whydoibother

Two regs, less than 30 min old, both trying to launder the bullshit Kissinger did. Odd.

> hese are the hard decisions one grapples with as Secretary of State.

SoS of an imperialist country. During a time of America's greatest atrocities. And during a time where no one could challenge US hegemony. There is no statecraft to be learned here. There is nothing to learn from him other than what a piece of shit he is.

Hate to break it to you, but that wouldn’t lead to communism. The people it replaces are useless to the ruling class. At best we’d go back to feudalism, at worst we’d be deemed worthless and a drain on the planet.

The grid actually produced something useful though.

Most people are barely aware of crypto, let alone the negative effects of it. Once people become more informed, hopefully more and more people will see what a plague on society it is.

And thinkers are automata with no empathy or compassion. Stop denigrating people for processing reality differently than you.

It is easy to talk about this over 100 years. But that also conveniently lets us ignore that the US was founded on the backs of chattel slavery. Turns out lots of forms of governments can hurt people. But at least the communists/socialists raised all ships, whereas the racist policies of our 'democratic' government only raised a few.

> They graciously agreed to return them for China

Sorry, but you can't 'graciously' return a colony. It was something they never should have had.

I wasn't singling a specific party out here. Merely pointing out that the ruling class is largely (neo)liberal.

Also, I hate to break it to you, but even if GOP opposition to social programs disappeared overnight, I would wager money that we still wouldn't get basic social necessities like UHC or UBI or housing rights. Liberal ideology is just as good at letting the poor die and starve as are the conservatives. The dog and pony show where they pretend their hands are tied cause of opposition is almost completely BS.

See how we still haven't gotten any student debt relief even though the executive could immediately provide it. See how these two liberals are still blocking the filibuster.

>Ask a bunch of drug addicts if they used weed before [heroin|coke|speed|lsd|<insert-drug-of-choice>|aota], most of them will say yes.

Correlation != causation. The idea of a 'gateway' drug is absurd.

The simplest explanation is that people with mental illness or trauma will self medicate. So given that, it makes sense that the easiest to acquire/least scary drugs would be the first used. I bet even more people got started on alcohol as their first 'treatment'. That doesn't make it a gateway drug.

>People rarely commit robbery and murder to get another hit of alcohol.

Weird. Almost like making it legal, relatively cheap, and easily accessible makes it so you don't have to resort to desperate means.

The fact you are happy your sister is in prison and not in a treatment facility says a lot about you.

You do realize you can vape flower/concentrate and eat edibles, right?

>Marijuana is a gateway drug, I strongly believe this but open for changing my mind if there is data supporting otherwise.

The burden of proof is on you to show this. What you strongly feel doesn't matter.

30 years? The 90s still had police going hard on drug dealers and users.

And I didn't realize the Sackler family was skating by cause the DEA stopped arresting marijuana users.

Also, on the more conspiratorial side, it is curious how opioid supply and use flourished as soon as we were in Afghanistan. Kind of like it did when we were in Vietnam. Two areas known for poppies and heroin. Given what we know about the FBI encouraging terrorism so they can then claim they stopped it, I wouldn't be surprised if the CIA/JSOC was funneling in the drugs for cash and the DEA was mopping that up for cash/reason to exist.

>That’s because the vast majority of things have a clear correct answer.

No, they don't. What is correct for rich western liberals often means further poverty, suffering, and death for those who don't belong to that class.

The sheer arrogance to even say that is boggling to me.

I think you'll find both sides are aligned on about 60 or 70 percent of things. This is due mostly to them all belonging to the same class and seeking to advance class goals.

Pick a few wedge issues for either side and voila: you have a 'representative' democracy.

The Nazis gave bogus info and were used to kill and torture countless people. You lose any moral high ground when you ally with psychopaths like that and are no better than they are.

The US had plans to invade Russia, Cuba, and pretty much any place they could think of. That is irrelevant.

And to your last point, I disagree. I know also that lots and lots of people in other countries disagree. Why do you think the US is hated so much globally?

Dulles brothers laundered money for the nazis during the war. Allen went on to secretly negotiate for surrender of Nazi/SS troops, who were then protected from prosecution and used for Gladio and later ratlined out to South America to train death squads.

To your second point: no. You aren’t the arbiter of what qualifies as an atrocity or not. Go tell the countless people in Latin America that their continued torture and suffering isn’t a big deal, cause hey at least they aren’t in a Russian gulag. You are as deranged as our government if you truly think that.

WW2 (Nazis are fascists) Indonesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_19... Guatemala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_genocide El Salvador https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadoran_Civil_War Chile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_...

I can go on. And these are just the individual incidents we know about. Who knows how much suffering and death happened as a direct result of the destabilization of the global south.

> there was never any justification to dismiss the lab leak theory

that isn't how this works. extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. there is zero evidence of a lab leak besides circumstantial.

> censor conversations about it online

they did a poor job of that then, considering all the very vocal people I had to hear keep talking about it for the last year.

>He was slated to be the clear winner until two events (COVID-19 and George Floyd)

weird how that works, huh? when you handle crises poorly -- or downright negligently -- people will hate you and not vote for you. strange.

Millions of people were killed by fascist regimes. Many, if not most, funded and supplied by the US gov't.

The fact that you think it was okay for the US to support former SS officers illegally operating in countries and later used to train South American death squads in torture techniques, all because 'commies are bad', shows how deranged you are.

What the US has done in the name of anticommunism dwarfs any evils done by communism.

> 4,000 troops to Syria to fight against Israel in the Yom Kippur war

Supporting Arabs retaliating against an illegal land grab by Israel.

>They also probably didn't send troops into Somalia

Helping Ethiopia defend itself against aggression from Somalia, the issue of which was caused by western meddling and colonialism.

>nor support the MIR and FPMR to destabilize Chile.

Supporting forces revolting against the horrible Pinochet dictatorship.

Really, why list any of this when we are talking about unwanted CIA intervention, which usually backed murderous right wingers? Cuba's interventions were at least battling western imperialism and had the support of part of the local populations and not just the rich land owners.

Are you going to play ignorant about the fact that the CIA recruited former Nazis to suppress socialist movements in Europe, without the permission of the states they ran this operation in?

> This was actually a good thing. Che Guevara was a psychopathic murderer and war criminal.

No, he wasn't.

>The truth is that Communists have killed more people and been responsible for more human misery than any corresponding movement or ideology in the 20th century.

No, it hasn't. Stop spreading worthless VoC propaganda.

No, it isn't extremely narrow. It is based on the truth, as shown in the article. What purpose has the CIA served other than business interests and anti-socialist ops (tied to business interests, can't have your oil fields nationalized by the local savages after all)?

How did allying with former SS commanders and other Nazis help the people? How did them stealing children from Cuba help the people? How did them supporting Cuban exiles ongoing terrorism help the people? How did Gladio ops killing any sort socialist movements in Europe help the people?

Maybe you should take a second to realize a lot of 'anti-american talking points' are actually valid criticisms of a corrupt and deranged government.

They don't do it to help people. They do it to advance western business interests, usually at the expense of the people.

Good overview, but the attacks on Cuba didn't stop after the bay of pigs. The CIA continued terrorist attacks on Cuba well after that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mongoose

Case fatality rate wasn't inflated, it was deflated if anything.

And there is still no real evidence of a lab leak, despite western intelligence continually lying about it.

Stop trying to tie it to your politics. Some people want real evidence before they scream about things like you do. It had little to do with Trump.

Nah. People tried that already with bad results. Not to mention, what happens when the foreigners you are exploiting start demanding the same things the locals are?

Not only that, but the social and political ramifications of having not only blue collar workers out of a job, but also the PMC class as well. You want a revolution? Cause that is how you get one.