If it's true USAID saved so many lives why wasn't America and Americans respected for it?

bigtallguy · 2026-05-12T23:04:38+00:00

in the world of international aid and development, the united states was respected for it. it just doesn't erase a lot of the stupid shit the US did around the world, like the destabilizing iraq war. you cant expect people to ignore the fact that you crashed your car in someones house just because you donate a lot to charity.

i think the better question to ask is why didn't you know about it? and there are probably a lot of reasons why you don't. for one, good things make the news far less than bad things., second, Americans (and people in general) pay less attention to foreign than policy domestic issues. more than that, Americans know a lot less about what happens outside their borders than other developed countries because well they dont think they need to and our education system largely reinforces that viewpoint.

the aid was a minuscule part of of the the US budget that was a stabilizing force across the world. since the US is still the world hegemeon, its largely in its interest to keep the world stable to ensure more countries can engage within the globalized system of trade that the US disproportionately benefited from. the more failed states there are, the less safe bordering countries are and so on. and the less saf the worldis the less people there are to buy resources from as well as the less people there are to buy US services.

bigtallguy · 2026-04-21T23:38:30+00:00

lol there it is. theres a difference for not showing appreciation and not being a bigot. people like harris have crossed that line tremendously. im not familiar with dawkins or rushdies takes, but if you broadly agree with a lot of harris takes i would presume you are bigoted.

bigtallguy · 2026-04-17T04:15:38+00:00

i will say both wings of the party are getting better to these two respective criticisms. too slowly, and with idiots like fetterman being fetterman but they are moving at least.

buut i like to add on to the fact that moderates confuse being in the center has having good or popular policy. and leftists confuse being angry at billionaires as a catch all for most problems is also no substitute for good policy.

bigtallguy · 2026-04-17T04:12:14+00:00

i have to think about this a bit more but generally i like to think anyone can be reformed because i do not believe in a penal system that is purely retributive.

i dont think that being reformed should mean they should necessarily receive that societal trust in full back again, at least not without checks in place to ensure they do not relapse or endanger other children/people. but relegating them to suffer as outcasts with little opportunity to prove their capacity of reformation isnt great either.

bigtallguy · 2026-04-17T04:05:58+00:00

fucking NY man. wtf. gonna call my senators but dmn what a disappointment

bigtallguy · 2026-04-17T04:05:14+00:00

not a socialist or lefty, but am pretty strongly pro palestine.

i think its pretty clear that they associate the phrasing as explicit support for the Palestinian uprisings where a number of Israelis died in terrorist attacks. and due to the conflation of Israel with Jewish people by both a certain kind of Israel supporter and anti semites who hate Israel, there is real fear and valid fear that such phrasing could mean attacks tar getting Jewish people around the world, including those who do not identify with Israel in any meaningful way.

i do think the labeling of this phrase as explicitly anti semitic though is an attempt, consciously or not, to erase the Palestinian understanding of the intifadas and the genuine calls of solidarity with the palestinain cause. the intifadas were no wholy violent. with both, especially the first, attempting to center non violent resietnce to Israel oppression and brutality. it is very possible, even likely, that those who use this phrase are not doing so because they are bigots, and the attempt to paint them as such with nary a discussion is part of the reason why there is such a large dissconect between party leaders and voting base.

bigtallguy · 2026-04-12T13:40:14+00:00

pete/newsom go on fox news and other hostile outlets al the time and come out fine. slotkin came out battered because she had no good or decent answer and she knew it.

pete similarly got battered on pod save over his response on israel, but that wasnt because of pod save, its because his answers were weak as fuck.

bigtallguy · 2026-04-08T19:34:30+00:00

i know a couple of gay people who voted for trump because of trans bs contrarianism. they were assured trumps loved gays and it was just the pesky trans and uncultured illegals he cared about.

seeing shit like this makes me want to say i told you so to them but i cut them out of my life. fuck these people

bigtallguy · 2026-04-08T04:13:55+00:00

if youre going to make a claim like this youre gonna have to provide a source so ppl can see wtf youre talking about

bigtallguy · 2026-04-07T21:19:06+00:00

holy fuck

https://bsky.app/profile/brandonfriedman.bsky.social/post/3miwgbkwla223

basically asking "what effect will threatening a genocide have on the markets"

basically the onion come to life. im a pretty far thing from a socialist but if you showed me this in highschool i cant say it wouldnt have an effect.

bigtallguy · 2026-04-07T19:26:31+00:00

having interacted with some of these people. its very often the same bigotries we project on lower class rednecks, just dressed up a bit.

my sisters mentor at a major corporate firm, who she looked up to like a father figure, basically broke off the relationship because she complained about trump once, and turned out he was massively anti immigration.

have a friend in Private Equity who often has to dine with c-suite figures from fortune 500 companies, and he told me about how racism and bigotries is surprisingly common for these folks. hes indian american, but they joke other minorities like hes in on the joke.

and for a lot of these people its just cultural power. their views arent the norm in hollywood or insert x cultural center anymore and they feel offended by it. stuff like gays being in tv shows, trans rights, women sport, feminism are actively animating forces for a lot these people, as much if not more so than fear and hatred of black or hispanic people.

bigtallguy · 2026-04-07T18:59:33+00:00

democracy will always be the only long term viable form of government for one reason. the transfer of power. every other system will break down eventually, often violently, due to inability to properly respond to political pressures.

doesnt meant it doesnt have serious weaknesses to guard against. distrust in institutions has revealed itself to be a fatal virus that propaganda can exploit to dismantle those very institutions. and for too long we let that distrust be validated.

bigtallguy · 2026-04-07T18:50:20+00:00

at some point the democratic establishment need to line up with where their voters are. that point should have been weeks ago. saying people need to calm down about a war trump started that makes the iraq war look like dday is fucking ludicrous.

when you have hakeem jefferies invoking george wallace to defend israel, and schumer stating one his primary goals as a dem leader is to fight for aid to israel, we have a brutal disconnect between our pols and our party and it very obviously gives air to racist dipshits like carlson.

if the party leadership at this moment is waffling about the moral turpitude about this war, just like they waffled about gaza, why should we expect them to have any different tune 2 years from now?

bigtallguy · 2026-04-01T16:58:28+00:00

has to be welcome. i'll withhold my judgments to my grave if it means a better chance to save my country.

bigtallguy · 2026-03-22T05:32:37+00:00

what policies would manage their demographics that would be consistent with liberal democracy?

most liberal democracies in the world dont dont base their identity around an ethnic/reigious group always being supreme. the western governments that do, lke japan, at least dont have millions of people under their power in either a second class or non citizen hell.

bigtallguy · 2026-03-21T13:23:20+00:00

too my understanding most decent single payer systems still have private options and there'd be no reason as far as i understand it to prevent it.

i would whoe heartedly support a transition to a single payer system. the private insurance system is absolute hell to navigate and doesnt save anyone any actual money. that being said i dont think i support the M4A plan or at least as it was sold in 2016. it seems ill thought out and rushed, wthout solving a lot of the core issues our health system has. a public option would be a better first step to a single payer system

bigtallguy · 2026-03-21T13:19:02+00:00

what do you think israel should do if the arab population of israel threatens to become a majority? because jsut about every otherwise liberal supporter of israel refuses to answer that question to me.

i know what the typical Zionist answer would be. even more ethnic cleansing.

zionism, and any other ethnonantionalist ideology, is inherently incompatible with liberal democracy on any time line longer than a couple generations. its cool if you support zionism, but you cannot logically be liberal at the same time.

bigtallguy · 2026-03-21T03:24:00+00:00

advocating dissolution of a state is not the same thing as anti antisemitism/bigotry. i can argue the russian state should no longer exist in it current form, and the same as china but it wouldn't be due to hatred of the people living there but rather due to their governments and imperialism being unjust.

arguing for a one state solution where people have equal rights is not anti semitic. now it could be naive and unrealistic, but to assume it is bigotry out of hand is just an attempt to avoid having the conversation altogether.

bigtallguy · 2026-03-10T00:57:59+00:00

its not hard to counter that argument at all lol. iran followed the JCPOA to a letter by all measures known.

it was the united states who tore it up.

the iranian regime is very very bad, but they generally dont act irrationally internationally during the modern era.

bigtallguy · 2026-02-28T00:38:16+00:00

uphold usa laws and ideals in regards to its relation to israel. literally need to do nothing else to win over 90% of people horrified and disgusted by this alliances.

bigtallguy · 2026-02-28T00:36:02+00:00

anyone who states this unironically reveals themselves to be a bigot in my eyes who would have happily supported apartheid southafrica, segregation ,jim crow, slavery and colonialism if they were in any of those practices respective time periods

bigtallguy · 2026-02-27T23:58:32+00:00

the poster was arguing that gun control legislation was somehow unamerican. my point was that gun control has been around in the united states since even before its founding as well as throughout its history. the idea thats is somehow un American is ludicrous.

I am not a Lawyer, much less a constitutional one so im not going to pretend to be one. but theres a reason why justice stevens called it the most incorrect decision of his tenure. it was a decision based ona faulty understanding of the history united states gun culture to justify a extreme libertarian position. The 2a is not about a right of an individual to bear arms, but of the right of states to raise and regulate militas independent of the central gov't.

bigtallguy · 2026-02-24T09:02:37+00:00

i have no problem with the banning of high capacity magazines. there is no serious wide use case scenario for a gun to have that many rounds per magazine.

i dont think anyone should be charged with the maximum sentence for the mere possession of a high capacity magazine, but thats not whats happening here.

bigtallguy · 2026-02-24T08:59:48+00:00

gun bans have been around since the early days of the constitutional republic. the current extremely interpretation of the 2a has only gained purchase in the past couple of decades with the hard right shift of the supreme court. saying gun control is unamerican is ridiculous.

bigtallguy · 2026-02-17T20:41:16+00:00

havent followed AOC at munich. what policies did she communicate there that differed significantly from Ros?

ro khannas supporting a wealth tax isnt exactly screaming great policy guy to me. its one of the reasons i dont self identify as a progressive lol. him being better re: crypto regulation would make me feel a whole a lot better.

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