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The US is busy making the biggest own-goal one could imagine. From a position of world-wide dominance and respect, it is being destroyed at a rate that is too

• gambiting 2y ago
  Well, Brexit took the spot previously. Not sure if US can top it, but they sure as hell trying.
  • grandempire 2y ago
    All the catastrophic things that were predicted form Brexit didn’t really happen though
    • enraged_camel 2y ago
      Yes they did? Is this a joke? Or have you not been following the UK’s descent into poverty and irrelevance?
      • grandempire 2y ago
        Here a few that were seriously threatened - all the major corporations would leave and there would be no jobs - collapse of the pound - start of wars within the UK and potentially with EU
      • rayiner 2y ago
        The UK’s GDP per capita trajectory diverged around the end of the Great Recession. That was before the Brexit vote (2016) and long before the actual Brexit (2020). France and Italy have been stuck in more or less the same doldrums since the same time: https://datacommons.org/place/country/FRA?utm_medium=explore&mprop=amount&popt=EconomicActivity&cpv=activitySource,GrossDomesticProduction&hl=en https://datacommons.org/place/country/FRA?utm_medium=explore...
        • Ylpertnodi 2y ago
          As a fairly regular visitor (for work), what particular doldrums are you referencing? Admittedly, the loss of the US market will be a big blow for exports, but the anti-US (Trump) feelings strongly would put up with a financial hit rather than dealing with Mr. Loopy. And Tesla's are becoming very unpopular...and unsellable.
          • rayiner 2y ago
            The per capita GDP of France, Italy, and the UK have been flat since 2009.
        • hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
          I'm not disagreeing with your main point (by a host of metrics, the UK and EU have stagnated economically compared to the US since the end of the great recession), but I also don't think GDP per capita is the best metric to use here given widening levels of inequality. Median income levels taking into account government transfers are much more informative in my opinion.
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
        • Aloisius 2y ago
          Em. Those aren't inflation adjusted. - UK - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDGBR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDGBR - FR - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDFRA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDFRA - IT - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDITA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDITA It would be somewhat unusual if they didn't all look similarish given the level of trade between them. The UK government predicted a 2% reduction in growth over 15 years with a soft brexit compared to what it would have been otherwise, but seeing it on a graph may be difficult given those countries were also hurt by Brexit.
      • dukeyukey 2y ago
        I'm as anti-Brexit as they come, but it didn't change the UK's direction much. It's still the 2nd richest European state (with the 1st declining fast), the 3rd largest tech ecosystem worldwide, one of the premier military powers. Brexit wasn't great, or even good, but it's not disastrous.
        • hnhg 2y ago
          That’s because Europe overall is declining fast. However the rest of the world is rising fast and the next ten years should be interesting from this alone.
          • cinntaile 2y ago
            What metrics are you using?
      • casey2 2y ago
        if THIS comment isn't satirical then truly and honestly you should lay off the propaganda pipe.
    • hermitcrab 2y ago
      It is significantly worse the most pundits predicted.
      • coldtea 2y ago
        Not tied to failing and increasingly irrelevant EU? What is significantly worse, is the governing clases continuing the same pre-Brexit policies and deals post-Brexit, to nullify it.
        • redserk 2y ago
          The UK is becoming a destination country for hiring low-cost services labor. Not exactly an endorsement of future success.
          • grandempire 2y ago
            Low cost compared to what? California and New York? That’s also true of many states where finance and tech companies have smaller offices.
            • hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
              I live in Texas and contract for a company based in Europe. Comparable UK software engineering salaries are about 1/3-1/2 of what my salary expectations are.
      • grandempire 2y ago
        I would do a quick google search of Brexit news articles with the year 2016.
        • hermitcrab 2y ago
          I was living in the UK at a time. Nobody worth listening to was predicting war or famine.
  • nickpeterson 2y ago
    It’s like blood letting, but less effective.
  • lokimedes 2y ago
    You have go go back to the collapse of the British empire to witness anything this grand. And that was driven by external factors.
    • drawkward 2y ago
      This is Russia driven. Its right out of Aleksandr Dugin's playbook for Russian political dominance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
      • hrgak100 2y ago
        Dugin had ideas of spheres of influence. Roughly speaking, he thought that America should be dominated by the US, Europe/Africa by the EU and Asia by Russia. This however coincides with the much older ideas of the technocracy movement, which was championed by Musk's grandfather Haldeman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement#The_Technate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement#The_Techn... So it is not necessarily Russia driven, but surely RT has recently published an article that defends the Technate (RT is blocked, so here is a copy): https://thepressunited.com/updates/heres-why-trump-really-wants-to-get-his-hands-on-greenland-and-canada/ https://thepressunited.com/updates/heres-why-trump-really-wa... Europe is a bit slow in picking up on all this: Russia, the US and China are carving up the world and Macron calls a summit to determine how to make Russia and China eternal enemies. The EU (and Ukraine!) have been played since 2008/2014.
        • deepsquirrelnet 2y ago
          > In the Americas, United States, and Canada: Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States and Canada to fuel instability and separatism against neoliberal globalist Western hegemony, such as, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists" to create severe backlash against the rotten political state of affairs in the current present-day system of the United States and Canada. Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social, and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics". It sounds like he’s less concerned about the west, but knows that there needs to be political chaos in order to prevent the US from interfering with Russia’s political goals. I guess that seems obvious at this point, but worrisome that the US government is now actively supporting of those goals. If you take an objective view that these are geopolitical conditions that would be beneficial to Russian objectives, and pair it with the concurrency of these things playing out, then it’s hard to see it as coincidence.
  • enraged_camel 2y ago
    Brexit pales in comparison to the damage that has _already_ been done to the US federal government. The dust just hasn’t settled yet so most of it not visible right now.
    • rayiner 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • MVissers 2y ago
        And the Chinese will pick up the pieces in Africa and other places.
        • rayiner 2y ago
          Which is good for those countries. In my home country of Bangladesh, China is helping build infrastructure. While the U.S. was bankrolling left wing social and activist programs to destabilize the government (and ultimately contributed to the recent overthrow of the government, which will derail a decade of consistent growth).
          • philipwhiuk 2y ago
            But really bad for American world view, force projection and so on.
            • rayiner 2y ago
              What “American world view?”
          • insane_dreamer 2y ago
            Chinese actions come with the same global political ambitions as the US foreign aid has. Don’t be naive as to their ends.
      • enraged_camel 2y ago
• rayiner 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
    It's funny how hundreds of millions of normal Chinese people belong to the "Acela class."[0] Supporting decent public infrastructure does not make one an elitist. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China
    • vinay427 2y ago
      As another commenter noted, I believe the phrase is used as a metonym (?) here to refer to a class of people that is largely unrelated to support for public transport.
  • dukeyukey 2y ago
    Americans should care because America isn't the world. So much wealth and power derives from people seeing you as the good guy. Blowing that up will make America poorer.
    • rayiner 2y ago
      The US is far less dependent on trade than the average country. We could close our borders to the world entirely and be fine after an initial discomfort. And nobody has has seen America as the “good guy” in my lifetime. We’re the country that destabilizes Latin American and Asian countries, bombs the Middle East, etc. I used to think there was at least a logic to all that, but it turns out our elites were just ideologues and morons.
      • MVissers 2y ago
        I can tell you that the non-US west has lost a lot of goodwill in the last few weeks. There are boycott’s afoot and I wouldn’t be surprised if canada and Europe will choose more Chinese and domestic in the future. Basically, the US closing its borders will lead to a Chinese world leadership which is not good for the US either.
• trescenzi 2y ago
  It’s like the “fish don’t know they are in water” saying. As an American if you weren’t educated to be aware of Pax Americana you very much struggle to understand it. The current world order is far from perfect and many suffer as a result but the people in charge of this effort absolutely benefit from it far more than they seem to understand.
  • totallynothoney 2y ago
    As a non-American cinemagoer, I wonder who will be the Chinese equivalent of Michael Bay.
    • NikkiA 2y ago
      Jackie Chan?
• coldtea 2y ago
  >From a position of world-wide dominance and respect It already had very low respect (except by paid hacks and client states) and declining world-wide dominance for decades. And the churn rate for those very dissaponting results, reflected in public debt, was huge. And that's assuming a nation having "world-wide dominance" is a good thing to begin with.
  • buyucu 2y ago
    i agree
• tim333 2y ago
  NYT sub headline just now: >...concerns that the U.S. will abandon Europe and align with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Nothing to worry about with Musk doing nazi salutes and Trump looking at hanging with the nearest we have to a modern reich.
  • insane_dreamer 2y ago
    The US just decided to negotiate with Putin directly, leaving Europe out of it even though they're the ones affected by the Russia-Ukraine war, not the US. And Vance explicitly said that Russia can't be expected to go back to the pre-war borders. In other words, Russia gets what they want (Donbas).
    • Sabinus 2y ago
      Trump also ruled out plenty of (admittedly high risk) interventions and solutions before the negotiations. Why would he make concessions for nothing in return? I thought he was meant to be a great negotiator and businessman.
      • hakfoo 2y ago
        The perceived return could be timing and presentation. If he has to spend the rest of his term negotiating back and forth over which flag flies over a particular outhouse in Western Crimea, he may not see that as being a successful deal-maker. Being able to say "we got buy-in for our first proposal, took me four days to end the conflict" fits his image.
• hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  There have been a lot of times over the past couple weeks where I've thought "OK, is the US toast now??", and the thing that finally did it for me was Trump's prominent post "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law." Trump announced the rule of law is dead and there has been basically no pushback. I mean, sure, it may have just been bluster, but the Republicans used to put the idea of the Constitution on a pedestal. Now the president is saying, loudly and prominently, that laws don't apply to him (or anyone who is "saving" the country), and it's crickets. There is no way the US comes back from this in my opinion. I'm not saying something like "collapse" is imminent, but I think the decline is irreversible once the rule of law has been declared null and void. Also, while I obviously have my opinions, I honestly would be genuinely interested in someone who has a different take (i.e. who thinks Trump's statement isn't as catastrophic as I think it is) to explain their rationale.
  • totallynothoney 2y ago
    As someone from LATAM who is more aware than they should be about the US system of government, I agree that the statement and lack of pushback is catastrophic for what it says about the current climate, but rule of law has been as weak as gypsum board for decades. The US system is full of shiny toys for a populist to cement power, and the only safeguards are decorum and the threat of eventual impeachment (good luck with that!). These issues exist because the American system is old and full of incremental cruft; newer democracies have had the advantage of starting with better safeguards, and there's an inability to actually change the system due to the legal system and Congress being a mess. Practically speaking, common law is the judicial branch using moonlogic upon moonlogic to create pseudo-laws (Roe v. Wade, Citizens United v. FEC) that may be good or bad but should be made by Congress. If the Constitution is unclear, it should be modified through a democratic process that can actually pass, not be continually reinterpreted in absurd ways by a 9-person court that can be corrupted and has no term limits. Congress is unable to fix itself; the unlimited filibuster in the Senate proves that, and the "pro-forma" session is simply embarrassing. Clear systemic change is excruciatingly difficult, so actions must be taken through fuzzy emergent messes without guardrails like executive orders. "Is outrageous thing X from this EO illegal? Idk, let's wait months to check with the courts." The popular comment I see is that institutions are people at the end of the day, so "strong institutions" is just a buzzword, and the current crisis comes from cowardice and inaction. But if the mechanisms aren't there to stop a bad actor in the executive, the best they can do is make some noise (which they should). If they truly bend the rules, the executive can always just write a more unhinged EO, so it all reduces to who has control over actual enforcement. The problem is widespread; for example, the election system is simply dysfunctional, like Flint water tier. From the basics of gerrymandering, to the electoral college creating absurd things like "swing states" (if you want to give more power to some states, just weight the votes), no real universal national ID, voter suppression, voting by mail is a horrible idea that invites conspiracy theories and is a crutch for the lack of accessibility, voting machines are bad and a crutch (see the French). Not even the schizophrenic rules-set is actually followed; the 2000 election was decided by Supreme Court fuckery. Trump would've been stupid not to try to interfere in 2020; an election was successfully stopped 20 years ago and nothing happened. The most basic democratic institution failed and the priority wasn't "let's fix this immediately, oh my fucking god." So yeah, rule of law has constantly been chipped away for some time, good luck with the midterms. To be fair to the average American, the idea that "gradually, then suddenly" also applies to the state is something people learn firsthand and hopefully teach their descendants. The history of outsiders only goes so far.
• deleted 2y ago
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• Arkhadia 2y ago
  As someone who has studied the American constitution and been actively engaged in much civil discourse locally, I firmly believe and comprehend the logic of an unmanageably large “government” being a very bad thing on many levels. Please explain to me your obsession with a massive tax funded “government” and your thinking behind a comment such as the one you made. Why do you think this way? Nothing could be more in line with the American forefathers vision than what trump and Elon are doing by dismantling a grossly overweight, fraud ridden, and useless system that the US calls much of its government. I’m eager for a cogent argument, that blends constitutionality and logic, for such a broken system. Hoping you’re the one to make this argument
  • bdangubic 2y ago
    Nothing could be more in line with the American forefathers vision than what trump and Elon are doing the problem with people like you (I sincerely do not mean this in ANY derogatory way, just generalising people that make these arguments) is that you are using “American forefathers” as you see fit. American forefathers would be ROLLING IN THEIR GRAVES seeing and hearing what Trump and Elon are doing. They literally fought against people like the two of them. If I have too choose between bloated federal government and having a President who thinks he is above the law and his Supreme Court cronies saying so in so many words and having a fucking african immigrant with god access to government computer systems I choose bloated government any day of the week and twice on sunday