mhoye11h ago
During the first few weeks of Operation Desert Storm we'd routinely see footage of entire battalions of Iraqi soldiers walking up to the first American GI they could find waving white flags, believing that the worst thing that could happen to them at the hands of the American military was a shower, an MRE and a pack of cigarettes. The mythos of the American a just actor was largely intact then, and that mythos saved a lot of American lives. And then Abu Grahib happened, and that all ended.
Show threadmhoye11h ago

Suddenly the prospect of surrendering yourself to American custody meant maybe getting tortured to death and maybe getting sexually humiliated as part of the process; everyone saw it was better to die fighting. In days the entire tide of that conflict in that whole region changed; there was no recovering from it.

We're looking at the long unwinding of that story here today, everywhere. Nobody can or will believe in Americans, or even the idea of America, again. That's over now.

Show threadmhoye10h ago

I think the only real question right now is how the rest of the world manages the unwinding of dying empires. What does America make, these days? Obsolete cars, innovative financial instruments, rented software, GPUs, guns and corn. Did I miss anything?

I sometimes wonder what Britain minus London looks like on a spreadsheet. What's the all-money side of the "only then will you realize that you can't eat money" coin?

Show threadRycochet
@mhoye The Uk is what you get when kings and the could be kings of the banking sector control an economy for centuries and regularly exercise the power of veto over every economic policy. There's only the occasional blip where they consider the other bits as they're afraid of being shot in basements by peasants who want to give communism a go.
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