The Maelstrom of Violence

[Kinser79]

(08-22-2017, 10:24 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Kinser.

Too many stripes.  I’m going with essay format.

Stripe format lends itself to forums but by all means use essays if you find them more appropriate.

Quote:The big thing missing in your analysis is the Cold War.  The big lesson falling out of World War II was the domino theory.  Supposedly, the military must be maintained to contain autocratic rule, mostly in the form of communism.

Domino theory itself is not a direct consequence of WW2, rather it is a consequence of Soviet Occupation of Eastern Europe following WW2. Your premise is flawed from the outset by this.

Quote:  The domino theory was first challenged by the peace movement during the Vietnam era.  It was challenged again externally, by France and Russia, during Bush 43’s Iraq war, as well as domestically in the stay the course v cut and run debate.  Both France and Russia were dealing for Iraq’s oil before the war started, and took exception to a sole superpower playing at neo colonialism.  Iran had it’s own ideas on local balance of power.  The western world was to a great extent willing to look away from the American Empire while the Cold War was in effect, but even an extremely competent and practiced Bush 43 foreign policy team didn’t anticipate how much opposition they would face when the sole superpower seriously twisted arms going for neo colonialism.

Yes, and no. Domino theory was firs challenged during the awakening, mostly at first by the civil rights movement. As Mohammad Ali said: No Vietnamese ever called me nigger. The so-called peace movement was largely ineffective both in the 1960s and the 2000s. Rather what ended the Vietnam war was pressure put on the political class by GIs and Silents who were tired of seeing coffins being sent home on their Tee-Vee every night at 6PM. (I actually had to think about using the 12 hour clock since I think in 24 hour.) In the 2000s yes Russia and France opposed the American Empire, but honestly we yanks have never cared what smelly foreigners (particularly of the cheese eating surrender monkey kind) have ever had to say. You can call that arrogant or whatever you want, but that is the reality of the current and traditional attitude of Americans to foreigners and foreign things. Seriously it is next to impossible to get us to use the metric system like everyone else--never mind that doing so would make life exponentially easier in many ways too numerous to mention in this thread.

I would say the issue with Bush II's foreign affairs/Empire Building team was that they were operating on a playbook written back when there was an existential threat to any who didn't want to be run by a communist party.

Quote:I can sympathize a lot with an alternate history shifting our heavy military spending and light domestic spending with the fall of the Berlin wall, but your partisan spin on history neglecting the Cold War is incomplete.  The West was going to contain communism.

Good. But I'm not concerned so much with history as I am the future. That is far less certain. To put it simply empires are formed from the desire to amass power and resources (an animalistic instinct as I've pointed out previously), however, maintenance of these empires is a choice. The Empire could collapse relatively peacefully and relatively easily just by it no longer being funded.

On the state level this is more difficult. However, culture is shifting as to where largely speaking the Emperor has no clothes. While the President himself is quite popular except with rabid communists (basically anyone to the left of John McCain) the federal government itself and its empire and its bureaucracy is not. 

Quote:If you are willing to let places like the middle east and North Korea be handled by the locals, shifting the US domestic / military spending balance far more in line to the global norm is very much worth considering.  Of course, that wouldn’t happen on a Trump / Republican watch.  It runs too counter to the unraveling memes and Republican base.

I'm in favor of foreigners managing their own countries. It matters not to me if we're speaking of Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea or some third world backwater in Latin America.

I think you're stuck in a time warp if you believe that Trump and the Republican base is still interested in 3T memes. Trump himself is a hostile take over of the GOP and a repudiation of the Neo-Cons (which are really Trotskites pretending to be Republicans). The "new" GOP will be one taking its queues from a far older current of American political experience.

Indeed, the President's speech last night indicates to me that he's not interested in nation building, what he is interested in is creating a stable situation where American Troops can eventually be withdrawn and not in the cut and run, power vacuum creating way that Obama did Iraq.

Quote:Similarly, the Great Depression and New Deal are illustrations of a national level addressing of a national domestic problem.  That too seems to have gone missing somewhere.

The Great Depression was largely created by the Federal Reserve mucking about in the money supply and the New Deal did not end the Depression either. What ended the Depression was first Lend Lease and later the War itself.

Quote:You’re hardly alone on this forum in being eager for a violent crisis that solves problems and make’s one’s own partisan viewpoint dominant.  I find destroying stuff easy to wish for.  It’s plausible resolutions that are hard.

I can't speak for others, but I'm not here for the "solution" I'm here for the fire. I'm not particularly beholden to a particular partisan viewpoint, though I do think that if US survives as an intact entity the Fourth Republic will either feature a new constitution or will be decidedly Civic Nationalist in character.

That being said, I do not think that the US will remain an intact entity baring liquidation of what passes for the left. To put it simply, the left wants to play a game of identity politics and either that applies to all (which means we have to tolerate Taylor, Spencer, and etc) or it applies to none (and that means Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have to go).

Quote:I agree human hoarding power and wealth an animal instinct.  This is to a great extent why I advocate feedback mechanisms that allow the common people to say no to elites.  Changing the identity of the elites without building support for better feedback mechanisms seems futile.

We already have the best possible feedback loops available in the internet, political activism and electoral politics. What is necessary is absolute adherence to free speech--something that is being actively combated by the so-called Left these days with their political correctness.

It should be noted that the very idea of political correctness itself is a mutation of a concept originally developed by the CPSU during the Stalin Era.