US Politics Mega-Blog - Page 90

On November 29 2018 05:21 iamthedave wrote:


Did it? I thought Mu-WAHAHAHA-gabe was deposed by a military coup in the end?

On November 29 2018 08:06 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Do you really believe Israel would continue with the expansive settlements if every major political actor in the US said unequivocally that the continuation would cause them to lose all military and monetary support? I know this is obviously completely hypothetical, but do you genuinely believe that Israel would disregard a demand/threat of this sort coming from the US? (Once again, I'm not arguing that lasting peace could be achieved through this alone, so you don't even have to concede your major point.)

On November 29 2018 09:05 xDaunt wrote:
Again, it is not in the American interest to shaft Israel. Israel is valuable to the US. Palestine is not.

On November 29 2018 09:33 GreenHorizons wrote:


I disagree. I don't think supporting ethnic cleansing/genocide even of "our enemy" is in our interests.

But my point was cutting direct aid is only a tiny part of what can be done which you seem to not disagree with.

Michael Avenatti sued Donald Trump for defaming Stormy Daniels against her wishes, Daniels told The Daily Beast in a statement on Wednesday.

Avenatti also started a new fundraising site to raise money for her legal defense fund without telling her, Daniels said. She said she is not sure whether or not she will keep Avenatti on as her lawyer.

Here is her full statement, provided to The Daily Beast:

“For months I’ve asked Michael Avenatti to give me accounting information about the fund my supporters so generously donated to for my safety and legal defense. He has repeatedly ignored those requests. Days ago I demanded again, repeatedly, that he tell me how the money was being spent and how much was left. Instead of answering me, without my permission or even my knowledge Michael launched another crowdfunding campaign to raise money on my behalf. I learned about it on Twitter.

On November 29 2018 09:58 xDaunt wrote:


This framing of the US/Israel relationship is not accurate.

Again, it is not in the American interest to shaft Israel. Israel is valuable to the US. Palestine is not.

On November 29 2018 12:48 GreenHorizons wrote:


It's not complete, but I see no inaccuracies.

This is somewhat unrelated but this line of thinking is why I say we would have sat by and watched Jews get slaughtered and allied with Nazi Germany against communism if it weren't for Pearl Harbor.

On November 29 2018 13:13 Doodsmack wrote:
Avenatti possesses every qualification that Trump possesses, but fewer vices. And there is no counterargument to that assertion.

On November 29 2018 13:23 xDaunt wrote:


It's neither complete (which, btw, necessarily implies inaccuracy) nor factually based. We aren't sending money to Israel for the express purpose of funding their genocide against Palestine. It's all incidental.



No, we still would have ended up fighting the Nazis at some point. Even before Pearl Harbor, the US was on a trajectory to do so.

The argument that you should be making is that we would not have started fighting the Nazis for the express purpose of saving the Jews. And that I do agree with. There is no shortage of atrocities that have occurred before and after WW2 that we ignored, ranging from the Armenian genocide, to the Japanese invasion of China, to all of the shit that happened in the Soviet Union and communist China, and all of the genocides that have happened in places like Cambodia or various African countries. The only one that we really did intervene in was Bosnia, and that's because it was happening on Europe's back porch.

The simple reality is that we don't have the resources to right every wrong globally. We have to pick our battles and not waste ourselves in the process.

On November 29 2018 13:32 GreenHorizons wrote:
What would the US interest be if instead of Pearl Harbor we come to terms on how the world gets divided between the US, Germany, and Japan along with commitments from Japan and Germany to fight the people we ended up fighting once the war was "over"?

Basically all WWII did for us was give us weaker allies against communism than we would have had in Nazi Germany and Japan, neither being any real threat to us dominating the western hemisphere.

I suppose some prefer a submissive/fragmented Europe, a helpless (as far as military aggression) Japan, and China and Russia being the other major powers and hostile. Instead of 2 peers in Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.

On November 29 2018 14:57 xDaunt wrote:


You're missing the larger ideological conflict that was brewing in the interwar period. There were three ideological camps with conflicting and mutually exclusive ideologies: the liberal camp (headed by the US and UK), the fascist camp (headed by Nazi Germany), and the communist camp (headed by the USSR).Though these camps might have (and, at times, did) align for mutual short term games, they were always going to be at war with each other at some point. Aligning with the Nazis was simply never going to be an option for the US because the Nazis opposed so many critical and fundamental US policy goals. This is why there was never even a question as to whom the US would support when the war initially broke out in Europe. US arms, aid, and materiel went almost exclusively to the UK before Pearl Harbor, not to the Nazis.

And you're really missing the point if you think that all the US got out of WW2 was weaker allies to fight against communism. The US inherited a global empire. Huge swaths of the world became de facto American colonies almost overnight. The wealth that this generated for the US while most of the rest of the industrial world was in ruins was unprecedented. The current world order that we have today -- at which the US continues to be at the center -- is a direct result of that post-WW2 inheritance..