JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
2hr ago
I agree with the point about Trump commonly making things too intense and making fireworks out of things that didn't need to be. It'd be nice if we had a person who is as bold and determined, but more of a diplomat than a showman. But to be honest, he wasn't treated fairly either - the idea of buying the territory, while certainly bold, is not crazy or impossible at all, and Denmark already was well on the way of granting it independence anyway. I'm not sure that'd actually be the best - I think the current solution is actually better for the US, keeping all the benefits and minimum responsibility - but certainly wasn't completely nuts as it was presented.
JarJarJedi
2hr ago
America is still America of "Tear down this Wall!" and Hollywood and WW2 and the Berlin Airlift, at least on the right, but Europe isn't the Europe of ancient culture, quest for freedom and resistance to evil. It decided the sins of colonialism are so great that they warrant civilizational suicide, and if the population is not on board with this, it has to be oppressed for their own good. The relationship changed because Europe changed. And tbh, in America right now the relationship with Europe is not bothering anybody much for that exact reason - the right just doesn't see how it can benefit America in its current circumstances (the left wants what Europe wants, but they don't need any allies in that really). Europe is certainly not very willing to defend even itself, let alone help US to do any would police things like getting rid of Iranian nukes. Speaking of which, Europe needs Hormuz open much more than the US does, as far as I can see, but they don't seem to be inclined to do anything substantial about it. So the question is - how much this relationship is working for America anymore?
JarJarJedi
20hr ago
The modern first world has a very, very strong norm of borders not moving, for obvious reasons
That's not exactly true. Turkey took North Cyprus in 1974, still keeps it, and now is a NATO member and almost became a EU member. There are a bunch of other changes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_border_changes_%281914%E2%80%93present%29 None as big as Greenland, but it absolutely has been normal to negotiate the possibility, and it has been occasionally also performed by force without serious consequences too (see Turkey).
JarJarJedi
20hr ago
But that's nonsense, Denmark knows what the danger is - this territory is far from Denmark and they can't defend it having a whole military as big as one army division (not to talk about the means to sustain long-distance military campaign ). US, OTOH, has the means and the desire to defend it. But they want some goodies for it. Trump wanted to buy the territory wholesale because it sounds cool. But the second best is to get the same benefits of the sovereignty - freedom of movement, freedom of military deployment, freedom of exclusion of others, freedom to mine the resources - without paying any money at all, but Denmark gets to keep the nominal title. The danger is being forced into the same deal by somebody like China - maybe not now, but in 10-15 years - who gives much less attention to European sensibilities than the US does.
Could Trump do it by "asking nicely" - i.e. doing the same in secret rather than in public? Yes, he could, but then he wouldn't be Trump. As I noted here many, many times, the "long time allies" aren't that much of an allies anymore, and become less of an allies every day, so not much loss. Maybe this particular show wasn't, strictly speaking, necessary, but not much lost here.
JarJarJedi
23hr ago
I would say there are two types of Good Things - one is indeed costing too much, such as universal unlimited healthcare, or giving free house to every person that doesn't have one. The other is just plain impossible - such as original communism (stateless post-scarcity society where everybody voluntarily works for everybody else's good) or abolishing the police and not having crime rates shoot up. The former ones are somewhat boring, the latter ones, being untethered from any reality on the ground, are visionary and inspirational. That's what people who see being untethered from reality as a benefit flock to. These people are almost impossible to dissuade - since their conviction never rooted in any realistic assumptions, providing them evidence would just convince them you are a hater.
Hasan Piker is every bit as much of a rabid, malevolent extremist as any literal National Socialist,
He is a National Socialist, just for a different nation.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
Maybe they just try to be part of your life, and that's the way they know how to connect?
And the US being more conservative than Europe didn't stop us from allowing our own mass migration that is now destroying the country.
True, but right now the balance is teetering around 50/50 - sometimes the left wins, sometimes the right. If we import millions of people who lean even slightly left off center, the right will have no hope at all. They don't need to be DSA voters - they just need to vote for DSA enablers because what they hear sounds good and close to what they had at home. To get over this, one needs massive trauma like one that Eastern Europeans have - convincing those to have communism would be harder, whatever variety it is. But the rest of Europe I don't think realized what they've done yet.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
Europe is beautiful, but their population voted in the policies they are suffering from now. If they move to the US, they'd probably vote for the same, and in 10 years, the US will be the same, and there would be nowhere to move to.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
It is them that moved Europe to the left.
By which mechanism? US academia does not control anything in Europe, and certainly didn't rebuild Germany or anything like that. I could admit it if Europe's academia were constantly adoring and copying American one, but at least for the "humanities", the relationship is exactly the opposite.
Sanders was the only one with reasonably strong rhetoric on the issue,
That's not true, virtually every prominent Democrat had been pro border enforcement before they were against it. Here's Senator Obama: https://www.c-span.org/clip/news-conference/user-clip-sen-barack-obama-on-illegal-immigration/4656370 you can easily find clips from others. By today's standards, this is literally Hitler. But 2005's standards, that's a common Democrat position which is part of the mandatory program, you can not be a serious politician if you don't support it.
Black Lives Matter, Trans Women Are Women
BLM is indeed uniquely US phenomenon, but I do not think it had any influence on European politics - mass immigration already shifted the power balance by then, and Europe's pro-migration policies have very little connection with it. As for trans issues, Europe is a bit more diverse on that issue (just as the US is if we look per-state) but European ideologues have been at the foundation of it. Psychoanalysis came from Europe. Postmodernism came from Europe. Deconstruction came from Europe. Post-structuralism came from Europe. Without all of this, the theory of "socially constructed gender" would not be possible.
cutting off your friends over politics is also something we imported from the US.
Oh come on. This one is from early 1900's: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/748/804/d0e but I am sure the phenomenon existed long before that.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Europe has always been historically way to the left of the US in general (not US university campuses) on virtually every metric. So much that in the US it is common for the Left to point to Europe as an example of "civilized countries" that have "common sense policies" that supposedly work very well. Of course, Europe does not have the history of slavery and racial segregation that US has, so in that aspect - which takes a lot of space in woke mindset - the US is necessary in the lead. Canada is trying as hard as they can to whip up their own story with indigenous tribes, but the best Europe can do is colonialism, and it just doesn't have the same punch. So it's hard to see for me how the US could have pushed the Europe to the left while staying themselves to the right. It's hard to me to see how US could have forced Europe to abandon free speech (maybe Germany excluded with the Nazi stuff, but we all know it's way beyond Nazis for the long time) while keeping it as a value themselves. The mass immigration in Europe started when in the US Bernie Sanders, Clinton and Obama were pronouncing fiery speeches about how we must be tough on illegal immigration. The entrepreneurship values that are still part of the American mythos had, as far as I could see, never been really part of the European one. So I am wondering here - what exactly did the American ideology shaped in Europe to cause what is happening in Europe now? Sure, American money I can get, but so far I think the deal has been more or less "you give us money and military protection, we tell you how much better we are than you". I just fail to see any casual link that allows blaming what's happening to Europe on America. Maybe on American academia in particular, but those have been looking up to Europe for their whole history.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
We were talking about Germany, where the history is as I've said.
Yes, but if you find the same pattern in a dozen places, and one of them has special history, but the pattern repeats unchanged in places that do not have the special history, then it's unlikely that the special history is causing the pattern.
that does not make America responsible for all Europe's stupid decisions.
In fact, I do not think any of the recent Europe's stupid decisions can be traced to American influence. Yes, the form of wokeness came from America, but the fertile grounds that demanded for something like wokeness to take form is local. If by some miracle wokeness in America didn't manifest, the Europe would do exactly the same stupid things, just in a different form.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
It's just "the current thing" manifesting. People scream what they see on TV. US TV is bigger than European TV.
Woke came from America.
Only in some narrow sense. US academia created the framework of wokeness. But European post-Marxist left created the US academia. Older US wokes still look at Europe with adoration, because that's where their ideological roots lie (even though I suspect diversity push would erase and replace those people quite soon, maybe even already happened, but the history remains). For the younger US wokes of course Europe is just a point on the map which has already been conquered and thus needs less attention than the current battles. For them, it's finally the time to get rid of the Western culture, and thus Europe is only a geographical location.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
Or, conversely, US left is the Europe-influenced one. The switch from Marxist "workers of the world unite" framework to "long march through the institutions" started with Gramsci, why attribute it to the US? European Left enacted the shift no less than the US Left - while nominally preserving the "workers" rhetoric on the background, the actual focus went elsewhere - and has been much more successful at it. So I am not sure it is proper to call them "US influenced". The US Left may be getting more headlines - because the fight in the US is still on, while in Europe it has largely been concluded, with the remains of the Right waging guerilla campaigns on the margins of power - but that does not establish influence.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
Every time I see them, I think it's just a casino. Am I right, or is there some intrinsic value I'm missing?
It's not a casino. Casinos are heavily regulated industry where most games are truly games of chance, which are skewed toward the house profits, but only to a specific (regulated, and not excessive) extent. If you go into a casino and play the roulette, you know you have the expected value of -0.053 and that's what you'd always get.
Memecoins work differently. They are a game of musical chairs, where everybody wants to sell it to the next bigger fool. Everybody knows it's going to zero eventually, and everybody hopes they could sell it at the profit before it happens. There is no intrinsic value at all, only fools fooling bigger fools. It's also not random with some well-known rules - it's just when the scammer decides to pull the rug. Everything between the ICO and that moment is just everybody trying to cheat everybody else, and that's the only thing that is happening.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
Oh come on. Did America also create Britain? France? Denmark? Austria? The pattern is the same all over Europe, everywhere the speech is controlled and restricted, especially the speech that is considered "offensive" or is threatening the narrative preferred by the government. The EU as a whole has a censorship law - DSA - that is actively used to suppress speech all over the EU. The Congress released a report a year ago detailing various aspects of this: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/foreign-censorship-threat-how-european-unions-digital-services-act-compels
I mean, sure, the deep state reptilians and all the orgs they run or used to run (no real reason to single out CIA, they are at practically every three-letter agency that exists) have no problem with the censorship and state control over speech. They would support any effort to increase the control, be it in the US or anywhere. We had it with "disinformation boards" (which was successfully repelled, fortunately), we had it with control over social media (which kinda died with Covid and Musk buying Twitter), we have the next fight now with the same people trying to seize control over AI tech, and we will see it many times more in the future. But to claim they caused the censorship push in Europe and Europeans are blameless agency-free puppets is complete BS. Europeans are doing it for the same reason bureaucrats everywhere are doing it - they want power. Not for CIA or somebody else, but for themselves. Control over speech means more power, and more secure power. That's it, no need to involve CIA.
This nonsense about "all the shit that is happening on the planet, CIA caused it" got to stop. Other people are people too, they can do stupid shit without the CIA.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
Being opposed to libertarianism doesn't make the CDU left-wing.
That is true, but it certainly makes it mis-aligned with American values. In the US, at least, freedom of expression, freedom of political participation and robust societal discussion of current political issues has been a nationwide shared value. It is not the value of the Left anymore - which is why one is tempted to associate the similar positions of CDU with the left wing - but going back to the original topic, if even the supposed "right" in Germany is hostile to the values that many in the US hold sacred - one is tempted to ask, what kind of alliance do we have? What do we have in common? Of course, US history knows many cases where we temporarily allied with countries much worse than todays Germany - such as Stalin's USSR, for example - but that was the alliance of necessity, and it was dissolved once the need passed. Is this the kind of alliance we have between US and Europe, which was necessary when USSR was alive? Is it still necessary today? In which form? To what purpose? I think these are the questions that need to be asked.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
The electoral picture is pretty much the opposite.
If you are talking about recent electoral pushback like AfD getting almost-majority in one state, then it's a reaction exactly on the consequences of the said takeover. And even this reaction is largely ineffectual - AfD does not have a majority and will encounter uniform rejection from pretty much every other party. All the problems that the emergence of the alliance caused - mass migration, crime, cultural destruction, welfare abuse, economic stagnation, military impotence, suppression of civil liberties, etc. - remain and I don't see any signs of anything improving there, however AfD or Le Pen are polling.
The fact that there is a lot of leftist screeching online
I don't know what the leftists are screeching about, and I don't care - they always screeching about something. That's not what I am talking about - I am talking about what's happening on the ground. I do not see Europe "moving right" in any substantial way, but I see all the problems I mentioned above, and really I don't see how they are solvable - you can not invite millions of migrants and not give them vote, if you're a democracy. You can not give them vote and not enact policies that they would like to have, if you're a democracy. And since nobody in Europe is ready to reject multiculturalism and declare assimilation to be the only way - they will have to change instead, to accommodate the people they have accepted.
Perhaps you'd want the reversal of these policies to go faster
"Faster" than "not at all"? Sure, I'd want that. But the question is not what I want, but what they do, and I don't see any reversal. Are we seeing mass deportations? Are we seeing welfare reform? Are we seeing Europe abandoning multiculturalism and adopting the policy of assimilation? Are we seeing deregulation, privatization and abandonment of speech controls? I don't see it.
JarJarJedi
7d ago
The US has historically led a coalition of developed nations that was fairly biased towards US interests
Historically, yes. But is it still the case? Europe is increasingly being taken over by the green-red alliance, and it's not entirely clear why the US should keep financing Europe's security while Europe is rebuilding itself as a woke socialist caliphate. It'd be nice to get the old, Western-civilization-aligned Europe back, but the US can not enact this change. Only Europeans can. And they do not seem to be able or willing to.
I am not a huge fan of Trump's "bull in a china shop" diplomatic style, and it does not seem to be practically effective that much - at least, I am not seeing a huge improvement in the terms of improving US standing and achieving US goals by diplomatic means. His only major success so far that I can identify is freeing the Israeli hostages from Hamas (which is extremely close to my heart personally but I suspect is not super high on the US priority scale) and some advancement on the Abraham accords (even though it is compensated for by increasing radicalization of Turkey). Beyond that, I can hardly name any diplomatic win attributable to him. Stuff like getting rid of Maduro sound a big win to me (at least so far) but there was not a lot of diplomacy involved there.
But while I am skeptical about his methods, I recognize that his approach of trying to get more favorable arrangements makes sense. If EU or Canada put tariffs on US goods, why the US should be fine with it? I think it makes sense to act towards achieving more friendly arrangements. The problem is it seems like Trump is very good in getting into the fight, but less good in figuring out how to end the fight in a way that achieves the goals that the entire fight was about.
undermining US hegemony in a bid for marginal revisions in an already highly favorable status quo is a questionable strategy
Unfortunately, the hegemony is coming into question whether we want it or not, for the reasons I named above. When the fundamental values of the countries are misaligned, the alliance can be maintained either by the US spending huge piles of money - pecunia non olet - or by US aligning more with the woke green-red alliance. The Left has no problem with either part of this, but the Right does. So the realignment is inevitable as long as the US does not succumb to the same alliance. The question is what form that realignment would take.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
यः धर्मम् परित्यज्य श्रिसुखम्हितेच्छय स दुःखं गच्छेत् न संशयः अष्तबहुभर्तामुढयथा
Google Translate produces:
He who abandons righteousness and desires the welfare of prosperity and happiness will undoubtedly go to suffering, as you have married eight many husbands
Which kinda sorta in the same direction, but hilariously inaccurate and converting Octopodes to "marrying eight husbands" takes it into yet another hilarious realm.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
I don't think it's accurate to say central bank policies have no effect. I've heard a lot of talk about zero-interest-rate phenomena and its influence on the tech market scene, for example, and I think that has a lot of basis under it. If you give people access to infinite money with the condition on "give it back some time later, maybe" it will have an influence on the economy, how could it not? I do not deny government spending and taxation has its effects too - I mean, we're talking trillions here, how could it not, and I think nobody would ever deny taxation directly influences economic behavior, and so does subsidizing.
That said, I think the idea that the Fed is only interested in pegging inflation to 2% and nothing else matters is naive at best. The Fed is seen as the steward of the economy as a whole, whatever is meant by that - I am sure they have enough charts for everybody - and the government would reach out to them (either quietly or flamboyantly, in Trump's case) if they want some economic policy to happen. I think that has been the case for a long time, one can call it by whatever term they want, but the government and the Fed have some ideas how the economy should look like, and they use all their tools to achieve it, and the inflation is only one measure among many.
JarJarJedi
16d ago
I feel Russia got a bit tamer since 1990s with Alan Chumak, Kashpirovsky, and so on. At least now it's more mainstream, cross-cultural superstitions, not something on the verge (and sometimes over it) of mass hysteria.
JarJarJedi
16d ago
Something needs to fill that God-shaped hole.
JarJarJedi
16d ago
Race is one of the most important aspects of one's character, according to the Left, and it is unchangeable, just ask Nkechi Amare Diallo. The logic is as much the subject to the ideology as anything else on the Left. That's how doublethink works.
JarJarJedi
16d ago
Believing and defending unpopular things
But not really unpopular things, just low-risk things. You don't get fired from your job for talking about capricorns - though you could be if you talk about mass immigration in a wrong way.
Having a lot of hardware doesn't mean much alone - Saudi Arabia has lots of hardware but is completely inept at using it, losing to Houthis all the time. Whether or not US is going to involve itself is a big gamble - wars are expensive, but they are also very useful for uniting the nation. And Japan may use this chance to come out of the shadow on WW2 and reassert its role as a normal nation with normal military. Australia is unlikely to pay any substantial role, as far as I understand they're completely cucked by now. I think you're right that economical pressure and corrupting the society is probably more likely ways, but you never know...
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