it aint that funny, many of us are rethinking spreading our American Freedom around the world. We (our ancestors) all came here because we wanted freedom. Why didn't everybody just come here? On a bad day I wish I could just eliminate congress and the president and decree as dictator exactly how it should be. Different strokes for different folks, but sometimes I think they just aint ready for our kind of democracy.
Why the Iran Nuclear Agreement is Good for the U.S., Israel, and the Mideast
- Thread starter piezoe
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Most of our continuous wars were fought for control of resources and hence profits. Nowadays the military is just an adjunct of corporate America. We encourage Young men and women to go forth and be slaughtered, by telling them they are fighting to preserve our freedoms (considerably diminished nowadays), and we glorify their pointless deaths. They are not dying to preserve our freedoms; they are dying to preserve Corporate Profits, or for various other nefarious reasons, invariably lied about and having nothing to do with preserving freedoms.
We are exceedingly clever at hiding from the public, and even the Congress, the real motives behind our attacks and invasions. When the W. wanted to kill Saddam Hussein because he had threatened his Daddy, he made up lies about weapons of mass destruction. When those lies were exposed, he claimed we were democracy building; hardly a justification for destroying a country and killing and maiming thousands, and wasting a Trillion dollars ..
When the U.S. paid for the cost (90%) of the French Indochina war it was over the vast agricultural, mineral, and petroleum resources of the area. When the French gave up, we invented the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify the continued killing, which cost a trillion dollars (2003 dollars) on top of what we spent to get the French, who wanted a share of the resources, to fight in Indochina
http://www.history.com/news/the-gulf-of-tonkin-incident-50-years-ago
We would actually be far more free if we didn't continually start these wars and stopped interfering in the internal affairs of other countries. ..
The U.S. is not the only criminal, terrorist nation, but that is no excuse...
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Wanting freedom had practically nothing to do with why most Europeans, the British, and the Scandinavians came to the New World. That is pure Sunday School bullshit.
Not sure about your conclusion. If we didn't start 'em, the other guy would.
I agree with most of that, but if we withdrew our military from the rest of the world, the standard of living here would suffer. Probably starting with the dollar being eased out as the world's reserve currency.
If we, or one of our allies whom we are bound by treaty to defend, are attacked by another nation using conventional, or nuclear weapons, the U.S. has considerably more than enough resources to defend itself and strike back!
We have no highly effective defense against rogue terrorists using unconventional means and willing to sacrifice their own lives. At best we can hope to thwart some fraction of these attacks at tremendous cost. All risk from terrorism can not be eliminated. The cost benefit ratio of anti-terrorist measures is highly non-linear. Costs, whether monetary or loss of privacy and freedom, can escalate by a power of ten although providing insignificant additional reduction in risk. That is due to the nature of terrorism. Although still imperfect, our best, and most cost effective, defense against terrorist attacks is to conduct our foreign affairs in a way that would not give cause to potential terrorists to attack us. Up to now, we have, for the most part, ignored this realty.
Other than not shipping arms into warring regions and supplying humanitarian aid, we should not involve ourselves unilaterally in the wars of nations we are not bound by treaty to defend. We should not invade or attack other nations unless they attack us. We should desist from unilaterally interfering in the internal affairs of other nations unless there is first a consensus among nations and multilateral action is possible..
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I'd have to think about that. I would think it might be the other way around with regard to living standards.
The dollar was once the sole reserve currency, it now shares that status to a some extent. It is certain to share that status more and more going forward. This reserve role, since the demise of Bretton Woods, is far more dependent on the strength of the U.S. economy than on military might. There is also an activation barrier to adopting other reserve currencies. Another factor is relative currency stability. No one wants a reserve currency that oscillates all over the place. But by far the number one reason the U.S. Dollar is likely to remain the most used reserve currency for quite some time is that the world is awash in dollars. Central banks everywhere have big dollar reserves to facilitate trade, and for other reasons. It is in the best interest of these banks, and their respective nations, that they maintain policies that are supportive of the dollar, within reason of course. The last thing anyone wants is a run on the dollar, where everyone trips over everyone else to see who can dump their dollars the fastest. That's not going to happen.
I see that I, in my response to Ricter's pithy remark, cleverly ignored the number one reason that there is a demonstrable ceiling on the number of terrorist attacks: the number of young people that can be convinced to blow themselves up is strictly limited. We tend to give ourselves too much credit for the effectiveness of our hundreds of billions spent on homeland "security", when the absence of attacks is due to something else.