Well that’s how a few hundred military bases can change perception lmao.
It’s like the old saying, ”If USA saw what A was doing to B they would invade C to ’protect D from E.’”
Just yesterday Trump admitted it was for the oil. Which also has the benefit of distracting from the Epstein files.
The Epstein Files are a distraction from the ongoing genocide in Gaza
The ongoing genocide in Gaza is a distraction from the planet getting hotter
The planet getting hotter is a distraction from the oppression of the non-billionaires.
There is no war but class war.
you wake up in the Squid Games universe
every day
There is no war in Ba Sing Se.
Its all a d8straction from the rest, they have literally outlined this strategy in public. Fuck the issues, we all know what needs to be done.
it’s oil and rare earth… but also the pretext if maduro being a dictator is true.
sorry i didnt know i was being too mean. ill remove the comment.
You are the reason people think leftist politicians cannot win. Young people learning the truth and coming to the correct side and people like you telling them they’re the problem and to fuck off.
Nah, another approach is better because it makes you feel superior. That’s what the most important thing!
Yeah, you’re right, but also, the commenter above isn’t just being mean for the sake of it, there is a real issue at the heart of it.
The issue is that having 1 person come around to your side implies the millions that don’t and won’t.
Some of those people simply don’t share any underlying morals in common so that’s fine, you’ll never see eye to eye in ideas because your goals are ultimately different.
Some of those people also just don’t care and/or don’t know.
Some people will never care, and that’s fine too, but some of those people will care if they do know.
Spreading information to those people is tough when you don’t have backing of the govcorp media ecosystem and it doesn’t help when the ideas you want to get across are sophisticated, boring and fairly nuanced and require lots of context.
It also doesn’t help that this would-be progressive in their ignorance could be damaging to the cause when misinformed, which means that sometimes you have to argue against this person and potentially turn them off the movement forever, because you never really know whether it’s possible to sway someone until you do.
That’s what makes ignorance trolling or JAQing so effective because progressives will either have to waste time explaining openly to someone who will never agree and only feigns ignorance, or risk being potentially a confrontational asshole with a genuinely ignorant person.
It also doesn’t help morale of said progressive when confronted with all that, that many of us simply learned about this information on our own, we never asked anybody of anything, we just explored enough perspectives on issues we cared about until our bullshit-o-meters were finely tuned enough to find truth and construct a path from reality now to future we’d like.
On the other hand, convincing some people who are actually sway-able to not want the world to function like a war crime can be like pulling teeth, people are zealous defenders of their opinions because it reflects badly on their self-esteem if they are misinformed and someone else isn’t, especially in the Information Age.
I speak from a progressive viewpoint but it’s just as true for any real ideological position, information is the fuel that turns simple moral beliefs into functional ideology.
For as long as we live in a democracy, we need to somehow solve the systemic issue of ignorance at scale without inventing a ministry of truth type situation and being able to effectively counter trolling and JAQing/sealioning while also treating those asking questions with the utmost care and having the emotional stamina to do that when many of us had nothing of the sort.
It’s a tough position, even describing it or explaining it is tough enough already when fewer and fewer people even seem to even just read at all.
Then there is often just confusion over what someone open to information actually wants, e.g. the Adam Something guide to dating video he made where he said that teenage and adolescent men want instructions and not philosophical musings on the concept of dating and purpose and approach came as a genuine shock to me, because from my, non-male perspective I can’t imagine anyone needing instructions or explanations of that sort of thing.
Literally only USA ever thought USA was the good guys
The USA has funneled tens of billions of dollars into international propaganda, to the point that Albanians erected a statue praising George W. Bush for an intervention he campaigned against four years earlier.
The UK is embarrassingly pro-American, to the point of doing mass arrests of their own citizens for denouncing the Gaza Genocide. Germany is embarrassingly pro-American, with the leading parties effectively operating as proxies for the Biden and Trump administrations. The Italians endlessly pander to Americans for business investment. The Hungarians are barely more than an extension of The Heritage Foundation think tank. Alberta, Canada is fully MAGA pilled, with Ottawa close behind. Argentina is saturated in American fanaticism. Chile just flipped to a pro Trump president. The Philippines and Japan are both climbing onto the bandwagon with India and Saudi Arabia.
It’s bad out there, boys.
Ehhhh, we had a perception as the big damn heroes after tipping the scales in WW2 and then with the founding of the UN, being the only member state that wasn’t devastated by WW2, positioning us as the de facto enforcer. There was some very limited good work done in that context that got good press in Europe. But we were also overthrowing democratic south American nations nonstop during that time… And everything since…
There have been times that others thought we were the good guys, but they were probably just wrong.
Somehow nobody remembers that the nazis literally copied their plan from USA.
Don’t forget Karl May!
Yeah… All those deaths at the loss of USAID are evidence that the programs weren’t doing anything in the first place.
Wouldn’t it be evidence of literally the opposite? USAID shuts down, people die because of it. Therefore, USAID programs were working.
I was reading that one as sarcastic, despite lack of /s And USAID is a decent counterpoint. The US HAS done good things! We’ve also done a HUGE amount of horrible ones and atrocities. Also we’ve got a habit of ALMOST eradicating some of the worst diseases of all time from the face of the planet and then going “ehhhh, it’s the third world’s problem now” so they can come back some years later despite having done 95% of the work.
In the same way that billionaires can do good things, the US can do good things and still be bad. We are absolutely capable of being good. This is a choice.
And the CIA had a hand in the Opium trade in Afghanistan while we were there.
The US is comically evil abroad, and getting worse domestically every day.
Fascism is imperialism turned inward. The US fears losing its grip on power so it’s begun to cannibalize itself in a desperate bid to restore its dominance.
US is comically evil everywhere the light touches
I’ll pick “Escuelita de las Americas curricula by 150 Alex”
Nobody pushes drugs.
Americans gobble up drugs like Hungry Hippos and the cartels are just violent psychopaths that want to be the distributors.
the cartels are just violent psychopaths that want to be the distributors.
You talking about the CIA/DEA cartel?
Lmao, you do realize that drugs are a global thing, right?
They are.
If you look up who consumes the most drugs I think you’ll find some really fun facts. Not only do more people in the US consume drugs but the quantity is also noticeably higher than anyone else.
The pusher theory is bs. Nobody is out there handing out free drugs to get people hooked.
well…not free, but big pharma has been caught many times bribing doctors to over-perscribe addictive medications to their patients
Big pharma is the pusher that cartels are accused of being.
If the US was just neighbors with Canada I guarantee you illegal drugs would be much harder to come by in the US. Most other developed nations have the luxury of being neighbors only with other developed nations (or being islands)
Anything to avoid accepting responsibility for ourselves, we have to blame “less developed” nations for our own failure to treat addiction at scale. Did you know the opiate crisis was created by the pharmaceutical industry for profit? Or that the CIA is known to have been (and let’s be honest, likely still is) involved in international drug trafficking, including financing the Nicaraguan Contras’ cocaine trafficking into the US, primarily in poor black communities?
Our for-profit healthcare system, the criminalization of drug addiction, and deliberate support of drug trafficking by our own government to achieve political aims both foreign and domestic created our drug problem. We have only ourselves to blame.
You sure about that?
Besides the problematic developed vs undeveloped labelling, most rich countries exploit cheap labor and production I. The closest or most convenient “poorer” nation.
Europe has used the Balkans and eastern countries that was since the iron curtain came down (and before that really). Russia too.
France and England used Africa similarly.
The US and China both got rich doing it internally, but then moved on to cheaper labor or new resources when domestic sources were used up.
I didn’t realize how large the Balkan drug trade was, thank you for that information. It seems the proliferation of illegal drugs is a problem of similar scope in Europe as the U.S.
lol
Americans are addicted to everything. Weed, coke, crack, fentanyl, alcohol, pain killers. If only they were addicted to not blaming everyone else for their fuck ups. Obviously, they are not mature adults.
Afghanistan
Nothing to do with Al Qaeda
Maybe /pol/ isn’t the best source for deep thoughts.
Yeah that’s like, a very basic fact to mess up so badly. Noone seriously disputes that Al-Qaeda did 9/11 (not just “in partnership with” as though they were along for the ride) and the country the US invaded that had nothing to do with 9/11 was Iraq, not Afghanistan.
Americans have a collective memory that lasts more than 3 years challenge (impossible difficulty)
Yeah, like how people in Mexico do illegal things so USA should bomb the fuck out of Mexico, right? jfc.
The imperial mindset is strong here.
Nobody is talking bombings, mate, just arguing what “nothing to do” means.
This ain’t about (the scale of) military interventions, but about rhetorics and semantics.
If you wanna be morally superior, at least get your facts right.
They are becoming self-aware 😮
Not that the 20 year occupation of Afghanistan wasn’t an absolute clusterfuck, but the Taliban were harbouring Al-Qaida leadership. To say otherwise is just denying historical facts.
Oh, hey, yes, you’re right, there’s that too: the US also invented the concept of the “war on terror”, which has now been adopted by Israel, for example, to justify the genocide of the Palestinians. It’s really handy when you can just “excuse” the cold-blooded murder of thousands upon thousands of civilians with the argument that they are all supposedly terrorists. All you have to do is say, hey, they’re harboring terrorists, so let’s kill them all, including the women and children - the more we kill, the better, because once they grow up, they’ll all be terrorists.
israelis were killing palestinians long before the war of terror though
That’s true, but now with the same argument that the US has legitimized, on an unprecedented scale. Not that this is any kind of justification, but once again it is the US that is making it possible - by preventing UN sanctions against this criminal state.
The precedence in Netanyahu trying to stay in power.
All the pro-peace israelis get killed by far-right extremists.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here? That we should deny inconvenient facts because they don’t fit simple black-and-white narratives? The War on Terror spawning countless atrocities against civilians doesn’t retroactively justify 9/11 or sheltering those responsible for it.
Do you think the War on Terror is the first time that the US spawned countless atrocities against civilians?
The glaring inconsistency lies in the fact that terrorists are not states against which one can wage war. This means that there are no regular armies fighting each other, but only one (usually vastly superior) army that arbitrarily decides which targets to attack and who to kill, which is not warfare, but the killing of arbitrary targets with arbitrary justification. This fundamentally flawed thinking was normalized during the occupation of Afghanistan under this pretext. It means nothing more than the right of the stronger party to do whatever it wants because it is supposedly fighting evil, which does not wear uniforms but hides among the civilian population, who are thus always under general suspicion of also being terrorists.
You say it’s okay when the US does it, but when anyone else does it, it’s an atrocity? You also say that the extreme disproportion between the victims of such an asymmetrical conflict would be acceptable. You do realize that Russia is justifying its invasion of Ukraine in the same way, right? And you really don’t see how absurd that is?
The only thing that could possibly top that is claiming that a country has weapons of mass destruction in order to destroy it, even though that country has no weapons of mass destruction at all - remember that US invasion? What I’m getting at is this: finding reasons for war that obscure the true intentions and coming up with justifications for extremely brutal actions is a specialty of the US. Another current example: the cold blooded murder of Venezuelan citizens in violation of international law – this time not on the grounds that they were allegedly terrorists, but on the grounds that they were allegedly drug dealers.
You say it’s okay when the US does it
Uh, no. I’m not. Learn to read.
You’re speaking to someone that likely thinks 9/11 was justified.
There is no speaking nuance to someone like this, very similarly to your average MAGAt.
Leftist try not to defend atrocities committed against America and its allies challenge (very difficult)
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And yet you sat there and accused the OC of saying that the killing of ‘terrorists’ was justified and 9/11 was not. You either believe awful shit or you need to take more time to articulate yourself beyond just emotionally vomiting on the keyboard.
ignoring context and facts is a big part of the over simplified ‘usa is evil’ narrative that many here are hopelessly wedding to.
the concept that international politics is about power… and not morality is really beyond most of the moralizing lemmites who seem to think somehow if they were in charge everything would be peace and harmony. or china and russia aren’t also imperialistic powers.
there is a real niave and ignorant takes on international relations from the leftits who seem to think in the usa would just stop being itself than the world would magically be wonderful.
If we really cared about drugs we would have drone struck the sackler family.
If you smoke it you’re an addict, if you take it in a pill you’re an upstanding citizen.
If you smoke it, your dealer is a scumbag criminal. If you take it in a pill, your dealer is privileged beyond all imagination.
I must have missed all the pro-XTC/MDMA propaganda.
RIP KingCobraJFS
Fuck sickos, RIP Cobes
twu
I miss him. Gonna pour one out for him rn 🫗
indeed, chairbugs be drinking good tonight. check this out for a classic Cobra vocal cover: https://youtu.be/hGZqob-j8-A
I was listening to his christmas album today lol
hahah, me too. it’s so awful, I love it
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