When we deploy troops, there's always a sense on the part of other countries that, even where necessary, sovereignty is being violated.
More Foreign Bases Than Any Empire in History ...Nation
800+
Yeah, I've mentioned the Atlantic article. Obama is spinning his legacy, and it ain't worth reading, except maybe for the pathology and the art of mendacity.
Do we hate Jeffrey Goldberg? I can't remember. I confuse him and Jonathan Chait embarrassingly often.
Are you confusing him with Jonah Goldberg? That's what I like to do.
3: Jews! How are we supposed to tell them apart?
More Foreign Bases Than Any Empire in History ...Nation
I really doubt this. The article cites a total of 800 US bases around the world. And that's everything - even warehouses. I would be amazed if the armies of the British Empire had as few bases as this - all those little forts and garrisons all over the NWFP and Burma, all those tiny outposts. There were over 200 separate territories, for one thing, and you have to reckon that almost all of those would have some sort of military presence.
American foreign policy really does look like it's going to be grim in the post-Obama era. Obama is at least ambivalent about stupid shit, but every other Democrat seems strongly in favor of it.
The article's very good. Reassuring (slightly worrying about Clinton, too).
3: I always confuse Jonah Goldberg with Jonah Lomu.
This is John Fucking Kerry, of all people to say something like this:
"It is directly related to our credibility and whether countries still believe the United States when it says something. They are watching to see if Syria can get away with it, because then maybe they too can put the world at greater risk."
It is a somewhat slow going, but good so far article. The bit about US indispensability and his reluctance to embrace it, was an interesting aside.
I would be amazed if the armies of the British Empire had as few bases as this - all those little forts and garrisons all over the NWFP and Burma, all those tiny outposts. There were over 200 separate territories
But all part of the empire, so not technically "foreign."
11: exactly. US bases are a very different beast in that so many of them are in formally sovereign states.
Plus the various bits of the British Empire were very definitely "foreign". They were not legally part of Britain. They had different laws (albeit generally based on English law). They had different systems of government; the Government of India in particular was very definitely not simply an extension of the government in London at any time in its history, and neither, of course, were those of the self-governing dominions.
The British Army even referred to service in bits of the empire as "foreign service" - as opposed to "home service" which was in the UK.
10: Also interested with the indispensability thing. I think this is actually the central problem for American policy: do enough of the (good) stuff that no-one else can to persuade other countries to pull their weight. No major problem in the world gets fixed without America getting that right.
14 not legally part of Britain, but not legally sovereign either (except for the Dominions, late in the day).
Also yes to heebie &c it is a very fucking long article.
17: well then it's a pointless comparison, because pretty much no empire in history has had any of its troops stationed on foreign soil at all. That's not how being an empire works. If you had a tuman in your city, you were in the Mongol Empire whether you liked it or not. The article is trying to make a point about "troops stationed outside the metropolis" - see the explicit comparison with the British Empire - and I think the numbers don't back it up.
An isolated factoid in a mass media publication might be pointless? Oh noes.
19: comity! I think the American system is so unlike anything before calling it an empire doesn't even make sense. (Haven't read bob's article.)
That the US has troops in so many independent countries is pretty remarkable, and I don't know that there's an exact historical equivalent. Of course they're largely there because the world knows that the US is both incredibly powerful and at a core level isolationist and feckless; we have troops in Europe primarily so if Russia attacks an American will be killed and the allied country will know that we'll respond.
(This is lifted from the Tooze "Deluge" book) but the story if the 20th century is largely (a) America is overwhelmingly powerful from 1914 on in a way no other country was ever even close to being (b) America is ruled by feckless nutjobs in Congress who have no interest in exercising that power responsibly. The 1914-1939 story is largely about the US recklessly fucking up as a hyperpower; the 1945-91 story is largely about the US reorganizing itself to make clear that it can credibly commit to act like a world hyperpower despite Congress and its antiquated Constitution. The main threat in the post-1991 world is again the US Congress.
22 was prob not the best comment to make while driving. There really is a point in there somewhere!
22, 23: I'm sure any pedestrians you ran over (like the civilians killed in American drone strikes) are proud to have died in the service of democracy.
Let's all take lessons in exercising power responsibly from the guy writing two paragraph statements while driving.
And the OP article describes a president describing himself as trying to act like a credible hyperpower ruler and being hobbled by nutjobs in Congress.
And Tooze's books are legitimately great. Reading group? They're both very long and dense.
He's in LA. What they call 'driving' is what everyone else calls 'sitting in traffic'.
Ugh. Like I said, the main reason to read the article is to learn from an incredibly brilliant and gifted liar, for instance Obama avoiding the detail and facts that was my mistake and that gives an opening for analysis and criticism.
"Don't do stupid shit!"
Well, what Obama did wasn't stupid shit of course, unless it was all the stuff that was HRC's idea and Obama was playing golf that day, but honest, DDSS was Obama's heartfelt principle. What a guy.
27: sumuvagum
Obama's greatest skill is in avoiding blame and taking credit. Harvard teaches that, doesn't it.
Ohioites
Is this a usage, or something you just made up?
31 has in fact largely been my view; but his administration (whether or not BHO personally) has accumulated some real foreign policy achievements. Domestic is a whole different shitstorm.
Did Obama not admit that Libya was stupid shit? Or at least not planning for the aftermath (not that it is clear what effective planning would have looked like.)
Yes. Don't recall if that's in the OP link.
35: He kinda subtly blames Libya on Clinton, although of course mouthing the pablum about ultimate responsibility etc.
Just like the too small stimulus got blamed on Summers, who nevertheless later got close to the Fed Chair for his horrendous fail.
Personally, I think the "bipartisan change the tone in DC" was the plan from the start, so that failures (or successes O wanted distance from) could get blamed on Republicans/rightie Dems, or the lesser sins of naivety and idealism.
I think that was the plan from the start because he drank his own kool-aid. Incompetence, not malice.
That seems about right to me. One of the disturbing things about his first term for me was the dawning realization that all that stuff about changing the tone and bipartisanship and coming together and so on was not actually soaring rhetoric at all but actually his plan. And it took an incredibly long time for him to realize that it seriously, really, very much was not going to happen even in the face of it clearly not happening and his opponents openly explaining to everyone who would listen that they would disembowel themselves publicly before they let it happen.
I may have phrased 37 badly.
I didn't mean to say he actually believed he was going to change the tone, but that the plan was to say it in order to have an excuse.
Hard to explain, but here are a couple graphs showing an example of what I am talking about. Government purchases/spending
My contention is that Obama always was a fiscal conservative and austerian, wanting to cut taxes and spending from the start of his campaign.* The question arose of how to get that done, after the Democratic landslide of 2008, while keeping his base and popularity for 2012.
Not incompetent at all. Brilliant, especially in inspiring (and demoralizing) the Republican base for the 2010 midterm debacle, about the only way he could manage the long term downsizing and privatization of the government. He desperately needed a Republican House.
*Perhaps if you like, he wanted to change black Democrats image from one of "tax-and-spend," something like the DLC project of the 80s and 90s)
PS, politics from NYT about very liberal Southern cities. Jackson Mississippi become way cool.
Fourteen of the 20 fastest-growing metro areas in the nation between 2010 and 2015 were in the South, according to an analysis of census data by the Institute for Southern Studies. That boom has not been driven by heavy industry, but by banking, insurance, health care and, increasingly, technology.Mr. Guillory, at the University of North Carolina, noted that the companies fueling the booms are often national or global, and cannot afford to brook sentiments that even begin to smack of bigotry.
"It isn't that these cities are elevating New Deal liberalism," he said. "It's much more of a cultural political liberalism. It's a different kind of mixture."
I found it depressing. Multicultural Neoliberal elites.
So I guess this is the current politics thread. I'd like to ask for some help here. This is starting up in my Facebook: "Thoughts?
7 mins ยท
The reasons for this "loss" are quite simple. In Nov and Dec last year the Dem Party database firewall went down on 3 occasions. On the last occurance a former Clinton employee who was placed within the Sanders Campaign staff as manager of their own database within the Dem Party overall voter database, "downloaded" a portion of Clinton's voter database. This "inside job" created a false story that hid the actions of the Clinton Campaign, who in all likelihood accessed the complete Sander's voter database and used that as a basis to organize a purge of Sander's voters from Ohio, Arizona, NY (as well as more states to come and past).
Also note that tonight's poll results, just like Ohio and Arizona are being reported as static % voting for Clinton over Sanders with a 21% lead. This is an impossibility tonight just as it was in the previous two "odd" elections where exit polling (usually highly accurate) shows a small vote differential or 3-6%. In truth the states different regions and precincts votes in very different patterns than the static 21% being shown. In some Clinton win by 60-40, in others Bernie won 60-40...and larger variable % differences have already been individually reported. If those were being accurately reported in the major media counts, the % difference between the candidates would be jumping around dramatically. The very static nature of the % the media is reporting is a definitive sign of collusion between the DNC/Clinton camps and those major media news outlets.
Why do I say this, I have been an election observer in 4 major, highly disputed elections in Africa over the last 15 years. In each one of these the US State Dept, CIA, EU observer teams, UN observer teams and even local African NGO observer teams looked at this exact relationship between poll reporting % in the government controlled or ruling party controlled media as a sign of massive vote fraud. This single issue was raised in each of those elections where I was an observer and was used by Hillary Clinton's own State Dept as an excuse to declare that election in question as "not free and fair" or as an out right fraud against the people of that country. She knows the playbook well...she just defrauded the people if NY and the US with this same strategy here, with the collusion of the US major media.
Please Share and repost..."
I want to debunk this. All I could come up with right away was: I dunno. I guess if it is for real there are going to be a huge number of people talking about how they were prevented from voting.
I'm definitely not going to believe this without ironclad proof, but I'm afraid others will. Give me your best arguments.
Nope, too late. After tonight, thank God, the right response to Sanders whatever is "no one gives a shit anymore."
The reasons for this "loss" are quite simple.
Indeed, they are simplicity itself: more New Yorkers voted for Hillary than for Bernie.
Why spend your time in the fever swamp, roger? You can make yourself sick that way.
I think it makes sense for both 42 and 43 to fuck off.
Speaking as someone who caucused for Sanders (and holy shit is caucusing ever a terrible way to select a candidate), I've got to admit that there's no point in wading into the fever swamp over this. Anyone who's that far gone is not going to be convinced of anything.
Yeah I guess it was a silly idea at that.
And Tooze's books are legitimately great. Reading group? They're both very long and dense.
I would definitely be on for a reading group! I've read them both but "The Wages of Destruction" in particular is one of those ones you can read again and again.
Tooze reading group in. That's Mossy, me, ajay on this thread.
I enjoyed the Capital readalong here a lot. I'd be happy to keep a list of who'se interested or whatever overhead there is.
How about choosing a preferred book, and asking Heebie to post asking if there are more interested readers who maybe didn't show up in this thread?
Which book, Deluge or Wages? I have read neither, I'd slightly prefer Deluge for myself. I 'd also guess more participants that way, because the Nazi economy is not the most obvious summer reading choice.
Both of those books cost more in a paper copy than on Kindle, which annoys me. Especially "Wages" as I'm trying to get away from reading things with the Swastika on the cover for bus-riding reasons.
Mobes, I'm going to refrain from saying the words p!rated PDF if you're that cheap. Sympathies on the book cover thing though, also on not wanting to carry a brick, I am with you there.
I've read both. I think the Nazi economy book is better and a mind-altering masterpiece. OTOH I think the Deluge would be a better reading group book - more to argue about, less need to be a specialist to offer interesting critiques, more direct relevance to today. OTOOH it is maybe less compelling as narrative than the Nazi economy book. Would be happy to do a reading group for either book.
52: I feel bad about pirating when the actual book is still well under $20.
One of Tooze's key arguments is that ebook piracy makes you Hitler.
I'll just get it from the library.
I can always be talked into reading groups, though I still haven't finished Black Jacobins. Sorry, snark!
How about we read A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal?
My mother just mailed it to me, so I have to read it.
Sort of on topic, if I bothered to attach a link:
Because of the power of Broadway, the new plan is to keep Hamilton on the $10 and replace Jackson on the $20 with Harriet Tubman.
60: That sounds like a win. I'm no expert, but Jackson seems to have been much more of an asshole than Hamilton.
Somewhere, a kid writing a musical about Jackson is furious.
62: Everyone forgets there already was a Broadway musical about Andrew Jackson!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Bloody_Andrew_Jackson
63: Interesting. I'd never heard of it (just googled it).
More to 60: since most ATM machines only dispense $20s, this will give Tubman a bigger visibility boost than if she were on the $10.
Andrew Jackson has the same butt as Bruce Springstein.
61: Genocide trumps elitism in the Asshole Hall of Fame. And Tubman was a major badass, so it's pretty sweet that she's displacing Jackson.
I finally got pushed to listen to Hamilton. Holy crap is it great.
66.2: Racist southerners might switch to $50s*, but maybe not because those have the guy who was buried in Grant's tomb.
* For reasons of inflation, the $50 is almost closer to value to the value of a $20 when ATMs became common than a $20 is now.
Yes, I'm excited about the Harriet Tubman $20 bills.
I picture myself getting a stack of 20s at the ATM and looking at them and saying, "Set me free, Harriet!" But I'm not sure what I do next.
I'd have preferred Francis Perkins, for the same reason Drum would: public servant, not just inspirational person.
I realize that the coins have already, at least since the Suzie abandoned that rule. And I'm not sure Franklin ever held a post under the current constitution either, although he was a delegate to the convention.
Racist southerners might switch to $50s*, but maybe not because those have the guy who was buried in Grant's tomb.
This really is great, isn't it. All the way from the $5 to the $50, we'll have abolitionist coverage (construed broadly, but still).
72: It would be hilarious and sad if the $2 bill becomes the currency of racists. I like novelty money.
Anyway, keeping Hamilton and putting a women--and especially Tubman--on the $20 is just so awesome in every possible way.
I also love the fact that Hamilton is retaining his spot on the $10 because of a Broadway musical.
Hamilton wasn't actually any kind of abolitionist, right? I bet racist southerners hate Grant a lot more than Tubman. I mean, even among racists slavery is currently unpopular.
Well, he was a member of the New York Manumission Society. It's not enough to make him a hero in the battle against slavery, but it's enough to call him an abolitionist, I think.
Maybe instead of Grant we should have Sherman.
Nah, Sherman was annoying. I read Grant's memoirs, and he turned into my favorite person ever. Then I read Sherman's memoirs and wanted to smack him. Yes, brilliant general, yes, deep understanding of the horrors of war, but I don't want him replacing Grant on anything.
I like that they both look so modern. Lincoln looks like he came from an earlier era, but Sherman and Grant look like moderately successful Ohio businessmen.
Grant's memoirs created a persona which has impressed people since they were published. McFeely has a good essay on the self-deception many readers have had in identifying with that persona.
I appreciate both memoirs in their different ways; Edmund Wilson perceptively described Sherman's as "picaresque," full of episodes. They're also full of what might be called skits, little play-lets. Sherman was mad for theater. In that way they remind me of Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That.
I guess it's time to turn on the VonWafer signal and aim it at the clouds.
I need to read Grant's memoirs. I read Sherman's years ago and enjoyed them. Some of the incidents before the war were interesting. For instance, he describes trying deal with a run on a San Francisco bank that he was in charge of. I forget how he dealt with it. I don't think it involved any shooting.
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Re: Reading group, with ancillary trolling
Read Deluge Tooze is too much, Frank's Listen Liberal is hot, but am inspired from reasons to be explained to recommend to the blog:
The Hamilton libretto, read as a work of ideas and politics
I have found several songs online, don't think it would be hard to post a few
Why inspired? Dark night of the insomniac came across LGM and Vox Dylan Matthews vilification of Andrew Jackson, which led to a little reading on Burr and an insight or intuition. There was much discussion in LGM threads that the eras now and then are incommensurable, and historical revisionism is goin too far. My gut disagreed.
I felt a parallel or something that goes something like:
Clinton/Hamilton = urban cosmopolitan elitism
Cruz/Jackson/Jefferson = rural populist racism
Trump? = Burr?
And what was interesting is to me how Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn socialist who moved to Vermont, and what he represents has no place in this enduring liberal narrative.
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Ps:Harriet Tubman? Meh, two fer one placid tokenism
Nat Turner.
Okay, Douglass. Emma G.
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Thinking a little more, about why I am offended by the current Hamilton apotheosis
I have always loathed Hamilton, and Clinton/Obama and of course Cruz/Jackson/Jefferson, and in my gut understand how Hamilton made deals with Jefferson and why I think Clinton will get along with Cruz McConnell and the House, in ways those who see the world in that polarity above in 84 can't understand.
It's about Fucking Meritocracy being anti-democratic and anti-socialist and how I fear, mistrust and oppose all those who raised themselves from a log cabin up by their bootstraps to go golfing with the billionaires. I kinda despise personal ambition.
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Sometimes Yggles is really smart. Read after I wrote the above
How Lin-Manuel Miranda taught liberals to love Alexander Hamilton
But to someone like Bernie Sanders and his supporters, crushing the political power of the rich is the central political cause of our time -- the key from which everything else follows. This worldview is incompatible with both the spirit of high-dollar, star-studded fundraising events (which, indeed, Sanders eschews) and with the idea of celebrating Hamilton and the Hamiltonian tradition in American politics.Not coincidentally, it also has a somewhat strained relationship with some of the racial justice and immigrant rights causes ("the billionaires," for example, are clearly not the primary impediment to the policing reforms sought by Black Lives Matter nor to obtaining a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants) that helped inspire the historiographical revisions that are the basis of Miranda's Hamilton.
Miranda is fucking serving New York finance.
And then there is Loomis over at LGM. Loomis, FFS.
"Another way this is really interesting is that it's really hard for me to see people who are damning Andrew Jackson defend the American Revolution. The American Revolution was largely a movement of racist white tax avoiders who openly advocated for genocide against Native Americans and who then acted upon that."
Is this the current politics thread? Because this Vox essay seems worth discussion. (Although it's so long that we might need to start a formal reading group to get anyone to finish it.) Excerpt:
Well, sure. In the past 30 years of American life, the Republican Party has dedicated itself to replacing every labor law with a photo of Ronald Reagan's face.But this does not excuse liberals beating full retreat to the colleges and the cities, abandoning the dispossessed to their fate. It does not excuse surrendering a century of labor politics in the name of electability. It does not excuse gazing out decades later to find that those left behind are not up on the latest thought and deciding, We didn't abandon them. The idiots didn't want to be saved.
It was not Ronald Reagan who declared the era of big government. It was not the GOP that decided the coastally based, culturally liberal industries of technology, Hollywood, and high finance were the future of the American economy.
If the smug style can be reduced to a single sentence, it's, Why are they voting against their own self-interest? But no party these past decades has effectively represented the interests of these dispossessed. Only one has made a point of openly disdaining them too.
Abandoned and without any party willing to champion their interests, people cling to candidates who, at the very least, are willing to represent their moral convictions. The smug style resents them for it, and they resent the smug in turn.
The rubes noticed that liberal Democrats, distressed by the notion that Indiana would allow bakeries to practice open discrimination against LGBTQ couples, threatened boycotts against the state, mobilizing the considerable economic power that comes with an alliance of New York and Hollywood and Silicon Valley to punish retrograde Gov. Mike Pence, but had no such passion when the same governor of the same state joined 21 others in refusing the Medicaid expansion. No doubt good liberals objected to that move too. But I've yet to see a boycott threat about it.
Isn't this just the same old same old "why not shove the blacks and women and gays and union members and greenies and intellectuals [continue until you finish alienating the whole Democratic electorate] under the bus and see if the Republicans like us a bit?"
I mean, this comes around every 18 months or so since the original What's the Matter with Kansas? and post-2004 despair threads, and since then you managed to win the White House twice without running as Republicans 2.0 With Slightly Fewer Guns.
89: Like I said, Sanders and his supporters just don't fit in your polarized worldview at all.* Y'all try to make him fit with "Berniebros" etc but then you see the 60-70% of black women under 30 who preferred him to Clinton.
I also have gotten the feeling that Vox, possibly contra Klein, has seen the future of the center-left and politics, and it ain't Clintonism. This is a fairly sudden change
The future also may not be the Democratic Party. A generation has decided the Party is too corrupt to reform.
Your comment kinda has the frame:"What about women? Driving the bus or back of the bus?"
And if I reframe as "What about workers, the 80%? Driving or baggage?" You think I am talking only about white conservative men?