Never played a conquest game where you stop researchers from giving your empire a tech advantage over others.
Narrator: It did not.
It’s a popular strategy for Fascists.
the Nazis and the OG Fascists did it, and so did the communist Chinese.
China currently churns out more college graduates than any other country, and the rate is increasing.
And they had a hell of a way to go given that it was less than 1% when they took over.
China currently is not communist either.
They stopped killing academics at around the same time they stopped being communist.
Incredible, more than 100% wrongness
If you can get out, now’s the time.
If not, now’s the time to buy guns and ammo.
And share them with your friends. Learn from Lenin, learn from the Vietnamese, learn from Alpaca farms.
What’s the story of the Alpaca farms?
Thank you.
Maybe also learn how to build molotov cocktails, how to grow vegetables in your apartment, and stock some durable food.
I got out to,the UK, but England is full of wannabe Americans that couldn’t get into the US to live if they wanted to. But they’re intent on turning the UK into an American territory. These idiots are fully prepared to privatize the NHS and their infrastructure because their white buddies across the pond are somehow a great example of how to advance a country.
Lots of Ameriboos over here with no shame. They’d lick trump’s dirty ass if they could become the 51st state.
Unironically… Where’s the best place to go if you can get out and only speak english?
Almost anywhere in Europe is the answer. My son did his masters in Denmark and never learned Danish. He lives in Germany now and speaks fuck all German.
Once in the Netherlands, after losing my glasses I asked an optician if he could speak English and he was thoroughly insulted.
Britain and Ireland are both native English.
Has an empire ever been so complicit in their own demise?
Maybe Pol Pot murdering intellectuals and people who wear glasses?
But was Cambodia really an empire?
Yes. Just a couple of centuries earlier, so your point still stands.
Maybe Cambodia and Khmer Rouge? But not many.
Yes, many times. Historically, it seems like the very strong empires first defeated themselves and once they were sufficiently weakened for outside forces to be able to threaten them … they still kept being self sabotaged by their own elite who prioritized maneuvering against each other for temporary power/wealth grabs over working together to face the outside threats.
The late Roman empire has a bunch of good examples: blatant corruption, over taxation of the poor, many assassinations, sabotaging their peers that were trying to improve the situation, constant civil war, the battle that destroyed the military backbone of the western Roman empire was fought between romans, … And all that while the empire was being torn apart by outside invasions.
Or a more recent example: the polish Lithuanian commonwealth had a paralyzed government thanks to corrupt elites with veto powers in their parliament of nobles (sejm) and only once the nation was mostly destroyed and the nation on the cusp of final destruction, did the sejm introduce some sensible new laws, but it was too late.
With smaller regional powers you can have cases like “they were in a golden age and had never been as powerful, but then the mongols appeared”, but with hegemon empires the failure of their inner workings is always going to be instrumental in their own demise.
Probably all empires seed their own demise, I would guess
But so deliberately? In what world does a half intelligent person believe this to be a good long term strategy?
Most of the US believes in this, or is just unaware. That’s how its been for most of history around the world.
…The remarkable issue here is the elites/rules we handed the reigns now drink their own kool-aid. The very top of most authoritarian regimes are at least cognisant of some hypocrisy, even if ideology eats them some.
The other is that people are more ‘connected’ than ever, but to disinformation streams. I feel like a lot of the world (especially the US fancies) themselves as super smart on shit they know nothing about because of something they saw on Facebook or YouTube.
It’s called a coup. The same thing our government orchestrated in other countries.
Or another way to look at it- cutting nearly 75% of scientists. Can’t have climate change if there’s no one working! Watch them find some money to give to ExxonMobile to ‘study’ the impacts of fossil fuels. Wonder what that report will say! /s
That’s only the half of it. Look at the rest of the policies, look how they want to cut Medicare and food stamps and other safety net programs.
Make no mistake, this administration wants to see people die.
This is the end game the technocrats have been working towards, this is how they’re enacting their eugenics. They want poor people, disabled people, disadvantaged people, to die. They believe they are culling the weak members of the herd for the sake of the betterment of “their” kind (rich, white, “healthy”, etc).
These policies aren’t stupid or ineffective, they are cruel and insidious by design
The whole conspiracy theory of the new world order feels more real every year. Make everyone suffer so they have no choice but to submit to the oligarchs.
People are already having trouble finding jobs. Cutting food stamps and Medicaid feels like pieces of making people suffer in a bigger plan.
I still don’t understand their end goal. If everyone exept for them is poor and dying who are they going to sell their stuff to? What will they exploit the people for if they can sell nothing because only they can afford it? Are they banking on becomming the new china and sell everything to the rest of the world? Wouldn’t killing half of your population bite that plan in the ass as a fuck ton of manpower is gone? And if they want to use machines as a replacement wouldn’t removing all the smart people be extremely unhelpful?
They goal is to get rich, they are mostly old, thinking I’m death in 10 years and fuck the next generations. If the country crashed, well then I can continue living in a Mansion in Dubai with an coctail in the hand. Plunder policy.
I still don’t understand their end goal. If everyone exept for them is poor and dying who are they going to sell their stuff to?
I’m increasingly believing that they don’t actually care about anyone other then themselves.
Their only goals are self-serving greed.
And the methods they intend to use to serve that narrow goal are extremely short sighted and lacking any peripheral vision.
Brain drain is a difficult downward spiral to break out of once it starts.
This is something I think a lot of people don’t realize; It’s a cascading failure. It’s not just that some competent people will leave the country. The rest of their teams will have to bear the extra burden and be demoralized. They will then feel compelled to leave as well.
It’s happened numerous times in both the public and private sectors. Now they’re deliberately trying to do this shit on a national scale. If we ever recover from this, it’s going to take decades…
And still some people think it will be fine in 3.5 years.
Oh my god it’s only been half a year D:
5 months, he was inaugurated January 20th
Fuuuuck this is depressing
It absolutely won’t be.
But it might be moving in the right direction.
Regardless, will take decades/generations to fully recover from this, if ever.
No, you’ll never recover. Your previous status was the result of a very specific set of historical circumstances (specifically the fact that you were the only major power left standing after World War 2) that aren’t going to repeat. If you fall, the best you can hope for in terms of recovery is to equal the other developed countries of the world. You’ll never exceed them again.
Unfortunately Americans cannot stand being told they don’t live in the greatest country on earth. It’s a wonder that fascism took this long to win in the US, because it’s fundamentally hyper-compatible with American Exceptionalism which every American besides a tiny fraction of far-leftists believe to be inherently and unshakably true.
Where do you go from there when most of your population wouldn’t accept a trade alliance that doesn’t massively favor the US? Because even if Trump is impeached tomorrow that’s what Fox News will be running all day every day to successfully torpedo anyone attempting to rebuild the country.
A country for REAL (white Christian male) Americans.
When are you people going to get the message. It was never a country that was about equality. It was about enrichment for a select group of people. When their privilege was threatened, the veil came off.
None of this changes until the rest of America decides enough is enough. That might never happen. If it does, it won’t be for years or decades.
The US died on Jan 20th, 2025.
I’d argue Citizens United was the death blow.
I’d argue Nixon started it.
I’d argue Johnson sealed our fate when he rolled over for Confederates after the war.
But really the argument could bemade that the moment European explorers realized they could just kill people and take their homes away and nobody would stop them, they decided to make it a core part of their identity by rationalizing everything they can, and dismissing whatever they can’t.
The devil works hard, but colonizers work harder.
This is good actually, because it will reduce the brain drain of other countries. Critical support for JDPON Don.
Speed running towards Idiocracy by 2028
no need to rush it, were already here.
who am I kidding, President Camacho would be way better than Trump and most DNC candidates.
The lowest bar ever.
Actually, I will politely disagree.
The moment Camacho saw someone smart, he put him to work on the solution, he actually cared for the people, had no ego, delegated well…
It’s a standard that which practically no politicians in the US has.
if you are like that, the intelligence is irrelevant, a cabinet is only as smart as the expert they appoint.
ironically, Idiocracy painted better politicians than we have.
I’d say we had a good run but we really didn’t.
Rest in piss USA, smoke em if ya got em
Keep on winning, America!
Well, that happened to Germany back in the 1930s/40s. Before that, about 1/3 of Nobel Prizes went to German scientists.
Of course a large percentage of those German scientists were Jewish, weren’t they?
Deeply unserious managers of empire continue to self-cannibalize their own productivity in an effort to go even more all-in on financial capital, all while the global south is doing its best to pivot towards more favorable relations with countries like China. When the US Empire runs out of countries to exploit, and financial capital ceases to be profitable, it will have no developed industrial base nor a strong scientifically trained worker base to pull itself back up. The US is cooked, this is just speedrunning the demise of the empire in a faster and harder fashion.
The good news is that the worse this gets, the more favorable the conditions for organizing become, and the more vulnerable to revolution the state becomes. We can legitimately take advantage of this, and gain mastery over capital, rather than the inverse. We can re-industrialize, become socialist, and begin the long and difficult but necessary path towards legitimate progress. It won’t be easy, but it will be doable.
A healthy, broadly educated population, which feels safe and secure, are incompatible with, and toxic to, conservative and authoritarian ideologies.
They need you to be sick, stupid, and scared.
Turning the US into Russia 2.0
As an outsider, I honestly and sincerely invite anyone to explain how any of what’s going on in the US today isn’t as American as apple pie and school shootings?
Russia is actually significantly better to live in than America, and it is a total shithole.
