I guess if you are several hundred year old empire you will have run into just about everything. The plague was just the last thing they saw, not the ultimate thing that ended them.
We’d be lucky if all this crap lasts long enough to watch a plague run through it.
Personally, I was thinking we could privatize the entire military in one fell swoop. And then let them sell their services to various foreign nations. Turn that one big cost center into a revenue opp.
No way that could possibly go wrong…
But if America does get dragged into any more conflicts, can we make it a home game this time? You know… ‘fight em over here so we dont have to fight em over there’. Sucks always being the away team.
The USA gets a whooole lot of soft power from its military hegemony, it's already paying for itself in the form of better trade deals - for instance, Taiwan basically only exists because of US hegemony, and they have better chips than the US does, and they don't sell their best outside of NATO.
The US is doomed to always be the away-team - they can't stay neutral because wars involve blocking the trade of their trading partner, which includes US merchant ships. They won't have a war on the home front, because they have the two biggest oceans in the world to make such an invasion a logistical impossibility (and the US navy is giant to enforce that).
Definition of soft-power: Soft power is the ability to co-opt rather than coerce (in contrast with hard power).
* looks up list of foreign intervention by the US over the last 60 years *
I think you might want to rethink your argument.
Yup. Enormous geographical advantages + a population armed to the teeth (relatively speaking) means the US is as close to impenetrable as is possible
So, we take your shit. Then we define your morality, then set the benchmarks and culture, and your ass better meet all that.
And if you don’t, well
we don’t wanna hear you say nigga no more
Imperial means we run you for a couple hundred years. I guess some people don’t get it. You pray to our god, for the foreseeable feature.
Behold South America, what god do they pray to? The fuck we said to pray to.
That’s imperial shit.
No magical mother in the sky. I just don’t like being polite no more, where this war at.
Your two options are caricatures
Read carefully :)
<https://www.reddit.com/r/rootsofprogress/comments/esgqsv/inf...>
Chart is sourced from:
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/2173395?seq=1>
The other thought that I've had is that we're exerting far less selective pressure on huamn infants now than a century or so ago, at least in modernised countries. By which I mean both rich and middle-income countries, as well as quite a few poorer ones which do have basic sanitation, hygiene, and healthcare availability. It's the first increment which matters far more than the last.