VaporTrail

lold at this response

The F-35 budget is a great example. Over budget, behind schedule. Airframe plagued with issues. The F-22 budget is another one. $10B upgrading it last year so that it could shoot down a Chinese balloon with a half a million dollar AIM-9X. Those are the most egregious offenders. We're building over 100 tanks a year in Lima, Ohio - for what mission? The old ones we gave to Ukraine are getting blown up left and right in Ukraine by drones/mines/ATGMs and one was just put on display in Moscow. We aren't going to find that many buyers for those tanks, though if GER/FRA/GB need em in a pinch we could try and lend-lease em. I certainly hope we won't be committing to a European war in the next 30 years that we'll need them.

Thank you, Thomas Massie for not being an idiot. This antisemitism bill going through congress uses the same language as the South Dakota law that recently passed. It literally just takes anything the Holocaust Remembrance Museum at face value. Completely unconstitutional.

Really, the only things that are bigger than defense spending are social security and health spending. Source: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58888

Not all aspects of government have as big of a budget as our astronomical(ly bloated) defense spending.

I don't think that cancellation based off an accusation is something to celebrate (and I'm not shocked that the writers at FP are celebrating that). You shouldn't be forced to resign from something because of an accusation (though I kind of wish that happened to our underperforming QB). Unless these people who resigned were also criminally convicted of something, I suspect that most of these resignations are corporations doing the bidding of a loud mob to avoid bad publicity. More legal resources for victims is great, but again, what's the measurable outcome? Sexual assault incidence has decreased? Something like that.

Disappear? No. Get knocked down quite a few notches? Yes. Rein in spending. Clarify what the mission is to justify spending rather than being the world police who "protect and promote democracy." Unfortunately for us, as demonstrated in Ukraine and the Middle East, we can't just simply spend dollars to achieve our geopolitical objectives. We should still be able to field a blue water navy. We have two gigantic moats in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. We have more guns than we do people. The Ohio/Mississippi/Missouri River Valley is the biggest breadbasket on the planet. No foreign nation is going to successfully invade and occupy our homeland. We are relatively insulated against a lot of the upcoming upheaval that EU, Middle East, and Southeast Asia are going to experience.

Clearly a conspiracy theorist

Serious question and one I don't know the answer to - is there any measurable outcome that has changed as a result of the MeToo movement? Less rapes or sexual assaults? Increase in rape convictions? Some measure of how safe women feel?

Trump, RFK, and Biden as well as congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle have all said they'd increase funding for Israel. So as far as the presidential election goes, the American voters don't have any choice but to support Israel. AIPAC has a $100M war chest that they're effectively using to outfund any candidate that is critical of guaranteed funding for Israel's military (again, they're a first world country with a top ten military). The entire blue side of the aisle is for more Ukraine funding. Lockheed Martin alone spends over $12M per year over the last 10 years on just lobbying. High ranking military officials retire and then become board members and lobbyists for Lockheed, Raytheon, etc. The government is working on a way to secure extended funding to Ukraine so that the next president can't turn it off. But yeah, it's definitely just a conspiracy theory.

The police are an arm of the government. The national guard is an arm of the government. They both do the government's bidding. The government is far and away in the pockets of the military industrial complex. They have gone as far as killing anti-military industrial complex protesters. They have demonstrated that they will come down hard on protests against their profits. There was a neo nazi rally in West Virginia today that went viral. In contrast to the current Gaza/Israel protests, no one sent the riot cops there to shut the nazis down because neonazis are an irrelevant group of people that don't endanger MIC profits. And honestly, the MIC benefits from neo nazi groups existence because it keeps the general population's anger directed at them rather than the MIC. Hate speech is protected speech. If you want to create a rally about hating jews, queers, blacks, californians, or the irish, that is your god given right as an American. If you want to wish for any of those groups of people to die in horrifying and painful ways, that is also your god given right as an American. If you trespass as an act of protest, then that's deserving of getting arrested, fined, and given community service - not up to 20 years in prison like the Jan 6 people are getting. If you harm someone who disagrees with you at a protest, that makes you a rioter and you belong in jail. If you block traffic to make your point, you are preventing ambulances from getting to hospitals and belong in jail. If you tell someone you're going to kill them, then that is a credible death threat, and 1A does not protect you from that, to jail you go. If you attempt to physically prevent a Jewish student from attending class, then you are in breach of the law and should go to jail. Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression is what the ACLU used to be before they turned into partisan hacks. Thankfully legal organizations like this still exist. https://www.thefire.org/news/heres-what-students-need-know-about-protesting-campus-right-now

If it was solely about rape and sexual assault, then I'm with you. When the movement snowballed into every other woman using the MeToo hashtag to bring up an awkward night of consensual sex that they later regretted, it became a cancer. The media and government weaponizing the accusations against Barney Frank and Justice Kavanaugh, both sides of the aisle, was nothing short of shameful. Being labelled as any kind of sex offender, is a life ruining experience for the majority of people. I don't think people should have their reputations permanently tarnished because someone 10 years later decides they regretted having sex with them. Somehow, this is a "redpilled" opinion.

The #MeToo movement was a cancer, and you cheer it on when it affects people you don't like, such as Trump. But the real irony, lost on you, is that Trump never would have become president if it wasn't for the #MeToo movement. Rust belt would have voted Barney Frank over Trump. But instead, Barney got #MeToo'd by Clinton's DNC even more egregiously than Trump did, and the country was left choosing between Trump and Hillary. I maintain that if Frank had stood up to these bullies and never apologized for his actions, he'd probably still be president right now.

You're right, it's actually the complete opposite. BLM protests didn't threaten military industrial complex profits - police stood down as the protests turned into riots and several American small businesses were destroyed. Vietnam and Israel antiwar protests DO threaten military industrial complex profits - police shut them down promptly. Personally, I'd prefer the government prioritize the average American over any foreigner, but I guess that is considered quite antisemitic in this day and age.

Time is a flat circle.