Hmm I didn’t see a commitment to respond with force. Just a statement of what is “right,” as if Trump gives one shit about that. Fail.

This is a good video on the topic - 2 years old so not just based on this week’s hubbub.

https://youtu.be/sxRdKRORYoA

Only country that ever burned down the White House? We won’t forget you! ;)

Dirty little secret: advertising drives very little of what we know as capitalism. It’s honestly just kind of a drain hole in capitalism, out of which flows billions of dollars into the void.

There is very public evidence. A former national security advisor Alexander Lebed claimed that 100 nuclear suitcase bombs had been “lost track of” on the TV program 60 minutes. That’s not very hard evidence, but it’s certainly worrying. And I don’t know what kind of hard evidence you could reasonably hope to get over such a damning and embarrassing state of affairs. Is Russia going to issue a report documenting how they lost 100 portable nukes? Doubtful.

Just when you’re celebrating the collapse of your enemy, you realize that all their armaments are hitting the secondary or black markets, going into who-knows-whose hands. Same thing happened with the breakup of the USSR. Nukes were “lost.”

Mark Twain, Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, Josephine Baker, Alexander Calder, Man Ray, Stuart Davis, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Beauford Delaney, Kay Sage, Joan Mitchell, Ellsworth Kelly, Sam Francis, Alexander Archipenko, and Edmonia Lewis all did it before it was cool.

“If I did it, here’s how I would do it”

By OJ Simpson the CCP

That’s how change occurs at the government level and so that is absolutely failing. If you can’t muster sufficient support to carry your agenda out and you get overwhelmed by challengers, that’s failing. If your agenda needs perfect conditions to succeed, it’s a fairyland dream.

This same thing is all that’s happened to the US as well.

Moreover, social programs across Europe are struggling to remain solvent in the face of aging populations and shrinking workforces. Even when the will is there.

We talk a lot about the failure of the American experiment but it seems that Europe’s experiment with social supports is also failing.

No I agree that I don’t want to hear pedophilia talked about as a form of sexual attraction. It is inherently predatory and should not be mentioned as just what some people happen to be attracted to.

*you know, even with an asterisk at the end to say that sure it’s wrong

Imagine thinking that what god wants most is for you to put on a little hat, grab a rifle, and go live in the desert in an RV.

Like I said, childish. And you just used a fucking AI reply as evidence? Call me when you’ve ever had to accomplish something in this world.

That’s a childish response. It’s very hard to change anything at the societal level by 20% and any program that does so is among the most successful of all time.

I don’t know why you act like taking old, crappy guns out of circulation isn’t meaningful. Just because assault rifles are involved in the biggest and most horrific shootings doesn’t mean that no harm is done with more mundane weapons. It seems plausible to me that old shitty guns are the very ones that kids find lying about the garage, or that get sold under the table to who knows what criminal, or that misfire and injure someone during legit usage.

20% is hugely successful.

US didn’t have total dominance around the globe either. They just had a lot of soft power

The US has military bases, nuclear subs and aircraft carriers stationed around the world. That’s a little more than soft power. And our military spending has always been outsized.

Sure, but Japan was always relatively small. It was a country with a low population and few natural resources.

This stopped being the yardstick for influence around WW1. Japan has the number 4 GDP in the world right now and they were number 2 for a while, very close to the US. China’s landmass and population don’t mean much to the rest of the world if all they represent is impoverished agrarians, which fairly describes a lot of China still.

The biggest issue with China is that they don’t believe in the right to free speech and free expression.

They don’t. They believe in collectivism and order. However I don’t know that they aspire to bring Hanification to me here in California. Their ambitions are more regional. The US definitely reached around the entire globe.

While the US has been more of an outlier in allowing unfettered free speech

For whom though? This is more myth than reality. The US deposed democratically elected leaders all over South America, and has supported dictators around the world if they offer us resources or control. Look at the Middle East. China has a long long way to go before they even begin to be as scary as the US has been for the last 50 years.

free expression is pretty central to European identity.

I’m not sure what “European identity” has to do with this conversation, which has been more about the US and China. I worry that we are veering into vague concepts like “western civilization” that are more myths for white supremacists than actual entities.

“Multilateral” may include a very powerful China. The two are not mutually exclusive. China has been very prolific already in exerting its soft power around the world. They probably do stand to gain from the US losing standing. However I very much doubt that the US losing standing will immediately lead to total Chinese dominance around the globe. China has a lot to deal with, surviving its impending demographic apocalypse. There was a time we feared Japan in the same way: nonstop economy, strong culture, they bought a lot of American assets and real estate… soon they’ll take over the world! They’re still here, and very powerful, but the “big bad” fears were overblown. I think similarly, China wants its historic provinces back, and would like to exert the same kind of influence over Asia that it once did, and be a global trade power, but all of that put together is still far less than the imperialism which America has actually achieved and maintained around the world. So yeah, an ascendant China may be one feature of this future but I don’t see the problem with that. I don’t start from a position of hating and fearing China.

Good. Obviously it was wrong to trust the US this entire time. It’s time to dismantle the post-WW2 American dominance over the world, and move toward a more multilateral future. This process feels scary and might be quite difficult, but it’s important and it’s time. No one country should be considered the world’s policeman or supreme authority. I just hope that everyone shaking their head at the US realizes that they can only sit there doing that for so long, because the very next thing they need to urgently do is step the fuck up into that leadership vacuum before dictators do.

He said he would end the war in a day.

He just didn’t say which day.