Chinese spy balloons have briefly captured the nation’s imagination, but they’re just another in a series of surveillance layers that begins with satellites and ends with phone apps. The spy balloons seem odd, but they reveal the thoroughness and dedication of Beijing’s data hounds who are not satisfied with hacking us, embedding thousands of spies in our universities and tech firms, but want that added edge with slow-motion spying on our bases and defenses.
The balloon may seem silly but it reveals a rigorous mindset that ought to be frightening.
China’s economic warfare hollowed out our economy in the same dedicated fashion, aiming low to aim high, capturing our industries from the bottom so that we laughed at all the ‘Made in China’ junk and we went on laughing until it became impossible to find anything else. No aspect of our economy was too unimportant to outsource and no angle was overlooked. Our retail sector now consists of buying American brands that are made in China from Chinese third party sellers on Amazon. Soon we’ll be buying Chinese brands on Chinese platforms like Alibaba.
The same obsessive attention to detail that served China so well in its economic war is at play in its war plans. Having lost an economic war to China, we’re sleepwalking into a military defeat.
Even on our end, we’ve lost war games against China over and over again.
“The trend in our war games was not just that we were losing, but we were losing faster,” Air Force Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote stated. We’re losing because we have no serious plan to win and that’s because we don’t really believe that there will be a war and so we don’t need to.
China is serious. We’re not. Xi lives in a zero-sum world. So does the rest of the Communist regime. They believe that for them to win, we have to lose. They’d rather not fight a war and they would prefer that we decline into oblivion while selling our souls for consumer gadgets, but they are seriously preparing to fight and win a battle that will establish them as the world power.
Our leaders speak of China as being a “competitor” rather than an enemy. That’s a concession on our end, but China has no intention of merely competing, it wants to end the competition.
We don’t. And that’s why we’re setting ourselves up for defeat.
Despite the defeatism in some circles, China is not naturally superior to us. But, like most of our opponents, it’s nationalistic while we have decayed into a globalist apathy that claims to care about the world, but without any particular attachment to any part of it including our own.
China knew that it could stomp over Hong Kong and that it would excite no more opposition from most of the western world and its leaders than the manifold human rights abuses all over the world. Similarly, it anticipates that if it can manage to take Taiwan, the story will vanish in the news cycle the way that fighting in dozens of other places in the world have.
In the globalist paradigm, everything matters and so nothing matters. China’s human rights abuses deserve no more and no less attention than those in Africa, the Middle East, or the rest of Asia. Untethered from national interests, we have come to view China’s advance through the dispassionate lens of human rights activism, outraged over everything and dedicated to nothing.
Globalism seduced us into handing out pieces of our economy to any nation willing to take it on the disproven theory that binding nations together through collective economic interests would end war and usher in a collective humanity, a European Union, a North American Union, a United States of Africa, a New Middle East, an Asian Federation, and finally a United Earth.
“No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other,” Thomas Friedman idiotically argued in his paean to globalization, ‘The World Is Flat’. “No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain.”
Someone forgot to tell Russia and Ukraine.
America’s Cold War diplomatic strategy, carved out by FDR and Truman administration holdovers, hinged on a multilateralism built around the UN and international organizations, that at times suspiciously resembled a mirror image of the USSR, to avert a world war. The Soviet Union easily infiltrated and took over the multilateral organizations, beginning with the UN, and built alliances with third world nations that kept free western nations on the diplomatic defense.
Every Republican administration until Reagan put all of its efforts into maintaining this house of cards as the only way to avert the horrors of nuclear war. The more domestic propagandists terrified us with nuclear bombs falling on our cities while children were taught to cower under desks (not in the hopes of saving their lives, but of terrifying their parents into clamoring for a diplomatic solution), the more we turned to the globalism that was slowly destroying us.
And then the Soviet Union fell.
Having learned nothing, or perhaps everything, the Clinton administration made globalism into the axis of our foreign policy. The world was divided between progressive regimes, abiding by international law and institutions, and reactionary ones opposed to the international order. Instead of returning to our national interests, we put our military at the disposal of the UN, we fought to bring democracy to countries united only by the democratic desire to kill all infidels.
Biden complained that China violated “international law” by flying spy balloons over our territory. China responded by accusing us of violating its territory. This tedious tit-for-tat legal wrangling, so familiar from the Cold War, is also entirely besides the point. Do we object to China spying on us on the grounds of international law or national interest? Anti-American leftists and a few rightists excel at pointing out where America has violated international law. But nations that prioritize their interests view violations of international law as strategic, not moral. We shouldn’t care that China violated international law, but we should care that it violated our territory. And that it did so as part of a larger program to spy on us in order to military defeat us.
To globalists, this is a minor matter. A war between China and America is to be avoided not because they care about America, but because all wars are bad as a matter of principle. They interfere with the free flow of commerce, raise ocean temperatures and teach little boys warlike behavior. But as Americans, China’s military and economic threat to us should be foremost.
The myth of international law is dying a slow death in Ukraine. But it’s died many times before, in two world wars and countless massacres, wars and genocides since, especially in Africa. The international conclaves of “people of goodwill” have accomplished nothing except to build lifetime careers bemoaning the millions of deaths that they have utterly failed to prevent while claiming that those track records of failure somehow endow them with moral authority.
Moral authority cannot be vested in multilateral institutions, only national ones because only nations can be animated by a clear and defining sense of right and wrong rooted in their cultures that they implement by risking the lives of their people. That doesn’t mean that nations are necessarily right, either always or at all, but, unlike globalist ones, they are meaningful.
Globalism claims to represent everyone while representing no one. Its ambitions are as vast in scope as they are empty. Its world government of abstractions commands the loyalty of no one even while basing everything discredited theories that have never worked in the real world.
China’s ambitions are equally global, but it is not globalist. It has a clear plan to expand its territories locally and its economic empire globally. The only way we can even begin to fight it is by making the vital nationalistic calculation that we must be at the epicenter of our interests. China is not a threat to the international order, but to us, and it has effectively used the international order to weaken us, bleeding our economy and shackling our military operations.
No one wants a war with China, but, as WWII showed us, the surest way to stumble into one is to pompously proclaim the dogma of international law that we have no intention of defending, while having no notion of how to deal with an enemy that isn’t seeking a diplomatic solution.
England and France were convinced until the last minute that Hitler wanted a diplomatic solution. The FDR administration believed that the Japanese diplomats were there to negotiate in good faith until the bombs fell from the sky on Pearl Harbor. China’s attack, if it comes, will be equally sudden, ruthless and decisive unless we wake up from our daze and deal with reality.
(If COVID was deliberately released from a lab, it was a mere underpowered trial run.)
America’s leaders, Democrats and Republicans, still live in a globalist fantasy in which most issues can be worked out across conference tables, and in the worst case scenario, sanctions can be used to bring recalcitrant regimes to the table. North Korea, Iran and now the Ukraine war have taught them nothing. The globalist fallacy is that everyone wants to be globalists.
They don’t. Instead, serious nations want to be global world powers.
International law was created to bind us to be reactive, to appease and to bribe other nations to join us in the globalist utopia. As a result we have lost our edge, betrayed our allies, and put ourselves on a path to defeat. If we are going to confront China and avoid a war, we need to take a leaf from its playbook and remember the lessons of our own history. Weakness and empty rhetoric impress no one. America should be strong and silent. We should let our actions speak louder than words, make few threats, but demonstrate that we would win any war.
China, its goods and services, its companies and its scientists, should have no place in this country. The entire question of being open to Chinese commerce should not even be considered until the day that China is willing to open its borders to us the way that we have to it. Our enemies have clearly shown us what we have forgotten: a military rides on the economy.
We have a limited window in which China has out-competed us economically, but not militarily, unless we shift that balance of power soon, then we will be stuck in a weaker position. And we will need to retreat from Asia entirely while trying to maintain what’s left of our economy. By then, there will be negotiations, not over the status of Taiwan, but the status of Hawaii.
Either we will shed globalism and rediscover our national interests or, like much of Europe, the question of national interests will become irrelevant because we will have limited scope for asserting them. We will retreat into globalism, not to restrain our strength, but to protect our weakness, and then we will be a few generations away from total national extinction.
It’s not too late, but if we refuse to remember what makes nations great, it will be.
Excellent analysis thank you.
“ made in China from Chinese third party sellers on Amazon”
Third party sellers who masquerade as local businesses all the time.
This is good news because it tells each and every one of us that we actually still care about our national interests, and Amazon and its Chinese partners know that. In fact Amazon is making it increasingly difficult to find out who the companies are and where they’re located. In China almost always.
Globalism was the inevitable consequence of outsourcing to China, actually Hong Kong and Taiwan before China broke its agreement, its international agreement with the UK. We kept our 99 year lease agreement with them but they breached their agreement with us.
There’s also good news that Boris Johnson has encouraged millions of Hong Kong citizens to settle in the UK and bring their manufacturing skills back home.
Yes. Amazon is becoming a platform that masquerades as a retailer. It’s a middle man for local shoplifting gangs and for China.
And Amazon doesn’t want customers to know that. It builds up the myth of a prestigious and convenient super-retailer when it’s just Alibaba with a $500 million woke Lord of the Rings series.
Globalism like communism is a secular religion and both are Utopian
America didn’t just defeat Communism in the Soviet Union it adopted it to metastasise like a cancer in its homeland 30 years later
The DEm -Bolsheviks are liberal Bolsheviks with similar utopian dreams such as abolishing the sexes, open borders and de-industrialising based on the fantasy of Climate Change
The original Bolsheviks wanted to rapidly industrial Russia with their 5 Year Plans and collectivisation of agriculture but the Globalists want to de industrialise and go back to a bucolic Eden powered by solar and wind . The Davos crowd are a latter day version of the Comintern
Both groups represent utopian megalomania
The Communists were animated by a leftist ideology that was oriented around class warfare and pursued industrialization as the solution.
The postmodern Left we’re dealing with is a more elitist strain filtered through romanticism and technocracy and believes that industrialization and humanity are evils.
They existed at the time and Orwell wrote about them.
“In addition to this there is the horrible–the really disquieting–prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”
“One day this summer I was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old men got on to it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink, and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on top of the bus. The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured ‘Socialists’,”
“He was probably right–the I.L.P. were holding their summer school at Letchworth. But the point is that to him, as an ordinary man, a crank meant a Socialist and a Socialist meant a crank. Any Socialist, he probably felt, could be counted on to have _something_ eccentric about him. And some such notion seems to exist even among Socialists themselves. For instance, I have here a prospectus from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say ‘whether my diet is ordinary or vegetarian’. They take it for granted, you see, that it is necessary to ask this question. This kind
of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people.”
These people are now the “Left”
Now the forms ask you if you’re female, male, non binary, trans or a frozen vegetable (ok, I stole the last one from old Curtis Sliwa radio show comments).
“Unless We Abandon Globalism, China Will Win”
“Ahem!” – – Islam
Islam takes over decaying civilizations. China will become a world power. If anyone occupies us, it’s Islam.
If there’s a war, Islam may take both sides.
Unless Americans abandon altruism they can not abandon Globalism. Globalism is altruism and self-sacrifice in practice.
The alternative to Globalism is Americanism which means an ethics of self-preservation and self-interest which means an ethics of selfishness. Selfishness properly defined, rational, logical, objective selfishness.
There is a reason why everyone thinks you are an idiot. I’ll leave it to you to figure out the reason.
Part 1
“Unless Americans abandon altruism they can not abandon Globalism. “
Once again, the broken record continues trying to jam its flawed paradigm in.
For the record, even a cursory look at American moralism in the 19th century and the turn of that century would point out what a nonsequtor it is. Obviously the US could be nonglobalist even if it was still moralist, altruistic, and self-sacrificing.
Especially since you are the one who has tried to elevate tidewater Virginia as the origin of American culture while demonizing (for both good and bad reasons) Puritan originating New England and outright ignoring the Mid Atlantic Rim. Well, guess which side of the country came to the ascendency during the 19th century, especially during and after the civil war?
Though I imagine you will ignore this evidence or concoct some story to try and divorce the emerging “Yankee Capitalists” of New York and Massachusetts from their predecessors while ignoring the clear continuities and rhetorical debt.
“Globalism is altruism and self-sacrifice in practice.”
At best it is only one version of altruism and sacrifice.
Part 2
“The alternative to Globalism is Americanism which means an ethics of self-preservation and self-interest which means an ethics of selfishness. “
We’ve already established that
Americanism did not originate with those alone. Indeed it could not have without the willingness to engage in self-sacrifice and altruism, as even a cursory examination of the fates of the American Declaration of Independence’s signatories (leaving aside the inaccurate Copypasta) or the Continental Army.
The balance of altruism, self-sacrifice, self-interest, selfishness, and self-preservation is what helped define America.
It is here that I will note that Benedict Arnold’s betrayal was a key act of selfishness and self-interest, and a tragic one. A crippled army veteran and war hero in debts and being snubbed (especially for credit for the Battle of Saratoga) seeking a way to remedy them however he could.
But you don’t want to address that because it drives a stake through your narrative that purely rational self interest and selfishness are the heart of Americanism and sufficient to constitute it. In reality without some degree of altruism (such as Washington’s refusal to go home when his army went into Winter Quarters) America would not exist.
Thanks Tortoise!
Part 3
“Selfishness properly defined, rational, logical, objective selfishness.”
Ah yes, “properly defined.” The typical sophist’s appeal that only they can properly define a concept and that everybody else does not understand.
But I am sure you will doubtless misconstrue this much as you keep lying that you won a debate about the start of the Renaissance and Thomas Aquinas without even knowing Aquinas wasn’t the first Latin Language translator of Aristotle.
We are stuck at a disagreement at what selfishness and altruism really mean. You insist that altruism really means simply helping others in a voluntary and non-sacrificial way, that definition is wrong. So there is no way to move forward with this argument.
Ayn Rand has correctly and OBJECTIVELY identified what the “self” is and therefore what selfishness really and rationally entails. Here’s the crux of the matter, Ayn Rand’s moral code of rational selfishness and her philosophy are historically speaking, brand new, a paradigm shift, a moral and philosophical revolution. So revolutionary you can’t or refuse to understand it. As do many others.
What Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo are to the Heliocentric Theory, Ayn Rand is to morality. The Sun doesn’t revolve around the Earth, but the opposite. Selflessness and self-sacrifice are not virtues but vices, selfishness is not evil but the fountainhead of the good.
It is what it is. It took the Cult of Jesus 400 years to become Christianity and become the dominant philosophy of the West. Objectivism is only 60 years old and what’s more it is up against 5,000 or more millennia of the mystical unreason of altruism-collectivism. Not just as manifested in Judaism and Christianity but in all religions and pseudo-secular belief-systems like Marxism and Nazism.
Part 8
“Here’s the crux of the matter, Ayn Rand’s moral code of rational selfishness and her philosophy are historically speaking, brand new, a paradigm shift, a moral and philosophical revolution. So revolutionary you can’t or refuse to understand it. As do many others.”
Here’s the crux of the matter. Every sentence of that is utterly inaccurate. I’m not surprised you wrote it, especially considering how the Objectivist Cult’s focus on elevating Rand as a singular genius both well beyond her accomplishments and without significant intellectual debts to those who went before her sans Aristotle leaves you deeply unfamiliar with the many people and groups that went before her from whom she directly or indirectly borrowed most of her philosophical thoughts and concepts (albeit not all at once or from the same place) and unable to coherently explain why the woman who supposedly had minimal philosophical forbearers could claim Objectivism or at least philosophical strands leading to it can be credited with things such as the Renaissance, the American Revolution, and the birth of modern constitutionalism*, but that doesn’t mean those things are not real.
Objectivism will entail a person having to abandon the magical thinking solace of Eternal Life After Death, of the supernatural forgiveness and reparation of willful and intentional personal evil actions, but that’s a good thing. An Objectivist has to take this life very seriously at all times because it’s the only life there is, the only chance at achieving virtue, goodness, and happiness. An Objectivist must and should live his life, so to speak, as an Objectivist monk, with full dedication to this life, his only life.
How many can do it? How many can give up the emotional solace of the magical thinking of religion? I don’t know. Not everybody will, of course, to this day there are Americans who seriously believe in Tarot Cards and the Horoscope. But the tipping point for Objectivism to become the dominant philosophy of America and the West is I would say 15 to 20%. That’s do-able.
It doesn’t matter if the other 80% of Americans remain religious because religion will be profoundly influenced, tamed, and leashed by the rationality of Objectivism.
Part 1
“We are stuck at a disagreement at what selfishness and altruism really mean. ”
Fundamentally, the problem is that you will warp the definitions in order to try and jam the square peg of your obsessions and biases into the round hole of reality. Which would be one thing, but the fact that you also deny the ability of anybody else to try similar (up to the point of trying to argue that we must all define altruism and self-sacrifice through your own interpretation of Objectivism – rather than that of Rand or Peikoff, given how as I pointed out Rand could acknowledge selfish self-sacrifice) and will be manifestly dishonest about previous events does not help.
The staggering hypocrisy also makes your analysis less palatable. It is ironic how you accuse religious conservatives in the US and the rest of the West of piggypacking and essentially stolen valor on a mostly-mythical Neo-Aristotelian supposedly Greco-Roman Pagan Renaissance (a concept that falls apart when one bothers actually researching Aristotle or the Renaissance), but will happily try to conflate Objectivism with the American Revolution and its ideals, where Thomas Jefferson was regarded as shockingly transgressive because he was a Christian-influenced Deist.
You also seem to be constitutionally unwilling to acknowledge that selfishness and altruism are rarely present in unalloyed or “pure” form without one another.
Part 2
“You insist that altruism really means simply helping others in a voluntary and non-sacrificial way, that definition is wrong. ”
Remember what I said about you being dishonest, lying about what I’ve done, and mangling definitions?
This is one of those times.
Stop trying to put words in my mouth. You really suck at doing it.
No, altruism is not “simply helping others in a voluntary and non-sacrificial way.”
Altruism is the (mostly) disinterest concern for the wellbeing of others and willingness to sacrifice for said others. Which you seem to have difficulty grasping, especially in terms of what a sacrifice is, especially when it comes to opportunity costs. Especially given the massive amount of times you have tried to claim a sacrifice or contribution was not such.
Part 3
“that definition is wrong. So there is no way to move forward with this argument.”
What a fractally wrong statement. Especially coming from someone who blathered about the Dark Ages lasting for a thousand years in spite of that being objectively untrue.
Let’s dissect this bit by bit.
Firstly: This entire statement is predicated upon you trying to foist a false definition of altruism *that you formulated* as my own, and THEN asserting it is false.
Secondly: This is false on its premise. You can continue discussion even with people who are using objectively wrong definitions. As I point out when you were chronically unable to define when the “Christian Dark Ages” lasted for the longest time, while also ignoring not just the original reason the Dark Ages were called such or the entire Carolingian Renaissance, but when the “Great” Renaissance started in Tuscany.. I simply continue expounding my arguments and definitions over the course of the discussion regardless.
Thirdly: Your definition of altruism and “rational self-interest” are not only (fittingly enough) utterly self-serving, but are often inconsistent and in the case of the former provably wrong.
Part 4
“Ayn Rand has correctly and OBJECTIVELY identified what the “self” is”
Untrue. At best she accurately defined the personality and mental self, mostly by cribbing off of many, many thinkers in that regard that came before such as Descartes. But the self is far beyond the mind, as shown by psychological matters such as insanity, disassociate problems, and coma. Rand greatly undervalued the importance of the body and the mind’s dependence upon it, and fittingly enough had little in the way of regard for psychological research. Which is ironic given her grandiose claims about the mind.
But leaving aside all that, being able to identify the mental self in the mid 1900s is not exactly a revolutionary or paradigmatic shift.
“Rand greatly undervalued the importance of the body and the mind’s dependence upon it”
Ah no, that would be Judeo-Christianity, Islam, and other mystical religions but not Objectivism.
Part 5
“and therefore what selfishness really and rationally entails.”
As far as outlining what rationality entails, Rand was preceded and bested by multiple far better thinkers, who pointed out the often illogical, irrational, and self-serving pathologies in her personality and work. Especially the tendency to mutilate or discard evidence that did not fit her conclusions (see: Aristotle, Animals in the Hunt, overdependence on factually untrue allegorical references). Which wouldn’t be such a problem – we are all human and all have our foibles – were it not for the dogmatic insistence of herself and her disciples that she were truly objective and rational and acting beyond such things. Which is ironic given how this goes against the not-so-basic wisdom of the Socratic Paradox that Aristotle was well aware of.
As for her definition of selfishness, she further erred by failing to recognize the inherent issue with her definition. Selfishness is not purely concern with one’s own interests, but *concern with one’s own Perceived Interests.* Which is an important distinction tying in to the importance of the Subjective Revolution and ties into a crucial issue. The recognition that humans are fallible and that our knowledge is limited.
You’re totally misrepresenting Objectivism.
Part 6
The person who perceives that they will catch a deadly disease if they do not – Adrian Monk style- wipe down the windows of their house with windex every day is acting in a way that is both selfish and irrational. Irrational because we can both agree (or at least I would hope) that there is no such dire need for such a remedy or foundation for this belief, and selfish because they are acting in their perceived self-interest. Perceived because in reality, outside of perhaps some degree of psychological assurance (That is offset by how neurotic this behavior is), said person really does not really have any interest in this.
The person who believes (rightly or wrongly) that they will be the beneficiary of a will and they have reason to look forward to the inheritance has a rational self-interest in the (perceived) inheritance of the will. That doesn’t mean that they will violate the rights of the testator who drew up the will (while more than one person has done that, the majority of people with such beliefs are guilty of no such thing), it does underline their perception of their interests.
Part 7
By failing to account for the fundamentally subjective and perception based nature of how we interact with our self-interest, Rand and many of her successors left themselves open to special pleading. That one is failing to “RATIONALLY” consider one’s own self-interest (as if rationality were necessary for selfishness), or that one isn’t reasoning their self-interests CORRECTLY (which does not change the fact that they are attempting).
And it is made all the more jarring because there are many cases where Rand came painfully close to understanding this, such as the famous statement that “The evil of a robber does not lie in the fact that he pursues his own interests, but in what he regards as to his own interest; not in the fact that he pursues his values, but in what he chose to value.”
But apparently she did not full grasp the full implications of how people regard their interests, and what this meant for her philosophical system, ESPECIALLY for those who defined their own “moral code” far differently than you, Rand, or myself and who saw no such evil or negative consequences in pursuing their own perceived interests as vilely, ruthlessly, and immorally as possible, and who denied the right of others and sometimes even themselves to a moral existence.
But at least Rand could acknowledge the basic concept that people could be selfish in an evil manner and that selfishness was independent of moral judgement. You seem to struggle with that.
Part 9
* Which by the way is one reason for her myopic obsession with Aristotle, her twisting of his (DECIDEDLY non-Objectivist and anti-Selfish, even anti-commercial) philosophy, and her desire to credit every good thing in modern existence with his influence. Because if Aristotle is the only philosophical debt she will acknowledge and she wishes to position herself as successor to him, then it becomes necessary to reframe history to highlight his positive influence (real or imaginary) and downplay his negative influence (such as how he thoroughly mangled cosmology and physics for centuries).
The fact that doing so implicitly undermines her own explicit philosophy, discounting the value in the accomplishments (largely driven by rational self-interest) of millions of people, some famous but most very much not so (such as whoever invented windmills in medieval Flanders all those years ago) in favor of a comically bloated Great Man syndrome is something you ignore. But it’s also necessary because if Aristotle could be shown to be flawed, especially grievously flawed (as we now know he was and he’d have been happy to admit) and that he had to be corrected, it pointed out that the Great Guru could also be wrong and have to be corrected.
Part 10
The flaws of “Great Man” centric history and how they undervalued the contributions of many was pointed out quite explicitly by the likes of Smith, who pointed out that even if a Great Man could define the economy and outline how it produced (which was dubious at best and utterly unthinkable in economies the size there) it was reliant on the contributions of many to keep going.
But I digress.
Rational selfishness? Heavily foreshadowed and outlined by the likes of Smith, Ricardo, and the Subjectivist Revolution Thinkers in Economics. Ethical ideas of the Self? Go all the way back to before the Ancient Greeks and especially Descartes. Opposition to religion and “mysticism” (while often regularly dabbling in a myth of progress and the human mind that is every bit as dogmatic and irrational as religion)? Dante, Voltaire.. It is true that nobody quite put those different strands together the way she did (and often in a much diminished and inferior fashion), but they did not originate with her. Indeed, many of the things you hail as “new” in her thought were in fact so old they were either well established or even fighting rear guard actions (as the heirs of the Subjectivist Revolution were in the face of Keynes and other State Socialists).
Part 11
Ironically many of her most significant contributions in philosophical concepts were straw men, such as trying to claim that those who believe any action is justified if it is perceived in their own benefit are doing so because of “irrational” desires (rather than thoroughly rational but utterly immoral – at least from our perspective – actions).
Ironically, an actual strawman from thousands of years ago in the form of Aristophanes’s Phaedra. “We know the good, we apprehend it clearly.
But we can’t bring it to achievement.”
Which ironically is a good metaphor for not merely much in the way of human nature, but also malignant psychopaths and narcissists, those who when they do not have their own moral code very different from anything we would recognize as such, take pleasure in transgressing “the good” in the moral code of others because it is not good. Trying to insist that malignant egotism is just a product of the “altruistic” mindset is as self-defeating as it is wrong.
Part 12
“What Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo are to the Heliocentric Theory, Ayn Rand is to morality.”
Firstly: It’s ironic that you who tried to ape Rand and Peikoff in insisting the modern world’s good things all derive from Aristotle highlight the value of great thinkers who dismantled Aristotle’s astrophysics and cosmology (which had remained dominant and sometimes even unchallenged through the “Christian Dark Ages” that supposedly were created due to the lack of Aristotle).
Were you a more critical or rational thinker, this alone might lead you to consider that something with your concept of history and philosophy is deeply wrong.
Secondly: Given what the Brandens and Frank O’Connor went through, the world should dread a world where Ayn Rand is the Copernicus of Moral behavior. Especially since she epitomizes how one can creatively bend, twist, or even break one’s own ethical principles while justifying or glossing it over with verbiage.
Fortunately, she is not. Hers was not an ethical revolution.
Part 13
“The Sun doesn’t revolve around the Earth, but the opposite. ”
Akshually that’s only MOSTLY true. The wonders of understanding gravity and physics now let us know that the Sun does revolve around the Earth…and every other physical body in the Solar System (and some beyond). It’s just that the effects of those is almost minutely small compared to the gravitational pull of the Sun and are nowhere near as important as the rotation around the Sun.
” Selflessness and self-sacrifice are not virtues but vices, ”
Untrue, they can be both.
“selfishness is not evil but the fountainhead of the good.”
Ah yes, once again with your utterly simplistic and biased stances.
The fact is that if Selfishness is “the fountainhead of the good” (your view) or a foundainhead of much that is good, it is *ALSO* UNDENIABLY THE FOUNTAINHEAD OF MUCH THAT IS BAD. Something that Rand Herself came close to acknowledging,.
Again:
“There is a fundamental moral difference between a man who sees his self-interest in production and a man who sees it in robbery. The evil of a robber does not lie in the fact that he pursues his own interests, but in what he regards as to his own interest; not in the fact that he pursues his values, but in what he chose to value; not in the fact that he wants to live, but in the fact that he wants to live on a subhuman level.”
Part 13
Part 13
“The Sun doesn’t revolve around the Earth, but the opposite. ”
Akshually that’s only MOSTLY true. The wonders of understanding gravity and physics now let us know that the Sun does revolve around the Earth…and every other physical body in the Solar System (and some beyond). It’s just that the effects of those is almost minutely small compared to the gravitational pull of the Sun and are nowhere near as important as the rotation around the Sun.
” Selflessness and self-sacrifice are not virtues but vices, ”
Untrue, they can be both.
“selfishness is not evil but the fountainhead of the good.”
Ah yes, once again with your utterly simplistic and false claims.
The fact is that if Selfishness is “the fountainhead of the good” (your view) or a foundainhead of much that is good, it is *ALSO* UNDENIABLY THE FOUNTAINHEAD OF MUCH THAT IS BAD. Something that Rand Herself came close to acknowledging, again, regarding the robber who sees robbery as in their own self-interest. But she tried to square the circle by arguing that the Robber is not acting as a fundamentally “rational” actor but was acting irrationally (as if rationality or irrationality were On or Off Switches and one was 100% of one thing or 100% of the other).
Part 14
“It is what it is.”
You don’t want to know that “it is what it is.”
“It took the Cult of Jesus 400 years to become Christianity and become the dominant philosophy of the West.”
This is laughably wrong by any stretch of the imagination.
Jesus was killed (or if you want to argue that he somehow was not a historical figure, “supposed to have been killed”) sometime in the 30s AD/CE. The New Testamen books began being written (if not in their coherent form) shortly thereafter, within a matter of decades, and spread further. By the time of the start of the 300s Diolcetian was the only one of the Tetrarchs to be staunchly opposed to Christianity (with Constantine, Maxentius, and Licinius all competing to curry the favor of the increasingly numerous and powerful Christian congregations) and shortly after the Edict of Milan in 313 Christianity became the dominant philosophy of the Western World.
Which is why Emperor Flavius C. Julianus is known as *Julian the Apostate* in spite of dying in 363 AD/CE (because he was brought up as a Christian but rejected it in favor of an odd Quasi- Monotheistic Neo-Platonic take on the Capitoline Pantheon). The latest possible date to argue that Christianity was not recognizable in the shape it is today was the codification of the Chalcedonic Creed in 451 AD/CE.
So simply put, your time frame is off by a century. If not two
Part 15
But it’s easy to understand why you are peddling this.
Firstly: it fits with your counter-historical bias that Christianity caused the Dark Ages. Which is why you want to make it closer to the middle and end of the 400s rather than the 200s and 300s (when it actually came to dominate) because you are simply not prepared to explain the Roman revival and Eastern Roman survival.
Secondly: it helps ignore the truly EXPLOSIVE growth of the Christian Churches and Congregations starting mere decades after Christ’s death, because it feeds in to your belief that Randian Objectivism will be the new paradigm shift that Abrahamic religion was and you one of its Apostles or at least a Church Father. When in reality Randian Objectivism has seen no such explosive growth or widespread influence, in part because it has gotten needled by those that took a look at it.
“Objectivism is only 60 years old”
By which point the majority of the canonical New Testament as well as countless bits of trash like the Gnostic Scriptures were already written and the first catacomb churches were already established in Rome, with a booming congregations. The chronology doesn’t fit.
Part 16
But there is something remarkable about you making the tacit admission that Objectivism is fundamentally a faith for you, and you feel compelled to make the comparisons, however wrong they are.
“and what’s more it is up against 5,000 or more millennia of the mystical unreason of altruism-collectivism.”
Millenia = 1,000 years.
5,000 Millenia = 5,000,000
Humans almost certainly haven’t been around that long.
Indeed, the first Australopithecine finds date back about 4,500,000 years.
“Not just as manifested in Judaism and Christianity but in all religions and pseudo-secular belief-systems like Marxism and Nazism.”
See above.
Part 16
“Objectivism will entail a person having to abandon the magical thinking solace of Eternal Life After Death, of the supernatural forgiveness and reparation of willful and intentional personal evil actions, but that’s a good thing. ”
Ok, how and why.
“An Objectivist has to take this life very seriously at all times because it’s the only life there is, the only chance at achieving virtue, goodness, and happiness. An Objectivist must and should live his life, so to speak, as an Objectivist monk, with full dedication to this life, his only life.”
This would be more convincing had you not needled people obsessively for being supposedly unwilling to enjoy life due to guilt, altruistic demands, and so forth. And of course, it has its curious echoes in freaking Khomeni talking about how Islam is a very serious religion and how there are no jokes in Islam. because “There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.””
I will refrain from making the obvious satirical word substitution gag for now.
Also, you’re kind of ignoring the importance of “this life” and its role as a chance to win or lose virtue or goodliness in Christian theology, since it differs quite sharply from Judaism in its conception of Sheol and in the idea of worldly reincarnations.
Part 17
“How many can do it? How many can give up the emotional solace of the magical thinking of religion? I don’t know. Not everybody will,”
The better question is: why. You are advocating people live as Objectivist Monks on behalf of the philosophical system of a guru that is not merely magical thinking or dependent on faith, but in many cases is self-evidently and objectively false (such as the obsession with mangling Aristotle and denying most of Rand’s philosophical influences).
Part 18
“of course, to this day there are Americans who seriously believe in Tarot Cards and the Horoscope.”
Indeed. But to believe that the Renaissance emerged because Thomas Aquinas started the Renaissance by translating Aristotle into Latin is if anything even more irrational. There is certainly nowhere near as much evidence definitively disproving Tarot Cards and the Horoscope as there is for taking a rudimentary gander at Greek learning in the early medieval era and the first two generations of the Tuscan Renaissance.
” But the tipping point for Objectivism to become the dominant philosophy of America and the West is I would say 15 to 20%. That’s do-able.
It doesn’t matter if the other 80% of Americans remain religious because religion will be profoundly influenced, tamed, and leashed by the rationality of Objectivism..”
You’re going to have to work overtime to do it. Christianity obtained that proportion in the population of the Roman Empire somewhere within a century or two of its emergence after the crucifixion of Christ.
Your time frame is late.
“You’re totally misrepresenting Objectivism.”
Then prove it.
I’m certainly misrepresenting it much less totally than you misrepresent Christianity, Aristotle, History, and a host of other things.
“Ah no, that would be Judeo-Christianity, Islam, and other mystical religions but not Objectivism.”
In other words: “NO U.”
Which collapses as soon as you bother studying Rand’s definition of the self and how it was primarily if not entirely mental. Which of course ignores the vehicle for the individual’s mental mind.
This was a folly that for all of their many flaws, most religions rejected and it was one of the defining conflicts between what would become “mainline” Christianity and the Manicheans, who held that all material life is evil and thus the world is pure evil while only the spiritual is good.
But I imagine there are better than even odds of you presenting this as a time where you “defeated” me in rational debate, much like you lied about being utterly defeated re: Aquinas, Aristotle, the Dark Ages, and the Renaissance.
Our government has already caved to china, that part of the war is over.
China is now in the process of figuring out what to do with its captives, US citizens.
Biological death or work camps? Will it be cremation/pelletized fertilizer? Or
aquamation/liquid fertilizer?
Good analysis, thanks! Several points I wanted to comment on. The discussion of international law was excellent. Then there is Friedman 🙂
When I was in elementary school in the 1950s, I remember doing the exercise of hiding under the desk. We had another exercise, where the whole class was lined up, then marched to a nearby tunnel for “shelter”. Not that that would have saved us from radiation for long. For a long time my belief was that we were too unimportant for the Soviets to bomb us. Then the satellite pictures from the USSR became available. They had my whole little “island” (now with filled areas so trains could come in) photographed and mapped and I believe targeted with several nukes. It makes sense to me now, the west coast terminus of the USA rail system, with several oil refineries and the largest WW2 shipyard would definitely have been a prime target 🙂
The locals in my new area (about 100 miles from San Francisco) are currently panicked about a nuclear attack from Russia over the Ukraine war. I was asked whether I would prefer to die quickly or slowly if the attack came. I said “quickly”, as a slow death from radiation sickness would be horrible 🙂
It would have been catastrophic, though post Cold War research questions how many Soviet nukes would have actually launched and hit their targets. Which is another reason why the USSR was unwilling to risk a conflict. Especially one that couldn’t be won on manpower.
The Russians don’t know how to win wars except by throwing bodies at them.
That’s what we see in Ukraine now.
The US never had an No First Use policy. Biden promised one and then didn’t commit to it.
Trump’s Nuclear Posture Review policy was much more aggressive than Biden’s.
Not even Obama or Carter were willing to commit to anything as stupid as unilaterally disarm our posture.
And if Russia or China thought they could strike first with no response, they would have done it already.
You want evil incarnate?
China and Russia murdered millions of their own people. The same monsters who used famine to starve their own people to death would kill millions of foreigners without thinking twice.
Brilliant brilliant just brilliant analysis. , you and Gorden Chang are on top of my list when it comes to China policy with the US. China just like rust they never sleep.
Thank you, that’s the best possible company to be in.
Is there anything about which our elites aren’t delusional? FWIW, my take on the reason Biden concealed and didn’t react against the Chinese balloon until it completed its mission is to not imperil the upcoming Blinken visit to China. The Chinese commit a warlike act against us and the Biden maladministration’s concern is not jeopardizing another opportunity to talk with, and get lectured by, the Chinese. We are lost.
That’s true. Even the Biden administration has all but admitted that it kept things secret to protect Blinken’s trip.
Mr. Greenfield’s writing marries deep understanding and powerful, trenchant wording. This article explodes off the page.
International law abiders are progressive enemies of national sovereignty. The Chinese balloon is a litmus test between globalists (violating international law) and nationalists (violating our territory). Nationalists (Westernkind) see this as the land of our ancestors / heritage. They bequeathed this beautiful land, culture and way of life to us. Those who will not defend this heritage to the last drop of blood are unworthy of that heritage no matter race, creed or national origin. Those who will not sacrifice to defend our country do not belong here.
We are overrun with economic migrants who hate us, our culture and even our nation. They choose us only because they can immigrate here to plunder us with the help of our traitorous government. I am unwilling to die for the country they are creating by replacing and diminishing us, and they are not willing to die for our country and heritage.
We need a miracle only God can give. This nation was established as a Christian nation. God spoke to Israel when He said, “and if My people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, forgive their sin, and heal their land.” 2 Chronicles 14 . The principle given to Israel in Solomon’s magnificent prayer is exactly the same for Christians in their nations.
Thank you. International law displaces nationhood and the rights of the people of those nations. Like all leftist programs, they remove popular sovereignity and replace it with protectorates for the good of the people.
“This nation was established as a Christian nation.”
So was every other country in the Americas, so how come those countries didn’t become as rich, powerful, and free as the USA?
Those countries were not really Christian? Real Christianity really only existed from 1776 to 1950 in the USA?
Part 1
“So was every other country in the Americas, ”
Mostly true, though Francia’s Paraguay is probably the exception.
“so how come those countries didn’t become as rich, powerful, and free as the USA?”
Part of it was due to dumb luck. Most of the aforementioned countries were colonized by Spain and Portugal, absolute monarchies that tried to micromanage their colonies from the Peninsula and which had taken pains to cement state control over religion (people tend to ignore the fact that the Spanish Inquisition was primarily set up by the Spanish Crown and not the Papacy, in contrast to most equally sordid inquisitions, and that Spain and Portugal waged a strange joint war against the Jesuits to subjugate the Guarani). So when the system “back home” broke down under the strain of the French occupation during the Napoleonic Wars there was really nothing like the kind of self-sufficient communities or civic life we saw emerge elsewhere like in the Thirteen Colonies and Canada, just a vicious battle for control over the remnants of imperial power.
Part 2
Though it is worth noting that many other American nations (ESPECIALLY Brazil) were making solid headway in the 19th century under decently enlightened rulers before the Long Recession of the 19th century and instability from fighting each other led to a rise in military rule. In particular that’s why Brazil
Ironically the former Caribbean slaveocracies outside of Haiti have generally preformed better since Haiti terrified everybody and British and later American enforced abolition (and the existing cultural mixing) helped smooth over a lot.
“Those countries were not really Christian? Real Christianity really only existed from 1776 to 1950 in the USA?
By and large they were. But in worldly matters a lot matters. Was the rather democratic Empire of Brazil less “really Christian” in 1888 than the assorted military dictatorships starting in 1889?
But as I’m sure we’d both agree, a lot of things can’t be fixed by prayer or belief alone. And I’ll also note that the cult of the Cacique and the Great Man were quite important in explaining why so many countries went very, very wrong. Especially when they were used as crude substitutes for actual institutions.
“Those who will not sacrifice to defend our country do not belong here.”
That’s precisely the moral code of the Nazis and the Soviets – self-sacrifice for the Aryan Race and the Fuhrer in Germany and self-sacrifice for the proletariat in Russia. Those that would not sacrifice themselves for the Almighty State were sacrificed and those that would were sacrificed too. WW2 Germany was an orgy of sacrifice and self-sacrifice. No different in essence from the Aztecs and the Incas.
“During the Hitler years—in order to finance the party’s programs, including the war expenditures—every social group in Germany was mercilessly exploited and drained. White-collar salaries and the earnings of small businessmen were deliberately held down by government controls, freezes, taxes. Big business was bled by taxes and “special contributions” of every kind, and strangled by the bureaucracy . . . . At the same time the income of the farmers was held down, and there was a desperate flight to the cities—where the middle class, especially the small tradesmen, were soon in desperate straits, and where the workers were forced to labor at low wages for increasingly longer hours (up to 60 or more per week)….
But the Nazis defended their policies, and the country did not rebel; it accepted the Nazi argument. Selfish individuals may be unhappy, the Nazis said, but what we have established in Germany is the ideal system, socialism. In its Nazi usage this term is not restricted to a theory of economics; it is to be understood in a fundamental sense. “Socialism” for the Nazis denotes the principle of collectivism as such and its corollary, statism—in every field of human action, including but not limited to economics.
“To be a socialist,” says Goebbels, “is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole.”
By this definition, the Nazis practiced what they preached. They practiced it at home and then abroad. No one can claim that they did not sacrifice enough individuals.” – Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels: The End Of Freedom In America”
Part 3
““During the Hitler years—in order to finance the party’s programs, including the war expenditures—every social group in Germany was mercilessly exploited and drained. White-collar salaries and the earnings of small businessmen were deliberately held down by government controls, freezes, taxes. Big business was bled by taxes and “special contributions” of every kind, and strangled by the bureaucracy . . . . At the same time the income of the farmers was held down, and there was a desperate flight to the cities—where the middle class, especially the small tradesmen, were soon in desperate straits, and where the workers were forced to labor at low wages for increasingly longer hours (up to 60 or more per week)….
The problem is that had less to do with the war itself in the NSDAP and more to do with the NSDAP’s policies (which sadly were all too often admired even in the relatively freer countries like FDR’s US and the UK). Which is why the shift to a collectivized state run economy happened well before the war broke out in the Reich.
Part 4
In any case, there’s not much debate that societies and people have to suffer during war. This was all too true of the Western Antiquity societies your idols laud in Athens and Rome, but those don’t trigger the same scare chords as “Literally Shicklegruber and Stalin.” And it conveniently allows you to dance around Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle’s writings on soldiering, war, and contributions to state defense.
Also while most would not argue the Nazis did not sacrifice enough people, it doesn’t take much of a surprise to argue that the French Republic, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands did not sacrifice enough to defend their countries and people from the Nazis, and wound up sacrificing far more through Nazi repression or local collaboration with it.
Part 1
“That’s precisely the moral code of the Nazis and the Soviets – self-sacrifice for the Aryan Race and the Fuhrer in Germany and self-sacrifice for the proletariat in Russia. ”
It’s precisely the moral code of most societies, including those you and your idols laud. You “conveniently” ignore the fact that Aristotle lauded his mentor Socrates for many things, including being a veteran soldier in the Athenian Citizen Army (and one that fought in three battles no less). It’s also a useful limit on altruistic behavior by the society, because it demands people actually put skin in the game. This is something that was gone over extensively in philosophical debates, such as the Putney Debates.
But pointing out that it’s the moral code of Ancient Athens, the Roman Republic, the American Revolution, and so forth doesn’t quite *land* with the same force, does it? Amazing how “rational self interest” and Objectivism in practice often wind up in the same philosophical place as the straw men Looters of Atlas Shrugged do. That they are entitled to the protection and possibilities of society but should not be asked to sacrifice for it.
(Let alone the issue of when service isn’t sacrifice, as Rand tried to argue in her speech to the military cadets).
Part 2
“Those that would not sacrifice themselves for the Almighty State were sacrificed and those that would were sacrificed too. WW2 Germany was an orgy of sacrifice and self-sacrifice. No different in essence from the Aztecs and the Incas.”
Most societies in war are an orgy of sacrifice and self-sacrifice. It’s kind of the nature of a battle for survival. And also it wasn’t just the totalitarian states like WW2 Germany and the Soviets that were orgies of sacrifice and self-sacrifice but also the US, UK, and so forth.
As well as hosts of little communities disconnected to one degree or another from the wider state but which had to face grim calculations of what to do when a ruthless army was entering its district. I have many, MANY disagreements with Orwell (being the socialist collectivist he was) but he was quite acid at how dependent people are on a provided defense. Which is indeed one of the most terrifying powers of the state, and which abuse helped cause it.
Start by pulling out of the United Nations and moving the whole lot to Moscow without America to finance their crimes
or better yet Somalia
We’re losing because we have no serious plan to win and that’s because we don’t really believe that there will be a war and so we don’t need to.
WE’RE LOSING BECAUSE OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S MAKE CHINA GREATER DOCTRINE AND SUCK THE BRIBES.
The Biden family, Nancy Pelosi’s son, and Sen Dianne Feinstein has long served the interests of Red China. Their greed is so that they will never stop.
We must ban the Democrat Party!
THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY
American people deserve to know what China was up to with Joe Biden, especially when Beijing had already shelled out millions of dollars to Biden family members — including millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on this issue. We need a special counsel now.
TOM FITTON – JUDICIAL WATCH
Breitbart Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris’s investigative work at the New York Post on the Hunter Biden “laptop from
hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that Joe Biden was
intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing to even have a 10 percent stake in a company the
scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
IN REALITY ‘GLOBALISM’ IS A POLITICAL PARTY THAT ONLY SERVES BANKSTERS, BILLIONAIRES FOR OPEN BORDERS AND DICTATORS. THE REST OF US PAY THE ULTIMATE PRICE FOR THEIR BOTTOMLESS GREED
Patriotism vs. Globalism in 2020: A Country Is at Stake
BY VERONIKA KYRLENDO
For the global majority, globalization has been a whole different story. Income inequality rose markedly both within and among countries. In the United States, despite a great increase in productivity thanks to new technologies, inequality rose. Underemployment, job insecurity, benefit loss — all increased.
The Democrats use globalism as an excuse or camouflage for their selfish power struggles. They do not care about anything they claim to care about. The altruistic claim simply motivates others to vote for them, but they betray all their promises to help others and only help themselves. Like the saying goes, anyone who loves children and ice cream can’t be all bad. But actually, they can. Being aged and partly senile does not make Joe any less dangerous or selfish, it just hides his threat behind his seeming weakness. Globalists want to share what less rich people have, not what they themselves have. So their promises are already lies. People who support the Democrats seem to automatically adopt and parrot whatever ridiculous propaganda the Democrat elites proclaim. Transgenderism, insurrection racism Islamophobia, pro choice. Whatever Chuck and Nancy say, average Democrats immediately jump on the bandwagon and shout out the slogans they hear from the far leftists in power.
Western Globalism is anti-national sovereignty, Open borders—“can’t we all just get along” with only a few really rich greedy people and corporations in dictatorial control in order to annihilate white supremacist Western Civilization to achieve “equity” to assuage themselves of white privilege guilt. It’s Open Borders Communism to ostensibly “save the planet.” Basic goal is democide by subversive methods of depopulation (bioweapons, mRNA “vaccine”), impoverishment, starvation and slavery. Nothing to do with any alleged “crisis” of climate change due to CO2..
CCP is Imperialistic similar to Nazi Germany, USSR and Japan of WWII. It spreads Chinese Communism globally too by infiltration of sovereign nations from within which is why the Western Commies are wannabee Chicoms. Westerners come in second place to CCP power based on Darwinian theory of survival of the fittest— most militarized and most most aggressive.
Western Leftist Commie/Fascist Globalists are the de facto 5th Column for the CCP.
Seymour Hersh is a notorious fraud. He’s been peddling fake news for decades.
Some people still remember when he was pushing the fake JFK – Monroe papers back in the 90s.
Only folks with zero integrity and credibility cite Hersh.
Here’s Lee Smith on Hersh’s latest nonsense
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/sy-hersh-swings-big-misses-lee-smith
The question of what happened to your pipeline must be really urgent to you, but I don’t really care about such globalist obsessions.
I’m much more interested in China stealing American technology than some Russian pipeline.
Just watched a 16min video of Klaus Schwab speaking at the world leader Summit. http//youtu.be/ cDybeNbFJXE
He who’s in control of the technology, controls the world.
Technology is the result and product of freedom and liberty. Serfs and slaves don’t produce much advanced technology. So if Schwab, Soros, Gates, and others like them think they can have the cake produced by free minds and eat it too, they in for a nasty surprise of economic and technological collapse.
Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” got the ending wrong. Ayn Rand in “Anthem” got the ending right, totalitarianism leads to a Dark Age, like the Christian or Muslim Dark Age. The Christian and Muslim medievals knew what they were doing.
We could simply suspend China’s permanent MFN status and that would clip their wings but good. This would enable us to continue benefitting from global free trade with countries that play by the rules.
That would be a good idea.
Clinton(Bill)sold us out then Obama now Biden are you seeing pattern here?
There is simply no way for the USA to opt out of “globalism,” since “globalism” is just another work for trade and commerce among disparate nations. The standard of living in the USA in the 1950’s and 1960’s was based on globalism. We liked it then because the USA was the only major industrial power remaining after WWII.