The fact that the west was, and still is, the most prolific war mongerers of the post-Enlightenment era blows your hypothesis out of the water as soon as it tries to float.
Honestly not sure how easy it is to actually stay out of the military when there’s compelled service in any country.
Don’t know about other countries, but in Apartheid-South Africa it was a very difficult thing if you were male, white and not rich. When I was a kid in small-town South Africa there was a conscientious objector living on our street. He was disabled - they had beaten him to such an extent that he was brain-damaged.
These are only off the top of my head - I’m sure there’s a few I’ve left out. These also don’t include the wars the west wages through it’s colonialist proxies and client states.
why did the West not spend more on military in the last 20 years?
As is perfectly obvious to anyone that can read, France and Germany together easily matched China’s military spending and outspent Russia by a wide, wide margin in 2009.
If you’re going to post bullcrap, I’d advise you not to post so much of it in one go - all you’re achieving is to make the stink reach further.
As is perfectly obvious to anyone that can read, France and Germany together easily matched China’s military spending and outspent Russia by a wide, wide margin in 2009.
…didn’t you get the first time around?
Half your examples are older than 30 years old.
Really? Go count them and get back to us. Don’t be long now!
The other half are literally fighting Al Qaeda and ISIS,
Are you talking about those Wahhabist groups that only exists because of the US’s shitfuckery? Those ones?
Go on… fling your bullcrap at the wall in the hopes that something sticks - let’s see if anyone falls for this clever and sophisticated strategy of yours.
Rep. Tony Gonzales called his GOP opponent in Texas a “neo-Nazi” and an “anarchist” intent on “burning the place down” — and said Republican hardliners seeking to oust him are a bunch of “scumbags” and MAGA wannabes....
The article doesn’t seem to mention who these “donors” are… you know - the people with enough wealth to buy the politics the proles are constantly being told to “vote harder” for that seems quite happy to listen to their preferred stuffed suit talking about crushing dissent and accelerating ongoing genocide.
You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)...
But this is not misinformation, it is uncontrolled nonsense.
Fair enough… but drowning out any honest discourse with a flood of histrionic right-wing horseshit has always been the core strategy of the US propaganda model - I’d say that their AI is just doing the logical thing and taking the horseshit to a very granular level. I mean… “put glue on your pizza” is just not that far off “drink bleach to kill viruses on the inside.”
I know I’m describing a pattern that probably wasn’t intentional (I hope) - but the pattern does look like it could fit.
Doesn’t sound all that different from the stuff emanating from the right’s Great Orange Hope a while back that worked pretty well to keep his base appropriately frothing at the mouth - you are free to write it off as pure coincidence… but I won’t just yet.
Here in 2016 South Africa our online media spaces lit up like a fucking Christmas tree with all the white supremacists coming out of the woodwork to celebrate Trump’s win. Since then, the second-largest of our (so-called) “opposition” parties - a party that can pretty much be described as the party of white liberalism - has dumped any black people they had in senior positions and began using GOP-esqe dog-whistling. All our parties - pretty much the entire formal political establishment - has been very receptive to violent, USian-style anti-immigrant narratives.
So yeah… you can flee the US - but you can’t really escape US politics.
Lol! That reminds me… about three years ago I was notified of a “town meeting to discuss local problems” held at a local school here in middle-of-nowhere South Africa. It turns out it was just a shady PR attempt by the local branch of the “white liberal” party I described above (the so-called “Democratic Alliance”), and the suit there doesn’t talk about our decrepit and failing water, electricity and sewage infrastructure or the fact that this mining town is being economically extinguished by privatized interests… instead, the only order of business was to brag about how they had set up surveillance in our main streets and handing off the data to the piggy for free.
I feel like strangling that particular suit every damn time I lay eyes on him.
was how they could perhaps create some sort of campaign website to try and incide violence among migrants,
We had that exact thing here in South Africa in the late 80s and early 90s - the only difference was that it was actually enabled by the Apartheid-state through their terrorist proxies (ie, mainly the South African Police). When the anti-Apartheid groups didn’t act “terroristic” enough for their taste, they just did it themselves and used the media to create a narrative of “black-on-black violence” to try and destabilize the country.
Like, how do you reconcile your “patriotism and love for your country” with wanting people to perform terror attacks?
They “love” their countries in the same way that a rapist “loves” his victims - the feel themselves entitled to it and deserving of holding the power of life and death over it. They do not actually care about the real people living in Sweden in any way whatsoever. That’s pretty much standard fare when it comes to far right-wing ideology no matter what part of the world you find them in.
The reason they want to “incite” (so-called) “terror attacks” among migrants they see as not “white,” “Swedish” or “Nordic” enough is two-fold.
Firstly, they want the Swedish people to see these migrants the way they see them - as a (supposedly) bloodthirsty and rapacious “other.” Not much different from the way the Nazis portrayed the “Jewish-Bolshevik hordes” before and during WW2. A (supposed) “terror attack” that can be blamed on the “other” will essentially result in the media performing this function for them.
Secondly, they want an atmosphere of panic - such as existed right after 9/11 in the US. They know that such a state of things will allow their ideology to suddenly seem “relevant” in the same way that militarism suddenly became standard fare in the US afterwards.
Scientists have warned that a court decision to block the growing of the genetically modified (GM) crop Golden Rice in the Philippines could have catastrophic consequences. Tens of thousands of children could die in the wake of the ruling, they argue....
Melinda French Gates announces $1 billion donation to support women and families, including reproductive rights (www.cbsnews.com)
WTF Joe... (lemmy.world)
Listen to a genius, kids. (lemmy.world)
How Uvalde’s GOP congressman is navigating a tense runoff and plotting to take out right-wing ‘anarchists’ | CNN Politics (edition.cnn.com)
Rep. Tony Gonzales called his GOP opponent in Texas a “neo-Nazi” and an “anarchist” intent on “burning the place down” — and said Republican hardliners seeking to oust him are a bunch of “scumbags” and MAGA wannabes....
Trump told donors he will crush pro-Palestinian protests, deport demonstrators | Speaking to wealthy donors behind closed doors, he said that he supports Israel’s right to continue “its war on terror. (wapo.st)
CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information (futurism.com)
You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)...
Back when America had a great tradition (i.imgur.com)
Americans, what's the plan if Trump wins the election in November? (serious)
‘A catastrophe’: Greenpeace blocks planting of ‘lifesaving’ Golden Rice (www.theguardian.com)
Scientists have warned that a court decision to block the growing of the genetically modified (GM) crop Golden Rice in the Philippines could have catastrophic consequences. Tens of thousands of children could die in the wake of the ruling, they argue....