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this guy apparently wants the u.s. to "own" south america, I really really hope he's joking but I can't even tell (https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ai6ta0/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_21/ef4x21r)
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Must be an extreme form of irony. The last chap is also very lightly suggesting invading Mexico.

This is an r/ssc user fetishizing US imperialism, of course they’re not joking

Ah, but what if they did it without war, or with very little war? Riddle me that!

I’d recommend continuing to focus on owning the libs, you’re having enough trouble with that already.

I don’t understand how you can post this:

There is no need to own it when you can just send in multinational corporations to extract all its resources and transfer them to the 1% in the West. If you own it, then you have to deal with actually governing it.

And still be on Team Capitalism. It’s the kind of baldfaced unironic evil that would sound absurd coming from the CEO of an evil megacorp in a cyberpunk novel. If you’re smart enough to figure out that capitalism systematically destroys the environment, exploits everyone it can, and enriches elites beyond reason, how do you go from there to “actually this is good, because it means that those elites don’t have to pay for a military occupation of the countries they’re destroying”.

It turns out you can’t do that, and the poster is not actually on Team Capitalism, I just misinterpreted their post.

99% sure that was offered as a critique of capitalism....
100% sure. The poster references Guatemala when someone is skeptical that corporations engage in imperialist practices.
~~Their business model is the Congo Free State.~~ Edit: Read the whole post, fuckers.
Nah if you actually read his whole post he's making a much more nuanced point than that. ​ >There is no need to own it when you can just send in multinational corporations to extract all its resources and transfer them to the 1% in the West. If you own it, then you have to deal with actually governing it. > >Personally, I'd rather allow them to deal with their own problems and resolve them on their own. I'm against Westerners without any skin in the game getting involved in other country's affairs except in extreme circumstances. > >Edit: To be clear here, I'm not saying my first paragraph is ethical. I was giving OP a reason why the US will never own it: the elites don't need to to get everything they want out of it. I recently read a book called "23 Things they don't tell you about Capitalism", and one of the essays in the book goes into this in further detail. I highly recommend it. ​
In fairness, I saw it before the edit, which does make it clear that he's not endorsing the politics of the first paragraph. I also read the second paragraph more as "I wouldn't do X" than "X is bad". So my bad on this one, I should have waited for more context, or just been a little less eager to score points in an ambiguous situation.
They consider themselves part of the aforementioned elites and thus feel entitled to wrest whatever the hell want from anyone, but as soon as they're the one's being wrested from...
It's when your politics are based on videogames like Civilization and you go for the economic victory. (Note that's not a real victory mode. Not even Civ considers wealth accumulation for its own sake a victory).