Globalization will live on, but only for countries who align themselves with the west.
Given the extremely myopic system under which our largest corporations (in America) operate, they've engaged in globalization in a way that largely maximized short-term benefit (to them) without regard for the long-term externalities. It's a shame that globalization had to be given a bad name by being executed poorly.
It's also good to remember that the person that's often credited for socialism, Carl Marx, didn't actually have a hand in it's creation as far as I know. He only wrote about what capitalism will cause, and his predictions were pretty much spot on.
From acknowledging these issues, socialism was created... But the person that created it wanted to be in power, so it created way bigger issues then the ones they addressed.
A typical true Scotsman fallacy. Pretty much the only good thing about communism was that the fear of it generally pushed the capitalism in the direction of a better, more socially-aware, self.
At the time, it was presented to the public as both. Inseparable. Liberalism was development. Development was liberalism. Besides the Communist Bloc, whose actual degree of development was rather questionable, no significant counter-examples existed at the time, and most recent political liberalizations had been followed by drastic and rapid economic growth as the country integrated into global capitalism. So it was a logical enough hypothesis. It was also the guarantor of global peace, supposedly.
This is a quote from Stephen Harper, former Prime Minister of Canada from a speech he gave at the United Nations in 2014 extolling the virtues of free trade:
> [...] We also believe that they are the necessary foundation for a better world for more people, necessary for prosperity, and with prosperity comes hope, and with hope, the greater inclination of free peoples everywhere to find peaceful solutions to the things that divide them.
> Indeed, we believe that freedom, prosperity and peace form a virtuous circle.
Similarly, Bill Clinton, former US President, on why China should join the WTO in 2000:
> The change this agreement can bring from outside is quite extraordinary. But I think you could make an argument that it will be nothing compared to the changes that this agreement will spark from the inside out in China. By joining the W.T.O., China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products. It is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values, economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people — their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power, not just to dream, but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say….
> State-run workplaces also operated the schools where they sent their children, the clinics where they received health care, the stores where they bought food. That system was a big source of the Communist Party’s power. Now people are leaving those firms, and when China joins the W.T.O., they will leave them faster. The Chinese government no longer will be everyone’s employer, landlord, shopkeeper and nanny all rolled into one. It will have fewer instruments, therefore, with which to control people’s lives. And that may lead to very profound change. The genie of freedom will not go back into the bottle. As Justice Earl Warren once said, liberty is the most contagious force in the world.
There it is stated openly as the justification for free trade. Trade will destroy authoritarian state control from within, expose people to freedom, which they will then demand, and that is why free trade with China is in the USA's best interests.
Liberals (by which I mean essentially all mainstream politics in the West today) have, historically, believed this. The economic pattern and means of production define the social and political environment. Opening up to trade meant opening up to new ideas which would necessarily bring liberalism. I used to devoutly believe this myself! Our politicians, I think, actually believed it, possibly wishful thinking.
Another goal in which it succeeded was in preventing major wars between the superpowers. US and China are so co-dependent in their economies that they can't declare war against each other. Russia less so, but, still, they can only engage through proxy wars.
Where it failed is that these long supply chains are incredibly brittle and chaotic - a major shock puts the system in cascading collapse and it takes years to recover it to a workable state. This TSMC investment is a response to those collapsed long chains.
Another failure was the promise to deliver better living standards to everyone. What happened is that industrial jobs in the developed countries were shipped to developing ones, favoring places where labor is so unregulated that it looks like indentured servitude.
Don’t they have a gross imbalance of H1B? Isn’t there a ratio they are supposed to stay above?
As well, there has been zero progress towards eliminating the need for a knowledgeable human participant to converse with the bot. A chat bot will, by definition, always need a human to push the conversation forward and that's the heavy lifting of the whole thing really. I have never seen an example of a chat bot questioning whether the human's query even makes sense let alone dispense constructive advice.
ChatGPT replaces use cases where Google was always a bad fit, not knowledge workers.
We shall see :)
Its interfaces are currently quite primitive too, so its current value may be underrated.
I would love to be able to edit an outline, while watching a filled out essay update side-by-side. The ability to tweak the outline, add hints, and tweak wording or completely take responsibility for particular sentences or paragraphs in the produced essay, would be a massive time saver, and productivity multiplier.
Note that demand for documentation tends to be a secondary, not primary, concern of the products they serve. So demand for documentation is not likely to grow dramatically just because documentation got vastly cheaper to write.
In other words, a productivity bump like this could eliminate a lot of jobs in just one category of knowledge work.
Add in the ability to use sibling tech to generate lively images, diagrams, figures ...
And translate ...
Note that the outline prompts, and other prompts, used to generate a document this way would be orders of magnitude easier to refactor to reflect future changes, than a manually written document ...
> version of slave labor. We... thought that would work forever
We expected forever slavery and freedom simultaneously.. Sounds like our typical hypocracy. This checks out
An excellent word, you just invented!
I suspect that once de-globalization really starts rolling along, we're going to see economic dislocations that are civilization-destroying. We won't get nation-states, we'll get civil unrest, regional secession efforts, anarchy, and war. Then some new form of political organization will arise, but I doubt it'll be either nation-states or globalization.
It's fair to say that less trade with a totalitarian rival power means less deterrent to war. Yes that's bad but the alternative of financing their military buildup and their oppression of their own people is not really a good one.
Why the leap from the end of unipolarity to the end of nation-states in general? (I assume you mean "countries" here, ex: the U.S. is not a nation-state) To me a Cold War II scenario and a bipolar world order seems more likely. I don't think there will be widespread civil uprising; I think you're underestimating how much control that governments (including democracies) have over their people.
It will take some radical technological change to overturn this power dynamic and displace national governments with anarchy and unrest as you mentioned. One example of tech in this vein is DAOs, which seem like an attempt in this direction but the problem is they lack enforcement via force and coercive violence. Until you can disrupt that (killer AGI drones?), central governments will remain the efficient and viable solution to consolidating power and enforcing order, and therefore they will be the dominant form of organization in the world. The disruption of U.S. influence and the end of globalization will not be the end of countries, at least until a radical technological change happens.
The modern nation-state grew out of a confluence of technology trends that accelerated throughout the 1800s. Mass-production made for cheap, accurate, long-ranged rifles. These made large armies of relatively untrained soldiers effective, right in time for conscription to fill the manpower void. Steelmaking made mechanized armor impervious to bullets, which also required internal combustion engines to power them, which required oil to fuel them. All of this required supply chains, which meant that political organizations large enough to build complex industrial supply chains and man them could steamroll earlier feudal empires that were still relying on cavalry charges, swords, and muskets. This happened in WW1.
Since roughly 2000 consumer electronics and inexpensive shaped-charge explosives have dramatically driven down the cost of fielding an effective fighting force. A ~6" diameter HEAT round can penetrate any reasonable level of armor, particularly if you can deliver it accurately enough to hit the same spot (defeating composite & reactive armor). Guide it with a microchip and you will hit that spot, and without a whole lot of training. MANPADS can take out far more expensive helicopters & close-support aircraft. Add drones and your $100M fighter jet is no longer assured air superiority, plus you can strike infantry formations from the air.
We've seen this already in those countries that have erupted into war. Afghanistan (repulsed first the Soviet Union then the U.S. using U.S-made weapons), Iraq (insurgency using IEDs), Syria (collapsed into anarchy, multi-sided urban war), Azerbaijan (very effective use of drones against Armenia), and now Ukraine (kicking Russia's ass with Javelins and Bayraktar). IMHO the reason we haven't seen it in developed nations is that it is far more profitable to take people's money than take people's lives. The folks with the capability to field smart weapons & drones are busy getting people to click on ads and fleecing them out of their retirement savings rather than waging war.
But it's absurd to think that, under modern military conditions, the strength of an insurgency rivals the military strength of the U.S.. For example, in all these conflicts you mentioned (-Azerbaijan), the U.S. isn't even sending troops (-Iraq, Afghanistan) and our side is still winning with its superior technology and supply chains.
The military conditions today absolutely still favor organized countries. In a future war against such enemy, if the U.S. has much to gain and doesn't care too much about the body count, you'll see Desert Storm levels of dominance. The reason we have all those real big "obsolete" planes is to drop real big fucking bombs like we did in WWII and Vietnam.
(Edit: maybe your insurgency has impenetrable air defenses consisting of thousands of drones with said "microchips". But at some point your insurgency will run out of supply and the U.S., with its "outdated" mass production capabilities and supply lines, will eventually outcompete you and then the bombers will be sent in.)
My point is that the military successes of insurgencies that you're describing are not enabled by a change in the balance of military strength. They're enabled by the fact that there was a significant decrease in the amount of effort that major military powers spent on war, e.g., when the U.S. decided not to irradiate the Korean Peninsula with cobalt. But just because countries don't go all-out anymore doesn't mean they can't or won't. These capabilities still exist and they implicitly influence every international interaction and transaction made with the U.S..
So no, anarchy will not erupt domestically when the U.S. loses some of its global hegemony to China. And the country with its centralized government and military is not yet an obsolete form of organization. Any domestic revolution would be put down easily, assuming there were people stupid enough to try. People will just adapt to whatever change happens and submit to their governments like always.
Millions of people worked towards peace, peacekeepers, activists, anti-war protesters, diplomats, lawyers, soldiers, etc. Many have laid down their lives.
It's offensive. and disrespectfull for purely commercial interests to claim all the credit. There is not even a rational argument provided beyong a correlation.
Maybe it's the other way round global peace has allowed globalisation. And it hasn't stopped Russia.
> unprecedented amounts of money were injected into the global financial system over the last 13 years
Every time I see a person that complains about government printing money, they can never answer how is money supply supposed to grow along with economy to enable economic expansion? The only mechanism is government printing money or banks creating loans
Also do you know that many governments owe like 30% of their debt to themselves?
'HM Treasury owes £2.1trn to holders of British government securities, of which approximately £745bn is owed to the Bank of England'
Only really fringe people complain that the government prints money at all. The more normal complaint is that the government is printing way more money than it should, for the amount of economic expansion that's actually happening.
People don't object to the money supply increasing. They object to their holdings being diluted in unaccountable ways.
Because that would not serve the real purpose of printing money, which is hidden (and therefore politically much easier) taxation, to enrich the government and its cronies at the expense of everybody else.
Money supply doesn't have to grow to enable economic expansion. Things can just get cheaper.
When governments print money, what happens is not that economic expansion occurs that otherwise wouldn't. What happens is that things don't get cheaper--instead, a portion of the economic gains from increased productivity go to governments and their cronies, instead of to all of us. In other words, printing money is hidden taxation. It's much easier politically than overt taxation precisely because it's hidden; people don't directly see economic value being taken away from them, even though it is.
This is idealism. It just so happens that resources are much more efficiently acquired through more peaceful means in this age.
If the incentives were in the opposite direction, those lives would have all been wasted. People don’t seem to realize how unprecedented this era of global peace is.
Most of the population is fed news from the extremely wealthy who benefit from these peace oriented policies. It really doesn’t take that much to take a population from benevolence to militarist nationalism.
Ah right, this is why slave owners have voluntarily freed all the slaves in the US? The french revolution was about aristocracy voluntarily giving up their privilidges? In Britain Parliament asserted it's dominance over the monarch through peacefull means?
In each case, idealistic people rose up against tyrany and cut some heads off
Slavery was a heavily economically motivated endeavor, obviously, otherwise it would never have occurred in the first place or wouldn't have taken so long to abolish.
The other two examples are just a changing of the hands holding power from one aristocracy to another. Peasants still lost out in both of those instances and life was worse after.
It is incredibly difficult to convince a greedy bastard to support peace. The natural order, for millennia, has been that when a greedy bastard meets a peace-loving activist, the greedy bastard takes the peacenik's stuff and then kills them. That is why we continue to have greedy bastards after millennia, and many of the original peaceful hunter-gatherer tribes have been killed off.
Capitalism's greatest success is as a sociopath-containment vessel. Historically, people who desire world domination achieve it by killing everybody else. Capitalism has managed to convince them that the path to world domination is making stuff and providing services for everybody else. This is a huge change in incentives.
> Capitalism's greatest success is as a sociopath-containment vessel.
> Capitalism has managed to convince them that the path to world domination is making stuff and providing services for everybody else.
Whether you end up with sociopaths in charge depends on whether you view profits as controlling the CEO or CEOs as controlling the profits. IMHO the former view is more accurate: you can reliably predict a psychopathic CEOs actions as that which will increase profits, while if they were actually in charge, their actions should be unpredictable.
Rather than point at a bunch of historical counterpoints, let me ask you this: are arms manufacturers and dealers engaged in capitalism? Weapons and munitions are certainly 'stuff' that is manufactured and sold in highly competitive markets.
> Capitalism's greatest success is as a sociopath-containment vessel.
So the capitalist plantation owners were convinced to give up slaves peacefully and the civil war was for nothing?
millions sounds too much.
I protested against USA war in Iraq 1 & 2, against USA bombing Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, against USA bombing Kosovo, against USA invading Afghanistan and against the too many times that the USA have bombed some place in the World, killing millions of innocent civilians.
But I don't feel like I worked for peace, I simply voiced my opinion, which was simply correctly pointing out that the USA have become a problem for global peace.
>I protested against USA war in Iraq 1
So you were OK with Saddam's troops invading Kuwait and raping the women there?
>against USA bombing Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia
So you were OK with Serbian genocide under Milosevic?
>But I don't feel like I worked for peace
Basically, you're in favor of Russian-style or Nazi-style "peace": "if we invade you and murder you all, don't resist, because that's warlike!"
Just one question: in USA okay with Iran repression or Putin invasion? they are not bombing there.
Do they like Talibans given they gave them back Afghanistan leaving behind vehicles and weapons, including fighter jets?
Do they agree with Saudi Princes killing journalists? because Bin Salman is still on the throne and USA still sell him billions in weapons every year.
> Basically, you're in favor of Russian-style or Nazi-style "peace"
Classic American , see a problem, take out the gun.
Now tell me again the story of Bush administration fabricated evidence to bomb Iraq.
I love it.
p.s. I live nearby former Yugoslavia, I have many friends there, nobody supported Milosevic here in Europe, many of us have witnessed the horrors of the war and the consequences of the American bombs, but he was such a threat that when they arrested him (because it wasn't so hard to find him) they couldn't charge him with anything substantial and he "died" of "natural causes" in prison.
That's justice according to US: first thing bomb civilians, then we'll think of something.
"The Trial Chamber of the Karadzic case found, at paragraph 3460, page 1303, of the Trial Judgement, that 'there was no sufficient evidence presented in this case to find that Slobodan Milosevic agreed with the common plan' [to create territories ethnically cleansed of non-Serbs]. The Trial Chamber found earlier in the same paragraph that 'Milosevic provided assistance in the form of personnel, provisions and arms to Bosnian Serbs during the conflict'."
Milosevic did it, but USA was unable to prove it, they already had what they wanted, a fruitful war, the trial, the real justice, don't sparkle their attention.
The America of Robert H. Jackson has long gone.
So, please, keep you bed stories for people who don't know better, spare me the propaganda. I'm too old for that sht.
Who's the real Nazi?
Because I think I saw actual Nazis walking around with swastika flags on American soil and nobody stopped or arrested them. They said it's freedom of expression. Then they assaulted Capital Hill, fomented by the POTUS, but it's OK, it's democracy at work I guess.
I also remember very well that only one country after world war 2 gave a medal to a Nazi, that place is the United States of A, the Nazi was called Wehrner von Braun.
I also remember very well operation Condor, Allende forced to commit suicide and Pinochet (a Franchist who loved Mussolini and praised Hitler) getting to power thanks to the US support.
Who armed the talibans in the 80s, to "use" them against USSR?
A spin off of that operation took the name Bin Laden, armed and trained in CIA camps in Pakistan.
Who armed Saddam in the 80s, to "use" him against Iran?
Because wars by proxy are much better, right?
If you create a new enemy every now and then, you can keep selling weapons and keep financing your military industry with hundreds of billions of dollars, the highest expenditure in the World, more than the rest of the World combined.
https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/d6a/dc7/4a5001b7beea096457f4...
And do you know why they like bombing so much?
Because they don't want to risk their soldiers lives, it isn't important enough for them, soldiers lives that they lost anyway, there is no American veteran that went back home and had a good life after deployment. Not a single one.
During the Afghan campaign sadly more than 22 veterans a day die from suicide and two serving military service members per day die by their own hands. [...] combat fatalities are less than 8,000, while more than 30,000 veterans and service members have taken their own lives.*
Cannon fodder. I'll ask again, who's the real nazi?
So now they use drones, that already killed thousands of civilians and hundreds of children (conservative estimates), because you know, if you are in the US you don't see them coming to your country mutilated. And if they do, they call them terrorists or keep them for decades in Guantanamo, with no charge whatsoever, deprived of every human right.
USA is a problem, not the solution.
>in USA okay with Iran repression or Putin invasion? they are not bombing there.
They aren't bombing Russia because that could start a nuclear war. Are you seriously that stupid to not understand this? This one really beggars belief.
They aren't bombing Iran because it's just too difficult a target; trying to subdue and set up better governments in Afghanistan and Iraq was bad enough, and in Afghanistan it was a failure. Iran is a much more powerful country; the losses aren't worth it.
>Do they like Talibans given they gave them back Afghanistan leaving there all their weapons, including fighter jets?
Wow, more utter stupidity. No working fighter jets were left behind. Even if they did, the Taliban wouldn't know how to fly them. They don't like the Taliban; they simply gave up because resisting them was costing too much and the Afghan people and government weren't taking care of the problem themselves.
>p.s. I live nearby former Yugoslavia, I have many friends there, nobody supported Milosevic here in Europe
More stupidity. Who do you think committed all those atrocities? Obviously, a lot of Serbians supported Milosevic.
>USA is a problem, not the solution.
So what exactly is your solution, genius? Let warlords do what they want?
Or maybe I come from a Country where these kinds of things happened.
Not all of us here are 20-something, some of us are old enough to remember what really happened.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/mar/26/terrorism
> They aren't bombing Russia because that could start a nuclear war
Remind me which Country is the only one to have dropped two atomic bombs on innocent civilians...
> No working fighter jets were left behind > Even if they did, the Taliban wouldn't know how to fly them
Aircraft worth $923.3 million remained in Afghanistan. The US left 78 aircraft procured for the government of Afghanistan at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul before the end of the withdrawal. These aircraft were demilitarized and rendered inoperable before the US military left, the report states
They are still valuable assets.
But is that really all?
Apparently not
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/27/politics/afghan-weapons-l...
https://www.voanews.com/a/pentagon-downplays-7-billion-in-us...
I wonder what a terrorist organization can do with billions worth of weapons, even if half working...
Thanks God the US fought "the war on terror"... (it would be hilarious, if it wasn't tragic)
Give 'em a few years and they will find a way to use them, like they did last time when you armed them against USSR and then they used those same weapons to take control of the country and even kick the American asses out of Afghanistan.
Americans literally ran away leaving afghan people to die
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecMrNMUuPMM
Afghans are paying for the idiocy of Americans that went to look for Bin Laden where he was not, knowing he wasn't there, only because Dick Cheney is a dick.
The Afghan opposition to talibans is now left alone and against a powerful enemy, with lots of weapons and money, left behind by the invaders.
Thanks 'mmmmurica
> So what exactly is your solution, genius?
The solution is unfolding on its own.
America is retreating, their culture has become toxic, their companies are considered dangerous for the economy and for the rights of workers, they cannot even give free healthcare to all their citizens, despite being the richest country in the World.
Culturally they have become irrelevant, they can only produce shitty superhero movies, socially the nation is on the brink of a civil war.
The golden age is long gone.
USA are already dead, they just don't know it yet.
Nobody even fears them anymore, not Putin that nowadays controls a poor Country that isn't even probably able to launch a real war against anybody, they don't have the money, the means and the skills. USA have been beaten even by talibans, a tribe of shepherds of sheep with no training in combat. In Iran they are laughing at USA announced sanctions, they can't harm them more than they already did.
Recently Turkey Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu rejected the condolences the U.S. offered following a deadly attack in Istanbul and accused Washington of complicity saying that "it like the murderer arriving as one of the first at the scene of the crime."
Bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia, ordered the execution of the journalist Jamal Kashoggi who "was ambushed and strangled by a 15-member squad of Saudi assassins. His body was dismembered and disposed of."
USA have declared not more than a few days ago that Bin Salman cannot be prosecuted, because he's the king.
Do you think that the fact that he buys every year billions in weapons from USA influenced the decision?
https://i.insider.com/5ab1652118d8521c008b45d9?width=1000&fo...
Nobody respects the US authority anymore, because they showed over and over that their high moral ground was only a facade.
Because we don't forget https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Ab...
Why should we listen to what they have to say?
If the CCP decide to cut the supply of components, they don't have the strength to react.
They know very well they have to, that's why they are on retreat.
They are in the same situation the western Roman Empire was between 410 and 476 AD.
Garbage was never a problem to begin with. US is a huge place. We'd be fine landfilling garbage for the next few centuries at the very least.
If you haven't read up on the unclassified docs that have been released about the secret agencies of this country, you should. We've done everything and worse to our own citizens. Including firebombing entire cities, sending the military to kill people striking, dosing unaware Americans with LSD... the list is long.
Two things can be and often are _true_ at the same time, but often the difference between them is that, for a given conversation, one of them is a proportionate contribution, and the other is a troll.
This is hardly a reasonable comparison. Most of the crazy shit you're talking about like breaking protests with the military and the LSD trails are from 60 years ago. Firebombing cities happened during WWII and was the accepted (though terrible and it turns out strategically wrong) air doctrine of all sides.
Yes, US bulk data collection is wrong, but we know it isn't being used to round up people en masse for wrong think. We don't run massive reeducation/forced labor camps for ethnic minorities. The Xinjiang internment camps have housed basically the equivalent of the whole US prison population and where there is institutionalized forced sterilization, mass rape, water boarding, torture involving electrical shock, and beatings. Even the worst US prison is basically day camp by comparison, and the people of Xinjiang are being rounded up largely for their ethnic identity.
You false equivalence is frankly, fucking bullshit.
With respect to the injustices of the FBI and CIA, there was a congressional commission that investigated abuses, held people to account, and enacted some laws to change the situation. Such a process is impossible in China today which has no separation of powers. Hell you can’t even talk about the Tiananmen massacre without being locked up and it’s scrubbed from the internet but we can openly discuss domestic police abuses all day long without fear of reprisal.
As for WWII it isn’t even relevant to the discussion of domestic policy, notwithstanding the fact that it was near total war.
The US was not founded on slavery and genocide, this is bullshit history. Half if the original colonies barely ever had slavery and had banned it before the revolution. The founders, if you’ve read any of their writings hoped to see the young republic end the institution within a generation, and expected to fade away due to epidemic pressures from the more productive north.
War for oil is a stupid conspiracy theory. The Iraq invasion never took oil resources and immediately handed them over to the Iraqi state which sold them on the global market just like before. There was no US genocide there or anywhere for oil. This is just nonsense.
Yes we do still technically have forced labor in prison, though it’s actually usually voluntary these days. This is totally different in kind and character from what is happening in Xianxjang, again where people are actual victims of a real modern genocide.
You’re engaging in giahgallop and whataboutism here.
>Half of the original colonies barely ever had slavery and had banned it before the revolution.
>Half of the original colonies
So.... you're saying that half of them had full on slavery, and the other half had reduced to no slavery....to me it seems "founded" on slavery is absolutely accurate, especially considering that is literally enshrined in our highest governing document via the 3/5ths compromise, and went on to be the heart of the southern economy, becoming near and dear to enough people's hearts that half the country went to war to preserve it. And what would you call what we did to Native Americans if not genocide?
I didn't address native peoples or genocide in my previous comment. But, if I were to do so I would probably argue that it was mostly carried out in the 19th century and was not a feature of the founding but its not an area of history I feel well enough versed in to make a super strong argument off the top of my head.
But that's not even the point, I'm arguing that the OP is acting in bad faith by arguing that CHina's current crimes are excused by the bad behavior of the US 250 years ago. Modern day slavery and genocide on the scale that exists in Xinjang are inexcusable and unparalleled since WWII. The US has made moral progress and the CCP is committing crimes against humanity.
Also, what do you mean firebombing our own cities. U.S. "strategic" bombing during Vietnam and WWII was on our enemies, not U.S. citizens as you claim. MKUltra was, sure, but it wasn't millions of people. And who cares about wiretapping; that's not even in the same ballpark. For most people in the U.S., we can live a free, safe, and open life, and so did our parents and grandparents.
One example of how the U.S. is not currently authoritarian is that we're all able to have this exact discussion strongly criticizing the U.S., on a U.S. website, over the U.S. internet, and still no one from the government is going to have us whacked.
This was wish a mix between wish-fulfillment and propaganda used to reverse the effect of Cold War propaganda. The main goals of globalization were economic and diplomatic, and those have been wildly successful. Billions of people have been lifted out of poverty, and nuclear war is completely unthinkable.
> Instead, China has taken all the benefits and used our money to build a system of oppression that would make George Orwell blush.
You don't need technology to build an oppressive regime. China were still closed off to international markets, they would be a lot closer to North Korea than it is right now.
Every other path will lead to doom. I mean, the framework could be something better than west's. But we first need such a thing, because it certainly has not been discovered yet.
That's just a return to status quo, isn't it? A patchwork of defense alliances and trade agreements?
It's more interesting to me, to point out the relative decline in the relative power and influence of the West. Whereas U.S. was 25-30% of global GDP post WWII, we are down to 15% and declining. The so-called "global south" nations, interestingly a lot of these nations are rising in relative economic power and influence and yet many of them straddle the line between aligning with East or West (see India's oil / energy agreements with Russia, or south America's reluctance to join along with Russian sanctions).
In this sense, it's more apt to point out that globalization will live on, but only for countries that neither strongly align themselves with the west nor the east.
The world quickly rebuilt after WWII, but it did so along two axes: the U.S. aligned western European countries, British commonwealth nations, plus Japan; and the U.S.S.R. east of the iron curtain, which included more communist aligned nations including China. The difference in economic productivity between the rival systems was stark: Western-aligned economies performed far better.
And it's the reason why the U.S. has had so much unilateral leverage over global trade and foreign relations since WWII, in addition to the Bretton Woods agreement, which made USD the global reserve.
But as the article points out above, the global GDP % of U.S. dropped from the year 2000 at 32% to around 15% today, now 22 years later.
The idea of liberalizing -- e.g. converting to Western values -- was the more modern version of this missionary argument, but it's basically the same argument, and really the same target audience, just shifted in time.
Shockingly, most of the world has kept their previous religion, although there are liberal inroads/enclaves scattered all over, particularly in coastal trading cities.
I think your treating 'globalization' as equivalent to 'American-style liberal democracy' in your last sentence there.
If only a hemisphere of the globe is 'globalized' than clearly the term has become disconnected from any literal meaning at that point. Both democracies and autocracies are increasingly de-globalized at the moment, its a statement about the network and not the nodes on it.
Although not yet directly comparable to the surveillance state that the CCP has created, there are have been highly successful forces within our own government to generate and implement systems of oppression within the United States. There is a definite inclination among regime elites to favor more centralized control of the public.
Just recall efforts to nationalize voting, policing, housing, and the internet. To say nothing of the covert surveillance or the plans to phase out non-digital transactions in order to curtail 'money laundering', or the gentle reminders of the IRS that they will pursue ever smaller transaction amounts. Or even the sword of 'regulation' that hangs over the head of social media companies should they not heed the _"""advice"""_ of executive agency functionaries.
It may be less formalized than China, but there can be no mistaking the current of this undertow.
A much bigger benefit is that globalisation promotes peace through increased inter-dependence. This is the same idea that was used at the very beginning of what is now the EU.
Of course the West also benefited tremendously from cheaper imports and larger markets for exports.
The world has actually become much more peaceful.
In a way, it's like chaining yourself to your trading partner. Now, you have to be very careful who you chain yourself to. Is it a stable democracy that shares your values, or is it some authoritarian hellhole with a tyrant and maniac in charge?
Your statement about the promised benefits failing to materialize is spot on, but this not the reason globalization is dead. Globalization is dead because the United States has stopped patrolling shipping routes with US warships and has, in general, lacked a foreign policy and interest in developing one.
The two might be linked, but just barely —- I suspect that one too many generations of mothers and fathers saw their children killed, maimed, or traumatized by senseless military misadventures, thus the appetite for these excursions remains low. Coupled with the fact that the US is aging —- fast —- and has fewer children to spare, the great unwinding is indeed before us. But I doubt, sincerely, that politically or spirituality the voting electorate had any realization of the sort you called out. That is, no contingency of American voters woke up to say, “Yes I can get a flat screen TV for $120, but what’s the real cost?”
Not sure about that. [1] [2] [3] [4]*
Global increase in purchase power have completely changed many markets, even in the West. Except, probably, the USA.
My speculation: when people say "globalization did not work" they mean "for my western Country, that got rich exploiting developing Countries"
But globalization is simply "the process of interaction and integration among people, companies, and governments worldwide" and achieved most of what it promised.
EDIT: talking a bit about the article, what's happening to TSMC is not due the fact that globalisation is dead, but because Taiwan is technically still part of China and the USA don't wanna go to war against China for Taiwan. Despite the fact that they support a free Taiwan, they never voted for its independence at UN.
"We oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side; *we do not support Taiwan independence;* and we expect cross-Strait differences to be resolved by peaceful means" (https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-taiwan/)
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[1] https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/263770/gross-domestic-pro...
[2] https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/263771/gross-domestic-pro...
[3] https://i.insider.com/4d3dca0accd1d578410b0000?width=607&for...
[4] https://ourworldindata.org/exports/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2... * warning: logarithmic scale!
We tacitly decided no one is worth keeping alive unless they coincidentally happen to be rich under a system intentionally funneling money to the top like all the rest.
Why care what anyone else has to say if their existence is not something I have an obligation maintain?
They don't have many freedoms you take for granted, like voting, but it turns out to be less fundamental than you imagine. If the regime does not oppress them they don't feel the need to change it.
Obviously there are horror stories, magnified by their control over media. But we Americans have our own horror stories, and worse, many ignore them despite the fact that they are quite well known.
China isn't the hell scape as it's often presented. Which actually makes them more dangerous to Western ideals and values.
Surveying them would be like asking citizens in cold war era Russia if they are happier than before and if they are lacking what the west has. They might reject it but they don't fully understand what they are missing.
Xi is more in the Mao class of leaders than his predecessors (both are uneducated populists who are not interested in developing strong institutions). I wouldn't count on China continuing to do well until they find a way to smoothly and consistently replace non-totalitarian leaders, which I think is related to free press/speech, as leaders want to set precedents so they aren't persecuted by the next guy.
As far as evil China, I don't disagree with that, but the US wasn't much better in a lot of regards. The US weaponized trade. We were like that drug dealer that gives you drugs for free to get you addicted, and then threaten to cut you off if you don't pay high prices. "you don't agree with our culture? we will cut you off!" It wasn't just trade, but the monetary system as well.
Needless to say, I am not optimistic about our future.
I thought Trumpism is not welcome here?
> Globalization will live on, but only for countries who align themselves with the west.
So globalization is just westernization?
Yes, except “the west” these days includes Japan and South Korea.
China having an export surplus precedes Trump's presidency by a few decades.
> globalization is just westernization?
I think the idea is that countries need similar regulations to complete fairly in a shared market. I.E. The US can really only trade with other western countries if they want to avoid a lot of the present pitfalls with global trade.