Max

I still can’t tell if the Trump admin have any positive policy positions (that is actually wanting something) as opposed to their negative policy position of undoing ‘liberal policy’ without any consideration of the consequences because lib policy is inherently harmful and any apparent benefit is actually just harm the Trump folks don’t know how to describe yet.

Bush’s war on terror was the attempt to convert Cold War soft power intro a traditional hard power empire and it was a complete catastrophe. That’s why all the former Bush guys, Bolton and his allies., were so intent on preventing Trump from doing this. Obama and co made it their mission to intensify soft power because that’s the best way to meet americas goals. I’m not convinced this isn’t just reactionaries undoing everything the non-white president did. There certainly isn’t a thoughtful reason to be doing this. Moving towards hard power is simply an objectively wrong move and this is doubly true from the perspective of an American populace that has no interest in joining the military let alone fighting and dying.

So it’s an ideological consideration certainly, combined with Elon having some issues with both agencies negatively impacting his businesses—for example, payments received by Elon’s starlink company were being investigated by USAID.

Blaming the proxy when it doesn’t work out, and claiming the issue is cost is just cope to make NATO countries feel confident it’s the dum dum Slavs fault and not the reality that NATO has little to no tech or strategic advantage over anyone who is actually a rival military. NATO doctrine during the ‘war on terror’ involved using as many munitions as possible in “shock and awe” attacks but maybe NATO wasn’t willing to extend the use of that tactic to a lowly proxy. Or maybe NATO doctrine only applies to farmers with 1950s weaponry defending their homes

I think folks can lose sight of this. The US is not and has never been a democracy. And even insofar as the sham elections go, as the AP byline shows again, both relevant parties have essentially identical foreign policy. Even now, Trump and co just appear incapable of getting the job done—it’s not as though they want America’s imperial grasp to weaken.

Marcuse is helpful here. The idea that average people in the US are actively considering how to uphold the imperial global order is preposterous. It’s more insidious. I don’t have One Dimensional Man in front of me so here are some paraphrases from the wiki article. As a disclaimer, the parts of 1D man on the USSR are based on analysis of common largely unsubstantiated western assumptions according to a former soviet psychologist I’ve spoken to about it. As they said, the USSR wasn’t maintained so it clearly had some internal concerns with getting people to accept the socialist mission, but that Marcuse’s concepts aren’t especially prescient factors in that situation, anyway:

“Modern industrial societies have furthermore created an “affluent society”, which in increasing comfort have disguised the exploitative nature of the system, and have therefore strengthened means of domination and control. Modern “affluent society” therefore limits opportunities for political revolution against capitalism.

Marcuse contends that in contemporary consumer societies, a select few wield the power to shape our conceptions of freedom by offering us the means to purchase our own happiness. In this state of “unfreedom”, consumers act irrationally by working more than they are required to in order to fulfill actual basic needs, by ignoring the psychologically destructive effects, by ignoring the waste and environmental damage it causes, and by searching for social connection through material items.

It is even more irrational in the sense that the creation of new products, calling for the disposal of old products, fuels the economy and encourages the need to work more to buy more. An individual loses his humanity and becomes a tool in the industrial machine and a cog in the consumer machine. Additionally, advertising sustains consumerism, which disintegrates societal demeanor, delivered in bulk and informing the masses that happiness can be bought, an idea that is psychologically damaging.”

I think we are mainly discussing intentionality and semantics.

Joe Cracker has no ‘good’ reason for supporting the imperial mission abroad but he does because of media influence, latent nationalism, etc.

You’re definitely not wrong. Admittedly my days of owning boxes of miniatures is long over, so my battletech knowledge does not extend beyond the late 2000s. Maybe it’s even worse now. Not to mention any sort of narrative lore controlled by a big business that hires working writers to fill out plot points will inevitably end up falling back on tired sci-fi tropes—many of which were solidified during the Cold War era.

is it a problem that all the various organizations in battletech are near uniformly morally detestable? I don’t think anyone is positively depicted outside of stories told from the perspective of individuals in the organizations, who of course view themselves favorably.