it. For Gulf War I, Cheney (then Secretary of Defense) explained why they left Saddam in power - that removing him would create a power vacuum and a civil war leading to regional instability. Gulf War II - with Cheney as VP - has exactly this outcome, leading us to dump blood and money (ours and others) in the desert sands.
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Machetes work just as well, if that is all you have (see Rwanda). I imagine rocks and sticks could be used if your civilization has not got to the universal machete ownership level.
How does what happened in Vegas happen with Machetes?