One life. Cost: Unknown. Effect: Global?

[Wanderfound]

@gracchus

That’s why I found your use of “Western” capitalism confusing. Most socialists like yourself don’t have any use for capitalism of any sort (including non-Western forms). I’ll assume you mean any capitalism grounded in the the 18th-century Western philosophical thought of Smith and Hume from which industrial and then modern capitalism (Western and Asian, etc.) emerged.

I tend to use “Western” capitalism to emphasise that it isn’t just an economic system, it’s tied up with an entire history of geopolitical dominance and exploitation.

You can’t understand it just by reading Smith and Hume et al. You also need the history of the Dutch East India Company, the Belgian Congo, United Fruit, etc. etc.

[gracchus]

@Wanderfound

You can’t understand it just by reading Smith and Hume et al. You also need the history of the Dutch East India Company, the Belgian Congo, United Fruit, etc. etc.

Well sure. Perhaps there’s a better and more historically universal term: imperialist capitalism, perhaps. That would bring it up to date to take into account current non-Western situations like the current Chinese state-capitalist adventurism in Africa or the asset buying on the part of Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds.

[wait_really]

@Wanderfound

The zero-sum argument relies upon an assumption that the current arrangement of Western dominance and exploitation represents maximum efficiency.

The requirement for profit is a massive drag on efficiency, amongst other things.

The energy used to sustain profit at this stage in the game is beyond the energy which could satisfy the general necessities of every human on this planet.

[zathras]

It’s interesting how the topic has drifted from the “political correctness” issue I was originally addressing back to bbs’s standard themes.

When someone says, “I pay taxes for my own country, it’s not my job to pay for everyone else as long as I do no harm”, we usually assume that they are decent people who just aren’t going out of their way to do good.
When someone says, “I pay taxes for people of my own race, it’s not my job to pay for everyone else as long as I do no harm”, we usually assume they are a racist asshole and we do not trust them to “do no harm”.
That’s “political correctness”: we expect people to pay at least some lip service to some shared values. If they refuse to pay lip service, we assume they are actively opposed to said values.

By my standards, the “saving American lives” crap from the clip firmly fell into the latter category. By American standards, it’s probably just “something people say”. I feel like among the other contributors here, there is no approval of this way of speaking, but no real outrage either. Nothing like it would be if that journalist had talked about race instead of country.

But there’s also the theory that language shapes thought, so that’s why I’m calling those things out. I wasn’t talking about global policy, I wasn’t talking about immigration, I was talking about showing basic respect for other people at least in language.

I will probably also post some more on what has become the actual topic of this thread, only I’m out of time for now

[Wanderfound]

@zathras

By my standards, the “saving American lives” crap from the clip firmly fell into the latter category. By American standards, it’s probably just “something people say”. I feel like among the other contributors here, there is no approval of this way of speaking, but no real outrage either. Nothing like it would be if that journalist had talked about race instead of country.

But there’s also the theory that language shapes thought, so that’s why I’m calling those things out. I wasn’t talking about global policy, I wasn’t talking about immigration, I was talking about showing basic respect for other people at least in language.

I don’t disagree, BTW.

I have posted on similar themes before:

U.S. spies are withholding intelligence from Donald Trump, who has none

To a non-American, the implication that non-American lives are not worthy of protection is much more troubling. It’s how you end up with unjust horrors like this: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2016/15-118 But if we have to bring it back to a narrow focus on American interests: the rest of the world sees this happening, and we also hear how Americans discuss it. When y’all do things that make it obvious that non-American lives are seen as second class (at best), we notice. When the US media res…

U.S. spies are withholding intelligence from Donald Trump, who has none

No offense but as an American, I’m first concerned, when it comes to the law, that American laws are followed and citizens are treated as we should be legally. That’s the duty of the legal system my people are citizens within. That isn’t to say the lives of non-citizens don’t have value but if our laws don’t even protect the lives of citizens, they are certainly never going to help non-citizens.

U.S. spies are withholding intelligence from Donald Trump, who has none

I hear what you’re saying. What I’m saying, is that whenever you consider a question along the lines of “why do they hate us?”… …this. This is why you’re hated. Want to reduce terrorist attacks on the US? Stop casually slaughtering foreigners. Could you really blame Sergio Hernandez’s parents if they took vengeance on their son’s murderer and the organisation that protects him?

And I feel like this is also relevant:

By the end of my first year abroad, I read US newspapers differently. I could see how alienating they were to foreigners, the way articles spoke always from a position of American power, treating foreign countries as if they were America’s misbehaving children. I listened to my compatriots with critical ears: the way our discussion of foreign policy had become infused since September 11 with these officious, official words, bureaucratic corporate military language: collateral damage, imminent threat, freedom, freedom, freedom.

Even so, I was conscious that if I had long ago succumbed to the pathology of American nationalism, I wouldn’t know it – even if I understood the history of injustice in America, even if I was furious about the invasion of Iraq. I was a white American. I still had this fundamental faith in my country in a way that suddenly, in comparison to the Turks, made me feel immature and naive.

I came to notice that a community of activists and intellectuals in Turkey – the liberal ones – were indeed questioning what “Turkishness” meant in new ways. Many of them had been brainwashed in their schools about their own history; about Atatürk, Turkey’s first president; about the supposed evil of the Armenians and the Kurds and the Arabs; about the fragility of their borders and the rapaciousness of all outsiders; and about the historic and eternal goodness of the Turkish republic.

“It is different in the United States,” I once said, not entirely realising what I was saying until the words came out. I had never been called upon to explain this. “We are told it is the greatest country on earth. The thing is, we will never reconsider that narrative the way you are doing just now, because to us, that isn’t propaganda, that is truth. And to us, that isn’t nationalism, it’s patriotism. And the thing is, we will never question any of it because at the same time, all we are being told is how free-thinking we are, that we are free. So we don’t know there is anything wrong in believing our country is the greatest on earth. The whole thing sort of convinces you that a collective consciousness in the world came to that very conclusion.”

“Wow,” a friend once replied. “How strange. That is a very quiet kind of fascism, isn’t it?”

[kingannoy]

I live in the Netherlands, we get a lot of US media here. When I grew up I thought the US was really great. The brainwashing via the media worked really well

Slowly, partly because of stuff like this, partly because of just more awareness to the bad stuff that the US has done, the image in my head has changed. I wouldn’t say the US is all bad but it is really dangerous and doesn’t seem to be all that aware of it.

When the Snowden leaks came out, I was really put-off by the importance put on only listening in on non-Americans. I am a non-American, why do you think it is ok to not value my privacy? Of course it didn’t take long until facts came to light that showed even American’s privacy was trampled on large scale. This was suddenly a much bigger deal, it makes it look like you have very little empathy for the rest of the world.

This extreme patriotism seems to also imply that if you don’t live in “the greatest country in the world” you don’t deserve to be treated with respect, like you guys are all great, and deserving of respect, just for being born there. This may, ironically, be the least great thing about the USA.

[zathras]

@kingannoy

“the greatest country in the world”

To defend Americans for a change, there might be another cultural factor at play here. In my impression, Americans are a very positive culture. When an Austrian and an American both say “I’m okay”, that means the Austrian doesn’t want to be impolite by bragging about what a great day he’s having, and the American is suffering from clinical depressioin.

So when an American says “my country is the greatest”, the intention behind the words is probably a lot less arrogant than people from many other nations will think. And likewise, if someone from another nation tells an American that “no, America is not the greatest country ever”, it might seem a lot more negative to someone used to America’s “everything is awesome” attitude than to someone used to traditional Austrian negativity.

But still, someone needs to tell them when they are saying things that are just plain offensive to the rest of the world.