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Re:PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN by adventured on Sunday July 12, 2020 @04:56AM (#23809961)
> Sure Americans have always thought it was acceptable to spend trillions destroying property and killing people as long as it was done on foreign soil “to bring democracy”.

That's so far fetched as to be silly. You mean "always" as in rarely have Americans agreed with that, and it didn't occur in the style you're implying until after WW2. The US military had very rarely left its own shores until WW1, and not in a huge & sustained way until WW2 and thereafter. The US didn't even have a proper standing military capable of leaving its shores leading up to WW2, it had to be rapidly assembled.

The US was an isolationist heavy nation culturally until after WW2, the globalization superpower era.

Vietnam was so popular & acceptable (ie not at all) among Americans it helped cause a severe cultural revolution.

The American people overwhelmingly do not want involved in foreign wars: they get ignored by the globalist war & meddling hawks. And now when a populist isolationist in Trump tries to leave Syria or Afghanistan or Germany, bring troops home, and pull back on the military industrial complex and its foreign adventurism, the globalists (in both parties) lose their minds and try to stop him. It's all hilarious in a farcical sort of way.

Re:PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN by jahaja on Sunday July 12, 2020 @02:27PM (#23813505)
Uhm, what? Philippines, Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Russia etc? All before WW2.
Re:PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN by scarface74 on Sunday July 12, 2020 @08:18AM (#23810781)
Let’s look at the last 40 years. We funded Osama and the Sandinistas in the 80s, the second Iraq War and Afghanistan to start.

Unless there are a lot of Americans being killed, no one cares.

If Trump were truly trying to pull back on the military industrial complex, he would cut military spending on weapons that goes to private industry - especially weapons that the military doesn’t even want - and finally close some of the military bases that military leaders are suggesting but the civilian government keeps open as a make jobs program.

Re:PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN by johnny22 on Sunday July 12, 2020 @05:54AM (#23810211)
they elected the people who put them in a war. It didn't happen in a vacuum
Re:PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN by 082349872349872 on Sunday July 12, 2020 @06:48AM (#23810423)
For the abhorred vacuum before the Great War, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informatio... and the Creel Report. (it was not novel at the time, "Remember the Maine!" having occurred in the previous century)

Orwell's "two minutes hate" was descriptive, not predictive. (His wife did work in the Ministry of Information during WWII, after all.)

p.178 of The World of Yesterday https://ia601609.us.archive.org/21/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.1... describing germanophone Zwei Minuten Hass in 1914:

> "Limited in their experience of Europe as a whole, and living entirely within the German circle of thought, most of our writers believed that their best contribution was to strengthen the enthusiasm of the masses and support the supposed beauty of war with poetic appeals or scientific ideologies. ... Poems poured forth that rhymed Krieg with Sieg and Not with Tod. Solemnly the poets swore never again to have any cultural association with a Frenchman or an Englishman ; they went even further, they denied overnight that there had ever been any French or English culture. It was insignificant and valueless in comparison with German character, German art, and German thought. But the savants were even worse. The sole wisdom of the philosophers was to declare the war a “bath of steel” which would beneficially preserve the strength of the people from enervation. The physicians fell into line and praised their prosthesis so extravagantly that one was almost tempted to have a leg amputated so that the healthy member might be replaced by an artificial one. The ministers of all creeds had no desire to be outdone and joined in the chorus, at times as if a horde of possessed were raving, and yet all of these men were the very same whose reason, creative power, and humane conduct one had admired only a week, a month, before."

(sometimes two minutes hate doesn't pay off: Bismarck used the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ems_Dispatch#Incident leak to sucker[1] the french into declaring war, in much the same way that a toreador waves the cape to citar, to provoke a charge from the amygdala, not the cortex, or the same way that Kenobi suckered Vader by turning off his light sabre)

[1] in his student days, Bismarck practiced provoking the attacks of a single opponent. Baiting nations in his mature career would then only have been a matter of scale. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck_als_Student#...

Schlagerpartys > Schlägerpartien. At least they're much less of a sausagefest.