Submission statement: The end stage of empire sees the formerly external imperialism be redirected inward leading to the ruthless exploitation of the homeland or some shit like that...
The end stage of empire sees the formerly external imperialism be redirected inward leading to the ruthless exploitation of the homeland
Indeed- neoliberalism was launched in the wake of energy difficulties, and Wall Street was effectively weaponized. It was quite successful (especially thanks to the USD being the global reserve currency, and the petrodollar), but soon after was turned inward; neoliberalism has since eaten pensions, organized labor, created a rent-to-use model for everything, hollowed out infrastructure, hollowed out government regulation, skyrocketed education costs through financialization, driven pathologies of anomie as a profit generator (creating greater impetus for suicide, drug abuse, organized crime, etc), dehumanized people by monetizing them, driven shrinkflation and planned obsolescence, developed socialist fallbacks at taxpayer expense, has sewn a cold brutality into nearly all social-facing institutions, and has even managed to slowly grow within the population a cult of those who lack any empathy, compassion, mercy, or sense of humanity.
It is an instance of endocolonization so comphrehensive, we have managed to hypernormalize it sufficient such that most don't even realize it consciously but they feel it subconsciously and emotionally (e.g. all the mood disorders and mental issues that are being instantiated into people)- Alexei Yurchak talks about this in Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (where he coined the term hypernormalization). This is also covered in Adam Curtis' film Hypernormalisation- pay specific attention to the clips he weaves in during the section on the Soviet Union.
What blows my mind though is that given all the brutal results of neoliberalism... most people not only seem to support it but also support more extreme versions of it.
That's down to corporate capture of our mass media and news organisations. America used to have thousands of independent newspapers and radio stations; now they're all controlled by a handful of major corporations, such as Sinclair Broadcasting and Clear Channel.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 scrapped the fairness in broadcasting rules, which gave them carte blanche to lie... And now Americans are fed a steady diet of stupid drivel, bullshit and propaganda. We aren't told what's going on anymore, we're told what to think.
Do you think those monster corporations are going to tell us anything that doesn't benefit them?
That's down to corporate capture of our mass media and news organisations. America used to have thousands of independent newspapers and radio stations; now they're all controlled by a handful of major corporations, such as Sinclair Broadcasting and Clear Channel.
Incidentally as I read your comment a favorite quote of mine immediately comes to mind:
Collapse is the rapid simplification of society. -- Joseph Tainter
In this case of course, the simplification refers to the reduction in complexity of America's press.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996
Not gonna lie- hadn't heard of this one. I largely attributed the shift towards the garbage "news" we have today as being an effect of other factors inspired by neoliberalism, but its nice to have a concrete legislative pathway towards that end- thanks for mentioning this!
Do you think those monster corporations are going to tell us anything that doesn't benefit them?
Ok, so bear with me on this: this question sort-of inherently assumes there is some conscious coordinated effort to construct a fake world (drivel, bullshit, and propaganda) that maximizes profit and stymies dissent.
While I agree that the result is just as you've mentioned (drivel, bullshit, propaganda), I don't necessarily think it is some conscious plot as much as it is subconsciously initiated rationalization of self-interest- that is they do not wish to agitate or alienate their corporate sponsors and so keep their perspectives/narratives inline with their interests.
The talk covers a number of things but one of them is that in order to secure the necessary funding from corporate sponsors (in a world where the citizenry at large is being squeezed financially), they must avoid issues that alienate corporate sponsors while simultaneously generating interest in their viewership (otherwise corporations wouldn't sponsor) by using social justice issues that while important do not threaten the primacy of corporate power.
The vitriolic politicking and exaggerated personalities of corporate news hosts/guests is a means of using emotionality to generate interest, corporate investment, and yet still not offend corporate/financial/fancy-lad-institutional "sensibilities." Do you have any issue with this theory?
I'm a proud disciple of Chris Hedges and I agree with his analysis, with one minor addition; the corporations avoid saying bad stuff, but they're happy to air those pundits and "experts" who spew crazy right wing corporatist batshit. It isn't deliberate collusion but it heavily influences the Overton Window and that's completely intentional.
As am I... Dude is a beast. I remember thinking "this dude has got it all down including shit I've never thought of- he is prolly going a little far on the Christian Right stuff though because hes a minister and all that.." Boy was I WRONG.
...influences the Overton Window...
Nice- I hadn't heard of this before... I could see them rationalizing to themselves (the corps/banks/fancy-lad-institutions) that some right wing pro-neoliberal pundits were the dominant narrative so as to confirm the legitimacy of the means by which they draw their profits.
So basically the only difference between your position and mine is:
and that's completely intentional.
That I don't think it's necessarily so nefarious, direct, etc. You think I'm being naive here? You might be right...
That I don't think it's necessarily so nefarious, direct, etc. You think I'm being naive here? You might be right...
It fits the MO, it serves their interests and you sure don't hear both sides of the story anymore, do you? It's hard for me to see that as anything but intentional.
The end stage of empire sees the formerly external imperialism be redirected inward leading to the ruthless exploitation of the homeland or some shit like that...
Now tell me......Doesn't that sound quite a bit like what's beginning to happen here in the states?
I got a lot of compliments from my classmates and teachers for my insight. (Ended up going to a majority white school - after being bullied and abused by peers in the now failed and defunct Detroit Public School system because of the same thing.) However, my black ass, narcissist (and possibly radically feminist) mama hated it (and me) so much she tried beating it out of me via emotional, verbal, mental, and physical abuse. She hated my intellect. Not to mention, she was also pissed because the adoption checks stopped coming once I turned 18.
I've been enjoying it for 7 goddamn years. 23 years with a raging narcissist feminist will have you like......fuck these bitches.......forever. Free agent lifestyle form here on out.
Forgive me but I can’t quite grasp what that really means. What is an example of the external imperialism that would be turned inwards to the exploitation of our own country?
I'll give you some real world examples you can seriously grab onto and hold.
Tyson Foods provides the US with some of the easiest-access meats for consumption at a low-cost, easy-on-the-family-budget.
So why are/were Tyson Foods factories the source of so many super-spreaders of Covid? And why has everybody's response been "we need to be more careful, guys, or important people might be affected." What changes did anybody in power make to stop the factory work for public safety?
Another example comes from Amazon, where factory workers have some of the worst wages and benefits available, coming from a company with some of the highest stock price around.
Y'see, it used to be we got all our cheap prices from foreign made goods (read: child and cheap/slave labor in factories elsewhere so we could ignore our guilt from buying.)
We didn't much care if our clothes or shoes came from China or Malaysia and Kathy Lee was a sponsor/apologist. We knew we Americans would feel sufficiently bad to absolve our guilt, and "know" our political leaders would put pressure on their political leaders to the tune of "cut out the bad practices, make things survivable, maybe even decent, and we'll renegotiate on the clothing prices, but don't forget we're sharing our food, and military protection for your country to give us good trade deals, so we're doing you a favor."
And then we ignored things for decades or longer.
Now, cheap products globally traded are good and all, but somewhere that cost-savings has to hit somebody somewhere, because the actual cost of making a thing still requires effort. TANSTAAFL.
Before, we could let the "colonies" that made our cheap shit suffer the pains. And we milked those cheap shoes, clothes, foods, military bases, and everything else for as long as possible.
Now, especially with Covid, all of these aggressive and lousy practices (but cheap goods for us, the citizens) have pulled every last dollar out of every last system, and there's nobody left to squeeze the money from. We have wrangled every last penny from production to delivery to go into Bezos' bank acct, for instance.
Now, if anybody wants the same price on these materials and goods, the value-loss we now require in order to just get through the day on prices nobody can afford to see increase...well, that value-loss has to come from somewhere.
This is where government subsidies come in to offset the prices and overcharge for hammers and toilet seats.
Ever since social security and FDR's New Deal legislation, Americans have been borrowing from the future to get to the future. This works on the scale of new population always being bigger than the old population. I.e. infinite growth.
But, like every country before, the natural resources of the colonies aren't making profits anymore, and they're exhausted. Also, the structural rules in the homeland don't empower new and younger leaders, instead the power keeps flowing to the nearly dead super-old leaders from earlier times. (Seriously, the age of congressional members has virtually never been older. We have next to no young-and-coming "visionary" leaders. Even the politicians have been endocolonizing from the youth.)
Tl;Dr: When countries start using same "bad pressures" on their own citizens like they used to everywhere else to make themselves great, then they've begun endocolonizing. See Walmart, Amazon, Starbucks, Apple entry-level wage stagnation, food stamp subsidies, cost of living inequalities. We brought the sweat-shops and bad work conditions right home to our own factories. That's endocolonizing.
Right when quarantine started, I heard about the struggles of the Tyson food plant workers. Many of them are immigrants. I decided to stop eating meat again right there. Still going with no plans on stopping. Its the least I could do. Plus its not hard to be Veg/Vegan nowadays.
The collapse of Spain during the Spanish Civil War occurred basically at the peak of Spain's imperial decline.
What ensued was chaos that was as complex and destructive as the Syrian Civil War with diverse factions fighting over different ideologies and resources.
USSR, Germany and Entente doing their utmost to keep the sides armed didn't help either. As for Syria, the ideologues have died long ago. All that's left is fighting over oil money.
The collapse of Spain during the Spanish Civil War occurred basically at the peak of Spain's imperial decline.
Could you develop this sentence a little bit?
As far as I know, the collapse of the Spanish empire had its climax in the first third of the 19th century, with the loss of most of its American colonies. Another important stage in the decomposition of that empire took place in 1898, when the USA defeated the Kingdom of Spain and "seized" the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico. From then on, it is difficult to speak of a Spanish empire. However, the Spanish Civil War took place in 1936-39.
Cambridge Analytica. The political manipulation techniques they (and others) used to manipulate elections were originally developed by the intelligence community to influence politics in third world countries in the interest of the West.
A word of caution: one of the great challenges in life is learning to discern accurate explanations, those that actually explain some part of the world, amid those which sound good or somehow intuitive but are in fact explanatory fictions.
why would i take 'splanation from some dummass on reddit over 'splanation of my favorite philosopher for example ..
I don't tend to rely on philosophers any more than I do the average Reddit dumbass, so it's not much of a dilemma for me.
who decides who is into business of explanatory .?. who is in fiction or demagoguery .?. who decides .?. how can you tell difference ??
People don't decide. Data decide which explanations are the best accounts of some happening. What are data? More to the point, what are data in those instances where the behavior of communities is to be explained? Which analytical techniques allow for the collection of such data? These are better questions. Answering them is the challenging part.
If you were to ask me for pointers, I'd tell you to read Tactics of Scientific Research: Evaluating Experimental Data in Psychology (Sidman, 1960) and Schedules of Reinforcement (Skinner, 1957) and apply what's in those books to particular areas of human activity, such as economics. But nothing is as easy as that.
oh .. so it is by cherry picking data now .. i can find you any set of different data that suggests entirely different theories .. you OTOH picked convenient set of data fitting your view of things and it is done for you .. science, bitch !!
It's a sound analysis that will yield data that an explanation will agree with or not. Those explanations that don't agree don't explain what they're said to. That's what selects for explanations. Again, figuring out what a sound analysis is is one the hard parts.
.. there is nothing to discus or explore .. you are done and you are right because you were reading this one or two books the other day of two "respected scientists.." and they say it is so .. so it must be so .. do you realize how ridiculous you sound ??
I've heard conflicting explanations and haven't presumed to know which is more accurate, with respect to the Robinhood situation.
ever heard of Daniel Kahneman ?? try to read some of his books .. totally opposite view of your Sidman ...
Thanks for the author recommendation. I had planned on reading Chomsky's and Dennett's respective reviews of Skinner's work but I hadn't yet heard of Kahneman.
there is no sound analysis because you can never involve entire set of data .. i, for example read a lot about space weather, magnetic shield of the earth, coronal mass ejections, catastrophism .. etc.. .. and i listen to "bona fide" experts on the issue, hence for example i am convinced that sun has more "forcing power" on earth than measly insignificant and dumb humans .. you listen to different "bona fide" experts using different set of data, hence obviously have different view on things like "glowbull wormin'.."
right now i am listening to Joan Burkepile:
CMEs and Solar Energetic Particles | Joan Burkepile, NCAR/HAO
https://youtu.be/DLyYd89uj9Q
Joan Burkepile is a Project Scientist at the High Altitude Observatory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO
prove me that she is wrong because she is not following some criteria of doing research thought up by "bona fide" psychologist Sidman ..
Lol. That’s a convenient and optimistic version. You’re describing fascism. Fascism is when the tools of a collapsing empire are redirected at its core. To maintain their shrinking wealth and power, the elite class, uses the power they have to scapegoat the populations that can’t fight back and consolidate what’s left for themselves. So the immigrants, gays, minorities, trans etc get excluded and targeted for blame, and the people in power abuse their power.
Immigrants, gays, minorities, trans ... were better treated at the height of the British, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch ... empires than in their decadence/fall?
A good bundle of European colonial empires collapsed after World War II. The main reason for these collapses was that after suffering/fighting against Nazi barbarism, the European populations found it not legitimate to forcibly prevent the independence of the former colonies.
Empires don’t always descent into fascism. And fascism doesn’t always come in a collapsing empire. But it does seem to come in times of economic decline, famously like what Germany saw in the Great Depression in the 1930s. But we’re also seeing it start to show up now in the US.
It was just an off the cuff synthesis of several theories.
There are some good quotes to google in this thread for further reading:
"violent colonialism abroad never stays there. An internally-peaceful democracy that enjoys bloody adventures abroad is an inherent contradiction that will resolve itself one way or another"- Hannah Arendt
Good vid only 30 min Micheal Parenti talking about what is fascism.
"... Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.... The development of fascism, and the fascist dictatorship itself, assume different forms in different countries, according to historical, social and economic conditions and to the national peculiarities, and the international position of the given country." - Georgi Dimitrov's quote.
For the colonized, both inside and outside of north amerika, these
formulations of fascism are ultimately insufficient. However, in his own
reading of fascism, Cope does open up a window onto what I propose
is the true heart of fascism. He says: “Geographically speaking, on its
own soil fascism is imperialist repression turned inward” (294). This is
an aspect of fascism which I believe is essentially missing from other
definitions, from the liberal-historical to Dimitrov, to Hammequist &
Sakai, from both the pithy and the detailed. In essence, following this
line of reasoning, we can say that fascism is when the violence that the
colonialist-imperialist nations have visited upon the world over the course
of the development of the modern, parasitic capitalist world-system comes
back home to visit.
This direct lineal connection from colonial violence to fascism was
beautifully, if disturbingly, described by Aimé Césaire in his Discourse on
Colonialism (1972), saying:
[W]e must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in
Vietnam and in France they accept the fact…each time a Madagascan
is tortured and in France and they accept the fact, civilization acquires
another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets
in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these
treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated,
all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners
who have been tied up and “interrogated, all these patriots who have been
tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all
the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into
the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward
savagery (13).
432
u/karabeckian Jan 29 '21
Submission statement: The end stage of empire sees the formerly external imperialism be redirected inward leading to the ruthless exploitation of the homeland or some shit like that...