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Jarmak posted:
Going Greenwald is a siren song to many people.
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Jan 26, 2022 15:49
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Just because the CIA coined the term "whataboutism" doesn't mean it's not worth holding a mirror up to the US when it cries about atrocities overseas. But that's just my opinion as an uneducated layperson.
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Jan 26, 2022 15:53
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selec posted:I don’t know that I’ve ingested any Russian propaganda but I do know the US doesn’t have the loving money to be doing this poo poo. Complete divorced dad behavior. Stop talking in metaphors and say real things, this is practically impenetrable to read.
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Jan 26, 2022 15:54
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selec posted:I don’t know that I’ve ingested any Russian propaganda but I do know the US doesn’t have the loving money to be doing this poo poo. Complete divorced dad behavior. I'm barely following whatever creepy analogy you are trying to make here but it appears to infantilizing the Ukrainian people and implying they belong to Russia.
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Jan 26, 2022 15:54
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Lib and let die posted:Just because the CIA coined the term "whataboutism" doesn't mean it's not worth holding a mirror up to the US when it cries about atrocities overseas. It is, in the right context. Still waiting to see how Eastern Europe joining NATO is the right context, e.g. what’s the relevance of the US invading Iraq or Afghanistan under stupid pretexts to Poland joining NATO?
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Jan 26, 2022 15:56
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Jarmak posted:I'm barely following whatever creepy analogy you are trying to make here but it appears to infantilizing the Ukrainian people and implying they belong to Russia. The United States is a deadbeat dad. Its children are its citizens, and instead of paying child support, he's whining in court that his rendezvouses with ukranian hookers is an urgent matter that needs full and immediate attention and financial support but aw geez aw man you really want me to buy my kids clothes for school? I suppose they want a unicorn and a rainbow too?
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Jan 26, 2022 15:57
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Jarmak posted:I'm barely following whatever creepy analogy you are trying to make here but it appears to infantilizing the Ukrainian people and implying they belong to Russia. No I’m infantilizing US voters, like I said nobody in this part of the world has any moral standing to make any judgments about Over There. In plain American: it’s deeply irresponsible to be a country that spends so much money subsidizing war in other parts of the world to the degree that we cannot or will not afford basic first world expectations of a developed state. If you are in the wealthiest nation in the world and homelessness still exists within your borders, and you have the kind of health care system we have, and still talking this poo poo up? I’m sorry but you’re not a serious person. You are somebody who thinks pro wrestling is at least kind of real. You have been hoodwinked. It’s laughably disconnected from the day to day experiences and needs of millions of underserved Americans and we deserve all the failures any reasonable observer of modern American military excellence can confidently expect.
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Jan 26, 2022 15:58
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Lib and let die posted:Just because the CIA coined the term "whataboutism" doesn't mean it's not worth holding a mirror up to the US when it cries about atrocities overseas. Whataboutism very famously started with the IRA in the U.K. and not the CIA. There's even some great 70's British rock songs about it. But, you're also mixing up two separate things. The U.S. can commit atrocities with its own army. NATO has an external command structure and very little actual army. NATO isn't something that the U.S. needs to do whatever it wants to do. The countries that join NATO do it because they don't want to be invaded by Russia. It's a defensive treaty, has an outside command structure, and very little actual army, so it is not especially useful for invading Vietnam or Grenada. Lib and let die posted:The United States is a deadbeat dad. Its children are its citizens, and instead of paying child support, he's whining in court that his rendezvouses with ukranian hookers is an urgent matter that needs full and immediate attention and financial support but aw geez aw man you really want me to buy my kids clothes for school? I suppose they want a unicorn and a rainbow too? This is a valid complaint, but it isn't really specific to NATO. NATO only gets about half of its funding from the U.S. and it represents 0.16% of the U.S. military budget and 0.08% of the total U.S. budget. It's not really the source of our excess MIC spending. Leon Trotsky 2012 fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Jan 26, 2022 |
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Jan 26, 2022 16:01
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Lib and let die posted:The United States is a deadbeat dad. Its children are its citizens, and instead of paying child support, he's whining in court that his rendezvouses with ukranian hookers is an urgent matter that needs full and immediate attention and financial support but aw geez aw man you really want me to buy my kids clothes for school? I suppose they want a unicorn and a rainbow too? Yeah the analogies suck when you can just say that our government can't even get the progressive party to agree on aid to it's citizens during a pandemic but playing world police to send lethal aid to the Ukraine while the Ukraine says the US is overblowing it's rhetoric and making things sound worse than they are is a bipartisan supported issue that's being rushed through. And if reporters ask why they can't pass aid they're mocked for wanting unicorns and rainbows.
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Jan 26, 2022 16:08
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Whataboutism very famously started with the IRA in the U.K. and not the CIA. There's even some great 70's British rock songs about it. Point taken, it was co-opted by the CIA. By my standards, that still doesn't excuse the US ginning up another war. People are starving and dying at home in the very same ways they have been for decades - starvation, exposure, easily treatable diseases (of the non-COVID kind, we've had piss-poor health outcomes in the US since well before the anti vax chuds were a thing), police violence, mental health catastrophes, our foreign policy of sanctions starves the populations of Cuba etc while the wealthy members of those countries survive just fine, we are, collectively, in no place to be enforcing our "benevolence" on the rest of the world. We have neither the material resources for it, nor the moral standing.
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Jan 26, 2022 16:09
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Lib and let die posted:Point taken, it was co-opted by the CIA. Yeah, I edited it in to the post above, but I completely agree with you and it is a valid complaint. It's just a complaint about U.S. MIC spending and priorities in general and not something specific to NATO, though.
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Jan 26, 2022 16:13
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News came out that Ruben Gallego met with 2018 Sinema donors about funding a primary challenge yesterday. And #NOLABELS pretty much gives the game away by putting labels (and the most  label possible on Sinema) on the candidates and pre-emptively going to bat for Sinema 2 years before the primary could even potentially start.https://twitter.com/NoLabelsOrg/status/1486044038486704132
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Jan 26, 2022 16:20
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Lib and let die posted:Point taken, it was co-opted by the CIA. Like Russia has moral standing for anything either. This is not "Both sides bad" one side is actively maneuvering a military with a long-state goal of holding a sovereign nation in their sphere of influence through force and has already actively done so. Lib and let die posted:People are starving and dying at home in the very same ways they have been for decades - starvation, exposure, easily treatable diseases (of the non-COVID kind, we've had piss-poor health outcomes in the US since well before the anti vax chuds were a thing), police violence, mental health catastrophes, our foreign policy of sanctions starves the populations of Cuba etc while the wealthy members of those countries survive just fine, we are, collectively, in no place to be enforcing our "benevolence" on the rest of the world. This really has nothing whatsoever to do with the topic at hand.
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Jan 26, 2022 16:24
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CommieGIR posted:This really has nothing whatsoever to do with the topic at hand. Except it really does- why is it so simple and urgent to, say, send more money to Ukraine when we cannot provide the most basic of social services at home?
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Jan 26, 2022 16:28
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CommieGIR posted:Like Russia has moral standing for anything either. This is not "Both sides bad" one side is actively maneuvering a military with a long-state goal of holding a sovereign nation in their sphere of influence through force and has already actively done so. Given the number of military bases (that we know about!) scattered across Europe, I'd say there's a very strong case that the US isn't "actively maneuvering" because most of our maneuvering has been complete for decades:  CommieGIR posted:This really has nothing whatsoever to do with the topic at hand. I would argue that the US gearing up to spend *illions on "defense" in Ukraine while hemming and hawing about not making good policy decisions at home because the government spending money = inflation is imminently topical to the discussion, but again...just an uneducated layperson on this side of the keyboard.
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Jan 26, 2022 16:29
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The US is the dad whose children are sick and starving but I really need to buy this $600 samurai sword and groceries are expensive, also gotta pay these Nazi hookers.
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Jan 26, 2022 16:29
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Nucleic Acids posted:Except it really does- why is it so simple and urgent to, say, send more money to Ukraine when we cannot provide the most basic of social services at home? No, this also has nothing to do with it: This is like people who say "Why do we have a space program, people are starving at home" That money wasn't going to get spent on them either. And American budget issues and lack of social safety nets/social medicine isn't going to get solved by not addressing Ukraine's needs. It wasn't one or the other. That money wasn't sitting in some account that was GOING to be used to address those things and then got sent to Ukraine in a big "Oopsie" moment. Lib and let die posted:Given the number of military bases (that we know about!) scattered across Europe, I'd say there's a very strong case that the US isn't "actively maneuvering" because most of our maneuvering has been complete for decades: Yeah, because we actively annexed some countries recently....oh wait. We didn't. Lib and let die posted:I would argue that the US gearing up to spend *illions on "defense" in Ukraine while hemming and hawing about not making good policy decisions at home because the government spending money = inflation is imminently topical to the discussion, but again...just an uneducated layperson on this side of the keyboard. Good. Cut the DOD budget. I agree. How does that change geopolitical spending? Not at all. The money not being spent to help Ukraine in the face of an immanent invasion was not destined for social programs either. That is something that has to be addressed, but this isn't going to address it. That's a deeper issue. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Jan 26, 2022 |
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Jan 26, 2022 16:30
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CommieGIR posted:No, this also has nothing to do with it: This is like people who say "Why do we have a space program, people are starving at home" I like your example, because the space race was literally just an arms race extension of the cold war. "Who can get to space to weaponize it first?" was the quiet part lmao
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Jan 26, 2022 16:31
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CommieGIR posted:No, this also has nothing to do with it: This is like people who say "Why do we have a space program, people are starving at home" Ukraine’s need are not ours, why should be wasting money on them?
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Jan 26, 2022 16:31
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CommieGIR posted:This really has nothing whatsoever to do with the topic at hand. I’m gonna trust Dwight Eisenhower over you on this one quote:
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Jan 26, 2022 16:32
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Nucleic Acids posted:Ukraine’s need are not ours, why should be wasting money on them? Was that money going to get spent on those social needs had it not been sent to Ukraine. Please prove that. Are you honestly pretending that the lack of social welfare and social medicine is because we sent the money to Ukraine rather than a long and storied history of us destroying those programs?
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Jan 26, 2022 16:34
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selec posted:I don’t know that I’ve ingested any Russian propaganda but I do know the US doesn’t have the loving money to be doing this poo poo. Complete divorced dad behavior. Yeah didn't congress just tell us we can't afford to Build Back Better? But now they found an extra $500 million for more war on top of the huge increase in the war budget they already passed? Incidentally, this is an indication that they don't really care that much if their Build Back Better agenda passes. Since congress is so unbelievably horny to rush out more war spending in less than a week (lol at all the people over the years who told me congress can't move fast in a crisis because the sacrosanct processes, which are now being waved, are inviolable), if they wanted BBB to pass they could just attach it to that. Imagine if Biden threatened to veto congress' new favorite war unless they pass the child tax credit and the minimum wage and that public option we were promised.
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Jan 26, 2022 16:36
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Nucleic Acids posted:Ukraine’s need are not ours, why should be wasting money on them? Not to say this argument may be applicable in this case, but I'd like to see what facts about Ukraine now distinguish the situation from previous times when turning a blind eye turned out bad.
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Jan 26, 2022 16:36
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CommieGIR posted:Was that money going to get spent on those social needs had it not been sent to Ukraine. Please prove that. No, I don’t, I also just don’t think the Democratic Party needs to be expediting 500 million in lethal aid when their own constituents are dropping of a plague and every other result of this country’s collapse.
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Jan 26, 2022 16:37
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CommieGIR posted:Was that money going to get spent on those social needs had it not been sent to Ukraine. Please prove that. The people who lobby for military spending also lobby against social spending. These aren’t independent political schools of thought. Rich people make money off arms, not infant mortality rates. My god dude take a step back from the keyboard and think through the larger political context in which these decisions are made.
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Jan 26, 2022 16:37
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CommieGIR posted:Was that money going to get spent on those social needs had it not been sent to Ukraine. Please prove that. I'd be interested in seeing what sort of framework you'd like this argument presented in - so far as I (a layperson, again!) am aware, asking someone to prove a hypotherical is a bit of a rhetorical dead end in the same vain as "If Hillary had won..." or "If Bernie had won..." No one is saying that not going to war with Russia will give us medicare for all, what I believe most of us to be saying is that it is morally reprehensible to be spending money on war while minimizing domestic issues that could be solved with a fraction of the spending we accrue going to war. I might ask, by your own standards: please quote the posts directly equating the money earmarked for war as being responsible for lack of socialized medicine in the US today. eta: to be particularly clear about my stance, it's unacceptable that we can print money to kill people, but not print money to help people. It's not a matter of "put what's in this bucket in that bucket", because the people controlling what flows into the buckets also control the money printer feeding the buckets.
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Jan 26, 2022 16:37
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Nucleic Acids posted:Ukraine’s need are not ours, why should be wasting money on them? Isn't this what people who are anti-immigration say about refugees/asylum seekers/etc from Mexico/Central America?
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Jan 26, 2022 16:38
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Nucleic Acids posted:Ukraine’s need are not ours, why should be wasting money on them? One, it's nice to see the America First rhetoric finally slip out from the 6 layers of metaphor it's been hiding under. Two, whether or not the US should spend money on Ukraine is secondary to whether Ukraine joining NATO constitutes "aggression" or "bullying", which was what the argument being made was about. This is a rhetorical slight of hand to try to shift the discussion to "is America bad?", as if establishing that counts as winning the first argument.
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Jan 26, 2022 16:38
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Nucleic Acids posted:No, I don’t, I also just don’t think the Democratic Party needs to be expediting 500 million in lethal aid when their own constituents are dropping of a plague and every other result of this country’s collapse. Agreed, and yet will they do anything? No. Because you are talking about a larger social issue with our political system. Doesn't change the fact that we gave assurances to Ukraine previously to stop the very thing that Russia is doing right now (ironically Russia claiming we are violating the same memoranda despite the fact that they've already openly said they don't recognize an independent Ukraie): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances
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Jan 26, 2022 16:40
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Jarmak posted:One, it's nice to see the America First rhetoric finally slip out from the 6 layers of metaphor it's been hiding under. Yeah I literally live in this shithole country that cannot get it together to do the basics for our citizens. You are loving right America first, as in “make sure your own home isn’t on fire before deciding to become the world’s fire chief” your 1930s jingoism doesn’t work on us anymore
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Jan 26, 2022 16:40
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Jarmak posted:One, it's nice to see the America First rhetoric finally slip out from the 6 layers of metaphor it's been hiding under. No, this is our chickens coming home to roost considering how we kept pushing NATO eastward after the end of the Cold War and basically raped Russia in the 90s.
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Jan 26, 2022 16:41
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selec posted:The people who lobby for military spending also lobby against social spending. These aren’t independent political schools of thought. Rich people make money off arms, not infant mortality rates. My god dude take a step back from the keyboard and think through the larger political context in which these decisions are made. They really don't in 99% of cases. Lockheed Martin would love for the U.S. Government to buy twice as many planes, cover their healthcare costs, and subsidize their wages. The people who are lobbying against social spending are generally people ideologically committed to it or opposed to taxation/regulation that comes with it. AHIP and Americans for Tax Reform don't lobby for more military spending. And AHIP is totally okay with more social spending as long as it doesn't result in shutting them out of the new spending revenue.
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Jan 26, 2022 16:41
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Kalit posted:Isn't this what people who are anti-immigration say about refugees/asylum seekers/etc from Mexico/Central America? It really isn’t, considering how conditions in those countries are the direct result of us dicking around south of the Rio Grande for at least 120 years.
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Jan 26, 2022 16:43
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Nucleic Acids posted:No, this is our chickens coming home to roost considering how we kept pushing NATO eastward after the end of the Cold War and basically raped Russia in the 90s. NATO is not an invasion force, and Russia already felt that ex-Warsaw Pact countries were "Not independent" and made active pushes to ensure that they remained in the Russia sphere of influence, often with force. Most of those countries actively sought NATO membership to keep Russia at bay since Putin has used force to bring countries back under Russian control. Nucleic Acids posted:It really isn’t, considering how conditions in those countries are the direct result of us dicking around south of the Rio Grande for at least 120 years. NATO is not comparable to US military endeavors in South America, in fact what Russia is doing to Ukraine is more akin to US interventions in South America which were wrong.
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Jan 26, 2022 16:43
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CommieGIR posted:NATO is not an invasion force, and Russia already felt that ex-Warsaw Pact countries were "Not independent" and made active pushes to ensure that they remained in the Russia sphere of influence, often with force. NATO has been responsible for multiple invasions around the world, and when you consider domestic actions taken in member countries contrary to popular will, it cannot be classified as defensive.
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Jan 26, 2022 16:44
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The US is the dad whose children are sick and starving but I really need to buy this $600 samurai sword and groceries are expensive, also gotta pay these Nazi hookers. The US runs a lot more like a household than I thought it did.
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Jan 26, 2022 16:44
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CommieGIR posted:NATO is not an invasion force, and Russia already felt that ex-Warsaw Pact countries were "Not independent" and made active pushes to ensure that they remained in the Russia sphere of influence, often with force. My "Not an invasion force" badge is raising a lot of questions already answered by my "not an invasion force" badge
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Jan 26, 2022 16:45
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Jarmak posted:One, it's nice to see the America First rhetoric finally slip out from the 6 layers of metaphor it's been hiding under. "America First" was about nationalism, not stopping forever-war spending so those funds could be spent on socialistic needs like food, housing, and medicine. But its super cool that opposition to playing the role of world police immediately gets you stuffed into the same box as Trump.
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Jan 26, 2022 16:45
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Jarmak posted:One, it's nice to see the America First rhetoric finally slip out from the 6 layers of metaphor it's been hiding under. So do you think we should go to war with the whole world Is there never a time we can question the wisdom of resources directed to interventionist adventures without it being America First rhetoric? Why are schools or hospitals here less deserving of that money
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Jan 26, 2022 16:46
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:They really don't in 99% of cases. Is the proposition here that there is an American political tradition that favors both increased military AND social spending? That’s a notion so absurd it’s not worth addressing. If the proposition is that the military industrial complex and the medical industrial complex employee different lobbying shops, I cannot see how this makes a reasonable point worth discussing. That’s beanplate material. The dominant political tendency in both mainstream parties right now is pro military spending and anti social spending. Any deviations from this overall tendency are scraps, and exceptions that prove the rule.
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Jan 26, 2022 16:46
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