Has the regeneracy arrived?

[pbrower2a]

(01-24-2017, 12:20 AM)SomeGuy Wrote:

Quote:If you are thinking of a real fascist to rule America, I would have picked Indiana Grand Dragon David Curtiss Stephenson.

Aha! Beat you to him. Pwned! 

I have the back story somewhat set. Now what is the drama?

[SomeGuy]

(01-24-2017, 01:59 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(01-24-2017, 12:20 AM)SomeGuy Wrote:

Quote:If you are thinking of a real fascist to rule America, I would have picked Indiana Grand Dragon David Curtiss Stephenson.

Aha! Beat you to him. Pwned! 

I have the back story somewhat set. Now what is the drama?

I am not sure the rest of your backstory holds together.  WHY did the Weimar Republic hold together?  It is easier to imagine a different right-wing Germany or a Communist Germany in the 1930s than a Social Democratic one, if your point of departure is in the mid-to-late 1920s.  How did Japan become democratic in the 1930s?  What happened to the military?  Stalin in India?  A Vichy France?  Wouldn't you mean an Action Francaise one?  How did that come about?  Mosley leading Britain?  Stalin in India?  WTF?  How on earth would German U-boats blockade France AND Britain?  Have you looked at a map, recently?

I like alternate history as an intellectual exercise, but I don't think this scenario really holds together as is.

[SomeGuy]

Quote:The "Trump is fascist" stuff is BS.

True.

Quote:However, the notion of the US ceasing to lead the free world and perhaps leaving NATO, is an entirely different matter, not to be scoffed at or poo pooed as paranoia.

Very possible.

Quote:Have you really thought about how that movie might end?

Quite frequently, it is one of the major reasons why I am here.

Quote:Pretty dumb if we blunder ahead thus and it turns out we could have won a war that we end up losing because of it.

And now we're wandering off the reservation again.  Have you genuinely thought of how a great power conflict would actually play out, if such were to occur?  Have you considered genuine geopolitical parallels between, for instance, the US' balancing act off Eurasia and Imperial Britain's balancing act off the Continent (read: Europe), or Nixon/Kissinger's rapprochement with Communist China v. the USSR, or FDR/Churchill's alliance with the USSR vis Nazi Germany, and how those examples cited might inform present policy?

If you haven't, here are some basic ground rules:

Avoid fighting on multiple fronts.
Pick your battles.
Don't let your enemies gang up on you.
Instead, gang up on your enemies by supporting the weaker of the two versus the stronger one.


Reducing tensions with Russia to focus on China is a perfectly legitimate geopolitical move.  Forcing two major powers with a long history of mistrust into each other's arms, where their strengths and weaknesses are complimentary and they could operate along interior lines, is not.

Hopefully conflict can be avoided, and if not at least managed well (read: not allowed to escalate to a full-scale nuclear exchange or a land war in Asia), but as a hegemon, pushing a maximalist agenda against everybody at once is the height of foolishness.  The Habsburgs were a mighty power, as was Louis XIV or Napoleon's France, or Imperial/Nazi Germany for that matter, but they didn't follow those rules and their bids for hegemony were ultimately thwarted.  We should not make the same mistakes.

[SomeGuy]

Personally, I would rather the US abandon its efforts at hegemony, cut what deals it needs to preserve its most important geopolitical interests, maintain a military for defensive purposes only, and focus on rebuilding its infrastructure and industry, but I am not sure that there is enough political support for all of that in Congress.  We may have to muddle through a while longer.

[Mikebert]

(01-24-2017, 12:28 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Personally, I would rather the US abandon its efforts at hegemony, cut what deals it needs to preserve its most important geopolitical interests, maintain a military for defensive purposes only, and focus on rebuilding its infrastructure and industry, but I am not sure that there is enough political support for all of that in Congress.  We may have to muddle through a while longer.

So do I.  And if we get that then your view of how this 4T plays out will come true.  But your basic M&T cycle calls for the macrodecision phase to end around 2050, so this would be early.

[Marypoza]

(01-24-2017, 12:04 AM)SomeGuy Wrote: me--no but (Lindbergh) was into eugenics. That's what he admired Hitler for. Until he saw the death camps, that is

SomeGuy Wrote:Eugenics was pretty popular among the Progressive set up until WWII.  And he was in Europe before the war to avoid the press, and largely visited the German military at the request of the American one.  The death camps came in the '40s, and weren't really known about except as horrible rumors until after the war.

-- l didn't mean to imply that he saw them before the end of the war. The Lindberghs moved Stateside as WW2 became immenent. When he returned to Germany after the war he saw the camps. I read up on Lindbergh since l posted last. He was chummy with Goering, not Hitler, which makes sense since Goering was head of the Luftwaffe. Goering presented him with some kind of German medal. He got into eugenics bcuz his sister-in-law died young from a heart condition. He even invented some kind of heart pump, a runner up to the artificial heart. His interest in eugenics was humanitarian, whereas Hitler was just plain sick

Quote:me--in addition to Silver Legion there was also the Bundt. lnfact one of the largest Nazi rallies ever was held in.... Madison Square Gardens. By the Bundt.

SomeGuy Wrote:*cough* Bund *cough*
Bundt is a type of cake, named after the brand name of the pan it was cooked in.  "Bund" is basically the German word for "band", as in an association, a league, or a waistband, for that matter.
The German American Bund never had more than a few thousand members, was restricted to people of German descent, and their big rally in Madison Square Garden was both their high-water mark and their doom.  The intemperate rhetoric, the violence, and the resulting attention from the government wiped it out.

-- yeah l know what a bundt cake is. My knowledge of the Bund & the Silver Legion comes from a cable documentary (some ppl like sitcoms, l like to watch documentaries) & the narrator pronounced it like a bundt cake. The visual of the rally looked like a Nuremberg rally @ 1st until the camera panned out & you could see it was @ Madison Sq Gardens.  But l don't think the rally was their doom. Their doom was helping some spies that Hitler sent over. Spies that were seen washing up on a Long lsland beach by either a cop or a Coast Guard officer ( can't remember which) & later on 2 of them turned double agents, turning in the whole ring

SomeGuy Wrote:No, the only real possibility for a fascist US at that time was if the second wave of the KKK hadn't started to fall apart in the mid-1920s, particularly after D.C. Stephenson was convicted for kidnapping, raping, and torturing a white woman in 1925, AND if the Great Depression hadn't been addressed.
 

-- what about Grampa Bush's attempt to overthrow Roosevelt, which was thwarted by Gen Smedley Butler? Grampa was big  on Hitler, even after WW2 started. In 1942 he was busted for "trading with the enemy". But instead of going to jail he went to the Senate. Our Govt was corrupt even back then :@

Quote:-- agreed. l think it cheapens the Nazis & what they did. Their horror show should not be made mundane.

Yup, we are in complete agreement.  As George Orwell pointed out decades ago, "fascist" has long since devolved into a snarl word, devoid of real semantic content, other than that the label is applied to people or things the user doesn't like.

Quote:me--As for the fascism, we already live in a fascist state. But then l go by the Mussolini school of fascism, which is govt of the corporations, by the corporations, & for the corporations (ok, l'm paraphrasing him but that's basically what he said) Under this definition, fascism has nothing to do with killing Jews or beating up gypsies & gays. That would be racism & bigotry

SomeGuy Wrote:*Sigh*
You are engaging in equivocation.  That is not what the word "corporatism" means, particularly not at the time that it was used.  It meant the organization of society into constituent groups (or bodies, which in latin is the root of the term) with common interests (farmers, businesses, labor unions) under the overall coordination of the state, as opposed to as a collection individuals.  Neither Mussolini nor Hitler took orders from big business leaders, just the reverse.  Hjalmar Schacht probably would have been much happier if the Nazis had been taking orders from big business leaders rather than the other way round.  Of course, they weren't, which is why he was ousted.

-- l never said Mussolini practiced his own definition of fascism (that l paraphrased) but we sure do here in the good ol USofA. Our pols are owned by corporations. Then there's Citizens United. All the stuff Bernie is fighting. But fwiw, there is some antisemitism as well, except it's against Muslims (who are also semites) not Jews

Quote:me-- The Dems really screwed the pooch this last time round

SomeGuy Wrote:It really depends on what the Republicans do, how that interacts with whatever external events will take place over the next 4 years, and how long it takes for the Democrats to coalesce around a new, politically effective agenda that can win them elections at more than just the national level.
We'll see how that all pans out.

-- yup

[pbrower2a]

If America becomes dictatorial, then it will lose its attractiveness to countries with democratic government. America goes from being the benign 800-pound gorilla to becoming a dangerous 800-pound tiger.

[Mikebert]

SomeGuy Wrote:The German American Bund never had more than a few thousand members, was restricted to people of German descent, and their big rally in Madison Square Garden was both their high-water mark and their doom.   

My grandfather stopped taking his family to the German-American picnic in Milwaukee in the late 1930's because the Bund was there and my grandfather wanted nothing to do with those sonofabitches, he used a term that I cannot recall to refer to them but the idea was something along the line of shitheels.  Losers, like the German Nazis.

[SomeGuy]

(01-24-2017, 01:11 PM)Mikebert Wrote:

(01-24-2017, 12:28 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Personally, I would rather the US abandon its efforts at hegemony, cut what deals it needs to preserve its most important geopolitical interests, maintain a military for defensive purposes only, and focus on rebuilding its infrastructure and industry, but I am not sure that there is enough political support for all of that in Congress.  We may have to muddle through a while longer.

So do I.  And if we get that then your view of how this 4T plays out will come true.  But your basic M&T cycle calls for the macrodecision phase to end around 2050, so this would be early.

Going by the vanilla theories on both, the M & T macrodecisions straddled two S & H turnings, generally the 4T into the 1st.  The last macrodecision went from the early 3T to the end of the 4th.

If we go by leading sectors generating outsized growth, East Asia (starting in Japan and ending in China) looks like the site of the next hegemon, and it is not inconceivable that a conflict in East Asia could, say, have a 4T phase, and then a period of lesser conflicts during the 1T as the victor consolidates their status, ending in the 2040s.  

With the 19th K-wave set to end in the 2020-2030 timeframe, and the next K-wave to ramp up after that, the 20th k-wave may in fact have its roots in developments made during the early part of said macrodecision phase.  This would be consistent with previous phases, with the 18th k-wave starting at the beginning of the 20th century macrodecision period and reaching the high growth period at its end, or an even closer fit with the 16th 17th k-wave transition at the turn of the 19th century with the Revolutionary/Napoleonic wars.

[Mikebert]

(01-24-2017, 12:28 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Personally, I would rather the US abandon its efforts at hegemony, cut what deals it needs to preserve its most important geopolitical interests, maintain a military for defensive purposes only, and focus on rebuilding its infrastructure and industry, but I am not sure that there is enough political support for all of that in Congress.  We may have to muddle through a while longer.

I don't think there is any advantage to hegemony anymore.  Hegemony worked for the Brits. They used it to become the leading economy in 1850.  Hegemony worked a lot worse for the US.  We already were the leading economy before we became hegemon.  Only the first fifth of the cycle can be interpreted as positive.  Since 1965 its all been downhill. 

I doubt China is going to want to take a bite of this shit sandwich. China's elites are not as comfortably in power as America's. They cannot afford the sort of stupid policy Americans pursue.  So if Trump decides to make the Spratley Islands a bone of contention, the Chinese have a variety of responses available beside all-out war.  I think they will make a well-considered choice.

[SomeGuy]

Quote: l didn't mean to imply that he saw them before the end of the war. The Lindberghs moved Stateside as WW2 became immenent. When he returned to Germany after the war he saw the camps. I read up on Lindbergh since l posted last. He was chummy with Goering, not Hitler, which makes sense since Goering was head of the Luftwaffe. Goering presented him with some kind of German medal. He got into eugenics bcuz his sister-in-law died young from a heart condition. He even invented some kind of heart pump, a runner up to the artificial heart. His interest in eugenics was humanitarian, whereas Hitler was just plain sick

Yeah, eugenics started out as a very hopeful idea, and then went dark places.  Otherwise, in complete agreement.

Quote: yeah l know what a bundt cake is. My knowledge of the Bund & the Silver Legion comes from a cable documentary (some ppl like sitcoms, l like to watch documentaries) & the narrator pronounced it like a bundt cake. The visual of the rally looked like a Nuremberg rally @ 1st until the camera panned out & you could see it was @ Madison Sq Gardens.  But l don't think the rally was their doom. Their doom was helping some spies that Hitler sent over. Spies that were seen washing up on a Long lsland beach by either a cop or a Coast Guard officer ( can't remember which) & later on 2 of them turned double agents, turning in the whole ring

The Feds also charged the leader with embezzling funds, if I am not mistaken.  It was a thing, but not one that had any real chance of coming to power, which is all I was arguing against.
Bundt cakes are delicious.

Quote: what about Grampa Bush's attempt to overthrow Roosevelt, which was thwarted by Gen Smedley Butler? Grampa was big  on Hitler, even after WW2 started. In 1942 he was busted for "trading with the enemy". But instead of going to jail he went to the Senate. Our Govt was corrupt even back then

Old Joe was definitely a Nazi sympathizer, and Butler's War Is A Racket still has a proud place on my bookshelf.

Quote:l never said Mussolini practiced his own definition of fascism (that l paraphrased) but we sure do here in the good ol USofA. Our pols are owned by corporations. Then there's Citizens United. All the stuff Bernie is fighting. But fwiw, there is some antisemitism as well, except it's against Muslims (who are also semites) not Jews

You're still playing word games with the meaning of the word "corporatism".  We definitely have elements of a plutocracy, but that isn't the same thing as fascism by a long shot.
Still, I don't think we are too far off.

[Mikebert]

Jordan, if Trump decides to press the South China Sea issue, as Spicer suggested, how would you respond if you were China?  I'd rather play China's hand in this situation and ours.  Not sure what I would do though.

[Marypoza]

(01-24-2017, 12:28 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Personally, I would rather the US abandon its efforts at hegemony, cut what deals it needs to preserve its most important geopolitical interests, maintain a military for defensive purposes only, and focus on rebuilding its infrastructure and industry, but I am not sure that there is enough political support for all of that in Congress.  We may have to muddle through a while longer.

-- well considering our, ahem, illustrious   prez wrote The Art of the Deal that's a distinct possibility

[Marypoza]

(01-24-2017, 01:26 PM)Mikebert Wrote:

SomeGuy Wrote:The German American Bund never had more than a few thousand members, was restricted to people of German descent, and their big rally in Madison Square Garden was both their high-water mark and their doom.   

My grandfather stopped taking his family to the German-American picnic in Milwaukee in the late 1930's because the Bund was there and my grandfather wanted nothing to do with those sonofabitches, he used a term that I cannot recall to refer to them but the idea was something along the line of shitheels.  Losers, like the German Nazis.

-- exactly, except they were American Nazis

[SomeGuy]

Quote:I don't think there is any advantage to hegemony anymore.  Hegemony worked for the Brits. They used it to become the leading economy in 1850.  Hegemony worked a lot worse for the US.  We already were the leading economy before we became hegemon.  Only the first fifth of the cycle can be interpreted as positive.  Since 1965 its all been downhill. 

I doubt China is going to want to take a bite of this shit sandwich. China's elites are not as comfortably in power as America's. They cannot afford the sort of stupid policy Americans pursue.  So if Trump decides to make the Spratley Islands a bone of contention, the Chinese have a variety of responses available beside all-out war.  I think they will make a well-considered choice.

You're taking an overly narrow, modern Anglocentric view of what the word "hegemony" means, and it is skewing your analysis.  The Gladstonian/Wilsonian global policeman, defender-of-the-liberal order role that first Britain and then America took on from the mid-19th century onwards is not the only hegemonic role detailed in M & T.  Britain didn't become committed to free trade until the mid-19th century with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, and yet it had been hegemon since the end of the War of the Spanish Succession.  Neither 17th century Holland nor Portugal nor the Italian state before acted in the way you are speaking of, either.  Hell, there was a large difference between the role played by Victorian Edwardian Britain and that played by the post-war United States, too.

I mean, I agree with your assessment, which is why I don't think it would work the way you are implying.  A China that secured the 1st and maybe 2nd Island chains, and its sea lanes to the Middle East and East Africa, which had an economic and political weight commensurate with its demographic one, that was the epicenter (at least at first) of whatever the 20th K-wave turns out to be, would fulfill the definition of an M & T hegemon without needing to become America 2.0.

[SomeGuy]

(01-24-2017, 02:02 PM)Marypoza Wrote:

(01-24-2017, 01:26 PM)Mikebert Wrote:

SomeGuy Wrote:The German American Bund never had more than a few thousand members, was restricted to people of German descent, and their big rally in Madison Square Garden was both their high-water mark and their doom.   

My grandfather stopped taking his family to the German-American picnic in Milwaukee in the late 1930's because the Bund was there and my grandfather wanted nothing to do with those sonofabitches, he used a term that I cannot recall to refer to them but the idea was something along the line of shitheels.  Losers, like the German Nazis.

-- exactly, except they were American Nazis

They must have come over from Illinois.  I hate Illinois Nazis. 

[SomeGuy]

(01-24-2017, 01:49 PM)Mikebert Wrote: Jordan, if Trump decides to press the South China Sea issue, as Spicer suggested, how would you respond if you were China?  I'd rather play China's hand in this situation and ours.  Not sure what I would do though.

There are a lot of other actors and actions involved, so it's tough to say for sure.  The One Belt/One Road thing is a sensible move, accelerating the ability to secure resources from routes not subject to US interdiction.  Stockpiling, too.  The use of nonmilitary maritime assets to put pressure on the US naval presence while maintaining deniability and escalation dominance would be smart, too, which they're also doing.  They can also do what Putin has, and they've been doing as well, in shifting the point of friction between them and the US to different areas, de-escalating in one area while ratcheting up tensions in another.  Continuing to pursue bilateral deals with places like the Philippines and Vietnam is clever, too, working to split up potential coalitions before they congeal.  Cyberspace is a potential area where they can bring power to bear with some deniability as well.  Somewhat more speculatively, the US private sector has an enormous amount of capital invested on the Chinese mainland, and pressure brought to bear here could lead to political pressure for the US back home.

But it's tough for them, too.  There is a great deal of nationalist sentiment among the Chinese public that needs to be assuaged, limitations in the extent to which land supply routes can replace sea routes, their own fragile economic state, trust issues between them and their neighbors, rising protests in places like Hong Kong and elsewhere, hard red lines with places like Taiwan and its geopolitical status, a military that hasn't fought a war in almost 40 years, technical limitations in the production of certain military goods like jet-engines, the geographic constraints of the first island chain, etc.  It really could go either way, if it comes down to out and out conflict (military or otherwise), between roughly matching adversaries.  And there are tons of ways things could spiral out of control, despite each side's best efforts.

[Marypoza]

Since l was paraphrasing, l decided to look ip exactly what Mussolini said & l found this:

The definition of fascism is The marriage of the corporation and state

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/search?...mit=Search

b4 you question my search parameters, let me just say l found the quote amongst a bunch of Mussolini quotes & l wanted to isolate it

[Mikebert]

(01-24-2017, 02:03 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:  A China that secured the 1st and maybe 2nd Island chains, and its sea lanes to the Middle East and East Africa, which had an economic and political weight commensurate with its demographic one, that was the epicenter (at least at first) of whatever the 20th K-wave turns out to be...

I don't see this as nearly equivalent to what previous hegemons had,  This seems like nothing to me.  Also the K-wave stuff is the precursor to hegemony.  Hegemonic powers dominate K-waves long before they became hegemons.  For example, Portugal began its K-wave program in 1415.  It did not emerge as hegemon until 1516.  The Netherlands had already dominated Baltic trade in the 16th century and sealed the deal with the development of the fluyt in the 1570's, long before they became hegemon in 1609.  The British began building the economic foundations  for hegemony with the successful cultivation of tobacco at Jamestown (tobacco) in 1617 and settlement of Barbados (sugar) in 1627, long before 1714.  America built the foundations for hegemony by their domination of the railroad (including the development of the telegraph which made railroads a true leading sector)  and the steel leading sectors in the 1840's and 1850's--long before 1945. 

If China dominates the 20th K-wave, it will power the hegemony to emerge after that time.  Consider the 1792 railroad date given by M&T. The railroad-industrial leading sectors, built on the existing British strengths in steam engines technology and metallurgy, power their second round of hegemony to emerge after 1815.

If we compare the 1973 beginning of the IT leading sectors to the 1792 ones you have to agree than this sector started in the US, it is NOT a Chinese sector.  Other countries (e.g. Japan) who had industrialized after the US could have run with this sector.  Japan already was a leader in electronics.  But it happened here.  This is why I came up with my alternate hegemonic cycle.  The US had been a major player in the railroad/industrial leading sectors and the following mass market leading sectors (automobiles/electricity/consumer products) and now was looking like it was dominating yet another leading sector with IT.  In M&T's scheme only the UK had led on more than two leading sectors, so it seemed the US was due for another round of hegemony.

Anyways, if the 20th K-wave is to be dominated by China, that would make 2030 like 1792, indicative of Chinese hegemony 20 years later--i.e. 2050, not 2017.

[SomeGuy]

(01-24-2017, 02:53 PM)Marypoza Wrote: Since l was paraphrasing, l decided to look ip exactly what Mussolini said & l found this:

The definition of fascism is The marriage of the corporation and state

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/search?...mit=Search

b4 you question my search parameters, let me just say l found the quote amongst a bunch of Mussolini quotes & l wanted to isolate it

There is no evidence he actually said that.  You are also still ignoring that "corporation" and "corporatism" have multiple meanings, particularly over in Europe.