Bassoe
Well-known member
Maybe then it should prioritize the half who make up the majority of military service and actual non-financialized jobs so we’ll continue doing so?
Israel has launched a preemptive strike on Iran, declared a state of emergency in preparation for retaliation
- Thread starter Rocinante
- Start date
Perhaps...
But then again, ask the military service members what they think of the geopolitical acumen of the kind of people who complain about "foreign warmongering" and "American Empire".
DarthOne
☦️
Most of them have no idea what’s going on at home.
And you have more of an idea about.... anything?
DarthOne
☦️
More then you, some guy from Poland, do about what its like in the USA.
And I have friends in the National Guard who've noticed the difference in attitude between guys who are posted over seas (and thus get most of their information from the news) vs people who live in the USA.
Also, I seem to recall that the primary reason you care about the American Empire is to keep Russia from kicking your nation's door down and invading. Again. Which given Russia's issues in the Ukraine, is less of a concern then you seem to think.
And all of them have family in USA though....
Yet also how does that relate to the fact that the whining about warmongers and empire is not widely sympathized with among US military?
If anything, attaching those fringe foreign policy views to your particular domestic concerns makes your opinion about domestic matters, to people who know the former, look less believable.
Failing at conquest, as we see at Ukraine, also can mean they will inflict some nasty damage to the economy and cities while trying. Don't act like either of us didn't see or remember the shit you wrote on Russia and Ukraine matters, and where your sympathies lie.
As someone who is active duty and overseas, there is no diffrence.
I see the same shit everyone back home sees.
Unless the people your nasty girl friends know don't have phones, internet, or even an unclassified NIPR at thier work....
Which I doubt because we all have online training we have to do at some point.
Your friend is lying to you.
Most active duty are not happy with a lot of current admin foreign policy, most are happy with domestic to a degree.
MAJORITY of the army isn't happy with a lot of stupid decisions they are making involving the Army itself.
Mostly QoL stuff.
Like pulling money from barracks improvement to go towards the border.
Getting rid of major morale boosting things in the name of "lethality".
Most of the military is just happy we get someone who is gonna keep giving us pay raises and more money above all else.
Though I will say that you also have a lot of senior leaders, NCOs and Officers that out of spite won't get out until after trump just so his name isn't on thier retirement papers, and for most of them it is congress who has to fire them. President just makes recommendations on them. (People don't realize that at a certain point congress is responsible for the military matters of who gets where and has to sign off on presidential nominees).
It is as I've been saying. We are in a class war, but they want people to think that we're in a culture war, or, failing that, a shooting war.
People on the Right need to stop shrinking away and muttering "but that's just Marxist stuff" when they hear "class warfare", because class warfare is affecting the Right, too. That is, the Right have been victims of class warfare just as much as the Left.
What is it when soldiers are forced to fight for a globalized economy that hollows out the job base and turns small towns into fentanyl and OxyContin dens? That's class warfare. That's some Wall Street pricks making money hand over fist off sweatshop labor at the expense of Main Street.
The Right doesn't have the luxury of saying "class warfare isn't real", when they're a target of it. Some Right-wingers know this. Despite James Lindsay’s whining about the “woke right”, more and more people on the Right are attaining class consciousness, because they have no choice. It's not like people can even opt out of this. The rich are preying on the poor, regardless of whether or not they wish to participate in class warfare. You can’t be class-agnostic when class warfare is imposed upon you and when your Elites are robbing you blind with systematic upward wealth transfers aimed at enshrining them as a permanent rentier manor lord caste in a techno-feudalist hellscape.
When they talk about people owning nothing and being happy, what they mean is that Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street will own everything and they will lease the shirts off our backs to us for a monthly fee.
Cultures and subcultures de facto exist. People act according to those. Classes are an artificial, lefty way to classify people *to which most of said people bear exactly zero loyalty to*. For some purposes they may be similar, but if applied to economic and global classifications, that's just marxist world revolution crap that is exactly as bad as everything our elites do, ironically for somewhat related reasons, fuck this shit. I don't fucking care which specific brand of delusional internationalist idealism one is pushing, they all suck on grounds of being delusional internationalist idealism. Doesn't matter if it's from east or west, or if it's from the left of now, 50 year ago or 100 year ago.
>globalized economy
Want autarky? Fine, move to North Korea. Or any other place on the planet where there are none of those rich people you complain about so much. The soldiers are most definitely not fighting for that kind of "prosperity".
It's not the globalized economy that's the problem. The problems are in how the government is managing the country's connection to it.
Yes it does and yes it will, classes are made up.
In cynical realpolitik terms, Ukraine is large enough and has sufficient resources to be a worthwhile junior ally to the United States like the European nations are, but Poland is too small and unimportant to be anything but a client state -- either ours or the Russians, and I increasingly do not care which.
If Putin came to the United States with a deal to end the war and informally acknowledge Ukraine as part of the American sphere of influence in exchange for us informally acknowledging Poland as part of the historic Soviet/Russian sphere of influence, I think that would be a good deal.
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DarthOne
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I would prefer Poland in our Sphere over the Ukraine. And yes, I know that's not as wise in realpolitik terms. So Otto Von Bismarck is spinning in his grave at me, I suppose.
Like it or not, people are sorted into economic classes by wealth and income. The sorting isn’t being done by the proles. The sorting is being done by the rich. They are the ones who have defined themselves as being separate from and superior to us.
America has a growing wealth gap that is eradicating the civil liberties that we took for granted. If you want to motivate people to fight on behalf of the precious NATO empire, then they need an incentive to do so. Nobody wants to sign up and fight, bleed, and die to line the pockets of a bunch of rich parasites who don't share the wealth, who have been dismantling our industrial base and stripping assets with leveraged buyouts and other such bullshit while letting wages stagnate for years and years.
The American Dream of a 2500-square-foot (232-square-meter) house in the suburbs, a three-car garage, a pickup truck and a boat in the driveway, all on a single income, and still being able to afford a wife, kids, and vacations, has been downsized, replaced with a tiny studio apartment, dual-earner households with no time for childcare, Netflix, drugs, and Chinese plastic dolls. America is Weimarized and demoralized. What do you expect people to enlist and fight for? Fuck globalism.
Morphic Tide
Well-known member
No, the sorting is being done by sociologists, usually post-facto. They're typically Intelligencia, which are a class very awkwardly between actual ruling elites and proper clergy. Said actual ruling elites typically concern themselves with much more granular classes because that's how the economy and people's self-organization work. "The Working Class" is uselessly broad for policy, "Dairy Farmers" and "Automotive Workers" and "devout Evangelicals" are not.
AnimalNoodles
Well-known member
This is why 'conservatives' need to stop slobbing the knobs of corporations and billionaires.
Elon musk wants to import a bajillion cheap indian nu-slaves to do his work, literally thinks americans are ineducable sub-tards and thinks putting chips in your brain is a great idea.
These people are the enemy. Stop being a 'conservative' people. All you are doing is conserving the power of the enemy. The right must develop its own version of progressivism, to smash the current system and implement its own agenda and to build something new that is actually worth conserving.
No more than they are sorted by education, criminal record or size of their ass. Statistics with a million right and a billion wrong ways to interpret them.
And here you show you know nothing of the rich you obsess so much about. In their world income is a worthless statistic. Power and connections with influential people are what they value. Then there's wealth. But income? Who cares if your billionaire friend is in negative 10 million a year income bracket?
You know who does obsess about income? Leftist strivers resentful at the above. If i were you i would not listen to them, they are retarded and malicious, and my contempt for their thought is limitless.
Well no one wants to fight for the rotten red ideas of XX century like delusions of global classes, that's for sure. Ironically the few remnants of those are the ones who don't pay their soldiers, not the "NATO empire".
Well tell that to the people who hate the very existence of suburbs (the very same leftists you take your talking points about inequality), look down at rural people on principle (also same people), and support feminism (also the same people).
Why do you listen to socioeconomic analysis and advice of... people who hate the very lifestyle you wish for and proudly announce they will never allow for it?
Though for that kind of prosperity to ever happen again you are either going to have to lover your standards (all of the above second hand and/or made from third world materials and in a rural area, which i guess many rural people do come pretty close to, the garage they may have built themselves and they cobbled together the boat themselves in it, but they do have one), have a new technological revolution or be a grand winner of another world war.
Wake the fuck up, the socialist dream is dead, and the left killed it. Only the famous capitalist country had it when it was the great winner of a world war for some time, no socialist country ever came close to giving it to their citizens, in fact often it was quite opposite, people had to famously wait for decades to get a tiny, shoddy apartment from the state in those, forget about owning a car there, and the state of course wants the wife to be part of the workforce too (if you are lucky she will get you some meat on the side from the store she works at beyond what little your ration cards allow). Chinese plastic dolls? That's a luxury, comrade.
Ever hear of Curtis Yarvin’s concept of the Cathedral? Academia plus Media. The new clerisy. Their role is to act as a mouthpiece for the ruling class and to tell the proles what to believe. A lot of Left-wing culture war rhetoric is performative virtue-signaling, designed by neolib/neocon think tanks like Tavistock, RAND, McKinsey, the Brookings Institution, the Atlantic Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the rest of their ilk, specifically to neutralize them as a threat by redirecting class anger onto innumerable fake grievances. The vast majority of people now live in a hyperreal simulacrum of a society. All the really important policy decisions are not handled by elected officials, but by a permanent state of unelected bureaucrats, intelligence agencies, military brass, contractors (including top defense contractors and private intelligence orgs), NGOs, and stakeholders. Collectively, the Managerial Class.
In Michael J. Glennon's book, National Security and Double Government, he outlined how the US government is effectively bifurcated into two entities, which he refers to as the Madisonian institutions and the Trumanite network. The Madisonians are signified by voting, elections, representatives; the appearance, the theater, the stage performance of governance. The Trumanites bypass democracy entirely, conduct unilateral decisions about foreign policy and economic policy behind closed doors under a pretense of national security, and so on.
When people talk about the Deep State, what they're actually talking about is the Shallow and Very Obvious State of civil servants and managers who don't care about the will of the electorate and simply do whatever rich and well-connected philanthropaths want.
In Adam Curtis's documentary, Hypernormalisation, he goes into detail about how technocrats and the managerial class, who believed in Taylorism and James Burnham-ite ideals about direct, scientific management of society without recourse to public will (this is basically all Fabian shit and has roots in Alexander Bogdanov and Tectology), decided to invent a fake, Truman Show-like artificial world for the rest of us to live in, to neutralize the common folk politically. This has been ongoing since the 1970s. In 1975, the Trilateral Commission published The Crisis of Democracy, a report where they complained that the little people had too much of a voice and that it was stifling progress in specific government reforms that Elites wanted. Those same exact networks that complained we had too much democracy in the 1970s now whine that our democracy is in peril and, ironically, cancel elections and ban political parties every single time a right-wing, populist party nearly gains enough power to roll back managerialism.
Technocracy is governance without the governed. It is administration without representation. It is the dream of eliminating negotiation, debate, or struggle, replacing the friction of politics with the smooth coercion of policy. You can see it in everything from pandemic response, to ESG enforcement, to Stakeholder Capitalism, to Digital ID and programmable money, to AI-based content moderation, to the obsession with fact-checking and mis-, dis-, and malinformation. Technocrats believe they should rule by fiat without interference from non-experts and the public. I happen to disagree.
Every right we have was bought with blood. Every liberty was wrested from tyranny, not with stakeholder meetings, but with defiance. What they call too much democracy was once called freedom. What they call polarization is actually resistance. We are being governed by people who no longer believe in the legitimacy of consent. They see the population as a biopolitical problem to be managed. But there's one thing they forgot to erase: memory. And when enough people remember what it means to speak without permission, the simulation ends.
You can't have conservatism if there's nothing to conserve. I've tried explaining this to neocons plenty of times, that they're asking people to sacrifice themselves for very little in return, and their response is always some variation on, "As bad as you think things are right now, it could be worse, you could be an actual chattel slave taking miles of Muslim cock", or something along those lines.
They tacitly admit that things are bad, but they act like we should just suck it up, because at least we're not living in commieblocks and queuing for bread lines. It's absurd. They expect us to ignore the Panama Papers, the tax evasion, the wage suppression, the way the rich flooded the Rust Belt with opioids. They expect us to pretend like the looting isn't happening, while the looters are still stealing our futures right in front of us.
"It could be worse" is not a convincing platform. It's what every tyrant says just before the total collapse of their regime. "Hey, it's bad now, but without me, it could be even worse". It stinks of failure. It's no way to bargain.
The problem that we have is that we have a ruling class who are arrogant enough to think that they've evolved beyond bargaining with the public. They have not. They must bargain with us. They must not coerce us.
Loyalty to corporations, global capital, and managerial technocracy is not conservatism. It's client-state feudalism, disguised in flag decals and slogans about "freedom" that never trickle down past the shareholder layer.
We should not be satisfied with managed decline. We should demand prosperity.
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Morphic Tide
Well-known member
But because the De Jure power remains with the elected officials, a single election going badly enough for the bureaucrats is sufficient to gut their systems. They can screech and moan all they wish, but an opposed Trifecta of what you call a "stage performance" can swiftly re-write the laws they sue with and send in the men with guns to kick them out. This is what is happening today in the United States. So tamp down on your ranting about conspiracies and doom, because they are losing.
Yes, and what do they replace the human bureaucrats with? AI dashboards that do the same thing. It's a shell game. They make it look like they're abolishing the technocracy, when they're really just performing a little sleight-of-hand and bringing in algocracy that serves the same exact function of disciplining an unruly populace, only now, they don't have to pay some useless civil servants' salaries and can give the cash to their crony contractor buddies instead.
Trump's Efforts to Dismantle AI Protections, Explained | ACLU
President Donald Trump has swiftly removed Artificial Intelligence protections, exposing people to real-world harms.
www.aclu.org
Trump’s AI policy shifts focus to ‘high impact’ use cases
The White House says a new federal AI policy rejects the Biden administration's “risk-averse” approach, but one former official sees it as a “smart evolution."
federalnewsnetwork.com
And they often are poison pilled by leftard staff to a point where they do their jobs poorly, or outright dodge that and instead fuck off waste their efforts on something that they aren't supposed to be doing at all.
What is private is beyond the question of government and democracy. What is owned privately is subject to owner's will, not democracy, the other way "stakeholder capitalism" and leftard failure of economy lies. That's a lot of laundering of public vs private ownership of all of the above and papering over ideological differences of what is/ought to be in that regard, and all sorts of factions have own views on this, and some malicious parties like to blur the line in this.
A lot of problem with moderate right now is pretty much the same one as what killed liberalism as a political movement. So much compromising to the left, that it becomes indistinguishable from it policy wise.
And you're no better as you show right here - obsessed with talking points about other people's money that you are getting from people who genuinely think you should in fact live in a commie block or favela for the sake of equality and environment.
At least their policies add up, because their policy would create a poor society where people have to live in those.
But why do you carry water for them?
Rationally it is one, when the alternative is people who think worse is better. Wishful thinking and utopianism are easy to imagine but are worthless as a policy.
No, they must improve, period, and whoever is for that should be bargained with, whoever is against, told to fuck off. Utopianism and commienomics are not something they should bargain with. Bargaining with the left is how we got into this mess in the first place. Not one more step to the left should be the slogan for prosperity.
Where the hell are conservatives advocating loyalty to those?