Look, we are as mad about it as you are, but we have to play by the rules.

The rules say we aren’t allowed to win.

The point of the comparison is that the two aren’t actually alike in scale though. Stubbing your toe and getting shot are both painful but it would be odd if someone with a gunshot wound was loudly complaining about their stubbed toe.

I think it’s more likely they’re just a USian, they deliberately elect these kinds of governments over and over.

I mean maybe it’s just an American values thing but I actually don’t think scientists are as bad as Epstein associates.

Israel keeps blowing up their civilians and has shown itself to be completely incapable of negotiating in good faith so that’s hardly surprising.

The Supreme Court could stop the count and declare a result. They have done that already once.

Presumably he will be monitoring the polling and will intervene using his agencies if it looks like things are going wrong. Declare you won, show your evidence for it such as it is, convince your supporters that you’re correct and then dare the Democrats to do literally anything to stop him.

Yeah it feels intentional and it makes me uncomfortable.

Where’s the part where people are making funny quotes about Tiny Man and stuff? I’ve been scrolling through the thread to see what you were talking about and haven’t found it yet.

Edit: I just searched for the tiny man square part of your quote and this post is the only thing that comes up.

Yeah there’s really no room for nuance on some of these topics for some reason. You don’t accept the line, a line fed to us by a government we ostensibly don’t trust about a sanctioned enemy that it has every incentive to make you dislike, and somehow you are questioning objective reality to defend an authoritarian.

I think it’s the sheer volume of anti China consent-manufacturing material that does it. Westerners are just bathing in it constantly.

The problem for Ukraine is not one of budgeting. Foreign policy is largely the domain of the president especially since the legislature has given up on war powers and doing anything to restrict the use of force.

Ukraine isn’t winning with the resources and backing it currently has, and it was losing ground even when supported by the comparatively enthusiastic Biden admin. Trump (correctly in my view) believes the situation will continue to deteriorate and that Ukraine is best off negotiating an end to the war as soon as it can before the terms get even worse.

Congress can’t compel Hegseth to conduct the war in a certain way, what Trump wants is what he is going to get until he leaves more or less. Which means Ukraine needs to hold out until 2029, at which point the damage will be done most likely.

Edit: I know the US isn’t fighting the war directly but the use of its intelligence sharing, materiel, and logistical/soft power have been indisposable to the conduct of the war before Trump came back. If he can’t be forced to be more generous with these things, which he can’t, he can force the war to end and worsen Ukraine’s position however much he would like to. A prospect that becomes more and more likely the more irritated he gets with what he perceives as Ukraine not cooperating with his goals.

I dunno. I don’t love the America of the 90s that was impoverishing the entire Eastern Bloc and like, invading Iraq and stuff. Or the one that opened a torture prison in Cuba in the 00s, invaded Iraq again, and terrified people across the world with an unaccountable drone war through the Obama years (to say nothing of Libya and the militarization of police).

You loved that America? The drone war/war on terror one?

You don’t understand, western nations helped defend one side of the civil war and propped them up as part of a global ideological conflict they wanted to engage in with countries on the other side of the globe from them. Not agreeing to allow their proxy to act with impunity is textbook imperialism.

Imperialism is when you don’t concede that a bunch of fascists who fought and lost a civil war and then fortified themselves on an island with the help of foreign powers and violently purged dissenters get to claim to be the government of both your country and other neighboring countries. The more that you spend decades seeking reconciliation diplomatically instead of through military ventures, the more imperialist you are.

Oh no, I definitely believe the US is especially bad. I didn’t claim otherwise. Good luck though.

Name a large country that doesn’t have mass civilian casualties in it’s past.

Is the argument supposed to be that everyone else is also bad so it doesn’t matter? Because I don’t agree with that reasoning, you can still find something objectionable even if other bad stuff also happens.

The guys who conducted experiments for Japan on living Chinese victims are also bad. The guys who armed and equipped the Taliban are also bad. The people that trained and armed the Contras, very bad. The guys who build weapons for Israel are also bad. It’s not a contradiction, there are plenty of other people who also have earned some sort of just retribution for the things they enabled.

I didn’t draw the US out of my hat, they came up because of the article in the link.

If you really want to put the US in a bad light you should mention that the US did a hell of a lot more damage to Japanese cities with conventional bombs than nukes.

Of course. I’m not the one who was saying only everyone else’s nuclear weapons matter, though, you’re the one who needs to prove that somebody else has a worse record on this. You can’t do that though so you’re pivoting to… I guess yeah they also killed a lot of civilians with conventional weapons? I’m not disputing that though, I think most of the people the US kills are killed with conventional weapons. My original point was that the US goes around hurting humanity because it is an unquestionable nuclear power. The nukes are deterrence to keep everyone else in line.

You might also want to consider that the question of whether Japan actually had non-combatants is debatable.

Or that I guess, can’t kill civilians if all the children in Hiroshima were combatants? Yeah that’s a sane approach, definitely makes the US position seem really reasonable.

That kind of logic can justify unlimited violence. It’s not debatable that civilians lived in Japan.

Look, I know you’re defensive of your country or whatever. But this is really some wild justification you’re attempting here, at the point where the defense is “everyone committed mass murder but also it’s possible that every single person in two cities deserved to be vaporized by a nuclear bomb” we need to take a step back and reconsider how we got here.

Or I’m just edgy and misinformed or whatever. But I think you’re relying on a lot of canned lines and not thinking about what happened in a neutral light. If anyone else (say, Israel? Saudi Arabia?) claimed they could kill everyone in an area because there weren’t any civilians we would all recognize that for what it is.

You are not misinformed because you don’t have access to the correct information, you are misinformed because you choose to be myopic because you think that makes you edgy or clever.

I think we just disagree about what the US is justified in doing to the rest of the world. I’m trying to meet you partway here but my guess is this is the actual divide and there’s not really anything I could argue that would affect that belief you have.

Lol okay, don’t dispute any of it that’s fine, guess they didn’t nuke civilians.

Other people need nukes because the US has them and demonstrated that it is willing to use them on civilians. Other countries have nuclear arsenals because that’s the only way to stop yanks from going and mounting a campaign that kills a million people or more in their region. Building nuclear weapons for the American military is objectively bad for the world. I didn’t say anything about Russia.

Oh I meant the impunity that being a nuclear power has given the US to exterminate humanity since WWII, a project it has carried out more or less continuously since they first got and used nuclear weapons on civilians.

Damn you mean I spent my career giving madmen the ability to exterminate humanity with impunity and now the madmen decided I won’t get easy access to medical care?