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Regarde Aduck posted:it wasn't convert though "We have to do this secretly and you have to do pretend you don't for sure know we did it" is several steps removed from the US showing up at Australia's house at 2 am, rifling through their possessions, and telling them what kind of car they're allowed to buy.
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Oct 5, 2023 01:08
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Usula von der Leyen's entire family is in the US and she is practically 75% American and 25% German. She was supposed to be the successor of Merkel. And don't get me started on the green party. Germany is way more of a US vessel state than France. That was one reasons the Aukus deal attacked the French MIC so ruthlessly. Little Macron melt down with recall ambassador and all the theatric, but ultimately swallowed the broken teeth and didn't have any come back against the US. The US did it more than one time to Macron too, when GM acquired Alstom, Macron was the finance minister.
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Oct 5, 2023 01:15
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yeah the thing that distinguishes France from the UK or Germany or the others is that most of the other governments in the US sphere are not just willing but eager to lick Uncle Sam's boot, even Germany. France still sees itself as an independent regional power allied with the Americans in a relationship of equals, one which France still has some control over. it's part of why they are so concerned with maintaining their own separate neocolonial empire - it's mostly for the material benefits, of course, but proving that they can, and that France makes policy for France and not because the US tells them to, also has something to do with it, I think. what that actually means practically is not much, but ensuring that they're never perceived as meekly knuckling under and following America's instructions is pretty important to French military and political leadership - to the point that they even (symbolically) left NATO entirely for a while there, and every once in a while make noise about maybe doing so again. even the possibility of another country challenging US control over its sphere is of course unacceptable to the US, so their close fraternal allies in France must be hosed over at every opportunity
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Oct 5, 2023 01:40
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stephenthinkpad posted:Usula von der Leyen's entire family is in the US and she is practically 75% American and 25% German. She was supposed to be the successor of Merkel. And don't get me started on the green party. Well that should have set off alarm bells lmao
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Oct 5, 2023 01:43
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Frosted Flake posted:The Australian government put out a giant paper about how the US was not actually going to give them the valuable or labour intensive parts of the submarine construction but France would. I mean they neoliberaled the hell out of their industry anyway because literal McKinsey and Co. told them having experienced shipyard workers with long term employment and steady work was inefficient because they would demand more wages, so weep not for Australia. lol and also lmao.
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Oct 5, 2023 03:13
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Slavvy posted:The only war Australia is getting into is one they start themselves, the idea anyone would attack them is just xenophobic delusion what are you talking about? australia lost a war on their sovereign soil against a foe that still roams their land (emus)
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Oct 5, 2023 03:13
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captainbananas posted:Nuke propulsion is loving insane poo poo and if the US hadn't had an autistic visionary establish an intergenerational choke-hold on its naval nuclear force I think it's safe to bet there'd be dozens of little elephant's feet scattered across the floors of the atlantic and pacific by now. small mercies Please explain this part? Sounds interesting
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Oct 5, 2023 05:52
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Осведомитель posted:
Осведомитель posted:
Iran just tested using A2A missiles on drones.
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Oct 5, 2023 06:02
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Fell Mood posted:What im learning from this discussion is that the US needs to get to work crippling France. They still have a functional arms industry. I'm picturing a color revolution in Alsace-Lorraine that we can turn into another Ukraine in a couple decades
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Oct 5, 2023 06:16
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Fell Mood posted:What im learning from this discussion is that the US needs to get to work crippling France. They still have a functional arms industry. great news, gas and oil prices in Europe have gone up since the Ukraine war and there's been a series of coups in French West Africa including one where they used to get Uranium for 80c/kg instead of the market rate of €200/kg and the people who are in charge now were trained by the US
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Oct 5, 2023 06:27
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ClassActionFursuit posted:I'm picturing a color revolution in Alsace-Lorraine that we can turn into another Ukraine in a couple decades The champagne special operation.
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Oct 5, 2023 07:18
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Death of Innocence posted:I don’t really understand America’s relationship to its client states, like in what ways it wields the influence to make these sort of deals. Obviously corruption and bribes are a part of it, but that can’t be the only explanation because it’s not like French arms dealers are somehow not capable of the same. I don’t know if America offered any kind of large incentive, but it’s kind of hard to imagine what kind of consequences they could openly follow through on against an ally for not taking the deal. american empire theory doesn't make a lot of sense when you dig into it.
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Oct 5, 2023 07:23
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Zodium posted:american empire theory doesn't make a lot of sense when you dig into it. You start out in 1823 by saying, "Manifest Destiny, Manifest Destiny, Manifest Destiny". By 1968, you can't say "Manifest Destiny"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like Western Bloc, first world nations and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about IMF-induced fiscal restructuring, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] every other country get hurt worse than the US. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the empire problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to ensure that the return to capital in the US exceeds that of anyone in the semi-periphery let alone the periphery", is much more abstract than even the IMF, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Manifest Destiny". So, any way you look at it, empire is coming on the back-burner.
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Oct 5, 2023 07:49
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Death of Innocence posted:I don’t really understand America’s relationship to its client states, like in what ways it wields the influence to make these sort of deals. Obviously corruption and bribes are a part of it, but that can’t be the only explanation because it’s not like French arms dealers are somehow not capable of the same. I don’t know if America offered any kind of large incentive, but it’s kind of hard to imagine what kind of consequences they could openly follow through on against an ally for not taking the deal. A lot of it, especially in Anglo countries, is simply that every single person including the political class and elites has been taught for their whole lives that the USA is the leader of the free world and fundamentally the good guys. Anything you do to harm your relationship with them therefore means you hate freedom and democracy, and necessarily threatens your own national interest because the good guy USA must have your interests at heart too. The USA = good idea is inextricable from all beliefs about the goodness of capitalism, liberal democracy etc, and all the reasoning for USA = good is also the foundation for everyone's ideas in Australia or Canada or the UK about why your own country is a good and decent place. Challenging this is pointless and impossible for anyone in a position of power, but even if they wanted to, they would be seen as insane cranks and immediately lose whatever position they had.
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Oct 5, 2023 07:52
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Death of Innocence posted:I don’t really understand America’s relationship to its client states, like in what ways it wields the influence to make these sort of deals. Obviously corruption and bribes are a part of it, but that can’t be the only explanation because it’s not like French arms dealers are somehow not capable of the same. I don’t know if America offered any kind of large incentive, but it’s kind of hard to imagine what kind of consequences they could openly follow through on against an ally for not taking the deal. ModernMajorGeneral posted:A lot of it, especially in Anglo countries, is simply that every single person including the political class and elites has been taught for their whole lives that the USA is the leader of the free world and fundamentally the good guys. Anything you do to harm your relationship with them therefore means you hate freedom and democracy, and necessarily threatens your own national interest because the good guy USA must have your interests at heart too. Yeah that's how Americans smooth out their brains and ignore the cognitive dissonance (that America's present socio-economic order is the idealized end of history so it's actually good if you do some less than ideal things to export it to other countries, like a little genocide as a treat), but what America is actually doing is massive amounts of economic, covert, and overt violence against anybody in its sphere of influence who doesn't take the deals it offers. Being at the business end of America's foreign policy doesn't even carry the fig leaf that this is supposed to be good for you as Chevron moves the gently caress in, bribes all your all-too-eager local pols, poisons your water, shoots your neighbors in the face, and disappears your protest leaders. The various propaganda campaign messages ranging from "that didn't happen" (for normies) to "it's a few bad apples but there's nothing we can realistically do" (for the adult-in-the-room babybrains charged with the bureaucratic middle management jobs required to make the nightmare machine work) to "it's a net good" (for the actual elites) are just jerk lube and America doesn't budget that for the people it needs to kill to make the gears turn. Anyhoo, it turns out you can run an empire for a pretty long time by human lifetime standards without any coherent theory about how the whole system is supposed to work if you a) steal a fuckload of people and land and then coast on the dividends of those thefts while exporting the 'steal people and land' model as quickly as possible and skimming all the profit and b) just outright kill anybody who doesn't play ball or who disagrees too loudly. That's how the internal policies get decided too. Best guess about what happens when a vicious settler-colonial empire with no national meta-cognition runs up against an actual state rival that matches and exceeds its human and industrial capital? Probably starts and loses a bunch of fights while it slowly turns into an even more vicious ultra-reactionary revanchist post-imperial corncob.
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Oct 5, 2023 08:14
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captainbananas posted:You start out in 1823 by saying, "Manifest Destiny, Manifest Destiny, Manifest Destiny". By 1968, you can't say "Manifest Destiny"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like Western Bloc, first world nations and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about IMF-induced fiscal restructuring, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] every other country get hurt worse than the US. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the empire problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to ensure that the return to capital in the US exceeds that of anyone in the semi-periphery let alone the periphery", is much more abstract than even the IMF, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Manifest Destiny". So, any way you look at it, empire is coming on the back-burner. it works well for explaining the relationship between the us and the (semi-)periphery. it doesn't work so well for explaining the relationship between the us and other core countries, because those are all part of the same nondecomposable system that works to exploit a divided periphery. it's american in the sense that america spawned that system, but that's about it.
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Oct 5, 2023 08:27
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Votskomit posted:Please explain this part? Sounds interesting Hyman Rickover was a 4-star admiral who is generally credited with creating the modern nuclear navy in the US. USN initially was thinking of making nuclear surface ships (cruisers or destroyers? dont remember), but RIckover was a former submariner and understood how nuke subs would be complete game-changers. For his insolence in trying to pull one over the surface fleet he was assigned to an advisory duty (a do-nothing career-ender) in a decommissioned women's restroom in D.C. So he went around everyone and went straight to Nimitz to make his case because Nimitz had also been a submarine guy. It worked, and Rickover ended up running navy's reactor program. He had made a career out of taking no poo poo from no one but simultaneously being smart and canny enough to use indirect methods to win (e.g., leapfrogging several layers of brass to plead directly to Nimitz). As part of that cunning, he played the bureaucratic politics game such that he had direct control over the appointment of any and all naval officers on nuclear-powered ships in the navy. Like literally all of them, whether you're an ensign fresh out of the academy or OCS, or set to take up command of a supercarrier. And he was famous for having unusual interview techniques (not in the tailhook way, at least as far as i've ever heard) where, for example, one guy made a positive impression by violently throwing all of Rickover's poo poo off his desk. But he understood talent development, and also understood that he needed to select for leadership that would excel in environments where there could be zero tolerance for engineering or other technical mistakes with ship propulsion. So the submarine force in particular ended up with (on average; no one is perfect) a much stronger talent pool. Anecdotally this carried forward into the 21st century tacit knowledge when I heard 1st class midshipmen (naval academy seniors) talking about how if they wanted to make admiral they'd have to go submarine or aviation; surface fleet was a dead-end. He was also totally loving ruthless in holding private contractors to account on projects he managed. And he managed every single nuclear reactor and, by extension, every ship that had a nuclear reactor, in the USN. His struggle against the grift was ultimately his downfall; he was forced to retire under Reagan when private equity ghoul turned Secretary of the Navy John Lehman found a sufficient cover story to justify shitcanning him. The Reaganites considered Rickover an obstacle and called his management of the nuclear navy a cult. General dynamics, aka the monopolist primary contractor for submarines, was allegedly bragging that they finally "got" Rickover after he was forced out. So fast forward to today and forty years later you have the uss connecticut running around in the south china sea and the investigation found among lots of other poo poo that no one was being held accountable for making navigation mistakes. the nuclear disasters are likely now just a matter of time (and whether or not they can hide rather than report them).
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Oct 5, 2023 08:32
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Zodium posted:it works well for explaining the relationship between the us and the (semi-)periphery. it doesn't work so well for explaining the relationship between the us and other core countries, because those are all part of the same nondecomposable system that works to exploit a divided periphery. it's american in the sense that america spawned that system, but that's about it. I think you could classify those countries as either basically bureaucratic capital finance institutions within the western empire whose elites don't really have their own greater aspirations at the moment for reasons of shall we say popular nationalist embarrassment (Germany, Japan) or overtly nationalist imperialist states relegated to the kid's table who are just glaring at the anglo pig-dogs and waiting for the chance to paint the map in the tricolor once more. Or the UK which has nearly completed its corncobification and is so nationally brain-damaged it can't even follow its imperial master's orders anymore but it doesn't matter because it has so little global relevance, so they keep it around like an inbred toy poodle.
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Oct 5, 2023 08:40
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Zodium posted:it works well for explaining the relationship between the us and the (semi-)periphery. it doesn't work so well for explaining the relationship between the us and other core countries, because those are all part of the same nondecomposable system that works to exploit a divided periphery. it's american in the sense that america spawned that system, but that's about it. the rest of the core was the core before the US was able to vault itself into first the core and then the central position following ww1 and 2, respectively. but while the careerist foreign policy types understand world systems theory, they privately disagree that the EU at-large or any discrete member nation is part of a nondecomposable core that has to be respected. They're more Hedley Bull 'The Anarchical Society'-brained. The rest of the West/first world is to be managed and, when necessary, brought to heel, because to do otherwise would be to give them the opportunity to be able to genuinely discipline the US in the future. That doesn't mean that every transaction is negative or that they won't preference other core nations at the expense of non-core, but there's only one 'core' that well-and-truly matters to them and it is comprised of 50 states (no sorry puerto rico et al, they definitely don't give a gently caress about you). Consider the 'premium economy' talking points that you've cited in the past; historically the US' investment in Western Europe (Marshal Plan and everything else) was justified in terms of (1) securing against communist encroachment, but even this was ultimately in service to; (2) ensuring a large enough foreign consumer market for US-manufactured consumer goods. That motivation's largely gone now, and a good chunk of the D.C. big-brained boyz want to literally triage everything across the Atlantic so that they can focus on tearing down Xi Thought.
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Oct 5, 2023 08:42
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crepeface posted:great news, gas and oil prices in Europe have gone up since the Ukraine war and there's been a series of coups in French West Africa including one where they used to get Uranium for 80c/kg instead of the market rate of €200/kg and the people who are in charge now were trained by the US people in charge now in west africa are trained by the us, or the people in france are trained by the us ? I wasn't aware of a mali/burkina faso/niger - us connection so I'm assuming the latter?
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Oct 5, 2023 08:43
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The Oldest Man posted:Yeah that's how Americans smooth out their brains and ignore the cognitive dissonance (that America's present socio-economic order is the idealized end of history so it's actually good if you do some less than ideal things to export it to other countries, like a little genocide as a treat), but what America is actually doing is massive amounts of economic, covert, and overt violence against anybody in its sphere of influence who doesn't take the deals it offers. Being at the business end of America's foreign policy doesn't even carry the fig leaf that this is supposed to be good for you as Chevron moves the gently caress in, bribes all your all-too-eager local pols, poisons your water, shoots your neighbors in the face, and disappears your protest leaders. The various propaganda campaign messages ranging from "that didn't happen" (for normies) to "it's a few bad apples but there's nothing we can realistically do" (for the adult-in-the-room babybrains charged with the bureaucratic middle management jobs required to make the nightmare machine work) to "it's a net good" (for the actual elites) are just jerk lube and America doesn't budget that for the people it needs to kill to make the gears turn. Anyhoo, it turns out you can run an empire for a pretty long time by human lifetime standards without any coherent theory about how the whole system is supposed to work if you a) steal a fuckload of people and land and then coast on the dividends of those thefts while exporting the 'steal people and land' model as quickly as possible and skimming all the profit and b) just outright kill anybody who doesn't play ball or who disagrees too loudly. That's how the internal policies get decided too. What about the nukes though
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Oct 5, 2023 08:43
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The Oldest Man posted:Yeah that's how Americans smooth out their brains and ignore the cognitive dissonance (that America's present socio-economic order is the idealized end of history so it's actually good if you do some less than ideal things to export it to other countries, like a little genocide as a treat), but what America is actually doing is massive amounts of economic, covert, and overt violence against anybody in its sphere of influence who doesn't take the deals it offers. Being at the business end of America's foreign policy doesn't even carry the fig leaf that this is supposed to be good for you as Chevron moves the gently caress in, bribes all your all-too-eager local pols, poisons your water, shoots your neighbors in the face, and disappears your protest leaders. The various propaganda campaign messages ranging from "that didn't happen" (for normies) to "it's a few bad apples but there's nothing we can realistically do" (for the adult-in-the-room babybrains charged with the bureaucratic middle management jobs required to make the nightmare machine work) to "it's a net good" (for the actual elites) are just jerk lube and America doesn't budget that for the people it needs to kill to make the gears turn. Anyhoo, it turns out you can run an empire for a pretty long time by human lifetime standards without any coherent theory about how the whole system is supposed to work if you a) steal a fuckload of people and land and then coast on the dividends of those thefts while exporting the 'steal people and land' model as quickly as possible and skimming all the profit and b) just outright kill anybody who doesn't play ball or who disagrees too loudly. That's how the internal policies get decided too. this too yeah
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Oct 5, 2023 08:47
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Slavvy posted:What about the nukes though I give it maybe ten years for the metastatic neoliberalism to finish that off. captainbananas posted:That doesn't mean that every transaction is negative or that they won't preference other core nations at the expense of non-core, but there's only one 'core' that well-and-truly matters to them and it is comprised of 50 states (no sorry puerto rico et al, they definitely don't give a gently caress about you). It's actually like twelve states when everyone is being honest.
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Oct 5, 2023 08:49
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The Oldest Man posted:I think you could classify those countries as either basically bureaucratic capital finance institutions within the western empire whose elites don't really have their own greater aspirations at the moment for reasons of shall we say popular nationalist embarrassment (Germany, Japan) or overtly nationalist imperialist states relegated to the kid's table who are just glaring at the anglo pig-dogs and waiting for the chance to paint the map in the tricolor once more. except for the part where everyone is champing at the bit to return to national imperialism, all the same is true for the us. all the constituent countries of the core blob are bureaucratic capital finance institutions within the western empire that exist to manage the tensions inherent to imperialism so that the world can be divided and exploited without the need for destabilizing inter-imperialist war. nobody wants to return to national imperialism. why would they? german capitalists can own raytheon shares just fine. the purpose of the system is to facilitate monopoly, not national hegemony.
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Oct 5, 2023 08:50
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The Oldest Man posted:I give it maybe ten years for the metastatic neoliberalism to finish that off. yeah - or a dozenish corps and firms for that matter. but also when it's rational actor super-serious calculation time it's minimum 26 states to make sure senate appropriations doesn't gently caress anything up
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Oct 5, 2023 08:53
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The country’s more divided than ever!
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Oct 5, 2023 08:56
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captainbananas posted:Hyman Rickover that dude was FTW recommend his book: https://archive.org/details/americaneducatiorick/page/n5/mode/2up
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Oct 5, 2023 08:57
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Zodium posted:it works well for explaining the relationship between the us and the (semi-)periphery. it doesn't work so well for explaining the relationship between the us and other core countries, because those are all part of the same nondecomposable system that works to exploit a divided periphery. it's american in the sense that america spawned that system, but that's about it. Neocolonialism requires cooperation among fellow imperialists because giving the locals apparent political and social autonomy will also mean that it is difficult to employ the full might of the imperialist war machine. If one imperialist is able to expand its colonies by direct military conquest and keep it, then all the others will follow in establishing direct rule over its colonies because to not do so would be to fall behind economically and hence militarily. In other words, it was because of the Soviet Union and the ComIntern that forced the imperialist camp to not gently caress each other over the question of reestablishing colonies. By the 90s of course, the Soviet Union is gone and the PRC is apparently going to become a good liberal democracy. Besides that however, there exists basically only two industrial powers in the imperialist camp - the United States and Germany - by then. It is small compared to its heyday but enough to establish the two as one-eyed kings in the land of the blind in the West. And the United States also holds the privilege of the USD being used as the reserve currency of the world. It is this exorbitant privilege along with the economic gravity generated that the United States was able to educate and cultivate the new elites of the other imperialists into believing that they're little Americans. With the China's inexorable rise as a great power, the United States is taking steps to secure its position as the top dog of the imperialist camp. Even if it can't be the great hegemon of the world, it can still be a big fish in a small pond. Periphalizaing the soon-to-be fellow former imperialists with their eager compradors not only helps stave off the falling rate of profit (if only for a few quarters more) but it will also keep them on top.
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Oct 5, 2023 09:23
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ModernMajorGeneral posted:The USA = good idea is inextricable from all beliefs about the goodness of capitalism, liberal democracy etc, and all the reasoning for USA = good is also the foundation for everyone's ideas in Australia or Canada or the UK about why your own country is a good and decent place. The inverse of this is the Empire Loyalist to Tankie pipeline.
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Oct 5, 2023 11:29
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I think EU (mainly France and Germany) have settled into the comfortable position of "don't compete with the US in computer tech and expensive strategic space/weapon infrastructure, use our own market size to ensure we have better quality of lives than the US" approach over the decades. France doesn't really have the heart to resist the US slowly stripping her independent industries piece by piece. Both UK and France know they don't deserve the permanent UNSC status anymore, they should have transferred them to India and EU. That's why they very rarely cast the veto vote. edit, oh yeah I forgot, Macron was talking about a "digital tax" against all (US) IT companies a few years ago. Where is it now? Macron is a little cuck. stephenthinkpad has issued a correction as of 12:14 on Oct 5, 2023 |
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Oct 5, 2023 11:45
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DancingShade posted:As the globe is round I think you'll find Japan is actually to the West in this case. you can't just cross datelines like that, your f35 will crash into the ocean
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Oct 5, 2023 11:54
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Truga posted:you can't just cross datelines like that, your f35 will crash into the ocean Counterpoint: You can't assume a f35 will be flightworthy to attempt the journey in the first place. Best to sail. Perhaps take one of those USN ships that dissolve in water and hope it lasts long enough to cross the Pacific before flooding.
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Oct 5, 2023 12:30
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lmao
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Oct 5, 2023 12:35
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captainbananas posted:You start out in 1823 by saying, "Manifest Destiny, Manifest Destiny, Manifest Destiny". By 1968, you can't say "Manifest Destiny"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like Western Bloc, first world nations and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about IMF-induced fiscal restructuring, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] every other country get hurt worse than the US. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the empire problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to ensure that the return to capital in the US exceeds that of anyone in the semi-periphery let alone the periphery", is much more abstract than even the IMF, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Manifest Destiny". So, any way you look at it, empire is coming on the back-burner.
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Oct 5, 2023 15:58
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Yeah, I think it is a bit difficult to say there is an "Empire" when it is openly making bold moves. The non-American core have as much autonomy as the US allows them, and are kept in line with trade and financial systems intrinsically interlinked. The US is pushing the F-35 so hard in part they want to make sure that Europe's basic air defense is completely under their thumb. France is regularly thrown under the bus because it has been more rebellious, but the US also hasn't been happy to use influence in West Africa through one of their vassals. It is just the US can't be everywhere at once. The thing is that the political classes of Europe are not universally on the same page. Northern Europe mostly is, Eastern and Southern Europe are slowly starting to go their own way and cracks are showing. I think silently in the background, much of the French elite isn't happy with the current arrangement, but there really isn't room for a "hard switch" to Eurasia at this point. That said, you may eventually have political balkanization in Europe as the US can't fully control the core.
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Oct 5, 2023 16:53
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Death of Innocence posted:That’s too simplistic because they aren’t about to do that to Australia over one arms deal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional_crisis
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Oct 5, 2023 17:36
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Zodium posted:nobody wants to return to national imperialism. why would they? german capitalists can own raytheon shares just fine. the purpose of the system is to facilitate monopoly, not national hegemony. [french national anthem intensifies]
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Oct 5, 2023 18:42
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captainbananas posted:Hyman Rickover captainbananas posted:So fast forward to today and forty years later you have the uss connecticut running around in the south china sea and the investigation found among lots of other poo poo that no one was being held accountable for making navigation mistakes. the nuclear disasters are likely now just a matter of time Hahaha perfect ending to bring it back to the thread title. Having never heard anything about this, I instantly believe the allegations. captainbananas posted:You start out in 1823 by saying, "Manifest Destiny, Manifest Destiny, Manifest Destiny". By 1968, you can't say "Manifest Destiny"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like Western Bloc, first world nations and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about IMF-induced fiscal restructuring, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] every other country get hurt worse than the US. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the empire problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to ensure that the return to capital in the US exceeds that of anyone in the semi-periphery let alone the periphery", is much more abstract than even the IMF, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Manifest Destiny". So, any way you look at it, empire is coming on the back-burner.
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Oct 5, 2023 20:31
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captainbananas posted:You start out in 1823 by saying, "Manifest Destiny, Manifest Destiny, Manifest Destiny". By 1968, you can't say "Manifest Destiny"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like Western Bloc, first world nations and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about IMF-induced fiscal restructuring, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] every other country get hurt worse than the US. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the empire problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to ensure that the return to capital in the US exceeds that of anyone in the semi-periphery let alone the periphery", is much more abstract than even the IMF, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Manifest Destiny". So, any way you look at it, empire is coming on the back-burner.
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Oct 5, 2023 20:43
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Zodium posted:it works well for explaining the relationship between the us and the (semi-)periphery. it doesn't work so well for explaining the relationship between the us and other core countries, because those are all part of the same nondecomposable system that works to exploit a divided periphery. it's american in the sense that america spawned that system, but that's about it. eh, the system is always underpinned by military power and that’s still american. the core countries were just allowed a degree of social democracy as a bulwark against the soviet threat to the east, and I think the past half decade or so has shown that the comprador bourgeoisie in the european vassal states are more than willing to bring their working classes down to the standard of free, god loving americans. first it was the uk and brexit, then germany via ukraine, now france. combined an uneven un-development, these countries are getting hosed just as bad as american cities are. but hey, at least number go up
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Oct 5, 2023 20:49
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