News analysis: The Independent’s political editor David Maddox’s trip to Washington DC for Trump’s inauguration found that the UK/US special relationship has morphed into deep antipathy for the Starmer government from the new White House administration
    • Max@lemmygrad.ml
      6·
      21 hours ago

      Trump seems to like Starmer personally so none of what was said by the admin previously matters anymore. That said Trump having another about-face on Starmer could be mere moments away at any time so who knows what will really happen in the end.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
      7·
      1 day ago

      Can’t see why he would given that Starmer sent advisors to help Harris campaign and has been openly hostile to Trump during the election. Trump is a very petty man.

  • Cruxifux@feddit.nl
    25·
    2 days ago

    American oligarchs are attempting to openly control the rest of the world. I hope to god the rest of the world doesn’t fucking tolerate it and we tank the US economy. I hope a civil war ignites in the US. I hope it becomes fractured and loses its status as world power. I hope for the sake of the rest of the world that that country comes to a fucking end. Otherwise we are all fucked.

  • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
    12·
    2 days ago

    My mind keeps going back to this video someone mentioned the other day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8U6hgWouUA

    Among other things, they talk about this way of thinking about the US empire as like the psychology of the “godfather” (the primary maneuver being “intimidation”) and I find it interesting to connect that to Trump. He is more like the mob boss without any pretense of decorum or “civility”. Which makes a kind of sense to me given the state the US empire is in. I don’t want to overstate it and make it sound like it’s over already, but China is able to stand up to them in a big way and some other countries are too, significantly, and the US’s problems are heightening from within, with its ability to intimidate and terrorize the world as a whole in much more question.

    I think it matches with what tends to happen when such an archetype of power is backed into a corner. They don’t learn from it and become a better person or entity (they have no interest in such). They become more openly aggressive because aggression and intimidation is what their strength, perceived and real, revolves around. The kind of action that would normally be a more covert propaganda campaign is his camp just brazenly saying they want to regime change an “ally”. You could argue the implication there is “you better toe the line or we can do to you what we’ve done to others the world over.” But the world has another option, something the empire has tried unsuccessfully to stamp out, and intimidation can’t undo the contradictions in play. They can try to destroy more in order to intimidate, but they can’t make the most significant opposition to them (China) bend the knee without destroying themselves. They’re too tied up in their own web of dependencies now. So what are they doing? Going after any and everyone they still think they can intimidate, on top of trying to hurt China anyway, but it’s too much and they increasingly just look like mask off mob boss world bullies, damaging their own remaining soft power in the process even as they try to stop people from choosing an alternative. They can’t do enough to compete with China on soft power (or I would say, “influence” when applied to China, because China is wielding power as a much more collaborative thing as opposed to wielding it as intimidation and exploitation) and they are, in his camp, falling back on the only thing left that they know.

    (If this is too fanciful / non-dialectical of a way of looking at it, feel free to tell me. I’m just finding it interesting making connections on certain things.)