If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they're lying.
Evidence or GTFO.
We also have Latinos for Trump
This is a good point. The Democrats also abandoned the idea that immigration was a moral issue or that building the wall was based on racism, and instead tried to run on, "We're the real border hawks" and it won over approximately zero moderate conservatives while alienating Latinos.
the Right Wing Podcast pipeline,
Another good point. Right wing podcasters and streamers are often promoted by the GOP, their politicians will go on their shows, even if they aren't 100% aligned. The good news is, there is one leftist streamer who has a big audience, on a similar level to some of the big rightist streamers, who could have been used to level the playing field at least a bit. The bad news is, because he supports Palestine, the Democrats wanted nothing to do with him, and completely failed to make use of him or even appeal to him.
No he absolutely would not lmao. How are y'all this naive?
That sounds nice, but I'd rather place my hopes on a more realistic solution, such as mole people coming up and saving us.
Do you think that supporting the interests of Western Europe is going to result in the US adopting a Western European style constitution? How do you envision this playing out, exactly?
I don’t know what all Xi hopes to gain by conquering Taiwan,
Might want to figure that out first, before trying to come up with a solution. Because I'd say the number one thing Xi would gain by conquering Taiwan would be, "Not having an island full of missiles pointing at us right off our coast."
When I clicked on this thread I did not anticipate one of the answers being "Taiwan just needs to adopt Juche."
A large part of why the DPRK is the way it is is because it has oriented itself around not getting invaded by a much stronger foe. They made the choice to orient their economy around self-suffiency, so that they could survive a prolonged conflict even if foreign navies completely cut them off from the rest of the world.
In contrast, Taiwan has an export economy, producing highly specialized equipment to be sold all around the world. Taiwan's economy is intimately connected to the rest of the world. Taiwan is a much richer country because of it. But it also makes Taiwan more vulnerable to trade disruptions, for example, if China imposed a blockade.
I don't think that Taiwan has any interest in walking the path of the DPRK. I'm also confused on how bringing a historical reenactment of the Cuban Missile Crisis into a situation that has been stable for decades is supposed to, what, bring peace?
What happened the last time China was balkanized? Let's ask the US government:
"But how could Japan, only 1/20th the size of China, with only 1/6th the population, even think of conquering China, much less the world?"
"Modern China, in spite of its age old history, was like the broken pieces of jigsaw puzzle, each piece controlled by a different ruler, each with his own private army. In modern terms, China was a country, but not yet a nation.”
- Why We Fight: The Battle for China (1944)
But why should US politics be oriented towards helping people who are already wealthy and secure instead of people who are poor and vulnerable, especially when their situation is our fault?
Why Western Europe's interests as opposed to the world's interests? Western Europe is doing relatively fine, it seems to me that I have a greater responsibility to look out for the global poor, especially those who are suffering due to US intervention.
Just maintain the status quo indefinitely. That's what most people in Taiwan want, and the status quo has maintained peace for what, 70 years? It could last another 70 years if we let it.
China’s stance on the issue is that Taiwan should be reunified with the mainland at all costs
Is it? China has maintained it's formal claim of Taiwan for decades but hasn't actually moved on it, even when it's foreign policy was much more extreme and interventionist. I don't see a reason to think they intend to deviate from this policy.
Sure, they do saber-rattling. But this is generally in response to the US increasingly deviating from the policy of strategic ambiguity in recent years (which the news doesn't generally report on as such). China right now is "winning the peace," they are growing in power every year (economically, diplomatically, etc) while the US burns itself out getting involved in every military conflict it can find. They have no reason to jeopardize that by forcing the issue, though how they would respond to deviations from the status quo (like formal recognition) is hard to predict. Trying to call bluffs is often how wars happen.
Is there a reason why Taiwan needs formal recognition? Is there suddenly something wrong with the compromise that has kept the peace for so long? They are functionally independent already. It seems like it's just a matter of pride, just words on a page. Materially, it would make no difference in their lives. Is that worth potentially starting WWIII over?
What I find terrifying is that most USians don't seem to know or care about strategic ambiguity. They are so easily worked up into a war frenzy, and keep trying to act like some kind of superhero who never has to make compromises or accept imperfect solutions, who instantly understands any situation at first glance. Continuing to apply this mentality as the US declines is going to lead to more and more conflicts with reality, and I'm frankly terrified at what my countrymen might decide to do when faced with the collapse of their superhero fantasies.
Libs would rather try to get millions of ordinary people to give up their most fundamental moral principles than ask one powerful person to exhibit basic human decency. They essentially treat politicians like gods, to be followed unconditionally. No form of democracy could ever work with such a submissive populace.
That's if you take what they say at face value, anyway. The reality is a lot of them don't want to pressure politicians about things like the genocide of foreigners because they don't genuinely care. They just have to pretend to for rhetorical reasons to appease leftists. If a politician disagrees with them on something they actually care about, they may suddenly find their misplaced spines. Hard to say how many are like that, as opposed to the ones who are genuinely spineless.
“Iraqi casualty figures are not known, but number at least 30,000..."
Casualty figures again. Those include wounded.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200719070432if_/https://www.ippnw.org/pdf/medact-iraq-2002.pdf
Military deaths included.
Note that the Project for Defense Alternatives report (cited on Wikipedia) claims 20-26k military deaths and 3,664 civilian. It cites these previous estimates and gives a detailed breakdown of where they may have been in error. I'm no expert, so frankly I don't know which numbers are more accurate, and I don't particularly feel like digging through the report to defend an off-hand comment that has already gone on long enough.
I will concede that by some estimates, of some metrics, Obama may have killed fewer people than Bush Sr. The claim of "fewer people than any president in the previous 50 years" is still patently absurd though, as he still killed more than Clinton. And it's still a hell of a long way from "100 to 1."
He's still a war criminal either way.
Unfortunately, the author does not seem to cover where he's getting the numbers for Bush Sr. We do know from his section on Obama's drone strikes (quite interesting btw, you should read it), that he is only counting those killed by the drone strikes themselves, and not counting anything that came from the ground occupation. Meanwhile, his number of 52,000 "direct" deaths from Bush Sr.'s air campaign is unsourced and conflicts with other, more established sources, like the Project for Defense Alternatives numbers.
This is one guy who's an assistant professor at a community college. I'm not going to treat his numbers as absolute when I have no idea where he got them from. If we are going to treat his word as authoritative, you should know that he also claims that Obama murdered three times as many people as George W. Bush. I don't agree with that claim either.
And we’re still have the “During the nationwide uprisings against the Ba’athist Iraqi government that directly followed the end of the Gulf War in March and April, an estimated 25,000 to 100,000 Iraqis were killed, overwhelmingly civilians.[253]”
That’s direct death
We seem to have vastly different understandings of what the word "direct" means. When I (or any reasonable person) talk about direct deaths, I mean people who were, uh, directly killed by US forces. As in, directly by the bullets and bombs they employ. That's the standard you're using for Obama. If the actions of US forces lead to uprisings, and those uprisings resulted in deaths, that is the very definition of what anyone would call "indirect." I mean, how many of the deaths included in those numbers were from government forces suppressing the uprisings? Are you really trying to include people Saddam Hussein killed as "direct" deaths from Bush? This is completely ridiculous.
You're just twisting definitions around because the actual facts don't line up with your narrative. If you want to include indirect deaths, then let's include indirect deaths when it comes to Obama. You have not presented any figure or estimate for that at all, so we have nothing at all to compare the 100k number to.
So there is no difference between Guilani and Mamdani because both have deaths from police action under their leadership? 1 or 100 is the same?
No, that's literally what this entire conversation has been about. The problem is that in the case of Obama vs Bush Sr, it is not "1 to 100," the actual number of deaths is roughly equivalent. It's only "1 to 100" according to your completely baseless, incredibly biased "analysis" where everything Obama does is interpreted in the most generous possible light imaginable.
I swear, the power his cult of personality has over you. You're trying so desperately to justify a double standard, to find some metric that lets you include a type of death in one case and exclude it in the other, because that's the only way to maintain the illusions you have about Obama.
- JumpRemoved
the one where ross says a slur
Yeah, also Indy canonically had sex with a 15 year old when he was 27.
I’m remembering the links from 15years ago when I had this argument with conservatives on Reddit who were pushing the idea that Obama was the worst president ever.
Which is not what I'm saying. I'm only saying that he's the same as the rest. A capitalist warmongerer with a smile who says nice things and acts with decorum, a kinder, gentler machine gun hand.
Also I'd be a little surprised if conservatives actually cared about how many Afghan civilians were killed.
You cannot take a Harvard study about predicted deaths from lack of medical care and then say that reported civilian deaths from war were from indirect.
Yes I can? Predicted deaths from lack of medical care are indirect deaths. That's what indirect means.
If you are going with direct civilian killings from Obama then you use the column labeled “Civilians killed as a result of U.S.-led military actions”
By all means. However the article only breaks down the stats that way through 2011. 596 + 440 + 207 gives us 1,244. If we assume a constant rate, then we can divide that by 3 to get the average per year and multiply by 8 for his whole term. That gives us an estimate of 3,317. As compared to the 2,300-3,364 direct, confirmed deaths from the US during the Gulf War.
And so finally we have one concrete metric we can compare the two on, and the conclusion is that they're roughly the same. Ofc, those numbers are both very low because of the metric we're using:
Note: In UNAMA/AIHRC methodology, whenever it remains uncertain whether a victim is a civilian after they have assessed the facts available to them, UNAMA/AIHRC does not count that victim as a possible civilian casualty. The number of such victims is not provided.
Both wars were wars of aggression, wars of choice, that could have been stopped with the stroke of a pen by the president and only the president, so I hold them each responsible for the total number of excess deaths, civilian or military, direct or indirect, Afghan/Iraqi or US. The total death toll for each is well over 100k.
Come on, now you're not even talking about the right war. We were talking about the Gulf War under Bush Sr, not the Iraq War which started under Bush Jr. (can't wait to hear how this is "another source I won't listen to"). What does the article on the Gulf War say?
The Iraqi government claimed that 2,300 civilians died during the air campaign. A Project on Defense Alternatives study found that 3,664 Iraqi civilians were killed in the conflict.
During the nationwide uprisings against the Ba'athist Iraqi government that directly followed the end of the Gulf War in March and April, an estimated 25,000 to 100,000 Iraqis were killed, overwhelmingly civilians
A Harvard University study released in June 1991 predicted that there would be tens of thousands of additional Iraqi civilian deaths by the end of 1991 due to the "public health catastrophe" caused by the destruction of the country's electrical generating capacity. "Without electricity, hospitals cannot function, perishable medicines spoil, water cannot be purified and raw sewage cannot be processed,". The US government refused to release its own study of the effects of the Iraqi public health crisis.
The number of direct, confirmed civilian casualties by US forces in the air campaign was in the thousands, nowhere near 100k. However, many more civilians died due to the damage to infrastructure or in the uprisings that the bombing campaign encouraged.
In other words, the 100k figure includes indirect deaths. This isn't me twisting numbers around somehow, this is simply what the article says.
I can't tell if you're confused or lying at this point. That 29k figure is direct deaths while the 100k figure includes indirect deaths, from things like losing power or access to medicine.
Again, I don't care if you want to include indirect deaths or not. What I do care about is if you arbitrarily include or exclude them in order to try to prove bullshit.
Back in the day (90's-early 2000's) it was hard to see how the right would ever really appeal to the younger generation (people were less politically engaged in general). There was no "alt-"right, just the traditionalists and Christian fundamentalists screaming about how Dungeons and Dragons is Satanic and shit like that. Those guys were incredibly lame, and very out of line with the sentiment of young people at that time, which was generally a kind of "free speech absolutism," brought on by being the first generation with access to the internet. Shock images/videos were common and being able to handle that sort of thing was a point of pride. Pretenses of respect and decorum were stripped away in favor of the raw and unfiltered.
Gamergate was the moment when this energy really began directing itself against left/liberal/minority figures, and took on a more explicitly political character. Because sometimes those people would critique video games and commit the cardinal sin of caring about things, while also sometimes disparaging things that people liked. Certain women became targets of hate in certain communities, and it wasn't long before rumors started circulating that a female game developer (who was frequent target of hate) got favorable reviews because she was sleeping with the reviewers. Thus the famous line, "It's not about misogyny, it's about ethics in games journalism."
As liberals and leftists were not really on board with all the harassment campaigns and violent threats, and they faced more and more criticism from that direction, and they eventually formed into (or at least formed a key component of) this "alt-right" movement that rejected the pearl-clutching and feigned piety of the traditionalist right, while still hating minorities and progressives and all that.