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#627 Feb 07 2018 at 9:01 AM Rating: Good
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Palpitus1 wrote:
You don't seem really interested in educating yourself about reality.
From the guy who unironically voted Jill Stein.
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#628 Feb 08 2018 at 12:49 AM Rating: Default
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lolgaxe wrote:
Palpitus1 wrote:
You don't seem really interested in educating yourself about reality.
From the guy who unironically voted Jill Stein.


As a California resident where Clinton would obviously win so the only possible effect of my vote was towards a third party reaching 5%.

Both math, and money, are reality. So are millions of dead arabs and North Africans. Math and money and votes for Obama and Bush instead of other candidates made this happen. The US is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.


ETA: and Stein isn't an anti-vaxxer. Her point there was criticism of how NIH and FDA and such might be compromised. But whatever. Your ilk will just ignore things.


Not me. I can't even fathom how much happier I'd be if I woke up not questioning everything and instead just a pipeline of ideology or prejudice or ignorance. Afterlife even.


"From the guy who unironically voted for Jill Stein". As if that's an impugnment, something to regret. And I haven't even mentioned the environment. But let me just ask you THIS QUESTION:

If the 2016 Presidential Election was decided by ONLY your vote. and ONLY four candidates: Would you vote for: Clinton, Trump, Stein, Johnson????


And don't be a mockery of yourself where you answer flippantly. Be honest for one ******* time in your life about your real preference if that one vote of yours would've decide the next President.

Edited, Feb 8th 2018 2:04am by Palpitus1
#629 Feb 08 2018 at 8:08 AM Rating: Excellent
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Clinton
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#630 Feb 08 2018 at 8:16 AM Rating: Good
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Palpitus1 wrote:
As a California resident
When someone questions your connection to reality, bringing up that you're from a place that had an election between a body builder, a midget, and a porn star for Governor isn't going to help your case.
Palpitus1 wrote:
And don't be a mockery of yourself where you answer flippantly.
If you want honest then you have to accept that the only way mine would be the deciding vote would be if absolutely no one else in the country voted if Stein and Johnson are still in the running.

I don't do hypotheticals.

Edited, Feb 8th 2018 9:16am by lolgaxe
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#631 Feb 08 2018 at 11:38 AM Rating: Excellent
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Man, it's awful enough when there's just a close election somewhere in the state. Can't imagine the amount of propaganda and B.S. that I'd have to deal with if mine was the only vote that counted.

Edited, Feb 8th 2018 9:47am by someproteinguy
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#632 Feb 08 2018 at 11:47 AM Rating: Excellent
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Wasn't that a movie? I want to say Mel Gibson or Kevin Costner or one of those guys has, through some contrivance, the tie-breaking vote of some major election?
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#633 Feb 08 2018 at 12:47 PM Rating: Good
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Google says "Swing Vote." Which if the synopsis is true it also didn't involve third party independents.
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#634 Feb 08 2018 at 12:54 PM Rating: Excellent
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Nothing really includes third party independents. Not even Hollywood fantasy can make them relevant.
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#635 Feb 09 2018 at 3:02 AM Rating: Good
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Palpitus1 wrote:
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You'll never get the chance, of course. You're too lazy to put in the work to solve your problem, even though the solution is right in front of you. You'd rather paw at the hem of Obama's robes than be your own man. Typical liberal.


Yeah, uh I tried to solve it last election via my vote for "Jill Stein". Which, if elected, would've led to much less millions dead and enslaved, globally. Why didn't you vote for such an outcome? Why? Why?


That was your attempt at solving it, was it?

I bet it was. I bet you swaggered out of that booth like a fucking peacock, dusted yourself down and proudly announced that you work there was done.

Then, later, while drinking your mocha-latte pumpkin bubble tea in some stupidly named café, perhaps one of your friends expressed concern about the world's woes. But you set them straight.

"Don't worry," you said. "All of that is over now. I voted for Jill Stein."

Your friend gasps as you smirk over the rim of your flowerpot of steaming beverage. Cue applause, the orchestra bursts into life and one of the women you've been on-and-off stalking for the past few months throws herself at you. Ethically sourced, free-trade confetti streams down from the ceiling.

You're a hero!

.

Listen, bucko. When I was talking about work, effort, all of that, I didn't have in mind a quick jerk-off session in a polling booth. And when you talk abouit trying to solve a problem, you should have the self respect to give me something that has a chance of actually doing something rather than salving your conscience. At the very least, give me something any ****-soaked drunk couldn't stagger in and do in five minutes.

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Not sure what you mean by "typical liberal". I'm atypical in lots of ways. For instance I am very in favor of the death penalty.


I'm certainly coming around to your point of view on that one.

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And not sure what ******* ******* other solution you're referring to, regarding my problem with the United States warmongering and murdering and leading to death and disruption and enslaving of hundreds of millions. I've done my election duty. Via not voting for a proven WAR CRIMINAL. And also not for that ******* Trump.


I don't know, actually doing something useful? When Obama saw the president do **** he didn't like, did he sit back and vote? No.

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You are complicit in voting for continuing to murder and displace and rape and enslave hundreds of millions of foreigners. I am not. I am in this thread even just asking for a committing Prez of a genocide to acknowledge a genocide 100 years ago. And so...yes at this point I guess I realize how absurd it is for Armenian ancestors to ever have hope.


See, this is what we mean when we say you liberals have no personal accountability. You refuse to take responsibility for what your government is doing, even though you do nothing to stop them, and indeed do everything to help them - it's your money that funds their war machines, after all. You are complicit. All you're doing is giving yourself excuses to continue to do nothing. Man up and take some responsibility for once in your life - then do something to stop it. Jesus.

Yes, it's absurd for you to ask someone in the middle of a genocide to recognise one. I'm glad you finally recognise that. Perhaps one day you'll realise that you need to be the change you want to see in the world.


Edited, Feb 9th 2018 4:04am by Kavekkk
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#636 Feb 09 2018 at 8:19 AM Rating: Excellent
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When running for elected office, be sure to ask Jill her secrets for winning votes.
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#637 Feb 09 2018 at 9:02 AM Rating: Good
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Wear a boot as a hat and promise everyone a pony if you're elected!
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#638 Feb 13 2018 at 4:44 PM Rating: Decent
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Palpitus1 wrote:
Both math, and money, are reality. So are millions of dead arabs and North Africans. Math and money and votes for Obama and Bush instead of other candidates made this happen. The US is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.


Yeah. Cause the world would be full of duckies and bunnies and shiny happy people if it wasn't for the US and its evil foreign policy mucking everything up. You're kidding, right? The world is a violent place, full of violent people, who do violent things. US foreign policy, at worst, determines which people that violence is directed at, and at best, dramatically reduces the total body count along the way.

Not on my most partisan day would I claim that Obama caused violence and death around the world. I will say that in several cases, he failed to prevent or reduce it, and most often that was due to his hands off approach to foreign policy (which to be fair, was in keeping with his ideology, so while I disagree with several of his foreign policy decisions, I can't fault him for making them). The point is that violence would occur anyway. It's most often a case of whether the US (and other similarly minded nations around the world) take an active interest in doing something about it. It's terrifically easy to simply count up bodies in conflicts in which the US is involved in some way, but that doesn't take into account what would have happened if the US had not been involved at all.

On balance, I don't think it's wrong to say that there would be more violence and death around the world in the absence of US involvement than with it. The US has a long and fairly unique history of involving itself in conflicts around the world, while asking nothing more than friendly relations with those it helps (which doesn't always work out so well), and taking no more land from those who's countries we fight in than that needed to inter the bodies of our soldiers who die. I think that we've lived so many generations in a world with the US acting in this manner that we've forgotten what things were like previously, and tend to ignore how things would be in conflicts where someone other than the US is involved in "meddling".
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#639 Feb 13 2018 at 4:54 PM Rating: Excellent
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gbaji wrote:
Not on my most partisan day would I claim that Obama caused violence and death around the world.

Don't sell yourself short.
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#640 Feb 13 2018 at 5:15 PM Rating: Excellent
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Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Not on my most partisan day would I claim that Obama caused violence and death around the world.

Don't sell yourself short.


Well, he was one of the founders of ISIS, right? That's got to count for something! Smiley: schooled
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#641 Feb 13 2018 at 5:31 PM Rating: Excellent
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#642 Feb 14 2018 at 4:34 AM Rating: Default
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lolgaxe wrote:
Wear a boot as a hat and promise everyone a pony if you're elected!


So....I typed up a big response with links and quotes and tried to copy it prior to the auto-ads to my right glued everything up since whoever is webmaster on this site sucks. But in short, and hope I can get this reply in under the 3-4 minute challenge:

The US spends $700 billion on warmongering. Somehow little Iceland can afford universal health care.

You prefer and like this situation.

You think promising Americans universal health care, free college, and I'm going to assume a basic income is bad. A reason to vote against someone.

Wear 3,000,000 dead Cambodians, 10,000 slaves in Libya, 500,000 dead Iraqi children, 20,000 dead and 100,000 with cholera in Yemen...."as your hat". Asshole.
#643 Feb 14 2018 at 4:39 AM Rating: Default
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gbaji wrote:
Not on my most partisan day would I claim that Obama caused violence and death around the world.


ROFL. So you don't what the country called "Libya" is, nor the one called "Nicaragua", nor the one called "Syria". ETC.

So, I mean, your claim is that President Barack Obama's actions and choices didn't cause a single death or act of violence around the world??

Plus south sudan, somalia, ukraine, pakistan, afghanistan, iraq....


Even conservative posters with big balls are now cowed by the hagiography of the Great and Shining Obama on the Hill.



Fucking pathetic these last dozen or so posts. Willful ignorance.


#644 Feb 14 2018 at 9:07 AM Rating: Good
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Palpitus1 wrote:
You think promising Americans universal health care, free college, and I'm going to assume a basic income is bad.
Assume all you want, Dorothy.
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#645 Feb 14 2018 at 6:49 PM Rating: Good
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Palpitus1 wrote:
So, I mean, your claim is that President Barack Obama's actions and choices didn't cause a single death or act of violence around the world??
How did you pull that out of what he said?
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#646 Feb 14 2018 at 8:06 PM Rating: Decent
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Palpitus1 wrote:
The US spends $700 billion on warmongering. Somehow little Iceland can afford universal health care.


It's not about dollars spent. The US spends 3.3% of it's GDP on its military. It spends 17.1% of its GDP on health care. This is not an either/or scenario. We can certainly discuss the quality of US health care, and its pros and cons, and whether we like it or not, or how "universal" it is. But the issue isn't at all about how much money is spent.

Quote:
You prefer and like this situation.


What situation?

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You think promising Americans universal health care, free college, and I'm going to assume a basic income is bad. A reason to vote against someone.


I can't speak for lolgaxe, but for me, I'm one of those crazy people who doesn't trust the word "free". It's usually used when someone's trying to pull one over on you, and more often than not means that there's a cost that's just not being overtly presented to you, but that will show up to bite you at some point. I also don't think it's the government's job to do stuff like that in the first place. I've written at length on this forum about my thinking on this, and I'm not going to repeat it here.

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Wear 3,000,000 dead Cambodians, 10,000 slaves in Libya, 500,000 dead Iraqi children, 20,000 dead and 100,000 with cholera in Yemen...."as your hat". Asshole.


Yeah. Cause no one ever died until the US came along. Got it!
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#647 Feb 14 2018 at 8:41 PM Rating: Decent
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Palpitus1 wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Not on my most partisan day would I claim that Obama caused violence and death around the world.


ROFL. So you don't what the country called "Libya" is, nor the one called "Nicaragua", nor the one called "Syria". ETC.

So, I mean, your claim is that President Barack Obama's actions and choices didn't cause a single death or act of violence around the world??


I think you've failed to grasp the difference between taking an action which causes something, and failing to take an action which prevents something. I'm more than critical of Obama's foreign policy. But my criticisms have been pretty consistent that his failing was that he failed to act in many situations where I thought he should have. He failed to act early enough in Libya, allowing that conflict to go from an easy rout, to a stalemate, to a near loss by the rebels, to swinging back in their favor, and then slowly retaking territory lost, and then finally winning. That ebb and flow in between cost tens of thousands more lives than would have been lost otherwise.

Guess what though? In the absence of any action, the same war would have occurred, and the same loss of life (perhaps even larger) would have occurred. Similar inaction in Syria (admittedly, that's a trickier issue) has protracted that conflict for far far longer than it would have taken if we'd stepped in decisively on day one. To the point where now it's a nearly impossible to resolve without even more deaths. And that's before taking into account the rise of ISIS. Which, of course, brings us to another failure to act, in the form of not renewing the SOFA in Iraq, which led to a premature withdrawal of US forces before the initially stated conditions (a secure stable Iraq capable of ruling itself and defending itself). Those conditions were clearly not met, else a bunch of people wandering across the border from Syria, initially with mostly small arms and whatnot, would not have been able to take and hold nearly a quarter of the country for several years.

Again though, that was inaction, not action. It was the US *not* being actively involved which allowed those conflicts to spill over into more areas than they started in, and massively increase the total cost in lives over time.

Which kinda completely counters your core argument.

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Plus south sudan, somalia, ukraine, pakistan, afghanistan, iraq....


Yeah. Cause Sunni and Shiite factions have been so friendly for so long. And Persian and Arabs have been so friendly for so long. They all just got along splendidly until we came along. Oh wait! No. They haven't. I suppose we could just step back and let them all kill each other for a few decades. Maybe take bets on who wins. And that's if we assume that said regional conflict doesn't spill out into larger areas of the globe (or that it'll ever actually end anyway).

You just don't get that in the absence of the US (western "meddling" as a whole really) getting involved in such things and doing what we can to tamp down on such violence, things would be much much worse. The hoped for result is if we can create peace, even if it's strained and "faked" at first, over time, over generations, those who live under that peace will come to see it as normal, and maybe will get over whatever past animosities existed between them and then... maybe... learn to get along.

It's a crazy idea, but it's also pretty provably the only one that's ever worked in the history of mankind. People stop fighting each other only when they stop thinking in terms of "us" and "them", and maybe even think in terms of "we". There's a reason why, in the post Civil War era, great efforts were made to shift people's thinking from being citizens of states to being citizens of the United States. We have seen similar efforts in Europe as well (what do you think the whole EU and Eurozone stuff is about?). Same kind of thinking. Again, it doesn't always work, but it's the only thing that can work.


Quote:
Even conservative posters with big balls are now cowed by the hagiography of the Great and Shining Obama on the Hill.


Not even remotely close. Again, my issue was with your claim that the US is to blame for these things, and that it somehow actively causes death and violence around the world. I don't agree. I think those things are very much present all over the world, all the time. The world certainly doesn't need us to cause it to fight and kill each other. Does that just fine on its own. The only question is when and how and to what degree we may choose to involve ourselves in those conflicts.

It becomes a moral issue, and frankly I'm surprised you're taking the position you are here. I'd think that someone so adamant about things like universal health care and free education would also see the inherent moral aspect of whether one who lives in a relatively "civilized", safe, and secure environment who looks outside his safe world and sees others who are less fortunate, who live in areas wracked with violence and suffering, and then maybe decides to do something. Now maybe this smacks of some form of manifest destiny, bringing civilization to the savages, or whatnot, and maybe it seems overbearing, like we assume "they" can't resolve their own issues. And frankly, I get that as well. But the reality is that we live in a world where what happens in remote places of it, does actually affect us. And while I'm not going to claim that this is always about altruism (we certainly have our own political and economic interests involved as well), that does not change the fact that we might just see as "good" the goal of trying to prevent conflicts around the world, and we might see as "good" trying to lift people who are not "us" out of conditions of slavery and/or oppression.

Because to do otherwise would be to fall back into that "us" vs "them" mentality. It's ok to let "them" suffer, because they are not "us", right? And yeah, sometimes the solutions are not clean and neat (they almost never are), but we also have to look at these things on balance and try to make some kind of moral decision. You can list off the numbers of dead in conflicts the US involved itself in, but have you spent any time looking at the number of dead in conflicts the US does *not* involve itself in? And have you spent any time considering how many would have died in conflicts even if the US was not involved? And have you considered whether the conditions of those who "lived" were improved or worsened as a result?

You're looking at just one side of the equation. That's never going to give you the right answer.
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#648 Feb 15 2018 at 3:13 AM Rating: Default
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Uglysasquatch wrote:
Palpitus1 wrote:
So, I mean, your claim is that President Barack Obama's actions and choices didn't cause a single death or act of violence around the world??
How did you pull that out of what he said?


Uh, because: "Not on my most partisan day would I claim that Obama caused violence and death around the world" is a bold and utterly idiotic claim. The fuck is wrong with you. Recent stroke?

I mean ROFLMAO, are you too claiming here that Barack Obama has caused ZERO violence and ZERO death around the world?? If not, then what is your fucking problem here??

Take a seat, lookie-loo.

Edited, Feb 15th 2018 4:53am by Palpitus1
#649 Feb 15 2018 at 3:22 AM Rating: Default
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gbaji wrote:
What situation?


A situation where all Americans have health care.

Quote:
Quote:
You think promising Americans universal health care, free college, and I'm going to assume a basic income is bad. A reason to vote against someone.


I can't speak for lolgaxe, but for me, I'm one of those crazy people who doesn't trust the word "free". It's usually used when someone's trying to pull one over on you, and more often than not means that there's a cost that's just not being overtly presented to you, but that will show up to bite you at some point. I also don't think it's the government's job to do stuff like that in the first place. I've written at length on this forum about my thinking on this, and I'm not going to repeat it here.


Don't want to get too far into it either, but what if any obligations do you think a state has to its citizens? That's a fundamental question.

ETA: And as your reply I assume you have an equal problem with "free" roads and K-12 education, for two things. All these years I guess I just didn't realize you're simply an amoral libertarian.

Quote:
Yeah. Cause no one ever died until the US came along. Got it!


My response there was because Lolgaxe was being a flippant *****, dismissing the tens of millions of deaths cause worldwide via US warmongering.

"When someone questions your connection to reality, bringing up that you're from a place that had an election between a body builder, a midget, and a **** star for Governor isn't going to help your case."

What the fuck was that reply? Is he more concerned about personalities than outcomes? And you chose to speak for him here in this reply?


Edited, Feb 15th 2018 4:26am by Palpitus1
#650 Feb 15 2018 at 3:36 AM Rating: Default
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gbaji wrote:
Palpitus1 wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Not on my most partisan day would I claim that Obama caused violence and death around the world.


ROFL. So you don't what the country called "Libya" is, nor the one called "Nicaragua", nor the one called "Syria". ETC.

So, I mean, your claim is that President Barack Obama's actions and choices didn't cause a single death or act of violence around the world??


I think you've failed to grasp the difference between taking an action which causes something, and failing to take an action which prevents something. I'm more than critical of Obama's foreign policy. But my criticisms have been pretty consistent that his failing was that he failed to act in many situations where I thought he should have. He failed to act early enough in Libya, allowing that conflict to go from an easy rout, to a stalemate, to a near loss by the rebels, to swinging back in their favor, and then slowly retaking territory lost, and then finally winning. That ebb and flow in between cost tens of thousands more lives than would have been lost otherwise.


Just this take on yours of Libya is enough to disqualify you as someone interested in objective death/life, stability/chaos. Libya was a manufactured intervention by France and Hillary Clinton, mostly in order to prevent a competing gold-based African currency as Qaddafi was attempting. And Libya, free health care, free college, etc....Then, and well now...not free...$200 bucks or so to buy a slave. Nice job UN, US, France, etc.

gbaji wrote:
Again, my issue was with your claim that the US is to blame for these things, and that it somehow actively causes death and violence around the world. I don't agree.


You don't think the US actively causes death and violence around the world............that's your issue...... your claim and belief.....

Okay. I'm just in an episode of The Twilight Zone at this point.
#651 Feb 15 2018 at 3:51 AM Rating: Default
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gbaji wrote:
It becomes a moral issue, and frankly I'm surprised you're taking the position you are here. I'd think that someone so adamant about things like universal health care and free education would also see the inherent moral aspect of whether one who lives in a relatively "civilized", safe, and secure environment who looks outside his safe world and sees others who are less fortunate, who live in areas wracked with violence and suffering, and then maybe decides to do something. Now maybe this smacks of some form of manifest destiny, bringing civilization to the savages, or whatnot, and maybe it seems overbearing, like we assume "they" can't resolve their own issues.


In the case of Libya, Libya WAS a relatively "civilized", safe, and secure environment, with universal health care and free education, and relatively progressive gender equality. And the wealthiest country in Africa.


I wouldn't [well I would but let's just say I believed in it] have a problem with Manifest Destiny and White Man's Burden if the West actually improved things. Instead they're either incompetent at improving things via illegal coup and murdering democratically-electing leaders etc., or they're fully competent because democracy and peace are not the goal. Ike and Smedley spoke on this.

Too much non-US success means coup, regime-change, assassination. Qaddafi...Allende...Mossadeq....

I think you're also a moral person but one who might be blinded by nationalism/jingoism, or other propaganda. US agenda since around 1898 is spreading capitalism and US business interests; not democracy. Accept or deny this. You have chosen to deny.

And all the other centrist assholes here. A bamboo forest worthy of a wuxia film. Who don't give much a **** about Libya, Syria, South Sudan, etc. At best ignorant, at worst amoral. Choose one.

Also, I previously slipped in "greatest purveyor of violence in the world" seeing if anyone would recognize it (which sure, some may have and think I'm useless or whatever so no reason to comment) as a Martin Luther King Jr. quote. That was when white liberals stopped supporting him. When he included class (wealth) inequity, and also US warmongering as great offenses, and as an obligation to decry against. And a lot more but sure....Dems and GOPs keep on 1000 bases and military operations in 170 countries....

Edited, Feb 15th 2018 5:17am by Palpitus1
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