Just like how the Israelis are bombing Gaza now to avoid a future Holocaust. Everyone knows ISIL are bad guys, well you know why? Because we trained them. We supplied them. Don't you hate that, when the freedom fighters of yesterday, blow up our boys and our puppets? I know that was then. Then was SIX MONTHS ago, you know how much changes in six months? Please, don't mention whether or not we or our allies are still arming them in Syria, or the fact that there are many other factions involved in the present Iraqi Civil War than simply ISIL. This is simple. Clear cut. Bomb to stop genocide. Bomb for the children. Please don't mention the millions of Iraqis that we killed, please don't mention about how US leadership used ethnic rivalry and ethnic cleansing to keep Iraqi resistance divided during the occupation. That was then. This is a clear cut battle with the new evil empire, riding in Toyota trucks we supplied and using the equipment puppet troops left behind. Please don't question our historical revisionist claims that we had the war won before the politicians got cold feet and wanted to get out. Please don't point out that America has lost nearly every major war it's fought since WWII. I know, I know, those were dignified retreats, never fight a land war in Asia and all those commonplaces. Anyone know why the Korean war was the forgotten war? No, it didn't have anything to do with media, but rather the humiliation Uncle Sam suffered when it's veteran greatest generation soldiers got the hell pounded out of them by the PLA. That was the cream of America's crop, the greatest group of soldiers America has fielded since the Civil War, they ran into Chinese soldiers who had been fighting multiple enemies for almost 30 years. Those feminine chinks sent them running back to the 38th parallel and those American Immortals, the very same Gods of War, living deities, who stared down Nazi "crack troops" (I get tears of laughter when I hear this) at Normandy. Yes, they shat themselves at the Battle of the Bulge, as they fought off a crippled German Army consisting of third rate soldiers who were far less motivated when it came to killing Americans than they were to killing Russians. We won the war didn't we? I'd like to see you do better!
See, Americans are bad losers, and when they lose just like the French in Algeria or the Germans after WWII, our hallowed military
Back to the Cold War. Back to Iraq. Back to the Future. Some Change, hope you got what you voted for! We're going back to Iraq because we never truly left, it's just that a small contagion of private mercs, glorified security guards, recruited either fascist goon squads or aging career soldiers with bad knees, couldn't swing it for us. I know Americans are cowardly, and I know Obama says there's never going to be a ground war, but you can't bomb all the time. Contrary to what our enlightened citizenry believes. At this point no one really cares that American justifications for war in Syria, Iraq, or Ukraine is paper thin. Their following the IDF's lead which just recently put on the world's greatest gong show during it's Gaza war. None of Israel's propaganda made sense, the purpose and message was convoluted, the eyes of even the converted shifted back and forth in doubt, but it was best to carry on anyway. See by Gong Show I mean the audience appreciates the act in spite of it's obvious lack of talent, in fact that's exactly what makes the show enjoyable. It's the same effect that the lovable loser from any Adam Sandler movie has on the audience. The more he tries and fails spectacularly, the more endearing he is. The history of political conservatism is full of a great many losers and incompetents and hence that makes them lovable all the more. Thus the IDF bangs a trashcan while doing it's best imitation of tibetan throat-singing: "HAMASSSSSSSS! TUNNELS!!!!!" one contestant farts h-u-m-a-n s-h-i-e-ld-s in morse code before shitting himself loudly as a look of pain streams across his face. All the Zionist judges love it, all the more because it's not any good, it's so bad it's good like having a drunk sing-a-long to Kesha. Elie Wiesel, descends from heaven and speaks solemnly on how pants shitting, the grunt, and the uncomfortable silence are really all just metaphors for the Holocaust. We all saw the man shit his pants, did nothing to stop it, now all we are left with is silence.
Enter Ukraine. The US government bases it's accusations against Russia on social media. Hilariously, the US gov goes ahead and keeps making it's claims as if the counter-claims and refutation of the evidence never happened. It's like a hipster who turns in a collection of his tweets about his childhood and/or anal leakage as his Master's Thesis and then turns around argues with the board: "NO! THIS IS LITERATURE! YOUR JUST NOT WITH IT! YOUR A DINOSAUR AND I'M A HIDEY LITTLE FIELD MOUSE" Suddenly, the accused becomes the accuser but more spectacular than anything is the incompetence with which the defendant defends himself. It's like he wins the jury's heart just by his strained argument, unintentional humor, and folksy naiveté and bluster. Right now all of the West is working to gang up on Russia, a country whose fallen into complete disrepair since 1990, whose glory days faded with the end of the Stalinist period. So the collective will of the G-7 is dedicated to punishing this second rate nation, hilariously the West's inept response has blown Russia up into super-power. Meanwhile China whose economic might arguably surpasses not only America, but even the collective West (especially industrially), looks on quietly at the show of stupidity. Their next... after we get Putin-Hitler-Stalin and liberate the gays. Out of the many convenient lies, Americans tell themselves, and this logic applies across today's hipsterized economic doctrines, is that America is rich precisely because it has such a big military. In other words, we don't have to do anything but keep our pimp hand strong and all the bread and butter will flow in. Unfortunately, while America has always been an expansionist power, it did not become rich simply because it was extremely violent or because it stole from the Indians, but because it invested more in production than anybody else. When you have half the world's industry, like we did after WWII, you can make a lot of rules, even after you suffer humiliating defeats in Korea and Vietnam. Now I'm not saying that American Imperialism wasn't pillaging on a grand scale even then, but look the Chinese are social-imperialists and even they needed a strong economic base of production before they could start reaping the benefits of large-scale conglomerated finance capital. The average Chinese worker puts a lot more into the capitalist system than they usually get back, so while that keeps China's economy healthy and bustling, it also means there is a class interested in it's overthrow.
Really economics over the past 30 years has been increasingly hipsterized. Silicon Valley tycoons and their upper-crust lackeys are responsible for all scientific innovation, and not public universities, government funding, or any of the numerous workers (especially third world workers) down the chain. This persistent romance of pony tailed CEOs supposedly fighting authoritarian regimes and stodgy old timey capitalists with nothing but computer codes, bowls of swag weed, and passion refuses to go away. It even seduced even a normally perceptive thinker like Terrence McKenna. Markets, stylish blue jeans, GOOD GOVERNANCE are the keys to economic success. Who cares if you perform well, so long as your stick-can performance draws a good crowd and healthy tips from the market? The extreme decadence of the idea that being paid well is indicative of quality work would've made Oswald Spengler roll in his grave. Yet that's the very idiotic idea behind the idea that the market rewards work appropriately, another pillar in the edifice of the meritocratic delusion. Everyone starts as a Van Gough in the market, we're all artists, unique snowflakes, the point is to finish as a Warhol--well paid. But still there is the hokey romanticization of even the shittiest, dirtiest, most underpaid work. In the same sense, that we come away with an admiration of the fisherman in The Old Man and The Sea HOWEVER the Old Man wasn't written to be a cuban magical negro but rather to expose to the reader the injustices that pervade the lives of the cuban working class. Similarly, as Paul Craig Roberts shows economic failure is explained away as a good thing, the economic hipsters come a long and turn conventional wisdom on it's head. Not only is industrial production insignificant, and inferior to the information sector, but in fact we are gaining by sending it abroad. What was Freakonomics except an economic hipster's manifesto? Oddly Levitt's "work" has become one of the most widely read economic treatises of the Empire, it fills its rightful spot as toilet reading for the powerful. I'm not too invested in the industry question per se as it is largely framed in terms of American Imperial politics. However, it can hardly be doubted that the damage done by the economic hipsters who spent trillions of taxpayers money with pathetic, painfully slow rates of growth to show for it, have done incalculable damage, perhaps much worse than the traditional marginalists and keynesians before them.
What amazes me is failure is never failure it's something else. Which was quite apart from how I was raised when winning and succeeding actually mattered. Now "succeeding" and "winning" are quite arbitrary, largely determined by adherence to groupthink and conformity at the moment. I would say here is one of the few places conservatives have a point, but love of order only reinforces this problem. Shockingly the conformity masks itself around as rebellion, like the youthful professor who drops pop culture references and acts like your buddy before asking you to do a million different things for him without much thanks or reward. Suddenly you realize a typical distant student-teacher relationship would've been much better. In fact, that is exactly what it was except in disguise.
In fact, Obama's African Summit as Washington's blog points out is actually weakness instead of strength, it hardly stunned even lackey leaders, and all Obama had to offer was more weapons and defense agreements. All Empires are doomed to extinction. But the shortest-lived are those based on the sword alone. It is hard to see how the American Empire, as the world hegemon could last much longer. The crises are insurmountable and the responses confused. Thus if America survives the early decades of the 21st century, it maybe as something like the Byzantine Empire or the Holy Roman Empire, an inheritor but devoid of the true spirit and essence of the original.
