Trouble is that we live in an ecosystem, and "hoard the maximum you can defend, not the minimum you comfortably need" is an optimal behaviour emergent from the system.
An ecosystem with an under-exploited niche will eventually produce the behaviour that fills the niche. It's a self-optimizing system. None of this is fundamentally escapable as long as we are living organisms competing for finite resources.
Maybe a hot take, but I don't know that "privacy" and "anonymity" are the same thing, or that the latter is worth preserving. I would very much like to live in a world where everyone stood by everything they said online with their real identity, just as they already do in the real world.
This was already the case for all of human history until the information age. If you wanted to say something, you had to physically say/print/shout it. And your reputation would be affected as a consequence. This more aligned with how humans are wired - that social actions have social consequences.
If every potential mate and employer was able to review everything you've ever posted online, we'd all be much more careful with what we say, much better able to screen out bad actors, and the wold would be a better place for it.
That works better in a less-connected, more local-bubble-centric world. Back then unless you were expressing something really inflammatory or contrary to a narrow slice of government-opposed ideology (e.g. red scare in the US), you could be spread your opinion mostly freely without too much fear of blowback.
In the modern world, we have governments (and politically aligned lackey-citizens) increasingly actively hunting down anything vaguely dissent-shaped and making those who spoke it suffer in some form, whether than be mass harassment and jawboning or outright muzzling or prosecution.
There’s a chilling effect with growing intensity that pressures people to either obediently nod along or shut up, which makes anonymity (even if only the plausibly deniable sort) important.
>everyone stood by everything they said online with their real identity
And get Charlie Kirk'ed? No thanks. There are a lot of deranged and demented people out there, and publishing on the internet is rolling that dice billions of times, compared to shouting in the town square.
I'm not sure I agree, people say unhinged things on TikTok/Facebook using accounts that have their full government name and/or showing face. I doubt deanonymisation would help.
To me "people will be on their best behaviour if they can't be anonymous" sounds eerily similar to Larry Ellison's "people will be on their best behaviour if they're constantly surveilled".
> If every potential mate and employer was able to review everything you've ever posted online, we'd all be much more careful with what we say, much better able to screen out bad actors, and the wold would be a better place for it.
This is stalking and is illegal. Are there any other crimes you want to claim as righteous?
Presuming you want stalking to be repealed and permissible, you have quite a few bars to pass through.
And in that society, are you willing to have me as your enemy who is very willing to push society to its utter limits? I know I'd be good at it, and I know thousands if not millions of people who share this interest. Because, as you say, its any potential mate/employer.
I'm failing to see why any of this is immoral. Taking every (legal, nonviolent) advantage is called "doing business". We live in a competitive ecosystem. Under such conditions certain behaviours are emergent from the system. It creates the niches that make this behaviour optimal. If you don't want to be taken advantage of by a sharp, don't be a square.
I don't see how living in an ecosystem, complete with selective pressure, asymmetrical compounding advantage, etc. can possibly be immoral, since it's fundamentally inescapable.
You seem like the type of person that will take advantage of others when a loophole law permits it. Sure, it may be legal, but it still makes you a bad person in my book.
Like most people, I treat people I know with a lot more kindness than people I don't. Whether most of us like to admit it or not, our actions demonstrate that we don't generally have much regard for distant strangers, no matter how profoundly they suffer and how much we benefit from it (see the conditions in which most of our goods are made). You can call that immoral, but rational self interest is absolutely normal human behaviour, and I'm not even a psychopath.
My point is that the niches exist to be exploited by the least scrupulous among us. As long as the niches exist, they will be exploited. Resenting that is akin to resenting the biggest fish in the pond for being so damn aggressive - it's pointless. We live in a pond, and we should focus on maintaining the nonviolent and often ecosystem-benefitting nature of the exploitation (since it is hard-won and precarious), rather than resent the inescapable reality of its existence.
It's lonely being an outlier, especially in a trait that's so fundamental to how you see the world. Despite best effort, it's hard to relate to most people, and they especially find it hard to relate to you. The delta of lived experience is quite wide, often insurmountable.
It’s not a capitalism problem, it’s an ecosystem. Wherever living things compete for finite resources and opportunities, certain properties emerge from the system. And make no mistake we live in a crowded world full of fierce competition.
Among these properties are optimum behaviours such as hoarding the maximum you can defend (rather than the minimum you comfortably need) and using your power to forestall the growth of others. These behaviours are repeated in nature from microorganisms to apes to humans.
There is no social order which can prevent us from living in an ecosystem, and from these properties and behaviours emerging.
The US American system is more capitalistic than the german one and the scissor between poor and rich is higher.
Thats definitly an indication that this plays a role in it.
And we do not have a problem of resources today, we have so much food, that its sometimes just spoils and no one cares and sometimes it even spoils in huge warehouses due to neglect or because a person decided not to sell it under a certain price.
Capitalism also sets priorities for resources. So instead of making sure everyone is fed properly, we also spend time and energy to diverge resource types like different plants, exotic plants etc.
> The US American system is more capitalistic than the german one and the scissor between poor and rich is higher.
And yet the US is a dominant player and Germany is not.
> And we do not have a problem of resources today, we have so much food
I never said there needs to be scarcity for an ecosystem to emerge. These properties emerge wherever living things compete for finite resources. Imagine a pond where you introduce a few small catfish. At first, food is plentiful. Yet the fish will grow and reproduce until it is scare. It's the same with resources. Individuals/companies/societies will grow to consume the maximum they can sustain, because this is the optimum behaviour in an ecosystem.
The point is that organisms which avoid these behaviours tend to lose, in every sense of the word, to organisms that do. The behaviours are emergent from the constraints of the system.
> that its sometimes just spoils and no one cares
Transportation costs are a major driver of food shortage. It's not at all free to get large quantities of food from where they are produced to where they are consumed. People are generally not willing to transport food (or do much of anything else) at a loss.
I don't think it's fair to compare US foreign policy to actual imperialism as practiced by the Soviets, the British, etc. The US does not maintain colonies, and, as you point out, does not even attempt to exert total control. Pursuing your interests and forcing total political and cultural domination are not equivalent. The US is more than happy for Germans to be German, Japanese to be Japanese, etc, as long as US interests are prioritized. This is clearly not the case for other major powers.
Nations (and people) exist in an ecosystem, and so will always behave accordingly, and always in their own interests. There are some emergent properties of ecosystems, one of which is that optimal behaviour is to acquire the maximum you are physically capable of defending, not the minimum that you need to survive.
It's perfectly reasonable for the US, the big fish in the pond, to leverage its advantages accordingly, and to the maximum. It would be a disservice to the US people if it did not. Smaller fish should indeed be glad that the big fish is as placid and strategically (rather than ideologically) motivated as it is, given the historically experienced alternatives.
> I don't think it's fair to compare US foreign policy to actual imperialism as practiced by the Soviets, the British, etc.
All empires function differently. The modes of empire were very different between the British and other recent European empires, which were very different to the Soviets, the Ottomans, the Romans.
Empires are heterogeneous even within themselves over time and across Geographies. The British empire took a very different form in Ireland, to the Americas, to India, to Kenya.
Similarly the Soviet experience was very different between the Ukraine, the Baltics, Georgia, Tajikistan; or in non-Soviet Warsaw pact countries, which were -- as for most countries in the American empire -- nominally independent, but practically not, see Hungary and Czechoslovakia for particularly pertinent examples.
Ultimately, this is a duck test thing. The American empire looks like an empire, acts like an empire, so to my mind it very much is an Empire.
> The US does not maintain colonies
This, I'm sorry, is categorically false. America has colonies in American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
I'd go further to suggest, that as Israel's most substantial economic and political backer, Israel could be considered something akin to a US colony in the Middle East.
I don't think you addressed my main point about ecosystems.
Following your argument, every major power could be considered imperialistic, which kind of defeats the purpose of the word. Aye the US maintains some minor, vestigial, colonies. However it does not engage in imperial conquest. South Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan are not part of US territorial holdings, and it was never a US war objectives to make them so.
We have to draw some lines somewhere, otherwise "imperialist" just means "really big". If you disagree, name a non-imperialist world power.
At no point in this thread have I claimed there are no other countries with imperialist characteristics, I'm just highlighting the fact that the US is very much an empire, an empire which runs my country and many more besides, and is very much the biggest and baddest of them all today.
Territorial conquest here is very much a legal, not a practical distinction. To return to my previous point, different empires function differently. I don't think absorption into one's de-jure territory is is necessarily a defining characteristic here. Much of India under the British, for example, was run through vassals.
To address your question directly, I'd say India is a major world power, with about four times the population of the US, and you'd be hard pressed to describe them as an empire.
China, for its part, maintains three overseas bases, only one of which in a country it has sent troops into during a conflict (Cambodia). This is in comparison to over fifty US bases, the largest of which are all very much the result of invasions.
In the 21st century, China has had a few border skirmishes with India. In the 21st century alone, the US has fought in Afghanistan, Yemen, the Philippines, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya, Uganda, DRC, CAR, South Sudan, Niger, Syria, Iran, Ukraine, Palestine, Lebanon, Venezuala, and Nigeria.
If you want to pin me down on a definition, I'd say an empire is a network of countries, controlled by and for the benefit of a central country, predominantly taken by force and maintained at least to some extent through the threat of force.
> An empire is a network of countries, controlled by and for the benefit of a central country, predominantly taken by force and maintained at least to some extent through the threat of force.
I tend to agree. The keyword is "control". The US does not control, it influences. The distinction is of kind, not of degree.
As a contrast I offer the former-Soviet empire, which was very much controlled from Moscow in a way Berlin is simply not controlled from Washington today. Much in the same way that Russia is attempting to control eastern Ukraine.
We need different words for these very different modes of existence. The Soviets controlled so they were an empire. The US influences so, despite being very large and powerful, and using that power to further its interests, it is not.
Empire is not defined by number of wars. China/Beijing exercises control over several nations that would otherwise be independent of it (Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, nominally Taiwan). Modern India is not an empire (though Mughal India very much was), neither is it exactly a major world power.
I think the demonization comes from people resenting the use of authority to restrict liberty, and from conflating the resentment of authority with bigotry. In this case, let private people discriminate freely.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." -H. L. Mencken
I think people should be allowed to make their own choices in terms of whom to hire/associate with, with absolutely no outside intervention. That doesn't make me a bigot.
"leftist subtexts" that treat this as a problem, and not as the single largest driver of growth in human history, to which we owe all of the material comfort we now enjoy.
An ecosystem with an under-exploited niche will eventually produce the behaviour that fills the niche. It's a self-optimizing system. None of this is fundamentally escapable as long as we are living organisms competing for finite resources.