The
U.S. Air Force has announced that it is ordering AMRAAM missiles worth $1.15
billion from Raytheon Missiles and Defense to supply to Ukraine, the U.S. Department of Defense reported on June 20.
I gotta say, the tankie infestation of the fediverse is giving me serious second thoughts about this place. I get that it will get better over time as more people join and dilute the crazies, but I currently have a very hard time suggesting lemmy to people because of this.
So what, am I going to defederate from lemmy.world which is like the most generic possible instance but posts there still attract these loonies? At that point I can just ditch the fediverse because it's useless as a reddit replacement.
No, that doesn't "say a lot about me" at all. I keep having to block tankies and similar shit bubbling up from lemmygrad. I've not seen an open nazi post here yet but if I see one be assured it gets the banhammer as well and "nazis" gets added to my growing list of "insane fringe groups prominent on lemmy which I never had to interact with on reddit".
No kidding. Who is honestly against moves like this? I mean very few issues are black and white and defending Ukraine is as close to being on the right side of history as one can get. They were invaded by a much larger country that suppressed them for so long. They are a democracy that is trying really hard to further the will of their people. Russians are committing genocide against the local population. Supporting Ukraine and watching the Ukrainians fight back for their freedom is one of the few great parts of history that inspires.
Who is honestly against moves like this? I mean very few issues are black and white and defending Ukraine is as close to being on the right side of history as one can get.
Says every single chickenhawk in this country every time there's a war. There is always an excuse.
Vietnam: They attacked us in the Gulf of Tonkin (which was false) and we have to fight communism!
Iraq 1983: We have to help Saddam Hussein defeat Iran. It's the right thing to do!
Iraq 2003: They did 9/11 and they have WMD's! (They didn't.) We killed a few hundred thousand Iraqis anyway just to make Halliburton a shit-ton of money.
Afghanistan: The Taliban is evil! (True, but that doesn't mean we should go bankrupt policing them permanently.)
And it's only a matter of time before any justifications for Ukraine blow up in your faces too. There's already been a ton of reporting on the corruption in the Ukrainian government this year. We'll learn more about that as we get even further entrenched into this war.
If you'd been paying attention you'd notice that since 2014 the Ukrainians have been modernising their political and military. The previous governments were infamously corrupt and were dislodged by a popular uprising. This government has made great strides to uproot systemic corruption. It's not perfect but they are certainly improving and need to be encouraged in this and their efforts to dislodge the Russian invaders.
Simply parroting Russian talking points (eg: corruption) will not do.
You're right, what excuses do the Russian invaders have for Ukraine? It sure blew up in their faces. And I hope it continues to until the invaders return to their miserable little circle of hell thry built for themselves.
Except if you actually lived in Russia in the 80-90's moved to the west, saw the life here and look where putler is going towards with his so called "rule of law", you would actually understand why it matters to stop that idiot. Out of the two clearly both evil, self serving entities of Nato or Russia, I know under which I would much rather live, even if neither is perfect.
Corruption happens everywhere, look at a UK, scandal after scandal, after scandal, do those involved in scandals resign? You wish they did, no those cocks cling on to power like a bad std. Only recently we had a string of relatively high profile resignation which had to be forced.
Sorry ranted on, but really the problem is that putlers regime is actually evil, Ukranians are dying to protect the rest of Europe from them. So paying for sending weapons to them is the least that I think I can personally do. For America it is better to stop putler before he attacks a Nato country and you would have to send your soldiers on the ground here.
(By the way, I agree with your Iraq statement, it was always about resources, and so is this war for putler, just look where "conveniently" gas deposits were found in 2012....)
Except that in this case the situation really is black and white, no grey area. A peaceful sovereign country was invaded by some genocidal fucks and it is our duty to help them. Corruption is not an excuse to stop the support, because Ukraine is actively trying to sort it out too. They know what life is like in the EU and they want more of that.
For the record, I live in EU, some 60 miles from the nearest russian military base. I have personal interest in Ukraine's victory because if it falls, then my country might be next.
Why do you have to bring whataboutism into this? I'm not talking about the past, I'm talking about this current war right now. It's extremely clear who are the good guys here.
America will always fight wars because their interests in resources, political alliances, and ideological stability. It's for the money. It's always the money at the end.
America is the cultural and military hegemon due to the proliferation of free trade enforced through an unmatched navy. America becomes more powerful by maintaining this status quo. It's why dangers to the oil supply have driven 3 out of the 4 examples you rightfully point out. Sadly the Middle East is the oilbasket of the world with the worst borders ever designed. If you want energy, you spread influence there.
However, there is one instance where the interests of the USA align with the general interest of the average Westerner.
People don't like democracies getting invaded. And potential democratic trade partners getting invaded is bad for business. You can have both at the same time. I will not defend the Gulf War under this banner, but the faster that we can prove that land grabs are nonnegotiable in this Pax Americana, the better.
And also, you don't have to convince me that war is inefficient. I've read Catch-22. But you do have to convince me that the destabilization of the breadbasket of Europe (and the world) is less important than the opportunity cost of a couple million lost to a few hundred corrupt officials.
What I see are some dissenting opinions and then people parroting US government talking points browbeating and downvoting them. Russia is absolutely wrong for invading Ukraine, but let's not overlook the US government using Ukraine as a pawn to advance its own geopolitical ambitions, similar to how it benefited from arming groups in Afghanistan when Russia invaded there.
I'm hoping Lemmy provides for more nuanced and diverse discussion instead of brigading and shouting down of opinions simply for going against the officially-approved narrative of the US government.
Nobody in their right mind is hating on the USA for not being world police. It's just White Man's Burden in disguise. Oh dear me you're so burdened by having to civilize the rest of the world, boohoo. Nobody asked them to, people even push back against it, and yet they do it anyway and then have the gall to complain about how much doing so is inconvenient. Then, two minutes later, the USA will complain about "sovereignty" and pretend they aren't encroaching on sovereignty every time they pretend to be world police.
International injustices like the US helping the Saudis genocide Yemenis? The problem is that the US is self-serving in its self-appointed role of world police. They don't care about injustices and only use (or even create) them as excuses to carry out selfish geopolitical objectives.
What's sad is how little our country knows of war outside of the US propaganda machine. We spend more on war in one year than the next ten countries combined, and those countries mostly have health care systems that don't bankrupt their people. Canada, for instance, spends a mere 23 billion a year on war.
We on the other hand don't have health care so our country can involve itself in eight or nine wars at once, and our people think it's a good thing because they can't form a coherent thought outside of what they're being told on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC.
US spends about as much per capita on healthcare as many other developed countries. The issue is that your insurance companies pocket a lot of it. Be angry at them, not at Ukraine or the weapons going to Ukraine.