Negatory

Primary blame goes to the Bush admin for fighting a war whatsoever. Turns out having an emotional response to a terrrorist attack isn’t a good grand strategy. Going to Iraq on top of that was inane. If you don’t have goals and a realistic exit strategy, you don’t get to go to war. The other thing that we have to realize is that we, as a nation, can’t just “fix” the world to be pro-US. But over 70 years of propaganda in US education during the Cold War teaching American Exceptionalism and 30 years of being the only superpower - something that is extremely rare in all of human civilization - is going to be hard to come to terms with. The future is not one of American unquestioned superiority. We’re going to have to find our place in a world that equalizes, and it’s gonna suck. Because I can tell you very few people on any political side have really embraced that reality. And let’s be real, both Obama and Trump were handed a hot bag of shit. Obama tried to just leave and ISIS happened. Trump was faced with largely the same problems and it’s a lose-lose. Now imagine that China invades Taiwan in 1-5 years. Do we go? Why? It sure as hell shouldn’t be because it feels right. Add Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Crimea onto Vietnam as big L’s for the US. We need to do some serious soul searching in the coming years. We need a better strategy than going by feel - it’s not working so good.

This opens a legitimate avenue for discussion. Should facebook, twitter, google, etc. be able to point out, when people link any "news" from that website, that the articles are "misinformation" or "fake news?"

Facepalm.

The more I approach this forum as a real time sociology exhibit, the more I feel at peace. I don’t know how you guys function believing everything is a conspiracy, from vaccines to immigrants to cabals. But I’ll join - Down with the Illuminati! Down with Gates! Down with Antifa who are personally driving drug cartels into America!

Kinda funny, arrests of illegal immigrants (by government employees, mind you) are at a high - you choose to interpret it as the gov doing nothing.

You’re right, that was a mistype. I meant to say a large fraction, not a majority - significantly larger than any actual adverse vaccine effects, as Pawnman has already cited.

There’s little point in having a rational discussion here fellas. As the anti-vax crowd on this forum has pointed out (weird to be called that, huh), they need literally no justification other than spite. Which is about all the justification they have. Any sort of appeal to emotion or point about helping mankind will be lost. This issue has been politicized to where they think of themselves as William Wallace fighting the British Vaccination squad, when in reality it’s nothing more than folks that are, ironically, doing what they’re told by misinformation and false news. To the “objective” “statistical” data that was presented above, it’s all hogwash. VAERS actually presents a significantly higher chance of adverse reactions if you want to actually look at data (contained below for all COVID shots). It’s actually closer to 100% than 0% that you’ll have an adverse reaction if you want to read these statistics. For the record, VAERS records things like “headaches,” “myalgia,” “pyrexia,” or “chills” as an adverse reaction. Mind you, this is with literally everyone knowing that if you get the shot, you get sick for 1-2 days - I.e. have an adverse reaction. The 0.27% number, I wouldn’t be surprised at this point, if it was entirely made up. Or they are misrepresenting a category of reactions titled “vaccination complication,” the 215th most prevalent adverse reaction. https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D8;jsessionid=D93E73A304E0219C83B64E8FE404?stage=results&action=sort&direction=MEASURE_DESCEND&measure=D8.M2 The actual truth, when you stop distorting the facts, is that the vast majority of people with COVID suffer complications as well. And there are mounds of data that show that getting COVID when vaccinated is significantly less severe than the alternative. But that’s not part of the calculus because of “spite” disguised as “liberty.” I’m glad we got to that in the last couple of days, because that’s the root cause. It’s not any sort of scientific or measurable reason. It’s to “own the metaphorical libs,” and that’s it.

See the 2014 annexation of Crimea. I promise we militarily had all the ability in the world to combat Russia conventionally. But that’s not how it’s going to happen.

Wow, what the hell 🤯

I understand you don’t like the point I brought up because it’s hard to refute. If you read it, you’ll also note that it wasn’t “progressive,” it tied in everybody! What specifically are you mad I haven’t responded to? EDIT: Also, I don’t spend that much time on this forum. I check it about once a week, say my piece, and leave. I don’t have an emotional attachment to my arguments, and I won’t change that. If you want my actual thoughts on a specific issue (I doubt you do), message me and I’ll make sure to give em to you (sts).

This is called resting on your laurels. We had significant government propaganda and government persecution of socialists/communists/Nazis/black rights (MLK??) for the whole time period that actually made us a superpower (essentially the whole 20th century). Literally, free citizens were regularly jailed, fired, fined, or alienated for ideas. This was a government backed campaign. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism Lets not pretend that government controlling the information narrative isn’t a real facet of our recent history and rise to power.

You guys are all smart people. Many of you even have security clearances and access to more detailed reports on weaponized misinformation and it’s effects on the U-S-of-A. You know that there are concerted attacks on the Information sector of America designed to cause turmoil, polarize folks, or get people elected who are in the best interests of our adversaries. From that standpoint, I’d hope you wouldn’t take such a black and white view on how to combat this adversarial disinformation, because it’s not helpful in making our nation strong or unified. From a grand strategy DIME perspective, many will even argue that the I (information) is becoming the most impactful way to fight the US for many adversaries. This is because many in the US will, ironically, fight to freely allow and maintain misinformation under the guise of liberty. It’s a tough problem, because it really is a Liberty vs security discussion. Maybe we should bring back the feel good official government propaganda machine that made people in the fifties to 2000 hate things like the concept of socialism so much? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Information_Agency You think it’s a coincidence that the US disbanded its official information propaganda around the same time that those ideals started picking up more (1998)? The pragmatic truth is that you can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you embrace free information - regardless of veracity - you open up a giant attack vector. And for almost no benefit other than the dumbing of society. People just don’t have the time or effort to trudge through misinformation, so we’re left with it having a profound impact on us at a national scale. This includes those from every spectrum: those that blindly call things socialism, q-anon folks, people who think it’s racist to require a voter ID just cause they’ve heard it is, people who think that Trump won the election, folks that think there is significant evidence of surface transmission of COVID, people who think that COVID isn’t real, people who think it is extremely deadly, etc. Disinformation is bad in our society and for our nations national security. If something is patently, provably false, why should that message not be stopped? The concern, of course, is who in government determines “the truth.” You can take two stances here: be a fatalist, accept misinformation, and say you could never trust the gov to do it. Or fight to make the government make bounded, reasonable, bipartisan stops against it.

This illustrates my point even more. If middle class people won’t do it, why would people who actually have no money? In my experience, unless you’re getting significantly better quality for the higher cost, people dgaf where things are produced. They’ll bitch and moan about China, but it is definitely not in the vast majority of American’s minds or capabilities to actually give a damn.

I agree with everything you said except for this. Americans don’t actually have the excess money to make market choices based on ethics or feelings - they overwhelmingly must go with the cheapest option no matter what if they want a chance at “the American dream.” You can’t blame people that don’t have excess resources for not spending them.

If you can’t address the content of the argument, you’re not really contributing.

This assumes that everyone agrees taxes are inherently fair, and that once money is taxed it is 100% fair and yours. The fact that things like the top marginal tax rate have gone from percents in the 90s to the 20s just since WWII, along with the amount of crying on both sides when taxes change in either direction really makes it hard to believe that anyone really agrees with your premise that the amount of post-tax money you have is inherently fair, just, or ethical. And if people dont agree with that, then they won’t agree with your point that $1B was necessarily obtained in an acceptable way just because it was obtained. To highlight this, if you make $500 an hour working 80 hours a week with no breaks, it will only take you… 481 years to make $1B. Oh also, this assumes no inflation, because in reality 480 years of inflation would mean you would have only been making $1 an hour to start out. I don’t care if you like it or not, but this is why people can easily question the morality of what, basically, amounts to taking other people’s labor because it’s nigh impossible to make $1B without exploitation and stealing of labor value. Finally, would you ever enter a poker competition where you get a $10 chip and have to play against the guy with $50k to get to the second round? Because that’s what it’s like for a baby born on the streets who’s trying to get the same opportunities as your Nantucket example.

The argument makes sense. Also, I’d like to point out its easier to hit a nerve here on Baseops than ever before, it seems. Here’s your founding fathers takes on inheritance. Spoilers: they didn’t believe in it. Adams: “A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural.” Jefferson: “I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, "that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living": that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it. The portion occupied by an individual ceases to be his when himself ceases to be, and reverts to the society.” More reading bemoaning this point: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.economist.com/lexingtons-notebook/2010/10/14/you-cant-take-it-with-you And no, to the secondary argument, I NEVER even partially implied that the other things in the list of 10 marxist things were good just because there were some that made sense. But I did point out that lumping together 10 disparate ideas that don’t make sense together was ineffective.

Random thought experiment to play devils advocate. Try to justify unbridled inheritance under the pretext that all men should be created equal - a decidedly American value. Not so easy, huh? Equality of opportunity, right? Inheritance doesn’t really translate to a meritocracy. Also, good luck trying to convince Americans that public schools, regulations on drinking water, improvement of soil, and abolition of child labor is bad just because a Marxist said it.

You guys going ad hominem because you don’t want to address the root of the arguments is pathetic. Joking about Navs is funny is funny if it’s good hearted, you guys are honestly taking it too far and need to stfu. That’s from a fighter pilot, since it matters so much to you guys.

No, I choose to get my data from a wide cohort of studies. I deliberately do NOT pick and choose. This included me looking very closely into things like hydroxychloriquine and mask usage. And when I find out that over 90% of them agree that one thing is more likely than the other, I go with that. Science is not some way to just pick and choose whatever you want while ignoring the other side. It’s humanity’s best method to settle emotional debates - like the one you are trying to have right now.

This argument is the perfect justification for anti-Vax moms who believe, despite evidence, that vaccines cause autism. Because feelings matter more than data! You have to realize that the whole of science is not just a liberal propaganda machine. While you may be correct that some organizations are biased, it doesn’t invalidate properly conducted studies.

On a side note, how do you have rational discussion about origination of a virus when you’re spending the majority of your time convincing 50% of Americans that the virus is even real or is killing people? Misinformation hurts productive discourse, that much we can agree on.

There’s a lot of complaining here about liberal media not putting credence to potential lab leak theories. I agree with that assessment, but it’s not even close to a pure liberal media issue. You guys lose your credibility when you fail to point out that Fox/OAN did the exact same thing by blindly supporting bogus claims. How many times was the virus a hoax on Fox? How many times was it going to be no worse than the flu on Fox? How many times was hydroxychloriquine touted as a miracle cure on Fox? Unfortunately, there comes a point where you have to place credibility in one source and disregard others. There is not enough time in the day to sift through every assertion from both sides, and most people take the easy route: they trust one network or group more. Yes it does. This is a ridiculous assertion. GWB lying about WMDs, Clinton lying about BJs, Obama lying about tax cuts - they all are bad and matter. Trump being a terrible leader is a large reason why Jan 6 happened and why the nations Covid response was so stupid. Words mean things. Words from political leaders mean more. To assert otherwise is absurd.

You have to understand that, for many voters, that is productive. You don’t have to like it, but that’s the honest truth.

Just like the economy of 16-19 was something that Obama did, but Trump gets credit for? Aside from the failed tariffs, I suppose.