TRUMP AMOUNCEMENT

[BushMasterBoy]

The tango was killed by a 500 lb bomb dropped by an F-16. The blast caused damage to his lungs. Ground forces tried to revive him, but he died of his injuries. But hey, it is your lie, you can tell it anyway you want.

[FoxtArt]

There's the 'cluster-b' reference I was waiting for. I knew it was in there somewhere.

LOL, there's no better example than Donald for a true-blue textbook narcissist.

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/...388801?lang=en

Trump thinks he's smarter than everyone else, and even he thinks there must be a secret "stable genius" idea to piss of liberals behind every mistake he makes hidden somewhere in there. His black and white thinking is why people are the next-best-thing-to-Jesus one day, and, e.g. "the worlds most overrated general the next". They don't know enemies nor friends, love nor hate, no higher emotions. They praise people and stab them in the back. He was Hillary's friend in the past, then her enemy, he wouldn't think twice about being her BFF if it suited his means to the end.

That's what they do....

Still, I voted for him for one reason only. SCOTUS.

[FoxtArt]

I don't discount the fact that perhaps some are drawn to the fight by what they see as American aggression or what have you. I do think that argument is WAY overstated, though.

We've killed a metric shit ton of these guys. Yeah, someone steps up. Then they get killed. Wash, rinse, repeat. Every time it seems to me the replacement is a little less powerful and has less influence over fewer followers. They also have far fewer places to hide. The problems is not that we're killing them and creating more, the problem is it's gonna be difficult to keep up this level of pressure on their organizations for more than a relatively short time. It's gonna take generations.

The underlying problem is we tried to democratize people who can't be democratized because their society is corrupt through-and-through.

Contrast the cartel problem in Mexico - police are corrupt, gov'ts corrupt, courts are corrupt, bribes everywhere, cartel is the de-facto justice in some areas. Even if we went "to war with mexico" and replaced their government, the people and their culture of corruption remain. The middle east is, was, and still is even worse then that, because not only do you layer the societal corruption, you embed it into religion with heavy elements of peer pressure.

The basic solution in the middle east is you need either despots / dictators ruling with an iron fist (and ignore the atrocities) - that is what their culture is accustomed to - or you have to embed so much money in the system and continue supplying it that you rule the equivalent of the "cartel" and there's more money to be had being "on your side" than "the other guys" which has been our strategy for awhile. That's almost all it boils down to.

It's hard to say if, when, or will it ever get better there, because as children grow up in that system they become accustomed to it, and then become it. There's no easy break to the cycle even if you go replacing gov'ts - and the American "democracy" experiment of the religious cartel resulted in even more people dying than would've if we just left things be. If we want to talk about human costs - lives lost, economic, displacement, refugees, etc. - Assad should've kept ruling Syria. Russia, actually, is on the "right" side of that war insofar as the lesser of two evils is concerned. And maybe even Saddam should've kept ruling Iraq. That doesn't necessarily align with U.S. interests though. If the Syrian "rebels" ever prevailed - of which there is little distinguishing between them and the Syrian ISIS beyond calling each a "sect", the net result would have plunged Syria into even a worse situation. Those societies do not do well in power vacuums, ISIS or anything like it will always come about - "religious cartels". Our support of the "civil war" resulted in many more deaths than would've happened and even ISIS - tragically - than would've happened if we just let Assad squish it early in the first place.

[TFOGGER]

People in the Middle East have been killing each other over whose imaginary friend is the One True God for thousands of years. Our involvement in those conflicts only has a limited and temporary effect. The best we can hope for is containment.

[bellavite1]

People have been killing each other over whose imaginary friend is the One True God for thousands of years. Our involvement in those conflicts only has a limited and temporary effect. The best we can hope for is containment.

FIFY

[Gman]

I don't discount the fact that perhaps some are drawn to the fight by what they see as American aggression or what have you. I do think that argument is WAY overstated, though.

We've killed a metric shit ton of these guys. Yeah, someone steps up. Then they get killed. Wash, rinse, repeat. Every time it seems to me the replacement is a little less powerful and has less influence over fewer followers. They also have far fewer places to hide. The problems is not that we're killing them and creating more, the problem is it's gonna be difficult to keep up this level of pressure on their organizations for more than a relatively short time. It's gonna take generations.

It's the usual process that's cycled through several times already in history. They rise up to take over the world, the world beats them back under the rock they crawled out from, and in a couple hundred years or so it repeats. There's no reasoning with them, so the 'martyr' concept doesn't hold water. The only thing they understand is overwhelming force to reduce their numbers.

[OtterbatHellcat]

Hey...the glass thing.

Let's get on that, and glad hand each other for months about it.