In various discussions about “what do we do with Venezuela?” we should not ignore that the people asking the question are representatives of a military superpower who took it upon itself to intervene in Venezuelan politics.
The US, as a superpower per se is hardly a good candidate to step and help the poor benighted Venezuelans set up a new government, considering that it has conspired in the overthrow of many publicly constituted governments and is, currently, led by a man who attempted to overthrow his own democratic process, then succeeded in the position electorily. The US, with its racist gerrymandered electoral college, is a duopolistic oligarchy that badly needs a house-cleaning in terms of the health of its body politic. We cannot ignore the effects of systemic racism in its founding, or its colonial projects.
My opinion is that the international community should no longer recognize the US as a legitimately constituted democracy and should remove it from the UN Security Council along with Russia (A dictatorship led by Putin) and China (another dictatorship led by Xi). If the populations of these nations adopt constitutions and sets of laws, and ratify them, that would be a good idea. I would further suggest that once the UN gets the US, China, and Russia off the Security Council, the council’s bylaws should be rewritten to do away with the privileged veto.
Note that any ratifiable constitution cannot embody the idea that a nation should be allowed to maintain and deploy an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.* Currently there are several nations in the United Nations that have secret or semi-secret arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, or stealth first-strike weapons. They all need to adopt constitutions or amendments deprecating them as a tool of statecraft and turning them over to the UN, collectively, as wardens and controllers of their terrible power.
Furthermore, since the globe is facing a climate crisis, it would be a good opportunity, now, to establish a supra-national climate control authority with the power to set emissions standards, and the capability to enforce them first with political force then with military if necessary. The military of every nation (I am looking at you, United States) should be counted against their carbon “footprint” and their use, deployment, and equipment should be in line with international non-imperialistic goals.
I am not saying that everone needs to go forth and study Locke, Paine, and Rousseau. I am saying, however, that it would have helped. Humanity has allowed some of the worst among us to take control over the rest of us. The catastrophic damage that government-sponsored “free market” anarcho-capitalism in the United States model has done to the globe is possibly beyond repair and is about 50/50 likely to wipe us out. Never mind all the other stuff.
Reliable climate models appear to be accurately predicting the incipient collapse of fisheries and agriculture, and the onset of world-wide famines and catastrophes over the next 30-50 years. Governments that ignore Rousseau and Paine’s basic arguments – that they are there to serve their people – will fail and be replaced in turn with those that are capable of doing so, or at least trying. Our future is to decide if the film Mad Max is a cautionary tale, or a documentary. Is embedding ourselves in a thin layer of pollution along with the dinosaurs, racists, monarchists, flat earthers, and deranged sectarians – is that the best we can do?
Humanity has lazed along too long, allowing the worst among us, and the least qualified, to rule us. At the nadir, are the theocratic ethno-states, which purport that our political options should be selected by breeding and/or good luck. Again, I am not saying we all need to study Rosseau and Paine, but we all need to understand their arguments, or we will collectively perish of heat, drought, and famine while vain and foolish leaders argue about who gets to claim a popular mandate. We, the people, need to establish that mandate and – in the meantime – stop the sociopathic fringe that wants to rule humanity from stepping near the reins of power.
We have a lot of work to do, and the cliff is approaching fast. Honestly, our fall has begun already.
If I may address you so, we are all comrades, for we all depend on eachother making the right decisions.
mjr.
*wave wave*
Bébé Mélange@#1:
Keeping things real around here? Ja?
i have to keep them unreal as much as possible.
That actually makes me wonder…. Do you ever do back-and-forth story telling sessions? I just wound up creating a minor conspiracy theory involving some battery plans and some black magic played by a tired old veteran in Las Vegas…I have a ton of fun messing with this stuff until I start feeling like it’s maybe bedtime. Someday there will be entire computer games’ plots devoting to unscrewing your characters from the arcane conundrums they get into.
It’s even spookier because I am pretty sure GPT won’t kill off one of my favorite characters like old general Flashman, but Himmler is charred toast if he tries to be the hero. So this thing “understands” narrative structure?
(edit: of course it does, it’s read every human story ever committed to media)
It’s neither. It is, in fact, propaganda; trying to tell people: “Don’t worry. It might seem rough, but isn’t it also kinda cool?”
As with all such wish-fulfillment, people always think they’re going to be the bad-ass anti-hero. They never seem to think they’ll be ‘guy with the infected face wound’.
LykeX@#5:
Yes, for some reason when they see “98% die-off” they don’t realize that means maybe 1,000 years of being perpetually in the 2% ain’t gonna happen.
The Zuckerbergs and Bezoses don’t realize that 100,000 years of famine is gonna affect Doordash. My favorite “I totally cannot wrap my mind around this” is the ‘pluvial event’s. Oh, wait, it rained for 10 million years straight? How are we supposed to get to 7-11 in that?! Shut up about the huge clouds of burning methane or choking CO2 just doodling around the lanscape. I already welcome death.
I’m 63 and have some money, great food and wine, and several bottles of diazapenes and a bunch of opium. If none of that works, I’ll be the happiest guy who ever played “Capitalist Roulette” (The capitalists own the gun, natch…)
Typo.
Russia (A dictatorship led by Putin) and China (another dictatorship led by Xi).
Crap. Both are fairly authoritarian leaders; neither for structural factors in the governments are dictators.
mjr@4 – in a sense, but more basic. i’ve used one of the phone app “companion ai” things to rp doing crimes. like, it was the wheelman while i robbed a convenience store and shot at police. nothing literary.
How would this work? Right now the UN is headquartered in the US. Presumably you’d see it headquarted in… Geneva, say?
First order of business is how you get all the people who work for the UN in the US OUT of the country without them being arrested or shot. If you manage that, you’ve got a nice little talking shop with a view of the lake and mountains where all the mice can agree that we ought to put a bell on the three cats. Except the three cats have all the food, all the water, and all the teeth and claws. (Yes, the UK has some teeth but I bet they can be bricked remotely, and France has some teeth but MAD is a thing so they’re largely pointless, no?).
The US on its own is so ludicrously dominant militarily that even if Russia, China and everyone else ganged up I wouldn’t bet on us against the US. Economically, China is in that position. Russia has nukes but its economy is in the toilet and militarily it’s not even able to roll over Ukraine and they’re right on its doorstep and much smaller, so they’re not really in the same league as the US and China.
I’m very pessimistic about the possibility of establishing a world order NOT based on US hegemony, unless a US president comes along who is OK with basically dismantling the US’s influence.
The British empire was in full flow at the beginning of the 20th century, but two world wars (and one world cup, doo dah) kicked the shit out of us economically and we had no choice but to give it up. The US was there to step in and take over, as it was on the up.
China could, at a whim, cripple the US economically, but they won’t do that because they take a longer view. But they’re sitting on a demographic time bomb too, so they’re not in the advantageous position the US was in 1945 to step up and rule the world. All advanced nations’ populations are getting old and if they’re growing at all it’s increasingly through immigration, not fertility.
I’m really just rambling now. The US is going to stay in charge probably for the rest of my life… but I don’t think it’s sustainable longer term than that, and the end of their empire is going to be bloodier and more horrible than the end of the British or Spanish empire periods.
Henry VI, Part 2
with modifications
chigau (違う) @ 11
Bugger, I’m still trying to work out which one’s Caligula and which one’s Tiberius! Soooo, in your mapping, which one’s Margaret and which one’s Young Clifford? ; )
astringer #11
I was just referring to the bit about the lawyers and suggesting a substitute for lawyers.
Marcus, things have advanced since this post. But, a question:
If Trump invades Greenland and NATO tries to stop him, will their F-35s get bricked?
@10 sonofrojblake
Put the UN headquarters in Tuvalu. Maybe that will help climate change to be taken seriously.
Move the UN to Puerto Rico and declare it a nation.
or some kind of city-state thing like The Vatican
ahcuah@#14:
If Trump invades Greenland and NATO tries to stop him, will their F-35s get bricked?
No, they will have plenty of other reasons not to work.
There was a time when we used to sit around and wonder if the USSR would have a “soft landing” from empire and now it appears that the same question is playing out. It appears that the way to soft land an empire is to put a chuckle-fuck in charge, e.g.: King Charles, Kaiser Wilhelm, Donald Trump.
Hitler was not a military genius.The genius was Manstein. Sadly, Manstein had to fight OKW tooth an nail to get permission to overthrow France. Ooops, I forgot to explain why none of this is relevant: Whoever is in charge of Greenland is interesting but the really interesting question is who has the logistical depth to hold and exploit. Imagine for a second, the insane difficulty of holding (whatever that means) territory while protecting extraction operations. The Russians right now are giving a great demo of how badly that works, and the Ukrainians are using quick response stuff off the top of their heads.
Obvious prediction: Napoleon and Manstein dominated their battlefields through the invention and brilliant use of combined arms. It says something mind-blowing about the French that they thought the strategic problem after WWI was exploiting breakthroughs. Meanwhile the German general staff had the French thoughts on what was going on and the French were legitimately right that exploiting breakthroughs was important. But the problem was that the panzers were not the point of the spear, the Stukas were. OOps, lose. Why is this relevant: the US could not hold Iraq long enough to get oil flowing again, and insurgents quickly drove them back into rear echelon canonments (see: force protection problem) The insurgent tacticts were hugely successful and were exactly as described by Sun Tzu in 600BC. You can’t blame the US for losing against new strategies like that. The F-35 will play its role if there is a conflict in Greenland. I’ll predict some weird shit for you:
F-35s: pff, one especially laughable aspect of them is (I have mentioned this before) they may be stealthy against radar but their sole over-clocked engine makes them lunchmeat against infrared missiles – after the F-35s get scaped from the sky the poor A-10s and F-16s will be back to doing the work.
B-52s: will work great. Why not, they used to be stationed at Thule and are well cold-wrung.
A-10s: I love A-10s but, sorry, they are used to Maryland spring and fall weather
Apaches: Crucial – they’ll be like the chasseurs a cheval de la garde imperial — they’ll take the field once and go home. But god damn it’ll be glorious!
So my short answer is that American air power will face-punch itself in a week. The US might still win if there is some clever strategy of using B-52s to hunt Drakens and Viggens.
Let’s us a historical analogy: could Rome have conquered Carthage? Well, yeah, they did. Could they have turned it into a productive colony that contributed to the empire? Are you kidding?
How long can the US hold Greenland without adopting the strategy it used in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria? 3 months. Not because those strategies are winning strategies (they are not) they are non-obviously-losing strategies.The end game of all off them, since Da Nang in Vietnam is a maginot line on the ground supported by massive air cover.
The only way to hold tough ground is to have the locals on your side, hold it with you. That works. The problem that so far the onl person who has turned that into doctrine was Ho Chi Minh.
So holding Greenland will mean keeping infiltration teams from sneaking in under the cover of darkness and blowing up infrastructure. That is the simple form.
The complex form, which will make me laugh till I get a hernia, if it happens, is the US keeps swinging its big schlong around and eventually a state of war obtains. Then some small number of Scandinavian Bastards (let’s say my kin) do a special operations attack involving someone’s willingness to survive in absolutely horrible weather, and maybe, let’s say, 6 B-52s explode. If I knew anything about the scandinavian/finnish/russian/latvian/specops team, I’d say it looked like the work of the Ukrainians because it would. I don’t know to what degree I want to go into this. My days mostly consist of polishing katana blades, (it is very satisfying to make a katana blade) and pondering force protection.
I hope SOMEONE in Trump-land is worrying about force protection, and I sincerely hope someone gives them enough oxycodone so they can quit with a minimum of pain. It is NOT a survivable problem. Let me give you one example: Rammstein. If the US triggers Article V by attacking Greenland, the Germans will probably show their proper military honor, by arranging a time-line of evacuation with the Americans in Rammstein. That’s the “we are all smiles” scenario. Planes come in and out and crypto gear and expensive secret stuff, maybe an Apache helicopter or 2, are destroyed. And the Americans also sneak out the 32-or-so Mark 81 low drag variable vield hydrogen bombs that live in approximently 4 revetments there. The Germans are punctilious diplomats and soldiers, and would never dream of interfereing with the departure of those bombs. What about England? What about Italy? How about Okinawa? Are the sons of the samurai tired, yet, of pretending we are not hiding nukes basically next to their nutsack? How about the South Koreans? The Japanese and the Koreans might really appreciate being able to study some US variable-vield stuff. They won’t sell it to Kim Jong Un because the tech just isnt there, but, seriously, the Trumpistas seem to be about to be engaging in a dance that nobody since Caesar would engage in (and if that doesn’t make ice-water run down your spine)
Trump will not attack Greenland because every NATO power with a US base will send an overwhelming force at 5:00am to secure the nukes and bombers and anything else of value. Picture men saluting and exchanging swords but, outside of Japan I don’t think anyone knows how to roll this without embarrassment.