I am not in favor of spreading our largess around globally. That should remain an individual decision rather than a governmental one.
Our government should not be either a war machine nor a giant secular church. Let's find a middle ground.
Oh and one other thing for the peanut gallery to chew on. They had a No Kings march here in Denver. It fizzled out, but the interesting thing is that the movement was led by liberals like my Boss who are self proclaimed antifa against the Authoritarian Republicans.
You're a fool who believes everything your right-wing outlets tell you, and who fails to comprehend *WHY* anything has been done.
- The No Kings Day protests did not "fizzle out." It was the single largest day of protest in American history, full-stop, but the current ~7 million estimate.
The protests ended at a scheduled time. There were permits, and porto-potties, and road closures, and this all means
scheduling. The right-wing spin has been to claim that they "fizzled out," but this is an attempt to *lie about and minimize* a massive, coordinated, nation-wide protest by
people who care enough to both follow the fucking law and clean up after themselves. One of the big points of the No Kings Day protest was to utterly and completely disprove the administration's latest claims that opposition is all "george soros funded antifa terrorists," where admin officials have literally compared anyone who protests Trump to violent terrorist gang members. You know how you do that? You make a ton of noise, you protest without any violence, and you make sure to follow the law and disperse in an orderly fashion with cleanup at the end of the event.
- Do you understand
why the United States had (past-tense, its largely been dismantled) such a massive aid organization? The influence of the US, including diplomatic and
economic, was rooted in "soft power." "Hard power" is military force - since the end of WW2 we've always had the "biggest stick," but the most effective option was to not actually use it. By far the most effective source of American influence across the world has been the exercise of soft power - giving aid, advice, training, etc to countries in need. Every dollar you spend on aid multiplies to
multiple dollars you don't need to spend on
bullets. It's literally more effective when we want to create effective trade deals or get diplomatic wins that reinforce the US position as
the leading global superpower to
be the good guys than it is to use military force.
You're being fed the usual idiot-slop that right-wingers have always pushed: American taxpayers are suffering because we're giving aid to foreigners.
This is a lie. Its always been a lie. The trade system that Trump has dismantled by starting chaotic trade wars (nobody can trust the US any longer) was
always "America first." It
always worked out in America's interest over anyone else's. Yes, they were mostly mutually-beneficial - that's the mark of a great deal. But American farmers, American tech manufacturing, American service-providers, all had incredible markets and effective trade to keep the American economy pumping. The dollar has been the global reserve currency and was kept incredibly strong - this made our exports more expensive, but let us
buy globally-produced components and products cheaply, with incredible control over global trade (due to control over the dollar). We kept some adversaries (Russia, Iran) "under control" through sanctions that
only work because of the US control over global trade and its massive "soft power" influence. Other adversaries (China) we kept tightly linked to ourselves through trade (we buy lots of stuff from China, but they
used to buy lots of stuff from us too - pork, soybeans, high tech goods, etc) - by maintaining a tight trade relationship we ensured that nobody would significantly topple the status-quo, where the US remained on top.
You're a short-sighted imbecile, Phat. You believe the first thing you hear that sounds good without
thinking for three seconds about the downstream effects or the reason
why.
You dont know where your tax dollars go or why or how. You just dont like paying your taxes.
You dont know how any economic system works or how any policy affects anything. You just know that you don't like your current situation, and some podcaster somewhere says "things were better when we used gold, and the price of gold sure is high now." You dont have any accurate understanding of why we moved off of the gold standard, what the consequences of moving back would be, why crypto is similarly nonsensical, or
how the most basic function of economic valuation works.
You fall for conspiracy theories and Trump-cult bullshit
every fucking day. It's exhausting - people take time to explain things to you over and over and over and sometimes it seems like you might be finally learning something about reality...but then a week later you listen to some new podcast and all your conspiracy-brained sludge gets dredged back to the surface and you show you've learned nothing. You'll say that you're having more doubts about Trump
but you say all the same horseshit that Trumpers support because you're a libertarian: a fascist who's either too cowardly to admit it, or too stupid to understand why economic regulation is required and what the consequences of unbounded "private ownership" lead to horror and death and tyranny.
-->“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.” - Francis Bacon"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
“A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” – Albert Camus
"...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995...
"Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends." - Gandalf, J. R. R. Tolkien: The Lord Of the Rings
"The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death."
1 Corinthians 15:26King James Version (KJV)
-->Nihil supernum -->
-->
™ Version 4.2
(1)