[blackjack21]

Covid has exposed America as a failed state is an excellent article the details why Covid ripped away the illusion that the US is still an industrial superpower. It rips to shreds the establishment plans of the last 30 years. While I agree with the title to a significant degree, because the medical supply chains, the lies from the experts, etc. illustrated how the old post-WWII government of so-called experts is so antiquated.

Dr. Fauci echoing China and the WHO that covid wasn't a big risk, then listening to Nile Ferguson waxing that millions would die and sending the establishment into a panic, then saying models couldn't be trusted, suggesting we never shake hands again, but that it's okay to have sex with a stranger you met online--it's just not believable that these people are experts at all. Then the hijacking and extensive prolonging of a brief lockdown to generate a recession to try to blame it on Trump in hopes of improving the failed establishment's electoral chances, followed by the riots of yet another Democrat-run city and police force killing a black man, and the Democrat establishment cheering on riots when in the prior week they were arresting barbers, hair dressers and kayakers as though they were saving civilization itself.

It's frankly become too much. The establishment is in a dead panic, because it is recognized by all as a failure.

The greatest morbidity the virus has latched onto in the global order is the rivalry between the United States and China. This contest is not new — International Relations scholars have long debated the ‘Thucydides Trap,’ named after the agonising and destructive struggle between Athens and Sparta chronicled by the Greek historian, wherein a rising power is inexorably drawn into conflict with the hegemon it displaces.

When Germany challenged British hegemony at the beginning of the last century, the first wave of globalisation ended in global conflict and then a pandemic; we must hope that this current pandemic, rapidly bringing about the end of the second wave of globalisation, will not similarly end in confrontation between the two great powers.

In this coming struggle, America is starting with a great and self-inflicted handicap. Obama’s attempts to reposition US foreign policy away from its destructive and self-defeating entanglement in the Islamic world and towards the coming confrontation with China failed, distracted by the bloody chaos brought about by the Arab Spring and by the Washington foreign policy “blob’s” unwillingness to wean itself off wars it cannot win.

Trump’s much-touted withdrawal from the Middle East has likewise seen the US bolster its forces in the region with tens of thousands more troops than his term began with, and allowed his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to pursue a burning fixation with regime change in Iran that is unlikely to end in America’s favour.

America has frittered away 5 trillion dollars on its Middle Eastern adventures, indebting itself to China in the process, and burned its domestic and international political capital to an unimaginable degree —with nothing at all to show for it. Now that the architects of this self-inflicted catastrophe wish us to join them in their next global adventure, we must think carefully.

Let’s remember how we got here. Only a couple of months ago, warning about dependence on China and the fragility of our supply chains, and urging decoupling from the aspiring hegemon, was viewed as the preserve of cranks of Right and Left, considered romantic at best and xenophobic at worst.

When Trump urged the same thing for the United States, China’s autocrat Xi was treated to a standing ovation at Davos, and hailed as the new champion of the global liberal order. But now Larry Summers, the high priest of globalisation and of America’s offshoring to China, is warning us against fragile supply chains and the urgency of decoupling with no reference at all his long and glittering career midwifing this catastrophe. Here is the global system, finally stripped of all illusions.

The result is the total discrediting of the US-led order, an order of which China’s rise is as much a direct product as it is a challenge.

Very well put. This is why Donald Trump was elected. HOW he was elected was by stripping the Republican establishment of its illusions and then taking on a grossly unprepared and arrogant Hillary Clinton. I find it remarkable how the people who despise Trump want to replace him with someone who is clearly going senile quite rapidly. If they're in China's corner, that's understandable. However, it's an incredibly stupid thing to do. Trump remains strong, because he remains the only US politician of any stature addressing this issue and the issue of illegal immigration and collapsing social cohesion.

The idea that a global liberal order could, like an iPhone, be designed in America and made in China was the product, where it was sincerely held, of pure ideological delusion. In its entire 5,000 year history, China has not spent one single day as a liberal democracy. The belief that a repressive autocratic regime would suddenly transform into a liberal democracy by being handed more wealth and power was patently absurd. Yet it is the people who held and promoted this claim for decades who intend to lead the world into a great power confrontation — against the China for whose rise they are directly responsible.

Globalisation was always the grand illusion of naive liberalism, taken advantage of by illiberal and non-liberal actors to pursue their own ends. It is the liberals, the TINA bluechecks, who are the artless rubes in this story. Indeed, it is they who deserve much of the blame now being directed at China.

Who else has said that? Donald Trump. He doesn't blame the Chinese. They're being smart. Our leaders are being stupid. He called it in 2016, and it has been laid bare.

How serious is the establishment about Covid? Apparently, not very serious at all. They abandoned lock downs that were destroying the working class for riots destroying America's urban areas--again, in some vain attempt to make something bad happen and blame it on Trump. The naivete is incredible.

I do not want to be ruled by these people anymore. That's why I support Donald Trump. It's not that I've ever seen Trump as a god figure, daddy, or some sort of savior. He's just NOT THEM.

I pretty much loath the establishment of both parties. This article really lays it out well. We're all going to have to endure another 5 months of relentless bullshit, but it just cannot change the facts laid bare in this article.

For those interested in a substantive read, and those wondering why Biden is still likely to lose to Trump in spite of the torrential propaganda, all the reasons are very neatly laid out in this article. It's definitely worth the time to read.

[XogGyux]

You and your establishment nonsense. It is time you start your journey to Emerald City to see if you can get a brain.

[Rugoz]

Do you have sex with a stranger as often as you shake hands, or how does that work?

Regarding your article:

For a brief few decades, the shift in production to China made a handful of Western individuals unimaginably rich, while lowering the living standards of the middle and working class.

Did offshoring lower the living standard of the middle/working class? No doubt it lowered their living standard relative to that of the upper class, but their absolute living standard as well? Quite a claim to make. Not impossible, but I would like to see the evidence.

While we at least, like our neighbours in Europe, have older traditions on which to draw, and with which we can temper liberalism’s zealous certainties, America was liberal from the start and will remain so until the end; with no countervailing influence, in America liberalism mutated into a fundamentalist religion.

That is funny, because apart from trade you seem to be a zealous economic liberal. Taxing the wealthy is bad (the irony), free education is bad, universal health care is bad, effective anti-trust regulation is bad. Everything that would make things more affordable for the middle class is bad.