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Anglo Respecter 40K Profile picture
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31 Oct, 5 tweets, 2 min read
Well isn't that obvious? If you're some sort of american dissident and you think you're the white army or whatever, lol just lol. It's 2021. You're the away team, the bolsheviks. There's likely going be an american rerun of the old WW1 defensivist vs defeatist debate in Russia.
A conflict over Taiwan isn't so much a big war that you either "win" or "lose", but the real stake here is whether the right should try to shore up the American Empire (for tactical or strategic reasons), or hasten its demise. And "defeatists" are probably going to win.
Partly because the Empire probably *can't* be shored up, but the big thing is just that as it stands it's hard to say that the US empire is really benefiting ordinary Americans all that much. And so just like with the bolsheviks in Russia...
...the people who stoke anger at shortages and an attitude of "let's just walk away" are likely to win out over time, given that people's anger over shortages tend to increase over time, while their patriotic commitment to the common cause of national defense tends to weaken.
Going to shill for Angela Nagle's substack here, particularly this short piece, as it is very relevant. Nationalism is, as Nagle point out, one of the traditional killers of empires. And American nationalism is likely to absorb that feature.

angelanagle.substack.com/p/how-will-the…

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Anglo Respecter 40K Profile picture
31 Oct
A Taiwan conflict is so fantastically dangerous to the US I have no idea how people manage to hold the opinion "dude we should just stand up for Taiwan, it's the right thing to do, no big deal".

Like what exactly is the *win condition* for a conflict like this?
The US isn't going to occupy Beijing and nation-build China. The best case scenario is that US forces defeat chinese forces in some limited skirmishes, the Chinese sustain casualties in the four or five digits, then go "oh well, see you in ten years when you're weaker."
That's the *best case* scenario. In the worst case, the Chinese actually defeat the expeditionary US forces and occupy Taiwan, which both the Chinese leadership and the Chinese population consider to be their national patrimony going back hundreds of years.
Read 17 tweets
Anglo Respecter 40K Profile picture
30 Oct
Pretty good article. It's interesting to me as an outside observer how talking about America as an empire only became totally rote and uncontroversial at some point after 2008; before that people still had the whole Toynbee attitude toward the subject.

theamericanconservative.com/articles/compr…
It's only really now - that the empire is well and truly struggling, that the rot has spread to every limb and the elite are openly clueless about what to do - that everyone calls the US an empire. Like yes, Tom Lehrer wrote "send the marines" in 1960, but...
...even in my 20s, the most common attitude you encountered was just "America is a big dog in a small room, it only wishes well but it sometimes knocks the furniture over". Calling it an empire meant you belonged to the fringe.
Read 9 tweets
Anglo Respecter 40K Profile picture
30 Oct
This is an interesting point, but the reasons for why this is how things stand are also kind of complex, if you ask me. It's worth exploring this complaint (red elites are feckless, while blue elites have real killer instinct) in greater detail.
So first off, you see this frustration a lot. And it's quite hard to deny that there's a huge imbalance between liberal and conservative elites in terms of how radical and combative they are. The former attack with strength and determination, the latter retreat or weakly defend.
People tend to explain this in terms of moral, ideological and subjective factors. Liberals are revolutionaries, they read Lenin, they're fiends and devils (but devilishly competent and fiendishly driven), and so on. People on the right are weak and old, clinging onto sinecures.
Read 28 tweets
Anglo Respecter 40K Profile picture
29 Oct
Let's take a break from foodposting for just a bit and consider this stuff seriously and what it tells you about the situation the US is in.
I occasionally get painted as some sort of "doomer" when it comes to the future of the US, and a word people love to use here is "apocalypse". That tells you something about how human psychology works in the face of normalcy bias.
In their mind, there are only two settings: business as usual, and people engaging in cannibalism out in the street. There's no continuum, just a binary. Given that I say the US is heading for some rough territory, that means I must therefore be a proponent of imminent collapse.
Read 31 tweets
Anglo Respecter 40K Profile picture
23 Oct
Time for another lesson in north germanic food supremacy, folks. This, time we'll be talking about why the perfidious english may be proud of figuring out how to mash potatoes, but only THE NORD has discovered the secrets of mashing potatoes the right way.
The dish pictured is called "Rotmos med fläsklägg", which translates into "ham hock with beet mash". It's one of my favorite dishes from my childhood, and it truly shows you the ingenuity of north germanic cooking.
In this dish, ham hock is boiled with carrots, allspice (this giant of nordic cuisine, the best spice in the world) and onions until ready to eat. But then, the carrots, rutabaga, and potatoes are added to the broth from the ham hock and boiled until soft.
Read 5 tweets
Anglo Respecter 40K Profile picture
22 Oct
Everyone going "we need to go to war against China over Taiwan if it comes to that, folks we have to stand up for what's right!" just befuddle me at this point.

Put aside nuclear weapons for a moment. Will the US actually survive a military defeat here, politically?
The current US has all the factors that turned Russia into such a mess and plunged it into a revolution in spades. In some ways, those red lights on the panel are actually worse today than in 1916.
Though a war where millions of conscripts die is obviously unlikely, war over Taiwan would seriously disrupt the global economy and plunge the continental US into rationing and hunger. If the generals then mishandle the war in the eyes of the population, hoo boy.
Read 5 tweets

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