It's also obvious that just like in WW2, American business will align itself with business interests even if those interests seem to be outright wrong. No matter, money is money. You would think we'd learned but we have learned nothing.

As for a Smith refusing, yes, that could be the case. But there was no consolidation of power and industry as there is in Capitalism. So you could easily find many other Smiths to help you with whatever you needed. Going forward there are many specialized industries many of which are extremely consolidated. So you can't just go to someone else they own a whole spectrum. And that also makes it much easier for China to shut down things, as they could blacklist a whole set of businesses not just one.

It would be interesting to see Trump pass a law prohibiting any US company from doing this... from stiffing freedom of speech to support China.

Maybe like we make a new category of money that can only do certain things and is heavily regulated and watched. And that's the sort of money that you can have way up there in the clouds, you can't have regular people money which is the money we have right now.

That then would move the discussion from how much they have, to what they can do with it.

Saddam was willing to leave.

> Both were successful by the metrics set out for it.

Because they were beat downs.

> Afghanistan and the second Iraq war, and the various "police actions" undertaken since then, have objectives that are unclear or are metric-based and do not easily translate to a simple objective that can be reasoned to be a stable endpoint.

i.e. not beat downs. America is good at beat downs, any idiot with a gun is good at a beat down because as the Beastie Boys said it takes a second to wreck. It takes time to build.

Remote wars then are bad because they facilitate beat downs. Because America has big guns, lots of money, and little actual intelligence of how to fix or change anything.

It's funny all these people saying oh well the CIA doesn't do anything it's those stupid people who are fighting with each other because of their ideology. And then look at how Russia with a bit of money screwed up American politics and how badly they reacted to this little bit of interference.

Prison is a final measure when all other measures have failed. Even with prison, first time offenders of non-serious crimes usually do not do time or are diverted to other programs to help them avoid this fate. I just love how all the nerds here are going crazy over letting bullies off the hook initially to try to reform them -- it's as if they all want to bully the bullies.

You can not eliminate the personality that needs bullying to validate themselves from the population. You can however hep them channel those needs into other things like entrepreneurship and leadership. To productively shape their needs for power over people rather than harassing and harming them.

There is no science and epistemology without their drivers. They are in fact the political economy. You can not divorce how they are used from politics.

So no matter how much stupid shit we do that makes no sense from any rational perspective we can tell a story about how it's good and make it all better. Then when someone like that 16 year old Thunberg girl tells a story that's against all the stories we have been telling we get angry about it going against progress, development, and technology... which are all stories of their own that obfuscate the fact that all of these things are not capable of co-existing with any sort of stable natural system here on earth... as they are meant to continuously destroy and recreate reality. They are in effect to turn reality into fantasy (we call it science fiction) by any means necessary.

Or you can hate people because they are not your tribe or religion... and then the West moves in an exploits that tribalism... And everyone is miserable and murdering in killing each other. The Ottomans were making wars on everyone around them for the longest time. There was no tolerance for anyone other than Orthodox versions of faiths like Islam.

Point being economic power structure is a lot more productive and stable than one based on tribalism or religion... As long as you play by its rules... Otherwise your own tribalism is exploited and you are soon turned into a fool.