As I get older it becomes more obvious that the whole "moral arc of history" line is complete nonsense. Evil usually wins. Goodness is a strange outlier in all of history. It has to be fought for relentlessly, and is fleeting at best. The world as a whole now seems to be reverting to the mean.
What do you make of the fall of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain in Europe? In the last thirty years, lots of countries have gotten more democratic.
A lot of American liberals just want to turn the clock back 20 years, when they were still doing military interventions everywhere in the world but at least the political class would get on TV and pretend to feel bad for it.
In a world where technology has made gentle imperialism untenable, your system has chosen honest imperialism. Wishing you didn't have to deal with this contradiction won't work. You will have to choose between getting rid of the "autocracy" and keeping the empire.
In a world where technology has made gentle imperialism untenable, your system has chosen honest imperialism. Wishing you didn't have to deal with this contradiction won't work. You will have to choose between getting rid of the "autocracy" and keeping the empire.
This is one of the most insightful posts I've seen on this app. Thank you.
but at least the political class would get on TV and pretend to feel bad for it.
Yeah. Words matter. I do indeed wish we were back to a time where that was the case. America has always been flawed and contradictory, but our greatness came from a shared sense of some higher ideals that we strived for, regardless of the messy reality. That's been lost, and it's sad.
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As I get older it becomes more obvious that the whole "moral arc of history" line is complete nonsense. Evil usually wins. Goodness is a strange outlier in all of history. It has to be fought for relentlessly, and is fleeting at best. The world as a whole now seems to be reverting to the mean.
What do you make of the fall of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain in Europe? In the last thirty years, lots of countries have gotten more democratic.
So, America good, China bad?
America? It was the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
No. Democracy good, autocracy bad. America is speed-running toward the latter at this point.
A lot of American liberals just want to turn the clock back 20 years, when they were still doing military interventions everywhere in the world but at least the political class would get on TV and pretend to feel bad for it.
In a world where technology has made gentle imperialism untenable, your system has chosen honest imperialism. Wishing you didn't have to deal with this contradiction won't work. You will have to choose between getting rid of the "autocracy" and keeping the empire.
This is one of the most insightful posts I've seen on this app. Thank you.
Yeah. Words matter. I do indeed wish we were back to a time where that was the case. America has always been flawed and contradictory, but our greatness came from a shared sense of some higher ideals that we strived for, regardless of the messy reality. That's been lost, and it's sad.