Hot Diggity! I am a One Percenter

@sree251 Challenging. Anytime you have reference something you realize you probably have to explain the reference to your audience. I try to keep up with what is trending, but nobody seems to want to remember historical contexts.

@dancingtongue Hi. Long time no see. We had a conversation a while ago on another thread.

I remember saying that a good time to die is in our seventies but you disagreed. You wanted to live as long as your body has not shut down regardless of its condition. This is not the kind of challenge I want.

Historical contexts of what?

@sree251 References to colloquialisms, catchphrases du jour. Every era has them. But a spot-on comment from an old radio program or even an early TV show doesn't have much impact when your audience today has already forgotten what the trendy saying of a week or a month ago was.

@dancingtongue Are historical contexts relevant? Cancel culture points to a disregard for old things and old people. Everything has gone digital now. I just can't imagine how grandma and grandpa adjust to never holding cash in their hands anymore. Do you have problems remembering passwords and running the risk of getting locked out from your bank account and contacts to the human race?

@sree251 I muddle through on passwords. Have to use the resets on occasion. Cash is still legal tender and I carry some. Credit and debit card work just fine. If you have money, they will find a way to get paid. Onus is more on them than me, imho.

As for historical contexts, I refer you to Santayana who said if people who ignore history get to relive it.

@dancingtongue
Onus will be on you with regard to utility bills and other critical stuff. You lose the service if you fail to pay. Same situation with credit/debit cards with online banking. You could risk losing access to your money. I long for the old days when we used cash and talked to bank tellers.


We humans are strange beasts. We have suffered two world wars and are marching towards WW3. Joe Biden is an old guy. He has seen enough wars. Why is he rooting to take out Russia and China?

@sree251
Auto pay works just fine.


Because he, like me, has real life memories of WWII and heard/read enough about how isolationism and indifference let two militaristic authoritarian regimes get a big enough foothold to embroil an entire planet. (I refer you again to Santayana. ) Biden does not want to be another Chamberlin who keeps appeasing Putin's aggression on his European neighbors as Chamberlin did with Hitler. Nor an FDR who thought economic agreements could contain Japan's aggressive military expansion in the Pacific, just as China is attempting with its threats to Taiwan and its continued saber rattling over the China Sea belonging solely to them.

@dancingtongue
Your perception as an American is your reality. I have met a friendly German trout farmer in Canada. He told me that he was 19 when he "fought the yankees". He spoke with affection and admiration for "Adolf". And that was his reality. Are you wrong or was he wrong? Both of you comes across as sane and good people. And yet, we pit ourselves against each other. You support taking out Russia and China regardless of the consequences. History has taught you that making peace is inviting disaster. Killing and getting killed has defined our history. You are not ignoring history and are intent on reliving it. It makes sense to you.

Killing and be killed makes sense to you? Wow, how can I accept that as my fate?

@sree251 Actually, having lived in Germany for two years, talked to Germans, and read history, I would agree that Hitler did some good things for the country. He came to power in a country totally paralyzed and fighting sky high inflation because of the excessively punitive economic sanctions imposed on them after WWI. He revitalized the economy; rebuilt the German spirit. This not excuse his foreign policy of leibensraum "annexing" by force of all Europe, nor the Holocaust against the Jews, the Gypsies, and the disabled. And does your friendly German farmer say "if the Yanks hadn't attacked us" as well, as I heard from a fewer older Germans, even though it was Germany that declared war on us after their Japanese allies bombed Pearl Harbor.

You will notice that at no time have I talked of "taking out Russia or China". Only standing up to Russia's aggression it's neighbors and keeping the seas open under international law.

@dancingtongue
This is what we are told about the Germans to motivate Americans to support the war against Germany. We don't know the truth behind Hitler's foreign policy. Right now, Americans are motivated to support the Ukraine war against Russia. Do you know the truth behind Putin's takeover of Crimea and eastern part of Ukraine? Let's hear it.


Who are we to keep the seas open under international law? What international law? The South China Sea is 7,500 miles from US territorial shoreline. Our warships are plying waters close to China not to mention our military bases (130 in Japan, undisclosed number in South Korea and the Philippines.) surrounding China. How would we Americans like it if China has warships plying up and down the US western seaboard on the pretext of protecting China's shipping supply lines to North and South America? You might like to read Major General Smedley Butler's book, "War is a Racket". (Link below). In Chapter 4, he advocated limiting our military forces to home defense purposes:



The ships of our navy, it can be seen, should be specifically limited, by law, to within 200 miles of our coastline. Had that been the law in 1898 the Maine would never have gone to Havana Harbor. She never would have been blown up. There would have been no war with Spain with its attendant loss of life. Two hundred miles is ample, in the opinion of experts, for defense purposes. Our nation cannot start an offensive war if its ships can't go further than 200 miles from the coastline. Planes might be permitted to go as far as 500 miles from the coast for purposes of reconnaissance. And the army should never leave the territorial limits of our nation.

https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

@sree251
I think enough time has elapsed, enough evidence uncovered, enough trials held to make our knowledge of HItler's foreign & Holocaust policies more than just the propaganda "to motivate Americans to support" WWII. Yes, history is written by the winners. But historians keep digging and over time zeroes in on baseline facts.


I know enough to know his public justifications are largely crap and sound a lot like Hitler's justifications for "leibsraum" and military excursions into Eastern Europe and Russia itself. Yes, there are a lot of Russians in the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, and a lot of Russian-speakers because of their long time as part of the Soviet Union. Yes, there probably are some lingering Nazi sympathizers in the Ukraine, as there are in other Eastern European nations, Germany itself, apparently Canada, and even the U.S. The way to resolve the issue is to hold honest elections and let the people choose their national government. Oh, that's right, they did that by leaving the Soviet Union and voting to return to their original sovereign identity that predated the take over of the Russian Empire as well as the Soviet Union.


Now I happen to agree with you that the U.S. shouldn't bully their way around the globe, trying to impose their will and form of government everywhere. It has backfired and gotten us in trouble everywhere we have tried it, from imposing the Shah in Iran, to the Vietnam War, and to a long string of regrettable adventures in Latin American going back, as you point out, to the bombing of the USS Maine, and even continuing today to the migration problems on our southern border fueled to a large extent by people fleeing the legacies of dictators we propped up in various Central American and South American countries.

Otoh, there are international treaties on such things as the extent of territorial rights a country has on the seas adjoining them, basic human rights, etc., that are the basis of international law. There is a United Nations, and an International Court in the Hague. There are treaty obligations for mutual self-defense, just as police departments and fire districts have mutual assistance agreements to assist one another when facing crises beyond their own capabilities. And while I agree we should downsize our military presence around the world, we are in Korea as part of the UN DMZ force established by the truce agreement between the two Korean nations. Technically, the Korean War never ended -- there only was a truce and an UN military force to create a demilitarized zone between them.

Thanks for the recommendation of General Smedley Butler's book. You do realize he died in 1940 before the U.S. even entered WWII, and his views were shaped entirely on his experiences during the Spanish-American War, other Latin American engagements, and WWI where global geopolitics and modern aerial and missile warfare technologies were quite different, don't you?

@dancingtongue
Enough evidence has been uncovered to prove whatever needed to be proven. History is always subjective. Political history is always one-sided story telling. In the fog of war, the demons in humans come to the fore. German atrocities are as vile as American atrocities. All people are equal in that regard. You don't think the Vietnamese regard us the way we regard the Germans? The common denominator is evil and it possesses all people without distinction. We deny that in order to feel holier than the bad guys.


Do you think that the US let the people choose their national government? You do come across as a reasonable guy able to look at the facts and allow the facts to change your opinion. Professor Jeffery Sachs is a well known political analyst and he said:

"The US has aimed to overthrow at least 80 governments since 1947, typically led by the CIA through the instigation of coups, assassinations, insurrections, civil unrest, election tampering, economic sanctions, and overt wars. (For a superb study of US regime-change operations from 1947 to 1989, see Lindsey O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change, 2018)."

Below is a link to his paper on US foreign policy. I would appreciate your review of and take on his analysis.

https://www.jeffsachs.org/newspaper-articles/wspgnywf65g3dw8wnkb6x4x84wrmz7

@sree251 I already stated I don't concur with most of our foreign policy history of interfering in other countries, and indicated that military force should be a last resort for self-defense and enforcing international law. We seem to agree, so I'm not sure why we keep beating this dead horse.

I will take a look at the paper and let you know, but I suspect no surprises since I already expressed my disagreement with the CIA's overthrow of Iran's first duly elected leader for the Shah, the entire Vietnam War, and our history of meddling and propping up dictators throughout Latin America.

@sree251 I see nothing startingly new in his analysis. Eisenhower began warning us of the Military Industrial Complex and how Big Business was shaping our budget and foreign policy decisions going back to the 1950's. Wall Street's over-reaction to the "Communist threat" -- which they themselves said was an economic policy that would fail on his own merits -- was totally irrational and largely dysfunctional, undermining the very ideals we said we stood for in setting up the United Nations. Promoting fear and funding ever increasing campaign financing and armies of lobbyists was all self-serving to perpetuate their business interests. No surprises there.

@dancingtongue
Ok, we are together and sharing the same perspective of US wrongdoing in this regard. And yet, you seems to support the same US foreign policy towards Russia and China. Why is that? Is there no other way except getting Russia and China to move into orbits around the US as the center of the world? We Americans have proven to the world that we are a bad people.

@sree251
I keep looking at it from an event-triggered response -- Russia invaded Ukraine; China is aggressively ignoring international laws of the seas -- while you are locked into nation-centric personalities. If Russia and China were respecting other nation's sovereignty and international law, then there would be no need to provide support and check their actions. That is a far cry from saying we were meddling in the internal affairs of Russia or China.

@dancingtongue

Event-triggered response. To you, the triggering event is Russia's military operations in Ukraine in February, 2022. To the Russians, it is the US-led NATO encroachment into Ukraine. To the Russians, this would portend the establishment of US military bases and weapons in Ukraine close to Russia's border. As an American, why is it your concern about Ukraine that requires our leadership in facing down Russia? You don't think the EU is up to the task of resolving matters with Russia in a peaceful manner?

With regard to China, the triggering event is China's claim to islands in the South China Sea. As you well know, all territorial claims, including that of the US over the American mainland called the USA, are arbitrary. Do you think the 25 million people calling themselves Australians have a right to an entire continent called Australia? The bottom line is that we need to share the planet and live on it together peacefully. My surmise is that the US's blue water navy and military bases in the Philippines, Japan and South Korea surrounding China and our encroachment into Taiwan has been bothering China as much as our military encroachment into Ukraine has agitated Russia. China has now built, in the South China Sea, several military-equipped artificial islands fitted out with airfields to serve as unsinkable aircraft carriers. They are intended for dealing with potential conflicts with the US over Taiwan. We are going to get clobbered.

We have been beating up small nations since WW2 in our effort at imposing a US-led rules based order. Russia and China don't want it. There are Americans who get that and feel it's high time we rein in the US government.

@sree251 I agree that we should be reining in our military footprint on the planet, much of it a relic of powt-WW II that has long outlived its purpose and is more of a detriment to 21st centruy geopolitics than an asset. Our continued participation in NATO does not require our having military bases in Europe. When I was stationed there we were told we were part of the NATO shield protecting democracy in Europe, but our assignment was to hold the Fulda Gap for 48 hours allowing sufficient time for the real fighting brigades to be airlifted from Ft. Hood. Technology and today's warfare have moved far past that concept.

That said, NATO didn't invade the Ukraine. The Ukraine asked to join it, and the EU.

Similarly, China can say its construction of artificial island aircraft carriers are defense against perceived threats from the U.S. Navy, but declaring that the China Sea belongs solely to them is perceived by their neighbors and others doing economic trade with them as an act of aggression.

@dancingtongue
Our continued participation in NATO, a relic of Cold War posturing, is starving the American public of funds for minding our own people's well-being and upgrading of our infrastructure. American society is a mess compared to those of Japan, China, South Korea, and Singapore. I hardly see police there and they are crime free and safe compared to the US. There is never a weekend that goes by without people getting killed and murdered in our cities. Smaller towns have endemic drug problems. We are as well-armed at home as we are abroad. US law enforcement, armed like soldiers with flak jackets and handguns, is pretty evident even at airports. The sight of them unnerved me every time I flew back from my yearly trips to Asia. I don't feel safe seeing a cop these days the way I did when I was a kid.


Do you still believe that? The Fulda Gap was identified by Western strategists as a possible route for a Soviet invasion of the American occupation zone from the eastern sector occupied by the Soviet Union after WW2. Are our strategists nuts? They kept up with that strategy 20 years after the war when you were sent there. I bet the Fulda Gap is still on their minds now that the Soviet Union is gone. I am glad we have a guy like Trump coming out from left field with the ability to step right into North Korea to be greeted by our sworn enemy of 70 years. No wonder our strategists want to do Trump in. He will scuttle US war plans and replace them with business plans to compete with China's Belt and Road ambitions to dominate the world economically. I prefer this kind of competition for world power. Everybody wins.


This was the perception in the beginning. China is cognizant of that and took effort to assure ASEAN nations that China is no threat. ASEAN is now China's major trading partner. There was a hiccup with Vietnam but China took care to address Vietnam's concern bi-laterally. There was no need for US intervention. These days, there is friction with the new Philippine government led by Marcos making an issue over a beached shipwreck near the Spratly Islands. China had no problems with the previous Philippine Government under strongman Duterte. Who knows? Perhaps, the CIA has its meddling hands in stirring up the fracas for an excuse to move the US Seventh Fleet in to face down China.

@sree251
The picture of two narcissistic authoritarians who view themselves above the rule of law -- one heading a third-world economy and the other with a track record of failed businesses, illegal business practices, and general con jobs -- working in unison together doesn't bother you one iota?


As I have already stated, I support downsizing our world-wide military presence and the military budget in relation to domestic spending on our own needs. That does not mean we should totally abandon our participation in NATO and other alliances. Isolationism, which helped fuel WWII, is not a solution in a world that has shrunk and become far more global since then. Not all solutions are binary just because we now live in a digitalized world.


Perceptions can be misleading. You are citing Asian cultures which tend to paper over their problems as a matter of honor and respect whereas we Americans tend to glorify our warts, particularly since the news media has been monetized by becoming entertainment. Not to minimalize the fact that we have problems with homelessness, drugs, and far too many guns in our American society, the totally bleak picture we are hammered with day after day by a media that reads more like a police blotter than real reporting doesn't gibe with actual crime statistics. And before you jump to the conclusion that crime stats are being distorted by the "deep state", I would say both pictures are probably distorted giving us this big disconnect at a time where we really need more closure on the actual problems and potential solutions.


And no wonder. In most communities we have gone from friendly Officer Pat, the neighborhood cop whom we knew and who knew us under community police, to centralized bastions of authoritarianism, militarized in weaponry and uniforms, and in many cases an ideological bent that does match the communities they serve. Much like the images of enforced compliance with the state-prescribed order we see in Tiananmen Square, Singapore, and your other ideal societies. And before you start labeling be a supporter of "defunding the police" -- one of the most misleading and worst slogans ever -- let me clarify that I am for increased funding for public safety IF it is used more effectively. As in a return to community policing, crime prevention programs, funding of additional first-responders better equipped to handle domestic abuse and mental health issues freeing police to deal with crime they are better trained for, and stronger internal controls to weed out the rogue cops with personal ideological motives.

@dancingtongue
Is narcissism a crime? Trump is not an authoritarian which is the nature of a government in the control of its citizens. How were you adversely impacted by the Trump presidency? Let's be objective. What draconian executive order did he signed that oppressed Americans?


I lived in Asia, 6 months a year. I spent time with the locals as well as with American expats and other westerners living in Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai. I did not live in expat ghettos among Americans who had no connection to the place they are posted. I speak Chinese and a smattering of Japanese good enough to win friends in places where Americans don't go. The locals tell me things. I would have made a great CIA asset but I was not. I trust those people and they trust me. Look, my grandfather was a Colonel in the US Army who served in WW2, Korea, and Vietnam. He was commandant of a prisoner of war camp in Japan. Decades after the war, his ex-POW would visit him in the US and bring him gifts of gratitude. I inherited my grandfather's house and his stuff including those gifts which grace the living room. A set of Japanese swords are on the mantlepiece. People can forge friendships across cultural and nationalistic divides. Those bonds can be as deep as the ones we form at home with our own blood.


We glorify our warts because we have no shame. This is not honesty. We do not value self-respect. This is why we have sunk so low that we don't even care anymore about how we look on the world stage. Take the Trump/Biden debate for instance. It was sad to see the US President at the podium, the leader of the greatest nation the world has ever known. The decent thing to do to a dying horse is to shoot it in the head instead of dressing it up in ceremonial gear and parade it for all the world to see. We have no shame, no heart, and we are Americans.


Ideological bent indeed. We went from friendly Officer Pat to a fat woman cop. This is a double whammy. Why is this happening? Have we gone nuts with our sense of virtue putting inclusivity ahead of effective law enforcement in the public space?

@sree251
Do I have to be personally impacted? Can't I have empathy for those who are? Can't I be opposed to his policies on general principles? And you might want to revisit the definition of authoritarian. He refuses to accept he lost the election. His tax cuts further eroded the middle class, increased the gap between the 1% and the rest of us, increased the deficit by the largest amount in history (albeit, the pandemic was part of the cause), and alienated most of our allies.


Totally agree. I have not had the type of experiences you have had (although I did live in Germany for two years, and despite being an American GI befriended Germans and actually sponsored one child who spent a year with my parents going to school here). My brother lived and worked in Japan for 20+ years and my sister-in-law was born and raised in Japan; they retired to nasty, liberal, leftist California. My cousin had to be smuggled out of China on a train to Hong Kong following Tiananmen Square by his Chinese friends, and not because he was one of the protesters or a CIA agent but simply because he was an American teaching English as a foreign language.



You missed my point(s). Police lost credibility because they stopped being community-based cops, stopped realizing (if they ever did) that people of all colors are part of those communities, became militarized in order to enhance enforcement instead of working at crime prevention, and valued the code of silence brotherhood over holding the rogue cops accountable for their actions. In short, they became ineffective and the so called "defunding" efforts have been to more efficiently use those funds to create a safer society and have additional first responders capable of de-escalating situations rather than escalating them.

@dancingtongue
This is interesting. Why was it necessary for your cousin to be smuggled out of China?

@dancingtongue
You accused Trump of being authoritarian. How did his policies impact you personally in that regard? How were you oppressed by his policies? Disagreement with his policies is one thing. Suffering the effect of his oppressiveness is another. No US President, including Trump, has power to govern the country directly. Congress is the legislative body that shares that power. Checks and balances is the name of the game defined by the Constitution.

@sree251
Tell that to Trump. He refused -- still refuses -- to accept he lost the election in 2020. He unitarily tore up treaties that only Congress can officially approve. He packed the Supreme Court with justices that are shredding precedents and Congressional acts, and boasts of it. He engaged in the detention, deportation, and separation of families at the Southern border which had no legal foundation and even his packed Supreme Court could not assent to, and has threatened a massive deportation if elected again.

And I ask again, why do I, personally, have to have been impacted to be alarmed at these actions? To revert once again to learnings of WW II and the Holocaust, there is the famous quote from Martin Niemoller: " First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."