|
Sarcastr0 posted:Congress never has operational authority, even when it keeps the purse strings. He shouldn't have worked so hard to create them in the first place
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 20:13
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 11, 2024 12:02 |
|
|
VitalSigns posted:Why didn't congress have any authority over operational decisions...oh right Biden gave Bush a blank check but somehow isn't responsible for the number Bush wrote in there maybe.. more drones?
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 20:16
|
|
|
Sarcastr0 posted:Congress never has operational authority, even when it keeps the purse strings. Right so they could have made the funding contingent on whatever they wanted But anyway, as I said this is all revisionism, Biden defended his vote even after Bush was very obviously making a total mess of things and analysts were warning that he was creating the conditions for a violent mass insurgency. The argument that Biden had a secret plan that would have made Paul Wolfowitz's fantasies of a quick victorious war come true is absurd on its face. This is also a good example of why voting for right wing neolib/neocon warhawk Democrats moves the party to the right, D&D liberals are now arguing that the Iraq War would have gone just fine if The Sensible People had been running it.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 20:18
|
|
|
Cpt_Obvious posted:Fair point. Here's Syrian Civil War casualties: How is 9% civilian deaths, still exceeding two years before, a "sharp drop"? Trump committed more ground troops and operations in 2017 in Syria than Obama did in 2016. And how are you attributing that drop or any subsequent drop to a change in the US policy when there are four factions of belligerents taking part, and no decrease in US forces or operations until late 2019? Xombie fucked around with this message at 20:22 on May 8, 2020 |
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 20:19
|
|
|
Sarcastr0 posted:Congress never has operational authority, even when it keeps the purse strings. Much like how the Republican Congress kept Obama from closing Guantanamo by mandating that no money be spent on closing the prison there, the Congress can vote to defund the war operations. Biden and Obama were in charge of the draw down from Iraq in 2010 and did nothing to leave a US contingency force there. They should have left personnel at the airbases in Al Assad and Balad which would have allowed for a much faster US response to ISIS's aggression and would have reduced the carnage from ISIS' invasion of western Iraq. The Obama administration used the SOFA negotiated by President Bush as their cover for not leaving troops, but, as Trump demonstrated this year, Iraq has no leverage to force US troops to leave. They could have used diplomatic pressure to force the Iraqis into allowing US troops to remain in Iraq, just as US troops remain in Germany and Japan. There is a direct line from the rapid drawdown in 2010 to the collapse of the Iraqi military in the face of ISIS in 2014.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 20:22
|
|
|
Sarcastr0 posted:What was Biden supposed to do to stop ISIS once it was off and rolling? The only thing that could have prevented ISIS was an Iraqi government that was capable of bringing disaffected Sunnis into the political process, but that Shia-dominated Iraqi government that failed at/didn't really want to do this was democratically elected so possibly there was nothing Obama/Biden could have done in 2009 short of reconquering Iraq and installing another dictatorship that would have pursued a more cosmopolitan path. But based on their record of loving up countries they would have hosed that up too. Which is exactly why invading the country and toppling its government was a stupid idea in the first place
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 20:23
|
|
|
Xombie posted:How is 9% civilian deaths, still exceeding two years before, a "sharp drop"? Trump committed more ground troops and operations in 2017 in Syria than Obama did in 2016. And how are you attributing that drop or any subsequent drop to a change in the US policy when there are four factions of belligerents taking part, and no decrease in US forces or operations until late 2019? Wow that is a very...selective reading of those statistics. The jump from 2017-2018 is a 41% drop in total casualties. The jump from 2016-2017 is a 35% drop. Civilian casualties dropped by HALF between 2017-2018. And if none of that is sufficient to admit that Trump's idiocy has something to do with all that, you must admit that the casualties in Iraq did not magically transfer over to Syria. Like, at least give me that.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 20:31
|
|
|
It is interesting that neolibs are now arguing Trump is worse than them because of casualties in a war neolibs wanted in the first place while the entire time neolibs were complaining Trump is a pussy and making America weak by not expanding the war even more
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 20:33
|
|
|
Was it Brian Williams who practically came when Trump bombed that Airfield in Syria?
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 20:36
|
|
|
Hillary Clinton's first public statement after her hangover concession speech was to demand Trump bomb Syria even more lol
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 20:37
|
|
|
nivdes posted:This applies to anyone who voted for the 2001 AUMF, i.e. the entire 107th Congress sans Barbara Lee. This isn't the own you think it is. nivdes posted:How is Biden responsible for ISIS despite having absolutely no authority over operational decisions in Iraq? Congress can only authorize a President to use military force, it does not have any role in planning operations. Aggressively spending decades lobbying for the creation of the conditions that made ISIS possible/inevitable.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 21:01
|
|
|
Cpt_Obvious posted:Wow that is a very...selective reading of those statistics. The jump from 2017-2018 is a 41% drop in total casualties. The jump from 2016-2017 is a 35% drop. Civilian casualties dropped by HALF between 2017-2018. Total casualties? Are you attributing the deaths of anti-Syrian forces to the US too? Look at the timeline of operations for Inherent Resolve. The US killed 1,600 civilians in the 2017 Battle of Raqqa alone. Where do you see the decrease in action that the decrease in deaths can be attributable to? Syrian human rights organizations attribute 3,000-3,800 civilian deaths to Coalition forces over the course of the war to this year. The interventionist policy of the US in Syria has never stopped, and has arguably increased. A decrease in deaths is attributable to one side losing, getting wiped out, or simply otherwise there no longer being the same amount of people to kill. Such as by mass emigration that we saw from Syria during the final years of the Obama administration and the first years of the Trump administration. The idea that Trump is committing less war in the Middle East is a myth. Even when he pulled out of northern Syria to let the Kurds die, he just put those troops in eastern Syria. quote:And if none of that is sufficient to admit that Trump's idiocy has something to do with all that, you must admit that the casualties in Iraq did not magically transfer over to Syria. Like, at least give me that. Then you have to admit why casualties decreased: ISIS left and/or got wiped out. US interventionism and war didn't leave. Trump did not simply "drop a bomb and forget about it". This has continued to go on. Only the front keeps changing. Xombie fucked around with this message at 21:06 on May 8, 2020 |
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 21:03
|
|
|
Cpt_Obvious posted:Wow that is a very...selective reading of those statistics. The jump from 2017-2018 is a 41% drop in total casualties. The jump from 2016-2017 is a 35% drop. Civilian casualties dropped by HALF between 2017-2018. Trump actually didn't have much to do with it; the vast majority of civilian deaths were from Assad's forces shelling and bombing civilian areas in places like Aleppo and the Damascus outskirts, which have since been captured. US airstrikes caused far more civilian deaths under Trump than under Obama.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 21:04
|
|
|
Xombie posted:Total casualties? Are you attributing the deaths of anti-Syrian forces to the US too? Look at the timeline of operations for Inherent Resolve. The US killed 1,600 civilians in the 2017 Battle of Raqqa alone. Where do you see the decrease in action that the decrease in deaths can be attributable to? nivdes posted:Trump actually didn't have much to do with it; the vast majority of civilian deaths were from Assad's forces shelling and bombing civilian areas in places like Aleppo and the Damascus outskirts, which have since been captured. Biden was an instrumental figure in convincing the 2003 era democratic party to trust Bush on the whole WMD thing. His actions have helped lead to over a million bodies in the middle east. He has said that he does not regret this, and that he would do it again. Same guy also wanted to invade Iraq (after Desert Storm) in the late 90s and said that the US should literally just make up a reason and go it alone.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 21:06
|
|
|
Marxalot posted:Biden was an instrumental figure in convincing the 2003 era democratic party to trust Bush on the whole WMD thing. His actions have helped lead to over a million bodies in the middle east. He has said that he does not regret this, and that he would do it again. Same guy also wanted to invade Iraq (after Desert Storm) in the late 90s and said that the US should literally just make up a reason and go it alone. And Donald Trump has continued these wars and made them even worse: increasing ground operations in Syria, using Iraq as a staging ground for war with Iran, rubber-stamping Turkey's war against the Kurds, and expanding arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 21:09
|
|
|
Xombie posted:This coincides with ISIS retreating to Syria and Trump shifting troops to make more war against them in Syria. They had lost all their territory in Iraq by December 2017. Xombie posted:Why should I to take time to "acknowledge" your imagined future policy of Biden's administration when you guys whitewash the very real current policy of Trump's? Can't help but notice how you shift from focusing on very real current policy to hypotheticals as it suits you, while dismissing hypotheticals as unprovable and therefore irrelevant. When it's pointed out that Obama in reality killed more Syrians than Trump, suddenly hypotheticals are okay, and instead of comparing the real number Trump killed you appeal to a hypothetical number of people you say Trump would have killed in Obama's place.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 21:10
|
|
|
Xombie posted:And Donald Trump has continued these wars and made them even worse: increasing ground operations in Syria, using Iraq as a staging ground for war with Iran, rubber-stamping Turkey's war against the Kurds, and expanding arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Yeah I too yearn for the good old days when we were just doing war crimes in Fallujah.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 21:12
|
|
|
Xombie posted:And Donald Trump has continued these wars and made them even worse: increasing ground operations in Syria, using Iraq as a staging ground for war with Iran, rubber-stamping Turkey's war against the Kurds, and expanding arms sales to Saudi Arabia. And Biden's only criticism of Trump's foreign policy is that he isn't expanding the wars enough, so the argument that Trump is the lesser evil isn't borne out by any evidence, past or present. Past: Biden killed a million people with his endless warmongering in Iraq Present: Biden is calling Trump a pussy, saying his cowardice is making America weak in the eyes of the world, and is egging him on to expand the wars, in other words the exact same poo poo Biden has been doing his entire career to shift America into a more aggressive and murderous foreign policy.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 21:14
|
|
|
VitalSigns posted:Can't help but notice how you shift from focusing on very real current policy to hypotheticals as it suits you, while dismissing hypotheticals as unprovable and therefore irrelevant. Actual history of things that have literally happened is not a hypothetical, especially in the sense of you trying to divine the future. quote:When it's pointed out that Obama in reality killed more Syrians than Trump, suddenly hypotheticals are okay, and instead of comparing the real number Trump killed you appeal to a hypothetical number of people you say Trump would have killed in Obama's place. That isn't reality. Syrian human rights organizations attribute 3,000-3,800 civilian casualties over the entire course of the past 9 years and 226,247 civilian deaths. 75-88% of those deaths are directly attributable to Assad. Half or nearly half of US civilian casualties are attributable to the Battle of Raqqa in 2017, under Trump. Where is the decrease in US operations to support that Trump has killed fewer Syrian civilians than Obama?
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 21:16
|
|
|
Just going to throw out to the biden bros in the thread that the last time a major empire went to war to distract from crippling social problems at home things got bad enough that Lenin took over The democrats main campaign push in 2020 is to start a war with China, Iran, and Syria to distract from crippling social problems at home
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 21:17
|
|
|
VitalSigns posted:And Biden's only criticism of Trump's foreign policy is that he isn't expanding the wars enough, so the argument that Trump is the lesser evil isn't borne out by any evidence, past or present. Your support for this is Biden saying we shouldn't abandon the Kurds to death just because Turkey asked us to. An action that, by the way, wasn't removing the troops from the country, but putting them in eastern Syria instead.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 21:18
|
|
|
Xombie posted:Actual history of things that have literally happened is not a hypothetical, especially in the sense of you trying to divine the future. So your argument is that Obama and Biden merely planned the Battle of Raqqa but Democrats lost the election before it happened, so the casualties have nothing to do with their policies? That seems...disingenuous It's also pretty ridiculous to pretend that civilian casualties in Syria have nothing to do with US foreign policy unless the US directly perpetrated them, the Syrian Civil War has its roots in, what else, the disastrous decision to invade Iraq VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 21:24 on May 8, 2020 |
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 21:21
|
|
|
Xombie posted:Total casualties? Are you attributing the deaths of anti-Syrian forces to the US too? Look at the timeline of operations for Inherent Resolve. The US killed 1,600 civilians in the 2017 Battle of Raqqa alone. Where do you see the decrease in action that the decrease in deaths can be attributable to? The deaths. I see a decrease in deaths. I don't know what else you expect me to prove. Deaths in the Middle East have fallen, across the board, specifically because Trump is too stupid to do something like Obama's surge. Has he sent a few more soldiers over? Sure. But NOTHING compared to the tens of thousands that Obama sent over. Also, please don't cherry-picking the statistics and ignoring my point that civilian casualties fell by half. Xombie posted:The interventionist policy of the US in Syria has never stopped, and has arguably increased. A decrease in deaths is attributable to one side losing, getting wiped out, or simply otherwise there no longer being the same amount of people to kill. Such as by mass emigration that we saw from Syria during the final years of the Obama administration and the first years of the Trump administration. I'm loving confused now. Because, just a minute ago, you told me that Xombie posted:This coincides with ISIS retreating to Syria and Trump shifting troops to make more war against them in Syria. They had lost all their territory in Iraq by December 2017. So is the war coming or going from Syria? Because you have claimed both of those things without proof. Xombie posted:Then you have to admit why casualties decreased: ISIS left and/or got wiped out. US interventionism and war didn't leave. Trump did not simply "drop a bomb and forget about it". This has continued to go on. Only the front keeps changing. At least recognize that you're STILL making the point that Donald Trump's foreign policy has resulted in fewer casualties.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 21:22
|
|
|
Xombie posted:Your support for this is Biden saying we shouldn't abandon the Kurds to death just because Turkey asked us to. An action that, by the way, wasn't removing the troops from the country, but putting them in eastern Syria instead. Could you maybe take a minute and figure out whether war is good or bad, then come back and make a lesser evil argument that Trump will do not enough/too much war, and we need to elect Biden to start less/more wars?
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 21:23
|
|
|
VitalSigns posted:So your problem with Drumpf is that he didn't go to war with Turkey They'll contradict themselves and argue in circles forever if it lets them ignore that Biden is a rapist on top of all the other horrible things he is.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 21:25
|
|
|
Yeah, this is still an absolutely endless argument about which warmonger is spilling more blood instead of being concerned that our options are limited to people who think empire building is a good foreign policy and that they're not rapists.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 21:27
|
|
|
Gumball Gumption posted:Yeah, this is still an absolutely endless argument about which warmonger is spilling more blood instead of being concerned that our options are limited to people who think empire building is a good foreign policy and that they're not rapists. Yeah that's the argument they want to have, they can endlessly bullshit around hypotheticals about which mass murderer will mass murder a slightly different amount of innocent people, rather than questioning why we should vote for a president that is mass murdering in the first place. But it's funny that they can't even keep their own argument straight and start calling for more wars more more more right in the middle of the handwringing over the slight difference in the size of the child corpse piles under Obama vs Trump
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 21:30
|
|
|
VitalSigns posted:So your problem with Trump is that he didn't go to war with Turkey How does any of this end in a war with Turkey, a NATO ally?
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 21:38
|
|
|
nivdes posted:How does any of this end in a war with Turkey, a NATO ally? So the troops weren't actually going to use force to stop Erdogan from moving in? Or they were but it's not a war it's just two armies shooting at each other?
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 21:49
|
|
|
I think one of the reasons the Trolley Problem is so intuitively effective is that it uses small easy-to-comprehend numbers and a very large meaningful difference between the casualties on each track. It's a no-brainer, pull the lever! But then the trick is they transfer the reasoning about a simple obvious situation into a complex one, hoping you'll forget about the complexities and stay locked into your easy thought experiment answer. A more accurate trolley problem would be: a guy takes you to a cliffside overlooking a vast plain, like in the lion king. He shows you two tracks, each track stretches off to the end of your vision in the horizon, and every single space on those tracks from here to infinite has a frightened, struggling person tied to it, thousands and thousands, those thousands repeated hundreds of times over, an incomprehensible mass of terrified humanity. You hear the whistle of a train coming down the escarpment. "That train is heading to the track on the right with 1.5 million people on it, its unstoppable power will crush them one by one until the valley is bright red with blood" "Oh my god what can I do" "Simple, just pull the lever there and the train will take the left track, with 10% less people on it. You will save 150,000 lives, which will comfort you when the unstoppable locomotive crushes a million bodies and more and the valley runs red with their blood, thanks to you...tsk tsk tsk now don't ask any childish questions about stopping the train or untying anyone." And that's not even getting into the fact that the guy asking you to pull the lever is the one who tied all those people to the track he wants you to send the train on, and four years later he's going to do it again. And also he gets to rape a bunch.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 21:51
|
|
|
VitalSigns posted:I think one of the reasons the Trolley Problem is so intuitively effective is that it uses small easy-to-comprehend numbers and a very large meaningful difference between the casualties on each track. It's a no-brainer, pull the lever! But then the trick is they transfer the reasoning about a simple obvious situation into a complex one, hoping you'll forget about the complexities and stay locked into your easy thought experiment answer. An even better analogy, it's the trolley problem but it has a 3rd track with no one on it. The guy giving the test looks at you and says "So do you pick track A with one person or track B with five people?" and you reply "What about track C, right there?". He then replies "No, there are only two tracks" so you pick him up, tie him to track 3, and let the trolley kill him. Because he was trying to make you complicit in his murders.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 21:56
|
|
|
remember not long ago when biden was accusing trump of not hating chinese people enough, he will absolutely plunge the usa into yet another war first chance he gets
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 22:01
|
|
|
Do you think progressives WANT to be sticking up for Trump? Trump is a loving monster who ruins everything he touches and has and will bring abject misery to millions, but the hard fact is that Biden is just as bad if not worse by all metrics, and it sucks.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 22:03
|
|
|
Yeah this. This is the guy. https://twitter.com/KrangTNelson/status/1258853088489848835?s=20
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 22:05
|
|
|
Yinlock posted:Do you think progressives WANT to be sticking up for Trump? Trump is a loving monster who ruins everything he touches and has and will bring abject misery to millions, but the hard fact is that Biden is just as bad if not worse by all metrics, and it sucks. Can you come up with a who is worse chart?
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 22:08
|
|
|
Marxalot posted:Yeah this. This is the guy. For $2800 you can get a standing room only ticket for a Zoom call with a rapist. That's a deal right there.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 22:11
|
|
|
Marxalot posted:Yeah this. This is the guy. It's a zoom call, at least with plate fundraisers you can pretend higher prices is a better seat (next to the president). Now it's just openly stating that if you pay more you get better access to the candidate.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 22:13
|
|
|
Gumball Gumption posted:It's a zoom call, at least with plate fundraisers you can pretend higher prices is a better seat (next to the president). Now it's just openly stating that if you pay more you get better access to the candidate. But do you have a chart??? We require charts if anyone is going to denigrate the good name of the very good Democratic Party establishment.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 22:15
|
|
|
Marxalot posted:Yeah this. This is the guy. Could Hillary's spitefulness be any more apparent than this?
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 22:15
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 11, 2024 12:02 |
|
|
I want to give Biden enough tokens that we can go private and he can tell me about his leg hairs.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 22:15
|
|
