Remarks on the Decline of American Empire(infoproc.blogspot.com)
infoproc.blogspot.com
Remarks on the Decline of American Empire
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/11/remarks-on-decline-of-american-empire.html?m=1
75 comments
Fyi - RT is paid for by the Russian Government.
What’s you’re point?
Do you point out that the BBC is owned/paid by the British government when someone posts BBC? (or NPR for that matter)
Do you point out that the BBC is owned/paid by the British government when someone posts BBC? (or NPR for that matter)
They’re very different. The BBC is an independent organization funded directly by license fees paid by television owners. Unlike RT, it is independent from direct government intervention, and it doesn’t attempt to advance the interests whichever party is in power. The BBC primarily exists to serve people living in Britain. RT is directly funded by the Russian government, and is targeted primarily at other countries outside Russia.
Jee, here I thought the World Service (the only BBC I can get) was targeted at me :S
Radio liberty was forbidden from transmitting in the US by Congress.
Radio liberty was forbidden from transmitting in the US by Congress.
I guess that depends on how much you trust a government news source when that government is headed by a guy that murders journalists that disagree with him.
What a load of self rightous BS.
The russkies are pricks. So are we.
The russkies are pricks. So are we.
In the context of a nation the UK had an adversarial relationship with, yes, that would be a prudent thing to point out.
Every day I drive through the counties that handed Trump his victory. Trust me the decline is real.
Must be nice to worry about the messenger. I’ll worry about the toxins DuPont dumped in the local water or the lead leeching from my tap.
But hey, I can afford to boil pasta with bottled water, so who cares?
Must be nice to worry about the messenger. I’ll worry about the toxins DuPont dumped in the local water or the lead leeching from my tap.
But hey, I can afford to boil pasta with bottled water, so who cares?
I suspect that the Chinese govt's censorship desires will drag it down in terms of being a tax on productivity. To expand more, Chinese companies will have to interact more with the rest of the world, and this will create further censorship and monitoring pressure on the govt.
Nobody mentions the amount of diversity present in America when compared to other homegeneous cultures like China. You will lose if you bet against diversity!
>>>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 assumptions belittle the value of non-american lives. If you want to muse about the decline of american exceptionalism, a good start might be to avoid repeating its mistakes in your own writing.
And there is more:
>>>Wars involving primitive religious fanatics in unimportant regions of the world should not distract us...
Um... "primitive religious fanatics" don't exist in only the "unimportant regions of the world". That is unless the author meant to include Europe, SE Asia, Africa and the US as unimportant. (I'd include south america but cannot recall any off the top of my head).
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 assumptions belittle the value of non-american lives. If you want to muse about the decline of american exceptionalism, a good start might be to avoid repeating its mistakes in your own writing.
And there is more:
>>>Wars involving primitive religious fanatics in unimportant regions of the world should not distract us...
Um... "primitive religious fanatics" don't exist in only the "unimportant regions of the world". That is unless the author meant to include Europe, SE Asia, Africa and the US as unimportant. (I'd include south america but cannot recall any off the top of my head).
Certainly hundreds of thousands, even the low end official figure for the Iraq war alone is 110,000 (top-end more pessimistic estimate is 1m+)[1]. Add on to that Afghanistan[2] (estimates of 110,000 to 360,000) and you’re up to a lowball quarter of a million total.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war...
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 think the American public tired of this neocon hawkishness and I'm hopeful we see a change in our foreign policy.
I think the American public tired of this neocon hawkishness and I'm hopeful we see a change in our foreign policy.
> It was an ambitious ideology which presumed everyone in the world shared western values or wanted them.
Eastern European here. After the fall of the iron curtain, what we really craved for was economic cooperation with the West, liberty of expression and civil and property rights.
Instead, we got US-sponsored liberal NGOs to steer the public opinion in certain directions, NATO military bases to protect us from evil Russia and crappy mass culture in the form of Hollywood movies. It was a great disillusionment for most people.
Eastern European here. After the fall of the iron curtain, what we really craved for was economic cooperation with the West, liberty of expression and civil and property rights.
Instead, we got US-sponsored liberal NGOs to steer the public opinion in certain directions, NATO military bases to protect us from evil Russia and crappy mass culture in the form of Hollywood movies. It was a great disillusionment for most people.
Now it seems the baton has passed over to EU who now want to impose their world view on eastern Europe with the carrot and stick of economic cooperation. Time will tell if their effort is equal folly.
That's not to deny China as well as Russia take opportunities to push their own visions.
That's not to deny China as well as Russia take opportunities to push their own visions.
I would argue that the disillusionment in the Czech Republic not only the fault of the Americans, but also the fault of the former communists, who remained in power for the most part. During the privatization process the countries assets were sold to the corrupt ex-communists and westerners for pennies on the dollar. There is as much evil and profiteering from within as there is evil from outside.
Which NGOs are you talking about? What have these NGOs done to harm the countries?
Which NGOs are you talking about? What have these NGOs done to harm the countries?
I will outline the Bulgarian perspective of events.
By the mid 1980s, "perestroychiks" in the Bulgarian communist party had prevailed over the old generation of die-hard communists. Despite officially calling themselves "communists", these people were avid pro-westerners and believers in market economy. One such key figure in Bulgaria was Andrey Lukanov, a minister of foreign trade during that time. When the Berlin wall fell, he headed the first democratic government and remained an influential force until his murdering in 1996.
Andrey Lukanov spoke eloquent English and was actively seeking economic ties and advices from the US. He even went so far to ask two American economy professors to devise a detailed economic plan which would guarantee the optimal transition to a market economy. Even the long-time president and communist dictator Todor Zhivkov officially admitted during his final resignation speech in 1989 that "communism was ill-conceived and we must be welcoming all foreign western capital". The trouble is, western capital didn't come as quickly as expected. We were left with factories and enterprises which were unable to compete with their western counterparts and our market was quickly flooded mostly with foreign goods. Everything else follows from this.
The privatisation therefore was more of an emergent act of saving the failed state enterprises. They were sold for pennies because they couldn't export their production and the domestic market was dire.
Nowadays, we have tens of US-backed NGOs (most notably "Otvoreno Obshtestvo", America for Bulgaria Foundation, Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, etc.) which work very hard to persuade us that gay rights, minority rights and saving the polar bears are the most important problems on our agenda, without ever acknowledging the deep economic problems that cause social tension and emigration.
By the mid 1980s, "perestroychiks" in the Bulgarian communist party had prevailed over the old generation of die-hard communists. Despite officially calling themselves "communists", these people were avid pro-westerners and believers in market economy. One such key figure in Bulgaria was Andrey Lukanov, a minister of foreign trade during that time. When the Berlin wall fell, he headed the first democratic government and remained an influential force until his murdering in 1996.
Andrey Lukanov spoke eloquent English and was actively seeking economic ties and advices from the US. He even went so far to ask two American economy professors to devise a detailed economic plan which would guarantee the optimal transition to a market economy. Even the long-time president and communist dictator Todor Zhivkov officially admitted during his final resignation speech in 1989 that "communism was ill-conceived and we must be welcoming all foreign western capital". The trouble is, western capital didn't come as quickly as expected. We were left with factories and enterprises which were unable to compete with their western counterparts and our market was quickly flooded mostly with foreign goods. Everything else follows from this.
The privatisation therefore was more of an emergent act of saving the failed state enterprises. They were sold for pennies because they couldn't export their production and the domestic market was dire.
Nowadays, we have tens of US-backed NGOs (most notably "Otvoreno Obshtestvo", America for Bulgaria Foundation, Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, etc.) which work very hard to persuade us that gay rights, minority rights and saving the polar bears are the most important problems on our agenda, without ever acknowledging the deep economic problems that cause social tension and emigration.
Do you think that the America for Bulgaria Foundation's promotion of gay rights is somehow harming your economy?
"The privatisation therefore was more of an emergent act of saving the failed state enterprises. They were sold for pennies because they couldn't export their production and the domestic market was dire." I do not know the situation in Bulgaria, but in the Czech Republic, the enterprises which were bought by the elites and foreign interests were not failing, and several ex-communists have become USD billionaires by having "purchased" them.
"The privatisation therefore was more of an emergent act of saving the failed state enterprises. They were sold for pennies because they couldn't export their production and the domestic market was dire." I do not know the situation in Bulgaria, but in the Czech Republic, the enterprises which were bought by the elites and foreign interests were not failing, and several ex-communists have become USD billionaires by having "purchased" them.
Few of the privatised enterprises in Bulgaria actually remained profitable, but their new owners (ex-communists and foreigners with questionable reputation) benefited greatly mostly from inheriting their assets like buildings and production lines, which were quickly disassembled and sold for hefty sums. Those money were then spent on luxury cars and political bribery, not reinvested in any way.
> 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 the situation in Turkey though I'm less certain on that one). Yes, yes, the war in Iraq contributed to it in certain important ways, but didn't dictate our response to it, which was about as wrong as it could have been, unless there were some serious poker chips in play with Russia that we mere observers couldn't see, i.e. aside from the obvious ones. There's been no widespread condemnation of that action or even common recognition that we're the reason it's such a big mess, as there eventually was in the case of Iraq at least, and incidentally we're still in Iraq and Afghanistan, so neoconservatism seems to be alive and well in some sense.
Mind, I protested the war in Iraq, was overall a fan of Obama's domestic policies, so I'm not a partisan looking for reasons to bash Obama or try to rescue Bush's incredibly poor legacy or anything like that.
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 the situation in Turkey though I'm less certain on that one). Yes, yes, the war in Iraq contributed to it in certain important ways, but didn't dictate our response to it, which was about as wrong as it could have been, unless there were some serious poker chips in play with Russia that we mere observers couldn't see, i.e. aside from the obvious ones. There's been no widespread condemnation of that action or even common recognition that we're the reason it's such a big mess, as there eventually was in the case of Iraq at least, and incidentally we're still in Iraq and Afghanistan, so neoconservatism seems to be alive and well in some sense.
Mind, I protested the war in Iraq, was overall a fan of Obama's domestic policies, so I'm not a partisan looking for reasons to bash Obama or try to rescue Bush's incredibly poor legacy or anything like that.
I happily voted for Obama twice, but his policy in Syria and Libya was a complete clusterfuck and in retrospect I think perhaps the country would be in better shape today had we elected Romney, who while I disagreed with his policies is fundamentally a decent human being and probably would have allowed the country to blow off steam without electing a monster like trump.
Syria is a huge mess, but the U.S. isn't the one paying most of the costs there (for good or ill). It's closer to the proxy wars great powers fight all of the time while the U.S. was and is on the front lines for Iraq and Afghanistan.
Most of the U.S. response has been to ISIS in Iraq, which is winding down but can be seen more as more fallout from the Iraq war than anything else.
Most of the U.S. response has been to ISIS in Iraq, which is winding down but can be seen more as more fallout from the Iraq war than anything else.
The take I get is that both their foreign policies were pretty hawkish neocon. Hillary was of the same quilt. Only Sanders and Trump bucked the hawkish trend.
Domestically their policies differed a little bit and also Obama was more charismatic, more like B Clinton, in that respect. GW was seen as a buffoon and tool of industry.
Domestically their policies differed a little bit and also Obama was more charismatic, more like B Clinton, in that respect. GW was seen as a buffoon and tool of industry.
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.
Sure, but Syria would have burnt out before that got started if we hadn't half-assedly propped up the opposition, just enough to ensure they couldn't be defeated but not enough to actually make them win. Year after year. Iraq was really bad and contributed to all this significantly, but in no way did it force us to turn the brief fire in Syria into a years-persisting human misery factory and radicalization engine of a smoldering brush fire as part of a proxy war with Russia.
We don't actually know that. From what I've seen, the Syrian government faction was maybe a third of the fighting force, but they had air power and the other factions were never able to unite for various reasons. The arms from the U.S. didn't make that much difference, and the war dragged on because the government didn't have a good way to end it without losing alot of soldiers in the cities (and massacring even more civilians). That left siege warfare and massive bombing as their only options, and both of those are slow and ineffective.
Same - I supported Obama for years, and yet my favorite bar trivia anecdote is "Name all the Nobel Peace Prize winners who have killed other Nobel Peace Prize winners" [0].
[0]: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/obama-apology-dwb-1.3261009
[0]: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/obama-apology-dwb-1.3261009
It was a delusional ideology that presumed that democratic systems can be imposed on another country by military force. This wouldn't work even if social democracy were the best possible system. To understand why just invert the circumstances and imagine China attempting to impose a (even superior) political system on the United States following an invasion or via foreign intelligence meddling. Do you think that would work?
It also doesn't work, because you cannot impose democracy. Imposed democracy isn't democracy.
>> trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended on middle eastern wars
> 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"...
> 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"...
Are you sure that money and life are not comparable? After-all, people spend all of their lives making money. People die of hunger. And to be killed is not so much a matter of a loss of life, everyone is mortal after-all, we will all die, it is a loss of time. And time is money, and money is time.
> Thousands may be how many american military lives have been lost but that is certainly nowhere near the actual cost of any war.
The direct cost to America was clearly the point of these remarks to start with.
The direct cost to America was clearly the point of these remarks to start with.
joss82(3)
The decline is overstated. International goodwill was at a very high point with Obama's election (Nobel, anyone). There's still nobody that can compete on the US's scale. There's a reason Macron wants to empower and streamline the EU (besides his power fantasies). Russia is a stagnant and isolated state, China has major ongoing issues with poverty and environmental degradation. China can't wage a war with the US outside of China itself.
It's good that the "empire" is in decline, but a focus on the present misses the fact that world powers go through long cycles of decay and rebirth. The British lost the US in 1783 (pretty major loss), but by 1922 was at its greatest extent.
It takes one election or world event to turn things around.
It's good that the "empire" is in decline, but a focus on the present misses the fact that world powers go through long cycles of decay and rebirth. The British lost the US in 1783 (pretty major loss), but by 1922 was at its greatest extent.
It takes one election or world event to turn things around.
At it's greatest extent, but also declining in economical production for many years and so heavily in debt that servicing interest required nearly half of the government expenditure. Then WWII ended the British empire, despite victory, and a massive part of that was the financial debt owed the USA.
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. They just represent the peak of a flow of lemmings over that cliff that began in the 1970s and 1980s.
We will be repaying the cost of these wars both in absolute terms and in terms of lost opportunity for generations, and we have absolutely nothing to show for it. We will pay not only with money but with internal strife, political extremism, and lost international prestige. Our involvement in the Middle East may be the worst series of decisions in the history of human civilization when considered in terms of the magnitude of that which was lost.
The neocons are the worst villains but not the only ones. They just represent the peak of a flow of lemmings over that cliff that began in the 1970s and 1980s.
We will be repaying the cost of these wars both in absolute terms and in terms of lost opportunity for generations, and we have absolutely nothing to show for it. We will pay not only with money but with internal strife, political extremism, and lost international prestige. Our involvement in the Middle East may be the worst series of decisions in the history of human civilization when considered in terms of the magnitude of that which was lost.
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.
Gulf War II was advantageous to Cheney, as he had been the CEO of Halliburton, and still had ties in the defense industry. As we know, Halliburton and other similar companies ended up with billions of dollars in US Government contracts supplying food and personnel for the Iraq war. Probably one of the greatest unenforced conflicts of interest in the history of the United States.
So who was the mastermind? Wolfowitz?
I don't even know all of the players, and don't claim to know their motivations. I will say that you don't need a mastermind or a conspiracy if your incentives are shared or aligned. Some may have done it for money, some for power, some to prop up W's popularity in order to pass a domestic agenda.
> I don't even know all of the players, and don't claim to know their motivations.
I'm asking for a response from someone who knows the players and can give convincing evidence for their motivations.
I mention Wolfowitz because as I remember it he was one of the chief writers of the PNAC policy pieces[1] that were urging for a ground war in Iraq during Clinton's second term.
I'd be interested in reading more from an expert on the chief movers and shakers in buildup to the Iraq War, especially since almost all of those neo-cons involved have done a lot to distance themselves from it over the last decade.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
I'm asking for a response from someone who knows the players and can give convincing evidence for their motivations.
I mention Wolfowitz because as I remember it he was one of the chief writers of the PNAC policy pieces[1] that were urging for a ground war in Iraq during Clinton's second term.
I'd be interested in reading more from an expert on the chief movers and shakers in buildup to the Iraq War, especially since almost all of those neo-cons involved have done a lot to distance themselves from it over the last decade.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
I’m not sure there was _a_ mastermind. More of a confluence of economic and political incentives combined with a bloodthirsty populace post-911.
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 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 1945.
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 1945.
If you compare Clojure and PHP, it doesn't mean that you think Clojure is like PHP. Germany is just a reference, many countries have rebuilt themselves after disasters.
Not only that but the torrent of lies used to sell it and the torture regime that went along with it destroyed the ability of the populist right wing to discern the difference between truth and reality and led directly to Trumpism. The failure of the policy led people to look for scapegoats and trump handed them to them. Ironically the people who pushed the policy were the first victims and I can’t think of anyone more deserving.
Who is Steve Hsu, and why are his statements, opinions, and speculation about the future of America notable? Or is he just summarizing the statements, opinions, and speculation of the historian in the ~30 minute video linked on the page?
Why does he need to be notable? Maybe he's just some guy on the internet with an opinion like you and me.
Well I guess that I implicitly expect opinionated front page HN content to come from someone whose opinion is more informed than mine. I’m not sure what to take away from this post, given the lack of supporting evidence for the assertions made. Currently I’m at “huh, interesting opinions, who is this guy and how did his post make it to the front page of HN?” Of course this is just my interpretation of why things get upvoted to the home page.
He made it to the front page because people here read it, thought it was interesting, and gave it a point. The fact it's on the front page means nothing more than that. Any reputation youre attaching to it doesn't exist.
Hmm, I see your point. So you don't think that reputability of the source plays into what makes it to the front page?
Generally, and purely anecdotally, I find HN content to be both interesting and either a) from a reputable source, generally for opinion pieces such as this or b) supported by facts, with sources, or with broadly-accepted knowledge held by the audience (such as with technical posts). Either a) or b), establish for me at least, some metric of reputability of the arguments presented.
I found this particular post to be interesting, but neither a) from a reputable source in the field (not trying to put down the author of the blog, just don't think based on his bio that this is more than one dude's opinion or he's just summarizing the content of the video) b) backed up by facts to support his opinions and assertions.
Generally, and purely anecdotally, I find HN content to be both interesting and either a) from a reputable source, generally for opinion pieces such as this or b) supported by facts, with sources, or with broadly-accepted knowledge held by the audience (such as with technical posts). Either a) or b), establish for me at least, some metric of reputability of the arguments presented.
I found this particular post to be interesting, but neither a) from a reputable source in the field (not trying to put down the author of the blog, just don't think based on his bio that this is more than one dude's opinion or he's just summarizing the content of the video) b) backed up by facts to support his opinions and assertions.
People are free to take whatever criteria they want into their upvote. Certainly all of that plays into the decisions individual voters make when they upvote a post, but it's not required.
There's no authority granted by being on the front page. You should feel free to question any ideas presented, no matter who they are from (including from people with actual authority... since even smart people are still just people).
There's no authority granted by being on the front page. You should feel free to question any ideas presented, no matter who they are from (including from people with actual authority... since even smart people are still just people).
Thanks for providing your thoughts on this, much appreciated!
[deleted]
If you have an illness, who’s opinion would you like to hear most? That of a random internet person or that of a medical professional?
If you don’t have an illness and just want to read random stuff, instead of some other leisure activity, I guess it doesn’t matter.
If you don’t have an illness and just want to read random stuff, instead of some other leisure activity, I guess it doesn’t matter.
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...
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?
Was there evidence presented that the Las Vegas shooter was motivated by hatred for some group (political or otherwise)? I guess I missed that in the papers.
You're saying a person (deranged or otherwise) did what he did without malice towards his fellow humans! That's some seriously warped observation.
This thread is not talking about Vegas.
It's talking about genocide. If internal strife gets to the point of extreme hatred, then you don't need guns to kill each other. Not saying I agree that would happen in the U.S., but that's what they're talking about. Not Vegas.
To reiterate: See Rwanda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide
It's talking about genocide. If internal strife gets to the point of extreme hatred, then you don't need guns to kill each other. Not saying I agree that would happen in the U.S., but that's what they're talking about. Not Vegas.
To reiterate: See Rwanda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide
That's like comparing a Ford Fiesta to a Formula One car.
[deleted]
I don't always think internal strife is a bad thing, nor that internal strife is at higher levels now than in the past. We had a civil war, and after that was the end of slavery and the gilded age. too much harmony stifles innovation
I'd also disagree with the passage at the end of the article. George Washington was about as mercenary and capitalistic as they come. The revolution against Britain was started by the wealthy merchant class who calculated the npv of continued relations with Britain vs independence and found that independence was more profitable. Rockefeller was obsessed with money (recorded every penny he ever spent). The Bay Area economy was created as a result of ambitious young people literally taking part in a gold rush. It is disappointing that the romantic, politicized and intellectually lazy notions put forth in that final passage get any credence
I'd also disagree with the passage at the end of the article. George Washington was about as mercenary and capitalistic as they come. The revolution against Britain was started by the wealthy merchant class who calculated the npv of continued relations with Britain vs independence and found that independence was more profitable. Rockefeller was obsessed with money (recorded every penny he ever spent). The Bay Area economy was created as a result of ambitious young people literally taking part in a gold rush. It is disappointing that the romantic, politicized and intellectually lazy notions put forth in that final passage get any credence
Edit: I should say I enjoyed the video. It's much more nuanced than the post that accompanies it.
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.
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.
I was wondering what "RT America" was -- i.e. the video in the article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)
"RT (formerly Russia Today) is a Russian international television network funded by the Russian government."
Note that China was a juggernaut up until a few hundred years ago.
https://infogram.com/share-of-world-gdp-throughout-history-1...
https://infogram.com/share-of-world-gdp-throughout-history-1...
China has alot going for it economically, and that's a good thing overall, but it has its own issues to reckon with. Also, it's actually harder for its neighbors to deal with China, and vice versa, because of distance and shared borders. The U.S. may come across as a noisy policeman at times, but that's less of a worry that a pushy neighbor that keeps trying to move the fence line.