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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31877 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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You did this.

Europe might enjoy kneecapping itself, but the final nails in it's coffin are gleefully driven by it's American "allies" undermining its industry, blowing up its infrastructure and hosting war at its gates.

This is why I always get tired when Americans complain about euro contribution to NATO and then turn around and destroy any local military industry that might compete with them. Remember those Australian submarines? Remember the F-35? You wanted this. You wanted benign clients. Well you got it.

Ultimately, even the suicidal elites we have are propped up by you and only survive because of organized cultural warfare that you use to stop us from wandering outside of your control. You even bullied the Swiss out of neutrality for God's sake.

We certainly hold the shame of losing, but I have no illusions as to whom is responsible for our demise.

But to turn around and claim that the blame rests solely on our refusal to adopt American customs sufficiently? What a joke.

Don't France, Germany, and the UK all have rather robust arms industries? Those Leopards and Challengers aren't made in the USA, after all.

They have arms industries. They don't have robust arms industries.

How many Leopards were made, ever? How many Abrhams? And how many of each do you think could be made if a full ramp up was announced tomorrow?

The franco-german successor MBT has been on hold since forever, and it's not even clear if it will be made. And the Brits have been giving up on tanks altogether.

Europe has real militaries don't get me wrong, but it can't fund a serious war (nor fight it for very long) and the industry is focused on maintaining capabilities on tight budgets rather than mass. There's a reason we were and are reluctant to send hardware we can barely afford as it is.

Not really, we can design arms, some of them are also pretty good, but building them in any amount of scale is not possible right now.

Not really.

They have some arms industries, but it's very small scale production compared to the heyday of industrial warfare. The production lines aren't mothballed but repurposed after the run is done, so when you want some more, it takes a lot of time to set it up again.

Challenger 2 stopped being built 20 years ago mind you. With Leopard 2 there are spare parts problems iirc and so on.

Aren't France and Germany major arms exporters? Esp on a per capita basis?

They are. On a per capita basis France's arms exports are larger than America's.

You did this.

Well, "we" as in the US elites did this. "We" the broad populace of the US did not. I personally would be happy for you guys to roll your own way on all matters foreign and domestic. It would be good for the American soul to have real competitors and not just fake ones.

Economies of scale (average costs fall as output increases) means that the US has strong military reasons for insisting that nations which it defends buy US military equipment.

Of course it does. Rival castles must be destroyed. Though this is usually sold as NATO standardization.

I understand why the Americans crushed Europe. What I don't understand is why they then turn around and act surprised that the Europeans aren't successful. It's not like this is fooling anyone but them.

Frankly American diplomacy has really been puzzling me lately. They don't seem to care or realize that they look like assholes on issue after issue. There always was such a tendency but it's now reached weird degrees. Biden calling Xi a dictator right after making efforts to open back dialogue is but the latest in a series of boneheaded moves. The peak of which was probably their handling of economic sanctions that has opened a big breach in dollar supremacy.

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