Are Americans a Broken People?
POSTED BY: SignyM
UPDATED: Tuesday, August 18, 2026 03:15
VIEWED: 19858
PAGE 13 of 29
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Originally posted by Niki2:
Citizen; it's long been on that road, and will continue on it until collapse is inevitable. All empires collapse over time, ours is no "exception", tho' we might think so.
Gino and Pizmo, thank you and right on!
I suppose the question is, is it going to be a total collapse and fragmentation like Rome, or the contraction from empire to middle power like Britain...
Either your with the terrorists, or ... your with the terrorists
Lets party like its 1939
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Quote:
Originally posted by GinoBiffaroni:I suppose the question is, is it going to be a total collapse and fragmentation like Rome, or the contraction from empire to middle power like Britain...
Why not both? Didn't Rome first shrink and lose influence, becoming a bit of a "middle empire" on its way to irrelevance and complete collapse and fragmentation?
It tends to happen quite slowly when it happens, sometimes taking generations. 'Course, in the modern world, things seem a bit more accelerated. The USSR collapsed seemingly overnight, and the American Empire is scarcely 200 years old and seems on a rapid downslope.
Personally, I'd be happy if we were a bit shrunk down. Middle Empires seem to have it pretty good - France, Germany, Great Britain (or is it just Adequate Britain now, since it's not all that great?
), Japan - all once had their days of empire, and all still exist, but in smaller, seemingly happier forms...Mike
Work is the curse of the Drinking Class.
- Oscar Wilde
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Quote:
I suppose the question is, is it going to be a total collapse and fragmentation like Rome, or the contraction from empire to middle power like Britain...
Either way, the strongest arm of enforcement deteriorates, and maybe once people wash the shiny veneer off their eyes, maybe we'll stop listening to the powers that be.
This is assuming that the inevitable collapse of the American empire wasn't pre-planned and caused by the powers that be, but I doubt it. They're usually too certain of their own infalliability. And the schemers in the past have been the FDR, Winston Churchill, and Stalin's of the world. Maybe as a former Russian ally China has been promoted into the globalization, but I doubt it, they just seem to see an opportunity and are taking advantage. Globalists only like the idea of globalization if they're the ones to implement it; while they can't quite see themselves as disasterous, they certainly would see China as disasterous.
China is certainly the next emerging superpower. I don't care if America loses superpower status to China so long as their ideology doesn't begin to influence us (and they don't invade).
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A lot of those "middle powers" are members of the G8, so I'm not sure what terms you're using for middle?
Anyway, I think the smart money would be on a break up for the united states. It's a country founded on division, still fighting a civil war that ended over a hundred years ago. A nation that has purposefully constructed itself on the notion of being a union of states. Historical precedent would seem to indicate that as the Federal Government's power wanes, state governments will begin to exert more power, and you'll end up eventually with something like the Holy Roman Empire circa 1600.
Quote:
(or is it just Adequate Britain now, since it's not all that great? )
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Cit, I think you misunderstand me. I'm definitely not slagging the UK, just playing word games. :)
As for the "middle powers", I'd be happy for the U.S. to become what we tend to refer to as a "middle power" - those nations who seem to have left "empire" behind and moved on to better (not bigger) things. Places like Denmark, France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, and Great Britain have all had their days of empire, and seem to be better places now that they've left that all behind.
Mike
Work is the curse of the Drinking Class.
- Oscar Wilde
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I think of a middle power as a country that has the political / economic / military power to influence the world, but not enough of it to run amok become arseholes on their own.
It other words they need to have a real coalition ( not a Bush one ) to exert big influence...
keeps things on more of a even keel
without superpowers screwing up the works perhaps we could fix the UN
Either your with the terrorists, or ... your with the terrorists
Lets party like its 1939
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Quote:
Originally posted by Kwicko:
Cit, I think you misunderstand me. I'm definitely not slagging the UK, just playing word games. :)
Huh? I was going for a more of an Al Murray moment
. Al Murray plays up the far uk right wing, that likes to ignore that the empire collapsed and all. He's a brilliant comedian and very intelligent guy, he's got a grounding in history (being a history student at Oxford if I remember rightly), and loves to lampoon the Daily Mail/Express archetype with his pub land lord character.I was not understanding the term middle power. Europe wields an awesome amount of power compared to it's size. I'd put a middle power as say India and current China (for all the rhetoric, they've got no military power projection capability, yet). At the time Britain is the second most powerful nation in terms of military power projection, and one of the largest economies, despite having a comparably minuscule population and few natural resources. Thus my question, if you remove the Us from consideration, the UK, France, Germany and Japan are the worlds most powerful nations, not middle powers.
Now Gino has given a different explanation. It's good in current circumstances, since we're in a world that had two superpowers (US and USSR) that could do as they pleased, and only had each other to worry about, and is now a world with the US that could (on paper at least) take on any two or more other nations with little worry. In an historical sense having a mutli-polar world is more normal, I think in history you'll see the uni-polar US centric world as a post 2nd world war aberration, that was a brief period between the collapse of one world order, and the cementation of another...
I happen to agree on the UN. It's a good idea screwed up by the fact that it's a democratic assembly in a dictatorial world.
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Some of this I agree with, and some not so much
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_power
I do like this bit
Definition
There is no standard agreed method to decide which states are middle powers. Some researchers use Gross National Product (GNP) statistics to draw lists of middle powers around the world. Economically, middle powers are generally those that are not considered too "big" or too "small", however that is defined. However, economics is not always considered the defining factor. Under the original sense of the term, a middle power was one that had some degree of influence globally, but not dominance over any one area. However, this usage is not universal, and some define middle power to include nations that can be regarded as regional powers.
According to academics at the University of Leicester and University of Nottingham;
"middle power status is usually identified in one of two ways. The traditional and most common way is to aggregate critical physical and material criteria to rank states according to their relative capabilities. Because countries’ capabilities differ, they are categorized as superpowers (or great powers), middle powers or small powers. More recently, it is possible to discern a second method for identifying middle power status by focusing on behavioural attributes. This posits that middle powers can be distinguished from superpowers and smaller powers because of their foreign policy behaviour – middle powers carve out a niche for themselves by pursuing a narrow range and particular types of foreign policy interest. In this way middle powers are countries that use their relative diplomatic skills in the service of international peace and stability. Both measures are contested and controversial, though the traditional quantitative method has proved more problematic than the behavioural method."[citation needed]
Either your with the terrorists, or ... your with the terrorists
Lets party like its 1939
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Quote:
Huh? I was going for a more of an Al Murray moment
Ah, then the misunderstanding was all mine! :)
I thought you were ticked about my "Adequate Britain" snark. Sorry 'bout that.
Mike
Work is the curse of the Drinking Class.
- Oscar Wilde
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