are war criminals or rapists a significant subset of your social group?
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Not that I know of, but a few people I know served overseas, so who knows what they did.
But my comment was supposed to be self-depreciating, tongue in cheek.
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I really hope you’re not implying that we can’t criticize Shrub because we’ve all done bad things. Or that it’s not fair to target him because other Presidents are just as bad or worse. The Bible really isn’t the best source for this sort of moralizing.
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You’re right, but I completely reject that. That was pretty much my point. By my reckoning, the fact that a government is behind doing something bad never makes it any better than if an individual does it. In many cases, it makes it worse.
I would say the relevant question is more whether it’s a war of aggression than civilian casualties per se, but you could still say that about almost every US president, including Obama, and I would. That was essentially my point about the hypocrisy of the people getting mad at Ellen about this. As long as tribalism keeps you from holding your own politicians to account for their war crimes, nothing will change and you are complicit. If you’re going to be in a position to criticize Ellen for this, the bare minimum is that you should never, under any circumstances, support a politician who has supported a war of aggression. I don’t, and that includes Bush and Obama and Clinton.
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I am anything but a “ centrist.”
First off, my point is that we shouldn’t minimize what Clinton did in Iraq or Libya, either, and we already know that Ellen minimized that, so we shouldn’t be surprised that she did the same for Bush.
My argument is not “both sides are bad,” it’s that there is only one side represented: the Eternal War Party, and that all the differences between these warmongers are much smaller that that fundamental unity of purpose.
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That’s the heart of the phenomenon I’m criticizing, this notion of false equivalence. Obama and HRC were far from perfect leaders, and I fundamentally disagree with a more than a few of their decisions, but it’s just crazy to argue that the differences between these two and, say, GWB and Trump are “much smaller” than their fundamental unity of purpose as “warmongers.”
I honestly thought this kind of thing would have died out after we saw what happened when we put W in office instead of even a relatively conservative Democrat like Gore (while being assured that there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between them by some oh-so-smart people) and definitely after the reality of Trump controlling our government instead of HRC.
If HRC would have been elected, would she have made generational damage to regulatory agencies and stacked the Supreme Court with ultra-conservative fuckwits who are on the brink of overturning Roe? Would she have pulled out of the Paris Agreement? There are a hundred other examples, but I think your position greatly minimizes these kinds of real-world differences.
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First off, though you don’t come out and say it, your position seems to be that it’s ok to support the mass murder of civilians as long as a politician does things that you like closer to home. I completely reject that. Blowing up civilians halfway around the world is just as bad as putting them in camps and killing them at home, and I will never support that.
Second, the dems has the opportunity to nominate someone who probably would have won, and who supported all of the kinds of positions you mentioned and was anti war. They fought against him tooth and nail. That clearly shows that for Clinton, the Democratic Party establishment, and the interests they represent, maintaining US imperial power through wars of aggression is much more important than any of the differences you mentioned, hence the unity of purpose I was talking about.
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You are incorrect. My position is that it is wrong to minimize the real, meaningful differences between different parties and different leaders. The fact that there were real differences between Sanders and HRC does not change the fact that there are real (and much, much bigger) differences between Obama & Clinton on the one hand and W and Trump on the other.
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Im not minimizing them, I’m saying that they’re less important than mass murdering civilians, which is something that you seem to be trying to minimize. Maybe you should be more specific about which differences you think are more important than that.
I would say that Clinton, Obama, and Bush are much closer to one another than any of them is to either Trump or Sanders.
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Huh. I think we’ll have to agree to disagree and I’m happy to let your comment speak for itself.
Indeed. If “less important than mass murder” is equivalent to “ minimizing” in your book, I’d say that means that you don’t think government sponsored mass murder is that big a deal. I definitely disagree with that, and that won’t change.
That’s out of line, and I’d appreciate it if we left this as it is.
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His continued freedom being an affront to international law and basic human decency for the crimes he committed while in office, I’d say he’s still hurting. And anyone who “pals around” (to use his own terminology) with known war criminals and horrific liars is doing their own dirty work for them by rehabilitating their public image, as if to say “nothing he did was worth getting fussed about. See, I can even stand to be in the same zip code without retching!”
Presidencies are fraught things regardless of who’s in the office. But the Republican elite has been a pretty explicitly criminal enterprise since at least the mid 1960s when all of the shitgibbons still darkening our political door got their start in executive politics under Nixon. I’m willing to make concessions on differences of opinion among the rank-and-file (but only to a point*), but anyone who thinks it’s socially acceptable to hang out with the demonstrably criminal higher-ups while demanding to be praised for their “decency” is in serious need of a clue-by-four upside the head.
* that point being when they decide to violate other people’s human rights, be they immigrants, refugees, LGBTQIA, POC, Muslim, and so on. Sure, let’s talk about the best ways to spend tax money and whether you think it’s a good idea for the government to try to ban buckeyball magnets. You don’t get to tell people they’re less than human or enact a campaign of brutalization and terror try and prove it without being removed from my Christmas card list.
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So my prediction was right: we are not actually talking about totemics. We are really discussing the merits of our system of government, leadership and oversight. Which is fine, but actually off the topic of friendship between two oppositely oriented richy richies.
Fair points. Maybe Bernie is ok, IIRC he voted against the Iraq war.
Do the two encounters cancel each other out like matter/anti-matter?
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Sanders has impeccable anti war bonafides, which is why the Democratic Party establishment hates him so much.
Also, I don’t care who Ellen hangs out with. My problem with the people calling her out for hanging out with Bush is the unstated insinuation that Clinton is somehow less of a war criminal than he is.
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My sinuses are playing hob with my eyes, and I keep glancing at the title as:
“Ellen’s lecture on beheading George W. Bush”
That would have been a much better lecture.
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That’s the point I’m trying to make. I verbally disapproved of the war and that was about it. I’m hardly some grand hero defending all that’s right and good, I’m a lazy first world citizen who found it much easier to sit by and let it happen than attempt to even disassociate myself from the US, much less oppose it. And I was even in the minority there, the majority of the nation, and we should never forget this, approved, at the time, of the invasion of Iraq, even as literally every qualified observer involved were waving their hands wildly screaming the whole Bush administration WMd thing was pure drivel. So no, I don’t approve of this sudden weird blindsiding of Ellen over something that is all of our sins. That’s guilty people trying to transfer their guilt onto a convenient scapegoat and nothing more.
Now the takedown notices, yeah, that’s sad, but that’s what happens when a mob suddenly tries to emotionally bully someone over something this stupid. They panic. Like I said earlier, manufactured outrage. That and mob mentality and no wonder she’s feeling confused and oppressed.
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Some corrections here. First of all, the no fly zone in Libya was actually a good idea and definitely shortened the length of their civil war while also reducing civilian casualties. Also, no, Clinton didn’t lead the charge. The French lead the charge, Clinton was just one single voice near the bottom of the command structure advising that it was a good idea. And it was. And before you try to argue that Libya is shit now, understand two fundamental points : 1. it was their civil war they’d already started and 2. the problems resulted from the lack of follow through. Obama admits it was, in his mind, one of his greatest failures in office, but not the no fly zone. It was the failure to put effort into stabilizing and building the region after the civil war that was the problem.
I was out protesting in the streets, and got ridden off the road by horse cops and then pepper sprayed the day after that, and I’m still culpable. The only way you avoid that as an American is if you were actively waging guerrilla war against the government. But there’s culpable, and then there’s thinking it was such a minor thing that you’re willing to support the very same politicians who perpetrated it.
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