The effects of empire go far beyond military. The monetary dominance serves as a hidden tax on all other currencies as the US enjoys more money creation than other central banks can manage. The US prints and the world gets the inflation consequences. Plus the cultural dominance lets the US reshape the world economy, legal systems and behavior to suit the interests of US companies. And yes, there is massive political interference and an absolute fit when foreign governments don’t bend the knee.
Your big mistake here is to imply some kind of us vs them. Regular Americans are not laughing at you, they are under the same boot heel that you are. This whole system is for the benefit of maybe a few thousand or tens of thousands of incredibly rich and powerful people. They don’t care about the citizenship of of the people they are exploiting. Actually, people in the EU have done a better job fighting back for more comfortable lives for all. Working class Americans are a lost cause.
And who exactly was running continental Europe before that?
meanwhile the US was pretty upset about the idea
I think the message is clear that it’s best not to upset the US.
see I can understand this logic pre 2014, but post 2014 (i.e. Crimea), absolutely not
the euros paid to putin were used to re-arm and those weapons are now being used in Ukraine
and if he wins then Eastern Europe is next in line
but yes germans saved 2% on their gas bills for 10 years
I doubt Putin is suicidal. Eastern Europe is in NATO, hence protected.
you've seen the playbook in ukraine twice now
there will be an russian speaking minority in estonia/lithuania/... that will that rebel against anti russian oppression, guerilla warfare against the authorities, then they'll hold an rigged referendum, then a decade later the Russian government will formally annex what they've effectively controlled for years
he won't send tanks across the border that will trigger Article 5
Well don't oppress them. Anyways in Ukraine Russian speakers are hardly the minority. In Baltic states however Russian speakers are true minority and do not matter much. They can't hold a referendum. Your logic does not make any sense to me.
What's this supposed to mean?
Certainly it's not referring to the portion of native speakers.
So you mean it's OK to oppress people just because they are Russian, or speak Russian? And the bad guys are those against oppression?
Long story short I am not sure NATO Eastern Europe is protected 100%. Luckily for now Putin cannot afford another front but there is already some saber rattling between Belarus and Poland and Wagner is in Belarus.
And I don’t know who did the sabotage, and I don’t know if it was on the suggestion of the US, but the winner certainly seems to be the US which has very effectively pulled Germany away from Russia and Russian energy markets.
https://gpil.jura.uni-bonn.de/2021/01/germany-rejects-u-s-sa...
It finally got its wish with the destruction of the NS2 ..
You all created us. So, you all are technically responsible for your own problems. ;)
Also, the US was bombing a couple of Middle Eastern countries then: creating the said refugees who could reach Europe on foot and/or boat, but not the American mainland .
One day there will be a massive wave of climate refugees rushing out of the uninhabitable zone and there will be US soldiers in the border guard towers with flamethrowers. The US will welcome immigrants when it suits them and roast them when it doesn’t.
As I am in Berlin right now I’ll remind us it wouldn’t be the first time people on top of a wall had kill on sight orders.
Are you talking about Canada?
Whether all this was in some sense worth it for mysterious realpolitik greater-good reasons—I dunno. Looks pretty bad on its own, anyway. Not enough help to win—but just enough to keep the fight going forever. Doesn't make much sense to me unless the point was to accomplish exactly that (to disrupt Russian and/or Iranian interests in the area without pushing too hard? To keep Syria too distracted to mess with Israel? Destabilize Syria so it can't interfere with Iraq's fledgeling state? I have no idea what the real motivation is or was, but it sure as hell doesn't seem to have been "help the Syrian people"—if it was, we've screwed that up pretty badly)
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-the-united-states-has...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-un-idUKBRE87...
I was mostly thinking of Syria and Daesh, and had forgotten about Libya. A non-insignificant chunk of refugees headed to Europe transit through Libya - which didn't use to be the case before Gaddafi was deposed.
The US went for Syria/Assad leading the intervention and whilst France picked up it's involvement against ISIL & the like particularly after the Paris attacks it wasn't as big on it as Libya.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-the-united-states-has...
Evidence against: https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/mariel-impact.pdf
My experience with social safety nets in EU is that they have been there when I’ve needed them - when I was a poor student, when I was sick — and now that I’m in a different life phase I pay that forward
Your math makes sense at any given instant, but who is on what side changes if you view it over time
Do you have a citation for that broad brush number for what they take?
If there are 101 people, 100 making 101 sandwich per year and 1 doing nothing, and everyone needs 100 sandwiches per year, 99% are contributing more than they take. This works the other way too.
Already your argument is falling apart. Government spending goes disproportionately to children and the elderly who don't work. Workers, even low skill ones, are almost always a net positive.
whose failure? Why are Europeans the default racists? The US is not even integrated and is going through large scale migration right now that has never happened before so the success of US integration is still too early to say. What does integration look like because the US has ethnic enclaves, everyone knows that.
It's absolutely right that the US promoted demographic change to Europe who followed foot but the migrants lack the skills who arrive and I don't think this even solves the problem. It may exacerbate the demographic trap for various reasons.
And by Europeans here, I mean the EU, the govt of some individual WE countries and a small minority of vocal activist personalities who haven't got any other purpose in life. Most run of the mill folks I meet are either strongly opposed or negatively indifferent to migrants, in direct opposition of their govts.
Most countries could have just said no to migrants, like Poland, Greece and Switzerland did. But they all wanted to play the self-righteous card.
Additionally many blame the likes of Merkel for the self righteous stance unaware of the fact that she (and her Dutch partners and such) had the greatest effect on building down inflow with an agreement she started brokering with turkey well before her famous comment. On the other hand fences and hard rhetoric in Hungary or the like did not visibly affect the numbers of incoming refugees.
The Turkish agreement is meaningless - if all of Europe had been vehemently opposed to importing immigrants, immigration would have stopped at the Turkish-Syrian border. Immigration did not happen because of the Syrian war - it was a constant trend. What opened the spigot was the fall of hard regimes in North Africa such as Libya, Tunisia and North Africa (something EU biggies like France, Netherlands, Germany supported because "dictators bad!"), which led to their own borders becoming much weakened.
Third, no immigrant wants to settle in Hungary because they're immigrants, not refugees. And as immigrants, they're simply choosing the country with the best welfare. There was even an article in 2016ish I read (I'm sure there are loads) where an interviewee said that he was taking his family from Greece all the way to Sweden because the welfare benefits were better.
This sounds like post hoc justification. If you want immigrants, wouldn't you want to pick the best and brightest, rather than whoever washes up on your shore?
* speaks the local language
* is highly educated (eg. post-secondary degree)
* is young
* has expertise in an in-demand industry
than one who is missing one or more of the above? For non-refugees, you can screen for the above factors and only admit the ones who are qualified, but for refugees you can't.
And that's fine, because those jobs can either be automated, outsourced, done domestically (ie. driving yourself rather than getting delivery), or at worst case paying more. All things being equal I'd rather have a chemical engineer who can do chemical engineering and deliver pizza, than someone who can only deliver pizza.
- not all jobs can be automated
- manual laborers make less money
If you see immigrants all around you doing great, while you clean toilets and struggle to feed yourself, that breeds resentment of your government.
And sure, it's easy to say the jobs should just pay more, but that's not the reality today, and if your choice is working a shitty job or starving then that's not really a choice at all.
I would also rather have the chemical engineer, but I think it would be even better to live in a society where both the delivery driver and the chemical engineer are net positives to society.
I never claimed that refugees have no selection effects, but is that selection effect comparable to proper immigration screening?
The US has something similar with its illegal immigration from Mexico. Every politician since Clinton has pledged to stop illegal immigration but nobody actually does anything about it, because they know that that their labor is essential to the country, and replacing the illegal immigration with legal immigration is too much of a political sore point.
for example look at Hungary. immigration is very unpopular at the polls, yet now the same government that created this sentiment through endless propaganda passed laws to allow more immigration of laborers, because the new Chinese battery factories that are under construction will require a lot more unskilled labor than which is available. they try to limit any kind of anchoring, no family unification, no visa for non-working spouses, etc. but it's not clear that this will actually attract enough workers...
The statistics are clear, these are just facts.
Yeah, that sounds like 'blaming the victim'
This is not a magical solution where you bring people and the GDP magically increases
It works in the US due to a variety of factors, but I agree with you that being a bit less racist at the same time pushing them to success (read: sink or swim) helps. Oh and the US has much less tolerance for people who come with bad intent and deports a lot more