Excuse me for harping on the biggest lost opportunity in like three generations…
5 Likes
ER - it seems maybe the DNC went with her, more than the populace.
6 Likes
Finally, History is realigning itself with the Call of Duty narrative.
4 Likes
Perhaps the borders were drawn up for ease of colonial administration.
6 Likes
If the options are let a few thousand innocent people die in a prison in their country, or invade that country on false pretexts, kill a minimum of ten times that many innocents in the immediate conflict, with far more dying in the aftermath, while destroy the country’s infrastructure, and destabilizing an entire region leading to more death, radicalization, human rights abuses in more governments cracking down on their populaces, and general conflict around the region, then I think that’s a pretty clear “damned if you do.” Especially when the American invaders set up a prison in which innocents were raped and murdered.
If we were using the criteria of human rights abuses and wrongful deaths in prisons as our justification for invading somewhere, Iraq didn’t stand out as uniquely bad in the long list of candidates. We’d really want to go after the big guys and invade someplace like China which imprisons and disappears far more and has a hideous track record on human rights abuses. And we shouldn’t do that either. These kind of problems of major human rights abuses and political imprisonment and execution might have solutions, but military invasion isn’t one with any record of success.
22 Likes
“Kosovo” made certain people cocky
5 Likes
Rwanda as well. I’m much more torn over using the military as a “humanitarian intervention” to halt genocides, since there’s at least some justification for immediate action.
8 Likes
Yeah but we don’t need China for our oil.
So yes, I agree we went in for the wrong reasons. At least to Iraq. We don’t need to be the World Police with Afghanistan.
The bigger issue was it was a violent place before anyone mettled in it. Before colonialism even.
The problem is - “someone should do something”, and something was done. At some point we should just sit back and let them handle it? No wars by proxie? No weapons? No no-fly zone? No humanitarian aid? Support oppressive regimes as long as they get the oil out to us?
I am not suggesting the other option is any better. I am more inclined at this point to just let them handle it.
1 Like
Even the humanitarian aid - food, not weapons - is making things worse in a way, because many times the various armed people get it and use it to control the people and feed themselves.
Fuck the DNC. If enough Americans had a clue, and Sanders got the support he deserved from the masses, their wishes would be irrelevant.
6 Likes
I voted for Sanders, and I wish he had gotten the nomination, but I do cut the DNC a little bit of slack for being annoyed at his run for the nomination. The guy may have caucused with them, but he didn’t start actually start calling himself a Democrat (and even then, inconsistently) until he wanted to get the party’s nomination. Why not run as an independent instead? Because he wanted to take advantage of the party’s powerful political machinery in order to have a realistic chance of getting elected. But unlike most Democratic members of congress, he didn’t put in the effort to fund-raise and support other Democratic candidates over the years, building up that machinery by spending many degrading hours at the DNC call center hustling for cash. His motivations for remaining independent may have been pure, and there’s no doubt that money in politics has a terrible, corrupting influence, but it’s the system that the DNC (and RNC) currently work under, and it’s not at all surprising that those within the system wouldn’t take kindly to someone they consider an outsider trying to get all the advantages of a party that they had previously kept at arms length.
5 Likes
What about the fact that members of the DNC are also human beings, who’d presumably like to see a government that doesn’t utterly debase the the entire concept of humanity?
A phenomenon like Bernie was exactly what the world needed, and it would’ve been just in the nick of time. Now we’re all completely fucked by business as usual pushing on past the point of no return. If USAnians can’t vote a shitload of Republicans out of congress and state governments quick smart, then that’s it - lights out.
12 Likes
waffle.
one and all, they cloak themselves in distorted religious justifications, based on those parts of their faith that speak about spreading Islam with the sword.
for you to make the supposedly profound point that they don’t have one coherent statement would be egregiously risible, if it wasn’t so obviously merely contrarian, as at least a half dozen major groups, each with their own fractal sub-groupings, are our opponents at present, in the ‘‘war on terror’’. so why would i suggest they had one coherent statement?.
what they do share, and what i did refer to, is Islamic extremism. which sees its end goal world wide conquest.
what you fail to address is the fact that no such provocation existed before the previous Islamic hegemonies. the point is, they are determined to have power regardless of what we may have done, or will do.
2 Likes
I promise you, nobody from the DNC ever said, “Bernie, you should really run as an independent.”
10 Likes
You can make that 240 years out of 240 years, if you include the class war waged in the name of fufilling the primary function of government as described by James Madison ie. to ‘protect the minority of the opulent from the majority’
15 Likes
12 Likes
FFS, the US isn’t actually at war with Islamic State, not just in the legal sense of a war declared by congress, but in the sense that the Obama Administration won’t authorise the sort of S&T that actual war involves. This would involve admitting that the POTUS was completely wrong about all that “JV team” stuff and would involve S&T of dealing with an actual state.
1 Like
The problem is they are propaganda terms, not ideologies.[quote=“songkran, post:2, topic:84625”]
f you think things like the DNC hacking aren’t state-sponsored hacking on behalf of Russia, then make the case for that. Don’t just insinuate it and gaslight the rest of us for having the gall to be opposed to interference in our election by a foreign power.
[/quote]
It’s the other way around: the lazy insinuations of Russian influence on everything need substantiation. But instead we get Democratic party nod and wink accusations of Trump being a pawn of Russia and asking for investigations. Which is the same level of discourse as Trump just “asking questions” as he regularly does.
11 Likes
What on earth was there to get cocky about in Rwanda? Western backed forces waited until the genocide was over to sweep through the country and then started a venal war which tore the region apart and killed millions in neighbouring countries.
A fucking clusterfucking disaster by the US. And Clinton and his “new african leadership” in particular.
5 Likes
I wouldn’t discount the Chinese so much. It isn’t Mao’s army of untrained peasants armed with WWII surplus weapons anymore. They are modernizing quickly, not surprisingly because almost all modern technology is made in China after all. Edit – I was actually trying to respond to Blaze Curry.
5 Likes
