- cross-posted to:
- latestagecapitalism
- cross-posted to:
- latestagecapitalism
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43260174
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Itâs not about capitalism itâs about hierarchy.
If the Soviets hadnât shit the bed at every opportunity theyâd have 900 military bases around the world propping up their hegemony.
I mean, after Lenin it was basically state capitalism, so same difference
âIf begging the question worked, we wouldnât need it smuggled in through a shitty meme.â
âOver 900 military bases around the worldâ is doing a lot of heavy lifting considering a) the 900 figure is pulled out of their ass and more importantly b) itâs more like 130 outside the US, mostly concentrated in a few countries â unless the meme is suggesting US military bases on its own soil are there primarily as a bulwark against socialism.
More importantly, though, as someone else pointed out: itâs about hegemony generically. If US foreign military bases exist not to further US hegemony but in the interest of worshipping capitalism, why are there bases in Europe standing in defense of social democratic countries against â what has now been for decades â one of the worldâs most hypercapitalist shitholes? Genuinely what work are these bases doing to uphold specifically capitalism? Did I wake up in 1983? Is the 82nd Airborne on its way to Grenada?
Keep europe dependent on the yankee empire and they act as forward basis so the yanks donât have to airlift everything from turtle island every time they decide to bomb west asia. What sort of dumbass question is this? Ofcourse theyâre there to uphold capitalism, what else would they be there for???
You might have had an argument if this were the 1980s. But communism failed. The âcommunistâ party of China is dominated by billionaires now. Even the communists are capitalists now. Your socialist youtube influencers are all monetized and are heavily promoted by big techâs algorithms. Many of them have merch stores and are millionaires. Leftism is just an aesthetic packaged and sold in a capitalist system.
Capitalist authoritarians in China maintain a communist aesthetic to have some weird semblance of legitimacy, and capitalist authoritarians in Russia have some nostalgia for the communist aesthetic. North Korea is backwards monarchy now, struggling to keep people from starving.
The military doesnât maintain capitalism because at this point the âcommunistsâ are all capitalists now. Maybe for a time it helped protect against the authoritarian capitalists but now the US authoritarian too. Weâre back to the era of Great Powers, and capitalism vs. socialism isnât a factor much like it wasnât a factor in the Great Powers world order of the past.
Sorry but Santa Claus isnât real and communism died a long time ago. Youâre just being sold the carcass by capitalists.
So I guess we have three options:
- The Congressional Research Service lied two years ago about the number of foreign military bases as 128.
- The US in 1.5 years sextupled its number of foreign military bases.
- World Beyond Warâs criteria of âany installation, facility, or site located outside the operating country that is financed, operated, leased, rented, or temporarily accessed by that countryâ to define a âforeign military baseâ is majorly misleading when taken out of context for a shitty meme.
Wonder which it is.
(Actual argument done, I can insult you without it being ad hom: fuck off, tankie. I disagree with ancoms sometimes on pragmatics, but their ethics are sound; not yours.)
Department of Defense, âFY2025 Base Structure Report,â 2024
According to DOD its now 1143 bases
The spreadsheet (source here) literally says the number of sites as of 30 September 2024. Do you understand that âsiteâ and âmilitary baseâ are different things? Here are their definitions if you want to play illiterate. A foreign site in this context can be any foreign property run by the DoD, including e.g. an office building. In your version of events, the Congressional Research Service says itâs 128 as of mid-2024, WBW using an extremely lax definition of what constitutes the US operating a military base arrived at 844, and Iâm supposed to believe the CRS and the DoD differ by nearly 10x and that the WBW totally missed this public report showing that they came up with less than 3/4 of the actual numberâŠ
⊠Is what I would say if you werenât completely misreading this spreadsheet anyway. 1143 represents the âgrand totalâ of âland-only sitesâ in the US, US Territories, and overseas combined.
Youâre. Just. Lying. Stop being disingenuous or fuck off.
Carrying water was expected. Little pissant seems to have hurt feelings
Would you describe a person being annoyed by mosquitoes as having âhurt feelingsâ? I have no respect for you and therefore no concern for the minimal amount of time you deign to spend crafting a cogent argument for me.
What I do care about is a tankie propagandist coming into an ancom community and shitting it up with disinformation. Ancoms are friends; you are not.
You sound more MAGA than ancom. Based on your downvotes it doesnât look like you are the friendly one around here
Please donât argue with mosquitos, thatâs fucking crazy man
Anything based is a military base đïžđȘ
US military confirmed operaring zero military bases?? đ±đ± (Except when helping Eastern Europe against Russia; theyâre pretty based then.)
If red light cameras worked we wouldnât need them.
Traffic and car-centrism exist because of capitalism. Fuck the man, take the bus.
If possible take the trains, if there are no trains take the bus, if there are no busses bike, if no bike than walk, if you cannot walk because the infrastructure is that hostile move to somewhere with trains (like NY or Chicago but ideally NY)
Seriously though, the amount of money I saved by not owning a car gets me a pretty nice place in a city with transit, itâs not great transit but I canât afford a larger city like Vancouver. Unfortunately where I live is also notoriously hostile towards pedestrians and cyclists.
I live in NYC completely car free, I take the subway everywhere and I just canât imagine my life without a good transportation system. I would genuinely recommend anyone who lives in a hostile area with no transit move.
my friend got sucker punched on the bus by a homeless person he was minding his own business the way nerds do and POW so ya ill take my capitalism 20 year old ford ranger thanks very much
Homeless people also exist because of capitalism
Not true at all, homeless people exist whether capitalism does or not, everywhere, all the time.
Change your position to align with reality as we know it, please and thank you
Must be an interesting reality you live in. You must have another reality to compare that doesnât have capitalism?
The person probably wouldnât have been homeless if not for capitalism. I also make a habit of not believing third hand stories off the internet.
Maybe disenfranchised people who are forced to live in the street have something to be angry about in a system that trains the wage slaves to dehumanize the people who donât fit in the same box so that we have something to fear if we stop contributing to the machine.
âDonât be like him, Little Timmy. You need to go to school and be a good little cog in the machine until you get ill or make a mistake and then it will abandon you and villify you for not being a perfect cog for the billionaires to use up like an infinite resource.â
This perfectly encapsulates my comment, thank you.
Youâre operating under the assumption that every homeless person is homeless because they are down on their luck and canât afford housing.
That is not the entire homeless population, and probably not the population that assaults random people on the bus.
Not to say that those people deserve to be homeless, but you canât make the assumption that capitalism is the reason theyâre homeless. There are absolutely homeless people who choose to not take their meds and/or stop doing drugs and refuse housing and assistance offered to them.
Clearly you do not understand: 1) how addictions work, 2) how mental illnesses that arenât addiction work, or 3) that almost no one chooses to be homeless but people do fuck up.
There is no excuse to dehumanize anyone and if youâve got yourself convinced that these people somehow got themselves where they are then youâve fallen for the capitalist propaganda cause guess what? People who are happy, stable, and well provided for do not generally start doing drugs and people with good mental health support do not typically just stop taking their meds, but people who are comfortable with the status quo will make any excuse to make sure they get to keep what they have while ignoring that everyone has a right to that same comfort but some people need extra help getting there.
My peers are dying due to this mindset. Just because a measure is effective does not mean it isnât nessecary. Donât need seat belts, people are rarely dyingâŠ
Iâm not sure I get it because red light cameras do work.
Theyâre designed to take pictures of the license plates of vehicles which illegally run a red light so that a traffic ticket can be issued to the driver. This ensures that the driver will have the infraction on the record and that the jurisdiction makes some (mostly) passive income.
Which part is not working?
The act of having them to enforce fines is designed to stop people illegally passing, not to find raise. However, people still illegal go through.
I donât think that ever was the design.
Also all 3rd world workers would get promoted to CEO for working brutal 12-14 workdays.
That is capitalism working.
Maybe Iâm a bit off, but out of all those âbasesâ, arenât a nontrivial number of them literally just an office on someone elseâs base? A sole soldier sitting in a base in the middle of somewhere counts as a âmilitary baseâ if they are supposed to be there.
Yeah many times itâs just a couple of officers that are there at the request of the country to help train their soldiers.
I need her in my bloc
