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  • Trump's been committed to ditching NATO & allying with Putin, his sponsor/mentor, for years.

    There's even a bill on the table, now, called NATO, about the US ditching NATO.

    Chopping social-systems will please, but NOT appease, Trump,

    & it won't change his strategic-course, to ditch NATO & piecemeal butcher it, taking Greenland as a means of strangling Canada completely, then waging war against Canada, because Canada stands in his way..

    then once Canada's down, destroying the hated woke EU in a pincer between Putin & him,

    so that in the end, only Putin, Trump, Millei, Orban, etc, get to be "kings" over the butchered West, & unlimitedly unaccountable..

    It isn't a zero-sum-game they're playing: it's a negative-sum-game ( mass-shooting, except through legislations, instead of bullets, killing entire-populations, not mere-individuals ),

    & the longer it takes for people to grok that, the greater the percentage of our countries' lives they'll succeed in shedding.

  • "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. [...] The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people." - Eisenhower

    • “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. […] The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.” - Eisenhower

      This is just ideologically ignoring that there are distinct-dimensions in the proper question:

      IF you've got cancer, THEN does it make sense to stop "funding" your immune-system, because the ( 10% when you're healthy, probably 25% when you're sick, or more ) fraction of your calories which are going to violence ought be going, instead, to comfyness??

      Idiocy.

      Survival IS a basic-need, as Maslow understood, & exactly as enforcement is a basic-need within your organism, it also is within countries.

      And between them.

      "serial-murder, treason, terrorism, etc, all just need to be made to be nice, & we'll compromise with them, & everybody will be happy"

      ( I'm NOT accusing you of having spoken that, but it's a fundamental idea behind the utopian non-reality that your, & Eisenhower's, ignoring-the-different-dimensions-of-requirement is doing ) ignores that diversity-of-intent is an actual thing, & it ignores the greatness of that diversity.

      Yes, some people actually butcher others for fun.

      NOT enforcing against that, is morally criminal.

      Yes, some factions, including countries, butchers others for fun/gain/profit/kicks/whatever.

      NOT enforcing against that is also morally criminal.

      Yes, WE ( all of our countries ) have committed evil, through our means, economic, through weapons, through selective-legislations ( ask the Indigenous people about that, sometime, if you've balls enough, oh readers, & the state-sanctioned slavery of Africans was only a subset of the world's slavery that the West was profiting from, including slavery of the Indigenous people in parts of the Americas ), & countering that means enforcing accountability on our own institutions

      ( good fscking luck accomplishing that: Rule Number Zero in institutions is NEVER tolerate accountability, & once that's done, then never tolerate responsibility is the next rule ),

      & that requires ACTUAL Journalism, which no longer exists, among our world ( only ideological parodies of journalism remain, now. Sad as all fscking hell. "The Elements of Journalism" now in its 4th edition, NEEDS to be made a high-school requirement, xor our civilization won't have enough leverage to be able to survive The Great Filter, this century )..

      but to declare that simply deeming all military/enforcement spending to be fundamentally contrary to social-support/education/etc, is DISinformation.

      Whether an organism needs an immune-system or not is dependent on its context.

      Whether a country needs military-investment is dependent on its context.

      NOT an ideological-belief ( either militarist or utopian ).

      Ukraine's need for military is not an ideological delusion: it is survival-requirement.

      When Trump declares war on Canada, so as to take-possession of the entire-continent for himself, Canada's need for military will be identical to Ukraine's: extinguishment is the only alternative to fit fighting survival.

      IF Trump gets through Canada ( he's getting old: there's a time-limit on his life ), then Putin & Trump are committed to butchering the hated woke EU.

      There are many right-wingers working to butcher the EU from within, as Millei is in the process of butchering Argentina from within..

      Those who are waging negative-sum-game ( mass-shootings are negative-sum-game, competitive-narcissism is zero-sum-game ) so that they can enforce that the "woke" are ALL butchered, lost, destroyed, shed, .. are warring for their ideology to be the final "ruler" of the world.

      It is ideological/"religious", not objective, the real war we're waging.

      ClimatePunctuation, however, couldn't care less about such ideologies: it's still accelerating, & all the bullshit "consensus" that that isn't happening is just helping obliterate more future-lives, a greater percentage of humankind. ( much of India, California, Texas, Saudi Arabia, etc, ought be uninhabitable before the end of this century: Trump's rampaging of Canada will be goaded partly by the continuing acceleration of ClimatePunctuation )

      Once our world has divided into the 4-ish alliances/empires that are the max this world can sustain, in WW3, then the REAL beat-down will begin: a whole-planet deathmatch, beginning in the early 2030's. Only 1 alliance/empire/faction will survive, .. IF any do ..

      NOT fighting for our lives IS obliterating our future-generations: obliterating THEIR lives, for sake of our complacent "status quo will save us" non-effort.

      Anybody who pushes nonviolence against cancer/ebola/marburg/rabies/etc should be considered to be lethally-incompetent, at best ( how many lives did Typhoid Mary indirectly-destroy? There IS reasponsibility in both action & in inaction! ).

      The same for any who advocate appeasing/accommodating those who are investing-in & are committed-to the annihilation of civil-rights from this planet, no matter what their "colors" or "stripe" or "flag" or ideology/prejudice/"religion" be.

      Feel free to deem me evil for any/every point I put in this comment:

      I expect that there will be either 0% survival of this century by our world's humankind, .. xor there will be between 1% & 2% survival, IF some faction grows enough spine to evolve, fast, relentlessly, endlessly, until surviving The Great Filter becomes for them possible.

      All who reject that axiomatically put me in the dangerously-mentally-ill or the evil category, & that's fine.

      I expect there to be about 8 billion fewer humans left alive by 2090.

      All the ideological "you have to be in this ideology, pushing this group's dominion of our world" .. or that, .. or the other .. they're all idiotic, in my view: like idiots fighting-over which deck-chair won't drown, while in the sinking of the Titanic.

      Totally-wrong frame-of-reference.

      Species-extinguishment's the proper frame-of-reference.

      Ideological-dominion cannot win, without snuffing this world's humankind.

      Only hard-objectivity/global-(not-ideological)-pragmatism can win The Great Filter.

      & nobody's accepting the evidence's framing of it that way.

      Exactly the same as nobody is accepting that the proper framing of all the geopolitical major-players is in the 3 kinds of "games", positive-sum games ( win-win alliances, none of which are visible in the world, to me ), zero-sum games ( competitive-narcissism, which is presumed by default to be the only game in the world by us, for some delusional "reason" ), & negative-sum games ( mass-shootings, genocides, what Putin, the Republican Party, Millei, Orban, Musk, & many others are doing only matches this, or a mixture of this & zero-sum game ).. nobody is accepting the correct-framing, so therefore everybody is "not seeing the forest for the trees", & losing their perspective in the political-details..

      & that is much of why I don't believe that more than 2% of humankind CAN survive this century, now..

      IF you won't know that the thrumming in the rails is the oncoming train, AND you're sitting on the tracks holding your sprained ankle, howling for attention ( ideological-conforming/belonging/dominion, remapped ), THEN getting splatted throughout the sky is Universe's right to enforce on you, right?

      IF, instead, you realize that the 200mph train's coming barely in time for most of you to survive getting out of its way, but all your friends die, aerosolized by the impact.. that isn't on Nature, that's on you, right? The telegraphing of what Nature was about to be doing was happening within your awareness's reach, but it was your belief that was vetoing it, right?

      The geopolitical-shitshow we're embedded-in was set up centuries ago.

      Our preventing this specific demise of the US of A would have required that education be nationally-organized/funded in the US for .. an entire century?

      Read Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" & understand that Kahneman & Tversky's "System 1", the imprint-reaction system, IS ideology/prejudice/"religion"'s basis.

      Read "Top Brain / Bottom Brain" & understand that "System 1" is lower-forebrain.

      Then understand that upper-forebrain requires LOTS of training to get it operating, its being allowed to "vote" in our world is dependent on its relative strength, compared with lower-forebrain, & that the 1st thing that Lenin, Rupert Murdoch, the Republicans, cults, religions, etc, ALL do, is they eradicate considered-reasoning from education, so as to prevent considered-reasoning/critical-thinking from gaining control, ever again..

      It's FAR too late to save the US of A's life, now.

      It may be too late to save humankind's life..

      Pretending that "there will be time: Universe will pause & wait for us, because it revolves around us!" as we've been doing, means that, at this point in our evolution, we may deserve Universe's extinguishing us: if we WON'T think, then natural selection ought clean our kind off from the map.

      Let some actually intelligent life evolve, instead.

      Yeah, I'm getting bitter, in my old age, but humankind's WON'T think galls, & being gaslit about it, on top, only galls more.

      shrug

      _ /\ _

    • Kewl. If only there wasn't a country that invaded another country on our borders, that openly talks about invading even more, fucking about with our utilities and using spies, the internet and sabotage to fuck around even more.

      A comfy life needs to be secured with military might, like it or not. Otherwise you get assholes in shitholes trying to forcefully take it from you. Rome knew that, the US knows that, the EU knows this (otherwise it wouldn't exist - since it is made to increase bargaining power and contains mutual defense clauses).

      So until Russia stops being a militaristic shithole that invades its neighbors and starts building those schools, power plants, hospitals and highways, we need to spend taxes on military. And yes, Russia is a threat - Georgia shown us, 2014 has shown us, 2022 has shown us.

    • When did the US elect a COMMUNIST

  • Why can’t we just distance ourselves from this? Why must we appease him!? 😡

    • We dont lol Americans think we are because we increase the military spending. We are also not cutting social spending

  • Opinion article. Also they missed many NATO Top nuances, like the whole political game. But yes, NATO members in Europe have been spending more, and more defense is and was needed.

  • I don't even know why my country is still in this cesspool. NATO is nothing more than an American subsidiary that forces others to buy its shit. My country has the atomic bomb, which is the only necessary thing to guarantee our sovereignty in the very long term. No reason to invest 5% of our GDP in additional death machines, especially when our debt is astronomical.

    • If we don't win this war now that it's limited to Ukraine, Putin will spread it to first Baltics and then Finland once he his army has regained enough strength. Unless we have developed our defense capabilities sufficiently by that.

      We need to be ready for the event that France and Germany decide that Ukraine should fall. And if at that point the only countries that have a serious ability to defend against the Russia are Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, then the economy of northwestern EU will be in shambles. And that will definitely affect the rest of EU, including whatever country you are from.

      If the whole EU is interested in repelling the Russia when it attacks, then it probably won't even attack. But if only the countries bordering it are interested in that, it abaolutely will attack the northeastern EU. And then your bread will get a lot more expensive.

104 comments