How does the World view America these days?

  On 4/21/2020 at 11:49 PM, auxien said:

our monetary supremacy relies in large part upon us keeping the attention of the world

No, it relies on secret services, military power, extensive surveillance and economic influence, especially through finance economy. Cultural hegemony is just a byproduct

  On 4/22/2020 at 12:47 AM, darreichungsform said:

No, it relies on secret services, military power, extensive surveillance and economic influence, especially through finance economy. Cultural hegemony is just a byproduct

...and the finance economy supremacy is in large part because we keep attention and interest and power. like i said.

Attention isn't the important aspect of it, though

then what is

see above

Seems we occupy the two last positions in WATMM's debate club, but I am only second last.

  On 4/22/2020 at 12:40 AM, auxien said:

too late now, save the short and snappys for Twitter. this is an intelligent dance music forum, we need it drawn out and overlong with excessive and entirely useless amounts of detail.

or propper memes

  On 4/20/2020 at 4:08 AM, Nebraska said:

 

Expand  

https://www.umass.edu/umpress/title/pro-war-movement

  On 4/20/2020 at 9:16 PM, Nebraska said:

peaceful protesting in virginia for affordable care act, gun regulations, asylum seekers/dreamers, climate research, children vaccination, police brutality and global pandemic affecting the world

 

Expand  

That little kid holding the sign looks so fucking scary.  They don't make 'em like that anymore.

Calling something a "peaceful protest" while they're all carrying guns is a heavy amount of cognitive dissonance.

  On 4/22/2020 at 12:47 AM, darreichungsform said:

No, it relies on secret services, military power, extensive surveillance and economic influence, especially through finance economy. Cultural hegemony is just a byproduct

It’s all about the benjamins. I agree that cultural hegemony is largely a byproduct, but the world was primed for that from the British Empire. 
If you lot (zee germans) has won the war, it might be different, but I still think the lingua franca would be English. Kraftwerk might have been even more popular though! Imagine a world where Kraftwerk and not Zeppelin or Floyd ruled the radio in the 70s/80s

  On 4/22/2020 at 3:08 AM, chenGOD said:

Imagine a world where Kraftwerk and not Zeppelin or Floyd ruled the radio in the 70s/80s

the world would be all about Autechre and Aphex, would be the biggest bands in the world right now and we'd be on here which is obviously now a forum dedicated to alternative rock bands that started in the 90's going on about how Foo Fighters is really way better than Bush for the last two decades.

  On 4/22/2020 at 3:20 AM, auxien said:

alternative rock bands that started in the 90's going on about how Foo Fighters is really way better than Bush for the last two decades.

I mean, that’s true, but I still threw up a little in my mouth. Damned social conditioning!

  On 4/22/2020 at 3:08 AM, chenGOD said:

It’s all about the benjamins. I agree that cultural hegemony is largely a byproduct, but the world was primed for that from the British Empire. 
If you lot (zee germans) has won the war, it might be different, but I still think the lingua franca would be English. Kraftwerk might have been even more popular though! Imagine a world where Kraftwerk and not Zeppelin or Floyd ruled the radio in the 70s/80s

axuien literally made the point that the US is wealthy and powerful because of the attention it gets (cultural hegemony) and "attitude and bluster" which I disagree with, it's only a small part. If Hitler had won the war Kraftwerk probably would have ended up in a concentration camp.

Sorry, I'm dead last in the debate club.

Edit: my point was that it's not much to do with the secret service and espionage and all that other shit. It's literally all about the benjamins. the Marshall plan, plus rebuilding Japan, funding all kinds of shit under the "pax americana", that's what got the world slurping down american cultural values like a rock addict sucking dick in a bad 90's movie.

  On 4/22/2020 at 4:15 AM, chenGOD said:

Sorry, I'm dead last in the debate club.

 

Edit: my point was that it's not much to do with the secret service and espionage and all that other shit. It's literally all about the benjamins. the Marshall plan, plus rebuilding Japan, funding all kinds of shit under the "pax americana", that's what got the world slurping down american cultural values like a rock addict sucking dick in a bad 90's movie.

Expand  

That other shit helps with the benjamins, tho

the question basically was why the US is wealthy & powerful. And yeah, I agree that it's wealthy because it has money  how did it get there, though? not through cultural hegemony, or at least not mostly

*posts clip of the line in that Marilyn Manson song that goes "capit-a-lism... has made it this waaaaay... old fashioned facism - TAKE IT AWAAAAY!"*

In a post apocalyptic future, human skulls will be used as currency and your only inheritance will be the skulls of your parents, if they haven’t perished by nebular plagueflesh, wormhole parasites, or radiant mangle waves. 
 

You can still wait in line at a grocery store to buy Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Don’t be a pussy. 

  Quote

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?

Expand  

-- Three Cheers for Socialism by David Bentley Hart, Commonweal Magazine (yeah, it's a Christian publication but there are plenty of valid points in the article that are not tied to religious views.)

update

  On 4/22/2020 at 11:59 PM, Candiru said:

In a post apocalyptic future, human skulls will be used as currency and your only inheritance will be the skulls of your parents, if they haven’t perished by nebular plagueflesh, wormhole parasites, or radiant mangle waves. 
 

You can still wait in line at a grocery store to buy Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Don’t be a pussy. 

I'm sticking with bottle caps, as that's a more plausible form of currency if pop culture from the last decade has taught us anything. Already been stockpiling at home.

the Onion is a treasure