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Kurtofan posted:which warring faction are you gonna join
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Jan 23, 2018 15:38
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 23:04 |
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do chinese people on average see their lives getting better or worse? do they see themselves as being better off than their parents? and that their kids have a good chance of being better off than they are? if the answer is generally yes then a collapse might take awhile
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Jan 23, 2018 15:43
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the right always talks about having "bug out bags" when the shtf. imo the left needs to think about "bug in bags" of in-demand goods that will be highly desired in the wasteland: liquor, cigarettes, etc. everybody wants to be the wanderer of the wasteland but who really holds the power?
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Jan 23, 2018 15:47
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the bitcoin of weed posted:america balkanizing would be funny as hell and also incredibly bloody, but they won't let that stop em https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SzOUvB1WSg
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Jan 23, 2018 19:10
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cargo cult posted:does india even have a chance in this scenario?
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Jan 23, 2018 22:02
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last time the united states really went hog-wild in a major war, most of the civilian industries were converted for the war effort. who has the logistics for a major war today? jeff bezos of amazon. not joking.
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Jan 23, 2018 22:04
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hell yes
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Jan 24, 2018 07:23
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well the weird thing is that by all accounts the government is on fire and the country is in systemic decline, but then you walk outside and everything is normal and people are acting normally, so it's a surreal feeling. kinda feels like someone dumped a really big turd in the pool and everyone is trying to pretend it isn't there.
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Jan 24, 2018 10:47
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stuff i've seen with my own eyes and not on the internet, culturally, that have disturbed me over the past two years or so + sitting in a movie theater and seeing the trailer for this tom cruise movie called jack reacher, which was like this vigilante movie. dad was next to me in the theater and almost recoiled from how violent it was. but it wasn't just the violence but the kind of sick pleasure the movie seemed to take in smashing heads together. + the proliferation of punisher skulls on the back of vehicles around where i live. this is mimicking a trend in the military but i'll also see them incorporated with a blue line for the police. + more and more billboards for guns and ammunition along the highway, which seems like a relatively new thing.
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Jan 24, 2018 11:01
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but not just guns and ammunition but the branding: CRUSADER with a christian knight carrying an AR-15. so, in these virtual mediated spaces there is a firehose of poo poo and people are acting like they want to kill each other. that is the glimpse into the subconscious. but in meatspace everyone is putting around in their cars and going about their business and you'd be none the wiser. but then you see this subconscious stuff start to bubble up in the form of these representations.
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Jan 24, 2018 11:09
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also online, how so many on the right talk about the ease with which they'd roll over the squishy liberals who are not making america great again. seriously: this reminds me of how the south talked before secession. the south fired the first shots of the war because violence served as a legitimizing force: the south needed to prove it was tougher. and while this kind of talk doesn't inevitably lead to violent conflict, it is one of the hurdles a society has to clear before it moves to it. though there was an actual violent conflict going on in kansas and missouri before the civil war and that is not happening today. and of course you hear that kind of talk because they're afraid too, and that kind of talk bucks them up. but i'd watch out for more of that. when people talk about conflict as being easy that is a bad sign. and this kind of talk can lead to all kinds of miscalculation and underestimating. (i've seen right-wing british people on the internet talk like this, because they think HM's military will back them, which is just insane. so this is contagious.) you'll hear "we have all the guns" but really, the U.S. is absolutely flooded with guns and the dealers don't care who they sell them to. how would they know who they're selling to? we've already supplied one drug war in mexico that has killed perhaps some 100,000 people -- within the past decade. you can go to a gun show here and see booths for volunteer border militias, and cars with plates from nuevo leon, coahuila and tamaulipas in the parking lot. now, it's not easy to legally acquire or possess a gun in mexico, but people do have them for personal defense. still, there is a lot of shady stuff going on at these shows, and there has been plenty of reporting over the years about how these arms bazaars have basically supplied the drug cartels for years. dealers don't usually ask you questions about why you're buying. BrutalistMcDonalds has issued a correction as of 11:52 on Jan 24, 2018 |
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Jan 24, 2018 11:38
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Moon Atari posted:Even people who are on the same general "side" as me politically seem pretty scary a lot of the time. There was this guy I've been following on twitter for years and suddenly he starts posting about how any one who is worried about or tries to reduce people discussing the murder of their political enemies is in fact sympathising with the enemy. That sort of talk is kind of alienating for me. I just can't feel comfortable around such explicitly violent ideology. suffice to say i think a military coup is extremely unlikely, unthinkable even, though it seems the U.S. is effectively being governed already by a military troika of h.r. mcmaster, john kelly and james mattis. and if we entered suddenly into a nightmare world where those guys went all the way, deposed trump, and then turned their guns on his supporters, a lot of self-described democrats would absolutely support it. i don't think it's going to happen but that's that subconscious thing i was talking about. BrutalistMcDonalds has issued a correction as of 13:47 on Jan 24, 2018 |
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Jan 24, 2018 13:31
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i totally relate to the idea that people don't want to talk about politics on the street. that's the surreal thing. but it seems like a bad sign if people cannot talk about politics without insane threats and other bullshit erupting like a volcano. it's like a cold peace. am i wrong about this? my mad-liberal father would always get into these pointless arguments with his republican business partner. they've had this feud for 30 years, and he was recently outraged that his colleague started saying that all the liberals need to be locked up as threats to the country, and this guy is not a random crackpot but a businessman and GOP organizer who attends the party's state convention. well, dad's rhetoric isn't much less heated. but maybe they'll just shout it out for awhile.
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Jan 24, 2018 14:02
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interesting thing about southern newspapers before the civil war, up until very late they were mostly pro-union. they were pro-slavery, of course, but the secession crisis occurred very suddenly -- ka-bang -- like a bomb going off. secessionists in the south believed they were experiencing a second american revolution. the question is what's the breaking point? and over what? health care? this is what i'm not seeing. the civil war was not war between parties; it was a sectional war over slavery and the pre-war parties fractured. Iron Twinkie posted:On local papers, that's really only an option if you live in the New York or DC area.
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Jan 24, 2018 14:23
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david runciman wordsquote:This is the crisis facing Western democracies: we don’t know what failure looks like anymore and we have no idea how much danger we are in. The language of failed states doesn’t fit the present moment because it conjures up images that are completely inappropriate for a society like the contemporary United States. There will be no widespread civil conflict, no tanks in the streets, no generals on television announcing that order has been restored. Trump’s victory has been greeted with some haphazard protests around the country, accompanied by sporadic violence. Had he been narrowly defeated, and then refused to concede, the story might have been different. But even then I find it hard to believe that civic order in the US would have broken down. The violence would doubtless have been greater and much of it would have been hateful. But widespread armed resistance to the regime is still very difficult to imagine. The US is nothing like the societies where we know what happens when politics falls apart, including Europe in the 1930s, which is often held up as a warning for what might be around the corner. Contemporary America is far more prosperous than other states where democracy has failed in the past, however unequally that prosperity is distributed. Its population is much older. Civil disorder tends to happen in societies where the median age is in the low twenties; in the US it is close to forty. Its young people are far better educated, or at least educated for much longer. Its levels of violence, though high by 21st-century European standards, are low by any historical measure. Its frustrations are those of a country where all this is true and yet still things are going badly wrong. These are First World problems. That doesn’t make them any less serious. It just makes it much harder to find historical precedents for what comes next.
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Jan 24, 2018 15:20
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quote:Meanwhile, the real long-term threats faced by American society will continue unaddressed. By fixing on the risks of direct political violence, we set a low bar that Trump will be able to clear with relative ease. The truly destructive violence of American society takes place under the surface and often passes unnoticed by all except its victims. It is the violence of a prison system that incarcerates and disenfranchises significant segments of the adult population, especially young African-American men. It is the epidemic of white-on-white violence that is estimated to have cost the lives of nearly a hundred thousand Americans since 1999 and yet has remained more or less invisible, until noticed by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton in a paper published in 2015. These deaths are the result of self-inflicted violence, either suicides or drug and alcohol overdoses (‘poisonings’ in the language of the report), particularly affecting white Americans living in the parts of the country that voted overwhelmingly for Trump – the South, the Appalachians, the Rust Belt. People in these communities are far more likely to kill themselves than they are to kill others, and they are dying younger than their parents did, a trend that is unique in a developed society. Trump’s victory might provide the victims of this epidemic with superficial respite – including the chance to direct some of their self-loathing outwards – but it will do little to address the causes of their underlying hopelessness. America is a society where many working-age people have given up and others have had their chance for a decent life taken from them by a violently punitive criminal justice system. If it is failing, it is failing here. When the Trump bubble bursts, there won’t have been a reckoning with this reality. But there will be an ever greater sense of betrayal.
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Jan 24, 2018 15:26
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you know now i'm thinking that this isn't the scary moment, but the compromise leading to the scary moment in a couple of decades which loops me around very nice and snug to the thread title
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Jan 24, 2018 15:30
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in the year 2070 chinese hospital ships will come to the rescue after the health system collapses https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbCAb7uuwPU  gonna get some cupping therapy while i'm on it. make me feel real good
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Jan 25, 2018 02:55
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culturally though it seems like india is more influential in asia i mean, i know whose movies and music i'd rather absorb also the cultural values of indian media seem to translate pretty well outside the country into central asia and the middle east. same kind of cultural language and issues at play (family vs. individualism, tradition vs. modernity, ethnic and religious issues). chinese movies? who watches that stuff other than the chinese? and has anyone watched chinese soft power media? it's terribly boring stuff. like baby's first national geographic documentaries with financial reports at the top of the hour. BrutalistMcDonalds has issued a correction as of 05:56 on Jan 25, 2018 |
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Jan 25, 2018 05:31
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_MyUGq7pgs
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Jan 25, 2018 05:32
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there's a south asian FM music station here because of the expats and it owns
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Jan 25, 2018 06:05
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Commerz posted:The Chinese are too arrogant and abrasive. They don't respect other cultures in Asia enough to export their culture meaningfully. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMRRIMmICmM
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Jan 25, 2018 06:19
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last chinese movie i watched was a martial arts film with really strong anti-japan themes. left a sour taste. so yeah i'd rather join the bollywood global multicultural twerkfest
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Jan 25, 2018 06:29
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Here's the pro-China argument: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0YjL9rZyR0 Talk kind of reminds me Khrushchev's "we will bury you." What he says around 16:00 is interesting, though. "Our political model is not for export." Also "stop messing with us and sort yourself out." Is he wrong? BrutalistMcDonalds has issued a correction as of 11:38 on Jan 25, 2018 |
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Jan 25, 2018 11:31
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"soft power" is really a "wonk" (ugh) buzzword that means persuasion as opposed to coercion. obviously governments persuade each other all the time. the fact that french is still used in diplomacy is an example of soft power. as far as examples, the U.S. has totally hosed itself in korea, the ROK of which is now moving to an accomodationist position vis-a-vis north korea, though i don't have a big problem with that. but i think a lot of the problems with the u.s. position globally are not going to be immediately obvious, but will be in retrospect.
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Jan 25, 2018 13:15
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gobbagool posted:regarding Korea, why wouldn’t it be in the US’s interest for there to be peace on the peninsula? the average American would be happy to see the troops come home and to let the Koreans pay for Korean security. the same for Germany. let those countries exercise all the soft power they like with China, Russia, whomever. it’s not like either country can afford to stop trading with the US, and beyond that who gives a gently caress if their diplomats clutch their pearls constantly over what trump tweets
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Jan 25, 2018 13:37
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gobbagool posted:Yeah, that would be an interesting thread on it's own. Why do you think SK would willingly hand itself over to the DPRK? I admit i don't know a lot about SK, but it seems like an economically successful more-or-less democracy wouldn't necessarily want to want to come under the rule of stone age autocrats? start here: http://sthelepress.com/index.php/2017/12/21/north-koreas-unification-drive/
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Jan 25, 2018 14:02
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSBGOM94PD4
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Jan 25, 2018 14:06
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i would suggest retiring the phrase "soft power" completely along with other phrases popular with the international relations 'experts' also if i remember right, the phrase was used heavily by the hillary clinton state department
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Jan 25, 2018 14:40
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Karl Barks posted:yeah i regret my posts
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Jan 25, 2018 17:21
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there's a trumpy candidate (actual friend of trump) trying to primary my GOP congressman. i don't think she's going to succeed, but she actually runs a company that arranges H-2B visas and has a contract to supply temp workers to a trump hotel. the main thing this anti-immigrant stuff is about in terms of policy is keeping undocumented labor cheap and in a position where it can't collectively bargain, which is good for wealthy developers (like trump). ICE detained some 139,000 people in 2017 but i'm not sure what the percentage of those are actually deported, and it is around 1 percent of the overall targeted population at most.
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Jan 27, 2018 10:26
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so what's my point? if there is a snapping point where americans start cracking each other's heads open and feasting on the goo inside, it'll be over immigration. there are 12.5 million undocumented immigrants in the country and the way some sectors of the hard right are talking, the tucker carlsons of the right, they want them all gone. that is not happening in practice. but deporting that many people is a breakup-of-yugoslavia level effort. and if you see a radicalization of the right here, that can take on a logic of its own where it's not just immigrants being targeted for "physical removal." it's the communists and the liberals (they're all communists anyways) that are really blocking this so they have to go, too, and there are too many blacks and they need to go back into their place, too, etc. etc. etc. in any case how much is all that labor worth to keep it undocumented? how much would certain interests stand to lose if the population were granted citizenship? the war over slavery was also a war over resources: people. the slave owners of their day controlled more wealth in the form of slaves than anything else in the united states except for the land. BrutalistMcDonalds has issued a correction as of 10:55 on Jan 27, 2018 |
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Jan 27, 2018 10:30
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it's an interesting thing to be sure because the GOP has people who want all the immigrants gone but the bourgeois base of the party benefits greatly from the present arrangement, as like i said it doesn't want to legalize the population. i'm texan so it's part of the atmosphere here. need to remodel your kitchen? hire a contractor and on the day of the job, he'll show up with a small army of migrant labor and complete the job in an afternoon like one of those time-lapse videos of an apartment building going up in china. the value of your house has now increased and the contractor and you (provided he didn't screw you over) have (in my vulgar marxist estimation) made a tidy profit extracted from the surplus value of those workers. so it's very easy to see a class warfare argument that is pro-legalization, but also a far right crusade against these rich people that is also anti-immigration. trump threaded that needle and got himself elected because of it. anyways i remember taking a trip out into the country with some friends, one of whom was from new zealand, and as we passed by an area in the city where migrant workers line up every day for those contract jobs, my friend asked "who are these people? what's that about?" and when i explained it matter-of-factly, like "oh, you know, it's mexican labor, here's how it works" he was pretty shocked, and really appalled by it. but it is appalling and these workers are exploited, and they don't have any rights. BrutalistMcDonalds has issued a correction as of 11:23 on Jan 27, 2018 |
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Jan 27, 2018 11:16
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 23:04 |
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gobbagool posted:Does NZ allow anyone who wants into their country?
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Jan 28, 2018 08:13
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