tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post3710206931077604639..comments2023-11-22T01:14:54.298-08:00Comments on amor mundi: Is Building or Looting the Path to Presidential Greatness?Dale Carricohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-45239064816782558842008-12-31T04:16:00.000-08:002008-12-31T04:16:00.000-08:00I have heard that Reagan did actually exhibit some...I have heard that Reagan did actually exhibit some real leadership on the question of nuclear proliferation, for which he deserves some credit (even if his idiotic championing of missile defense ultimately cashes out in a compensatory arms-race, endless destabilizing provocations in the worst imaginable places and moments, and militarist budgetary derangements without end here in the US).<BR/><BR/>It's interesting to re-imagine the Cold War as a meta-stable planetary postcolonial hegemony that mistook itself as a stalemate between two diametrically opposed ideologies when in fact it constituted a continuous ideological system representing the ideology of extractive- centralizing- authoritarian industrialism. <BR/><BR/>The "end of the cold war," then, might represent less the victory of one antagonist (capitalism) over the other (socialism), but the exhibition of systemic contradictions at both poles in a planetary hegemony that eventually engulfed the whole, first at one pole and very soon after (what wishful thinking, the end of history!) at the other. <BR/><BR/>Few readers of this blog will be surprised to hear that I regard the successor to extractive-industrialism as polyculture: sustainable planetary p2p consensual multiculture. Darker possibilities are certainly also possible, history in this moment is rather up for grabs.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-3080829442725595432008-12-31T01:11:00.000-08:002008-12-31T01:11:00.000-08:00I think the reason why many Americans have and wil...I think the reason why many Americans have and will probably continue to believe that Ronald Reagan was an influential U.S. president isn't so much because of his supply-side economic policies (known as "Reaganomics") but rather because of his mythical role in single-handedly ending the Cold War when, in reality, a degenerated workers' state's internal weakness became obvious enough that the USSR would have eventually collapsed regardless of whether we had a "hawk" or "dove" in power...Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com