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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez


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1 hour ago, SpiralOut said:

I love how this is the one war that is a war too far for the Republicans.

A hundred fucking years of beating the war drums for any threat, any perceived slight whatsoever.  But now that there's a Democrat in office and because the prime backer of the Republican party and their cult leader is getting his ass kicked by the Ukrainians, out come the doves of peace.  Republicans never met a conflict they didn't enjoy dumping piles of taxpayer money on to kill as many yellow or brown people as possible in the name of free-dumb, but now all of a sudden the Treasury can't bear the fucking expense.

The conflict can be over tomorrow.  All Putin has to do is bring his conscripted slaves back across the border to Russia where they belong.  

Remind me to never trust a Republican to guard my back if America ever gets invaded.  You turn around and the next thing you know they'll be licking the invader's fucking boots.

To be fair, they're not for every war. They were also pretty dead set against intervention in WWII.

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On 9/30/2023 at 10:07 AM, Anastasis said:

Love getting lectured about abusive relationships by the ghouls that will happily trade Ukrainian lives and prolong the conflict to forward their foreign policy objectives, and at the same time crow about the awesome ROI. 

What about the fact that the Ukranians are unquestionably willing to lay down their lives for freedom? Do you also support a woman who is beaten to shit daily by her spouse to stick in the marriage for the kids, who he also beats the shit out of? That's pretty ghoulish. 

But since we know that's just an illustration, please tell us why we should force the Ukranians who are 100% supportive of their fight for freedom should be told to sit the fuck down and give up their resources, land, and borders to a shitbag invader? I guess you don't believe in the freedom of those people to choose to put their own lives on the line for their freedom? 

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50 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

What about the fact that the Ukranians are unquestionably willing to lay down their lives for freedom? Do you also support a woman who is beaten to shit daily by her spouse to stick in the marriage for the kids, who he also beats the shit out of? That's pretty ghoulish. 

But since we know that's just an illustration, please tell us why we should force the Ukranians who are 100% supportive of their fight for freedom should be told to sit the fuck down and give up their resources, land, and borders to a shitbag invader? I guess you don't believe in the freedom of those people to choose to put their own lives on the line for their freedom? 

Ana will never honestly engage with you on this.

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On 9/29/2023 at 11:46 PM, fattyflattie said:

Like Ted Cruz taking a pic with a guy who ends up being a shitbag.  And then getting ripped on it for this site, as if he knew who some rando wanting a pic was?  That's what you mean by error not lying with the audience, correct?  

 

Wake me up when Cruz resigns. You know, like the Canadian dude did.

edit: or even apologizes.

 

Edited by High Plains Drifter
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28 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

I'm fully aware, and obviously I'm mixing this metaphor a bit, but much like forcing a vote on the floor of a chamber of congress, you get to see Josh Hawley run away like a bitch on the record. 

I just want the anti-Ukraine support crowd to be honest about what they're actually saying. It's obvious that their preference would have been for us not to get involved whatsoever and for Russia to have rolled through their country, killing at will. And I don't even mean that in a "Gotcha, you're a piece of shit" kind of way. There are a dozen conflicts and genocides ongoing globally at any given time that America chooses to not get directly involved in that most barely know about, let alone shed any tears over. It's a perfectly reasonable opinion to want America to be totally isolationist when it comes to our foreign policy, however misguided it may be in these circumstances.

Just stop hiding being bullshit talk about "brokering peace" with a mad man and not supporting all of us neocon warmongers.

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11 minutes ago, aggie08 said:

I just want the anti-Ukraine support crowd to be honest about what they're actually saying. It's obvious that their preference would have been for us not to get involved whatsoever and for Russia to have rolled through their country, killing at will. And I don't even mean that in a "Gotcha, you're a piece of shit" kind of way. There are a dozen conflicts and genocides ongoing globally at any given time that America chooses to not get directly involved in that most barely know about, let alone shed any tears over. It's a perfectly reasonable opinion to want America to be totally isolationist when it comes to our foreign policy, however misguided it may be in these circumstances.

Just stop hiding being bullshit talk about "brokering peace" with a mad man and not supporting all of us neocon warmongers.

Good post. Like you, I can "understand" the isolationist stance assuming that is backed by the ethnocentrism of We are America and we can win any war!

But countries like Slovakia who have anti-Ukraine funding fatigue I don't get. Like, bro, you are tiny and you almost share a border with Ukraine. Russia would pop you like a pimple, and oh by the way, you are in NATO for the protection because you aren't a global superpower just like Ukraine. Y'all are the same. In fact, you are worse. You are the ugly step-sister to beautiful Czech Republic.

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2 hours ago, SydneyCarton said:

What about the fact that the Ukranians are unquestionably willing to lay down their lives for freedom? Do you also support a woman who is beaten to shit daily by her spouse to stick in the marriage for the kids, who he also beats the shit out of? That's pretty ghoulish. 

But since we know that's just an illustration, please tell us why we should force the Ukranians who are 100% supportive of their fight for freedom should be told to sit the fuck down and give up their resources, land, and borders to a shitbag invader? I guess you don't believe in the freedom of those people to choose to put their own lives on the line for their freedom? 

They were all for the Iraq war when no weapons of destruction were found, and suddenly it was all for freedom and because Islamic culture didn't respect women's rights.  Now they flip flop.  Every other time they're for wars and their rich cohorts making and selling arms.  But now we have a real situation where freedom may not be paying as much as the commies.  

Edited by Mdhorn
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On 9/29/2023 at 7:10 PM, aggie08 said:

Are we really doing this?

It's absolutely unforgivable that a 98 year old veteran with the last name Hunka wasn't properly vetted beforehand. People should be fired, and they deserve the current egg on their face.

...but do you honestly believe that anyone giving him a standing ovation had any inclination that he was an SS Nazi? Really?

I swear, the right purposely takes the dumbest, most illogical positions possible and makes a game out of trying to make the narrative stick.

 

Cheap sophistry. 

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21 minutes ago, longhornmatt said:

I never really realized it until recently, but I agree they ironically have some underlying belief that the dictatorships and communists countries are somehow stronger than the democracies because they’re not “soft”.  It’s like Trump praising China for being “strong” in cracking down in Tiananmen Square.

They still do it with China, too, even though at the moment they are favoring Russia over China.  There’s always chatter about how China plays the long game, China is smarter and more calculating than the West, China can do things we can’t because they can command 1,000,000,000 people to do something at the drop of a hat, etc.  Bitch, please.  They have to steal IP from the West for everything, they construct centrally planned ghost towns in the middle of nowhere, and they cause pandemics and have to weld their citizens inside their apartments for 3 years when they try to do virology research.  

The criticisms of totalitarian communist governments that they espouse when they aren’t deciding to defend them taking over the world are actually true.  Authoritarian countries ruled by fear are corrupt and inefficient, and you’ll find all kinds of ridiculous things if you look under the hood.  Kind of like a political party that only exists to flatter one idiotic man at the top.  

It's hard to ignore the comfortable alignment a preference for that political hierarchy has with their preference for a specific family hierarchy.  It's also hard to ignore the overwhelming weakness and insecurity a preference for those hierarchies reveals.  

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45 minutes ago, longhornmatt said:

I never really realized it until recently, but I agree they ironically have some underlying belief that the dictatorships and communists countries are somehow stronger than the democracies because they’re not “soft”.  It’s like Trump praising China for being “strong” in cracking down in Tiananmen Square.

They still do it with China, too, even though at the moment they are favoring Russia over China.  There’s always chatter about how China plays the long game, China is smarter and more calculating than the West, China can do things we can’t because they can command 1,000,000,000 people to do something at the drop of a hat, etc.  Bitch, please.  They have to steal IP from the West for everything, they construct centrally planned ghost towns in the middle of nowhere, and they cause pandemics and have to weld their citizens inside their apartments for 3 years when they try to do virology research.  

The criticisms of totalitarian communist governments that they espouse when they aren’t deciding to defend them taking over the world are actually true.  Authoritarian countries ruled by fear are corrupt and inefficient, and you’ll find all kinds of ridiculous things if you look under the hood.  Kind of like a political party that only exists to flatter one idiotic man at the top.  

The preference for authoritarianism comes from a deep-seated discomfort with the fact that their own political ideology (which is tied to race and religion) is less and less competitive in the marketplace of ideas. And instead of being better salesmen or adapting the ideology, they want to instead just eliminate the marketplace. 
 

The “hardness” they admire has nothing to do with the other nations’ competitiveness either on the battlefield or in the global economy. (Russia fails desperately at both). It’s all about the desire to punish political enemies at home. 

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On 9/29/2023 at 9:57 PM, Anastasis said:

That we need to broker cessation of violence among these Slavs asap. 

Referring to “Slavs” as if it’s any way explanatory or useful here is really one of the dumbest ways to sound smart, closely following “what if Canada invited Russia to base missiles there.” 

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8 hours ago, SydneyCarton said:

But since we know that's just an illustration, please tell us why we should force the Ukranians who are 100% supportive of their fight for freedom should be told to sit the fuck down and give up their resources, land, and borders to a shitbag invader? I guess you don't believe in the freedom of those people to choose to put their own lives on the line for their freedom? 

I don't think that we should just tell them to sit the fuck down. I think that we should be brokering a cessation of the violence rather than just continuing to dump billions of dollars of arms into a region of the world with a long reputation for corruption and arms trafficking. We literally set the stage for this conflict over an extended period of time, and I understand, there is not a good solution at this point, so we're pot committed. Which Americans are generally ok with because it only really directly impacts us in terms of Monopoly money, and they have been particularly primed over the last few years with this particular adversary. Doesn't hurt that the cash is flowing to all the right industries, we clearing out some old shit to replace with new, so it's all copacetic. Maybe at some point we learn and listen to some of the voices that were telling us how this was going to go decades ago. Maybe at some point we have some self-reflection wrt our foreign policy posture, and question the credibility of the American rules-based international order. Maybe we learn. But probably not. 

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6 hours ago, Mdhorn said:

They were all for the Iraq war when no weapons of destruction were found, and suddenly it was all for freedom and because Islamic culture didn't respect women's rights.  Now they flip flop.  Every other time they're for wars and their rich cohorts making and selling arms.  But now we have a real situation where freedom may not be paying as much as the commies.  

 

I've brought this up in discussion with my gop family members when it comes up, also if there was oil in Ukraine, we'd have troops on the ground by now

 

6 hours ago, RomaVicta said:

I'm unaware that I've done this. Which nazis do I applaud?

 

No beans in chili, food Nazis duh!

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1 minute ago, longhornmatt said:

Let’s just get to the real issue here.  I’ve seen you reference Yemen in the past in what seemed like personal terms.  What foreign country did America bomb that you have ties to that makes you hate America taking any posture other than compete isolationism?

I guess maybe just living through the fall of the Iron Curtain, 9/11, the Iraq War, viewing our middle eastern policy through a lens tinted by some common sense, and a consistent pattern of outcomes associated with our dysfunctional foreign policy is more impactful to me than others. I mean, I can understand why some of the posters that were wearing diapers when some of that shit went down are where they are. What I don't understand are the posters that lived those same experiences, and I expect are capable of some critical self-reflection of our role in the world during the post-WWII pax americana, and why they are where they are.    

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I think I've been reflective along those same lines [as Anastasis]. I wrote something that invited a flare-up of comment in the Decline of Trump thread. I didn't pursue it out of laziness and awareness that it was the wrong thread. This likely isn't the right one either.

Our record in Latin America alone is a breathtaking excercise in exploitation using just about any means. Our deposing the democratically elected president of Iran to re-install the Shah so we could have our way with local resources in another bloody black mark on this overly self-congratulatory country.

We paint our foreign and war policy as good guys versus bad guys. Simplistic and counter productive. The well-written responses in that other thread pointed to the Pax Americana and the value of American military force in the world since WWII.

I was not making an absolute argument against every action the US has taken. I was just pointing out the large element of our foreign policy which is stupid, brutal, and working in service of the greed now grown almost holy in our culture.

We fumbled the best chance we had in Afghanistan by pulling out the special forces to secure the north of Iraq when Turkey, one of the allegedly threatened neighbors of Iraq refused to participate in the second war of the Bush term.

The invasion of Iraq was a disastrous policy in some ways worse than Viet Nam because at least in the earlier bloody, useless war, we thought we were fighting an actual enemy. At least North Vietnam was communist even though they posed no threat to the US.

Over and over and over again.

Edited by RomaVicta
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8 minutes ago, longhornmatt said:

So, where in the Middle East?  Also, the fact that the Iron Curtain fell and it’s called Pax Americana might suggest that our foreign policy wasn’t altogether dysfunctional.

Everyone who wasn’t in diapers when the Berlin Wall came down: “Fucking American foreign policy!  What a terrible experience we are living through!”  Is that how the history books read now?

It was a Pax Americana for Europe to be sure. The US protected that part of the world.

How much Pax was there in Southeast Asia, Latin America, or the Middle East?

Did we really need to get so crosswise with China?

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16 minutes ago, longhornmatt said:

So, where in the Middle East?  

Has our policy been objectively dysfunctional?  Draw ring around the region. 

17 minutes ago, longhornmatt said:

Also, the fact that the Iron Curtain fell and it’s called Pax Americana might suggest that our foreign policy wasn’t altogether dysfunctional.

Yeah it's been awesome.  As long as you are a north american or western european, and not a south american, central american, african, asian, middle eastern or other threat to American hegemony. Do you even appreciate how stupid you sound once you get outside of your jingoistic bubble. 

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Can someone remind me the fate of the last person who took up arms against Putin, before brokering a cessation of the violence?

It's been a whole month, after all.

Anyone who thinks that Putin would offer favorite terms--and then honor those terms --is being intentionally disingenuous.

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8 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

Has our policy been objectively dysfunctional?  Draw ring around the region. 

Yeah it's been awesome.  As long as you are a north american or western european, and not a south american, central american, african, asian, middle eastern or other threat to American hegemony. Do you even appreciate how stupid you sound once you get outside of your jingoistic bubble. 

The  most awesome part of our foreign policy is how many people aren’t Eastern European anymore, they’re Western European. 
 

You’re also writing off a whole hell of a lot of Koreans, Japanese, and others who like us a hell of a lot more than any realistic replacement with the little “Asian” line. 

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I don’t really disagree with much of what Ana said, other than this brokering a cease fire idiocy.  It is some serious head in the sand stuff (or just as likely wanting to be contrarian), which I guess is why he never directly addresses how that cease fire would or even could work.  

Edited by Ted Lange
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1 minute ago, RomaVicta said:

If you're talking about Ukraine, you and I likely part ways on our opinion of that policy. I'm for supporting this spear in the side of Russia. And the Russians asked for it.

I understand. This situation is fucked and we are pot committed. But I think that you also understand our role in bringing us to this place. Russia needs to withdrawal from the territories occupied post invasion. I think that Ukraine is going to have to live with the state on the ground in Crimea. And if we can play a role in getting the parties involved back to that pre-invasion position, I think that we should. Otherwise it is just going to be a brink-testing meat grinder that burns through Ukrainian and Russian lives and American taxpayer dollars for a long time.  

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3 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

I understand. This situation is fucked and we are pot committed. But I think that you also understand our role in bringing us to this place. Russia needs to withdrawal from the territories occupied post invasion. I think that Ukraine is going to have to live with the state on the ground in Crimea. And if we can play a role in getting the parties involved back to that pre-invasion position, I think that we should. Otherwise it is just going to be a brink-testing meat grinder that burns through Ukrainian and Russian lives and American taxpayer dollars for a long time.  

You can always tell the people talking in bad faith because they can’t help adding “and Russian lives.” 
 

Our only concern should be tilting that kill ratio way in favor of AFU as fast as possible.

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1 minute ago, Anastasis said:

I understand. This situation is fucked and we are pot committed. But I think that you also understand our role in bringing us to this place. Russia needs to withdrawal from the territories occupied post invasion. I think that Ukraine is going to have to live with the state on the ground in Crimea. And if we can play a role in getting the parties involved back to that pre-invasion position, I think that we should. Otherwise it is just going to be a brink-testing meat grinder that burns through Ukrainian and Russian lives and American taxpayer dollars for a long time.  

Sounds reasonable to me if Russia can be brought to do those things. I'm not informed enough to see why Putin will settle for what is obviously a defeat. Perhaps there are angles hidden to me. 

It has become a horrific grinder of lives and communities. I don't see how or why the Ukrainians will give in. I would feel worse if Ukraine fell for lack of support from us. 

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I think I've been reflective along those same lines [as Anastasis]. I wrote something that invited a flare-up of comment in the Decline of Trump thread. I didn't pursue it out of laziness and awareness that it was the wrong thread. This likely isn't the right one either.
Our record in Latin America alone is a breathtaking excercise in exploitation using just about any means. Our deposing the democratically elected president of Iran to re-install the Shah so we could have our way with local resources in another bloody black mark on this overly self-congratulatory country.
We paint our foreign and war policy as good guys versus bad guys. Simplistic and counter productive. The well-written responses in that other thread pointed to the Pax Americana and the value of American military force in the world since WWII.
I was not making an absolute argument against every action the US has taken. I was just pointing out the large element of our foreign policy which is stupid, brutal, and working in service of the greed now grown almost holy in our culture.
We fumbled the best chance we had in Afghanistan by pulling out the special forces to secure the north of Iraq when Turkey, one of the allegedly threatened neighbors of Iraq refused to participate in the second war of the Bush term.
The invasion of Iraq was a disastrous policy in some ways worse than Viet Nam because at least in the earlier bloody, useless war, we thought we were fighting an actual enemy. At least North Vietnam was communist even though they posed no threat to the US.
Over and over and over again.
This is where I'm at. Most all of our global adventures were horrible failures and costly, excepting when we prevent or reduce Genocide. Ukraine was invaded by Russia, a country that explicitly declared Genocide on them then started murdering people. Pretty easy calculus when they openly state thier intentions.
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You can always tell the people talking in bad faith because they can’t help adding “and Russian lives.” 
 
Our only concern should be tilting that kill ratio way in favor of AFU as fast as possible.
Well it would ideal if we could end the war without so many dead Russians but they appear to be rather unconcerned and fatalistic about it from the top down. Lots of Telegram posts about " we have broken guns, shitty food, no plan, and we will likely all die but we aren't pussies and are going forward with our shovels.
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1 hour ago, 956 Worldwide said:

You can always tell the people talking in bad faith because they can’t help adding “and Russian lives.” 

LOL. This post brought to you by the same vein of State Department talking heads that went to the UN and sold the world on a completely fantastical set of intelligence that ended up costing over $2T and 500k lives.  

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1 hour ago, aggie08 said:

Can someone remind me the fate of the last person who took up arms against Putin, before brokering a cessation of the violence?

It's been a whole month, after all.

Anyone who thinks that Putin would offer favorite terms--and then honor those terms --is being intentionally disingenuous.

It's the dumbest fucking thing he's posted here, and that's saying something.

What if -- and I'm just spitballing here -- what if the legitimate calculus was "we can save the most lives by helping Ukraine fight back"?  I know, crazy talk, and other less than noble American interventions render this one equally bad.  Of course.

I'm reminded of this guy in "Good Will Hunting", with worse hair:

image.thumb.png.4f9c15371d0c7e8c0fd57e95761544d3.png

 

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Hey look, I sincerely hope that the West dumping hundreds of billions dollars worth of arm into this ends up playing out well for the Ukraine and for us in the long term. I don't think it is particularly crazy to question that maybe it doesn't based on historical performance and outcomes. 

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