I'll try to explain it as objectively as possible.
In his recent talk with Tucker, he starts out defending the blob, and he later expounds on it in 1.5 hour talk. The central proposition is "no blob, no pencils". Meaning that pencils consist of a large number of materials, many of which come from different countries, and if one of those countries decides to do an export ban, then you do not have pencils. So you need a blob to put pressure of those countries, or destabilize them, or corrupt judges and labor unions, or coup them, in order to be able to have pencils. That is, he says, necessary for American prosperity and safety. He says he does not want MAGA to preside over the 'demise of the American empire'. At the same time, he completely backs what is being done by Trump et al. right now, and he disagrees with methods that are at odds with what he views as 'American values'.
I get a bit annoyed by this argument. Every country in the world has pencils, and no blob. For the materials, there is perfect competition, so even if Malaysia puts an export ban on, nothing will happen. Also, while putting diplomatic pressure may be legitimate, corrupting judges and labor unions (which he seemed to explicitly endorse) are not in my view.
Thoughts? Is he having second thoughts? Did they get to him? Is he playing devil's advocate to prevent people from going overboard in his view? Was he always a double agent (no, he wasn't)?
That's absolutely fucking retarded.
No, you do not need an imperial subversion, coercion, and terrorism apparatus to manipulate countries into producing pencils. You can just fucking buy them.
B-B-B-B-B-BUT WE NEED TO CONTROL THE MARKET SO THAT THE CORPORATE MEGOLITH CAN MAKE THE PENCIL
No, you can just buy the material for the pencil.
This is a socialist mentality. If the government doesn't organize the planet, no one will produce pencils.
I found his interview with Tucker puzzling as well. Every time he came up with an example of what good we were supposedly getting out of the blob, it was either completely subjective or arguably not actually a good thing.
I'll still listen to what he has to say, and if he can point at specific functions that we need to keep for specific reasons I can consider it, but if the argument is "we have to overthrow governments foreign and domestic so we can have pencils" then I'll just say that I can live without pencils.
And no, I don't think he was a double agent, but even if he was, I don't care. The information was accurate as far as I can tell, and I don't want to let blue haired weirdos sitting in DC offices be in charge of who runs governments half-way around the world.
The US can manufacture anything in the world. We used to, in fact, thanks to being the only major industrial base to survive WWII mostly intact.
We don't have to rely on some Ricardian nebulous free trade concept that is now laid bare to be a lie. The theory of comparative advantage, which assumes both labor and capital are not mobile, utterly fails when they are.
Every major world nation that has set themselves up as an export economy has punishing tariffs that protect their domestic industries. Japan does it, China does it, Korea does it, they all do it. It is about time the US responded in kind.
We used to be able to build a destroyer a day in WW2. With half the population, way worse education, and way worse literacy.
Free trade is actually wildly productive (which is why we have free trade between American states). The problem is that we don't have anything like free trade. We have free trade, but only for specific corporations who are rewarded for engaging in Colonialism inside the US.
You actually would profit massively in a free trade, free market from the other guy having a tariff on you because he would put himself out of business. They are a terrible idea to impose in a vacuum. However, we have a Socialist economy that promotes internal colonialism, unlimited remittances, and unlimited taxation on the American consumer, mixed with Byzantine regulations.
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People still can't do math, but now they have AI to solve it for them.
I think the number of people who couldn't read in the USMC during WW2 was 30%.
Yes, way worse literacy.
Someone hasn’t seen inner city school stats lately lol
I'm fully aware of that. Even with those numbers, literacy in the US is closer to 93%. Literacy during the 40s was surprisingly high. It wasn't truly outlandish, or exceptional given the time, but it didn't even crest 75% nation wide until the 60's IIRC.
I know you're trying to point something out but he's correct on the rest of it. I think his point is we did more with less.
The reason why corporations are as retarded as they are and why our economy has so many issues is because of over-regulation. It allowed corporations to grow bigger, resize, merge into bigger ones. There was less competition, yet the demand was still there, so to satisfy that demand, we chose to outsource it to produce it for cheaper with slave labor.
General MacArthur thinking we could kill Communist China with Capitalism in the 80s was one of the WORST fucking things that was done to the US government and the US as a superpower.
Also I imagine the ratification of the 19th just added fuel to the fire by essentially doubling our workforce pool.
I don’t know too much about him beyond a couple interviews I’ve seen but just to clarify:
Is he saying “without the blob america wont have pencils”
Or is he saying “without the blob America won’t control the international pencil trade (and all the accompanying benefits)”
iirc he worked at the state department, and by all accounts this seems to be how they’re taught to think there - in terms of “soft” power and hidden, plausibly deniable, machinations
Probably number 2.
It's obviously #2, and he's trying to confuse it as #1.
Pencils.
Fuck you man lmao, that made me snigger.
Benefits accruing to not-me really.
Why do you think India buys oil in dollars or SA sells oil in dollars? Because we make them do it, and we benefit hugely from it.
US dollar is the reserve currency because we used military, CIA, USAID, and other tools to force that on them against their own self-interests.
If we didn't do these 'immoral' things then what would happen? Everybody wouldn't just live in peace and prosperity, China would do it and our economy would be at most 1/4 the size - in fact they may be doing it right now, to US.
You can take the principled stand and be fine with working 4x harder than Chinese, for less wealth, as long as you understand that's what you're calling for and that most Americans won't want that.
The problem with USAID, from a US or even Western perspective, was not that they were fucking with other countries, but that they got infested with crazy liberals that were not using it to benefit America but instead their own personal insanities.
If we didn't do these things China would fucking die because we'd stop literally giving them all of our money. People would stay away from their cartel, whatever is left of it, because they'd get more money trading with us and we wouldn't be stealing it.
The weakness in our economy isn't because we just have a weaker economy than China (we don't). It's because the blob is supported by multi-national corporations that are maintaining their hegemony by undermining the American economy because it is our economy that would threaten them with competition.
It's like saying the Slave Plantations in the American South built American wealth. Wrong: they stunted it. Slavery was a wildly expensive luxury belief system which generated personal wealth to elites, and not to the general marketplace who were basically convinced to stay out of cotton industry unless you had a plantation.
The blob maintains the Corporatism. The Corporatism then claims to be the center of all wealth and development. Instead it's the very thing that is rewarding our enemies and holding us back.
How did the US dethrone UK? Because we had more people and industry and resources.
China has all that. There's no world in which China just "fucking dies" unless they kill themselves (which is what the good USAID money went to, among other things).
India, Russia, the rest of BRIC just will decide not to trade with China because 'China bad'? Nope.
You're confusing the bad USAID/meddling with the good, and Mike Benz specifically mentions this how the bad USAID is now going to protect multinational corporations that don't benefit or represent the U.S. any more (whereas they did before like 1970). Listen to what he says and I bet you'll actually agree with him.
Considering that culturally, they seem to have your average corporate mindset, that being; Short-term profit at all costs, cut corners whenever possible, and always have a public image of being completely together no matter how low the "days since last accident" number is....
China has worse people, industry, logistics, efficiency, and more.
The CCP's collapse is nearly guaranteed if the US went back to containment like it did prior to Nixon. No one has benefited from Chinese manufacturing, only the CCP.
You don't actually want China to kill itself, because it means a Chinese Civil War, and you can expect 200 million dead from that if China's history is anything to go by.
BRIC is barely even able to organize itself together.
That's almost exclusively what all US international meddling is for, even going back to the Spanish American War. This isn't a 'recent' thing. Alexa, what is "The United Fruit Company"?
lol why do you think this is?
You are exactly what Benz is concerned about - people who don't understand that if you waved a wand and the dollar wasn't the reserve currency our economy would shrink 3/4 overnight and whoever takes the mantle would be that much stronger. Without dicking over other countries this would have happened decades ago.
The reserve dollar puts every other country on a treadmill, where it looks like they're running fast but aren't catching up to us. We mess with the speed sometimes, trip them up, and they go flying off the back. If we just stop the treadmill they'll not only catch up but go shooting past.
BRICs isn't able to organize itself because the countries themselves don't want to organize.
Our economy would shrink by 1/4th and it's explicitly as a result of people like Benz who are prepared to use the Deep State as an imperial project to keep specific multi-national corporations running the world for themselves. The state isn't even interested in American dominance. They aren't propping America up, just themselves at our expense. That is the 1/4th that would die.
No one else would be able to take up that mantel, because no one else is capable of the retarded imperial project we've embarked on.
It was supposed to be rhetorical. Obviously BRICS has been resisted by American soft (and hard) power.
As I've already mentioned and you've pretended not to hear, your characterization of what Benz said is false.
Not being the reserve currency means effectively we'd have to balance the budget while paying off 7 trillion in external debt. If we throw out the imperial baby with the bath water we're in for a much larger contraction than 1/4th. And it's simply naive to think America is the only country that would leverage their power for control over global finance.
The purpose of that external debt was to manage the empire. There is literally no reason a strong and successful economy couldn't keep the US a reserve currency. The reason it isn't already gone is because of the weakness of our economy since the 70's, and our imperial efforts since even before that.
This isn't about thinking that china wouldn't try to leverage power. It's about thinking that the US economy wouldn't be able to a better option even with aggressive coercion from other states.
I agree that the Petrodollar has been fantastically useful to the USA. That said, the deal is that the USA lends its military might to grant stability and legitimacy to the ruling factions of the OPEC nations, in exchange they trade oil in greenbacks.
The USA don't need a corrupt, wasteful bureaucracy for that. The USA needs strong leadership and a capable and effective military.
We don't even need OPEC and Saudi Arabia. We don't even need Canada with their marshes. With our off-shore drilling we are energy independent.
I get the Petrodollar Scam is a good con for us. But we don't even need that. The American economy is the greatest in the world and it's not close. We just have to stop being willfully retarded.
China only exists because we allowed US corps to become oligarchs, abuse our own nation and ship all their actual production to china and elsewhere.
Those corps don't exist in slite of government, they exist because of it. Government protects big business with nonsense like corporate personhood and not enforcing US labor standards on companies selling in the US.
What the fuck is "the blob" here? You clearly don't mean the classic monster movie.
All that usage of a slang term I've never heard before, and Urban Dictionary is NOT helping.
And what's worse, no comments are explaining it either, so I have to ask!
I check here almost every day, and I have NEVER heard this one before.
The deep state.
Weird, but okay. Thanks for the straight answer. I appreciate it.
Thanks for asking, I didn't know either and a google search revealed this page as the first result.
It’s just another way of saying “deep state.”
The deep state as in the intelligence services, there are 19 official ones. And the shallow state, which is basically the entrenched federal workforce. The government that you don't and cant vote for.
I watched the whole interview. Benz understands the swamp, and knows it's detrimental and unrepentantly corrupt. He is just not willing to change the status quo too much. You can see him really getting into telling some new story about corrupt x or corrupt y, but then reels himself back in out of fear of committing to a course for change.
change is painful, I expect things will hurt for a while. it's why i didn't expect egg prices to magically drop on day one of the trump presidency.
...but short term pain for long-term gain has always been a better strategy than the opposite...
Pencils are just a metaphor for smart weapons.
What he's ignoring or intentionally omitting is that America actually has all the natural resources it needs to make absolutely everything we could ever need. We've got some of the largest and purest quartz, coal, rare earth reserves, etc on the planet. We currently lack the generationally developed skilled labor necessary for utilizing it all to the fullest, right away, but that's not impossible to rebuild. You can thank deindustrialization for that.
It sounds like he's perhaps poorly arguing for new positive international structures led by America to replace the old Atlantic blob. Not unlike Jordan Petersen arguing for a UN replacement, or Elon Musk declaring "Novus Ordo Seclorum." Globalization is not going away and power vacuums are always filled by somebody.
he’s a jew who openly admits to pretending to be an anti-semitic proud boy on gab for reasons, fuck this guy and his defense of funding trannys and other degenerates overseas just so we can use them as assets to topple leaders in poor countries who dont do as they’re told. that’s the problem with jews no fucking moral code at all, you can’t say we don’t want this shit in our country and than actively use it to destabilize and fuck other countries
He's correct, there is a very good reason for countries to have Armies and be able to project power, being able to project power without an army is useful because it's cheaper and more effective in lots of cases. This is "soft power" The world is not kumbuya and hold hands. Countries will exert power and influence aka bend them to their benefit. The stronger country will bend the weaker country, or it will be done to them.
This is the on paper purpose of the intelligence agencies. USAID was meant/originally providing money to bribe/influence other countries. Once you take a mafia don's money, they own you.
It's not literally about pencils. It's about long complex supply chains that create the lifestyle that benefits America, is reliant on a very fragile system that is backed up by US force. If you take that away it collapses as the system is optimised for efficiency not resiliency.
Unlike the military though, which is very obvious when it's being used so it's hard to overuse it and obvious when it's happening. The covert services are, well covert. So naturally they find a nail to always hammer. Whether it benefits the US or not.
which one?