• ddh@lemmy.sdf.org
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    3 days ago

    “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

    • Paragone@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      “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

      _ /\ _

    • Maalus@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      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.

      • Quadhammer@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        I don’t disagree. But teddy had it right when he said speak softly but know when to swing your big dick

        • Maalus@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          And there it is, everything is NATOs fault. If only we gave everything to Russia, the world would be saved.

          Tell me, why are there no more Tatars in Crimea?

          • Valmond@lemmy.world
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            3 days ago

            This is like URSS bingo:

            1. They were deported

            2. They were starved to death

            3. They were sent to war

            • Maalus@lemmy.world
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              3 days ago

              Compared to before, no, there aren’t. There has been an ongoing genocide since the tsarist times, that the soviet union “finished”. Thousands of people completely relocated. That’s why people are “wary” of Russia - because it is a genocidal state since time immemorial.

              • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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                3 days ago

                Compared to before, no, there aren’t.

                Well, that can be said about Greeks and Armenians in Crimea as well as Crimean Tatars. That’s because after Stalin’s forced movement to Kazakhstan (which is barbaric act, of course) or wherever, when descendants of those people were allowed to return, they were more likely to move elsewhere in the union. And after 1991 Greeks would often repatriate, well, to Greece, changing the ethnic character of the whole Russian and Ukrainian Black Sea coast, and Crimean Tatars to Turkey.

                I think you also underestimate the role of Sevastopol. Purely due to strategic importance there’d be people coming from all parts of the empire and the union, and the “melting pot culture” there was Russian.

                There has been an ongoing genocide since the tsarist times,

                That’s a weird way to say this, before Crimea becoming part of the Russian Empire the actual Crimean Khanate didn’t exist for too long. It seems you have a misconception of Crimean Tatars being some sort of the native population of Crimea. They were not. They were a nomad vassal state to the Ottoman Empire, conquerors themselves. They weren’t the majority there ethnically under that khanate either.

                That’s why people are “wary” of Russia - because it is a genocidal state since time immemorial.

                That’s gross from someone who’s likely a US-American or a European. Also “time immemorial” doesn’t quite mean what you seem to think.

                • Maalus@lemmy.world
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                  3 days ago

                  So they invaded Poland to get back at the US? Like they invaded Poland in 1920 when they got their ass handed to them by a newly sovereign country? Just like they are doing now to Ukraine?

                  • Maalus@lemmy.world
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                    3 days ago

                    The funny part is that Russia literally did it first, they occupied Poland for 123 years. Then Poland was reformed after WW1, along with Lithuania. Then of course the Russians attacked Poland 2 years after it was reformed / independent, and got their teeth kicked in so hard, they had to wait 20 years to try again and ally with Nazi Germany to succeed.

        • Valmond@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          Stop protecting yourselves! Or I’ll attack!!

          Do you know why NATO exists?