Ah. Then looks like it either really was that close or it’s staged.

That’s the question, isn’t it? He’s old so it’s hard to tell. This is coming out so fast.

Here, here!

He could remove aid but I doubt he could convince Congress and the American people to help Russia. Plus, his whole pro-Russia thing with respect to the war has been posed as an isolation thing. Maybe I’m wrong, though. He’s not afraid to be a hypocrite. A Trump candidacy is depressing and I’ve been trying not to dwell on the possibility of it tbh.

That’s a huge simplification of what that means. But if you’re going to deny the long history of NATO being an extension of American power and a way to legitimize their military conflicts around the world from Libya to Iraq, then there isn’t really anywhere to go next in this conversation.

Okay, that’s quite the straw man, but now I get your confusion, because you’re making up arguments you think I’m making. I never said “everybody evil because puppets of US”.

I made a single sentence criticizing NATO (because often America is bad believe it or not and they’re the main superpower behind it). Everything else you’re assuming or making up. People can believe other non-US countries, including Russia or China or other Western countries, can be bad, can support Ukraine in their war against Russia, and still think that NATO is an arm of US imperialism. Some people are capable of holding these multiple non-conflicting thoughts in their head at the same time. It’s not whataboutism, because it’s related to NATO the whole topic of this thread, it’s just adding to the conversation and exploring the nuance of it all. But I forgot that NATO and the US can do no wrong and is a perfect angel at all times, so that’s my fault for saying anything. Would you feel better if I said Western imperialism so it wasn’t so specific to the US, though?

It wasn’t a good question nor was it asked in good faith. I answered what I could with some context. It’s like asking if we know the world would have no wars after we got rid of the Nazis and all the evil in the world would disappear. Well, no, obviously not, but that it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t improve things.

But they get more money if people have to rent their games forever than if they can own things. It’s happening with everything really and companies always want the most profit.

It would definitely weaken a ton although I doubt it would immediately dissolve, although its power is heavily based on our leadership and military and anyone who doesn’t see that is pretty naive. Hopefully Europe would help Ukraine enough to make up for us having Trump and probably not helping them anymore, though.

NATO is an arm of American imperialism so it’s relevant to the article and conversation at hand.

Thanks!

It’s a civil engineering disasters podcast. I’ve heard them before, they’re actually pretty good. I like them but it requires looking at slides, so doesn’t really fit listening on my commute so I haven’t gotten too far, though. Usually they’ve got pretty good information so I doubt they’d say anything outrageously untrue unless they’re joking. There are a couple laymen in there just to tell jokes and put some banter in between the civil engineering and retelling history, so I could imagine one of them saying something like that jokingly, or one of the engineers, who has a really dry sense of humor, saying something like that, but I haven’t listened to this particular episode. But anyway, that’s probably why it meanders a bit throughout. Because the podcasts style. Anyway, just saying so people don’t have a negative reaction of the podcast from this reply because it’s not a bad one lol.

Got a time stamp or anything?

So have Muslims and Christians. Doesn’t give them the right to kill all the other people and take their land. Not to mention everything they do to encourage settler colonialism, like giving settlers a free pass from Europe or the US to come in and take homes from natives in the area. You can find so many examples of random people from Germany or New York who show up and are given a house that belonged to some Palestinian family for generations.

If the occupying state is dismantled, how can one live peacefully with the people who tortured you, your family and society for decades and made your life hell…

South Africa pulled it off. But yes, it basically required dismantling the state completely from what it was. South Africa as it existed before and after apartheid are essentially different states with the same name. They got a new Constitution and everything. They still have a lot of problems with the white population having a majority of the land and money, but there’s nowhere near the violence there was beforehand. Everyone mostly lives in peace together now. It can be done. The same thing happened with the IRA in the UK.

We would need to do the same thing. Dismantle Israel completely down to its roots, build something new in the same place from scratch, a place for both Palestinians and Israelis can live together. Some people would be pissed and there’d be some trouble in the beginning, but most people want to live in peace.

Are people seriously still saying this shit when we see this news story almost every year?

Even your own article shows how bad faith that argument is, but it’s from the US so it makes sense. The US media loves their propaganda. It points out that US laws makes it impossible for a ship to dock at the US for 180 days after docking at Cuba. They regularly fine and sanction foreign countries and foreign companies when dealing with Cubans. A ton of banks have stopped dealing with Cuba because of this. They also prevent US used goods from being traded to Cuba when it is a part of a bigger thing, so if any part of a foreign made product has something from the US, it can’t be traded over. This ends up including tons of medical equipment, farming equipment, scientific equipment, etc. There’s a bunch of other laws, too. Family members can’t even wire over remittances any more without paying tons of money.

Of course they can’t force other companies but they make it nearly impossible for companies to trade with the US and Cuba if they want to make a profit. Especially considering the power of the dollar in the US market. That’s what makes it a blockade. Saying a bunch of these facts while giving a “false” is extremely bad faith. It’s like saying Trump didn’t cause January 6th because he didn’t tell people directly to riot. It’s a very surface reading.

The Cuban government of course isn’t perfect, but that doesn’t detract from the power the US has on them. Plus, when the Republicans went to protest on January 6th it was against their own government, but that doesn’t mean they had a point. Most of the protests were from power failures, long food and medicine lines, and Covid lock downs, which is partly the government’s fault and partly the US’s for making them a poor country and restricting their ability to get medicine and make food through the sanctions I mentioned above. And partly just Covid’s fault, every country dealt with that. But the President went out and talked with them, and the country ended up making some economic reforms recently. That’s more than I’ve seen the US ever do in response to protests lol. If we really want to know if the Cuban government is so terrible, you should support the US lifting the embargo so the government can ruin itself. It obviously hasn’t destroyed the government over the last 60 years anyway.

Wtf is that third thing? Are you confusing it with the thing Trump did, refusing to give them funds until they make up dirt on Biden? Because what you said was weird and untrue. The first two things were.

Hopefully this is a wake up call. We’ve got military bases all around the world, the only country like that. That’s weird, right? We’re the world government stomping around the world, deciding what countries are part of the modern world and which ones aren’t depending not on whether you’re a dictatorship or not, but whether we like you and if your economic policies are beneficial to us. And that authoritarianism and imperialism is finally coming home to roost domestically. I hate to see it, because I live here, but it makes sense with what we’ve been as a country since we killed off all the natives for their land.

They need to trade with people for money and food. If their closest neighbor let them trade, I guarantee Cuba would be saying the opposite to stay on the good side of them. But since they can’t, and Russia was iced out of the world economy pretty much, of course they’d extend a hand to Cuba, which is similarly iced out. And of course they’d accept for the good of their people. Who knows if they actually care how that war goes, they’re just a tiny island nation that wants to be able to eat and survive. We can’t blame them for making decisions under this kind of duress.