You should absolutely blame the Diet Coke and the execs that push it. Almost every aspect of eating the food we need to live is distorted by people trying to make as much money as possible at the expense of our health. They know it. They spend billions doing it. You likely wouldn’t have been consuming it or so much of it if it wasn’t on every billboard and commercial and was at the back of the store in plain boxes without the big ‘sale’ or ‘bogof’ stickers. It doesn’t have to be this way and you shouldn’t blame yourself or any other individual for a social problem.

One day!

I can’t remember who it was. A famous actor, anyway. They were talking about what’s happened with movies. There’s nothing in the middle.

It’s either $100m+ or less than $3m. Either it gets a big producer and they pump so much money into it that it must be safe because it can’t lose money. Or is a small producer doing it for the love, but a small budget doesn’t go very far. The risky narratives done well would be funded somewhere between the two extremes but it’s just not how it’s done anymore.

In a strange way, to get more money in for the riskier productions, we need to get the money out of Hollywood. Can’t see it happening, myself.

I’m sure there are some people in that area who would do it for free if they had the tools.

Don’t forget about saying the settlers have a legitimate say on what happens to Hawaii.

What if 90% of Hawaiians had revolted (and lost) while 90%+ of the other 10% of Hawaiians voted in the referendum?

But no down votes!

False dichotomy is when you point out that people might want something other than two shit binary choices.

Probably not with the US around. It’s never let any other country live in quiet peace and prosperity. It’s always worth being optimistic, though.

Why don’t you read some communist literature? There’s 150 years worth of recommendations on almost every conceivable topic from many countries and in many languages. Almost all of us started as liberals until we read something that changed our minds. Once a Marxist has explained capitalism, there’s almost no chance of going back (although some do, and they tend to become the worst type of monster).

The US is still bitter that Hawaii was more advanced than the United States of Backwards way back when.

I can’t say that I agree with many Floridian laws but this is one I could get behind. To put it mildly, what a pos.

The US “aids” pro-US political groups with billions of dollars everywhere! How nice.

Yes but what if this time the US didn’t want something out of it? If the US did want something out of it there would be evidence of it, surely? Like a website for privatising Ukrainian assets? Or IMF reports explaining how half the loans were given to pay off the previous ones until Ukraine dismantled it’s manufacturing industries, military capabilities, and devalued it’s currency? Or, I don’t know, an article like the one in the OP that quotes someone explaining the US is only involved to quell dissent about it’s failing economy among it’s domestic workers.

Do you honestly believe that? You honestly think that US aid has saved lives in Ukraine? Some surely has but the weapons? Ig it’s not your family and friends in the cross hairs, your fields poisoned with depleted uranium, or your kids’ cross country tracks littered with cluster munitions. You really think the country responsible for embargoes of medical supplies to Palestine, Yemen, and Cuba, to name a few, is sending aid to save lives?

Ukraine is another Kurdistan to the US. The only question is whether it will take the Ukrainians as long as it took the Kurds to learn that the US is nobody’s friend.

The US has spent 30+ years shit stirring, dismantling Ukraine, running coups, and undermining Ukraine’s relationships with it’s closest neighbours. Now it’s provoked a war and all gullible liberals can say is the same thing they said about the US contemporaneously with all its other wars.

The article in the OP demonstrates exactly what I and others like me have been saying from the start: the US is not involved to be the good guy, it has no moral high ground; it is only involved to make money, and no number of Ukrainian lives is too great a price to pay for US prosperity. The US is involved to steal as much Ukrainian wealth as possible.

It’s not just the ‘profit’ from selling the weapons (which Ukraine will pay for, not the US, so there’s no benevolence in it but self-interest). Every aid package is another tranche of the same kind of loans that the US has used to loot and privatise the country’s assets for decades. The same thing the US does everywhere. The only difference now is the novelty of trying to physically destroy Russia’s military at the same time.

It’s a bit rich to say that I’m the one with a narrow minded view of geopolitics when you’ve reduced a 30+ year conflict to it’s surface details. Events like this cannot be separated from the political economy or their historical context. It’s clear that liberals still haven’t learned to correct a flaw in their framework that was identified 150 years ago (source otherwise only indirectly relevant):

That in their appearance things often represent themselves in inverted form is pretty well known in every science except Political Economy.

Some people have dug beneath the appearance of things, whereas others accept them in their inverted form.

There’s that as well!

Seems to be, but it’ll take a long time to go completely. It’s easy to over estimate the speed at which these things happen.

I see you’re coming at me with another semantic argument. This one based on the notion that by ‘doesn’t have an industrial base’ I can only mean ‘doesn’t have any industrial base’. That’s a rather strange reading as it assumes I have zero grasp of logic. The existence of the tiniest fragment of industry would render my argument incorrect. It’s acting in bad faith to assume I meant that.

Which leaves the search for an alternative interpretation. Such as the US doesn’t have a sufficient industrial base to achieve its goals militarily in the Ukraine. The figures are hard to come by as there are lots of definitional issues. Still, trade publications and Congress are worried.

“U.S. policies and financial investments are not currently oriented to support a defense ecosystem built for peer conflict,” the report read. “This was a troubling truth during the last 20 years of asymmetric conflict against non-state actors. In the return of great power competition, this gap is an unsustainable indictment.”

US manufacturing can be as large as it likes but if it can’t join up it’s thinking and produce what fighters on the front line need, it doesn’t count for much. It’s DIB is not set up for wars against industrialised countries that are determined to fight back. It doesn’t matter what weapons and compatible ammunition the US does produce, either, if it isn’t working to supply them to the people doing the fighting and isn’t willing to use them itself for (rightly) being at least a little bit reluctant to start a nuclear third world war.

I’m a little skeptical of the extent of the claims about the weaknesses of the DIB and more so of the framing of the solution. The details are coming from people who want to increase the military budget (without otherwise wanting to change the underlying political economic system). Still, there does seem to be some movement to use the Ukraine war to justify costly improvements to the US DIB.

Will the changes come? And will they come in time to defeat Russia in Ukraine within a reasonable time frame? The plan will struggle against the existing contradictions unless there’s a change in logic, which doesn’t seem to be on the cards. So it’s unlikely to be a complete success even if some fixes are implemented.

It’s irrelevant whether you accept what I’m saying. I’m only summarising what the US military is saying. This is public information. If you’re interested, search for ‘us defense industrial base’. What I’ve explained is such a hot topic, you don’t even need to add e.g. ‘problems’ to the search terms for articles about the problems to be returned.

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