Stoker
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Posts posted by Stoker
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If NATO expansion is a legitimate reason for Russia to invade sovereign nations (it isn't), why did they invade one of the countries that explicitly wasn't on a path to NATO membership?
Russia saying they don't want NATO to expand, and then invading only countries that haven't joined NATO, is incoherent and self-defeating. Putin is the greatest NATO salesman since Khrushchev.
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11 minutes ago, BashiChuni said:
so many of you guys have zero critical thinking and just parrot what the media tells you to say/think. nato has provoked russia since the early 90s with expansion. it's a fact. you can say its russian talking points as many times as you want....still doesn't make it not true.
Again, Russia does not have the right to dominate the lives of 300 million people outside its borders. We "provoked" Russia by letting democratic states align with us instead of Russia? That's like a wife-beater saying his victim provoked him by trying to leave the trailer park.
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30 minutes ago, BashiChuni said:
we need to examine HOW WE GOT HERE
putin didn't just decide to "steamroll Ukraine"
the US and NATO have provoked Russia for decades...we got here because the neocons and war hawks in government WANTED this war
The only thing that wouldn't have "provoked" Russia to war is letting them reconquer the entire former Soviet Union and the former Warsaw Pact. That's a couple hundred million people who have made it emphatically clear over the past couple centuries that they DO NOT want to be ruled by Russia. I don't think it's the US' right, power, or in its interest to tell those people crying for freedom that it's too bad, they need to submit because we don't want to offend the Russians and then have to kill them.
Europe tied it's entire energy sector to Russia to give them a reason not to have a conflict - and that didn't work, either.
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2 hours ago, gearhog said:
For those interested in how we are being involuntarily indebted for $Billions on the promise that you'll work hard and pay an increasing amount of taxes for the rest of your life, here is a list of ways fraud is being committed and enriching others at your expense, with links to government websites touting how these expenditures will ensure a prompt Russian defeat and guarantee peace and stability throughout the world.
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/06/27/gravy-train-independent-audit-ukraine/
I can't tell from this article if there's actual allegations of fraud, or if it's just bitching that we're spending money in general. If it's the former, there are avenues to address that and they don't include "Cut Ukraine loose, let the Russians roll through Europe and upend the free world order." If it's the latter, well, it's time to grow up and realize the US Government is a vehicle for shoveling money out the door to accomplish policy goals. And at ~$300 per American to stop a genocide and cripple a major threat to US foreign policy for decades, it's pretty cheap.
We spent on COVID bailouts about 45 times as much as we've spent on Ukraine. It's a rounding error in the budget.
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13 hours ago, HeloDude said:
So what you’re saying is that it has nothing to do with a dictator murdering innocent people as long as those people geographically live in on one side of a border vs another.
I'm saying the Western electorate is a lot more ok with you murdering your own people than they are with you crossing borders. I'm not saying I agree with that stance, but is the default stance of democratic nations since circa 1917.
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14 hours ago, HeloDude said:
So if you didn’t want to go to war in Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein, were you in the camp of appeasing murderous dictators? Or does this only work certain murderous dictators?
Another point—you can be anti-Putin and anti-supporting Ukraine with (what seems) an endless huge amount of taxpayer money/arms.
If the murderous dictators are only murdering "their own" people and not invading neighboring countries, it becomes a lot easier to justify not getting involved. Recall that WW2 started over Poland, not Kristellnacht.
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I mean, Taiwan doesn't explicitly support Taiwan's independence. If there's one lesson we should take away from our involvement in Afghanistan and Ukraine, it's that we should only commit to helping people who are willing to die for their cause.
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I thought the whole point of a MBCBP is that it isn't subject to the 401k limits. It's basically a funded pension pretending to be a 401k, but it's not actually in an account you own.
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18 minutes ago, brabus said:
I also don’t understand the “need” to cover yourself in pride paraphernalia…I don’t care who you love or bang, why do you need to shove it in everyone’s face?
Eh, I get it. People were getting legally persecuted for being gay less than fifteen years ago. I've been to retirement ceremonies where someone brought their partner - who they had to hide for the first ten years of their career or their career would have been over. That's sad, and the scars from that don't go away overnight.
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3 hours ago, Guardian said:
How much of that is owed to China?
China and Japan are the largest foreign holders of US debt. Japan owns slightly more than a trillion, China slightly less. So about 5% each.
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30 minutes ago, BashiChuni said:
i'm tellin ya we let zelensky hijack american foreign policy and it's going to lead us right into world war 3
so foolish from this inept biden administration
The idea of countering Russia has been US foreign policy since 1946.
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16 hours ago, Clark Griswold said:
Everyone complain of non-symptomatic headaches constantly with dizziness
Sent from my iPhone using TapatalkThey're army helicopter captains, they're already not flying.
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The fact that Minihan isn't on the short list for CSAF is why he sent that memo out. If you're not winning the game, try to play a different game.
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I don't know how it goes in T-38s, but sometime in the early academic phases of T-6s you get access to full cockpit simulators with screens. Just go practice there with a couple friends. It's basically unlimited, provided you show up early enough to beat everyone else on the sign-in sheet.
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9 hours ago, Guardian said:
Is firing squad still an option? Not even kidding. It should be. Might help turn some things around in this military of ours.
Seriously. Let's remind people what happens if you leak documents and you aren't a general or a politician.
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13 hours ago, Pooter said:
Question 1: how was capitol police so bad that the building got overrun by maga buffalo hat retards
It's not a hard question to answer. The Capitol Police were/are a glorified security guard force, where anyone competent leaves for a different federal agency ASAP. Leadership roles go to people who've stuck around by default. You spend enough time sitting by a metal detector, you eventually freeze when it comes time to start shooting.
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20 minutes ago, HeloDude said:
Why wasn’t Russia invading Ukraine in 2014 treated the same way as in 2022? Is it because Ukraine didn’t fight back in 2014 as they did in 2022? Is it because shots weren’t fired in 2014? Or is it because of something else? Because last I checked, an invasion is an invasion…
In my mind, it's pretty much because they didn't fight back in 2014. There is a plausible (if not legally legitimate) argument for Russia to own Crimea - it was the least Ukrainian part of Ukraine (thanks to successful ethnic cleansing on the part of the Soviets). Within Ukraine, there wasn't nearly as much appetite for conflict with Russia - a good chunk of the country thought they should be oriented towards Russia, not the West.
I've read a couple of the opinion polls done in Ukraine now about the war - the country is united to a level you wouldn't believe if someone told you the poll was done in the US. Something like 90% of the population is convinced they'll win the war, and virtually all of the pro-Russian sentiment is gone (not least because the people with pro-Russian sentiment were likely drafted by the Russians and sent to their deaths).
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3 hours ago, nsplayr said:
I mean I think @Stoker did a pretty good job! "Vladimir Putin is being defeated in Ukraine and America's economy is stronger because of his failed war." Put that on a bumper sticker, and also continue the policies that are making that come true.
Aww, shucks...
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14 hours ago, dream big said:
The fact that we are sending hundreds of billions of dollars to Ukraine in a time where our economy is suffering is something the Democratic nominee will have to defend, and a fact that the Republican nominee will exploit.
We've sent $75 billion of aid total, and that includes near-expired or obsolete equipment and ammunition donated at book value. The war is almost certainly a net positive for the US economy - Europe is buying gas from us instead of the Russians, the developing world is getting their grain from Iowa instead of Ukraine, and the entire world is buying American military hardware instead of post Soviet crap or indigenously developed "better than nothing" gear.
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7 hours ago, dream big said:
It was a photo op, nothing else. Stop pretending otherwise.
You don't think it might strengthen Ukrainian troops' resolve? Their are still areas of the world where the words "US president" has meaning and respect.
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5 hours ago, Lord Ratner said:
How many hundreds of billions have we invested so far?
Most corrupt? You know Russia is in Europe too, right?
We've given them something like $20b so far, but it's really all about the accounting. If an artillery shell costs $500 and has a shelf life of 20 years, does giving an artillery shell that's twenty years old to Ukraine count as a $500 cost? IIRC virtually all of the early equipment we gave to Ukraine was either obsolete already or due to be replaced in a couple years. Stingers, humvees, MRAPs... I can write a report about how these cost X to produce and we gave them to Ukraine but that doesn't account for the fact that they were destined for the scrapheap.
If you were king of defense appropriations, how much would it be worth to you if you could buy a magic button that crippled the Russian military for a decade or three?
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5 hours ago, filthy_liar said:
Jeb kinda fell into the "well, that was my dad and grandad that did that, not me" trap.
Jeb is too much of a policy wonk to survive in today's politics. No one gives a crap about how you're going to increase the effectiveness of program x by y percent. They want to hear how you'll punish people who think differently and spend money on people who think like them.
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5 hours ago, FLEA said:
Some of us don't value that very high.
Well I guess that's why we have elections. The "keep helping people kill Russians" party did historically well during the last midterms.
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3 minutes ago, torqued said:
What is that point? Just ballpark it.
The money and effort we spend supporting Ukraine will effectively terminate the ability of our second greatest foe to threaten European security at a less than nuclear scale for the next twenty years or so. I think we should spend commensurate with how much we value that goal. I don't know, man, I'm just a guy who flies planes, not a senior staffer on the Appropriations committee.
I guess my point is, the people who moan and complain about all the money we're spending on Ukraine are either willful or ignorant puppets of Russian information shaping efforts. If someone from your political party had a magic deal where, for 2% of Federal spending a year, they could reunite Europe behind a pro-US banner, crush one of our biggest enemies, generate new markets for US energy exports, and protect 45 million people from subjugation, oppression, and extermination, would you say that is a good deal?
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Was flying for the Air Force worth it?
in General Discussion
Posted
People spend years of their life pursuing the goal of becoming an Air Force pilot, and then the Air Force does its level best to make you regret it. It isn't the individual's fault that many (most?) people who go this route end up disillusioned with the bureaucracy they work in.
If you had a genuine, WW3 crisis that directly threatened the US, I think you'd have lines out the door of people willing to leave their airline jobs and put a flight suit back on.