10 ms·

Remarks on the Decline of American Empire

80 points by dilap 9y ago

sandworm101 9y ago
>>>1. US foreign policy over the last decades has been disastrous -- trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended on middle eastern wars, culminating in utter defeat. Lost me in the first paragraph. It hasn't been "thousands" but tens or hundreds of thousands dead. Thousands may be how many american military lives have been lost but that is certainly nowhere near the actual cost of any war. Such little assumptions belittle the value of non-american lives. If you want to muse about the decline of american exceptionalism, a good start might be to avoid repeating its mistakes in your own writing. And there is more: >>>Wars involving primitive religious fanatics in unimportant regions of the world should not distract us... Um... "primitive religious fanatics" don't exist in only the "unimportant regions of the world". That is unless the author meant to include Europe, SE Asia, Africa and the US as unimportant. (I'd include south america but cannot recall any off the top of my head).
- robin_reala 9y ago
  Certainly hundreds of thousands, even the low end official figure for the Iraq war alone is 110,000 (top-end more pessimistic estimate is 1m+)[1]. Add on to that Afghanistan[2] (estimates of 110,000 to 360,000) and you’re up to a lowball quarter of a million total. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%93present) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war...
- mc32 9y ago
  One hopes neoconservatism is good and dead. It was an ambitious ideology which presumed everyone in the world shared western values or wanted them. I think the American public tired of this neocon hawkishness and I'm hopeful we see a change in our foreign policy.
  - bluetomcat 9y ago
    > It was an ambitious ideology which presumed everyone in the world shared western values or wanted them. Eastern European here. After the fall of the iron curtain, what we really craved for was economic cooperation with the West, liberty of expression and civil and property rights. Instead, we got US-sponsored liberal NGOs to steer the public opinion in certain directions, NATO military bases to protect us from evil Russia and crappy mass culture in the form of Hollywood movies. It was a great disillusionment for most people.
    - mc32 9y ago
      Now it seems the baton has passed over to EU who now want to impose their world view on eastern Europe with the carrot and stick of economic cooperation. Time will tell if their effort is equal folly. That's not to deny China as well as Russia take opportunities to push their own visions.
    - timthelion 9y ago
      I would argue that the disillusionment in the Czech Republic not only the fault of the Americans, but also the fault of the former communists, who remained in power for the most part. During the privatization process the countries assets were sold to the corrupt ex-communists and westerners for pennies on the dollar. There is as much evil and profiteering from within as there is evil from outside. Which NGOs are you talking about? What have these NGOs done to harm the countries?
      - bluetomcat 9y ago
        I will outline the Bulgarian perspective of events. By the mid 1980s, "perestroychiks" in the Bulgarian communist party had prevailed over the old generation of die-hard communists. Despite officially calling themselves "communists", these people were avid pro-westerners and believers in market economy. One such key figure in Bulgaria was Andrey Lukanov, a minister of foreign trade during that time. When the Berlin wall fell, he headed the first democratic government and remained an influential force until his murdering in 1996. Andrey Lukanov spoke eloquent English and was actively seeking economic ties and advices from the US. He even went so far to ask two American economy professors to devise a detailed economic plan which would guarantee the optimal transition to a market economy. Even the long-time president and communist dictator Todor Zhivkov officially admitted during his final resignation speech in 1989 that "communism was ill-conceived and we must be welcoming all foreign western capital". The trouble is, western capital didn't come as quickly as expected. We were left with factories and enterprises which were unable to compete with their western counterparts and our market was quickly flooded mostly with foreign goods. Everything else follows from this. The privatisation therefore was more of an emergent act of saving the failed state enterprises. They were sold for pennies because they couldn't export their production and the domestic market was dire. Nowadays, we have tens of US-backed NGOs (most notably "Otvoreno Obshtestvo", America for Bulgaria Foundation, Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, etc.) which work very hard to persuade us that gay rights, minority rights and saving the polar bears are the most important problems on our agenda, without ever acknowledging the deep economic problems that cause social tension and emigration.
- distances 9y ago
  > Thousands may be how many american military lives have been lost but that is certainly nowhere near the actual cost of any war. The direct cost to America was clearly the point of these remarks to start with.
- eeZah7Ux 9y ago
  >> trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended on middle eastern wars > Such little assumptions belittle the value of non-american lives ...and american lives as well: I'm always surprised at how in some cultures it's considered acceptable mixing money and human lives in the same sentence as if they were somewhat comparable items. On top of that, human lives are often listed after money, yet nobody seems to take notice of this. "oh it's just semantics"...
  - timthelion 9y ago
    Are you sure that money and life are not comparable? After-all, people spend all of their lives making money. People die of hunger. And to be killed is not so much a matter of a loss of life, everyone is mortal after-all, we will all die, it is a loss of time. And time is money, and money is time.
- millermp12 9y ago
  In Europe and the US, our religious 'fanaticism" doesn't involve beheadings and bombings.
joss82 9y ago
George W Bush should be trialed in front of the International Criminal Court, if that court wants to remain relevant. Any international lawyer here who knows a way to start the process? I know I'm naive, the guy is going to die of old age after a long and blissful life likely playing golf and having fun. Edit: typos.
- arethuza 9y ago
  The US actually has legislation that authorizes the U.S. president to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
- specializeded 9y ago
  He isn’t African, the ICC won’t bother and everyone involved knows it.
- eksu 9y ago
  That would be a great way to destroy the ICC, and sorta fuckup the whole world in a lot of ways.
aaron-lebo 9y ago
The decline is overstated. International goodwill was at a very high point with Obama's election (Nobel, anyone). There's still nobody that can compete on the US's scale. There's a reason Macron wants to empower and streamline the EU (besides his power fantasies). Russia is a stagnant and isolated state, China has major ongoing issues with poverty and environmental degradation. China can't wage a war with the US outside of China itself. It's good that the "empire" is in decline, but a focus on the present misses the fact that world powers go through long cycles of decay and rebirth. The British lost the US in 1783 (pretty major loss), but by 1922 was at its greatest extent. It takes one election or world event to turn things around.
- fooblitzky 9y ago
  At it's greatest extent, but also declining in economical production for many years and so heavily in debt that servicing interest required nearly half of the government expenditure. Then WWII ended the British empire, despite victory, and a massive part of that was the financial debt owed the USA.
api 9y ago
To me the lynchpin is the monumental catastrophe represented by Iraq War II and the entire decades-long Middle East quagmire in general. It's been nothing short of national suicide, especially when one considers what else might have been done with all that money. We almost literally set the surplus of an entire American generation on fire and watched it burn. The neocons are the worst villains but not the only ones. They just represent the peak of a flow of lemmings over that cliff that began in the 1970s and 1980s. We will be repaying the cost of these wars both in absolute terms and in terms of lost opportunity for generations, and we have absolutely nothing to show for it. We will pay not only with money but with internal strife, political extremism, and lost international prestige. Our involvement in the Middle East may be the worst series of decisions in the history of human civilization when considered in terms of the magnitude of that which was lost.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  Not Germany waging two world wars? Germany in 1910 was dynamic, and due to those wars they lost multiple generations and at least a third of their land. Germany recovered from that within 40 years. The Iraq war was a disaster, but there's nothing especially trying about recovering from that given time.
  - throwawayjava 9y ago
    Germany was rebuilt from that, first through a brutal dictatorship and then, after that, with enormous assistance from the largest and strongest economies in the world, powered by a demographic boom in the richest parts of the world. And no matter how much progress has been made between 1950 and 2017, there's so little comfort in drawing a parallel between our present situation and the trajectory Germany from 1910 to 1945.
    - aaron-lebo 9y ago
      If you compare Clojure and PHP, it doesn't mean that you think Clojure is like PHP. Germany is just a reference, many countries have rebuilt themselves after disasters.
ramzyo 9y ago
Who is Steve Hsu, and why are his statements, opinions, and speculation about the future of America notable? Or is he just summarizing the statements, opinions, and speculation of the historian in the ~30 minute video linked on the page?
- elliotec 9y ago
  Why does he need to be notable? Maybe he's just some guy on the internet with an opinion like you and me.
  - scribu 9y ago
    If you have an illness, who’s opinion would you like to hear most? That of a random internet person or that of a medical professional? If you don’t have an illness and just want to read random stuff, instead of some other leisure activity, I guess it doesn’t matter.
  - ramzyo 9y ago
    Well I guess that I implicitly expect opinionated front page HN content to come from someone whose opinion is more informed than mine. I’m not sure what to take away from this post, given the lack of supporting evidence for the assertions made. Currently I’m at “huh, interesting opinions, who is this guy and how did his post make it to the front page of HN?” Of course this is just my interpretation of why things get upvoted to the home page.
    - millermp12 9y ago
      "Well I guess that I implicitly expect opinionated front page HN content to come from someone whose opinion is more informed than mine." Maybe not. But he is more informed on this subject than the average HN reader. Or was HN created just for you?
    - rgbrenner 9y ago
      He made it to the front page because people here read it, thought it was interesting, and gave it a point. The fact it's on the front page means nothing more than that. Any reputation youre attaching to it doesn't exist.
tolger 9y ago
I think the bigger risk is internal strife. When half or your citizens hate the other half, that's a recipe for disaster.
- Fluid_Mechanics 9y ago
  Combined with widespread gun ownership and ethnic enclaves...
  - njarboe 9y ago
    Machetes work just as well, if that is all you have (see Rwanda). I imagine rocks and sticks could be used if your civilization has not got to the universal machete ownership level.
    - soperj 9y ago
      How does what happened in Vegas happen with Machetes?
      - seanot 9y ago
        Was there evidence presented that the Las Vegas shooter was motivated by hatred for some group (political or otherwise)? I guess I missed that in the papers.
        apoorvkumar 9y ago
        You're saying a person (deranged or otherwise) did what he did without malice towards his fellow humans! That's some seriously warped observation.
      - dean 9y ago
        This thread is not talking about Vegas. It's talking about genocide. If internal strife gets to the point of extreme hatred, then you don't need guns to kill each other. Not saying I agree that would happen in the U.S., but that's what they're talking about. Not Vegas. To reiterate: See Rwanda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
aaavl2821 9y ago
I don't always think internal strife is a bad thing, nor that internal strife is at higher levels now than in the past. We had a civil war, and after that was the end of slavery and the gilded age. too much harmony stifles innovation I'd also disagree with the passage at the end of the article. George Washington was about as mercenary and capitalistic as they come. The revolution against Britain was started by the wealthy merchant class who calculated the npv of continued relations with Britain vs independence and found that independence was more profitable. Rockefeller was obsessed with money (recorded every penny he ever spent). The Bay Area economy was created as a result of ambitious young people literally taking part in a gold rush. It is disappointing that the romantic, politicized and intellectually lazy notions put forth in that final passage get any credence
DubiousPusher 9y ago
Edit: I should say I enjoyed the video. It's much more nuanced than the post that accompanies it. I thought historians abandoned "moral decline" arguments with the 19th century. What I find funny about them is they're always characterized as a decline in morals particularly important to the observing historian. And of course, no empirical measure of moral decline is ever given or even suggested. So what arguments like this really amount to are a feeling. A feeling felt by curmudgeonly historians throughout time. Nostalgia. And most likely, nostaligia for a time they themselves never inhabited. All the better because there are no negative memories to sour the nostalgia. America in my opinion is not in moral decline. We are reaching for a moral high point actually (but just barely). But that's just my feeling, so it's about as valuable as the ideas on offer here.
kyaghmour 9y ago
I was wondering what "RT America" was -- i.e. the video in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network) "RT (formerly Russia Today) is a Russian international television network funded by the Russian government."
thedevil 9y ago
Note that China was a juggernaut up until a few hundred years ago. https://infogram.com/share-of-world-gdp-throughout-history-1gjk92e6yjwqm16 https://infogram.com/share-of-world-gdp-throughout-history-1...
jonathanehrlich 9y ago
Fyi - RT is paid for by the Russian Government.
- cucuuc 9y ago
  What’s you’re point? Do you point out that the BBC is owned/paid by the British government when someone posts BBC? (or NPR for that matter)
  - ladon86 9y ago
    They’re very different. The BBC is an independent organization funded directly by license fees paid by television owners. Unlike RT, it is independent from direct government intervention, and it doesn’t attempt to advance the interests whichever party is in power. The BBC primarily exists to serve people living in Britain. RT is directly funded by the Russian government, and is targeted primarily at other countries outside Russia.
    - cucuuc 9y ago
      Jee, here I thought the World Service (the only BBC I can get) was targeted at me :S Radio liberty was forbidden from transmitting in the US by Congress.
  - RickS 9y ago
    In the context of a nation the UK had an adversarial relationship with, yes, that would be a prudent thing to point out.
    - cucuuc 9y ago
      Every day I drive through the counties that handed Trump his victory. Trust me the decline is real. Must be nice to worry about the messenger. I’ll worry about the toxins DuPont dumped in the local water or the lead leeching from my tap. But hey, I can afford to boil pasta with bottled water, so who cares?
  - 9y ago
tabtab 9y ago
I suspect that the Chinese govt's censorship desires will drag it down in terms of being a tax on productivity. To expand more, Chinese companies will have to interact more with the rest of the world, and this will create further censorship and monitoring pressure on the govt.
nikdaheratik 9y ago
Alot of the same arguments I heard from old people 20 years ago. I agree with the foreign policy critques, especially regarding the middle east, but we had similar issues with Vietnam 50 years ago and even larger ones with the Civil War and still bounced back. China has alot going for it economically, and that's a good thing overall, but it has its own issues to reckon with. Also, it's actually harder for its neighbors to deal with China, and vice versa, because of distance and shared borders. The U.S. may come across as a noisy policeman at times, but that's less of a worry that a pushy neighbor that keeps trying to move the fence line.
perseusprime11 9y ago
Nobody mentions the amount of diversity present in America when compared to other homegeneous cultures like China. You will lose if you bet against diversity!

80 points by dilap 9y ago

>>>1. US foreign policy over the last decades has been disastrous -- trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended on middle eastern wars, culminating in utter defeat. Lost me in the first paragraph. It hasn't been "thousands" but tens or hundreds of thousands dead. Thousands may be how many american military lives have been lost but that is certainly nowhere near the actual cost of any war. Such little assumptions belittle the value of non-american lives. If you want to muse about the decline of american exceptionalism, a good start might be to avoid repeating its mistakes in your own writing. And there is more: >>>Wars involving primitive religious fanatics in unimportant regions of the world should not distract us... Um... "primitive religious fanatics" don't exist in only the "unimportant regions of the world". That is unless the author meant to include Europe, SE Asia, Africa and the US as unimportant. (I'd include south america but cannot recall any off the top of my head).

robin_reala 9y ago
Certainly hundreds of thousands, even the low end official figure for the Iraq war alone is 110,000 (top-end more pessimistic estimate is 1m+)[1]. Add on to that Afghanistan[2] (estimates of 110,000 to 360,000) and you’re up to a lowball quarter of a million total. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%93present) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war...
mc32 9y ago
One hopes neoconservatism is good and dead. It was an ambitious ideology which presumed everyone in the world shared western values or wanted them. I think the American public tired of this neocon hawkishness and I'm hopeful we see a change in our foreign policy.
- bluetomcat 9y ago
  > It was an ambitious ideology which presumed everyone in the world shared western values or wanted them. Eastern European here. After the fall of the iron curtain, what we really craved for was economic cooperation with the West, liberty of expression and civil and property rights. Instead, we got US-sponsored liberal NGOs to steer the public opinion in certain directions, NATO military bases to protect us from evil Russia and crappy mass culture in the form of Hollywood movies. It was a great disillusionment for most people.
  - mc32 9y ago
    Now it seems the baton has passed over to EU who now want to impose their world view on eastern Europe with the carrot and stick of economic cooperation. Time will tell if their effort is equal folly. That's not to deny China as well as Russia take opportunities to push their own visions.
  - timthelion 9y ago
    I would argue that the disillusionment in the Czech Republic not only the fault of the Americans, but also the fault of the former communists, who remained in power for the most part. During the privatization process the countries assets were sold to the corrupt ex-communists and westerners for pennies on the dollar. There is as much evil and profiteering from within as there is evil from outside. Which NGOs are you talking about? What have these NGOs done to harm the countries?
    - bluetomcat 9y ago
      I will outline the Bulgarian perspective of events. By the mid 1980s, "perestroychiks" in the Bulgarian communist party had prevailed over the old generation of die-hard communists. Despite officially calling themselves "communists", these people were avid pro-westerners and believers in market economy. One such key figure in Bulgaria was Andrey Lukanov, a minister of foreign trade during that time. When the Berlin wall fell, he headed the first democratic government and remained an influential force until his murdering in 1996. Andrey Lukanov spoke eloquent English and was actively seeking economic ties and advices from the US. He even went so far to ask two American economy professors to devise a detailed economic plan which would guarantee the optimal transition to a market economy. Even the long-time president and communist dictator Todor Zhivkov officially admitted during his final resignation speech in 1989 that "communism was ill-conceived and we must be welcoming all foreign western capital". The trouble is, western capital didn't come as quickly as expected. We were left with factories and enterprises which were unable to compete with their western counterparts and our market was quickly flooded mostly with foreign goods. Everything else follows from this. The privatisation therefore was more of an emergent act of saving the failed state enterprises. They were sold for pennies because they couldn't export their production and the domestic market was dire. Nowadays, we have tens of US-backed NGOs (most notably "Otvoreno Obshtestvo", America for Bulgaria Foundation, Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, etc.) which work very hard to persuade us that gay rights, minority rights and saving the polar bears are the most important problems on our agenda, without ever acknowledging the deep economic problems that cause social tension and emigration.
distances 9y ago
> Thousands may be how many american military lives have been lost but that is certainly nowhere near the actual cost of any war. The direct cost to America was clearly the point of these remarks to start with.
eeZah7Ux 9y ago
>> trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended on middle eastern wars > Such little assumptions belittle the value of non-american lives ...and american lives as well: I'm always surprised at how in some cultures it's considered acceptable mixing money and human lives in the same sentence as if they were somewhat comparable items. On top of that, human lives are often listed after money, yet nobody seems to take notice of this. "oh it's just semantics"...
- timthelion 9y ago
  Are you sure that money and life are not comparable? After-all, people spend all of their lives making money. People die of hunger. And to be killed is not so much a matter of a loss of life, everyone is mortal after-all, we will all die, it is a loss of time. And time is money, and money is time.
millermp12 9y ago
In Europe and the US, our religious 'fanaticism" doesn't involve beheadings and bombings.

joss82 9y ago

George W Bush should be trialed in front of the International Criminal Court, if that court wants to remain relevant. Any international lawyer here who knows a way to start the process? I know I'm naive, the guy is going to die of old age after a long and blissful life likely playing golf and having fun. Edit: typos.

arethuza 9y ago
The US actually has legislation that authorizes the U.S. president to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
specializeded 9y ago
He isn’t African, the ICC won’t bother and everyone involved knows it.
eksu 9y ago
That would be a great way to destroy the ICC, and sorta fuckup the whole world in a lot of ways.

aaron-lebo 9y ago

The decline is overstated. International goodwill was at a very high point with Obama's election (Nobel, anyone). There's still nobody that can compete on the US's scale. There's a reason Macron wants to empower and streamline the EU (besides his power fantasies). Russia is a stagnant and isolated state, China has major ongoing issues with poverty and environmental degradation. China can't wage a war with the US outside of China itself. It's good that the "empire" is in decline, but a focus on the present misses the fact that world powers go through long cycles of decay and rebirth. The British lost the US in 1783 (pretty major loss), but by 1922 was at its greatest extent. It takes one election or world event to turn things around.

fooblitzky 9y ago
At it's greatest extent, but also declining in economical production for many years and so heavily in debt that servicing interest required nearly half of the government expenditure. Then WWII ended the British empire, despite victory, and a massive part of that was the financial debt owed the USA.

api 9y ago

To me the lynchpin is the monumental catastrophe represented by Iraq War II and the entire decades-long Middle East quagmire in general. It's been nothing short of national suicide, especially when one considers what else might have been done with all that money. We almost literally set the surplus of an entire American generation on fire and watched it burn. The neocons are the worst villains but not the only ones. They just represent the peak of a flow of lemmings over that cliff that began in the 1970s and 1980s. We will be repaying the cost of these wars both in absolute terms and in terms of lost opportunity for generations, and we have absolutely nothing to show for it. We will pay not only with money but with internal strife, political extremism, and lost international prestige. Our involvement in the Middle East may be the worst series of decisions in the history of human civilization when considered in terms of the magnitude of that which was lost.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
Not Germany waging two world wars? Germany in 1910 was dynamic, and due to those wars they lost multiple generations and at least a third of their land. Germany recovered from that within 40 years. The Iraq war was a disaster, but there's nothing especially trying about recovering from that given time.
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  Germany was rebuilt from that, first through a brutal dictatorship and then, after that, with enormous assistance from the largest and strongest economies in the world, powered by a demographic boom in the richest parts of the world. And no matter how much progress has been made between 1950 and 2017, there's so little comfort in drawing a parallel between our present situation and the trajectory Germany from 1910 to 1945.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    If you compare Clojure and PHP, it doesn't mean that you think Clojure is like PHP. Germany is just a reference, many countries have rebuilt themselves after disasters.

ramzyo 9y ago

Who is Steve Hsu, and why are his statements, opinions, and speculation about the future of America notable? Or is he just summarizing the statements, opinions, and speculation of the historian in the ~30 minute video linked on the page?

elliotec 9y ago
Why does he need to be notable? Maybe he's just some guy on the internet with an opinion like you and me.
- scribu 9y ago
  If you have an illness, who’s opinion would you like to hear most? That of a random internet person or that of a medical professional? If you don’t have an illness and just want to read random stuff, instead of some other leisure activity, I guess it doesn’t matter.
- ramzyo 9y ago
  Well I guess that I implicitly expect opinionated front page HN content to come from someone whose opinion is more informed than mine. I’m not sure what to take away from this post, given the lack of supporting evidence for the assertions made. Currently I’m at “huh, interesting opinions, who is this guy and how did his post make it to the front page of HN?” Of course this is just my interpretation of why things get upvoted to the home page.
  - millermp12 9y ago
    "Well I guess that I implicitly expect opinionated front page HN content to come from someone whose opinion is more informed than mine." Maybe not. But he is more informed on this subject than the average HN reader. Or was HN created just for you?
  - rgbrenner 9y ago
    He made it to the front page because people here read it, thought it was interesting, and gave it a point. The fact it's on the front page means nothing more than that. Any reputation youre attaching to it doesn't exist.

tolger 9y ago

I think the bigger risk is internal strife. When half or your citizens hate the other half, that's a recipe for disaster.

Fluid_Mechanics 9y ago
Combined with widespread gun ownership and ethnic enclaves...
- njarboe 9y ago
  Machetes work just as well, if that is all you have (see Rwanda). I imagine rocks and sticks could be used if your civilization has not got to the universal machete ownership level.
  - soperj 9y ago
    How does what happened in Vegas happen with Machetes?
    - seanot 9y ago
      Was there evidence presented that the Las Vegas shooter was motivated by hatred for some group (political or otherwise)? I guess I missed that in the papers.
      - apoorvkumar 9y ago
        You're saying a person (deranged or otherwise) did what he did without malice towards his fellow humans! That's some seriously warped observation.
    - dean 9y ago
      This thread is not talking about Vegas. It's talking about genocide. If internal strife gets to the point of extreme hatred, then you don't need guns to kill each other. Not saying I agree that would happen in the U.S., but that's what they're talking about. Not Vegas. To reiterate: See Rwanda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

aaavl2821 9y ago

I don't always think internal strife is a bad thing, nor that internal strife is at higher levels now than in the past. We had a civil war, and after that was the end of slavery and the gilded age. too much harmony stifles innovation I'd also disagree with the passage at the end of the article. George Washington was about as mercenary and capitalistic as they come. The revolution against Britain was started by the wealthy merchant class who calculated the npv of continued relations with Britain vs independence and found that independence was more profitable. Rockefeller was obsessed with money (recorded every penny he ever spent). The Bay Area economy was created as a result of ambitious young people literally taking part in a gold rush. It is disappointing that the romantic, politicized and intellectually lazy notions put forth in that final passage get any credence

DubiousPusher 9y ago

Edit: I should say I enjoyed the video. It's much more nuanced than the post that accompanies it. I thought historians abandoned "moral decline" arguments with the 19th century. What I find funny about them is they're always characterized as a decline in morals particularly important to the observing historian. And of course, no empirical measure of moral decline is ever given or even suggested. So what arguments like this really amount to are a feeling. A feeling felt by curmudgeonly historians throughout time. Nostalgia. And most likely, nostaligia for a time they themselves never inhabited. All the better because there are no negative memories to sour the nostalgia. America in my opinion is not in moral decline. We are reaching for a moral high point actually (but just barely). But that's just my feeling, so it's about as valuable as the ideas on offer here.

kyaghmour 9y ago

I was wondering what "RT America" was -- i.e. the video in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network) "RT (formerly Russia Today) is a Russian international television network funded by the Russian government."

thedevil 9y ago

Note that China was a juggernaut up until a few hundred years ago. https://infogram.com/share-of-world-gdp-throughout-history-1gjk92e6yjwqm16 https://infogram.com/share-of-world-gdp-throughout-history-1...

jonathanehrlich 9y ago

Fyi - RT is paid for by the Russian Government.

cucuuc 9y ago
What’s you’re point? Do you point out that the BBC is owned/paid by the British government when someone posts BBC? (or NPR for that matter)
- ladon86 9y ago
  They’re very different. The BBC is an independent organization funded directly by license fees paid by television owners. Unlike RT, it is independent from direct government intervention, and it doesn’t attempt to advance the interests whichever party is in power. The BBC primarily exists to serve people living in Britain. RT is directly funded by the Russian government, and is targeted primarily at other countries outside Russia.
  - cucuuc 9y ago
    Jee, here I thought the World Service (the only BBC I can get) was targeted at me :S Radio liberty was forbidden from transmitting in the US by Congress.
- RickS 9y ago
  In the context of a nation the UK had an adversarial relationship with, yes, that would be a prudent thing to point out.
  - cucuuc 9y ago
    Every day I drive through the counties that handed Trump his victory. Trust me the decline is real. Must be nice to worry about the messenger. I’ll worry about the toxins DuPont dumped in the local water or the lead leeching from my tap. But hey, I can afford to boil pasta with bottled water, so who cares?
- 9y ago

tabtab 9y ago

I suspect that the Chinese govt's censorship desires will drag it down in terms of being a tax on productivity. To expand more, Chinese companies will have to interact more with the rest of the world, and this will create further censorship and monitoring pressure on the govt.

nikdaheratik 9y ago

Alot of the same arguments I heard from old people 20 years ago. I agree with the foreign policy critques, especially regarding the middle east, but we had similar issues with Vietnam 50 years ago and even larger ones with the Civil War and still bounced back. China has alot going for it economically, and that's a good thing overall, but it has its own issues to reckon with. Also, it's actually harder for its neighbors to deal with China, and vice versa, because of distance and shared borders. The U.S. may come across as a noisy policeman at times, but that's less of a worry that a pushy neighbor that keeps trying to move the fence line.

perseusprime11 9y ago

Nobody mentions the amount of diversity present in America when compared to other homegeneous cultures like China. You will lose if you bet against diversity!