Pentagon study declares American Empire is 'collapsing'
medium.com
medium.com
Good.
potentially undermining trust in incumbent governments for the foreseeable future
Even better. Trusting government is a fool's errand.
But, the document says, this should not be seen as defeatism, but rather a “wakeup call”. If nothing is done to adapt to this “post-primacy” environment, the complexity and speed of world events will “increasingly defy [DoD’s] current strategy, planning, and risk assessment conventions and biases.”
IOW, it's not the Department of Defense at all. It's more like the Department of World Domination.
Great job guys!
How do you run society without trust?
Trusting governments has worked out so well historically though. That got us many wars, untold numbers of people killed, incarcerated and/or experimented on. It got us untold numbers of people inhibited from creating wealth and a better future for themselves, so the existing elite power base could preserve itself. It got us civil asset forfeiture, the "War on Drugs" (aka, war on civil liberties), horrible nutritional advice promulgated by the USDA and their ilk, which has ruined people's health (hey, eat lots of carbs, fat is evil!). It's got us entrenched systems which promote the morality of one religious group (Christians, in the US) regardless of one's personal beliefs. It's got us MKULTRA, COINTELPRO, Room 641a, etc., etc.
The challenge for those who critize government generically is that they design a good governance ... whether we call some part of it government or not.
On balance, though, for most people, it actually has. Which creates a bit of a messaging problem for anarchy in the general case.
The absence of government, on the other hand, was even better. We have such incredible highlights as the dark ages, the Mongol conquest, islam's spread, ... each of which killed far more people than 40-45 including Japan and the Holocaust, when the total human population was a fraction of what it was during WWII. Collapses of government which are more recent, but on a smaller scale are currently used as laughingstocks for anarchists and ... sorry to say ... rightly so. Among such examples are Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan as recent examples.
Without the government, can you really vouch for all 7 billion humans alive, even for basic things, such as that no group of them would commit mass murder, just because it would provide a better meal tomorrow evening ? How about all 300 million Americans ? I don't think so. How about 10 million New Yorkers ? I wouldn't take that bet.
The bet that they wouldn't band together and steal whatever they can is so ridiculous it's barely worth thinking about.
You distribute trust and power among actors in a way that is secure and relatively equitable (compared to current power structures). Enter bitcoin and other more versatile cryptocurrencies like Etherium.
Cryptos may form the foundations of a healthier globalism and a new era for the human race, in that we will be less bound to and reliant on government as a separate, opaque power structure. However, there is a long way to go regarding development and adoption, and, let's be real, the overwhelming majority of private citizens may never understand the function or power of cryptos, while government entities will see it as the power threat that it is and may legislate it away while the populace remains ignorant.
FFS, look at history. When governments collapse, what springs up is never a wonderful, harmonious, anarchist collective. What actually happens is this: a short period of chaos, followed by the public willfully putting a strongman authoritarian into power when they're sufficiently sick of the instability and just want peace and quiet back. This is a constant pattern throughout history and it is ridiculous to think "this time will be different".
How about just this as starters: 1. Legalize marijuana 2. End civil asset forfeiture 3. Stronger anti-trust on the internet and wireless spectrum 4. Improve the legal system to prevent civil cases from stifling free speech (perhaps by offering pro-bono lawyers to individuals sued by corporations for acts of speech only) 5. Work to end corporate influence over government.
It's not an all-or-nothing thing, we just need to decide what we care about, talk about it, and it will happen (but slowly).
Actually they kinda are. When I say "don't trust government" you can take that as "grant government ZERO authority which can be abused" (the anarchist position, and, by happenstance, pretty much my actual position), but you can also read it as "trust the government with less authority which can be abused."
And even as an anarchist, I'd take any developments in regards to the latter half of that as progress in a generally positive direction. I mean, I'm an anarchist, but I'm also a pragmatist. We won't get an ancap society in my lifetime, but if we could scale back the size and scope of government just a bit, I would be happy(er).
1. Separation of powers
2. Accountability via body-cams
3. Freedom of speech to protect political progress that threatens incumbents
4. Making voting systems that have auditibility
etc. These are all good practical ways to reduce trust in government with no downside. Why ask for "trust" instead of offering proof?
It is our role in a democracy not to trust our government, but to guide it (by selecting the correct representatives) to represent us on the things we agree on.
So anything that moves towards less secrecy, and more transparency, is compatible with my "don't trust government" position. Of course one can argue about just how far to take it, but I think most of us agree that we've gone too far in the secrecy and obfuscation direction as of late.
Even better. Trusting government is a fool's errand.
wow, great... what do you suggest -- remove governments and go back to clan wars? or perhaps we should be asking the question of how did we end up with governments that cannot be trusted...
1. First America stops being world police.
2. America plays ball with rest of world (adopts metric system, becomes a leader in climate, shares control of internet, turns concern toward to real issues like asteroids, population growth, health issues, cyber security)
3. Citizens acknowledge that war is a tool for siphoning tax money into the coffers of people with connections/government-contracts, and move towards a post-war-era.
4. Citizens start to move to a post-nation era, where we acknowledge have more in common with each other than our own politicians who drive us apart for financial gain.
5. We move toward universalizing language, so we hit a point that declaring war with Iraq seems as absurd as declaring war with Canada.
6. The very concept of "superiority" and "class" becomes meaningless as we move into an era of excess due to automation.
[Link to Pentagon's study: https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/download.cfm?q=1358]
Our current foreign policy is far from ideal, but there is a delicate global balance which would be dangerously upset if we ceased global operations and "world policing." The GP is niave to think that such rosy, utopian intentions would not be taken advantage of by other global players. Look, for instance, at the current posturing by China in the Pacific. Imagine the scaling of their operations if there was no one in our position to apply pressure against them.
Someday, sure. But, globally, humans are still viciously tribal, and some form of enforcement keeps everything running smoothly for everyone. And while Americans foot much of the bill, there is no denying that our benefit is of larger proportion as well.
"Now is the perfect time to close the Suez Canal" "Now is the perfect time to invade South Korea" "Now is the perfect time to plunder any ship with cargo" "Now is the perfect time to take Qatar"
The reality is, America's military presence abroad is a stabilising force. Take that away and other powers will move in to fill the vacuum.
The world is changing really fast, and the rate of change is getting faster. When people argue "That could never change!" I have to wonder if they have any real evidence... Do you?
I'm sure people argued the American economy would collapse without slave labor.
And America not being world police isn't a revolutionary change, we only started being world police in the last 70 years or so, and it's done more harm than good realistically.
I'm unclear what your defeatist motivation is, but it doesn't seem like you've actually sincerely thought this through.
1+2. One way or another, America will "stop playing world police". It might do things like adopt the metric system (depending on how long the "rugged independence" streak runs). U.S. climate policy is about as important to the world as Californian climate policy is to the rest of the country (near zero). The internet is already splintering into interlinked regional networks, and will continue to do so naturally.
3. War isn't inherently a way to enrich private entities, although it's clearly true that that's one effect of it, in this country right now (and arguably, currently the primary reason). War has been a constant reality, at least since the time humans began agriculture. Maybe it'll go away in the future, but I see no evidence of it.
4. One over-arching nation, with some division of regional governments. Conflict will just move down the tree.
5. A single, universal language isn't an inherently good thing. It sounds like a great way to kill off cultural diversity.
6. We'll have to change the nature of the human animal. We're naturally prone to categorizing, ranking, organizing, and using those structures to assess threat levels. Denying that is fighting nature; you won't win that war.
> The world is changing really fast, and the rate of change is getting faster. When people argue "That could never change!" I have to wonder if they have any real evidence... Do you?
True, true. Things will change. They'll follow the path of least resistance, on the macro and micro levels. Your 6 steps are fighting entropy the whole way. They're radical claims. Radical claims require radical evidence...do you have any?
If other planets/moons/whatever haven't been colonized by the time humanity gets empirical data for that hypothesis, a lot of people are going to wish they'd put that a little higher on the list.
It's very possibly an asteroid could strike us and we wouldn't even be aware of it till after the fact, or at the very least till a week or two before it strikes... if it's in one of our blind spots (i.e. the other 95% of the sky)
Also does post war mean war never again happens? Or just happens less frequently?
I truly believe a post war era (war not happening for millions of years) will not be possible without genetic mutation of the human genome.
Yes, how do we do this? I'd like to see us declare victory, and remove our troops from South Korea, Japan, Germany, the rest of Europe, the Middle East, and everywhere else. The UK did essentially this over the course of the 20th century. Is there any way to accelerate the process without world wars?
Does anyone have examples of groups working "together" that share one common interest, and are opposed on many other fronts?
Perhaps Chinese would be a good choice.
I don't have the implementation details. But just to illustrate how doable it'd be, I'd suggest we take something neutral (like Esperanto) and every language start adding 20 Esperanto words to their language per year, with a plan to coalesce after 200 years.
40,000 shared words isn't a full language, but it's enough to make conversations and debates possible.
1 - "World police" tends to stick around, or soon comes back. (depending on how encumbering you define the "world"): US, British Empire, Rome, Ancient Persia, Chinese Dynasties. All have sought and won control of major parts of the world because it was beneficial to them and their trading partners.
2 - Sharing control of the internet with whom? China? Russia? Iran? Saudi Arabia? Cuba? The internet is fragmenting and soon each country will have their own local control. No need to share. (unfortunately)
3 - War is about power. As long as one person wants power, there will be war of some kind.
4 - Politics is also about power. As long as politicians have that power, they will seek to keep it (see also #3). See Venezuela for a current example of how sad this can get.
6 - Status, attention, and ego are just a few things that cannot be automated away. If your point were even remotely true, then the difference between a typical underpaid school teacher and Elon Musk (or Larry Ellison, or Donald Trump, etc.) would be trivial after the 100+ years of automation we've experienced.
Finally, collapse of empires tends to be followed by periods of lower economic output and higher violence; not to mention significant loss of knowledge. I'm not happy that we have one, but seeing it disappear could easily be worse.
2. What if, like blockchain, we build a DNS model that is server agnostic? People are already working on this, if you think it's not possible you should learn more.
3. That's not valid logic.
4. That's not valid logic.
6. [There seems to be no 5?] Historical fallacy.
> 6. The very concept of "superiority" and "class" becomes meaningless as we move into an era of excess due to automation.
We already have excess of some things such as calories and clean clothing. The cost of 2k calories per day is a pretty small fraction of minimum wage. We are also witnessing a rise in food classism that is targeted at the foods that are hard to bring the price down on. It has become a status symbol to "know where your food comes from" or to eat at a "farm to table" restaurant. These are associated with ways to get your calories that have high logistical & labor costs.
I agree that we will see eras of excess in more and more goods and services, but the idea that humans won't find a way to show superiority or class by consuming higher cost goods/services seems kind of out of touch.
For the record, these places were Russian sphere of influence before the conflicts started. Though not strictly Russian territory, indeed.
Anyway, it is truly scary if they think they need to massively expand the already unparalleled American military dominance.
Trump of course should resign if the intervention is proven as deliberate and facilitated by his side, but shall we make a list of all the foreign elections the US have been meddling with in the last 50 years?
The real solution? American friends, as much as I love you (and I do, mostly), you should just stop being so way up your own ass all the time. About everything. There's a world out there, across the borders and the two ponds.
It wasn't the only decision that had this effect, either. The report might as well say "We used to be rich, but we spent it all on fast cars and drink."
The cure is, get this, transparency. It'll take some effort to get to a true transparent government and im calling this new form Transparentism.