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#15029860
annatar1914 wrote:You had asked me about my insistence on predicting the coming series of wars, and I'm reminded by your reply of Norman Angell, who wrote a book right before WWI saying it was impossible because evryone's economies were so interconnected that war would be a disaster....

I'm not making Angell's point though. I'm not saying war is impossible, because we are too interconnected. Generally, war would have to serve a purpose. In the case of WWI, Germany did not start the war. It did have an interest in drang nach Osten. The Triple Entente had the major empires. Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy's Triple Alliance was defensive in nature. The British had the wealthiest and largest overseas empire, with France behind them. Russia, by far, had the biggest contiguous empire. Yet, Russia was still pushing for southern ports and were interested in the Serbian/Yugoslav nationalist project to that end, and possibly blunting drang nach Osten. It was ultimately Serbia backed by Russia that led to the destabilization effort in Bosnia. Economically speaking, it was Germany and drang nach Osten that the Russian, British and French Empires feared, and that's why Germany was wrongly blamed for WWI.

annatar1914 wrote:Because of the crisis of overproduction in capitalism among other things, war is needed to devastate old markets and re-create ''new'' ones, and to seize the resources around the world of course. A little thinning out of the herd is good in the eyes of the Elites too.

Ok. I think we agree on the economic front, and the motivation. That's actually more similar to WWII than WWI. Either way, Germany responded with the Schlieffen plan, which failed in WWI, but was successful with new tactics in WWII--until Operation Barbarosa collapsed.

Europe is in a bad way, but the only over-producer in Europe is Germany. The world's largest over-producer is China. The United States is its largest market, followed by Europe. Whereas, in WWI or WWII, the European theater was characterized by Germany's Schlieffen plan, Asia was a completely different theater. China is far away from its largest markets. China can no more attack the US than the US can attack China. Sure we could have naval battles. In both WWI and WWII, the big battles were between neighboring powers.

So in an upcoming war, you'd naturally look for that to be the case too. China's best "moral" case for war is to subsume Hong Kong and invade Taiwan under the "One China" pretext. Taiwain is getting a new batch of F-16s, which is upsetting China. China is also making extensive claims in the South China Sea. So I think that's probably the most likely venue for war.

annatar1914 wrote:China is the rising power, it's that simple.

I agree, but I think there is a significant difference between the rise of Germany and the rise of China. Germany was historically weak due to its disunity until the late 19th Century. Yet, with the industrial revolution in full swing, Germany had some significant advantages much like America's Midwest--navigable water ways and ocean-going ports among the most obvious. However, Germany was a leading power, especially in chemistry. By contrast, Britain and France were milking older technologies like steam engines. Today, China is manufacturing goods for the United States and the EU, but little of the IP is developed by the Chinese. They have been given their status via trade policy. This is not unlike the rise of post-war Japan until the late 1980s.

annatar1914 wrote:The war will be fought by proxy, at first.

I think any land conflict in Asia would limit America's influence to proxy status. We're definitely not interested in a land war in Asia.

It's very possible that China's rise halts, much as Japan's did around 1989. The Nikkei closed at ~20k today. On December 29, 1989 it was at ~38k. Have a look:

Image

For war to break out, China would be the one to start the war. Maybe their actions in Hong Kong and in the South China Sea are the start of it. However, I'd be more inclined to see it like the halt of Japan's rise in the late 1980s.

It's simply no longer in the US interest to allow China unfettered access to the US market while China blocks US goods. It's simply no longer tenable--especially given a two-year phony propaganda campaign that Russia backed Trump and that such action is "treason"--that China is attempting to interfere in the US 2020 presidential election by targeting tariffs primarily for political effect. No person who took Russiagate the remotest bit seriously can now stand by and say they are a-okay with China trying to influence US presidential politics. So I think Trump's utility is forcing the establishment to face up to the fact that European powers will not act as allies to the United States--coming late to the party as it were, which is how they felt about the US in WWI and WWII. Meanwhile, we can no longer afford a Wall Street class that sees its private wealth accumulation as somehow separate from the United States and the interests of the United States. So some people with excessive production exposure in China are going to feel some pain.
#15029863
blackjack21 wrote:It's simply no longer in the US interest to allow China unfettered access to the US market while China blocks US goods. It's simply no longer tenable--especially given a two-year phony propaganda campaign that Russia backed Trump and that such action is "treason"--that China is attempting to interfere in the US 2020 presidential election by targeting tariffs primarily for political effect. No person who took Russiagate the remotest bit seriously can now stand by and say they are a-okay with China trying to influence US presidential politics. So I think Trump's utility is forcing the establishment to face up to the fact that European powers will not act as allies to the United States--coming late to the party as it were, which is how they felt about the US in WWI and WWII. Meanwhile, we can no longer afford a Wall Street class that sees its private wealth accumulation as somehow separate from the United States and the interests of the United States. So some people with excessive production exposure in China are going to feel some pain.

The left-wing Democrats don't care about any of that. They hate President Trump so much that they would be happy with a recession to get Trump out of office.

Bill Maher says recession is ‘worth it’ if Trump loses in 2020
User avatar
By Godstud
#15029866
FFS, @Hindsite, he's a COMEDIAN. Look up the fucking word before you post such stupid shit.
#15029867
Hindsite wrote:The left-wing Democrats don't care about any of that. They hate President Trump so much that they would be happy with a recession to get Trump out of office.




You need to understand the way the progressive mind works. They are motivated fundamentally by envy, resentment and a desire for power. Trump has taken their power from them, and they will never forgive. But the establishment they represent has had it’s day. Their idealism was always vulnerable when viewed from a games theory prospect and was ultimately going to fail. The notion of superiority they hold in order to justify their claim to power is based on them being the good people and others being the bad people. Thus they can never admit to their flaws and so they can never change.




https://quillette.com/2019/08/14/the-argument-for-equality-and-fairness/

The Left and Resentment

The argument that progressives are primarily motivated by resentment of the rich and powerful found expression in the work of authors like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche. In novels like The Devils, Dostoevsky (whose work I have analyzed and critiqued in more detail here) painted a darkly satirical portrait of the progressives of his day. Superficially, their pamphlets and writings overflowed with sympathy for the plight of the poor and suffering; sentiments Dostoevsky himself shared in his earlier more progressive period which found expression in novels like Poor Folk. But in person many progressives were pedantic, spiteful, and entirely devoid of genuine warmth towards anyone. Their meetings were characterized by self-righteous sermons and constant quibbles about what names to call everyone by.


More worryingly, Dostoevsky concluded that their various pieties about exploitation by the powerful actually masked darker feelings of anger and jealousy. Once in power, the Left’s calls for “unlimited freedom” and prosperity would end in “unlimited despotism” because they were actually motivated by an unstated desire for authority and revenge against those who had done better than themselves. Nietzsche echoed these sentiments throughout his work. While he was no friend of traditionalism or nationalism, he made plenty of caustic remarks about the “slave morality” of the socialists. In his posthumous collection of notes The Will to Power, he compared socialists to envious children who might nonetheless bring about catastrophes across the globe. Though, characteristically, Nietzsche wasn’t entirely worried about the consequences of such mass violence on the victims.

Socialism—or the tyranny of the meanest and the most brainless—that is to say, the superficial, the envious, and the mummers, brought to its zenith—is, as a matter of fact, the logical conclusion of “modern ideas” and their latent anarchy: but in the genial atmosphere of democratic well-being the capacity for forming resolutions or even for coming to an end at all, is paralysed. Men follow—but no longer their reason. That is why socialism is on the whole a hopelessly bitter affair: and there is nothing more amusing than to observe the discord between the poisonous and desperate faces of present-day socialists—and what wretched and nonsensical feelings does not their style reveal to us!—and the childish lamblike happiness of their hopes and desires. … In fact, I even wish a few experiments might be made to show that in socialistic society life denies itself, and itself cuts away its own roots. The earth is big enough and man is still unexhausted enough for a practical lesson of this sort and demonstratio ad absurdum—even if it were accomplished only by a vast expenditure of lives—to seem worthwhile to me.

However, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche were both writing from a standpoint which was critical of the Left because its ambitions ran counter to theirs. Their own philosophical inclinations towards a form of religious nationalism and a perfectionist account of the Superman would naturally make them hostile to progressivism. A more knowing critique still was formulated by George Orwell.

In his excellent 1946 monograph Why I Write, written shortly before his death, Orwell opined that “every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” This emphatic support for the Left echoes his claim in The Road to Wigan Pier that, from one point of view, the argument for socialism was simply “common sense” and “seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.” Yet few would write more bitterly about the failures of the Left, both personally and on a large scale. His classic 1945 allegory Animal Farm is a lacerating account of both the evil and hypocrisy of Stalinism and its defenders, and Nineteen Eighty-Four paints a frightening picture of a dystopian future where INGSOC (the English Socialist Party) establishes a totalitarian nightmare state.

Why then would someone for whom socialism was virtually “common sense,” and who fought bravely against the rising tide of fascism in the Spanish Civil War, have such a pessimistic appraisal of the Left? Part of it, of course, came from the increasingly chilling reports emerging from the Soviet Union, which recounted a litany of horrors with which the modern world is now familiar. But Orwell also insisted, in the manner of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, that most leftists did not care very much about the working class or the oppressed.

In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell devoted hundreds of pages to portraying the suffering of the British working class in Northern England and calling for democratic socialism as a solution. But he also points out that progressives have been utterly unable to convince the working classes to support socialism or social democracy. This isn’t because workers would be unsympathetic to their arguments, but because socialists themselves were unlikeable and made no effort to disguise their disdain and condescension. In their habits and mannerisms, they were mostly middle class snobs with a puritanical outlook on party loyalty and a serious dedication to theoretical abstractions at the expense of concrete problems:

Sometimes I look at the Socialist—the intellectual, tract writing type of socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation—and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe it is a love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom of all people he is most removed. The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy; what they desire, basically is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard.

This desire to “reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard” was at the root of Orwell’s anxieties about the Left. While he was a democratic socialist with a progressive outlook, unlike Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, Orwell shared his predecessors’ anxieties about whether leftists were genuinely motivated by a desire to do good rather to acquire power for themselves. In the backdrop was of course the experience of the Stalinist terror state, which crystallized many of these anxieties.
#15029877
I do competantly challange the previous predictions of comming wars. Youre not taking into account a shift in power away from nuclear powers that biological powers represent. You'll either see all out nuclear war in the next four years that results in cave survival or you'll see global famine and cannibalism. Both possibilities are horrific. But the previous predictions are naive.

I do think tho that it could all be staved off with a new global-archaic-revival sport as long as you can get it past a few theist organizations with inhumanoid notions of what constitutes decency.
#15029944
This fool Trump has managed in a few months to undermine and destroy international markets that took years to build - sorry folks - once gone they will not be coming back.

Not to mention the billions of dollars in taxpayer money he is now handing out as government welfare to millionaire farms to "buy their support".

The whole thing is an incompetent, ego driven disaster for the country, all so this conman trump can stand up at his pathetic "rallies" and act tough.

When in fact trump is a weak minded, conman without a clue or frankly a care about what he's doing.
#15029950
I am of the impression that the US dollar will be compromised under this Administration. I can't really fathom how the Bretton Woods arrangement will continue (or the purchase of US Treasuries by foreign countries) when so much political intention is toward pursuance of isolationist sentiment. The US dollar is a reserve currency and the US doesn't really appear to be fulfilling its role in the international community as the carrier and protector of it in an acceptable manner.
User avatar
By Crantag
#15029974
prophetofpan wrote:I am of the impression that the US dollar will be compromised under this Administration. I can't really fathom how the Bretton Woods arrangement will continue (or the purchase of US Treasuries by foreign countries) when so much political intention is toward pursuance of isolationist sentiment. The US dollar is a reserve currency and the US doesn't really appear to be fulfilling its role in the international community as the carrier and protector of it in an acceptable manner.

Bretton Woods ended under Nixon, FYI.

It's also called the Gold Exchange Standard, and is no more, for quite a long time.
#15029979
Crantag wrote:Bretton Woods ended under Nixon, FYI.

It's also called the Gold Exchange Standard, and is no more, for quite a long time.


Remnants of the agreement are still in play. Otherwise the US wouldn't be able to successfully enact sanctions against other countries.
#15029981
Godstud wrote:FFS, @Hindsite, he's a COMEDIAN. Look up the fucking word before you post such stupid shit.


He was a mediocre comedian. Now he's a talk show host, and he believes exactly what he says.

Bill Maher would welcome a recession if it means Trump loses. He wasn't saying that to be funny, he was saying that because that's what he believes. And this scumbag didn't say it once, he said it three weeks in a row.

Of course, Maher is exceptionally wealthy and wouldn't really be impacted by a recession too greatly, so he adopts the "fuck the little people" approach if it means Trump gets beaten in 2020.

Anyone who doesn't believe Maher is sincere when he says that is a fucking fool...
#15030140
Hindsite wrote:They hate President Trump so much that they would be happy with a recession to get Trump out of office.

It's possible they get a recession and don't get Trump out of office. Right now, though, US monetary policy is a bit too tight. With negative interest rates in Germany and Japan, US bonds become very attractive to the point that they are bid up such that the 30-year Treasury is yielding just under 2%. With rates looking like that, I'm going to have to think about refinancing my house.

Godstud wrote:FFS, @Hindsite, he's a COMEDIAN. Look up the fucking word before you post such stupid shit.

He's said it in all seriousness multiple times.

foxdemon wrote:The notion of superiority they hold in order to justify their claim to power is based on them being the good people and others being the bad people. Thus they can never admit to their flaws and so they can never change.

That's a pretty apt description and why there efforts to importune us to drop support for Trump do not work. No matter how much they try to trash Trump, they do not modify their narrowly weird values to appeal to the broad working and middle classes of the United States.

Blacklist13th wrote:You'll either see all out nuclear war in the next four years that results in cave survival or you'll see global famine and cannibalism. Both possibilities are horrific. But the previous predictions are naive.

Unrestricted nuclear war is an unlikely outcome. Recently developed countries end up being the most vulnerable to nuclear war, because they have such population dense cities like Delhi, Sao Paolo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Lagos, etc. You could also lump first world cities like Tokyo or London into that mix. It's really hard to destroy countries with distributed production like the United States with nuclear weapons. That ship sailed with containerization of freight 50+ years ago. New York City would be your best target. Nuclear weapons were developed to address the extremely high casualty rate of bomber pilots and the horrible accuracy of bomber sorties. Mass destruction was a simple but horrific solution. Today, JDAMs and guided missiles render that sort of thing totally unnecessary.

jimjam wrote:This fool Trump has managed in a few months to undermine and destroy international markets that took years to build - sorry folks - once gone they will not be coming back.

Are you short? My buddy thinks the lows may not hold. He manages about $500M. You'll be missing out on the very buying opportunity you warned us about a few days ago that Trump's rich friends will exploit to their maximum advantage.

jimjam wrote:Not to mention the billions of dollars in taxpayer money he is now handing out as government welfare to millionaire farms to "buy their support".

Well, we wouldn't want to let the government of China collude with the Democrats in presidential politics, would we?


jimjam wrote:The whole thing is an incompetent, ego driven disaster for the country, all so this conman trump can stand up at his pathetic "rallies" and act tough.

You think? He says he's trying to do something about China's trade barriers to US goods and running $500B trade deficits with them every year. That seems like there's a little more substance to it than acting like a tough guy at rallies.

prophetofpan wrote:I can't really fathom how the Bretton Woods arrangement will continue (or the purchase of US Treasuries by foreign countries) when so much political intention is toward pursuance of isolationist sentiment.

You know, it could be that people buy US Treasuries, because Japan and Germany offer negative yields, and the US is the world's largest bond market with a positive yield and stability.
User avatar
By Crantag
#15030149
prophetofpan wrote:Remnants of the agreement are still in play. Otherwise the US wouldn't be able to successfully enact sanctions against other countries.

Not really. The institutional framework collapsed. The convention of the dollar as world reserve and trade currency remains, which is probably what you really mean.
#15030156
foxdemon wrote:You need to understand the way the progressive mind works. They are motivated fundamentally by envy, resentment and a desire for power. Trump has taken their power from them, and they will never forgive. But the establishment they represent has had it’s day. Their idealism was always vulnerable when viewed from a games theory prospect and was ultimately going to fail. The notion of superiority they hold in order to justify their claim to power is based on them being the good people and others being the bad people. Thus they can never admit to their flaws and so they can never change.

The problem is that there are a hell of a lot of them.
#15030217
Hindsite wrote:The problem is that there are a hell of a lot of them.



Their numbers are declining. Not least due to the ‘circular firing squad’ concept. Many progress people find themselves afoul of the strict but petty moral standards and become excluded from the in group. Others are simply repelled by the obvious ruthless pursuit of power.

This declining legitimacy is why Google feels it must interfere with the 2020 election outcome. This is why the MSM has gone into propaganda overdrive. This is why the Democrats and FBI felt it necessary to concoct the Russian collusion plot to remove the a President.

They are trying every dirty trick in the book. But they keep failing. Which is good. If they were to succeed, that would be America’s ‘et tu Bruti’ moment and the end of the Republic. They really ought to learn some principles and respect democratic outcomes. At least they should if they want America to retain the title of being a liberal democracy. This applies to the UK and EU establishment also.

Liberal democracy is based on the principle of rule by consent. So they have to respect Trump’s election, Brexit and they need to stop trying to rerun referendums until they get the result they want. Also, if there is a significant part of the population that doesn’t want mass immigration, then the rulers need to respect that too, rather than using accusations of racism to beat the populace into submission. The progressives always were a bunch of authoritarian power freaks.
#15030243
Crantag wrote:Not really. The institutional framework collapsed. The convention of the dollar as world reserve and trade currency remains, which is probably what you really mean.


Which was enabled by the original framework of Bretton Woods...... :lol:
#15030251
foxdemon wrote:They are trying every dirty trick in the book. But they keep failing. Which is good. If they were to succeed, that would be America’s ‘et tu Bruti’ moment and the end of the Republic. They really ought to learn some principles and respect democratic outcomes. At least they should if they want America to retain the title of being a liberal democracy. This applies to the UK and EU establishment also.

Liberal democracy is based on the principle of rule by consent. So they have to respect Trump’s election, Brexit and they need to stop trying to rerun referendums until they get the result they want.

Yes. It looks like the Queen has given Boris Johnson permission to prorogue parliament to prevent Jeremy Corbyn's anti-Brexit campaign.

prophetofpan wrote:Which was enabled by the original framework of Bretton Woods...... :lol:

Yes, but much of Europe operates under a single currency now--badly, but it's nevertheless another factor that put an end to Bretton Woods. The Euro isn't a reserve currency principally, because Europe's banking system has been rather unstable.
User avatar
By Crantag
#15030288
prophetofpan wrote:Which was enabled by the original framework of Bretton Woods...... :lol:

That's too simplistic. I might say that what enabled Britton Woods enabled the current situation. Or not. It's debatable.

I'm not disagreeing to be disagreeable but you look foolish throwing out references for an institutional framework that died 45 years ago as if it were still in force today. It's foolish/ignorant when people refer to the Bretton Woods system as the Gold Standard as well (which they often do) but you calling the present system the 'Bretton Woods' is more foolish/ignorant.

We probably agree more than disagree but try to know what you're talking about a little better is all. The internet makes it pretty easy to look these things up.

The current system is entirely not Bretton Woods. Maybe that's just some term you learned and never understood the history of.
#15030429
foxdemon wrote:Their numbers are declining. Not least due to the ‘circular firing squad’ concept.

If that is true, I haven't seen any real evidence of it in polls or the MSM.
foxdemon wrote:Many progress people find themselves afoul of the strict but petty moral standards and become excluded from the in group. Others are simply repelled by the obvious ruthless pursuit of power.

I don't see progressives as very moral at all, but they do call for high moral standards for others, if they believe it helps with their ruthless pursuit of power.
foxdemon wrote:This declining legitimacy is why Google feels it must interfere with the 2020 election outcome. This is why the MSM has gone into propaganda overdrive. This is why the Democrats and FBI felt it necessary to concoct the Russian collusion plot to remove the a President.

That is because they see President Trump as a serious threat to their control of power and must resist him with all their might. With declaring all these sanctuary cities for illegal immigrants, it seems obvious that they see those illegals as future voters for them in their power grab.
foxdemon wrote:They are trying every dirty trick in the book. But they keep failing. Which is good. If they were to succeed, that would be America’s ‘et tu Bruti’ moment and the end of the Republic.

I hope they are failing, but they are certainly hindering Trump and the conservatives by using their allies in the courts, especially the 9th Circuit.
foxdemon wrote:They really ought to learn some principles and respect democratic outcomes. At least they should if they want America to retain the title of being a liberal democracy. This applies to the UK and EU establishment also.

The Democrats do not want to lose power and anyway they are obviously sore losers.
foxdemon wrote:Liberal democracy is based on the principle of rule by consent.

I don't recall the words "liberal democracy" used in the U.S. Constitution. It simply stated how it was to work.
foxdemon wrote:So they have to respect Trump’s election, Brexit and they need to stop trying to rerun referendums until they get the result they want. Also, if there is a significant part of the population that doesn’t want mass immigration, then the rulers need to respect that too, rather than using accusations of racism to beat the populace into submission. The progressives always were a bunch of authoritarian power freaks.

The accusation of racism has worked wonders to keep them in power. I guess, in their minds, anyone that does not agree with them must be a racist and maybe even a Nazis, White Supremacist, or White Nationalist, or at least has White Privilege.
Praise the Lord.
#15032185
With each passing week it becomes ever clearer that Donald Trump’s trade war, far from being “good, and easy to win,” is damaging large parts of the U.S. economy. Farmers are facing financial disaster; manufacturing, which Trump’s policies were supposed to revive, is contracting; consumer confidence is plunging, largely because the public (rightly) fears that tariffs will raise prices.

Business leaders aren’t do-gooders, but they are realists. Most of them understand that climate change is happening, that it’s dangerous, and that we’ll eventually have to transition to a low-emissions economy. They want to spend now to secure their place in that future economy; they know that investments that worsen climate change are bound to be long-run losers. But they’ll hold off on investing in our energy future as long as conspiracy theorists who consider global warming a gigantic hoax — and/or vindictive politicians determined to erase Obama’s achievements — keep rewriting the rules.

Some kinds of business do thrive under Trumpism — namely, businesses that aren’t in it for the long run, operations whose strategy is to take the money and run. These are good times for mining companies that rush in to extract whatever they can, leaving a poisoned landscape behind; for real estate speculators sponsoring dubious ventures that take advantage of newly created tax loopholes; for for-profit colleges that leave their students with worthless degrees and crippling debt. Remaking the U.S. economy in the image of Trump University isn’t exactly making America great again.
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