No, you’re obsessed with Trump because you can’t square him. Aren’t the systems of civility and institutionalism supposed to stop that kind of guy? Total freak out, he’s mango Mussolini, he’s a Cheeto in the dang White House!!! In reality, he’s there because the business interests in this country like his meaningless word drivel spew which seems to make line go up for some reason.

This isn’t even a meme it’s just repent for your sins

No, let’s contextualize this rather than doing an all sides bad gotcha that ends up feeding those with hegemony.

You seem to accept a hermeneutics of innocence towards the US and its ideology, fundamentally. When the constitution talks about the right to bear arms, in a militia, in the context of slave uprisings and settler-empire conflict, it’s actually a far sighted stroke of genius. The founding fathers knew 250 years later suburban dads would need a gun to protect their McMansion from inner city thugs. No, they weren’t coming up with extra-historical wisdom, they, like the many founding philosophers and practitioners of liberalism, were cruel slavers, atrocious exterminators, and elitists who thought they knew best. History doesn’t go away because you close your eyes and ignore it. The constitution or supposed founding values not being applied on so many occasions from lynchings to foreign occupations isn’t because “America is an ongoing project, a living document,” it’s because countries are what they do and who they represent. As opposed to pieces of paper. I have no sympathy for these viewpoints because you immediately drop the hermeneutics of suspicion on any critics of the American nightmare. If in Cuba the churches are empty, religion is being suppressed. If they’re full, people are rejecting their atheistic ideology. Funny how that turns out. American institutionalists keep crying.

Pivot to Asia is still happening in part despite ongoing MENA events wrt Saudi Israel and Iran. Turn NK and Russia against China, disrupt Belt and Road/BRICS, Sahel, sort of the Cold War strategy done post Sino Soviet split. But I’m not sure they can get the split part here. It just looks embarrassing and weak for Trump, humoring his enemies while they have no interest in breaking ranks.

Imperialism is when a country does something in its interests, which tends to be most things?

If you use out of scientific context psychological terms as a substitute for meaningful political analysis, it’s because you’ve got nothing else. I highly recommend this essay on “psychopolitics”

The USSR quite notably developed from its starting point as the backwater of Europe in 17 to the second place industrial power by the 50s? I guess I would get a bit to charitable for you if I talked about the ways imperial relationships between regions and Russian chauvinism were challenged in the Soviet Union, and I don’t think this is the place for a reasonable discussion of failures like wartime deportations, but I do think relationships changed somewhat.

But the point was the DDR, which was in the context of postwar realpolitik and animosity, simultaneously. I think Japan might be more complex because a cursory examination of the history notes their colonial adventures in Korea and China. Funny how that comes before an industrial base in merchantalist and capitalist regimes.

A lot of labor in slaughterhouses or for that matter construction, landscaping, etc. is done by undocumented immigrants. If they try to unionize the owners and coyotes can just turn them in to ICE. The reason republicans are so obsessed with the border is because controlling these unofficial immigrants/migrant workers is a form of labor discipline that keeps prices of otherwise untenable products like a lot of meat or seasonal fruit low. Dems in turn want an “open border,” because the neoliberal agenda means not letting borders get in the way of cheaper labor.

In the end, there’s homeostasis. Made possible by extreme violence by human traffickers, ranchers, border patrol, and plant owners. Enough get in to keep costs low, but not enough to fight for bargaining power. If we look at the characters in The Jungle, they came from immigrant groups being basically let into the country no problem. They could participate in strikes because they were “legal,” and eventually when the postwar consensus saw the American labor movement fall into a pit of consumerism, become white people rather than Poles, Jews, Slavs, Italians, etc. That’s not going to happen again.

Yeah it probably sucked to live in the occupation zones/East Germany from 45 to the sixties. And then shit started to decline in the 70s so yeah sucked. Point is you can’t just make economic prosperity and the liberal conception of freedom (being able to say anything and get nothing) happen out of the most adverse of circumstances. The U.S.S.R. hadn’t centuries to plunder colonies and accumulate the requisite wealth to fuel a global economic system for instance. It was always against the grain.

I’ll wait until the Xi bucks arrive to give you your affirmations. Until then, keep believing. American empire loves you and will NEVER do wrong to the settlers at home.

You realize the both sides thing comes from the idea that one side is actually different? I hate these internet cliches because smugly incorrect people will grandstand with them. Whataboutism too. You know the democratic party also gets aipac money right? Democratic Party politicians and democrat media are equally (if not more due to their neoliberal globalist stance) compromised by Israel. Get a spine, if you can’t even break the party line to whisper a mild critique about the milquetoast “””opposition””” that’s been complicit in a genocide for 3 years I have nothing to say to you. Politics is only a sport for you, then.

I would reccomend Chapter 8 of Killing Hope by William Blum. It’s all very interesting reading but this ads some complexity to the point you bring up. It’s fair to say the Soviets were harsh on the Germans with their reparations, for good reason and to the detriment of realpolitik. However when we see this as an internal failure brought on by essentially internal fuckups, we miss the external and the fact that there’s no distance between the two when you’ve been under siege since 1917. The other chapters of this book explain what happened to the other underdogs when they couldn’t keep things in perfect order.

I haven’t read the collected works of Xi Jinping cover to cover but it feels like a different voice. I mean arguably a lot of things published under his name are a collaborative work by the CPC central committee anyways, but just, feels a bit different.

Yeah Xi’s speech was very obviously ghostwriter/AI, and the bit about making China and America both great again was a bit on the nose. Trumps latest truths are pure ai no sauce, Chinese are gonna do the same reciprocally. It’s clear Xi is just indulging our dear leader as a matter of decorum.

On a side note wrt to bibliographies and the Frankfurt school Western Marxism by Gabriel Rockhill is a great book. Essentially an analysis of intellectual commodity production, ‘left wing’ academia, and the lessons of the past available when theory isn’t reified.

I’ll be honest and say fantasies of a second civil war are trite. Right wingers will make one up about big government overreach (aka international capitalists removing the protectionist frameworks keeping crybabies like US ranchers and carmakers afloat) where the conclusion is getting back to what the founding fathers desired. Cosmopolitan types will make one about “””polarization””” and oh have you no decency??? where in the end everyone becomes a perfect, compliant neoliberal subject.

Whatever the case, it’s pure american exceptionalist drivel. Both are adamantly for the document that says slaves are worth 3/5 of a person. There is no serious willingness or dare I say ability to contend with what actual war looks like. These fantasies always stand counterpoint to the reality where as it turns out we aren’t having a setpiece war. Ever. It’s all cultural animosity. Economically, in the real world, everything is in lockstep. So a film about a scary future we can look at then turn off, it reassures us of the greatness of the US, in weal or woe, a place outside of history, above history.

Germany moment

Isn’t the biggest thing he’s known for is supporting humanitarian stuff in Palestine? I know ‘campist’ used to mean anyone who condemned imperialism, NATO anarchism, and seriously analyzed the forces at play (finding that the primary contradiction, the thing we need to break to lay the foundation for anything else, is imperialism). But now it just means thinking third worlders are human? Bar was low but Jesus.

I should clarify, it’s more of a justification for tracking features and market protectionism (like allowing only 4 brands of printer) than an actual issue.