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Despite the best efforts of his staff, Trump has failed to start any new wars. Meanwhile, Biden is already rattling the saber.
To be fair, he's starting Space Force , though it may wind up being stupid and harmless. Weaponizing space isn't great.
We already basically had a space force, it was an inevitability. Trump did it because he wanted his name on something historic.
Spinning it out into its own branch gives it institutional inertia that makes it harder to wind down, though. That same institutional inertia will also help it perpetuate itself in a way that, say, an individual Air Force program can't.
You're right that Trump didn't create Space Force out of whole cloth, but it's still a significant step in the wrong direction.
Fair enough. It could easily also be considered a step in the direction of humanity's advancement away from war and toward space innovation.
We know the military gets far more funding than anything, so a Space Force will be much better funded than NASA.
The more US resources are diverted from bombing innocents and towards innovation the better. Still, there's a lot of places that could use that funding before a 'Space Force', but that's not the reality of this nation.
It will be satellite-to-satellite weapons, electronic warfare, and surveillance
The only time capitalism is slowed down is when leftists, abolitionists, activists, etc. can make actual inroads into progress. It's happened throughout society in fits and starts, and that's why black people can eat at the same places white people can, women can vote, slavery (at least outright owning people as property) is illegal, we have 40-hour work weeks, etc. That process will get harder with Biden in office because Biden and the Dems will position themselves as the pinnacle of left progress and then move the country to the right while saying they're left.
Under outright Nazis like Trump, yes material conditions may get worse in the short term (although Biden is so bad that who knows), but we're not just electing a president for 2020. All this stuff will have ripples toward the future, and the left will almost completely disappear from the radar under Biden because he and the Dems will be "the left" again (as Republicans and libs both love to paint them).
I think there is a tendency for extremely online people to just assume that everyone (the "regular people") knows what the left is, what they're saying, what they're doing. That isn't the case. To the extent that people do know, it's because committed leftists, and quasi-leftist libs like Bernie Sanders, just shout these things over and over into the mass media void. That power, what little it may be, is going to be completely shut down with Biden and the Dems subsuming the role of "the left" as they did under Obama. A lot of people on here and elsewhere online like to shut that down like it doesn't mean anything, the left will continue and thrive and so forth. But if it's only thriving among the 800 people you read on Twitter, and nobody else ever sees it or covers it, what good is it?
At least under Trump, you have libs sort of united with leftists by necessity, where even if they are going about it the wrong way (OMG RUSSIANS AND THEIR FB MEMEZ!!!), they're forced to take a negative posture toward authoritarianism and the right.
But against President Biden, who's our ally or advocate in mass media? Fucking Glenn Beck? Wheeling out his dipshit blackboard to say how Biden is too much of a radical leftist Marxist Saul Alinsky acolyte? That will be one side of the debate, and the other side will be Joy Ann Reid saying the American Utopia has been achieved under Biden and Republicans are determined to fuck it up because they don't like abortions.
This is a very big, real issue not being addressed in these struggle sessions. We will disappear completely from US discourse under Biden.
Libs are not 'sort of united with leftists'
Libs have spent the last 4 years shrieking about a faked conspiracy of Russiagate - precisely to avoid doing the introspection needed within the democratic party and continuing Neoliberal ideology
That is why I said "sort of". They're mortal enemies of leftists, I agree, but they're forced to share a common enemy with us in Trump, and even if libs work against us in every single other way, they're still putting it in the water that the authoritarian presence at the top of the food chain, in the White House is a Bad Person™.
Who is going to do that, credibly, if Biden is the president and not Trump? The libs will go back to sleep/brunch, and the right's critiques of Biden and Dems would be delivered as if Biden is a Black Panther. AKA, substance-less and useless.
If you look at the post, I didn't say the left will disappear. I said disappear "from discourse". There will always be those of us doing good work, helping people, trying to improve material conditions on the ground, or even electorally, working at the municipal level, attorneys and judges that are actually compassionate doing good for people within a shit system. Et cetera.
But media is a big deal, the corporate stranglehold on it is a BIG factor in shaping how people and especially Americans think, and our presence there, even in the 0.00001% way it existed from 2016-2020, really gets good ideas out into the ether. No one would be talking about M4A if Bernie Sanders had not become a viable candidate for president and gone on MSNBC and even Fox 150,919,248 times and shouted in his cranky old-man way about M4A.
So my big fear is that if Biden "becomes" the left, it will have the same chilling effect on left ideas as when Obama subsumed "the left" in this country... but worse, because Biden is even worse than Obama, and because the world is coming apart at the seams and in dire need of left ideas injected into the discourse, immediately, in a way that wasn't the case in 2012.
it will have the same chilling effect on left ideas as when Obama subsumed “the left” in this country
Obama credibly ran as a progressive, though. Clinton was the centrist in the 2008 primary. Biden can't subsume a left that was never even lukewarm on him, especially when that left has far more of a media/electoral/online/in-the-streets presence than it did 12 years ago.
You're failing to consider the multiplier on climate destruction and climate policy destruction Trump will do over Biden, which will make most of the third world, especially Africa and South America, unlivable for billions. Billions more will suffer, and sooner, with another Trump term.
This isn't me telling you to vote for Biden, but you're thinking this logic in short term. And you're wrong.
Don't get me wrong, Joe Biden will not stop climate change.
I genuinely don't think humanity will stop it at this point, it's about how soon it happens and how fast it spirals out of control to the point of causing billions to die.
He will continue to advance it, but not as fast.
I despise the dude but you'd be insane to over-irony to the point of claiming Trump is better for the third world even considering the damage he's doing to the climate.
Downvoting instinctually is shitty too.
The scales we're working with aren't that tight. Trump is actively deregulating industry and destroying the EPA, opening up protected lands for oil extraction, etc.
Joe Biden will at least not deregulate the regulations Obama put in place, obviously. And committing trillions to climate action is seriously a lot, even if it's less than Bernie and still not 'enough'.
Guessing a number for the difference in policy between the two over the next four years (and likely more than four, for either of them) is nonsense because neither of us have real numbers there, but the difference is not total collapse of 4 years sooner.
Even a 10 year gap or a 20 year gap for technology to develop and those developing nations to prepare saves billions of people. So yes, it does matter, despite the true doomerism of the situation as a whole we're talking the scale of billions of human lives and suffering.
I don't think that opportunity offsets the acceleration of climate death.
Child brain argument.
Literally standing here arguing that hurting the environment more is the same as trying to save the environment.
People are convincing themselves that Biden sucking must mean he's as bad as Trump or worse than Trump on every single issue.
I know, it's going a bit too far. We love to irony post, but the trap that comes with an entire site of irony-posting is attempting to out-irony each other, and irony slips into genuine posting eventually.
Trump is dramatically worse for the climate than Biden. Biden is nowhere near enough.
You're over irony posting again.
Biden is not equal or near Trump in climate response. Biden does, for all his flaws and failings, have a $1.7 trillion dollar climate action investment plan.
Except Biden's climate plan is a major part of his platform and when he wins it will in part be a mandate to implement that.
Versus Trump winning with his mandate to deregulate and continue to destroy the climate.
I do not need to sit here and shitfling back and forth with someone who refuses to even accept that yes, one is much better on climate than the other.
I would disagree, though I can see why you would argue that. Here's why.
You may point the utter failures of the coup attempts in Venezuela, and say they failed solely because Trump is incompetent. This disregards the fact that attempts at regime change during the Obama years were also unsuccessful. It also smacks of great man theory- instead we ought to be looking at why Venezuela is so resilient to regime change. Also, there was a successful coup in Bolivia, so I will not accept that Trump's incompetence is too much of an impediment on the CIA regime change capability.
Trump has claimed he was going to leave the middle east, but that has not come to pass. Drone strikes are continuing unabated across the region, we're still in Afghanistan, and despite what libs will say, Trump bombed Syria, just like Obama before him. I don't see any real change from Biden on this front.
Trump is also terrible on cuba, which was perhaps one of the very few good things Obama did.
And this is not even mentioning climate change, which affects all the nations of the world but especially those in the global south. Biden will do very little to slow it, but at least he will not actively tear up existing environmental protections.
Tldr, Biden is appalling, but so is Trump
You may point the utter failures of the coup attempts in Venezuela, and say they failed solely because Trump is incompetent. This disregards the fact that attempts at regime change during the Obama years were also unsuccessful. It also smacks of great man theory
It's also utterly implausible that the CIA came to Trump with some workable plan for regime change and Trump said "nah let's just get some of those Black Rifle Coffee guys and send them in on speedboats!" What's the actual theory for how Trump personally fucked that one up?
Depends on which country. Trump's foreign policy will be worse for most African countries, due to his insane racism and peddling of conspiracy theories, such as the white farm murders lie in South Africa. Biden's foreign policy will be worse for countries like Venezuela or Iran for example, as he will want to coup these countries or start more forever wars in the middle east, while Trump is too incompetent/doesn't want to do so. Ultimately trying to weigh which is more important, Africa or Latin America, is a futile exercise as both are ghouls that will stop at nothing to maintain US supremacy across the world.
Worse for Asian countries grouped with the sinophobic "China" scare too.
Biden’s foreign policy will be worse for countries like Venezuela or Iran for example
Biden was part of an administration that reached a major diplomatic agreement with Iran. Trump ripped that up and took us to the brink of an invasion.
He also helped invade Iraq, and Trump was too much of a coward to actually do anything Bolton wanted to
Trump was too much of a coward to actually do anything Bolton wanted to
He assassinated a top Iranian general while the guy was on a diplomatic mission to Iraq
So we're giving credit to Trump for committing war crimes but -- at the last possible minute -- not starting a war that would make Iraq look like a backyard wrestling match.
But Biden would totally be worse because checks notes he wants to rejoin Obama's U.S.-Iran deal? Quit while you're miles behind here.
And "Push back against Iranian influence in the region." I know the stereotype about libs not reading, but damn. I sent you his proposal a few comments ago
You sent me an article stating that Biden wants to rejoin the U.S.-Iran deal. Thats a hell of a lot more material than vague "push back on their influence" rhetoric, especially when the comparison point is a guy who's already committed an act of war against Iran.
But I see we've shut our brains off and concluded that Biden bad = Biden is worse than Trump on all dimensions, ackshually.
So we’re giving credit to Trump for committing war crimes but – at the last possible minute – not starting a war that would make Iraq look like a backyard wrestling match.
You're framing it as "credit" again, which makes no sense. People here aren't patting Trump on the back. They're arguing why he's less apocalyptically awful than Biden by a small degree.
You know this, and you keep trying to frame it as people like Trump, which is from the Lib 101 playbook ("oh you aren't all-in on Ridin' with Biden, huh? What time is it in Moscow, Boris")
I still believe the whole Iran general assassination was a compromise with Bolton so that Bolton would not testify during impeachment. Bolton has been wanting to invade Iran since the day he was born. Although trying to assign logic to anything Trump does is another futile exercise
Just hiring John Bolton in the first place should show how dangerous Trump is on foreign policy.
And yet Bolton, or someone like him, will 100% be in the Biden cabinet, making the same decisions.
Except with Biden, he will be sealed up in the basement of the White House like an entombed mummy while those guys have free rein to murder and enslave people. As opposed to having to navigate Trump's witless interference and incompetence, saying counterproductive things about peace talks with North Korea and pulling out of Afghanistan, in between diss tweets at Bette Midler.
And yet Bolton, or someone like him, will 100% be in the Biden cabinet, making the same decisions.
Biden was part of an administration that negotiated a diplomatic agreement with Iran, and he's stated he wants to rejoin that agreement. How is that remotely similar to John "literally been trying to invade Iran since the revolution" Bolton? I have no doubt Biden will be a shitty imperialist in many other areas, but on this particular point equating him with Trump is just laughable. Trump was hours away from starting a war with Iran this January.
I mean literal war criminal Colin Powell spoke at the DNC and endorsed biden too, so like i'm not sure that's really any worse
An endorsement =/= a cabinet position.
The baseline here is what Trump has already done: attacking Iran and getting us within hours of a full-scale war against a country with 80+ million people. To find an example of a Democratic president doing anything close to that you'd have to go back to, what, LBJ?
Biden will no doubt continue the standard-issue imperialism of Obama and Trump -- expanding our drone terror campaign, trying (sometimes successfully) to initiate coups in places like Venezuela and Bolivia, etc. -- but attacking a country like Iran is in a whole different stratosphere. As a comparison, look at Libya vs. Iraq. Libya is a mess, but because we didn't invade and didn't engage in a full-scale bombing campaign for over a decade the casualties have been fairly limited. Wikipedia lists about 9,000 Libyan deaths since 2014, but let's assume that's off by an order of magnitude and call it 90,000 deaths over about six years. We've killed 2.4 million Iraqis and counting since 2003; a full tenth of their pre-war population. That's another order of magnitude greater than our damage to Libya even if you assume the Libyan Civil War will continue as long as the Iraq War has continued, and it doesn't even factor in the long-term effects of a sustained bombing campaign (CW for fucked up images of babies we've deformed). There's no comparison.
All this stuff runs together because even Democratic imperialism is fucking awful, but there's an enormous difference between run-of-the-mill CIA crimes against humanity and war.
The idea that either of them makes a difference is absurd. We live under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. If the bourgeoisie want to drone strike weddings, the weddings will be struck. If they want to start trade disputes with China, they will be started. If they want to give us healthcare, we will be given healthcare. Pretending the face of the bourgeoisie matters is silly. The only argument that might actually be kind of reasonable is that the contradictions appear higher to the PMC, those who are least affected by the rule of the Bourgeoisie, under Trump because of how absurd he is, and therefore inclines them to political activity which might help us a tiny bit.
This isn't a very hot take lol, people have been saying this since the primaries ended. That's why you keep hearing about Biden being a competent imperialist and Trump being an incompetent fascist
I think this is build on “Trump is a right-wing isolationist” perception and I do not believe in it anymore. Mike Pompeo running the shop is def not good for non US nosphere nations. I could be wrong, and I am open to change my mind on this.
We're just using contractors and special forces in even greater numbers, the whole "air strike obama" meme applies 10x to Trump.
I’m not a VBNMH at all, but this is a stupid take. How is Trump better than Biden on this issue?
I can give you Korea, but Trump was having weapons smuggled into Venezuela to support the terrorists there. Also, look at Iran and Saudi Arabia . Trump nearly dragged us into a war there. It was only due to sheer luck and chance that Iran was forced to back down. He’s sent more troops to Saudi Arabia. He dropped a Moab on a hideout in the desert. Sure Biden would be another awful neoliberal, and you shouldn’t vote for him, but Trump has caused a lot of damage overall in the 3rd world. He’s launched more drone strikes against Yemen in 2 years than Obama did against Yemen in 8.
Look at Bolivia, an attempted coup in Venezuela, and going from a diplomatic agreements with Iran to almost starting a war with them
The least effective coup in history, and Biden would assuredly intervene in Bolivia, as well as Iran
going from a diplomatic agreements with Iran to almost starting a war with them
You really want to make the case that Biden would somehow be worse on Iran?
I don't have to, he did. https://www.mei.edu/publications/what-biden-iran-strategy-might-look
Biden’s statements over the last year indicate the former vice president would likely re-enter the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which President Donald Trump abrogated and replaced with a “maximum pressure” campaign aimed at forcing Tehran back to the negotiating table.
Lmao
I’m not a VBNMH at all, but this is a stupid take. How is Trump better than Biden on this issue?
I think it's misleading to frame this as "Trump is better" because that implies anything Trump is doing is good.
Trump isn't good, but we're comparing two flavors of toxic waste here. Trump does like 85% of what the military industrial complex wants, then his brain cells, corroded from 70 years of Carl's Jr. and Wendy's, misfire and he does something counterproductive to their interests, like meet with Kim, or threaten to pull out of Afghanistan by Monday, or suggest in a tweet something everybody knows and can't say, that the military is run by war profiteers.
So no, Trump isn't good, but that 15% where he says things on a whim while shitting out White Castle on the crapper at 3AM, separates him from Biden, who will just be sealed up into a sarcophagus on January 21, 2021 after taking the oath, never say or do anything again except PR appearances when they prop him up in front of a camera, and give way to let John Bolton et al. take over and coup and drone everything that moves.
Yes, it is sad that our two choices for president are "war criminal who is really bad at being a war criminal but still kills hundreds of thousands of people", vs. "senile war criminal who knows he is senile and will step out of the way for competent war criminals to loot the planet". It sucks, but that's the decision, and we should look at it critically
Chapo dot chat winding up to unironic "Vote Trump" posts I see
Did I say vote trump
Do you know what "winding up" means?
I'm looking at the posting trends and predicting the logical next step. We all know libs suck, but we're moving to contrarianism for contrarianism's sake at warp speed.
Our condescending lib means: to eventually run in to, arrive at from a different origin.
video evidence of hex bear winding up to cross the political divide
'winding up to' means preparing for, like winding up to kick the football.
'winding up at' means taking the scenic route to finally arrive, taking a winding route.Edit: there are a few more similar idioms:
'winding up a project/affairs' means settling/liquidating/completing it, is like winding up a cable.
'winding up someone' means making somebody angry so they lash out, is also like a wind-up toy.
