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Miscalculating America
The Brink of Reckoning
I was just talking with someone about the major flaw I see in the Putin plan to destabilize the U.S. for Russia’s benefit.
It is a deep misread of who the American people are. One of our big traits, and it is not a good one, is we are incredibly violent. He thinks we are decadent and weak, and maybe we are. But we are also wildly violent.
It’s like he hasn’t read about basically any decade in our history. You think America won’t hurt you even if it hurts us? Have you met an American?
We have made peace, functionally, with having more guns than people, guns that often end us. You think we hesitate to bring you with us?
As I said it is not good. Some cultures have created a word for death through overwork, or enjoying the suffering of others. The United States could coin a word for murder-suicide.
It is like Putin has never grasped the full extent and potential of America’s pathologies.
When Japan attacked a military base, that wasn’t even in a place that was a state yet, we took a few years to go from having very little standing military to figuring out how wage war on multiple continents and rebuild the surface of the sun in two of their cities. When people flew planes into buildings and a field, we dropped our…
