TheSanSabaSongbird

Well, that and the fact that the DPRK is being held hostage by one of the world's most successful organized crime families. Had North Korea won, the only difference would be that the Kim family would control all of Korea. I don't think it's accurate to say that the US made the Kims what they are.

One thing that I think is not widely appreciated enough, especially by younger people, is how much the fear of a third world war dominated the 2nd half of the 20th century. I don't point this out as any kind of moral justification on anyone's part, but rather as an explanation that is far more convincing than the simple US bad, communism good and vice versa that is so common on social media.

We have to remember that the men behind all of these events had survived the largest war in human history and absolutely believed in the possibility of even worse to come. It informed everything about how they thought about the world. How could it not? The things they had seen and experienced first hand were, as they say, the stuff of nightmares.

The answer to your question is this; do the math. It turns out that it's less expensive to cover everyone than it is to rely on a system wherein illegals can only access healthcare at the ER.

It really is as simple as that.

Yep. Same here. That said, both of my parents are already deceased, and I don't have anything to show for it, which is fine, since I never expected anything in the first place.

I'm going to try to do better for my daughter.

I don't think that's it at all. In reality, many and probably most Trump supporters are perfectly nice, kind and decent people on an individual basis when it comes to how they operate on a day-to-day basis.

In my experience most of them are simply poorly-informed and/or have a very limited understanding of the world outside of their cloistered information ecosystem.

The problem isn't so much that they are fundamentally "cruel" or hateful, but rather is that our current information economy is such that it's easy and comfortable for them to live in a sort of unreality that silos them off into tribal-like identities that are self-reinforcing and that as such, create a kind of impermeable membrane that's almost impossible to penetrate.

That this is so, is not an accident. It comes as an almost inevitable reaction to the fact that for decades now, large swathes of working class white people have been faced with the fact that their interests don't matter, that no one gives a shit about them, and that the powers that be are more than willing to sell their livelihoods out for the profit of a few elites.

Trumpism is obviously not the answer.

It's a con job, a fake out, but it feels like the right kind of "fuck you" to a lot of people who hate what globalization has done to their communities.

This has created a kind of tribalistic identity politics that can't be solved for through things like objective reality.

The only way out is to acknowledge that there are vast swathes of working-class people throughout the West who feel disenfranchised and who cannot be ignored, no matter how much we may think of them as spoiled babies.

The 20th century called and wants its foreign policy back!

Long story short, while what you say is historically true, it has little or nothing to do with current reality and in fact, your version is insulting and unwelcome to current Latin American nations inasmuch as it's a story that privileges Anglo-American narratives as somehow having primacy.

Go ahead and go fuck yourself.

Scarcely. You're concerned to make an irrelevant point about the US when in fact we're trying to have an intelligent discussion about the CCP.

Nobody cares. Shut the fuck up. There is no lack of venues in which one can appropriately bitch about the US, but this is not one, you whiney little fucker.

You want to change the subject because it's obvious that you're uncomfortable with people questioning the CCP's authoritarian tendencies.

If you were OK with it, you wouldn't feel the need to trot out your deeply condescending and stupid whataboutism.

Whoosh!

Or, you know, not the party that is openly authoritarian and anti-democracy. We don't have to like Kinzinger's politics, but let's not be fucking morons and misrepresent the reasons why he's turned against his own party. That's good for no one.

And yet, there was a considerable portion of the western press that very much did question the WMD narrative, most notably in the US, Gannet, which still owns more newspapers than any other publisher in North America.

I had recently finished up an undergrad degree in journalism at the time and it was very obvious to anyone who was paying attention that people were selectively consuming whatever news told them what they wanted to hear. A huge portion of the country went bat shit crazy after 9/11 and had no interest whatsoever in listening to anyone who urged caution. At the time I worked for a local paper in California's Central Valley and we were basically called traitors every time we questioned the narrative at all.

And yet somehow you found room to believe that they are able to secretly control the major wire services. In a thread full of deeply stupid ideas, this one is probably the stupidest of all.

I'm sorry, there's just no way to be polite about it.

That's why China is such good friends with all of its neighbors, amirite?

It's whataboutism.