I read a number of the UK papers every day online. They are better than US papers for a variety of reasons. (( In the current ‘intelligence system’ it’s recommended that americans read Al Jazeera, Pravda, China News Daily, BBC News as well as the NYT. All are biased but the important issue is to know how biased our own papers are. ))
US papers in general, formed to create homogeneity in the community. That community-centricity is why they’re going out of business in this post-community era. The web allows communities to have disparate voices (like normal people do) rather rather than having a self-centered referee edit, and dramatically bias their opinions toward the fantasy of democratic secular humanism. UK papers are more like the web: they represent factions.
Our only ‘faction’ is the financial press. The rest, of the papers are almost universally are left-leaning along with our universities, that by and large, teach the religion of democratic secular humanism, as do our grade schools – a notion notion that has something to do with the fact that our children start to lose competitive ground in education about the time we start teaching them the religion of democratic secular humanism.
If a religion has such a negative competitive impact can it be useful for any productive reason? Is not the measure of any philosophy the competitive standing of it’s practitioners? Of course, these ‘priests of democratic secular humanism’ attribute the a supposed american exeptionalism to their religion. But american exceptionalism is clearly false.
Differences between US and european productivity are accounted for by differences in the number of working hours. While this productivity generates a lower cost of living in the united states, and while american government consumes less of the GDP than governments do in europe, and while americans live generally better lives, even if they live RISKIER lives, than do europeans, there is no exceptionalism to the culture that is caused by democratic secular humanism. American exceptionalism, which is almost entirely the product of selling off a continent, the military strength to do it, the system of private property rights that allows us to do it quickly and easily, and the use of those profits from selling off the continent being directed to the maintenance of the system of international money, defense and trade and the demand for our primary product: “dollars”, and the profits made by selling those dollars because of that militarily constructed system of money, trade, and soldiery. In other words, “property”, which is the prerequisite for trade, and the conversion of violent efforts at acquisition to peaceful efforts at production and trade, is created by vast military expenditure. The system is prolonged like any social system, by the promise of violence if it is broken. Unlike other systems, it is a system that increases production and makes the ‘pie bigger’ rather than decreases production by wealth transfer.
Militarism for the purpose of ENFORCING PROPERTY RIGHTS is part of capitalism’s virtuous cycle of dividing labor, increasing granularity of property rights and types, increasing production and decreasing prices, instead of the use of violence to abuse the system of property rights. Militarism is, and can be, a good thing, depending upon how a culture defines it’s property rights. And the more granular the property rights and the better enforced, the more prosperity that people in a culture can generate by virtue of being ABLE to calculate USES of that property.
People are not pacifist by nature. Humans are the most successful super predator that has ever occupied the planet. People are pacifist because they are weak. (( See Kagan in Power and Weakness, as well as Sorel in Reflections On Violence, as well as Keegan’s History Of Warfare )) They are predatory by nature when they are strong. Only by maintaining violence over this system do we make the system one where participation in the game of the virtuous cycle is the only possible solution to the improvement of one’s life and resources. And membership requires two payments: respecting property and control of, and responsibility for, your breeding.
So, in today’s Times Online there is another article about the desire of the Taliban to start peace talks with americans. The reason for these talks is that Pakistan is no longer allowing the taliban safe haven, and that they are perfectly willing to wait until the Americans leave to reassert their power over their society. By giving the americans a reason for virtuous exit they buy themselves time to regroup, rebuild their numbers, rebuld the poppy and heroin trade, rebuild tehir finances, and retake social positions in the gangster state of afghanistan.
America took over the British Empire, it’s trade routes, naval bases, currency position, after the first world war. Americas policy difficulties stem almost ENTIRELY from british and french colonial history – the foolish organization of territory by other than tribal boundaries, in the foolish presumption that humans do not act, and prefer to at, according to tribal preferences.
If America STOPPED maintaining that system, does anyone live under the illusion that there would not be VAST and VIOLENT attempts at filling the vacuum of power? It would be the greatest commercial land grab in human history. It would be bloody. It would be violent. It would involve massive wars, starvation, trade interruption, an the only choice for those that choose not to participate would be to participate or be doomed to poverty and ignorance.
As an island nation lacking the resources to support itself, with a culture of feminized men so comfortable in their weakness that they have lost the Civic Republican Tradition of the Fraternal Order Of Soldiers (where the British ‘mates’ cultural concept comes from) how would the UK fare in this new world? It would collapse into either switzerland or return to it’s historical position as a backwater.
Just as there are plenty of silly americans in daily press, there are an almost unlimited of silly, ignorant, self deluding brits commenting as well. And these comments are important because they express popular sentiment.
One of the comments left on this article is by a nobody named Peter Codner who aside from being a barrister and apparently confusing analytical psychology for something other than another post-christian cult of absurd metaphysics, states that “The semblance to Vietnam which was an humiliating defeat for the americans is uncanny. the yanks will run away.”
While I understand that short time preference is a result of social class – meaning that we can educate people to use advanced tools and logic but not if we do not extend their time preference so that they can think beyond their experience, and learn that their experience and ability to comprehend that experience is profoundly limited – I fail to understand how one can live in today’s society and not grasp the problem of extending time preference so that we see all actions and outcomes in both their short, medium and long term contexts.
Running from an unnecessary battle for political reasons is very different from both running away from your history, and your own failure as a nation, and your responsibility as a nation for the problems you created.
The Yanks won almost every battle in Vietnam. The loss was political, because of home political tensions not a military or economic defeat. And it still achieved it’s strategic ends. As did subverting the soviets in Afghanistan.
Democracies lack the stomach for sustaining war. And they do so because of people like you. Of course, such sentiment comes comfortably to Brits, who lost their entire empire trying to stop Germany from taking it from them. Frankly the world would be better off if we had let them. Certainly Americans would be – we would not have to become an empire and live under a government-of-empire, if we did not have to take over the British empire when Britain collapsed, like reed. We would not have to protect a world trade and financial system that only served to inflate our entablements. We would not have to deal with the after effects of poor British (and French) judgement that left behind a post colonial Network of violence and poverty around the world.
Brits are a silly, petty, pointless people who inhabit little more than an empty client state living off it’s heritage, and propping up it’s ridiculous system by immigrating it’s way into a temporary fictitious prosperity, by fomenting consumption at the expense of it’s heritage and culture, at the expense of producing increases in productivity, where the government consumes 50% of GDP, the military is only slightly less of a Potemkin village than is the laughable Canadian.
I expect this kind of behavior of the french, who ceased being a world power when the effects of killing off their aristocracy and descending into Bonapartism ( democratically justified totalitarianism ) and are happy today to simply rest on past glory, consume their accumulated historical investment in a single century, and who because of it are simply obstructionists – obstruction is the only political power they have – so it is the political power that they exercise.
Brits are happily self-congratulatory to live under the US common man’s soldierly umbrella of protection, and his society’s necessary militarism while criticizing him on a daily basis. (( What will happen if the middle-american cultures who supply military talent ever figure out how much contempt that they are held in both by their coastal and international critics? )) A “thank you” might be more appropriate than your petty slander. But then again, while no man is a hero to his debtors, a decent man does not slander his debtors. Only an indecent one. False wisdom is the last refuge of the weak whose current technique is to hid behind the cloak of intellectual and moral fraud.
But then, isn’t that the purpose of all religions?