Let's make fun of Trump, bash him, etc. while we can!

[pbrower2a]

(04-23-2019, 09:25 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: There are at least two types of anti-Americanism.

One is leftist anti-Americanism. They hate America for being "imperialist", for doing military interventions against Third World nations. What they don't understand is that any country would act like that as a world hegemon. Britain, Spain, China or Japan would also intervene against the Taliban or Saddam if such action would be in their interest. Especially the Japanese would certainly play very rough if they weren't defeated in WW2. Anti-American leftists hated George W. Bush more than any other president. The also hate American businesses for "homogenizing the world", but I think British, Chinese or Japanese businesses aren't any better in this regard. Capitalism, despite its achievements, tends to disrupt time-honoured ways of life. One could also point to many instances of American businesses donating to charity, or valuing the environment and human rights.

Of course. free-market capitalism depends upon economic freedom, including the ability to get away with much that many people find objectionable -- ugly displays of opulent extravagance, pornography, reality TV, Ultimate Fighting, cars that do over 120 miles per hour. People want the Good Life on the cheap, whether they are capitalists or not, and that is much of the homogenization of culture (fast food, box stores, suburban sprawl). Capitalism of any national origin can homogenize the world, and I remember when many thought that Japan would do exactly that -- before Japan went into a recession and never really grew out of it.

Another interpretation I have is that every country eventually hits a point at which it can get no improvement simply by working more hours and applying more capital. The economic buzzwords for that appear as "diminishing returns". A comparatively small investment in Tanzania can improve much rather cheaply, but it takes huge amounts of investments just to create one job in America.

Quote:Another, and growing variety is neoreactionary anti-Americanism. Cf. Russia's Alexander Dugin. People like him hate America for being the place of origin of "degenerate lifestyles". Their buzzword is "Hollywood values". This also makes little sense, because European intellectuals are at least as supportive of social freedoms as American ones. The very idea stems from the French Enlightenment. According to the Pew's global moral survey, the most pro-gay nation is Spain. It's true American pop-culture played a role in promoting the notion of social freedom throughout the world, but again - global hegemony of any Western European nation would likely result in the same effect. The neoreactionaries claim Europe's true identity is pre-Enlightenment Christendom, but it was destined to die off anyway. The cultural and political changes of the 1920s were caused by domestic factors more than by American influence.

To someone like "national Bolshevik" Alexander Dugin I show the intellectual equivalent of the middle finger. Yes, there are plenty of 'degenerate lifestyles', but this reflects either an inadequate level of formal education (for real degeneracy look at prison populations full of inmates with as a general pattern below-average, and often much-below-average formal education... and at street gangs that disparage formal education as... whatever. 







Clearly decadent (Mara Salvatrucha-13, a truly nasty gang), but far from the mainstream of American life. 

Also decadent in a different expression:



Well-educated people rarely submit to large, gaudy tattoos -- but this is not the sort of thing that one would adopt if one attended the University of Texas and came under the benign influence of some Jewish professor of an academic subject. This said, people who have nothing more to be proud of than for being 'Aryan' are not so much degenerates as they are people who never developed any perch from which to fall. The sort of person who can drag a black man behind a pick-up truck just for being black and 'sub-human'

I became pro-gay after being gay-bashed. It's not that I suddenly felt an affinity for any 'gay lifestyle' -- it is that I recognized law and order as essential to the civil liberties and social peace that most people want.  Yes, "law and order" can be a pretext for oppression and exploitation, and such a pretext is to be rejected. Oppression and exploitation at most defer a social blow-up while intensifying its ultimate consequences. I saw the real decadence not so much in people having no choice but to be what they are, but instead in violent, hateful people. It is not up to me to show my sexual orientation, because I am far more than my sexuality.

The Enlightenment paradoxically gave conservatives the tools for identifying and excoriating excess; excess implies the debasement of others for the grandiose indulgence and display of a few, as in a Trump Tower. I admit to some archaic tastes, but I do not so much deny them from others (I lack the means for that) as I promote them.






OK, still fresh 300 years later.