/edu/ - Education

>>7638
The Soviets tried to convert military gear to civilian use, in order to claw back some of that value. Like they tried to convert tanks into tractors and construction work machinery. Most of that didn't work well because tanks are fuel guzzlers and maintenance hogs.

Some of it did work tho.
-They managed to build a north-pole explorer vehicle on the basis of a converted tank which was pretty inspired.
-Then there are the spectacular rail de-icing/snow-clearing machines that use old jet engines like enormous hair-dryers.
-They build the ultimate fire-engine by taking a tank and sticking a custom turret on it that uses 2 jet-engines with water injection. This thing was powerful enough to spray out the infernal fire-torrent of burning oil-pipelines.

Military transport helicopters, and supply-trucks were also successfully converted to civilian use. There is a very successful company that makes super rugged all terrain trucks that came out of this.

The US has a cargo-lifter helicopter with a unusual inter-meshing dual rotor design, which got converted from doing military supply drops, to search/rescue and forest-fire-fighting.

>>7638
>Is it just a tool to extract value from other countries?
Yes from the perspective of the imperial bourgoisie they are investing into means of conquering in order to extract super-profits from the periphery. Well to the extend they are rational actors. A lot of the military industrial complex is just a racket for private contractors. The most expensive toilet seat was a whopping ten grand.

>>7639
Well that's true, and computers and internet and GPS are all military developments, so I guess there's some tie-in to what people actually find socially necessary.

>>7640
So I guess it depends on the point of view: if it's from the POV of the bourgeoisie, the military is necessary, so they fund it. But from the proletariat point of view it is a surplus resource sink and a tool of imperialism. Then most of the military is a waste of human life.

However that still leaves me confused: what is being created by this industry? Of course we can tally up how many human hours work for the MIC, but is it or is it not work that goes into creating value? And if it's not (because it's not SNLT) what is being created?

>>7641
>So I guess it depends on the point of view: if it's from the POV of the bourgeoisie, the military is necessary, so they fund it.
Yes but not for every capitalist, the circle of capitalists that benefit is shrinking. Some capitalists are loosing out. We're sort of nearing the end of the age of empires as well, which means that the returns on investment for imperial stuff are going to shrink and eventually it'll turn into a loss.

>But from the proletariat point of view it is a surplus resource sink and a tool of imperialism. Then most of the military is a waste of human life.
Well the world has anarchy between states, so you can't do without some amount of military, but yeah upholding a imperial system that's a drain. That's why all empires fall.

>However that still leaves me confused: what is being created by this industry?
Like you said there's some technological offshoots. Politically i think the current crisis period will "produce" more assertive pacifism.

>Of course we can tally up how many human hours work for the MIC, but is it or is it not work that goes into creating value? And if it's not (because it's not SNLT) what is being created?
You need work to create value, but the reverse is not necessarily true, not all expenditure of work creates value. For example all the human effort expended for the 2 decades of Afghanistan forever-war yielded roughly nothing. All the dead/maimed and all the grind that went into it, poof.

It doesn't create value.
Eisenhower was calling out the two obvious threat to what had taken over the US, that he was tasked with representing. Aristocracy fears a military coup - this is the most obvious way the nascent globalization project would be destroyed at home - and it fears industry that is not in service to aristocracy. and technological values not lining up to aristocratic desires.

In effect, he was calling for the MIC to not be independent of the true ruling power, and appealing to factions in the US public that were more amenable to seeing the militarists as a threat than the aristocratic project.

>>7641
The military is most unnecessary though. It's well known that most of these weapons platforms will be obsolete and scrapped without seeing significant use, and their use as a deterrent is questionable. The purpose of all of the military apparati in the past century has been primarily defensive. The German war plan during the Nazi period was no exception. Retards think "offense won", but the Germans expected that if they did not engineer the swift victory backed by internal coup, they were going to have to continue pressing, and defend the Nazi imperatives. It just so happened the Nazi imperatives weren't "defending Germany", but defending their stolen hoards of gold as the rats slinked off and left the German people to eat shit.

If you took these weapons for an offensive war, they get utterly destroyed against any half-competent defensive strategy. Setting up a modern war entails a ridiculous setup of siegeworks before the war begins, logistic expectations of what will result from it, and limited war aims. General war becomes far too difficult to control or predict, and no one is in the business of throwing away their big and expensive military because it's a freeroll.

One reason why it was a fools' errand to believe Bush would attack Iran (aside from there being nothing to gain and the known existence of the Iran-Contra network).

>>7642
>Well the world has anarchy between states, so you can't do without some amount of military, but yeah upholding a imperial system that's a drain. That's why all empires fall.

Thats not what conservatives say. They say empires fall due to women and youth being given rights and amenities.

>>7703
Arguably it's the opposite, when empires deprive people of rights or material resources, they create incentives to oppose empire

>>7703
Conservatives are retarded natural slaves if they actually believe the slop they feed to their enablers. Conservative cuntrags and their cuckold husbands love saying that shit.

Feminism is imperialist - it is one of the imperial pillars throughout history, the claim to women and of the women to sacred status, if they are selected as valid members of society. In barbarous conditions, the sex of the participants is ultimately irrelevant, since barbarous societies have no concept of "rights" as such. The only right in barbarism is strength. To call conservatives "barbarists" is a grave insult to the barbarian.

>>7713
Empire as a concept cannot be opposed meaningfully by pretending it doesn't exist or can be legislated out of existence by decree. That's not how empire works. Calling a totalizing legal regime "not an empire" does not make it not-an-empire. Most people really don't think about opposing empire seriously. They think only of performative opposition, or they oppose empire in the only way humans ever really did - by avoiding empire at all costs, in a hopeless struggle against the conditions of humanity and civilization. Even if there were a post-civilizational normal, empire as a concept would remain. It might be a different empire, but it has always been trading one boss for another at best. Almost always, the contest has been to usurp an empire, or more accurately, usurp the offices of imperial authority while keeping the essential structure intact. Nearly all revolution and "activism" is about this goal - presuming the imperial shibboleths are natural and eternal and baked into the subjects genetically, and building their entire concept of the political, the law, and social institutions around this belief. It has always been ruinous, but humans find this attractive until there has been too much rot and it is truly ended once and for all. Even this would not change the existence of empires. It would be more likely that humanity ceases to care about empire and sees it as a beast that refuses to die, or humans see despotism as the only correct condition of political society, and this becomes the final form of human government. It is also more likely that humans in such conditions will gradually destroy themselves as "persons" and cease believing that such a thing as "rights" would be relevant even if they existed. Even if they regained property in some sense, the idea that humans regard "rights" has been destroyed forever. Humans only know how to lie. Failed race.

It's rather pointless in this discussion because empires never once were founded on male dominance. The sexualist ideology is for the slaves, the perverts, the fags. No one cares about this when they have actual lives. If you're made to care about this stupidity in the first place, you're not fighting empire. You're screeching about ideology, and that's irrelevant to empire or any concept of the political. Empires, as I said, tend to be feminist rather than misogynist. Bitches love having all of the finery and plunder given to them by imperial suitors. The peculiar type of feminism that prevailed is eugenics on the death march, more than a generalized hatred of men. The hatred of men, much like love, is doled out sparingly, marking clearly who is favored and who is disfavored. That is the praxis at work. Outside of the selected losers, men and women of valid status do not give a shit about any of this, and laugh at anyone who is forced to comply with an insane sexual ideology. We've always known what this was ever since Tavistock imposed this shit.

>>7724
the irony is conservatism doesnt really exist

>>7725
>Empire as a concept cannot
>be legislated out of existence by decree.
Interesting thought, i haven't come across any analysis regarding a legalistic strategy.
Now i have to wonder.

>in a hopeless struggle against the conditions of humanity and civilization. Even if there were a post-civilizational normal, empire as a concept would remain. It might be a different empire, but it has always been trading one boss for another at best. Almost always, the contest has been to usurp an empire, or more accurately, usurp the offices of imperial authority while keeping the essential structure intact.
That's a lot of words to say
<nothing can be changed
It's obviously wrong, empires as a structure began at some point, and eventually imperial systems will be done because the material conditions no longer allow for it. You can't argue against this unless you want to commit the eternal-ism error.

From the looks of it, in present conditions the imperial structure seems to be less effective than the competing structures, so maybe we are witnessing the end of the age of empires. Maybe the US empire will be the last one and nobody will be able to create a new one after that.

>>7727
A particular empire rises and falls, but empire is a game that will be played in one way or another. Empires never fall on their own. They are always pushed to break them at the end by something. If nothing is there to break them, they don't fall - and that's why Imperial China kept going to the 20th century, despite being invaded so many times. There never was "another system", and when the empire of China did go down, it was after a century of modernization and subsumption into the last remaining empire, in fits and starts. Communist China plays the same game as every other superstate of the 20th century - bargaining position within that one empire, the last empire. Nothing on Earth will end it, no amount of decay will be too low for it.

That was what the fall of Rome was by the way - usurpation of the empire by barbarian warlords, rather than conquest of an alien. Ricimer and Odoacer were at one time men with pull in the Western Empire, since by that time, the military was run by barbarians who effectively were the throne. But, they didn't destroy the Roman system and did not market a "different empire", and the first thing they did after 476 is present the rule of German kings as imperial legitimacy much as clients were installed before. They weren't establishing a Germanic, anti-Roman empire. They wanted, when they got around to it, to be the new Rome, much like the old boss. But, the real imperial authority was in the Church, where it remains to this day. The Church can rebrand itself however much it likes, extend its tendrils, elevate its agents around the world, place an economic or financial center in London or Paris or Shanghai if it really wants to.

The error of empire is confusing centralization and city-state establishments with Empire proper. That wasn't what Rome was, wasn't what China was, but the mythos requires the city to be the showpiece of Empire - for Empire to be synonymous with civilization. This wasn't a thing in China, where the imperial capital only had special power because that's where the emperor and his court were situated. Beijing literally translates to "Northern Capital" and was established out of basically nothing because it was removed form the prior capital, and seemed as good a place as any to plop the Ming Dynasty court. Rome the city was a persistent drain on the Empire, but all of the cities and tribes that became friends of Rome were clients of both the city and thus the Senate, and of individual politicians and generals, until the Caesars took the lion's share of that for themselves, and now they were all clients of the Caesar and Caesar alone.

Empires are not engines of commerce or industry. Empires, as a rule, revile industry and do as much as possible to undermine it, except to the extent that industry can be extracted for what they really care about. The city was for Empire an expedient way to manage this extraction, rather than the point in of itself. The extraction is carried out for entirely unproductive enterprises, which is what the imperial clique and those feeding from it always want. Republics are little more than a get rich quick scheme to promote men of the middle class to office-holding, and subvert what a ruling interest really fears - the little people and especially slaves fucking off forever and taking all of their shit back, ending this sorry experiment once and for all. When that happens, the slaves don't think this is about an ideology where there are no empires, but the slaves want their empire and for the big empire to finally leave them alone. That was basically what the Haitians wanted - to kick out the French, not be under ruinous debt, and otherwise, they'd be ruled by a king and manage their own affairs. Empire is never an ideological thing. One way or another, every state has to play the game of empire, and Empire itself has nothing to do with the state or the law or anything you think of as "political matters". Empires are by their nature depoliticized, outside of court intrigues and the classes that contest for imperial favor. That's always how it works, so long as we conduct politics in this fashion.

If it were going to be different, you'd have to really think about what you are doing, instead of retreating to ideology or institutional shibboleths about the s'pos'das. You'd find, as many already have, that you need an army, you need your own bank, you need to manage your internal economic affairs and not sell off every part of your country and its people at cut-rate prices. You'd also need to make a pitch that your establishment is a force for good in the world, rather than screaming "me wantee" like a retard. "Me wantee" isn't a constitution or any sort of moral agency anyone will regard, and no state in history has ever been premised on "me wantee" in the crassest way imaginable. If it is espoused, it's a fool's thinking of political power, appropriate for fools who are just smart enough to feed the torture machine and not ask questions.

Not saying "Empire is eternal" in the current condition of it. The political thought at work is not centered around Empire, but around aristocracy and its conceits. The Empire is, for them, a vehicle for them to have their Super Adventure Club. They actually believe they're going to become gods. It really is that crazy up there. They're not going to give up Empire, but of all of the people, aristocracy are the only people who really get anything out of Empire. Everyone else, up to the warlords who are nominally given a crown, has to ask themselves what any of it was for once they win the game. It never made them any happier, or safer, or richer in the long term. The spoils of Empire always taste bitter. The best they aspire to is to attempt to reform Empire, make it tolerable to live in, as the genuine conditions of Empire required it to be. Even the extremely ultraviolent empire domianted by the eugenic creed is lax compared to the "maximal torture state" that is technologically possible, if that was really what we are here for. Eugenism carves out so many exceptions for its favored courtiers and butt-buddies for the stupidest reasons, and it's very expensive to maintain that, even after the fictions of law and any sort of public interest are disbanded. Anyone who thinks eugenics is the future is a fucking idiot and deserves all of the horrors coming to them. Enablers, though, do not think. They never have, and why would they? Thinking too hard gives them wrinkles, and it's not like it's intellectually hard to see what this turns into. They're trained, like animals, to feel good, so they do it. It really is that sad.

If you had global communism, that would still be an extractive empire. It might be a more evenly developed empire, but communism as it was formulated is extremely extractive and sees the environment and nature (correctly) as alien to the city. It was in theory extractive for a purpose that could be rationalized and given to the public. Communism did not fail for economic or managerial reasons, like the Party was too stupid to add two and two. The industry, technology, and resource flows of the Soviet system were admitted to basically work fine, or worked better than the capitalist counterparts which were always ruinous for anything you'd actually want. The only reason we still have what they call "capitalism" today is precisely because it is economically ruinous, and they believe the ruination can be directed to ensure the right people are selected to die "by nature". If not for that, 1970-1975 would have been the end of any belief that capitalism could work. The facade and efforts to placate the failing middle class who didn't get that they were sold down the river a long time ago would have abruptly ended, and in many ways, they did. No one could think the voodoo economics of Reagan was intended for anything but full depopulation, and during the 1970s, they talked about this all of the time and never shut up about it since. It is flabbergasting to me that we don't admit this is the default, and we pretend that the s'pos'das are the reality. It's insane.

If you wanted to do away with Empire for good, the only way this would happen would be to shrink the imperial apparatus and all it entails by tacit agreement. Instead of doing that, modernity did the exact opposite. It hobbled all of the things that constrained Empire's invasion of public and private life, and strengthened the imperial and aristocratic interest and its mode of thought and politics above all others. Humans didn't know anything else, and they won't know anything for a very long time. If and when this does happen, it only be known in fantasies - and under the present conditions, such fantasies are deemed "crimethink" or they are premised on a world-view that is so detached from anything science would confirm that it requires a whole panoply of magical thinking to sustain those models of the universe. But, I believe, not too long from now, it will become more acceptable to say what this is and what it always has been, with the full knowledge that the bastards won, and we're stuck on this cattle train to the next apocalyptic cycle, after "the return of the Christ" is played out and they finish off the Christian deception.

The type of society that would do this would be one of two things. The vision presented to us that can be done any time is democracy in the true sense - which is to say, militant mob rule on a permanent basis, where the mob works out a system to do away with aristocracy forever, or close enough to forever. Since doing this goes against most of the things that make that armed mob capable of doing anything, and works against the interests of that sector in the long term - remember, they don't believe in ideology, and could easily accept a different king and call it good - this leads to outcomes that, if they were ever allowed to exist for humanity, would be very calamitous. Given the current state of humanity, very likely this angry mob will just proclaim, having seen enough, "we're done - forever". They would exist primarily to draw down of their own accord the numbers of humanity, starting with the masters who organized the managed cull, and considering this life and its aspirations to be nothing but a fruitless and vain effort. This is what many of the peasant revolts were - revolts led by would-be messiahs, that could seize a city, and if they were fortuante, spread the religious virus to another city, another village, and so on. There is nothing preventing the masses from "rebelling on their own", but the nature of their rebellion would not be a political rebellion, or a "movement" or an obviously manufactured PR slogan. It would be nothing less than a jihad - or, more appropriately, a new type of religious struggle that displaces "jihad" as a particularly effective concept of such a struggle, that would be utterly ruthless and terrible beyond any braying about "we will make no excuses for the terror". If you are going to conduct any terror and you're not a sniveling retard, you don't need to say you need no excuses. History has provided ample excuses for the terror, and every terror in history has given their reasons. What sort of fag doesn't have a whole theory of how to conduct the terror if they set their mind to it? Idiots! But, the only way this happens is if there is a new religion, and for many reasons, religions don't exist as an invention or a "theory" that can be built by some great working. Every religion that has ever existed stems from the same root - the problem of evil, and the study of it, for whatever purposes one might have. Religion is not the sole study of the evil, but no understanding humans have beyond the most trivial of the evil can avoid religious origins. One does not declare a new god like a new fad, especially since the old polytheistic game is dead on arrival. The major religions today feature a "god" whose entire existence is a near-total opposing force to the "gods" that humanity once believed in, intended to prepare humanity for the obvious consequence of their millennia of intransigence. So, the only away a new religion "works" is one of two things. Either existing revelation and religious fervor is channeled towards some event in the world that makes a new jihad the central cause and holiest ritual long enough to speak of doing what finally has to be done… or actual gods or spirits appear in the world in some fashion that is acceptable enough to enough people, to make clear what this history has always been. This would not happen by any intellectual exercise or struggle session, and both of those things are designed specifically to destroy that. A new religion of the masses would almost certainly see itself at total and irreconcilable war with the old religions and with eugenics in total, and very likely any new religion would hold the eugenists as uniquely guilty in world history. The ritual sacrifice eugenics entailed would be entirely reversed, with all that was done now being more than enough of a pretext for the holy terror, continuing for centuries to make it clear who won the true war. Eugenists and all of their sniveling lies will burn not just in Hell, but in a living Hell. We'd make their Ingsoc power trip fantasies look like some candy-ass Theosophy reading group. As for the Satanists and other such fags, and for infidels following false prophets, their penance is impossible, but they will be granted, by the mercy of Heaven, a reprieve, so long as their commitment to eugenics, if it exists, is made clear. Those who tasted deeper blood will be summarily exterminated. We would, out of necessity, devise a proper rendering of law that circumvents the "justice" facade, and begins the very long process of undoing the aristocratic shibboleths that were installed in every hitherto known law code.

The other way a new religion arises basically makes clear that the "religious revival" will never happen the way we think onr can it last long, without drastic changes to the human constitution and perception of themselves. If this happens, then the entire program of revolt or "jihad" in the same sense serves no purpose. The lowest class stopped caring a long time ago about believing this world could be saved. The world didn't do this to us. Humans did. So, the more likely course of action is that the lowest class, and increasingly the other orders, will do terrible things to themselves to tolerate living under this order, knowing that this world was truly conquered by Satan. But, such a conquest will not be respected nor regarded, for compliance was never an option. Already, there are people today coming around to that reality, and many who were there because they knew what this was, and felt it was best for their simpler interests to ignore it as best as they can. I don't blame the people who wanted to ignore what they knew could not change realistically, many of whom were trying in some way to stem the worst of this in whatever way they oculd. Most humans are not habitual enablers, even when they are forced to or they are induced to do so. The usual habit is that people taste their socially necessary quota of blood to get into valid society, give their hearts to Jesus or Allah or the demonic deity of their choice, and having done the thing that humans do, carry on doing as little as possible, since even the nastiest of humanity has a sense that this turns on itself - and it surely has if they wanted anything else form this sad, sorry race.

But, the more likely "endgame", is that humans will, out of necessity, turn away entirely from political and social life, and see that, after all of this, there really isn't anything to do or any great mission. Despite obvious failures, deliberate incompetence, laziness, disinterest or outright sabotage of productive society by the workers who know they will never get anything food out of it, and just about the most ruinous language and thought humanity could have developed, humans have through their crude productive arts produced such a surplus that there is no reason that most of the populace would be thrust into onerous and exhausting "extermination through labor" that capitalism always entailed. There was never a good purpose for forcing such an insanely long work week. You'd only impose that if the goal was extermination, and that was indeed the goal of the Company when they started the modern revolutionary fad. That's all capitalism is - a theory of democide and enclosure. By extension, that's what Marx's version of communism was, since he went out of his way to destroy anything that would have actually ended it - calling it the ruin of the contending classes. The ruin of the contending class has been the goal of labor, rather than any idea that they should adopt the same vampiric thinking that did this to them and the less fortunate. Let it fail. It is no loss to us, and for most of history, that was the position of the broad masses - that they were more than happy to encourage the rich to kill each other, if a few of them got some goodies and the favored of the workers got it easy. Every slavery offers this carrot, and wageslavery is no different. Slaves are never equal and this is made abundantly clear to anyone who manages anything.

Anyway this is moving far afield of the OP.

>>7726
You're right, conservatism is a made up "ideology" with no substance whatsoever. There is no lower creature than the American conservative - a cuckold, a pervert, who is dumb enough to actaully believe their leaders are angels. What a retarded party.

Going back to what I was writing about Empire, I don't see the idea of Empire ending unless humans psychologically detach from any sense of self. This is possible - there are people who do so now, in small ways and rarely as much as they can while keeping up any facade for interfacing with predatory society. If that becomes the overwhelming majority position, and self-interest is almost entirely abrogated or changes to eliminate the conception of the person or philosophical subject, then Empire would no longer be a concern for much at all. It would still remain a fact, for Empire is inherent to what it means to speak of political society, human or otherwise; but it would not be a fact of any moral importance or granted the spiritual values we attached to empire. For many people, empires remain amoral entities, little more than the name of the master you pay tribute to, who might give something in return as empires are typically transactional in order to perpetuate themselves. The empires today give as little as they can and take everything, but empires have to feed some of the people to go along with this insane death cult to feed the Super Adventure Club.

I believe the most obvious endgame for humanity is that most of humanity will just… leave. They'll live out their lives, what little is left of them, and refuse to reproduce. There will be brief rises of repopulation once the primary period of eugenics is over, only to turn back when they realize there's really nothing to live for and nothing to do. Efforts to force-breed offspring have always failed and do not produce the result social engineers insist they must. If they worked, they would have been done a long time ago, since modernity was not the first experiment with that. You're going to see that the current depopulation dream will fail, because there's still fight left in humanity, and pure spite will prevent what they have wanted to do. What follows will be a long grind - and the plan of the eugenists is a roughly 40-50 year "final stage of the siege", where they simply choose who lives and lock out everyone else until they die from pure exhaustion. But, this will still not reach their goal of the golden billion. What follows would be a brief rebuilding, this time managed since the victors of the coming transformation will almost certainly promote reproduction among their own kind with generous subsidies at the expense of the enslaved and defeated. But, this will have limited effect, and after whatever settlement is made to finalize the new world order by the early 22nd century (this is where the crystal ball ceases to work), there is even less reason to give a shit. Depopulation will resume, this time not in accord with a ritual sacrifice plan, but because the slaves will refuse to the bitter end to do anything, will poison themselves, slit their wrists at the first opportunity, and there will be nothing, no control of information or reality, that prevents this. The only thing that ever moderated slavery is that every hitherto known form of slavery either allowed manumission, or granted to slaves a level of dignity and protection that was compatible with life, and usually both carrots were extended. There is no way to moderate the form slavery will take - has already taken - in the world to come, to meet the demands of the incoming aristocracy and what is required to maintain it. We already see those who checked out, whose sole purpose is to plot the final escape route, who have been able to share notes. The dying slaves would not be truly necessary for the new aristocracy, since the chief function of slavery is not productivity but command and control of those who would otherwise contest the political and imperial settlement out of dire necessity. There will simply be nothing to stop this, and no reason one way or another to do other than let "nature" take its course. The nihilistic drive will seep into the more favored classes, and without any real objective or purpose to attain, and no way to restore the Plan War of the 20th and 21st centuries, the final fading of humanity begins. It is probably around here that "new religion time" is contemplated, but this doesn't change much either, and while there are a few fervent believers, "be fruitful and multiply" would only feed the thing you're trying to defeat. The calculus for that no longer exists, and any new religion would see correctly that "be fruitful and multiply" was intended to create cattle and eager fodder, not men. The new religion wouldn't do much to reverse the trend, other than giving the faithful some purpose to reproduce out of pure spite. It would be a religion of those who are hardcore about it, and it would, given the conditions, almost certainly be adoptive of those who have nothing and were never going to have anything. This is one of the ways Christianity found success early on, by extending this to a few who really got into it. It still works today, although the meaning has been so perverted and the religion is exposed as essentially Luciferian. The history of Christianity would make clear that doing a repeat is wrong - they would know why it failed, why all of the hitherto known religions were demon-worship of some sort or another, and that the grim fate of the world is evidence that the old gods were all wrong. Said religion would find converts among the favored classes, who will at first co-opt it as they always have, but this time, it won't work. Too much has been seen and cannot be unseen, and among the tenets of any religion with viability will be to remember how public relations did this to us now.

The full extent of the "religious future", which is the most human of them, is broadly in line with some of the fringe stuff that is mentioned if you really get into theology and what these ancient myths really say about the distant future. There is indeed a reason why a made up religion won't work, without harkening back to the ideas that were at the center of most of the world's religions. They were based on something that was real, or real enough to those who saw the world in that light. Among the problems of evil religion has answered for humanity is the nature of time and history itself, and this figures prominently in the Abrahamic religions for a reason. There is a reason other than expedience or correctness why this view of time and history did prevail. What I vaguely would piece together is that they imagine, at some point, there will be creatures like humans, or humans themselves, who "see through time", and have a different perception of history and time and causality than we're locked into today. This is alien to the theories allowed for us, and difficult to explain without becoming too esoteric, but it is very likely that "space alien gods" are, in the mind of the people who get it, future humans or something akin to that, and in desperation, those who lived throughout history saw - by whatever means available to them - this future as fate or prophecy or some connection, for they had little reason to attach themselves to "now" and the conceits of such. In our time, "now" took on meaning it never had historically, where "imminent critique" was shoved down everyone's throats precisely for its retarding effect on thought. The same thinking which would allow prophecy and such foresight - and conversely hindsight and the first serious inquiry into philosophy of history - likely is what allows humans to make mental connections at all, or contend with language and the world in ways that are not as crude as mechanistic operations would make them seen. You might be able to draw out a mechanical model of how "this works", but it would be highly abstract, and humans at present are not adapted to think in this way most of the time. They'd go mad if they tried, and it is folly to "make it so". But, such a prophetic fate likely is the end stage for at least some of humanity, or something in the future - or, it was a phantom born out of necessity, because humanity had nothing going for it and was obviously guilty of a litany of crimes of Being.

But, religious kookery aside, the most likely fate for most of humanity is that they simply find nothing in this world, and leave not long after they arrived. That has been how it was for the vast majority of humanity, who really can't say this was "for" anything but a lot of hassle. The best parts were whatever time we stole away from the beast. I find that more of a cause for believing in prophecy than any desperate calling of the masses. But, there have long been those who turned away form the stupidity of this rat race, and what else would they do except contemplate this? It is too intrinsically interesting to not do so, if you're like me. Most are not like me, but many are in this regard, or are even more into it than me and better at it. I'm just following along.

>>7728
>A particular empire rises and falls, but empire is a game that will be played in one way or another.
You are able to recognize that an empire can fall, however you don't see that on the hole the imperial structure is subject to the same principle. If material conditions change enough then imperial systems will no longer be viable, the same way individual empires got rendered unworkable.

>If nothing is there to break them, they don't fall
The imperial economic motor is based on investing into conquest and then getting a return on that investment by looting the conquered. If there is nothing there, as as you put it "to break them", then the imperial system will eventual have conquered everything. At that point the imperial economic motor stalls hard. These systems have inertia and continue investing into conquering, but they get no returns on investment.

You have to realize that imperial structures cannot sustain them selves. They have to conquer. Conquering means being able to capture wealth that has been accumulated over an extended period of time by societies outside the imperial domain. Empires burn through wealth faster than it is being created, usually because of military expenses, elaborate population control mechanisms and all sorts off costs related to the maintenance of a ruling class.

It is very much physically impossible to uphold an imperial system indefinitely.

Of note is also that imperial systems don't seem to last as long as they once did, it used to take centuries for an imperial phase to exhaust it's "fuel" or bang against an unyielding opponent. Now we're down to a century or less. The US empire began it's primary imperial phase in the 1950s, and it doesn't look like it'll make it to a full century, as in 2050s. So the imperial tendency is manifesting in shorter bursts.

Here is the thing, I don't really see a successor for the US empire. The place in the world that has the economic strength to become an empire, does not appear to have the ambition. The only hint of imperial striving i have seen in China was a capital formation called Ant-group (or something similar), it tried to establish multinational financial power, in the fashion imperial capital usually does. And they got cut down to size. So my guess is that either there will be a protracted period without an empire, or it's over and there will be no more empires.

>>7736
Empires always rejig and restructure their "system", as do most functional states. This used to be expected with every generation, or every administration. The idea that this didn't happen and there was some "originalism" that must never be changed, is when the typical functioning of states, empires, and any institution was occulted, and we were not allowed to say what any of this was. At no point is an empire, a state, or a ruling class, dogmatically devoted to a fixed "system" which doesn't even describe the actual governing apparatus or anything that actually happens. Imperial officers, for the same reason as states, are quite aware of the conditions in their domain. Unlike states, empires are not beholden to "political correctness" or any the narratives that are given to the losers who will only be lied to. Rove said the crass and stupid version that is given for public consumption: "empires make their own reality". That is not a farcical or performative statement. It is of course wrong, but that was a statement for public consumption, so that the people knew it was truly over for them. The point is that you seem to think that imperial officers, the political class, or any self-interested agent, is locked into a "system" that is entirely given to them, as if they're too stupid to see anything around them and will march like lemmings. It's pure Fabianism!

Empires ARE NOT ECONOMIC PROPOSITIONS. In principle, empires will extract whatever material is available to them, as they please. After the fact, the imperial religion declares that the imperial authorities command nature at all levels, or in the current rendition, ARE "Nature" and the ruling aristocracy is identified with Nature itself. The naked and open theft of land and life that aristocracy revels in is naturalized, and reality is adjusted to the new normal. Imperial authorities alone make these claims. States and political organs cannot make them without invoking theories or excuses. Empires make no excuse for the terror, and never have.

The difference between a state, which exists on paper, and an Empire, which claims real assets and wealth, is that empires are always zero-sum propositions. They can't make matter, but they can make as much money - a purely institutional invention - as they like. This is exactly what happened after 2000. The public debts of nations before 2000 was high by historical standards, but manageable by today's standards. Nearly all of the money that exists was created ex nihilo in the past two decades, with 2009 and 2020 being the years where an arbitrary quantity of money was magicked into existence because the banks said "you will do this or we will make your world ungovernable". $1T of public debt becomes $20T just for the US federal government, and the states and firms selected to live were given more on top of that - and because the money is fictitious, life goes on as if nothing "really changed". Yet, a lot of things did change. Money is deployed for tactical purposes, and this is exactly and explicitly what was done in 2008. 2020 was a power play. They threw a third of the workforce out of work by decree, and dared anyone to say no to it. No one of substance did. They oculd only "stand and die". Why do you think you're going to have an actual rebellion after that? There is NOTHING in the people, and they know they've been defeated for a long time now.

After 2020, open talk of new systems - multiple new systems - is raised, much of it being implemented right now and without any public deliberation or any expectation that the public interest matters at all. States, even despotic states, have to acknowledge there is a public that would be interested about an affair that will fuck them in some way. In the past, despotic states could "skate by" because most of the human population was marginally attached to the commercial economy. General commodity exchange wasn't the norm, but the exceptional case, done alongside the landed economy and feudal obligations. There were markets and commodities and money and debts and usury and things we've known since ancient times, but ordinary people didn't have much attachment to the bank, or pay too much mind to the Bank of England doing terrible things. As this built up, the little people came to distrust commerce and finance altogether, and everyone and their mother knows the bank is not their friend. Even during the capitalist period of history, ordinary workers were marginally attached to any of the policies of the state. The state was wholly adversarial to them, and workers had no vote and no right to anything, even a right to exist. ORdinary workers, and quite a few of the bourgeoisie, had no great affinity for the state or any institution, and saw the entire process as an alien to them, because it was an alien and intended to make them suffer. The great fear was an alliance of technology and industrial labor - sometimes rendered as "science and industry" or "science and labor", but properly speaking, science is the domain of workers rather than institutions, and institutions abhor science in the genuine sense. Still, the intended meaning was not lost, and while the workers were rightly suspicious of technology, there was in that time less of an existential divide between petty bourgeois and worker. There was a stark class divide, a division of expectations and social standing, but it didn't occur to the bourgeoisie that they were made of any special substance or essence that made anything they did right or good. The bourgeois mentality was that they won and this was the spoils of war, not just in-of-itself. It took British imperialism as a theory to sell the idea that it was good in-of-itself, and free trade is an imperial system with winners and losers. This was the beginning of the end of the republics, this nascent social experiment that never really worked. To this day, "ideological capitalists" are imperialists first and foremost, and capitalism was the preferred extractive method for a time, when it was remotely functional. By the middle of the 20th century, capitalism was only defended because a lot of useless eater bourgeoisie were about to get rekt, and so they were sold compliance to sit down, shut up, and let the thieves take everything. That's all it ever was, my friend.

British imperialism - and that's what anyone who is honest is referring to when they speak of "imperialism", because there's only the one empire - was not disguised. The British would say, well into the 20th century, "we are imperialists, and this is a good thing". Theodore Roosevelt sold it as "Americanism" but it was the same thing, serving the same master. The imperialists never shied away from their world-historical purpose or what they believed in, which is why Planned Parenthood proclaims "proud of our past" - their past of eugenics and butchering children and mothers. The imperialists said "this is good" and truly believed it, and they did indeed believe it. This never went away. It rebranded, and made it inadmissible to speak of any other world. Eugenics won.

The Empire could, if it really wanted to, abandon eugenics overnight as its core orgaizing tenet. It doesn't do this because the alliance of interests within eugenics is only united by this one thing, this one credo, and the base of eugenists clamor for far more blood than the Empire can offer. This is what every empire in history has dreamed of - to convince a critical mass of their population to become fanatical, bloodthirsty screamers with no soul, unflinching in their eternal "Jehad". No empire in history could ever do that. For most of history, empires ruled over slaves and commoners who were not going to shed blood or risk their own lives in battle for it. Most empires did not have a professional army until the medieval period, and the Romans were an exceptional case; and the Roman military system changed as needed, and change in the recruitment base changed the nature of the state without really changing the empire and its roots in republican cruelty. The Empire was, from the middle republic on, purely extractive, and during the early republic, the Romans didn't have much to extract but the city of Rome itself and were fighting for their lives like every city-state on the rise. Rome did not build an empire out of absolutely nothing in a vacuum, for they rose in a world where empires were already extant and growing around them. It is an ideological tenet of modernity that empires are created ex nihilo and states are natural beasts. The reality is that states are unnatural and arbitrary creations, and empires are tangible enough to be considered real, even if they are products of civilization and thus anathema to natural history. No one denies the threat of Empire, even Empire which revels in lack of authority and the unlimited right of transgression. At core, empires have no necessary moral character whatsoever, which contrasts states which are held by men who have to want to rule to continuing holding this instrument. Emperors can be decadent and not give a shit because their calculus is entirely different. As long as they lived, as Marc Antony did, they were as good as gods, and that's all that counts. Empires only do as little as they need to not face terminal revolt or invasion form outside. The other conditions of imperial failure - destruction of educational basis in total, genuine environmental collapse which has never actually happened in recorded civilizational history - have been forestalled indefinitely, or were always hypothetical threats. In any event, vast educational changes - think of the introduction of Christianity, Islam, monotheistic institutions with vast reach and institutional authority that intentionally sought to usurp empires - don't really end the empire, but adapt it to conditions it deems appropriate. The Roman temporal empire became the spiritual empire of the Catholic Church. Much of the late Roman administrative apparatus Diocletian set up was inherited by the Church, continuing to this day, with obvious reforms to adminisntration since no "system" is ficed in that way.

I don't know how to tell you everything you believe about these concepts is rooted in lies or outright insanity. But, I try, however hopeless it is. I try, and people are "corrected" back to the retarded ideology.

Historically, Empires were not particularly expansive in land claims or commercial claims. The British Empire is a colonial empire that consciously kept the colonials as different races and identities and made that central to their governing idea. They'll tolerate colonial democracy as long as its of the "liberal" (i.e fake) variety. But, that is coming to an end, and much of the world does not want that.

By which I mean, most of the world never asked for this "liberal democracy", saw from the start it was a farce and intended to turn on itself, and it was destroyed from within since it only existed for eugenics.

Rome was sort of exceptional with the land grabbing it did - but again, the Roman imperial claims were not absorbing nations into a Roman nation or identity, making them Roman nationals or Roman in cultural mores. The Romans didn't care about that. What usually happened is that a Roman governor came in, said you now paid Roman taxes in Roman currency under Roman law, and the lccal elites became clients of the city of Rome and the political class of Rome. "Romanization" was only a partial policy of the Romans, almost all of it towards Northern Europe and Britain who were barbarians. In all cases, empires only were able to expand into barbarian territories with a contiguous land border and no difficult natural barriers. Civilizations do not land grab each other. British imperialism saw the colonized as barbarians with no cities and no technology, and that it was their imperial mission to uplift them - and this is where science fiction tropes come from. Even here, the British knew making black Africans into British people was pointless in Africa, and the model of black assimilation in Britain were American slaves fleeing to Britain or Canada, usually offered freedom and pension in exchange for fighting for the Crown.

So, there is a huge thing about black Britons and Canadians being the superior intellects of their race, which given the eugenism of the English, suited them just find.

>>7738
>Empires always rejig and restructure their "system", as do most functional states.
No they don't adapt, when their systems begin to fail, they close their eyes to reality and double down on the old formula ignoring that it no longuer works. The British empire collapsed rather suddenly because they charged into the Suez crisis like oblivious morons, following the imperial recipe. The ruling class in the UK still tries to larp as great imperial power, even-though they haven't been, for 80 years. They send an imperial delegation to India , to lecture them about not toeing the line on sanctions against Russia, and the Indian government just ignored it. Look at the neocons, how they're running the US empire in the ground. They're continuing a strategy that doesn't work anymore.

>Empires ARE NOT ECONOMIC PROPOSITIONS
That's just ridiculous, do you think they run on volunteer work ?

>After the fact, the imperial religion declares that the imperial authorities command nature at all levels, or in the current rendition, ARE "Nature" and the ruling aristocracy is identified with Nature itself
I have notice that too. The ideology is a bit weird considering what we do to nature. Trees a nature and those get cut with chainsaws.

>>7746
This is retarded thinking. Empires are not autistic. The ruled are treated as if they are autistic, cajoled infinitely at the lowest cost possible. The present empire explicitly does this and has a scientific approach to alienating its subjects absolutely - declaring them "IQ 0". Past empires did this imperfectly, but never once did empires exist to offer the subjects nice things.

Do you not see your error? Everything you believe is premised on the belief that the empire gives its subjects nice things, and has been corrupted somehow by malevolent, impure actors, and that this can be corrected technocratically. Numerous assumptions about nature, human beings, information, history, reality, intelligence, thought, consciousness, and so on, must be inserted. The people who think autistically are not the rulers, who are perfectly aware of what they are doing and the distinction between them and those who will only be lied to. Ideology is for the slaves, who are taught to believe that the projection of power is power itself, and that "there is no spoon", to quote that stupid and infantile movie.

It is flabbergasting to me that I have to say these things, but I have to, because this stupid idea has been promulgated ad nauseum. Every time you repeat it, the masters smirk, knowing they have yet another rube. I try to dissect this, only to have to repeat myself. It truly is a mental illness. Basic concepts of what this is are rendered inadmissible, and they are replaced with this "total and unknowable system" that builds new contradictions to cover itself. The worst thing anyone can do is lie to themselves. Lie to others if you like - you should consider the consequences of this habitual lying, especially since ordinary subjects never believed in this - but if you lie to yourself, you are the only fool.

You see here that every concept of reality you hold is based on assumptijons on top of assumptions, which all much line up "just so", presenting a total system which is immutable and unknowable except as "contradictions". It's a pure magic trick, and you're an idiot for believing in it, when basic sense would tell you the folly and how this hasn't worked once for the slaves. Again, this was worked out as a science long before we were born. The Southern slave system was premised on such a science, the precursor to such habitual lying given a religious authority.

Who believes in this ideology? It is a religion for the courtiers who are kept out of the know and away from any lever - knowing just enough to push the buttons in the death camps. They're the slaves of the slaves, ad infinitum. Such habitual lying is the basis of every hitherto known slavery - that is, slave systems are always premised on a known lie, and glorify explicitly injustice in every deed and every institution supporting a particular slavery. The power of Lie is the point. This only works so far as knowledge translates into any material agency, and so it is always supplemented with a vast preponderance of violence. Therefore, slave patrols and the chief function of militias being to put down slave revolts, which they very effective at doing. It was the first such system, which if you understood American history and you clearly do not, is something the political class in America were perfectly aware of. No slave master is ignorant of how slaveries operate. To an extent, the slaves must be aware of the modus operandi of slavery, lest they forget their place in the order, and this knowledge is never limited purely to what the master pedagogically allows. The made-up history where masters immaculately controlled all information Negro slaves received never actually happened at the level of the subject. The slaves were perfectly aware that they were slaves, and would always be slaves - they would always be uyghurs, and the repetition of "uyghur" was deliberate and habitual. They wrote books on how to utilize language to this effect, and encouraged it among the slaves themselves. The full operating details of a slavery do not need to be known, but no one in a slave society believes slavery operates by unknowable laws. All operations of a slave system are knowable, even more than the knowability of anything we regard as nature or in the domain of science. Where science began with doubt and neutrality - humans are, by nature, alien to the world beyond the fact of their material constitution, and nothing about us is "dialectically tethered" to anything else by immutable laws - slavery begins with "perfect information in perfect systems", and seeks to remake reality in a given ecology in accord with the general plan of the slave system. This plan is always made by some rational agency in order to exist. Nature did not provide any slavery ready-made for us, for they are always institutions made by men, and enforced by men. If the slaves themselves enforce their own slavery, that is still a man-made slavery that ends when the agency of the slaves acted otherwise. Nothing about humans of any particular race suggests a native affinity for freedom-in-the-abstract. If anything, slavery is the natural condition of the human race, due to its origins in ritual sacrifice and habitual acts of terror. This was explicitly the justification of African slavery - that they came from a society where slavery was normalized in this way, and therefore it was acceptable and "natural enough". Liberty is the exception and highly unusual condition, and it only exists when there really is no one and no thing commanding this. The concept of such is far less evident than slavery among humans. Humans are liars, born and bred to be such. Not once has the concept of a free society entailed much more than the freedom of a group to transgress, or freedom in the sense of engineering and motion of some machinery. The nascent attempts at such - and the slaves could certainly understand the concept of not doing this shit - were always snuffed out when they questioned the core shibboleths of ritual sacrifice at the center of the human race. It only ends when humans really want it to be different, and ask themselves what they would do. But, you don't do that. You retreat into yet more just-so stories, and insist everyone must lie to themselves like you do. It's really sad. I don't know why you think you're smart, but it is sadly a persistent illness once it takes root. It is the result of habitual child abuse.

Just as the slaves are quite aware that slavery is a bunch of bullshit, those that the slaves are induced to kick down have always known that their suffering - the truest suffering and the true purpose of the human race in total, with no possibility of redemption ever - is wholly unnecessary, not even desirable as a quality in of itself. But, every slavery in history has been democidal and vicious. It is the core conceit of the commons - the technological interest - that slavery can be made automatic, efficient, and natural. By doing so, the common producers are convinced they possess a perpetual motion machine that feeds their social superiors whatever tribute is necessary, and eventually would allow the technocrats to usurp the proprietors and aristocrats - to become the new aristocracy. New nobles. New gods. This is the central imperial myth, if you know British and American history and the counterparts of such in most of the world. It is a particularly Satanic myth, and the rise of Babylonian Satanism and its priors was a unique event in human history. Every other such recurrence was long ago subsumed into the original, since an abiding quality of Satanists is that they always seek the greatest and universal Satan for any niche they inhabit. Where there were for example Chinese subjects amenable to the Satan, they were the first to abase themselves to the white conquerors, who were in that time the earthly representatives of Babylonian Satanism.