yesterday the US & Europe contributed aircraft and firepower (Navy and Air Force) to “help” shoot down Iranian missiles and drones — you know in addition to the massive “iron dome” defense system that we pay for.
imagine if we cared for gazans or Ukrainians like we care about Israel! Imagine if we cared about poor Americans like we care about israel! I cannot with this country
the iron dome and all of our foreign military capacity is just an incredible feat of engineering, billions of dollars and decades of intensive manufacturing, congressional policy support, bipartisan agreements, and full media capitulation. IMAGINE if we directed that level of resource coordination to a Green New Deal, healthcare for all Americans, or humane migration policy & system, imagine what we are quite literally capable of accomplishing!
just imagine if every time you turned on the tv or saw a headline it was a charismatic person or pundit explaining how the Green New Deal would improve quality of life for everyone while boosting a new kind of economy. Imagine if every single congressperson had to, at minimum, agree that GND was our single largest spending priority and we don’t even question that in public, imagine if instead of an Iron Dome over Israel we constructed an Iron Roam system of high speed trains in the US
@seachanger Blargh. I've said this before, I think about this every single time I'm walking in coastal San Diego because every single time I do that, the military is doing drills over the ocean the entire time, and descending on my peace with fighter jets or copter blades making a huge racket. It makes it so obvious what the priorities are; not having $ for things to make communities healthier and safer is absolutely a choice
this post could be extrapolated to almost anything in the massive, bloated, unaudited and opaque pentagon budget.
we have about 750 US foreign military bases in 80 nations. it's utter insanity... unless you imagine that we are a militaristic, violent empire bent on destruction. then it makes sense.
@inquiline and there’s something about how we don’t talk about it. we don’t really see the budgets or the defense programs debated or discussed like we do our social proposals. something about how they operate as a given, as a thunderous background to our lives. we may not be able to stop it, but we can stop the silence around it, the yawning vacuous black hole of social license we give the US military
@seachanger I didn't see it as much before I moved to CA. In NYC there were tons of cops, ofc, and in other places, also cops, but the military per se wasn't in the fabric of daily life prior to coastal CA. And it's kind of invisibilized/normalized here too. Everyday militarism.
But yeah also the fact that military spending is a given, and can only increase, whereas other programs are debated, means-tested in ways that don't even save $$, or simply cut, yes, a choice.
I'd just add that, from the perspective of someone who lived in Riverside, the militarization is was always much more obvious to me when I'd visit San Diego-area beaches than places in Orange County or LA County.
Maybe counter-intuitively, I suspect that the obviousness of the background militarization is also part of why San Diego's punk scene has sustained places like the Che Café, while somewhat similar spots like Koo's in Anaheim weren't able to survive as long.
Once you've seen through those "They Live" glasses in San Diego, you realize how much you're surrounded by varied forces that desperately want you to stop questioning their authority.
@ryanrandall@seachanger Super interesting. In LA-Long Beach there are quite a number of traces, but mostly just vestiges, whereas in SD it's still very much active and on display. That said even the vestiges up in LA are pretty recent (Navy only left LB in the 90s). (LB is interesting bc it has both the shadow of being a navy town and the punk scene?)
@inquiline@seachanger I wish I'd explored LB more! It's a part of the greater LA area I know the least. I'd usually only drive the 91 that long if I was going to go visit my roommate's family in Carson.
I was exploring the most between about 1996 & 2006, and it was much more the electronic music and indie rock scenes than punk, although there was always some DIY undercurrent though it all.
My friends & I would usually be heading to venues in Hollywood, Santa Monica, Silverlake, or Costa Mesa, or a few different neightborhoods down in San Diego (UCSD, Hillcrest, or the Kensington area I think).
Maybe LB just felt too similar to Riverside back then? Or it was easier to learn of the venues in LA & San Diego for whatever reason? LB's punk history is really interesting; I just never happened to head that way as frequently myself.
@ryanrandall Can't say I have explored deeply either, as I am An Old and a transplant and it's been pandemic more years than not since I settled in LB (bounced around for a few years prior). But there's a lot there, and clearly still important to The Kids as well as many fellow Olds.
@seachanger Yep. Joan Didion on Lakewood, in LA County where it starts to border OC, it is all this geography:
“vast grid familiar to the casual visitor mainly from the air, Southern California’s industrial underbelly, the thousand square miles of aerospace and oil that powered the place’s apparently endless expansion"
@paninid Nice essay. San Diego is so overlooked compared to LA, and so interesting (not always in good ways) in its own terms. LA has the noir-in-sunshine element and this also helps San Diego's violence escape notice somehow
Coming back from the eclipse, getting on the subway at the Port authority bus terminal, there were two national guards and two police officers at the turnstile
SB19 data from us fuels entirely appropriate to mention here that 150 million spent to stop $1,000 worth of Subway fare evasion And I don't think that includes the national guards presence that was a new addition recently
@seachanger@inquiline in my world that is a critical conversation. I have long said that the reason we have nuclear weapons is because of their use in transferring massive amounts of public money to private hands. They are militarily useless weapons.
@seachanger The next step is understanding why nations don't do this.
My answer is: because it doesn't make the powerful more powerful.
Because it doesn't support entrenched powers.
Because, in fact, it threatens entrenched powers.
I really really really want to see people switching frame of mind, stop seeing powerful people as worth of worship or as something to aspire to, and see them as a fucking threat to life and freedom and having good things.
I really want people to start imagining that the current shape of our society is not necessary, that yes, another world is fucking possible.
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