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On August 02 2018 14:23 Aquanim wrote:Show nested quote +On August 02 2018 14:20 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 02 2018 14:10 Aquanim wrote:On August 02 2018 14:06 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 02 2018 14:00 Aquanim wrote:On August 02 2018 12:32 reincremate wrote:On August 02 2018 12:16 Aquanim wrote:
If zlefin had listed every single condition for the prosperity of the United States, including those not directly related to the point he was making, we would likely have been waiting for a while. A laundry list of all the specific advantages a nation has would not be as revealing as simply pointing out that the U.S. is mainly wealthy for the same reason other nations are wealthy: centuries of doing really bad shit to people. Oh, and also hard work and all that. "Worked super hard to get where we are today" is a great way to negate all the horrible exploitation and mass killing that had to happen in order to produce the balance of wealth and power in the world today. And if zlefin had been saying "The US is particularly wealthy because its people worked super hard to get where we are today" you'd have a point. "The US is particularly wealthy because it's big and has a lot of natural resources" does not have the same character. But systematically exterminating and exploiting the people who utilized those resources before them then kidnapping and forcing a bunch of people to build the foundation of the country, followed by the exploitation of millions of workers for hundreds of years would be more honest. As it's not as if it just tripped and landed on a land of plentiful resources and sprung into a "high level of development" as a result. The euphemism of "spends a lot on the military" doesn't really capture the horrors the US has committed to ensure it's place of power. I don't substantially disagree with this and I doubt zlefin does either. That doesn't mean zlefin deserves censure or even commentary for deciding not to recite it in a context where it was irrelevant. It's always relevant, and does deserve to get called out. If the US habitually overcompensated for it's erasure of the parts of it's history it doesn't like it might be different, but ya know. Particularly when it's not even really accurate. Perhaps 'natural resources" played a significant role in our current positioning but our size is has no statistical significance on our wealth. That would be to say that "We are wealthy because we have a large amount of natural wealth" isn't saying anything without the context of how it was obtained. That the people who had been using it were systematically exterminated isn't an irrelevant detail, it's an immutable characteristic of our wealth. As is the exploitation it took to turn it from shit on/in the ground into more familiar measures of wealth. Well, I think from here people can make their own decision as to whether they think you're picking a fight with zlefin for the sake of it or not. I'll take my leave.
This is a forum, not a circle jerk room. It's perfectly normal and natural to masturbate argue with each other. What's your point? That we aren't supposed to argue with each other?
Also lol at saying you'll take your leave, but to continue posting and that you are done here and still to continue posting more than anyone else.
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On August 02 2018 20:19 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
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This is a forum, not a circle jerk room. It's perfectly normal and natural to masturbate argue with each other. What's your point? That we aren't supposed to argue with each other?
It seems like you missed the words "for the sake of it". I don't see the point in petty zlefin-baiting.
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On August 02 2018 18:24 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On August 02 2018 18:08 iamthedave wrote:On August 01 2018 02:26 GreenHorizons wrote:
Remember the parties are powerless to control who's in their party, but you can't have a third party because the two parties have all the power. I mean at least p6 is consistent on this not attributing any responsibility to the Republican party for Nazi's running under their banner.
It's impossible to make any sense of this stuff sometimes. You can't have a third party because people won't vote for it. There are no rules preventing someone starting a third party. You must know this. The issue to prevent change is most of America is hardcore democrat OR Republican, with little inbetween. In addition, your rules don't allow for coalition governments, do they? It's always a clear winner? The UK has the same problem in theory, in that most households are hardcore one or the other, but there's enough smaller parties bleeding votes that occasionally coalition governments have to happen (the Tories have had to make coalitions with the lib dems and DUP in recent years). P6 seems dead on the money. If your intention is to engage with that one phrase in isolation I don't see a reason to, if instead this is your entrance into the greater discussion I'd expect you to engage with the rest of the argument. Which is that parties are mostly powerless (by choice) to control who attaches a D or R to their name, they however wield a great deal of power when it comes to the significance that comes with it, both electorally and legislatively. That is to say that whether a Nazi or a guy Banned from the local mall calls himself a Republican or not they have little influence over, whether he's sponsored/endorsed by the party, given seats and votes, and so on is. So if it's a pedantic point about party membership, then sure, if it's the point that was actually being made, not at all.
That was just a response to that particular point, yes.
As a gateway into the larger discussion, I mostly agree with you and haven't had much to add. Save a +1 for you I guess. I'm relatively good with far eastern and european history and I'm well aware of the amount of exploitation and oppression almost every major culture has used to get where they are today.
I think Korea might be excluded from that, with emphasis on 'might'. Japan didn't exploit too many people but did butcher the natives a la American Indians, so I think that puts them at least partially under your metrics.
I do feel too much is being read into what Zlefin said/didn't say, however. The US is largely in its particular place in the world not because it exploited people harder than anyone else (I'm pretty sure my country still wins that race), but because it had the natural wealth to build a strong bedrock onto, and the US's size gives it a higher ceiling than most other nations. I think that's all Zlefin really meant to say.
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I don’t think explaining the US place in the world by « we are great people, we work hard” is any dumber than giving “slavery and genocide” as an answer. Those emotional moral judgments bring nothing. Every significant country in a position of power, at any point in history, has done a lot of horrifying shits. France, England, Russia, Turkey, Germany, you name it.
And the US wealth has less to do with the slave-operated southern plantation or even the ressources taken from natives, than with the successes of the industrial north. It has also a lot to do with its unique geographical place, its immensity, its uber capitalist ethics, the contingency of history (the world wars in particular), the foreign policy and military choices it made, the arcanes of the international monetary system after ww2, etc etc.
Now of course we can also talk about the horrific crimes commited at various time by the USA against africans, natives, central americans and so on and so forth, or about all the great things the country has accomplished, but if it’s about understanding the country’s place in the world we can do better than this.
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On August 02 2018 22:00 Biff The Understudy wrote:
I don’t think explaining the US place in the world by « we are great people, we work hard” is any dumber than giving “slavery and genocide” as an answer. Those emotional moral judgments bring nothing. Every significant country in a position of power, at any point in history, has done a lot of horrifying shits. France, England, Russia, Turkey, Germany, you name it.
And the US wealth has less to do with the slave-operated southern plantation or even the ressources taken from natives, than with the successes of the industrial north. It has also a lot to do with its unique geographical place, its immensity, its uber capitalist ethics, the contingency of history (the world wars in particular), the foreign policy and military choices it made, the arcanes of the international monetary system after ww2, etc etc.
Now of course we can also talk about the horrific crimes commited at various time by the USA against africans, natives, central americans and so on and so forth, or about all the great things the country has accomplished, but if it’s about understanding the country’s place in the world we can do better than this.
This is exactly the point GH was trying to make (I think).
The thing that the US has in common with every other highly developed/technological society on Earth is how they got there. You get your power by doing horrible shit to people, whether that's by using your military and foreign policy, rigging the banking system to concentrate wealth, or stripping assets (including slave labour) from other countries.
Its not a coincidence that every country in a position of power got there by doing awful things at pivotal moments in their history.
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That may be true, but it begs a lot of questions as to causality and the extent to which nations have benefitted from "not awful" things as well.
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Uhm... Because the countries at about similar development levels fought 2 World Wars on their own soil losing immense amount of Infrastructure and like 2 Generations of able bodied males?
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On August 02 2018 22:38 Velr wrote:
Uhm... Because the countries at about similar development levels fought 2 World Wars on their own soil losing immense amount of Infrastructure and like 2 Generations of able bodied males?
I think that might have played a small role, too. But then America did have Vietnam, which killed a shit ton of America's youth.
On August 02 2018 22:00 Biff The Understudy wrote:
I don’t think explaining the US place in the world by « we are great people, we work hard” is any dumber than giving “slavery and genocide” as an answer. Those emotional moral judgments bring nothing. Every significant country in a position of power, at any point in history, has done a lot of horrifying shits. France, England, Russia, Turkey, Germany, you name it.
And the US wealth has less to do with the slave-operated southern plantation or even the ressources taken from natives, than with the successes of the industrial north. It has also a lot to do with its unique geographical place, its immensity, its uber capitalist ethics, the contingency of history (the world wars in particular), the foreign policy and military choices it made, the arcanes of the international monetary system after ww2, etc etc.
Now of course we can also talk about the horrific crimes commited at various time by the USA against africans, natives, central americans and so on and so forth, or about all the great things the country has accomplished, but if it’s about understanding the country’s place in the world we can do better than this.
Dumber? No. Self-serving and cowardly? It's those in spades.
The people who trot out 'we are great because we work hard' either aren't particularly up on history (which is fine, it's a topic that doesn't interest everybody, and they can be educated) or know full well they're talking shit. It's something used by people who want to talk down to people from other nations that aren't as prosperous, while disavowing the path of destruction every developed western nation has walked to get to where it is.
That's not saying 'you should feel bad for being born in the west', just 'don't actively pretend that people in the west are fundamentally better than the people our ancestors oppressed because we won a war or two and pillaged their resources for the glory of the homeland'. Which is what a lot of people who trot out that language are actively doing.
And also why it causes GH to enter rage mode, I suspect.
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United States41117 Posts
That and every war the US has fought in has been away from it's economic centers, we have two vast oceans shielding us or buying us time. The Civil War was the last major conflict that ever really harmed the United States. During 1942 when U-Boats were parked outside the East Coast we were never really in any danger from being invaded, or starved etc.
All other wars after could be compared to colonial fights.
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One of the takeaways from this discussion is that comparative history is really tough and oftentimes a practically impossible undertaking. This inherent difficulty ought be remembered whenever someone wants to make a hand-wavey reference to a nation's history as a reason for this or that.
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On August 02 2018 22:56 iamthedave wrote:Show nested quote +On August 02 2018 22:38 Velr wrote:
Uhm... Because the countries at about similar development levels fought 2 World Wars on their own soil losing immense amount of Infrastructure and like 2 Generations of able bodied males? I think that might have played a small role, too. But then America did have Vietnam, which killed a shit ton of America's youth.
The devastation in terms of infrastructure on home soil and lives lost from Vietnam is not comparable to WW1 and WW2, except perhaps in hollywood movies. No matter what occured in Vietnam, it wasn't American didn't have to rebuild roads, railway, homes and a modern economy from the ground up, nor did anything approaching lives lost, or time lost approcaching anything UK or Germany had to suffer in WW2.
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On August 02 2018 22:56 iamthedave wrote:Show nested quote +On August 02 2018 22:38 Velr wrote:
Uhm... Because the countries at about similar development levels fought 2 World Wars on their own soil losing immense amount of Infrastructure and like 2 Generations of able bodied males? I think that might have played a small role, too. But then America did have Vietnam, which killed a shit ton of America's youth. Id say the loss of infrastructure and development is considerably more significant then the lives lost and American didn't suffer much there as their wars were fought on someone else's soil.
Vietnam wasn't actually 'that' bad for the US. 'only' a little under 60k dead. Most casualties were Vietnamese.
WW2 was 417k for the US.
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On August 02 2018 22:59 farvacola wrote:
One of the takeaways from this discussion is that comparative history is really tough and oftentimes a practically impossible undertaking. This inherent difficulty ought be remembered whenever someone wants to make a hand-wavey reference to a nation's history as a reason for this or that.
As I have had to do consistently when right wing posters here have tried to draw comparisons between Trump's rise and Brexit, while ignoring the very different reasons behind the two events.
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On August 02 2018 22:59 farvacola wrote:
One of the takeaways from this discussion is that comparative history is really tough and oftentimes a practically impossible undertaking. This inherent difficulty ought be remembered whenever someone wants to make a hand-wavey reference to a nation's history as a reason for this or that.
Agreed. If people are looking for a reason why specific nations are more “successful”, the commonality is relatively temperate climates and large amounts arable land. It does not seem like a huge factor in modern life, given the advances of technology for transporting food. Large surpluses in food not only helps create economies, but helped those areas recover from shocks like natural disasters or wars. The exploitation of other humans is a commonality throughout all of human history and is not solely responsible for the success of any given region across human history.
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On August 02 2018 22:56 iamthedave wrote:Show nested quote +On August 02 2018 22:38 Velr wrote:
Uhm... Because the countries at about similar development levels fought 2 World Wars on their own soil losing immense amount of Infrastructure and like 2 Generations of able bodied males? I think that might have played a small role, too. But then America did have Vietnam, which killed a shit ton of America's youth. You should re-think this argument and find a different avenue, because that one is a dead end.
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The only war that America fought in which America had casualties on par with what the European nations suffered during the World Wars was the Civil War.
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When historians talks about the evolution of warfare, the US civil war is seen is the prelude to World War 1. It was one of the first wars were a nation was able to turn a large portion of its economy to a sustained war effort. And the first war where we started to see the lethality of the industrial war machine could achieve. The causality counts were shocking and some European news papers had some real color language to justify how blood thirsty American were. They are a fun read if people can find them.
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On August 02 2018 14:29 a_flayer wrote:
Oh right, I forget he has me muted too, hahahaha
Me 3 lol.
I think the mentality of it goes back to StealthBlue's article he posted about the Third Way. Suddenly now they want to have a debate in the party after ignoring us for decades and seeing us take the message to the people. Or the guy who condemned Bernie's rhetoric about the rich, because "I want to be rich". Selfish ambition completely missing the point.
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EPT
