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It's not an insult. NZ declared war with Germany on 3 Sept 1939Why are you trying to insult the U.S. by saying they "didn't do anything for a very long time"? We didn't go to war until war was brought to us.
True. In my world I don't have an aggressive enemy like NATO encroaching on my doorstep for no reason, thank goodness.I'm sure Putin would agree with you.
Maybe in the modern world in which you live there's no danger of a foreign power invading another country. Maybe in the world in which you live it's not the done thing to promise your friends 'Hey, if someone comes for you, then I'll be there to help'. Maybe the world in which you live is a very long way from eastern Europe. Maybe your world has never been invaded.
If you think NATO is an aggressive danger then this is a discussion not worth having.True. In my world I don't have an aggressive enemy like NATO encroaching on my doorstep for no reason, thank goodness.
What if the USA and Russia switched?Is NATO going to start a war with Russia?
Because we promised them if they got rid of their nuclear weapons, we’d defend them against just such an attack?Ukraine is a de facto NATO country, else why would the U.S. spend a gazillion dollars to fight Russia over it?
Cough Iraq cough!Why are you trying to insult the U.S. by saying they "didn't do anything for a very long time"? We didn't go to war until war was brought to us.
Thank you for reinforcing my point.Because we promised them if they got rid of their nuclear weapons, we’d defend them against just such an attack?
Please explain what point you're trying to make here.Cough Iraq cough!
Do you even pay attention to what the Trump fans say?
What?
This situation is perhaps a little bit of both...do you know the difference between an eyeopener and "enemy of my enemy"?
I'm sorry, was USAID using slave labor? Can we set that right by financing trans-sexual ping-pong in Bolivia? Should we take up the cis-man's burden and teach the less enlightened that "gender" is a spectrum and that a confused boy can be transformed into a suicidal girl with the proper surgery? I mean, it's only a few gigabucks, Uncle Sammy blows through that much before tiffin, and they take tiffin pretty doggone early in those parts.And just think how much better we'll feel about ourselves if we know that we've spent a few thousand million dollars building state of the art squash courts in Côte d'Ivoire.Sure we did. Then we freed them, and now we can hate the guys who shamed us into giving them room and board and Sundays off while they were slaves. We can even send Musk and his thugs around to drag them out of their offices. Oops. It looks like we could have done that without having freed them and it would have made the slaves cheaper to keep. I guess Trump is a smarter President than Jeff Davis was.
I'm trying to remember what this sub-thread was about...I do pay attention to what they say.
I'll still stand by my original assertion.
Democrats seem to see US politics through the lens of "If we just got Trump out of the way, the other team would fall back in-line and we could accomplish all the things we want to accomplish just like we used to"
Republicans don't see it through the same lens. They very much acknowledge that the fact that the Nancy Pelosis, the AOCs, the Liz Warrens, and Chuck Schumers are just spokes in a much bigger collective wheel.
Evidenced by the lengths they went to run a scorched earth political and media campaign to convince the American public that Donald Trump should be unelectable. As if they thought that staunch resistance to their policy initiatives lives and dies with one guy.
With or without Donald Trump, the days of Democrats getting to run against "squishy" republicans for easy wins is over.
This situation is perhaps a little bit of both...
But: "Enemy of my Enemy" logic was never viewed as a valid reason for military meddling among democrats in the past.
And the "eyeopener" you speak of was somewhat artificial, as the "eyeopener" wasn't something that came about organically. It was coordinated effort to "open people's eyes to something" for self-serving reasons.
Speaking of russian propagandists.. Stone has produced propaganda films for putin *after* the Crimean invasion.It was an eye opening in the same way that an Oliver Stone or Michael Moore "documentary" is eye opening. In that, while it certainly gives people new information and factoids that they may not have been previously aware of, the disseminator of said info is using and presenting it in a specific way to get the "newly enlightened" people on their side ideologically.
Not terribly surprising, that kind of content is what guys like Stone, Moore, and D'souza have become known for, making "documentaries" that play a little fast and loose with the details in order to draw viewers over to their ideological positions.Speaking of russian propagandists.. Stone has produced propaganda films for putin *after* the Crimean invasion.
But that's where we seem to be talking past each other...I'm trying to remember what this sub-thread was about...
Oh, yeah. Funding for a project that characterized russian propgandists as .. russian propagandists. Oh. No. It's not about your characterization of the Democratic party or its leadership or their motivations to support Ukraine in 2022 whether they did so before or not.
Probably both.When you hear many of the hard-right republican talking points about how "Did you know that in Muslim countries they don't let women drive or vote, and they'll even execute people are LGBT or atheists!"
They may be "exposing" a truth that some people weren't aware of, but does anyone, for even a split second, think their actual motivation for fixating on that is a desire to protect rights of women, gays, or free-thinkers? Or is it merely a subversion attempt to drum up support for things like travel bans, invading middle eastern countries, and "Christianity-first" domestic policies?
Yes we are, let me explain...But that's where we seem to be talking past each other...
If those self-serving motivations are the reason for a desire to "highlight and expose Russian propagandists", and the entity with the self-serving motivations are the ones who get to define "propagandist", it's perfectly valid to question their sincerity.
Perhaps the best comparison I can give:
When you hear many of the hard-right republican talking points about how "Did you know that in Muslim countries they don't let women drive or vote, and they'll even execute people are LGBT or atheists!"
They may be "exposing" a truth that some people weren't aware of, but does anyone, for even a split second, think their actual motivation for fixating on that is a desire to protect rights of women, gays, or free-thinkers? Or is it merely a subversion attempt to drum up support for things like travel bans, invading middle eastern countries, and "Christianity-first" domestic policies?
I am far, far, far, far, far, far, far more interested in the motivations of those telling lies or doing bad things than I am the motivations of those who tell the truth or do the good thing. There really aren't many times when I was concerned about the motivations of truth-tellers and do-gooders.
This post is ridiculous.In what other situation would a similar problem be approached as "Wow, this other country is a major threat to Western Nations and threatens our democracies and usurps our elections.... boy I hope they attack one of their neighbors so we have an excuse to arm the people fighting against them"
BTW, if a person says, "Did you know that in Muslim countries they don't let women drive or vote". I wouldn't assume the person is right wing.
That used to be the standard position of the US-DemocratsThis post is ridiculous.
I understand you are trying to go full on MAGA. i.e. What's in it for me?
But if you standby and do nothing while aggressors slowly bully and pick off the weak links, then move on to the next conquest and the next one, and just slowly pick off the sheep, then you will find before long there are no sheep left.
If USA, and UK and others weren't protecting other nations, then there would be many more wars today than there are.
If you guys stop protecting others, then others will have a need to develop WMDs.
Well, OK. I guess you're not interested in the moral aspect of it. You'd rather not consider whether a large country run by a thug can simply invade another country is morally acceptable or not. You'd not want to think about the ethics of the matter. And you'd skip on any responsibility that you might have to countries which are members of an organisation of which you are a founder member, an organisation which has pledged to support each other should any suffer aggression from an enemy. As regards that last point, maybe as Ukraine is not a member of that organisation you think that it doesn't apply.In order for actions like arming Ukraine or intervening by funding them to be considered "the good thing" for the US, one would first have to explain how that's the "good thing" with respect to the stated reasons we were given for why people in the US were supposed to want to support the involvement.
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