DebateGate
General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: Plane on February 11, 2016, 11:23:10 PM
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That sounded good for a bit, then he seemed to start saying that he mostly meant the military.
As if the Military were not already the branch of government the most cut in recent years.
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It is also the branch that has no real cost supervision on hugely expensive weapons that are of very dubious value for the defense of the country.
We have overspent like drunken sailors on weapons and the military since WWII. There are many industries that love the non competitive nature of
military weaponry. All they have to do is say it is secret. There is no foreign competition, and very little national competition.
The F 35 fighter and the additional aircraft carrier and all its backup boats are not necessary. We do not need three air forces.
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So Sanders is unaware that the military has already been cut a lot since the 1980s?
Bush, Clinton ,Bush and Obama have benefited from the Reagan "peace dividend" a lot .
So now it could well be argued that we have barely enough military to fulfill our obligations of treaty.
Lets get the rest of NATO to get off of their duffs.
It is ridiculous that France has ONE carrier, England has ONE carrier and Spain has one carrier that is very old.
Lets persuade our allies to spend a lot more on their strength and then after that reduce our spending in the same scale.
The other choice is to relax the free world while the enslaved world is stirring.
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What precisely is the "enslaved world" these days?
Russians and Chinese are free to travel wherever they want, the same for all the Eastern European countries except perhaps Belarus.
That leaves North Korea, Eritrea, Belarus and maybe a couple other African nations.
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I agree with your list , but why is it so short?
Is freedom easily found in most of the world ?
Would you not include the territory where Boko Haram and Isis hold sway?
And is the freedom of Russia really first quality?
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Boko Haram is not going to be defeated by F 35's or aircraft carrier groups. It is in Nigeria, and is not a country.
The freedom of individual Russians is not something that will be improved by the US ,military. Get serious.
The term "free world" was always a prppaganda term and now it is simply meaningless and obsolete when it applies to the defense of this country.
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There is an enslaved part of the world and we have already established agreement that North Korea is a prime member of that .
Does this have to be only fully fledged and recognized countries?
I also agree with you that the enslaved world is smaller now Post Reagan.
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The term is NOT "post Reagan".
It is "post Gorbachov".
Reagan has nothing to do with the collapse of the USSR. All he did was talk about tering down the Berlin Wall, after which years passed before it happened.
He was not Joshua, and the Berlin Wall was not Jericho,
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Hahahahahahaha!
Gorbachov made a serious effort to save the Soviet Union, a theoretical alternate president would ,perhaps, have helped him do that.
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Nonetheless, it was Gorbachov that decided not to send troops to prevent East Germans from escaping, first to Austria.
The ones who really tore down the wall were the Germans on both sides of it. Of course, the E German Volkspolizei did their part by doing nothing to stop them. Reagan has zilch to do with it. He was drifting off in Altzheimerland by then.
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You think Kennedy did nothing too?
The Soviet Union was a tough nut, Reagan did not destroy it by himself.
...but his shaming of the Evil Empire , his shaking a finger at the wall , his military buildup that the Soviets could not afford to counter, were all effective parts of the grand anti-communist conspiracy.
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Reagan did not destroy it at all.
That "Reagan defeated the USSR and tore down the wall" crap is just that: crap.
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That is not precisely what I am saying.
Reagan certainly did not act alone everything he did could have been undone by the Soviets of earlier years, before the years of disillusionment had eroded the faith of the Soviet man.
Reagan certainly did not act alone if there had not been previous presidents that weakened and bled the USSR with words and deeds secret and public the Soviets might not have been so demoralized and weak. President Carter as a standout example.
The leaders of other Nations and the Catholic church also took effective actions and multitudes of individuals learned and acted Matthias Rust being an unusual example flying into the USSR while many thousands voted with their feet trying to get out.
So I can't maintain that Reagan alone ended the Soviet Union, but he was a big part of the leadership and direction that brought a long festering corruption to the point it could erupt, And because the people within the Iron Curtain were so ready for it that they lanced the boil from within , this happened without the millions of casualties that had been so long predicted.
So Reagan was not alone , perhaps not even indispensable , but Reagan led when many were too timid Reagan led.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGVaoF3cqe4&feature=player_detailpage
This is why President Sanders will certainly be a wartime president.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZgyCLJOofw&feature=player_detailpage
Al Jezera view of Drone program.
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Yeah, right. Putin wants to conquer the entire world.
What a crook!
Peddle that crap somewhere else. I ducked and I covered. It was all nonsense.
Ben there, done that, it was bullshit then, it is bullshit now.
The US simply has to recognize that Ukraine and the mostly Russian populated parts of Georgia are part of the Russian sphere of influence.
Syria has been a Russian ally for 60 years. It has NEVER been an ally or even on good terms with the US, and won't be, because it is Israel's enemy.
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So Putin is building a new fleet of ballistic missile submarines and developing a harder to block ballistic missile, to fight the incursions of insurgents in Syria?
Perhaps Putin is doing all this major weapon development because President Obama is frightening to him?
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The US has dedicated itself to encircling Russia and depriving it of the former Soviet republics.
The idiot Republican candidates in the debates spent a lot of time talking about how they wanted to arm and ally this country with Ukraine.
That would be an error.
Putin was indoctrinated with the same bogus Cold War hokum the military seems to have indoctrinated you with.
The Ukrainians have themselves to blame for the mess their country is in. The US has spent millions trying to provoke Russia over Ukraine.
Money wasted that will only end up costing us even more.
Crimea was never really a part of Ukraine. It never had more than a small minority of Ukrainian citizens.The parts of Georgia Russia annexed were majority Russian as well.
It would be insanity to give NATO membership to either Ukraine or Georgia as one of the Republicans said.
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Don't a lot of the citizens of the captive nations want to get away from Russia?
I think it is self destructive for Russia to keep them.
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Russia is the business of the Russians. If it is bad for the Russians to keep "captive nations", then that is their problem, not ours. The US cannot mold the entire world to its liking and it is a waste of money and effort to even try.
Belarus is the only really oppressive ex-Soviet nation. It poses no threat to the US or any significant US interest. No matter who runs Ukraine, it is far more important to the Russians Poles and other neighboring countries than to the US.
We have 6% of the world's population. It is absurd to continue this idiotic Cold War fantasy.
Russia has its sphere of influence, Europe has another, China another and the US has more influence that its small population merits. The American government should stop meddling in everyone's business. It does not make one bit of difference to anyone in this country whether China controls ths Spratley Islands
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So you don't like the United Nations?
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That has nothing to do with any of this.
How many American lives are the Spratley Islands worth?
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Since we have sent a carrier battle group through recently , ten thousand or so .
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They were not killed. Perhaps a few might have caused dirty looks, but I doubt that they were close enough to see them.
The Chinese are not dumb enough to fire on a US warship. They need our markets. What is going on between the US and China is ritual posturing.
It is rather like the border closing ritual at the India-Pakistan border.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC9NeJh1NhI
But less colorful. The Ministry of Silly Walks meets the Defense of the Fatherland.
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This is a border dispute.
It seems to be worth tens of thousands of Chinese lives so far devoted to the project.
We will probably find it has been worth the extinction of a few fish species as well.
At stake are many tons of first rate food and a few complete oil fields.
Perhaps this will resolve itself , a major storm or tsunami is liable to shatter these sand islands , it is hard to believe that they are safe human habitat.
So the number of Chinese lives this issue is worth?
Pilipino and Japanese and Vietnamese lives?
If the wider issue of freedom of transit of the oceans is considered , we are all involved.
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The Chinese can fish without building up these islands. There are no Filipino or Vietnamese living anywhere nearby. Why the Chinese would be more likely to fish a species to extinction than Americans, Filipinos, Vietnamese or anyone else is a very dubious proposition. If there is oil, the American people would not benefit. No American should be asked to die for ExxonMobil, Shell or Texaco.
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With these territorial claims they do plan to prevent the fisheries from being available to any other nations.
Perhaps you do not like fish, but to the Philippines, Japanese, and Vietnamese reduced access to fishing is a big deal.
I was not thinking about overfishing, for which the Chinese are just as likely to improve the situation by reducing the access to fishing.
The Chinese by building islands of dredged material are covering large areas of reef with sand and mud, killing the reef and very likely already causing some extinctions in reef fish.
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The United States and the rest of the world has acted as thought these islands did not exist since forever. Now that the Chinese have found a use for them, the US wants to defend them. And this is not about the damned fish. This is like a playground dispute. Marco Rubio somehow sees this as a reason for war or something. It isn't.
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Fish as food is important.
What is the overall effect you would expect for doubling the cost of protein in Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines?
Most of these islands were submerged at high tide, the point of building them up isn't nice beaches.
There is a very important principal of freedom of the seas , which has been important to the USA since we fought the Barbary Pirates rather than pay them a transit fee.
There is incidentally an oil field that might be pretty big, but oil could be shared in the manner that north sea oil is shared between Scotland Norway and England. I don't think that monopolizing the oil is as important as the fishing rights.
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Since the islands belong to SOMEBODY and that somebody has territorial limits around the islands, this is NOT a "freedom of the seas" Issue. Bt the way the So has refused to sign the Law of the Seas treaty.
One thing is clear: these islands or whatever they are, are NOT US property. Therefore, US laws will NOT apply if China is shut out of expoitation of the islands. If it is about oil, US companies have made some of the greater oil messes on this planet and are clearly not better than anyone else.
So if it is about fish, then it mush be because the US thinks Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan or whoever will have more strict fishing laws than the Chinese. If the fish are a resource, it makes no sense for any nation to overfish.
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These islands do not have a legal existence , do you scoff at the notion of international law?
Could the USA build a chain of new islands around the rim of the Gulf of Mexico and claim all the ocean enclosed within as our exclusive territory ?