The advantage being that then you don't need to think seriously about it? — Olivier5

Call it inductive reasoning. And your questions are good - but don't ever expect to get them answered.

I haven't seen any evidence of that, — Olivier5

True. Should have prefaced that with the fact that I take it as axiomatic that anything the liberals do is as either backscratching for their mates or angling for votes.

????

The government, sure. But what about the voters, — Manuel

So far the voters have proven themselves cowards, although they are largely kept in their cowardice by a massive propaganda apparatus which works in direct cahoots with the shameless government. Australians are by and large hostage to their own comforts - particularly houses - even as the conditions which maintain them are being eaten through every passing minute. I think anyone who cares about our international representation does feel embarassed, but I don't know how many people that is.

It's not even like the French deal was any good to begin with. In fact it was very likely the fruit of pure corruption, with a lobbying firm of ex-government operatives having pushed through the deal in the first place:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-11/scott-morrisons-friend-hired-by-french-during-submarine-talks/10797920

The lastest drama is just another episode in an already long-standing history of the government out to convenience, and frankly, pay their friends with taxpayer money as and when it suits them. It's a debacle from A-Z. It certainly has nothing to do with the needs or wants of the Australian people.

Endless vitriolic criticism is negation — tim wood

In a world full of positive bullshit - people like yourself, say, who, in the face of an actual quotation from an actual book, continue to perpetuate myths about American history fabricated from thin air - negation is both necessary and frankly, an activity of joy.

America, for example, entered WWI not for reasons adduced 100 years after the fact, but for reasons in force at the time that compelled/impelled the entry. — tim wood

"I don't need no stinkin' history book. I'm just going to regurgitate the propaganda they told me despite having cited nothing and having pulled this entirely out of my ass". You and Trump supporters are indistinguishable.

It is not clear that our government is capable of embarrasment.

Oh. You would prefer some wishy-washy "both-sides" approach that is unprincipled and compromised and which you can get literally anywhere else. Yeah, nah. Gonna stick to the ruthless criticism of all that exists thanks. And the ruthless criticism of power - like the murderous US Empire - more than anything.

Also no, US war-mongering is never justified. Ever. Not once. It always ends up for the worse. Anyone who knows anything about anything knows this. When your country is run by weapons manufacturers - which it is - you have no standing to even think about justifying American interventions overseas. Ever.

I don't think your problem is I'm not constructive. You initially responded to me posting a two paragraph excerpt from a book that explained US motivations for going to war (not constructive??), with a series of whataboutisms. As far as I can see, a chunk of history - especially one that dispels common self-aggrandizing myths about the US - is positive in the extreme. I think you just don't like having those comfortable myths challenged. I think by 'constructive criticism' you mean: 'criticism that is agreeable with the things I think I already know and positions I already have, and does not make me feel uncomfortable'.

If you need to paint me as a DNC apologist, again that’s your own business. — Xtrix

We know democrats are bought by corporate interests, and not on our side — indeed — Xtrix

‎

If only I could sit as comfortably doing nothing as you — Xtrix

Nothing, of course, is exactly what you have been doing. Much to the delight of the democrats.

Because I'm a democratic operative/apologist who's perpetuating harm and giving cover to the party. — Xtrix

Eyyy. Took a while but we got there. Proud of you :blush:

Then I could sit on my ass doing nothing as well. — Xtrix

It would be better, for you and others like you, in particular, to do nothing. Then the democratic party would not be provided with the cover of legitimacy that you so lovingly supply as they deliberately wreck things. The conditions for perpetual decay would be eased. Your doing nothing would be a net positive in the world.

I realize you literally cannot comprehend this point, but it's worth a try.

Yes, I realize that your temporal scale runs to about the length of 'a moment' and no more. Meanwhile, one looks forward to another 70 years of failure I suppose. Like the ones you repeatedly cite so proudly.

The first step is to stop perpetuating harm by buying into these spoon-fed narratives — StreetlightX

Can't wait till this thread gets back on track with liberals being mad at Manchin and Sinema.

I'm sorry about your comprehension skills. Must be an American education thing.

Your posturing is fantastic, though. We're all very impressed. — Xtrix

Almost as good as democratic posturing. I couldn't possibly hope to match.

Yeah I didn't think you had anything substantial to say either.

Oh you're still going on about the failed policy that did not pass as some kind of defense of the democrats? What was it last time? "We'll pull them to the left?". Now its: "this failed policy was great on paper". In a few months it will be: "aw, if only the democrats were not wiped out at the mid-terms" After that: "oh boy, how horrible is this Trump fellow, we better vote blue no matter who". You're an excuse machine - with hand-fed Democratic Party Excuses™ - with only failure to cite.

Stephen Fry on the American "infection" - his words - of the British NHS; "a new pandemic":

Lol, you've spent this entire thread apologizing and cheerleading for the democrats and now wonder - a fake wonder, performative and deliberately forgetful - why your equally fake 'obvious' acknowledgements about the corruption of the democratic party seem to be such a big deal. Push comes to shove you will flag wave for your precious party while fake acknowledging its shortcomings as the work of - what was it you said? - a couple of "moderates". Fraud.

No leftist supports the Democratic party.

"Nine times out of ten quotes are made up and attributed to people who didn't say them" - Harry Potter

You can not know in knowing's sense of not being aware, forget about it while doing something else. — StreetlightX

'Forgetting a headache' sounds an awful lot like not having a headache. How do you forget a headache? Is it the same as forgetting where I put the cup yesterday? I can imagine: "my headache was alot less intense just now", or the use of "I forgot I have a headache" to approximate the former. The grammar of 'forgetting' is not quite right.

Questioning why it seems you're not aware you have a headache (your example basically). — Antony Nickles

That is not my example. There is no one that would question 'why it seems you're not aware you have a headache' - as if they knew better than you. At best, they might say, 'Don't you have a headache? Why are you exerting yourself like that?", or something similar.

--

Cavell: "There is nothing we cannot say. That doesn't mean that we can say everything; there is no "everything" to be said. There is nothing we cannot know. That does not mean we can know everything; there is no everything, no totality of facts or things, to be known. ... If we say the philosopher has been "misled by grammar'', we must not suppose that this means he has been led to say the wrong thing - as though there was a right thing all prepared for him which he missed".

What’s the alternative I’m missing in terms of action? — Xtrix

What kind of question is this in response to what I wrote? "Yes, fine, I am enabling and making things worse by actively perpetuating harm, but what else would you have me do???". It's not a serious question. Your sincerity is fake. As for not buying into the narrative, of course you do. You - and you're not alone of course, you're a statistic - peddle the idea that the chief impediment to progress is not the democratic party as such, but just a couple of rogue elements here and there which can be brought to heel with some activism here and there. Never mind that Biden broke practically every promise he made going into the election bar pulling out of Afghanistan - they still got this. Again, this stuff is not 'failure', 'unfortunate' fifty-offs. It is deliberate.

People speak of Biden being "forced to water-down" this or that bill. Please. He does it with joy.

It’s failed, and that’s disappointing. — Xtrix

It's disappointing to those who had any expectation it would be allowed to pass by the democrats at all. I keep telling you, and you keep displacing the issue. This very vocabulary is the problem. The democratic party is a hostile agent, and until you treat them as such, you are an apologist. The choice is not - despite your disingenuous and self-serving characterization - of 'doing something' vs. 'not doing something'. It is between enabling harm and disabling it.

And what exactly was the rhetorical strategy here? "I know the democratic party has been completely bought out and fails at every progressive measure it tries to enact, but as countervailing evidence, consider this bill that failed on account of the democratic party having been bought out and never getting anything done". Well gee, guess you got me dead to rights.

70 years of rightward drift of which democrats have been exemplary lubricants and people have the gall to think it is 'adolescent' to call out this utter bullshit for what it is and to ask that people stop lapping up the orchestrated cycles. If I'm 'cynical' then people like you are Sisyphean nihilists. The democratic party is the Auschwitz of American political hope. It is where hope is sent to be liquidated under the guise of making a better world. My problem isn't that 'I don't have hope'. The problem is that I think more highly of hope than the hopeless vulgarization of tying its significance to an apparatus full of corporate hacks. Anyone who tells anyone else that unless they believe in the democratic party, they 'lack hope', can walk into the ocean and never come back out of sheer embarrassment.

Don't you dare lecture me about hope and cynicism when your version of watered-down, mud-brown hope is putting trust in a proven apparatus of decade-long failure that is nothing more than a group of plutocratic arse-kissers and yes-men. Go gaslight someone else with democratic piss passed off as poor-quality chardonnay that you get mad that people don't want to drink.

My ragging on the States is exactly proportional to the harm and misery it has caused in the world. Except it isn't because literally nothing could be proportional with it.

There’s nothing to be “duped” about. I’m talking about a specific program which he fought against, for obvious reasons. There are other interests in play. Sinema, for example, has fought against negotiating drug prices, for obvious reasons. — Xtrix

And if it wasn't Sinema, and it wasn't Manchin, it would be someone else. And they too would have some nicely distinguishing feature that just so happens out of pure and absolute coincidence to block exactly what was on the table at exactly that point in time. It will be such a mystery how this keeps happening! Foiled again! Next time, he will be better, the battered woman says.

So your hope is a reality. If you refuse to see it, that’s your business. Now what? Stay home? Tear it all down? Give us your plan. — Xtrix

The first step is to stop perpetuating harm by buying into these spoon-fed narratives. This is, as liberals like to endlessly yarn about, harm minimization. It is an active harm to continue to act as if the democrats are not against any sense of progress by matter of design. It provides cover and provides a guarantee that they will continue to be a wholly corporate owned party that occasionally will rename a street in honor of BLM. The narrative you buy into and feed - which the democrats in turn have fed you themselves - is itself a harm. What you 'push for,' actively makes things worse, by enabling worse conditions. It is not, despite the fantasies dipped down to you from above, some kind of rear-guard, protective action.

You, and people like you, are enablers. Drug dealers of toxic, unrealizeable hope. Wittingly or not.

The first world war was the first hint that the British could not get their own way in the world anymore, they needed the Americans. — boagie

The United States finally entered the war [WWI] neither because of German bombing of commercial ships nor out of any ‘idealist’ desire to ‘make the world safe for democracy’, but because the allies could no longer keep up their purchases from US firms. Guaranteeing their borrowing was now beyond even the great J. P. Morgan’s means. The US ambassador in London, reporting on the international situation, found it ‘most alarming to the financial and industrial outlook of the United States’. British and French inability to keep up orders would surely mean ‘a panic in the United States’, and he concluded that it was not ‘improbable that the only way of maintaining our present preeminent trade position and averting a panic is by declaring war on Germany’ (quoted in Lens, 2003: 260).

Only by entering the war could the US government guarantee the $3.5 billion the allies owed to US bankers and businesses,and authorize a further $3 billion in loans for continued allied purchases from the United States. So with war and what amounted to a government export credit to the belligerents, US manufacturing went from 35.8 per cent of the world total in 1913, compared with Germany’s 14.3 per cent and the United Kingdom’s 14.1 per cent, to 42.2 per cent in 1926–29, while the war reduced Germany’s and the United Kingdom’s shares to 11.6 per cent and 9.4 per cent respectively (League of Nations, 1945: 13).

-Radhika Desai, Geopolitical Economy.

The Americans needed the British - and the rest of Europe - to keep buying their stuff.

Do you believe it a coincidence that the person fighting the hardest against it happens to be the biggest recipient of fossil fuel contributions? — Xtrix

No - in fact, it makes Manchin all the better for dupes to train their hate at. And him all the more happy to receive the utterly ineffectual hate, for which he will probably be paid even more. And the democrats the happiest of all, getting to play a oh-woe-is-me card as if they are victims rather than accomplices. Everyone - but people not paid by corporate money - wins.

In the mean time, I'll choose to keep doing as much as I can... — Xtrix

....to perpetuate the hand-fed narrative designed to keep you invested in a malicious organization?

As for this psychological twaddle about hope and cynicism: I have hope because I believe not utterly everyone will buy into democrat bullshit. I am utterly brimming with hope that people are not so utterly, incredibly, indelibly moronic that they actually think the problem is people like Manchin and Sinema rather than the entire democratic party apparatus, rotten from Joe Biden to AOC. The only cynics are those who look at the existing state of affairs and think: there can be no other possible way. People who believe in the fabricated drama of democratic party facades so as to better perpetuate its complete capture by corporate interests do not have a monopoly on hope. In fact they toxify it.

But they are willing to vote for the bill, and have stated so publicly — Xtrix

Of course they are. What matters is the result. They will vote for the bill and have stated so publically because the likes of Manchin will not. And then people like you, fed your little dose of psuedo-hope, like the morphine addicted rat pulling at the lever, continue beliving that the democratic party is being compromised by exogenous forces, rather than coordinating to get the best possible results for their corporate sponsors at every point.

At what point, after decade long "failures", does it begin to seem to someone that maybe none of these are failures at all? What state of wretchedness does one have to be in to stop perpetuating their own being held hostage? It's like an abusive relationship: "he'll do better next time I swear!". Girl, he won't.

The alterntive to murdering ten of millions of people worldwide is not murdering tens of millions of people worldwide. — StreetlightX

Cite? No? Didn't think so. — James Riley

Reposted without comment.

:snicker:

The alterntive to murdering ten of millions of people worldwide is not murdering tens of millions of people worldwide. One of these things I personally have done, unlike the US. You'll never guess which.

Good rant tho. Somewhere, in the background, a tiny patriotic trumpet is playing.

Quite an impressive, and saddening, list. Not looking for a debate, but I’m just curious how many items on your list you personally disagree with, or feel that the world would have been better off without the US intervening? Half? 75%? — Pinprick

I looked through and to be honest it's hard to find an item I do think would pass that test. Maybe maybe maybe the Kosovo intervention, but I'd have to read more into it to say for sure. One of the more depressing books to read is William Blum's Killing Hope. It details most of these interventions and the price paid - in pretty much all cases, the outcome is awful. And, contrary to the USs rah rah about freedom and democracy, many of the interventions were engaged in precisely to kill off exactly that.

--

Edit: as for the fine distinction between 'the people' and 'the powers that be' that some people are drawing - imagine telling the family of some exploded person that. "Oh the American people didn't really want to see your son in pieces, it's just the powers that be, America is really good I promise". One look at America's disgusting veneration of military culture in everyday life will tell you all you need to know about what 'the general population' feel. Hell just look at the movies it produces.

And we'd have to listen to a metric shit-ton of wailing and whining and crying about "socialism" and "communism" from a bunch of anti-intellectual, uneducated, conservative Republican stupid fucks who wouldn't know socialism, communism, or representative democracy if it hit them over their pointed little heads. — James Riley

American Empire is a bipartisan project, pursued with clarity and intent. The rest of your post is bloviating apologia.

Anything good to say about anything? — tim wood

And this utterly irrelevant question addresses my initial post how?

The US is a colony.

It just so happened to have genocided 5 million or so of its local occupants before settling on their land and letting them rot.

I dunno, so far you replied to my post with a bunch of utter irrelevancies. "You're a negative nancy". What is this, a kindergarten?

Is how you present it reasonable? That manifestly is not. — tim wood

So, still can't be bothered to spell it out? No wonder you want to curtail speech. You simply can't be bothered to use it so there's nothing for you to lose anyway.

Cool. Must be nice to ignore the larger point so you can wangle with irrelevancies that you can't even be bothered to spell out.

But trust you to side with the billion dollar oil company that dumped toxic waste in Ecuador that killed hundreds of people. Classic liberal.

A positive statement about the way you think things should be — tim wood

All those who call for the curtailing of free speech without addressing the media ownership and power disparities in media production should be put into a barrel and shot into the sun.

And yes, literally by Chevron:

"When a NY Court decided to pass on prosecuting him for that, Judge Lewis Kaplan used a legal loophole to turn over prosecution of the case to Chevron ... Today, the Chevron-supported judge, aided by the Chevron-supported prosecution, sentenced Donziger to the maximum time of six months in federal prison".

Because now private companies have sovereign power to adjudicate law - and in other jurisdictions, ignore it entirely - and apparently some morons think this is a perfect time to call for the curtailing of speech.