US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1784

On September 03 2019 07:14 micronesia wrote:

Good post but one point of clarification: When reactors like the Fukushima reactors significantly overheat, the zirc fuel cladding undergoes a reaction with water (the primary coolant) that releases hydrogen gas. The hydrogen concentrations in the containment at Fukushima built up to explosive levels and then detonated in several locations, including in one of the buildings with a reactor that hadn't been operating recently.

On September 03 2019 23:49 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:

For sure. I found it comical but then we got kind of serious so I felt I needed to put that out there. I wonder, if Portugal and Spain hadn't journeyed as far as South America and tried for Southeast Asia, could they have stayed on par with England, France, and to some extent, the Dutch. Could they have taken Hong Kong from Britain? World history is fascinating.

In a lesson of why trump shouldn't be allowed to tweet anything, ever, I present to you exhibit A. Amateur satellite trackers have found the satellite that took the Iran picture.


Source

Seems minor, but little things can add up quickly.

On September 04 2019 01:59 zatic wrote:

The position of satellites isn't exactly secret. I mean, they are right there above us, it's not like you can hide them. Any foreign power to who it matters knows already where every spy satellite is. Amateurs have often enough spotted them too.

The capabilities were also fairly well understood even by amateurs before. This image pretty much just confirms the "Hubble, pointing down" assumption.

Finally, Trump didn't tweet this without someone checking it first. There is some analysis out there that show that redactions to the screencap of the picture have been added before Trump send it out.

On September 04 2019 03:50 TheTenthDoc wrote:


Keep in mind redactions to the screencap is no guarantee it was checked for public consumption. It could have easily been redacted or adjusted before being included in the document he took it from (after all, he 100% took it from an official briefing doc) with no intention for dissemination to the entire twittersphere. And, of course, we can't trust Trump's word on it since he is a pathological liar.

On September 03 2019 23:00 KwarK wrote:

So the premise of the joke is that 19th and early 20th Century American leadership were generally racist expansionists who saw the northern half of Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and a bunch of other places as being rightfully theirs. These are all Spanish speaking places. None of the British or French places were targeted.
The substance of the joke is the idea that to ignorant racists anywhere hot, south, and where the people speak “Mexican” is just another form of Mexico and therefore intrinsically inferior to the US and subject to manifest destiny.

It’s a mockery of colonialism combined with the stereotype that Americans don’t know or care about the wider world. An understanding of Spain would be beyond the simplistic hierarchy of colonialism and so in the eyes of the Americans Spain is rounded down to Euro-Mexico. Spain is obviously its own country with its own complicated history and culture. But the United States decided it was entitled to the former Spanish Empire and I am jokingly suggesting this is because all of that history and culture were lost of the American invaders who thought it was basically Mexico.

On September 04 2019 05:12 Introvert wrote:


What do you mean "None of the British or French places were targeted." I must be missing your meaning here, because of course until the French and British were kicked out of what is now the US they were fighting or arguing over it all the time. The Spanish tended to get run over because they were unable to defend what was ostensibly theirs. Neither the French nor the British were so weak on the continent to make that possible.

On September 04 2019 07:44 KwarK wrote:

We're talking 1840-1940 era here. Which conflicts do you have in mind?

So the premise of the joke is that 19th and early 20th Century American leadership

On September 04 2019 08:05 Introvert wrote:


That's why I ask. I interepted this as being a different date range. In that time period there wasn't a whole lot of land on the continent controlled by the British or French in the first place (excepting Canada, which America failed in taking any real part of twice). Expansion westward, rather than worrying about small islands, occurred for totally rational reasons, not least of all that American traders were already moving that direction and the government was just keeping pace. Aggregating over a century and collapsing the nation-state conflict to one "area" seems unhelpful. The fact is, Spain and later Mexico simply didn't have the capability of keeping what they claimed, while the French and British could theoretically fight for what they had. Although in my personal opinion, whether or not France sold colonial Louisiana, the Americans were taking it and moving all the way to the Pacific no matter what. Expansion seems to me to be less about racism and more about having the easiest, most profitable, and (maybe) most glorious growth, with perhaps some racism back-filling into justification for the manner of the expansion, if not necessarily the expansion itself.

On September 04 2019 08:05 Introvert wrote:


That's why I ask. I interepted this as being a different date range. In that time period there wasn't a whole lot of land on the continent controlled by the British or French in the first place (excepting Canada, which America failed in taking any real part of twice). Expansion westward, rather than worrying about small islands, occurred for totally rational reasons, not least of all that American traders were already moving that direction and the government was just keeping pace. Aggregating over a century and collapsing the nation-state conflict to one "area" seems unhelpful. The fact is, Spain and later Mexico simply didn't have the capability of keeping what they claimed, while the French and British could theoretically fight for what they had. Although in my personal opinion, whether or not France sold colonial Louisiana, the Americans were taking it and moving all the way to the Pacific no matter what. Expansion seems to me to be less about racism and more about having the easiest, most profitable, and (maybe) most glorious growth, with perhaps some racism back-filling into justification for the manner of the expansion, if not necessarily the expansion itself.

On September 04 2019 08:18 GreenHorizons wrote:


My Washington state history teacher would have a conniption if I didn't mention "54 40 or fight." The role racism plays is complicated but it served as both motive and justification in colonization and expansion. On the mainland, racism was key to exterminating the native population, and the extermination or "civilizing" of native populations was used as a major motive for expansion.

Early citizens of the US were extremely genocidal.

On September 04 2019 08:41 KwarK wrote:

Your US history seems really shaky. The British and French weren't kicked out of the continental US, the continental US was filled with them (plus Germans, Dutch, and so forth). They were the US. The thirteen colonies weren't wrested from Britain by the US, the US was made up of the thirteen colonies, they're not an outside agent, they're a secessionist faction in a civil war. Louisiana wasn't predated upon by the US, they were integrated into a system that they were already very closely tied to through diplomatic means. Europeans were still flooding into the new world, the Americans you want to suggest were rivals to European colonial powers were the European colonizers. I suspect if you traced your family history back to 1789 you'd find more of your ancestors in Europe than in America, as would almost all Americans.

So no, the US was not a colonial rival of Britain and France. It was colonized by the British and French (and Germans, Dutch, and so forth) through mass migration. It did not target British or French (or German, or Dutch) colonies for expansion because it was one of them. A release valve for surplus population, a source of raw materials for use in the old world, a new market to sell goods to, a valued trading partner, and so forth. Obviously the US was politically independent but that does not mean it was not extremely heavily colonized after 1789 by the Northern European powers.

I'm also not sure what other date range you'd put on the US's colonial history (as distinguished from westward expansion into Terra Nullius which isn't colonialism (for the record I know there were people living there until white men came and shot them all, but they didn't have a flag which means it's not official)). The end date has to be the end of the colonial era which I put in 1939 but you could arguably put at Suez. I'd use the Mexican-American War as a start date because it's the point at which the US starts deciding that it deserves land that belongs to people who do have flags. If not 1840-1940, what would you use? Arguably 1823 for the Monroe Doctrine, which saw the US tacitly claim the Americas as their sphere of influence. Certainly not the Louisiana purchase or earlier.

The British and French weren't kicked out of the continental US, the continental US was filled with them (plus Germans, Dutch, and so forth). They were the US.

On September 04 2019 09:06 Introvert wrote:


That's actually a good example of what I'm talking about. In the end, there was no fight, and there were more Americans than anyone else in the territory by the time it officially became a part of the US.



This is such a troll response and I'm not sure what I did to deserve it. I thank you for making it obvious right at the start though, with this gem



You originally premised your joke on the idea that racist expansionists saw the "Mexican" speaking places as inferior and thus ripe for some Manifest Destiny. I'm pointing out that the reason it was mostly Spanish or Mexican controlled land that was sought was because most the land that didn't belong to the US (but that they wanted) by this point was Spanish or Mexican. Westward expansion wasn't colonization, it was conquest. Colonization is a related, but distinct topic. And as GH mentioned above, the US did in fact successfully take more from the British in the mid 1840s, and amusingly enough that was another dispute between the Spanish and the British where the Spanish couldn't actually back up their claims.

On September 04 2019 09:18 GreenHorizons wrote:


Specifically it's that Britain still had a navy so taking islands wasn't much of an option for the US which had practically none. But if you tell someone in the US you're Spanish they are likely going to presume you're from Latin/South America not Europe.

On September 04 2019 09:19 KwarK wrote:
Do you not see the issue with an American, arguing in English, that his country rid itself of the English?

The United States wasn't a distinct entity that came in and fought the English crown and wrest the colonies from them. It was a politically dependent European colony that became a politically independent European colony.

On September 04 2019 09:32 Introvert wrote:


Which is what I alluded to earlier, yes. The British, and theoretically the French, had the military capability to defend their territory.



Do you not see the the issue with interpreting what I wrote as saying the US literally shipped every Englishman or Frenchman off the continent? The USA was an independent nation-state that either won, bought, or negotiated their way into territory claimed by European powers. Playing nice with the non-Spanish powers was not so much a function of racial other-ness as it was a question of prudence and realistic expectations.

On September 04 2019 09:46 KwarK wrote:

It's not just that they didn't expel them (and I didn't say that they did, you're still not understanding), it's that it was business as normal. The United States was colonized by Europeans. The Irish for example. You can't draw a line between before the War of Independence and after and say 'colony before, nation state after". It's not that simple, political autonomy does not by itself exclude colonization. The United States was colonized by Europeans throughout the period in question. Think of 1789 as the moment of conception. You can trace things back to there but the substance of the baby didn't exist at conception and was subsequently drawn from the biological substance of the mother. You're projecting the fully formed baby back to conception. Playing nice with the mother wasn't smart politics, it's because it was still in the womb.

I'm also not sure what other date range you'd put on the US's colonial history (as distinguished from westward expansion into Terra Nullius which isn't colonialism (for the record I know there were people living there until white men came and shot them all, but they didn't have a flag which means it's not official)).