We could get a lot more benefit if we spent that money on building infrastructure instead of blowing shit up, but I still agree. Doing the right thing and US interests aligning doesn’t seem to happen very often. I think we have to act when they do.
Most Ukraine funding is actually in the form of weapons, most of which have been sitting in warehouses in case of war with Russia. Now they get used before going obsolete and the US’s #1 rival is quickly becoming irrelevant without putting US soldiers at risk. We provide the weapons and Ukraine supplies the soldiers. I think we got the better side of that bargain.
This whole idea that the US is spending money abroad out of some kind of altruism or that we just let other countries take advantage is preposterous. It’s always money spent in furtherance of US interests. We are the wealthiest country in the world in large part because we exploit the labor and resources of the rest of the planet.
Down payment on a bribe.
Some people just want to watch the world burn.
There is a ton of academic interest in the relationship between sexuality and fascism. It was first noted in “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” by Wilhelm Reich after WW2. My comment is, of course, a massive oversimplification of a complex social dynamic.
It’s the same dynamic that made US racists paranoid that black men wanted to rape white women when, in fact, their deeper fear was that white women wanted to have sex with black men. Fascists are particularly sensitive to sexual relations between “their women” and whomever they have chosen to blame for all their misfortunes.
Women live in the same declining capitalistic society as men, yet they are far more resistant to fascism. That’s not to say there is something wrong with men or masculinity. Society puts different pressures on men and women so they react differently.
Did someone ask all men to apologize for something?
How is it insulting? I didn’t say it was you. Fascism is a social phenomenon driven almost entirely by men. That doesn’t mean all men are fascists, or that there is something wrong with masculinity. It’s about certain men in certain situations reacting in what is an entirely predictable way. It is perhaps an insult to fascist men, but I’m comfortable insulting them.
No, it’s not “men’s” fault, but the people who’s fault it is are primarily men. That’s not an opinion, that’s just history, not to mention what’s happening before our eyes. Even women who are fascist push patriarchy. There is no point in debating whether fascism is primarily a male driven phenomenon. The only legitimate question is why?
Fascism is sociologically rooted in the sexual insecurity of men. That’s why it’s always men driving it.
Their interests aren’t generally all that aligned, so that helps. It’s pretty obvious that the garbage coming out of the cable news networks is at a minimum deeply sympathetic to American corporate interests, if not straight up misinformation.
From a US perspective, I see these tactics being used far more extensively by wealthy individuals and corporate interests than I do Chinese interests. Unfortunately, our government and especially our politicians are often directly involved in spreading misinformation and suppressing the truth. We need strategies that function outside of government to close the gaps between reality and public perception.
A few years ago when I was working from home and on the phone all day, I much preferred my landline. My cell service was decent, but the landline was better. No dropped calls, no static or garbled audio (from my side anyways), and no latency causing me to talk over other callers. I always hated getting on calls when I was remote from my home office.
That’s the only reason I’ve ever done much of anything in shell script. As a network administrator I’ve worked many network appliances running on some flavor of Unix and the one language I can count on to be always available is bash. It has been well worth knowing for just that reason.