Yes the US is uniquely fucked, really. At least the previous global hegemon fought two world wars to lose its place. The US is basically committing geopolitical suicide at the top of its powers because of gender neutral toilets and the price of eggs. A rather pathetic country and people, sadly.
The British Empire was not inflitrated and was not pursuing policies that prioritized another entity's interests. > powers because of gender neutral toilets and the price of eggs. A rather pathetic country and people, sadly. What is sad imo is thinking that the above the actual reason for the shenanigans. US has been unlike itself since 9/11. Everything changed.
Then share the reasons. We are witnessing the end of the era of American global dominance. The four years of Biden were but a reprieve. Trump 2.0 is here to finish the job and end it all once and for all. The American Experiment has failed.
Comparing this to the current situation in America, both Hitler and Musk/Trump largely said what they wanted to do before hand: >Mein Kampf, in essence, lays out the ideological program Hitler established... Hitler's revolutionary goals included expulsion of the Jews, and the unification of German peoples into one Greater Germany. Hitler desired to restore German lands to their greatest historical extent, real or ima…
Maybe that was lost in all the other noise domestically but in international news the extremist was quoted musing about annexing Panama, Canada, and Greenland. And recently Gaza? Not sure about Mexico.
We all saw the Nazi salutes with our own eyes, the man and his ex girlfriend both follow and interact with avowed white supremacists and Nazis on his own platform. The lie is coming from Musk and his cult of supporters.
> We all saw the Nazi salutes with our own eyes You all decided to interpret his gesture as the nazi salute. Big difference.
Yes when he did not comment afterwards that it wasn't a Nazi salute, I decided to interpret it as one. It's not something that happened in isolation.
I allow for the possibility that in the moment he didn't mean for it to be that salute. Now if he's too weak to clarify it wasn't? Then he did a Nazi salute in all ways that count. Being an accidental Nazi is very much on topic for the text we're commenting on.
Do not overlook the largest player in this game, who is not "for-profit", well not directly, they are pure "for-power" players. That player is religion, primarily the manipulating faiths of Christian and Muslim religion, which is at the seat and center of anti-intellectualism.
Is this still true as it used to be? I of course see what you refer to, but I also know many highly intelligent and culturally literate people who are devout muslims and christians. Furthermore a lot of anti-intellectualism today is secular: flat earthers, people who call sugar "basically poison", anti-vaxxers, etc. I think this comes from a very different place: these theories/viewpoints distract people with a feeli…
I believe it is more subtle, it is the effect of intolerance, in general, on the education system, which appears most often from religious perspectives. This is multiplied by a generalized impressment of obedience to adults and authority in school aged children. Children are taught that certain thoughts and lines of reasoning are sinful to the degree they face damnation, which to many imaginative young minds equates to a terror brainwashing where they become afraid to think, crippling their critical analysis before it can develop. They are rendered old children with childlike understandings of life's unanswerable questions, which they get answered by their faith. They never develop working secondary considerations, and are gullible because of it. Such people are perfectly capable of becoming research scientists, doctors, even attorneys, because we have an incredible compartmentalism capability. As you point out they are incapable in interpreting media, and why would they? It's not their specialization. They can apply critical analysis and secondary considerations within their career, because it was hammered into them in that compartmentalization, but it is not innate to them, they are not natural critical thinkers. So politics using indirect language and wolf whistling Nazi signals is just right over their heads, they will argue with you how their candidate never says racist anything.
You are clearly saying it's acceptable for Israel to respond to the pogrom on their citizens.
Can you clarify whether or not it's also acceptable for Palestine to respond to the pogrom on their citizens? Is this a privilege that every country gets, or just Israel?
And does the amount of acceptable response scale in proportion to the amount of citizens killed in the pogrom?
The text itself is thought-provoking and worth a read.
One takeaway is that it's easy to get lost in the churn; not as a society to take action when it's easier for each individual to mind their own business. And let society be torn apart. Is this what is happening now?
"The Germans" is an absolutely jaw dropping read, a series of interviews with average German citizens and low-level nazi party members, conducted a decade or so after the war, by an American Jewish journalist. It shows, in first hand accounts, the banality of evil and how easily it can prevail if people do nothing. It is an account of modern tyranny and everyday collaboration. The parallels in the feeling of what's h…
i don't even want to give people that benefit at this point. used to think that it was education, circumstances, outside forces, culture, etc. like "if only" we had XYZ then we can prevent this. at this point i just want to call it "stupidity". not even a left vs right thing. there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things wo…
This sentiment is exactly what David Lynch explores over, and over, and over:
Why are some people willing to be so evil.
I think we tell ourselves it’s environment or inequity or education… but the older I get, the more I think there is a kind of lack of conscientiousness that most people have, and that they are decent folks is only that they have something to lose.
Unless a theory can explain the prevalence of litter, which should effectively never happen based on most criteria, than that theory of why bad things happen is insufficient.
> so that US is less likely to engage militarily with whatever conflict happens in those coutries eventually Or you know, we can stop getting into wars? Did our adventures in the middle east advance US interests? > It's part of being a global hagemony It's called overextension and almost every historical power declined due to internal rot coupled by continuously getting into conflicts, which, wouldn't you know, drain…
>>Or you know, we can stop getting into wars? Ah yes, "just stop". I mean, but all means - please do. >> Did our adventures in the middle east advance US interests? They made a few american corporations extremely rich and justified balooning the military expenditure. Whether that's in US interests or not - you decide. >>It's called overextension It's part of projecting your might as a superpower. The same reason why…
> because it's explicitly in American interests to do so
Please elaborate, and be precise because every interventionist argument is like, "but our trading partners, but our allies" but always fails to link exactly how that improves the lives of Americans. So tell me exactly what we are afraid of. If its trade tell me exactly what the comparative advantage is or what the resource we need is. And if its defense, tell me exactly what the threat vectors are, not just, "the island chains".
We've doing truly stupid things in the name of bullshit concepts like "containment" which led us into Vietnam, or "stabilizing the region" which led us into the middle east.
We can start with the Burmese scholarships that gives 300k per student; please tell me exactly what the American interests are.
> so that US is less likely to engage militarily with whatever conflict happens in those coutries eventually Or you know, we can stop getting into wars? Did our adventures in the middle east advance US interests? > It's part of being a global hagemony It's called overextension and almost every historical power declined due to internal rot coupled by continuously getting into conflicts, which, wouldn't you know, drain…
Hey, if I told you I happened to be an expert in this field, hypothetically, and I said this was a vast oversimplificaiton, would you be willing to listen to an expert? Or do you not trust experts at this point time?
I'm pretty open minded so if you have a detailed answer, I would love to hear it. Just to be clear, I'm not a fan of hand wavy answers around like "stabilizing" or "soft power" because I feel like vague language masquerades corruption and misuse of funds. What I want to know are the direct causal links between our money and our interests.
> there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work I'm sceptical of that. I tend to suspect that Michael Gove's "the people have had enough of experts" thing was _kind_ of correct; there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout, at least, the West at the moment. (I don't think this is quite the same as traditiona…
Fwiw, my experience from growing up in deep red America was that anti-intellectualism was staggeringly strong there. People would actually define their beliefs in opposition to those of people they perceived to be 'smart'. The way that I always understood this was that if they had a disagreement with someone 'smarter' than them, and they operated in good faith, they would lose ~98% of the time. This doesn't feel good…
I'm in a red state and I hard disagree with your generalizations. Even in red red red states Kamilla got 30%-40% of the vote. Trump got 40% in California.