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They're the double dragons of white dudes who view the globe as a chessboard. They're both massively influential in "lets play post-colonial imperialism games."
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Jul 27, 2018 05:32
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CountFosco posted:I honestly think that Kissinger genuinely believes in Mackinder's "world island" theory of geopolitics, and that a Russian-Chinese alliance would command the "heartland" and thus command the "world island." Such geographical determinism is utter nonsense, of course, but it's a nonsense that's shaped diplomacy for more than a hundred years now. CountFosco posted:If you think that Mackinder has no real influence on American foreign policy, consider the way that Zbigniew Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard" is summarized: "Regarding the landmass of Eurasia as the center of global power, Brzezinski sets out to formulate a Eurasian geostrategy for the United States. In particular, he writes, it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger should emerge capable of dominating Eurasia and thus also of challenging America's global pre-eminence." being an international relations person must be so much fun you get to make up crazy and ridiculous stories all day and people will believe they're real
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Jul 27, 2018 08:15
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sea power is really important for being a global power though. but having lots of sea power mostly means having a ton of resources to burn on a navy and large merchant marine, and having those resources would make you a global power anyway
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Jul 27, 2018 09:20
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Chinatown posted:Evil. Prevails. 
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Jul 27, 2018 12:16
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The Playboy of the Western Wing  
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Jul 27, 2018 12:19
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He’s gonna outlive us all OP
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Jul 27, 2018 14:19
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Larry Parrish posted:sea power is really important for being a global power though. but having lots of sea power mostly means having a ton of resources to burn on a navy and large merchant marine, and having those resources would make you a global power anyway It's important to note that the resources necessary for sea power have shifted over time. In the age of sail, global sea power literally ran on renewable energy, i.e. the wind. Now, it's important to note that to harness this power you had to have a large crew, and you had to logistically support this human-power with food and water, but in this era the most important resource was high-quality timber. Without the large amounts of timber available from northern Spain (https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article/17/1/116/423962) their trans-atlantic fleets would never have been possible. England may not have benefited from the non-existent gold of their north american colonies, but they most certainly did benefit from the very tall, straight pines which were well-suited for tall ships. The invention of the steam engine, of course, changed things entirely; Britain's fortuitous and plentiful coal deposits allowed them to transition from sail-based sea power to coal-based sea power more effectively than their competitors. Should the peak-oil guys prove correct, and we literally run out of oil, it seems more likely to me that we'll return to an era of sail than to a sort of mad max dystopia.
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Jul 27, 2018 15:31
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It's also important to note the economics driving these foreign relations theories. We hardly talk about mercantilism today, but mercantilism was real, and we ignore it's influence at our own peril. In an era before cheap oil, the transfer of resources, whether unrefined commodities or manufactured goods, was far more expensive than it is today, and tariffs added to this cost. I believe that this cost cultivated in the european mercantile class a desire for economic autarky, or in other words resource self-reliance. In a theoretically pure economic autarky, all of the resources necessary for the economy to function are contained within the state, allowing the mercantile class to ignore tariffs and retain more value for themselves (tariffs are a defacto sales tax). However, no country on Earth contains within it all of the diverse resources necessary for the sort self-reliance and lowered tariffs that autarkists crave. Thus, the British Empire expanded across the known world, as much driven by the pursuit of wealth as for ideological reasons of the white man's burden or the desire to paint the map with British sovereignty. An African nation under colonial rule would not have the agency to demand higher prices for the goods that the English desire, and thus the African peoples were made to be under colonial rule. A similar drive for autarky motivated the concept of "lebensraum" during the Nazi era. The propaganda claimed that the motivation was for wholesome Aryan families running wholesome Aryan farms in a more wholesome way than the degenerate slavs, but make no mistake, the primary motivating factor were the soviet oil resources which necessitated that oil-starved Germany had to be dependent upon foreign powers.
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Jul 27, 2018 15:48
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Peak oil now that's a blast from the past. It was all the rage 6 or 7 years ago I guess it turned out to be bunk (for now).
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Jul 27, 2018 15:55
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All neoliberals believe in free trade and global institutions. Do you understand why this is? It is to perpetuate the entrenched power of the developed west against the developing world, through a financial system which systematically devalues resources by denying African, South American, and Asian countries the ability to demand a fair price for the resources which they have. Neoliberals are tied to the libertarian wing of modern conservatism through their relentless advocacy of free trade, a rhetoric which disguises the fact that free trade has tremendous costs for the developing world. And they absolve their underlying guilt by making a special effort to buy "fair trade" coffee while meanwhile ignoring the reality that there is no "fair trade" movement for such fundamental resources as rare earth metals, timber, etc.
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Jul 27, 2018 15:56
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the desire for 'lebensraum' was more complicated than that. it wasn't for the acquisition for scarce resources. it's 2 goals were:
rudatron has issued a correction as of 16:18 on Jul 27, 2018 |
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Jul 27, 2018 16:05
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The Ol Spicy Keychain posted:Peak oil now that's a blast from the past. It was all the rage 6 or 7 years ago I guess it turned out to be bunk (for now). Peak oil comes from a certain Malthusian mindset, and like all Malthusian prophecies it made a certain amount of sense given that we know that we live on a planet of finite resources, while at the same time the hedonistic treadmill which we are on seems to demand endless growth of demand for such finite resources. However, they clearly underestimated both the amount of undiscovered oil that there existed in this finite planet, and the ability for societies to adopt in a widespread manner higher-efficiency policies which would help soften the edge of our demand for energy resources. The underlying premise of peak oil, the fact that we live in a world of finite resources (save for the energy we receive from the sun or the gravitational effect of the moon) remains true. However the peak oil zealots were too reductive, focusing on this one truth while ignoring other factors, like the fact that cars have the ability to run with a higher mpg. It's difficult to fully come to terms with just how fuel inefficient US cars back in the 1970s were. Continuously low gas prices and lack of competition allowed the big 3 automakers to indulge in overly-heavy, fuel-inefficient gas guzzlers. However, this fuel inefficiency goes back to the very beginning of automotive transport. Ecologists may claim that the model T got 20+ mpgs, so why can't we have much more fuel efficient cars today, but the best data we have suggests that the model t wasn't all that fuel efficient (http://www.fuelly.com/car/ford/model_t) and furthermore, the model t had a twenty horsepower engine. Let's take a stereotypical gas guzzler, the lincoln continental (http://www.fuelly.com/car/lincoln/continental/1966). It has an average mpg of about 12, probably less. Certainly it does a lot worse than the early model t, which got 15+. However the lincoln continental also had a whopping 360 horsepower. So some with some rough calculations, we can say that the cost for horsepower was much higher in the model t than it was in the lincoln continental. If we take the most optimistic estimate for the mpgs of the model t, 20, we can see that this engine could only produce a meager 20 horsepower. A lincoln continental has half the fuel efficiency per mile of the model t per mile, but it produces the horsepower of approximately eighteen model ts. The engine itself, then, is much more efficient in transforming oil into raw horsepower. The deeper problem was that it needed 360 horsepower in the first place in order to satisfy demands for speed and luxury. The weight of a lincoln continental ranged from 5,000 to 5,700 lbs, depending. In comparison, the model t weighed between 1,200 to 1,650 lbs. Peak oil types only look at the raw mpgs of vehicles and assume that that means that we're going to always consume oil at rates in keeping with historical trends. They overlooked the fact that our use of oil had massive efficiency gains that we simply had to fight for collectively.
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Jul 27, 2018 16:38
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CountFosco posted:All neoliberals believe in free trade and global institutions. Do you understand why this is? It is to perpetuate the entrenched power of the developed west against the developing world, through a financial system which systematically devalues resources by denying African, South American, and Asian countries the ability to demand a fair price for the resources which they have. Neoliberals are tied to the libertarian wing of modern conservatism through their relentless advocacy of free trade, a rhetoric which disguises the fact that free trade has tremendous costs for the developing world. And they absolve their underlying guilt by making a special effort to buy "fair trade" coffee while meanwhile ignoring the reality that there is no "fair trade" movement for such fundamental resources as rare earth metals, timber, etc. i see a lot of people complain about "free trade" and the arguments are either pretty sensical "its not actually free, its rigged", or its this. i dont understand what this even means
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Jul 27, 2018 16:43
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rudatron posted:the desire for 'lebensraum' was more complicated than that. it wasn't for the acquisition for scarce resources. it's 2 goals were: I think that you're making a mistake here to not differentiate industrialized agriculture and centralized agriculture. They most certainly did want to create in the slavic lands that they conquered rural areas of Germanic family-scale farms, but I'm skeptical that these farms wouldn't have had access to industrial farming techniques and technology simply for ideological reasons. In a system where small scale property holders create the agricultural wealth, but do so with modern equipment, you're simply not going to have that many more jobs available than in a more centralized system. The nazis never abandoned industrial production and never would have abandoned it, because they were following in the Bismarckian model of preventing communism by eroding the desire for communism. And I fail to see how an urban labor pool wouldn't necessarily produce lots of men who could be drafted into the army.
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Jul 27, 2018 16:49
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The Ol Spicy Keychain posted:Peak oil now that's a blast from the past. It was all the rage 6 or 7 years ago I guess it turned out to be bunk (for now). peak oil is definitely going to happen, the only question is when. and it's fundamentally impossible to reliably guess when, since your predictions obviously can't account for stuff that hasn't been discovered yet the reason people cared a few years ago was because gas prices were high. as soon as prices dropped again, fingers went back into ears oil reserves turned out to be slightly larger than expected, and fracking has had a big impact as well. but peak oil is probably still lurking just over the horizon
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Jul 27, 2018 17:09
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same
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Jul 27, 2018 17:22
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BONE DOG posted:He's a piece of poo poo and how is he still alive and McNamara is dead? Because only weaklings feel regret
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Jul 27, 2018 23:09
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i think its a lot more likely that commercial fleets move to nuclear power than sail power after the oil dries up. the markets will demand that ships remain as fast as they are now
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Jul 27, 2018 23:40
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If after the transition from oil to no-oil civilization maintains the ability to utilize nuclear technology, sure.
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Jul 28, 2018 00:25
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The Muppets On PCP posted:being an international relations person must be so much fun you get to make up crazy and ridiculous stories all day and people will believe they're real The old crusty-rear end Germans in the 20s and 30s who did it were doing it as a way to try and explain extremely abstract concept.s The morons who do it now are basically just cargo culting them and it's sad.
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Jul 28, 2018 00:34
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God what a hateful picture I literally paused for a minute to contemplate this face and the evil it represents
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Jul 28, 2018 00:35
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lol at the d&d types making paragraphs about whether harry kissenger should be dead by now he should already be dead
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Jul 28, 2018 00:38
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kissy kissy bang bang 🇰🇭
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Jul 28, 2018 00:40
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Lastgirl posted:he should always already be dead
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Jul 28, 2018 01:23
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I feel like we've lost the thread here Kissinger should be trebucheted onto an ice floe that is on fire and in space
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Jul 28, 2018 09:22
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No. 1 Apartheid Fan posted:Can we start taking bets on who gives the most ridiculously pathetic insincere eulogy? I don't' think any of the eulogy's will be insincere, especially not at the official event.
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Jul 28, 2018 19:46
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Nobody has the decency nor diginity to die any more.
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Jul 28, 2018 20:12
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(repost from months ago)
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Jul 28, 2018 20:20
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https://twitter.com/dasharez0ne/status/1023362656483373056?s=19
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Jul 29, 2018 01:22
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 06:38 |
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henry pissinger
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Jul 29, 2018 04:14
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