Thinking of the "top ten" follies perpetrated by the Western ruling class during my adult life:
1) Deindustrializing/impoverishing/oxycontifying vast regions of the US out of an entirely ideological commitment to "free trade."
Carlo Lancellotti
11K posts
Carlo Lancellotti
@_CLancellotti
Professor of Mathematics.
My thoughts may not be worth much, but you can have them for free.
Side activity: delnoceinenglish.org
New Jersey, USA
Joined May 2017
- Replying to @MattPolProfIt is not astonishing at all. Why on earth do you think it isastonishing?
- US evangelical Christianity feels foreign to me for many reasons, but I am still shocked by how urban liberals loathe it, and gratuitously associate it with backwardness and racism. It is probably the most glaring example of gut-driven bigotry I have observed in 35 years here.
- A rarely discussed aspect of globalization are former "third world" intellectuals who move to the "west" and display complete ignorance of local history, which they insist on reading through surreal "imperial" lenses. It is a sort of "reverse-orientalism."
- Let me be blunt: anybody who looks at the fiscal and demographic situation of Western countries and does not understand that assisted dying will be aggressively promoted to cull the weaker segments of the population, save money and reallocate health resources is a complete fool.
- If I may state the obvious: the current level of emotional investment in politics is pathological and a grave symptom of cultural and religious emptiness. The US now has the essential ingredient of totalitarianism: a militant elite for whom politics is everything.
- The transformation of the left in my lifetime is perfectly symbolized by the fact that instead of criticizing Bezos it criticizes Beethoven.
- Replying to @_CLancellotti2) Making most of Western Europe dependent on Russian energy imports, out an entirely ideological rejection of nuclear power etc 3) Trying to extend NATO to the Don basin out of ... only God knows what.
- Replying to @_CLancellotti4) Aiding and abetting demographic collapse and a mental health epidemics by embracing even the most pathological outcomes of the 1960s sexual revolution. 5) Corrupting the educational system by pushing universal credentialism and the politicization of education.
- Only an American academic could think that Mussolini would think in terms of "White Christian" demographics in 100% white, 95% Catholic Italy of the 1930s. Not just idiots, but completely US-centric idiots.
- One thing that genuinely surprised me many years ago when I became acquainted with US academia was that on more than one campus the really nihilistic department, the one truly bent on destroying its own discipline, was the English department.
- Replying to @_CLancellotti10) Starting world war 3 to cover their asses after people got angry about 1 through 9 (let's hope not) Am I forgetting anything?
- Replying to @_CLancellotti6) Creating enormous loads of public debt and implicitly debasing the currency in order to protect a phony financialized economy and vast unchecked monopolies. 7) Wasting trillions of dollars and thousands of lives in useless, grinding conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan etc
- Replying to @_CLancellotti8) Destroying the European unification project by depriving it of any ideal content and making it a tool of techno-bureaucratic control. 9) Splitting the US in two by promoting universal politicization and cultural/economic/racial segregation.