I’ll believe Trump actually intends to cut the military when he does it and not a minute sooner. People on both sides like to pretend he’s an isolationist but military spending only went up in his first term. Likely, he’s just going to pivot to China.

Ofc it’s congress who sets the budget so he can just quietly sign off on the increases the same way he quietly gives tax cuts to the rich.

What they think they’re doing and what they’re actually doing are two different questions. What they’re aiming to do is keep things trucking along while making as much profit as possible, more or less the same as most politicians, but with a bit more of a realpolitic approach. There is no long term plan, and that goes for basically anyone remotely near to the levers of power. What we have is a system of competing groups all singularly focused on maximizing their profits for the next quarter, nobody’s actually at the helm and it’s an open question whether anyone could take the helm and alter the course from the natural progression determined by systemic forces.

Where we are actually headed, regardless of who’s in charge, is a matter of several inconvertible facts. First, the US is clearly in decline and will eventually lost its spot as global hegemon, at this point, there is a serious risk that it will start WWIII in response, as Americans are not ones to accept defeat gracefully. Second, climate change will render more and more areas in developing nations unstable or uninhabitable, causing a major refugee crisis which has already started and is going to get considerably worse. What measures will be taken to maintain the dividing lines that keep people from poor countries out of rich countries is another question, and it may well be answered with genocide.

If, by some miracle, cooler heads prevail and we don’t start WWIII, and you’re lucky enough to have been born in a rich country, then we will likely just see things get gradually and progressively worse. But it will be the kind of apocalypse where you still have to go to work. Day to day life will carry on, just with more uncomfortable things you have to push out of mind, more frequent shootings, the reemergence of all kinds diseases and more pandemics that you’ll be expected to work through. There isn’t going to be a tipping point that causes a revolution, nor are the elites going to unveil a secret plot to make everyone eat bugs or whatever. You’re just going to be working longer hours, affording less, retiring later (if at all), and probably having to navigate and even more bullshit process for applying for jobs. Going further into this sort of “boring dystopia” is almost certainly where we’re headed.

The two most important political priorities, arguably the only two priorities that really matter, are demilitarization andopposing war with China, and opposing genocide of foreigners/refugees/immigrants. These are the things we will be facing, perhaps within the next 10 years (but if not then certainly later), and if we aren’t able to organize resistance along those lines, things are going to get very ugly. Actually stopping the decline is very unrealistic/implausible and has been for some time.

I was raised Catholic but rejected it pretty much immediately when I reached the age of reason (~13 or so).

So all I have to do is listen to and obey everything my parents, teachers, and religious leaders tell me and I’ll go to heaven, but, if I had been born into a Muslim family in one of the countries we were bombing, doing that would get me sent to Hell and I need to reject everything I was taught, get on a plane, randomly walk into the right church, and believe everything they tell me. Oh, and if I was like some random Chinese farmer a thousand years before planes were invented, I guess I’m just fucked. Yeah somehow I don’t believe that an all-good perfectly-just god would have every soul play fucking roulette to determine what their chances in life will be of getting into heaven.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned about the history of this contradiction, which goes back to a 400’s debate between Augustine and Pelagius regarding original sin. Pelagius argued that it was theoretically possible, but incredibly difficult, to live a life free of sin and therefore not need Jesus’ forgiveness. He was also critical of the way Christians were integrating with the Roman empire, with all the same practices but now the social climbers called themselves Christian to win the emperor’s favor while otherwise doing all the same shit they would otherwise. Augustine rejected this, arguing that the Father would not sacrifice the Son unless it was strictly necessary, furthermore, Pelagius’ arguments would undermine the authority of the church (this was stated explicitly). Augustine invented the concept of original sin as something passed down through generations (despite this making zero sense), cited a mistranslated passage from scripture to support it, and used that to explain how even someone who lived a perfectly innocent life deserved to go to hell. This included, of course, fetuses. It was the Church’s position for a very long time that if you have an abortion, or even a miscarriage, then your baby’s soul is burning in hell.

What’s particularly funny to me about this is that, after Pelagius was denounced as a heretic for saying people needed to actually live virtuously instead of just relying on Jesus to forgive them, he became so reviled that people were often accused of “semi-Pelagianism.” All through the Reformation, everyone was accusing each other of being “semi-Pelagians” and trying to position themselves as the true inheritors of the Augustinian tradition. It wasn’t until relatively recently that anyone started saying, “Hey, maybe the Augustinian position is actually kinda fucked up.”

But it’s fine! The Nazis killed more civilians, so, you know, from then on literally nothing less than the Holocaust ever matters, right?

You’re not supposed to agree with that.

Of course, only the Americans matter, right? Let’s focus on those poor soldiers who went off to another continent to massacre villagers and sometimes got shot, and completely ignore the million villagers who were massacred and had napalm and agent orange dropped on them.

But it’s fine! The Nazis killed more civilians, so, you know, from then on literally nothing less than the Holocaust ever matters, right?

That’s the real meaning of “Pax Americana” right there. The US will come to your country and slaughter people en masse and leave it in rubble using chemical weapons that last for generations, and then they won’t even recognize it as a significant conflict because it was primarily your people who died, and only Americans register as human to them. Perhaps later they’ll come by to film a movie about how killing you made them feel sad.

The numbers are irrelevant. Just because WWII was so deadly doesn’t mean you should trivialize Vietnam and other conflicts. It’s ridiculous to call it a “small policing action to keep dictators in line” when over a million people were murdered in a war of aggression, propping up a dictator against a popular movement.

I gotta organize them to make them more singable sometime.

K bud.

When did 'Murica, land of the free, abandon freedom for madness?

Oh, I got this one! Pick me, pick me!

Mexico, Samoa, Hawaii, Philippeans, Columbia, Hondurus, Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico (again), Haiti, Dominican Republic, Russia, Greece, Costa Rica, Albania, Syria, Egypt, Guatemala, Iran, Syria (again), Indonesia, Iraq, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba (again), Congo, Dominican Republic (again), Iraq (again), Guyana, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Angola, East Timor, Argentina, Afghanistan, Nicaragua (again), Granada, Panama, the USSR, Iraq (again again), Haiti (again), Yugoslavia, Afghanistan (again), Venezuela, Iraq (again again again), Haiti (again again), Palestine (continuously), Syria (again again), Libya, Bolivia (again), Venezuela (again)

Does Vietnam fall under “small policing actions that are necessary to keep dictators in line?”

I’m on the side of both Palestinians and Jews, extremely opposed to the side of Zionism.

Congresswoman Sarah McBride is the one that really hurts for me. First trans member of congress at a time when that kind of representation is desperately needed. She would be a ray of hope and a rare bit of uplifting news, but she has to be a fucking Zionist. Many trans spaces I’m in want nothing to do with her over it.

Putting aside everything else, approximately when do you believe that happened?

As much as we might criticize the whole, “End of History” idea, I feel like the 90’s was the last time Americans had anything like that kind of optimism. There was a feeling that we were entering a new age of international cooperation, and although I was only a child that was something I really believed in. But we soon found new conflicts to be embroiled in a the dream has died and was proven to be foolish and naive, and now everyone across the political spectrum is highly cynical.

I’m sure that there are many cynical people in China too, but I can hardly remember the last time I saw someone who wasn’t cynical when it comes to politics. Whether or not it’s naive, it hits me on an emotional level.

China hasn’t had a war in over 40 years.

Tbh, I was shocked. Much as I’m sympathetic towards China, but I still usually look at it through a lens of realpolitik, like, “Of course they’re vying for dominance like everyone else, but at least they’re doing it through economic development instead of wars, and it’s better if there are two major powers instead of one.” Maybe that cynical perspective is more realistic, and maybe XHS users aren’t a representative sample of all Chinese people, but still, the fact that so many of the replies were so hopeful and internationalist was genuinely moving to me.

Link

Cruise ships sometimes have repositioning cruises where they go one way across an ocean to start operating in another region, and they can offer significant discounts. I’m sure there’s cheaper ways but it’s an option.

In the long term, yes. The bourgeoisie are rich and comfortable with no desire for a war that could jeopardize their position. However, they have lots of financial incentives for military spending because it’s rife with corruption. As such, they do a lot of saber-rattling to make WWIII seem like a genuine possibility, while also fighting in proxy wars around the globe.

But the problem is, they’re playing with forces beyond their control. If you have a generation raised on constant propaganda to genuinely hate other countries, then all it takes is a couple people in the wrong positions at the wrong time who aren’t in on the game. Right now, the rabid dog is on the leash of the bourgeoisie, but the gamble they’ve been making is that they can keep pumping steroids into it forever and never lose control.

Furthermore, wasting all this money on war and militarism has allowed China to emerge as a credible threat to their global hegemony. China is sitting back and focusing on domestic economic development, and they are winning the peace while the US burns itself out. What happens when the only area in which the US has an advantage is the military? Are people really going to accept becoming #2, or are they going to force a confrontation? Given that we’re talking about Americans, who are 1) Riled up on propaganda, 2) Preoccupied with being “#1,” and 3) Unused to experiencing the effects of fucking around firsthand, it seems almost inevitable. Ofc, it’s true that we somehow maintained a Cold War with the USSR for decades, but it’s different today because conditions are declining and the far-right is growing stronger every day.