I thought that at some point, but after encountering many real people in my life (doing all the human things, like breathing, eating, walking, sleeping, not an alien at all) I don’t anymore. It doesn’t fucking matter which consistent ethos a person has, all of them are fundamentally inconsistent due to human psychology or conflicts with the complexities of reality. And some of those suck donkey balls. Like National Socialism.

What’s wrong with “nihilist”?..

and how the parties completely re-aligned since the Civil Rights era.

“Completely” is wrong. The economically progressive policy on one side and crony-capitalist on the other have not shifted places.

One can rather describe it in the “Nazi bar” terms, racists jumped from the Democrat “bar” to the Republican “bar” and changed it for their ideas, but only where the racist categories were not orthogonal.

Honestly the way Americans, and most of all educated and\or elitarian Americans, behave in society, - it makes perfect sense that at some point it will be sold. Nothing like it really in the world, with the UK as the close second.

It’s still funny, Alaska was sold to the US because the Russian empire’s expectation was for the US to eventually control all of the North American continent. Not even control, but settle first of all. Like with Texas, it’s not very convenient when the main settling power is different from the one having theoretical control.

So honestly a meeting in Alaska would make the best sense as a prelude to selling Kamchatka to the US or something like that. It’s kinda sobering that the US today (contrary even to 50 years ago) is not a society that can settle anything new.

And if we think about it, in the middle of the XIX century it was expected that the African continent will be settled by Europeans similarly to the Americas.

South American states preserved, despite all the crime and poverty and dictatorships, some degree of cultural diversity and even humanism, but don’t look as attractive for immigrants as then. Let’s say they were half-settled.

USA was half of the world’s GDP at some point. It’s not anymore.

The whole Africa was in population less than Europe. Settling it was plausible. Not anymore.

There were fewer Iranians on the planet than European Jews. Not anymore.

So I would say that, sacrificing Native Americans, the humanity has formed an immunity against European empires. It doesn’t yet look so, but the numbers don’t lie. And building combat drones en masse is honestly nothing that the non-imperial part of the world can’t do. Actually the involved defense-related corruption is probably less everywhere else relevant than in the NATO countries.