By that logic, you don’t even need to know my stance on Russia, because the fact that I opposed the war in Afghanistan “proves I’m not anti-imperialist.” The Taliban definitely isn’t socialist either, after all.

I’m saying it’s wild you promote it as AES when it fucking isn’t.

And I’m saying no one considers Russia to be AES, it’s a strawman that libs tell each other about us until they forget they made it up.

If someone says something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.

It’s only baffling if you don’t listen to the actual reasons people believe things and just assume it’s because Russia used to be socialist, regardless of how many people say otherwise.

Liberals will refuse to listen to our explanations of our positions and then call our positions bizarre and indecipherable. Because you get your understanding of our positions from stories you make up and pass around about us that have no basis in reality.

Dresden Codak

The military industrial complex.

Of course, material conditions have nothing to do with what beliefs people arrive at or what movements spring up, no, it’s entirely 1) AI, before it existed, or 2) magic.

I knew about MK ULTRA from that time but hadn’t heard about this one. I know about so much fucked up shit the US has done, but it seems like there’s always more out there.

Maybe the real problem was that there weren’t enough civilian jobs that could make use of the valuable skills they were taught, like, “how to get shoved into the line of fire while the rest of us run away.”

Oh, I absolutely support “attempting beneficial cultural change on the other side of the world.” Go write a book, sing a song, make a movie, you can still do that, right now, nothing’s stopping you!

What I oppose is drone striking weddings halfway across the globe, kicking in doors and screaming at people in a language they don’t speak, classifying every “military aged male” as an enemy combatant even if they’re just a bystander to falsify your casualty reports, abducting innocent people indefinitely to secret torture dungeons without charge or trial, and that sort of thing. You know, things like, “forced rectal feeding without medical necessity.”

Like, have you looked into what the war actually, physically looked like for people? “Attempting beneficial cultural change,” what the hell are you talking about? Even if it wasn’t an extreme whitewashing of the situation, you don’t impose “beneficial” cultural change as an occupying force, at gunpoint! The only thing we did was make them hate us more.

By the way, do you know how we finally got bin Laden? It was by using a fake vaccination campaign to collect blood samples in Pakistan. You wanna talk about humanitarianism, do you have any idea how many people could die, how many preventable diseases we could fail to eradicate, if people in developing countries mistrust vaccination drives because the CIA uses them as cover? But you know, at least our lust for revenge was satisfied. (Speaking of, the US also promoted anti-vax conspiracy theories in the Philippines, during COVID, to keep them from relying on Chinese vaccines.)

Yes, but also, the Catholic Church is and always has been a conservative institution, and doesn’t really need infiltration to be so. Anecdotally, my family has been Catholic for hundreds of years, literally the reason some of them came to America was because of Otto von Bismarck’s opposition to Catholicism, and they are diehard Republicans.

But pulling out at that point caused the deaths of western allies and handed victory to the Taliban, causing millions to suffer eg. women can’t get jobs and single-mother families starve to death… and it was entirely foreseeable.

That’s a completely ridiculous and absurd position. They did not “hand victory to the Taliban,” the Taliban won victory over 20 years of fighting and the withdrawal merely acknowledged that fact, a fact which Americans seem to have deluded themselves into thinking was anything but inevitable, and they really didn’t like their delusions being shattered. The embargo, not the withdrawal, is what’s caused most of the suffering. As the band Flobots said in 2007, “We already lost the wars they keep waging.” Somehow, in spite of over another decade of accomplishing absolutely nothing, people seem, if anything, more willing to keep fighting the pointless, hopeless battle.

What is the alternative to the withdrawal? Please, provide an answer to that question. Do you think if we stayed there another 20 years, then we could leave and our puppet regime wouldn’t instantly collapse? Or should we have just stayed there inevitably, even sending our grandchildren to go fight in that stupid pointless war?

The only thing that you said that’s correct is that on day 1 of the war, we should not have gone in. But on day 2, we also should’ve left. On day 3 we should have left. On day 300 we should’ve left. On day, what was it even, 7000? On day 7000, we absolutely, 10000% should’ve left. What possible reason could you use to justify delaying it further? What could we do in another 300 days that we couldn’t do in 7000? At that point, you’re just arguing for making it a permanent war of conquest.

Your problem, and the problem of everyone who thinks like you, is that you’re incapable of facing reality and accepting that sometimes good decisions are painful. When an alcoholic decides to go clean, what do you think that first day is like? Is it pleasant? Of course not. They may be irritable, they may have to have awkward conversations or confrontations with their drinking buddies, they may even lose friendships over it! But it’s still the right decision, the important thing is that they stopped. This is the same way. Yes, the immediate effects of pulling out may have been unpleasant, but you have to be very short-sighted to not recognize it as an obviously correct and necessary decision. Y’all just see the unpleasantness and say, “Everything’s been shitty since I decided to quit, I should just have another drink.”

Even the government we propped up told us to leave! How can you possibly justify continuing the occupation? And how can I possibly view you as anything but a warmongering imperialist for taking that stance? You’re talking about murdering people! Do you even realize that?

I remember growing up in the 90’s and it being fairly common to think that there were no real enemies out in the world, that all the conflicts were over. “The end of history,” gets mocked a lot, but the idea of putting conflict behind us and working together towards a common cause of advancing together is something I really miss.

But if that period of relative peace had continued, then people would’ve started asking questions about why we’re still dumping more money into our military than the next 9 countries combined when the USSR no longer exists (to quote Terminator 2, “They’re our friends now”) and China such a big trading partner that nobody would dream of rocking the boat. And if people started asking those questions, it’d be real bad news for the war profiteers who make bank off that spending. And so it all went out the window, starting with the “war on terror,” and now the government’s trying to make us see everybody as a threat.

And so we can’t have nice things, like healthcare, we all have to tighten our belts so that we can make more tanks. I remember when that was seen as right-wing.

This is something that always struck me as strange, coming from a conservative Catholic family, is how people in my family don’t recognize that they’ve been in the crosshairs before and very well could be again. But I suppose that’s all fairly distant to them, and they don’t connect that to other targets of conservative hate. Especially since the right took on anti-abortion views and made it mainstream instead of a fringe issue that only Catholics cared about because of some bullshit Agustine wrote.

Isolationism. I completely reject the idea that my country’s (the US) military interventionism is in any way driven by benevolence, or makes life better either for Americans (outside of war profiteers) or for the people of the country we’re fucking with.

This is really controversial on here, for some reason. The fact that I want to leave other countries alone and focus on investing in schools and hospitals and public transit instead of bombs and tanks (I don’t even really care if it’s being spent domestically or abroad, so long as it’s being spent on good things instead of bad things) causes a bunch of people to call me a “tankie” and say that I’m just as bad as a fascist. All because I say shit like, that I don’t want to start shit with North Korea. I don’t even give a shit about North Korea. Like, I just watched how Afghanistan played out and went, “You know, we probably shouldn’t do shit like that again,” and supposedly left-leaning people really, really hate me for it. It’s genuinely bizarre. I even got attacked once for defending Biden pulling out of Afghanistan! People just love sticking our nose in other countries’ business, for reasons I can’t even begin to understand.

Bastion of freedom and prosperity? The US?

They did enslave indigenous people, they just found it harder to do. They knew the land, and if they escaped they’d just have to make it back to their own communities.

The very first ship that returned to Europe from America had native slaves.

The tortoise was Hamas.

Yes, because that’s exclusively what soldiers do when on deployments. They literally only shoot children.

I literally just acknowledged that they do things other than shoot children. The problem is, “I don’t just murder children, I also do other stuff” is not any kind of defense whatsoever.

EOT on my end. You’re just shouting naive platitudes from an imagined moral high ground, when in reality you’re just ignorant. No point continuing this thread.

And you’re just blindly licking the boots of your oppressors.

I never said anything even remotely similar to “the military is inherently moral”. Is moral of you to put words in others’ mouths?

Calling any form of military “unethical” is the absolute peak level of clueless wishful thinking.

Right, you only said it was “idiotic” to claim that any military was anything but moral, my mistake, that’s extremely different from saying that the military is inherently moral.

Military in normal countries is used in times of peace to help fighting natural disasters, like floods. I don’t see that as immoral. Do you?

Spend a month helping out with natural disasters, but then you go and murder one bunch of kids and everybody just remembers you as a child-murderer 😔