• merc@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    Civilization is doing pretty well outside the US. If the US disappeared tomorrow, the rest of the world would do significantly better. I don’t know how the world will deal with climate change, but without the US it would be easier to make progress. The tech firms blowing up the AI bubble, and invading our privacy are nearly all American. A lot of the private equity firms destroying the world are also American. If the US could hurry up and finish collapsing, the rest of the world’s civilization could just move on.

    • tetris11@feddit.uk
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      1 day ago

      I put a lot of US’s problems as interfence from Russia and China to empower the far-right so that Russia has a customer base for oil, and China can race ahead in the green markets.

      I think a world without the US would just mean that Europe and South America are targeted in the same way

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
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        20 hours ago

        I think you’re overestimating the influence of Russia and China and underestimating the dysfunction in the US.

        • tetris11@feddit.uk
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          18 hours ago

          The dysfunction in the US has always existed, but it never spilled over into politics quite to this degree.

          Russia was found to be sponsoring the NRA, and the rise of evangelicals as a voting group seems to be a co-ordinated world-wide phenomenon.

          Whilst one can blame the techbros and robber barons for exacerbating this, I’d argue that those same elites thrived more under stable economic growth than an unstable one

        • tetris11@feddit.uk
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          24 hours ago

          I think also people forget how good the US was in being a stable pillar of free and open collaboration in the sciences worldwide.

          What is happening now is a major shift in that stability