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The Geopolitics of it all

  • Thread starter Thread starter QV
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First of all, sorry for all the typos. I was typing the above piece in bright sunlight and could hardly see the white on green type. It's a miracle any of it made it into the post.

While histrionics beget histrionics effects are in evidence....
Paywalls. Which is the second reason why I don't read the Telegraph.
Let's look forward to the end of the 'Bonsai Armies' ;)
The UK spent 2.07% of GDP or $US68 Billion and yet there has been a litany coming out of various sectors there that their forces are incapable of providing a credible defence. Most recently one of its two aircraft carriers went Tango Uniform, a not uncommon situation for them. They're short of people (even while reducing numbers) and new equipment is well behind schedule.

2% is not a panacea.

I think Russia/Putin felt that if only took small slices at a time, Europe would not act or coordinate, combined with the trade and gas supplies, he likley felt that he had them right where he wanted them. It seems that was only partly true
That's my view as well. He's been a gatherer of low-hanging fruit presenting himself as a saviour of ethnic-Russians living in former Warsaw Pact countries (notwithstanding that they were in the role of occupiers there since WW2) and the builder of buffer states between poor Russia and the manic NATO states. In fact his buffer states become occupied territories.

IMHO, NATOs problem is personnel costs. Industrialized countries with a social structure (and the US has one regardless of how weak) cannot build volunteer armies at wage parity with the public and private sector. It eats up entirely too much of the funds available, limits manpower and plays havoc with both capital equipment acquisition and O&M funding.

2% is only part of what is needed. There is a desperate need for the West to return to conscription and/or a massive shift to the use of reserve forces. Many European countries have the option for the former. The US already makes massive use of the latter. The math for volunteer, full-time armies doesn't work under the situation that NATO is once again facing. We need more trained people, more properly maintained equipment, a functioning defence industry, and a forward defence structure on NATO's borders (including Canada's skies and maritime shores). The measure should be defence outputs and not defence inputs - Canadians and Europeans are experts in how to waste defence inputs on nothing meaningful.

🍻
 
Thought -

Because those 90 million fighting age European males will be fighting in their own back yards then they can operate effectively with, using Canadian terms, a Class A/B army. The Finnish model if you like and one that has become popular again since the Russians invaded Ukraine.

The Euros can pay a Class C army for expeditionary tasks if they so choose. Regs are staff and QRFs.

North America's commitment to Europe demands a Class C / Reg response.

EU GDP 19.35 Trillion
US GDP 23.32 Trillion

The EU should be able to deter Vlad on their own.
 
Mexico as a cautionary tale for Western liberalism?

Liberalism has a complex history in Mexico. After Spain lost control of its colonies early in the 19th century, liberals seeking a decentralized and republican form of government fought constant military and political battles against throne-and-altar conservatives. After defeating a French-backed army in 1867, the liberals put in place significant reforms, such as the separation of church and state, religious toleration, and the removal of the legal and corporate privileges of the army and the Indian communities. The 1857 Constitution became a symbol of liberal reform, and liberal political success.




That first blush of liberalism was shut down by the intervention of Napoleon III and was a contributor to the Franco-British animosity post-Crimea.

Mexican conservatives sought the aid of French emperor Napoleon III. With the United States embroiled in its Civil War (1861–65) against secessionist southern states, its focus was on domestic turmoil rather than exerting its power against the intervention of the French in violation of the Monroe Doctrine. A Mexican monarchy backed by France would, in Napoleon III's estimation, lead to the exertion of French power in Mexico and Latin America.[15]

After the administration of Mexican president Benito Juárez placed a moratorium on foreign debt payments in 1861, France, the United Kingdom, and Spain agreed to the Convention of London, a joint effort to ensure that debt repayments from Mexico would be forthcoming. On 8 December 1861, the three navies disembarked their troops at the port city of Veracruz, on the Gulf of Mexico. When it became clear to the British that France's aim was to seize Mexico, the United Kingdom separately negotiated an agreement with Mexico to settle the debt issues and withdrew from the country. Spain subsequently left as well. The resulting French invasion established the Second Mexican Empire (1864–1867). France, Britain, Belgium, Austria, and Spain recognized the political legitimacy of the newly created monarchy, but the United States refused to do so, since it was a violation of the Monroe Doctrine, prohibitiing European powers' interference in the Americas.[16]
 

History is Multipolar

Whether called the “End of History,” the “rules-based-international order,” or even “Pax Americana,” the general order backstopped by American power after the Soviet collapse has been seen by several generations of American leaders as a final development of human political structure. Author Charles Krauthammer was more perceptive when he called this era the “Unipolar Moment.” While he acknowledged the moment could last decades, he also recognized there would have to be some end date on the order, even if that was at some point in the distant future, obscured by the fog of time.

The fog is now clearing and that point is now coming closer.

Resultantly, the U.S. needs a new strategy to erect a new global order that will be, by nature, multipolar. Given that this is the default situation of international relations throughout the majority of history, this should not be surprising. Even when empires bestrode various regions, there was never a global hegemonic power. Not even Rome’s power was able to dominate Imperial China or vice versa, much less any groupings in the Americas.

The U.S. grand strategy of pursuing a truly global “rules-based” liberal order was only possible in a time where most economic and military power was concentrated in its hands after the near collective suicide of much of the rest of the world during the two cataclysmic world wars and after the other main contender for that role, the Soviet Union, collapsed. The goal across both neoliberal and neoconservative dominated administrations in the first decade of the post-Cold War era was clearly to maintain the U.S. atop the global power hierarchy as a sort of quasi-“GloboCop” enforcing western-oriented values and legal notions. From an American perspective, even if sometimes used as a rhetorical fig leaf, these values were perceived as universal and embraced the spirit of isonomia.

Unfortunately, as time has moved along, the U.S. strategic class has increasingly risked overstretch while exacerbating tensions among other, now rising, powers with alternative views of what global, or at least their regional, order should look like. Indeed, it has proven that the U.S. desire to impose its unique form of perceived universal values is not shared by many other regional powers.

The four-year term of President Donald Trump shook up this ossified status quo and began to change this bi-partisan direction to one more in line with realism and the search for a balance of power. But it was not long enough to firmly implant a new direction for U.S. grand strategy. The post-Cold War status quo essentially has been restored by the current Biden Administration.

Yet, even as U.S. strategy returns to its embrace of the ultimately ephemeral, universal “rules-based order,” numerous contradictory trends are emerging, interacting with each other, and refracting in unpredictable ways. This is leading to a historical discontinuity as each trend undermines the pillars of long-standing post-Cold War U.S. strategy. Some trends reinforce international isonomia as newly emerging powers are able to exert power in ways previously unavailable to them. Other trends reinforce the more anarchical Hobbesian state of nature as technology empowers dictatorships, non-state actors, or even individual zealots or nihilists with various levels of devastation possible more quickly than in any previous historical epoch.

Thus, it has become critical for current and aspiring strategists in the U.S. to recognize and accept that in this new era, unparalleled U.S. dominance can no longer be expected and that a ceaseless pursuit of it will only lead to the further breakdown of any semblance of order. This would lead to the ever-present possibility of catastrophe as well as undermining the possibility of isonomic societies to flourish amidst the dangers of technologically charged global chaos.

 
Much of a sameness with Zeihan's analysis of China's situation. Dire.

I find this the most interesting bit.

What a muddle the world economy has created for itself.

Burns had it better but I chuckle for all of those Masters of the Universe that believed they were in control.

The best laid schemes gang aft agley.

Laisser faire capitalism is.


Xi Jinping will make the West pay for China’s economic collapse​

It used to be said that when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold. The same might now be true of Beijing
JEREMY WARNER14 February 2024 • 6:00am
Jeremy Warner



China’s economic woes will not derail Xi’s geopolitical ambitions CREDIT: CARLOS BARRIA/AFP
China’s economy is imploding, prompting much schadenfreude from Western commentators delighted by the turn of events. The wait for today’s denouement has been a long one.
For decades, China defied the laws of gravity, confounding all predictions of imminent collapse. The confusion of democracy, it seemed, was no match as a form of economic governance for the planned certainty of authoritarianism.
Yet driven by a devastating combination of structural and cyclical faultlines, disaster seems finally to have struck. Serves them right, and proof positive that autocratic regimes are always destined to fail, is the general tone of the commentary.
It’s only natural to gloat after all the years of being lectured on the decadence of our own Western decline, which by the way, we hardly need reminding of.
Yet we should be careful what we wish for. China’s problems could very soon become our own.
For more than a century now, the old saw that “when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold” has been a remarkably accurate guide to what’s about to unfold elsewhere.
What happens in the US inevitably washes up on Europe’s shores six months to a year later, and sometimes, as occurred with the financial crisis, almost immediately.
In recent years, however, the US has been joined on the world stage by another 10-ton gorilla, throwing everything out of kilter. The way things are going, we should perhaps be thinking more in terms of “when China sneezes….”
It has long been obvious that China has entered a period of much slower growth. Chinese statisticians and party apparatchiks have worked tirelessly to disprove this reality, but even among the regime’s most supportive Weibo cheerleaders, it must by now be impossible to ignore the evidence of their eyes.

In part, it’s just simple mathematics. The larger an economy gets, the more difficult it becomes to sustain past levels of growth.
The comedown is nonetheless proving politically punishing for a regime which has for decades thrived on the apparent development miracle it has engineered. The promise of ever-growing prosperity is the glue that keeps Xi Jinping in power. Worryingly – and it happens to all totalitarian leaders – he must now find other, less benign, pursuits to unite the nation.
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China’s economic travails already find their expression in rising geopolitical tensions, tit-for-tat protectionism and the advent of a new cold war.
The other likely consequence is that China will soon be directly exporting its economic ills to us here in the West.
There’s a parallel here with Covid, which relied on international connectivity to transmogrify from an apparent outbreak of influenza in Wuhan into a hugely destructive, global pandemic.
Similarly, China’s economic implosion threatens a worldwide contagion of deflationary forces, spread from one country to the next via the transmission mechanism of global trade and finance.
For decades, China has remained largely immune to the ups and downs of the business cycle, with a rate of growth that has left Western economies standing.
In the 40 years up until the pandemic, China’s rate of growth was around three times faster than that of the US, enabling a breathtaking process of economic catchup.
When America and Europe caught pneumonia during the banking crisis of 2008-10, China sailed on regardless, apparently oblivious to the Western collapse.
“You were my teacher,” Wang Qishan told his then opposite number in the US, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. “But look at your system, Hank. We’re not sure we should be learning from you anymore.”
China’s advance was tolerated because it was thought that allowing China access to Western markets on equal terms would be as beneficial to us as it was to them, and in time would open the doors to China’s eventual democratisation.

The election of Donald Trump as US president ended an era of tolerance of China CREDIT: Carlo Allegri/REUTERS
It was all part and parcel of the “end of history” delusion, with Western mores and values emerging as the final winner.
All this came to an abrupt end with the election of Donald Trump as US president in 2016, determined to stamp out what he saw, with justification, as unfair Chinese competition.
In his mind, China had at America’s expense stolen, copied and subsidised its way to a position where it had become a direct threat to US geopolitical and economic hegemony.
Yet China’s current slowdown has very little to do with the souring of relations that followed Trump’s election. Far from it, China’s exports both to the US and Europe have continued to flourish regardless.
Neither Trump’s trade war with China, nor its effective continuation under his successor, Joe Biden, have had much effect on the overall level of Chinese exports to the US.
Nor has the wider breakdown in relations prompted by China’s complicity in the pandemic, the crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, and President Xi’s continued support for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
With a few exceptions, notably cutting-edge technology, business has continued as usual. The West can therefore not in any way be blamed for China’s present predicament, which is virtually all homemade. China’s carefully curated reputation for excellence in economic management has overnight been transformed into a picture of incompetently pursued make-believe.
How else to describe the so-called “three Ds” – debt, deflation and demographics – which have ruinously combined with a cyclical collapse in the property market and the related after-effects of Xi’s disastrous zero-Covid policy to produce a perfect storm of economic negatives?
China's price plunge
Line chart with 13 data points.
Annual Consumer Prices Index
View as data table, China's price plunge
The chart has 1 X axis displaying Time. Data ranges from 2023-01-01 00:00:00 to 2024-01-01 00:00:00.
The chart has 1 Y axis displaying %. Data ranges from -0.8 to 2.1.
Chart annotations summary








CHINA'S PRICE PLUNGE

Annual Consumer Prices Index
%
End of interactive chart.
Not that the now all-too-obvious recession will be acknowledged in the official data, which will miraculously continue to conform with the government’s 5pc growth target.
But everyone knows the truth; the big end has gone on China’s growth engine – a largely unrestrained property market recklessly and lavishly fed by state-sponsored credit expansion.
If the effects could be confined to China itself, this wouldn’t from a Western perspective matter very much and might even be regarded as positively welcome if it helped to disarm Chinese expansionism.
Unfortunately, neither is true: China’s economic woes will not be confined to its own shores and nor will it derail Xi’s geopolitical ambitions, which may be further emboldened by the need to defuse internal unrest with the hate plank of a foreign enemy.
As for exporting China’s economic ills, this will come naturally through the deflationary forces that years of over-expansion have unleashed.
Consumer prices in China are already falling, and so are export prices as Chinese producers seek to dump great swathes of excess capacity on Western markets.
Western economies may be powerless against the deluge, given how dependent they have become on Chinese supply chains.
The inflationary problem that China sparked coming out of the pandemic, when it remained substantially closed for business even as Western demand came surging back, has reversed. Falling demand in China now threatens the West with an equally destabilising, deflationary doom-loop.
What a muddle the world economy has created for itself.
 
I wonder how much of the US "production figures" is Canadian oil sent to the US and then reexported at a higher price?
None.

Production is counted as barrels pumped from the ground, not what is imported/re-exported.

Not saying that some enterprising refinery isn’t importing “inexpensive” Canadian crude and then making the spread on re-exporting, but it probably isn’t alot. There isn’t one “crude oil”. The quality varies from region to region and one cannot pretend that Cdn Heavy Oil is West Texas Intermediate.
 
Chris Alexander's assessment...

For this era of democracy, market-driven prosperity and the rule of law to continue, Russia must be defeated and Ukraine must win a decisive victory by joint efforts delivered under the banner of collective self-defence.

So far, the only allies on a war footing in support of Ukraine are on the Baltic or NATO’s eastern flank – countries that have faced Russian aggression for centuries.

At $2.4-billion, Canada’s military support to Ukraine is modest, at best – a fraction of what we could and did provide (most recently in Afghanistan) and what is ultimately needed to win.

With the U.S. Congress wavering, European commitments often blocked by Hungary’s Viktor Orban and other spoilers, and France, Germany and Britain unwilling to lead in any true sense, Canada should provide 1 per cent of its GDP – about $20-billion – in military support for Ukraine.

Ukraine’s allies should also do the following:

- take Kyiv out of the strategic grey zone and into NATO and the EU;

- dedicate NATO training, logistics, supply, munitions and other capabilities to winning the war in and for Ukraine;

- green-light Ukrainian attacks on Russia, including with ATACMS and Taurus missiles;

- dismantle Russia’s support networks for global active measures and send their spies back to Moscow;

- deny Moscow more oil revenues by lowering the sanction price cap, call the bluff of profiteering ship owners who have helped the Kremlin stay solvent, and enact secondary sanctions on states used to circumvent the current regime;

- meet all of Kyiv’s ammunition needs with wartime production levels;

- enable Ukrainian air, artillery, air defence, drone and naval supremacy;

- make hundreds of billions of dollars in Russian central-bank reserves available to Ukraine;

- indict Moscow’s entire chain of command for war crimes;

- and, finally, remove Moscow from the UN Security Council and other international bodies.


Like Telegraph articles it is behind a paywall.....
 

Europe needs to “stop whining” about Donald Trump as it has no control over who Americans elect and must work with whoever wins the race, the Dutch prime minister has said.

Mr Rutte, who is said to be positioning himself for the role of Nato’s next secretary-general, said the EU had to work with “whoever is on the dance floor”, referring to the US election.

“We have to do this because we want to do this, because it is in our interest. This is crucial. And all that whining and moaning about Trump, I hear that constantly over the last couple of days, let’s stop doing that,” he said during a discussion at a security conference in Munich.

There could also be “no doubt” that Vladimir Putin would “test Nato” if he were to win in Ukraine, Mr Rutte told conference delegates. And he said he was “cautiously optimistic” that the US Congress would eventually pass a crucial bill to supply arms to Ukraine.
 
That which can't be done legally at home can be done for you by friends abroad.

State Department, Open Society, British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the EU finance a UK entity that rates sources on a Disinformation Index.

MSM good. All others bad.

State Department Threatens Congress Over Censorship Programs​

A year after its censorship programs were exposed, the Global Engagement Center still insists the public has no right to know how it's spending taxpayer money​

MATT TAIBBI
FEB 17, 2024
1,219
306
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https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch...04b-b167-4ffd-bf72-26cb8c9095c6_2896x1870.png
“You can look, but don’t touch!”
The State Department is so unhappy a newspaper published details about where it’s been spending your taxes, it’s threatened to only show a congressional committee its records in camera until it gets a “better understanding of how the Committee will utilize this sensitive information.” Essentially, Tony Blinken is threatening to take his transparency ball home unless details about what censorship programs he’s sponsoring stop appearing in papers like the Washington Examiner:


The State Department tells Congress, which controls its funding, that it will only disclose where it spent our money “in camera”
A year ago the Examiner published “Disinformation, Inc.”, a series by investigative reporter Gabe Kaminsky describing how the State Department was backing a UK-based agency that creates digital blacklists for disfavored media outlets. Your taxes helped fund the Global Disinformation Index, or GDI, which proudly touts among its services an Orwellian horror called the Dynamic Exclusion List, a digital time-out corner where at least 2,000 websites were put on blast as unsuitable for advertising, “thus disrupting the ad-funded disinformation business model.”


The culprit was the Global Engagement Center, a little-known State Department entity created in Barack Obama’s last year in office and a surprise focus of Twitter Files reporting. The GEC grew out of a counter-terrorism agency called the CSCC and has a mission to “counter” any messaging, foreign or domestic as it turns out, that they see as “undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States.” The GEC-funded GDI rated ten conservative sites as most “risky” and put the Examiner on its “exclusion” list, while its ten sites rated at the “lowest level of disinformation” included Buzzfeed, which famously published the Steele Dossier knowing it contained errors and is now out of business.
In an effort to find out what other ventures GEC was funding — an absurd 36 of 39 2018 contractors were redacted even in an Inspector General’s report — the House Small Business Committee wrote the State Department last June asking for basic information about where the public’s money was being spent. State and GEC stalled until December 3 of last year, when it finally produced a partial list of recipients. Although House Republicans asked for an “unredacted list of all GEC grant recipients and associated award numbers” from 2019 through the current year, the list the Committee received was missing “dozens” of contractors, including some listed on USASpending.com.
The Examiner and Kaminsky subsequently wrote an article slamming GEC for sending “incomplete” records of the censorship investigation, in the process including links to a “snippet” of the GEC’s contractors:


In response to the outrage of this disclosure, the State Department sent its letter threatening in camera sessions until it gets a better “understanding” of how the Committee will use its “sensitive” information. That’s Beltway-ese for “We wouldn’t mind knowing the Examiner’s sources.”
About that: the State letter wrote that the Examiner’s records were “reportedly obtained from the Committee,” and included a footnote and a link to a Kaminsky story, implying that the Examiner reported that it got the records from the Committee. But the paper said nothing about the source of the documents, which as anyone who’s ever covered these types of stories knows, could have come from any number of places. It’s a small but revealing detail about current petulance levels at State.
“Anti-disinformation” work is not exactly hypersonic missile construction. There’s no legitimate reason for it to be kept from the public, especially since it’s increasingly clear its programs target American media companies and American media consumers, seemingly in violation of the State Department’s mission. The requested information is also not classified, making the delays and tantrums more ridiculous.
There are simply too many agencies that have adopted the attitude that the entire federal government is one giant intelligence service, entitled to secret budgeting and an oversight-free existence. They need pushback on this score and have at last started to get it. Thanks in significant part to the Examiner as well as lawsuits by The Federalist, Daily Wire, and Consortium News, the latest National Defense Authorization Act included for the first time a provision banning the Pentagon from using “any advertiser for recruitment that uses biased censorship entities like NewsGuard and GDI,” as a congressional spokesperson put it in December. We’ll see how it pans out, but congress withholding money for domestic spy programs is at least a possible solution, now in play.
Perhaps it’s time for the State Department to receive a similar wake-up call. If GEC wants to put conditions on disclosure, can we put conditions on paying taxes? SMH, SMH…
 
Can't spy on your own people? Get your friends to spy on your people and tell you all about it?



But don't worry about this. State Department says the New York Post is not trustworthy.
 
I'm going to make a confession. I've always felt we've been under ongoing influence of the communists. I've blamed governments, individuals, groups and other countries. I know what communism is and I don’t have a single good thing to say about it. If you didn't agree in broad terms with my stance, I considered you the enemy. I did learn about communism in school. Unfortunately, my formal education stopped in grade 10, in 1968. Anything I've learned has been from experience, reading, news, when it was news. I've always know there was something wrong with society at least as far back as the mid 60s. I have struggled to figure out how retarded and backward our society has become. How giving a logical explanation, to supposed educated people, is dismissed with words like bigot, racist, oppressor, etc. No discussion, no compromise. I don't know how I landed on this video, but it gave me an epiphany. I think I finally understand what is happening to our society and individual citizens. It was the video I linked to here, that cleared the muddied waters. Spend some time watching it. I believe the author has stripped the flyshit from the pepper. I don't think I'm ready for nuanced, contrary discussion, but am willing to hear other views, even contrary ones. I'm just not sure I'm informed enough, to go toe to toe with my more educated and eloquent comrades here. However, if needed, I'm sure I can come up with something, even if it's more questions. At 70, I don't worry for myself, I worry about what kind of society my grandson will be subjected to. OK, that was to long and maudlin. Here's the link.

 
Modern history, which I'll define as from the start of the industrial revolution for the sake of my thoughts, has always included a struggle between socialism and capitalism. Even though they can co-exist, they find themselves pitted against each other.

As the old western hereditary systems eroded (ie Kings and Queens), largely because the means of production allowed a general rise in everyone's condition, the middle class became the center of the economic engine. In a utopia, the appetite of the middle class does not exceed resources available, the appetite of the upper class does not consume so much resources that the engine sputters, and the appetite of the lower class can be naturally fed by the efficiency of the whole.

However, people are greedy.

So the struggle is between a greedy upper class that wants to take too much wealth and power than the system can provide, and a set of elites that want to provide more to the lower class than the system can provide, in order to feed their own wealth and power. All with the background that the appetite of the middle class must be sufficiently controlled to note overburden the resource pool.

Capitalism got out of hand in the late 1800's and had be reigned in; I'd argue that that is the case now as well (the concentration of wealth is much more dangerous than the spread of wokism; I'd even argue that the specter of wokism is being used as a propaganda tool to hide that concentration). Socialism got out of hand with the rise of Soviet style communism.

Both of those are caused by a power hungry ruling class; the solution is a continual rebalancing.

I'm not inclined to watch a video comparing wokism to communism or Marxist Leninism as that, in my opinion is not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is certain ruling classes on both ends of the capitalism - communism spectrum manipulating the middle class in order to gain power; the current culture wars, in my opinion, are just an extension of that, and need to go away.

We are still in the process of equalizing society, so that everyone is given an equal chance (and no, I don't have an answer for what that really means). Problem is, in order to fix societal inequities, the wealth and the power of the middle class must be spread over a larger base. That process scares two groups of people: the largely European male group who fear they are losing their status, and the others who fear they will never get an equal status.

.. and the problem comes in when when one or the other ruling class preys on those fears for their own ends.

I'll pose this thought experiment: a modern democratic military is supposed to exist in order to defend the nation state that supports it. In other words, we pool our national treasure and blood in order to protect what is important to us. Is that not socialist behavior?
 
I will give another thought bubble: when one of the historically disadvantaged members of society hear European males say society broke when we started to move away from those same European males holding all the power and wealth, what reaction are they supposed to have?

Many people of a visceral support for Trump (and other's like him, Viktor Orbán of Hungary is worse) because they strongly believe that we need to "Make [a place] Better Again" and that person represents that.

However, just as many have a visceral reaction against him because the "better" they hear being referred to, by usually narcissist power hungry people, is when institutional racism, classism, and misogyny were the norm.
 
I'll pose this thought experiment: a modern democratic military is supposed to exist in order to defend the nation state that supports it. In other words, we pool our national treasure and blood in order to protect what is important to us. Is that not socialist behavior?

It is a very complicated thought experiment.

I would argue no. Investing in a military structure for defence (or offence) is not a redistribution of wealth and ownership to the population. It is a tool of the system. In most western states the military apparatus is not owned by the people, it is owned by the state (or in our case the crown). While the people pay taxes and part of that goes to collective defence, it is a social behaviour and is not necessarily socialist behaviour.

This is though a simplistic answer to a complex question.
 
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@Fishbone Jones , appreciate the candor. Typing 1 handed with a 1week old in arm so this won't be indepth as I'd like.

I'm not going to go into the weeds arguing Lindsay's speech, just going to offer some food for thought- going to accept/humour the premise of "wokeism = cultural marxism", but challenge what I see as a pretty serious error in his conclusion/ implied takeaway.

Let's start with economic Marxism- namely where it took hold and where it didn't, as identified by Lindsay

Where it did succeed? Feudal societies with a structural class of literal serfs hungry for something better

Where did it fail? Post industrial revolutio western societies where economic success led to prosperous citizenry

Takeaway - marxist theory and its utility for sparking revolution falls apart when the proletariat doesn't have enough to grieve to be sparked.

So if we were to jump forward to now, and focus on "cultural marxism", and posit that there is an enemy using cultural marxism to foment revolution on the backs of a cultural proletariat- whats the takeaway from the failure/success of economic marxism as a revolutionary weapon? That we need to man the walls to fight the serfs (in this case racial minorities, queers, leftists) hammer and tongs to keep them in their place, or that we need to acknowledge and relieve very real grievances to bring them more fully i to our society and remove the motivations that the bad actors use to incite revolution?
 
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Fishbone... sorry for rambling. I agree we've been under the influence of communists. It is there stated aim to remake the world in the image they want.

We've also been under the influence of capitalists. In my opinion they've created even more havoc. They've certainly been more responsible for the breakdown of the old social structures.

I just want you to know that even though I don't agree with your analysis, I also don't dismiss it.
 
Fishbone... sorry for rambling. I agree we've been under the influence of communists. It is there stated aim to remake the world in the image they want.

We've also been under the influence of capitalists. In my opinion they've created even more havoc. They've certainly been more responsible for the breakdown of the old social structures.

I just want you to know that even though I don't agree with your analysis, I also don't dismiss it.
No worries. I'm still distilling things anyway. All input is good.
 
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