The fact that nobody mentioned Israel is the point. I stg. It isn’t a “strawman” to point out possible unintended consequences of supporting a policy.

“I think I should jump off a tall building.”

“Are you crazy? You’ll die!”

“Wow, what a strawman. Nobody even said anything about dying. I don’t support falling to my death, only the jumping.”

It’s not a “strawman.” I understand that most people on here don’t want the weapons going to Israel, which is why I made the point. But the reality is that, once a weapon is built, it’s in the hands of politicians to give to whoever they like. If those politicians are pro-Israel, then even if you want the weapons for the purpose of defense, there’s a significant likelihood they’ll be used to perform genocide.

How many of those weapons are going to end up in Israel’s hands?

Fuck off with your cherry-picking bullshit.

“Cherry picking” is what you did. Grabbing very specific things you can point to as different while ignoring the general case. The other presidents during that period also had major problems. Clinton was an architect behind mass incarceration, Obama doubled down on the pointless war in Afghanistan and did nothing to roll back the surveillance state, etc. Even if it was just Bush, that still wouldn’t be “cherry picking” because Bush was president for a substantial time within the period you mentioned.

Bush was indeed terrible, but even then he wasn’t in the same league as Trump in terms of corruption or tyranny.

Trump is more corrupt and tyrannical, only because he is standing on the shoulders of giants. He wouldn’t be able to do half the shit he is if the power of the executive hadn’t expanded so much during the period from the 90’s to the 2010’s that you idolize so much.

Again, the fact remains that you’re trying to normalize fascism, which makes you fucking evil. You lose; end of.

If the exterminator tells you the termites ate through the foundations of your house, do you say that he’s “trying to normalize termites,” which makes him “fucking evil” and means the things he says are false? What a load of bull.

I’m not the one who normalized fascism. All the politicians who enacted fascist policies are. I’m only the one informing you about the state of things, and you’re only upset with me because you don’t want your little bubble to burst.

Clinton and Kamala both tried to appeal to that “near right” and failed. Social pressure isn’t going to magically disappear, I can agree with the point about guns but that just ties into what I’m saying. If anyone on the right can be appealed to, it’s the isolationist, pro-gun libertarian types. You will never win the nationalists, they already have a party that is giving them exactly what they want.

I heard a lot of younger people saying Trump was the peaceful, anti-war President.

This is such a big factor, imo.

The democrats refuse to budge from this neocon position of “benevolent interventionism.” and Trump has been able to attack them over both parts of it, which allows him to appeal both to libertarian types who want to stay out of conflicts because “the government doing stuff is bad,” and to nationalist types who want to just overtly plunder everywhere (with his actual policy being the latter). Meanwhile the democrats just cast anyone who disagrees with them on foreign policy as a Russian bot. They’re stuck in the early 2000’s where there was overwhelming bipartisan support for “bringing democracy” to the Middle East, and they seem think if they can just pick up the “moderate Republican” neocon voters who definitely exist and still believe in that project, then they’re sure to win.

The effect is that they fail to capitalize on the ideological divisions that exist on the right. The actual Republican voters that there would be a chance of peeling off are the libertarian anti-war types, but that would require actually trying to appeal to anti-war voters instead of treating them with contempt.

Bush was president from 2000-2008

2000-2008 is within the time period of “the 90’s through the 2010’s.”

I don’t know how it could possibly be more clear that you are the liar and I’m not.

And every major war since WWII has been compared to it, whether it’s Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. And most people buy it every single time, which is absolutely wild.

“America! Take a good look at your beloved candidates! They’re nothing but hideous space reptiles pedophiles!”

"It’s true, we are aliens pedophiles, but what are you going to do about it? It’s a two-party system."

Some of us are capable of hating the empire for multiple reasons at the same time.

No shit Trump isn’t foreign, but he also isn’t “normal” or a continuation of how the US was in the '90s through 2010s,

YES you did fucking say Bush.

And none of them attempted a coup or tried to destroy all the checks and balances of our government in order to set themselves up as a dictator with unlimited corruption!

Bush absolutely destroyed all sorts of checks and balances and got near-limitless power, which has be maintained by every president since. Warrentless wiretapping? Mass surveillance? Authorization to attack every country on earth? Indefinite detention without trial in the torture dungeon at Guantanamo? He was not held accountable for any of it, because as Edward Snowden revealed, Obama wanted to keep most of it going himself. That’s why he became public enemy #1 and was hunted to the ends of the earth.

You wanna talk corruption, who benefited from the multiple wars of aggression Bush started? Oil companies and arms dealers. Nobody else.

We used to have some pretense of civil liberties and privacy, but that was all long gone before Trump ever ran for anything.

You can always just ask for a source.

14. Police and sheriff’s patrol officers

Fatal injuries in 2016: 14.6 per 100,000 workers

7. Driver/sales workers and truck drivers

Fatal injuries in 2016: 24.7 per 100,000 workers

Not quite double but fairly close.

Maybe it ought to be the thin garbage line, since garbage collectors face even more danger and are even more essential to society being able to function.

I’m genuinely speechless.

Please open a fucking history book.

The War Powers Act of 1973 only requires the president to notify congress within 48 hours. The president only needs authorization it troops are deployed for longer than 60 days.

The US drone strikes wherever it feels like, whenever it feels like. In fact, this was reaffirmed in one of the wiki pages you link in another comment:

The authorization granted the president the authority to use all “necessary and appropriate force” against those whom he determined “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the September 11 attacks, or who harbored said persons or groups.

Note that no specific country is mentioned in that, meaning that it gave the president complete, unilateral authority to determine which countries fell into that category and how to respond.

Business Insider has reported that the AUMF has been used to allow military deployment in Afghanistan, the Philippines, Georgia, Yemen, Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iraq, and Somalia. The 2001 AUMF has enabled the US president to unilaterally launch military operations across the world without any congressional oversight or transparency for more than two decades. Between 2018 and 2020 alone, US forces initiated what it labelled “counter-terror” activities in 85 countries. Of these, the 2001 AUMF has been used to launch classified military campaigns in at least 22 countries.

Even now, all Trump would have to do is say he determined that Venezuela at one point “harbored” someone connected to 9/11, there could even be truth to it! If someone tangentially connected at some point might possibly have passed through Venezuela without the government’s knowledge, that’s enough (not that we would even be told the reason). This insanity became the law of the land over 20 years ago, with near-unanimous bipartisan support, and it has survived multiple democratic presidents. Biden invoked it regarding Somalia as recently as 2021.

Welcome to the paying attention club, glad you could join us, but this is absolutely not new.

What exactly do you think occurred in Russia in 1991?

How many of those countries have been subject to neocolonialism and CIA coups? Lots of people support politicians who want to continue stealing from and exploiting countries in Africa and elsewhere, so by that logic it seems to me that the chances are pretty high, actually.

I don’t think enough people are being born in Palestine to accommodate all the American souls who karmically ought to be reborn there.

In that case room temperature IQ means you’re by far the smartest person who’s ever lived.