U.S. Politics: Dirt From Ukrainians, Bombs for Iranians, Shut Down Your Brainiums...

[DMC]

10 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

I’m under the impression there’s a tape of Trump’s call to the Ukrainian President as well. Before I went out to dinner tonight I was watching CNN and one of the commentators said he wanted to hear what tone of voice Trump used in his discussion with the president. But I can’t see any confirmation of that right now.

As @The Great Unwashed implied, while there may well be a tape, the administration can just deny its existence.  The Nixon tapes were only subpoened after a WH admitted the system's existence in televised testimony.  That's unlikely to happen this time, but hey never say never.

[Jace, Extat]

23 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

And yet, all those jobs exist for the sole purpose of supporting the people that will ultimately pull the trigger. They don't get to deflect responsibility just by pointing out they weren't the one personally pulling the trigger. At best you can say that by volunteering for the US Military is volunteering to help kill Iraqis and Afganis. And I personally don't see much of a difference there.

That's because your understanding of the world is less developed than that of an infant. I'm sure the military band personnel can't sleep at night for all the deaths their parade ground drilling has caused. Ditto for the JAG officers, cooks, medical personnel, and engineers. 

I'm all for shitting on army men and the type of people they attract, but the first step to doing anything with competency is knowing what the fuck you're talking about.

[Jace, Extat]

10 minutes ago, DMC said:

As @The Great Unwashed implied, while there may well be a tape, the administration can just deny its existence.  The Nixon tapes were only subpoened after a WH admitted the system's existence in televised testimony.  That's unlikely to happen this time, but hey never say never.

Oh shit, I thought he was making a pee joke...

[DMC]

4 minutes ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

Oh shit, I thought he was making a pee joke...

Ah, yeah I think you're probably right actually.  This is the problem when we're both high.

[TrueMetis]

12 minutes ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

That's because your understanding of the world is less developed than that of an infant. I'm sure the military band personnel can't sleep at night for all the deaths their parade ground drilling has caused. Ditto for the JAG officers, cooks, medical personnel, and engineers. 

I'm all for shitting on army men and the type of people they attract, but the first step to doing anything with competency is knowing what the fuck you're talking about. 

Yeah I've no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, I'm only in the fucking military. You want to give the non-combat trades a pass based on not being directly responsible? Fine, I guess the rest of us were just following orders as well.

[Darzin]

Give them a pass for what? The war in Iraq is over or was until we redeployed to protect a democratic government from fucking ISIS. or in Afghanistan where we are fighting the Taliban? Like yes we have been in Afghanistan forever but I have a hard time framing that war as unjust. It's not like the US military is just going around shooting random Afghans and Iraqis. I'm all for ending the forever war but most of our opponents have been pretty reprehensible.  

[TrueMetis]

2 minutes ago, Darzin said:

Give them a pass for what? The war in Iraq is over or was until we redeployed to protect a democratic government from fucking ISIS. or in Afghanistan where we are fighting the Taliban? Like yes we have been in Afghanistan forever but I have a hard time framing that war as unjust. It's not like the US military is just going around shooting random Afghans and Iraqis. I'm all for ending the forever war but most of our opponents have been pretty reprehensible.  

A pass on not being every bit as responsible for the stuff the military does as the combat troops. That's true whether a war is entirely justified or not.

Also let's be real, plenty of people in the US military, and the other militaries involved I'm sure, are precisely going around shooting random Afghans and Iraqis. Civilian casualties with fuck all or few enemy combatants killed is common as all fuck.

[DMC]

3 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

Also let's be real, plenty of people in the US military, and the other militaries involved I'm sure, are precisely going around shooting random Afghans and Iraqis. Civilian casualties with fuck all or few enemy combatants killed is common as all fuck.

So this justifies characterizing every member of the US armed forces as (at least) "volunteering to help kill Afghans and Iraqis?"

[Zorral]

As expected, the WH expects to do no more than provide a redacted version -- just as with the Mueller Report.  That's worth less than warm spit, as we are all well aware.

One hour ago:

Quote

As House Democrats moved to begin a formal impeachment inquiry, the administration also prepared to release a redacted version of the whistle-blower’s complaint.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/us/politics/trump-whistleblower-congress.html

 

[Conflicting Thought]

1 minute ago, DMC said:

So this justifies characterizing every member of the US armed forces as (at least) "volunteering to help kill Afghans and Iraqis?"

Arent they a part of the US army? The arm forces are not just soldiers right?, so if you are a part of the army then you are partly rwsponsible for the things the army does. I dont think that is a controversial point. 

[karaddin]

2 hours ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

You realize that the vast, vast, vast, vast, majority of soldiers have jobs that should never put them in a position to fire their weapon or kill anyone at all, right? 

The amount of effort you went through to qualify your statement does you no credit.

Yes I am aware of that. If you are signing up for the US military while it is at war on the assumption that you will never have to kill someone then you shouldn't be signing up. You can't know what role you will ultimately serve. How the fuck is that a controversial statement? My qualifiers were indicating that I don't necessarily damn the soldiers for doing it anyway, but they did enlist.

Also it wasn't even my statement if you care to look back through the thread, I just boggled at Scot getting offended by the idea that soldiers enlisting during war could be signing up to kill people.

[Conflicting Thought]

20 minutes ago, Darzin said:

Give them a pass for what? The war in Iraq is over or was until we redeployed to protect a democratic government from fucking ISIS. or in Afghanistan where we are fighting the Taliban? Like yes we have been in Afghanistan forever but I have a hard time framing that war as unjust. It's not like the US military is just going around shooting random Afghans and Iraqis. I'm all for ending the forever war but most of our opponents have been pretty reprehensible.  

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/09/23/world/asia/afghanistan-civilian-deaths-army-airstrike.amp.html

So reprehensible. So just. 

[Jace, Extat]

14 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

Yeah I've no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, I'm only in the fucking military. You want to give the non-combat trades a pass based on not being directly responsible? Fine, I guess the rest of us were just following orders as well.

You know what, I'm capable of admitting when I'm wrong. And I was wrong. You clearly know exactly what you're talking about, you just lack the capacity to make intelligent, or even basic, connective conclusions. I've lived in this country for a long time and seen a lot of military advertisements during football games and Survivor and episodes of House, M.D. Common features of such shameful videos are: men running towards smoke, men rappelling from walls and helicopters, men jumping out of airplanes, woman doing man things, promises of college, promises of skills training for eventual civilian employment, a guaranteed paycheck, "broadened horizons" and men standing at attention in front of an orgy of flags.

What I have never seen is a promise of getting to kill people. Ever.

You wanna claim that folks in the military all share responsibility for the deaths incurred in the execution of operations on foreign soil, you be my guest. I wouldn't even think to correct you. But the statement that individuals, many of them barely adults, who have been indoctrinated into believing the American armed forces represent courage and respectability "volunteered to kill people" is so abjectly wrong that I find myself in the altogether unprecedented position of defending soldja bois.

Maybe you silly foreigners don't understand that schools in America have fucking pep rallies to let army mans tell children how brave it is and how much you can improve your life if you join their cult. You do know what a school is, right? The things where children go to learn about the world and tend to be impressionable upon while they're there?

So actually I've come full circle again. You have no idea what the fuck you're talking about.

[DMC]

7 minutes ago, Conflicting Thought said:

Arent they a part of the US army? The arm forces are not just soldiers right?, so if you are a part of the army then you are partly rwsponsible for the things the army does. I dont think that is a controversial point. 

By this logic every member of the federal government is partly responsible for Trump's actions, or I'm partly responsible for every action my university and its faculty and staff makes.

[karaddin]

1 hour ago, TrueMetis said:

And yet, all those jobs exist for the sole purpose of supporting the people that will ultimately pull the trigger. They don't get to deflect responsibility just by pointing out they weren't the one personally pulling the trigger. At best you can say that by volunteering for the US Military is volunteering to help kill Iraqis and Afganis. And I personally don't see much of a difference there.

Thanks, the response to that suggestion is making me feel like I'm in bizarro world where soldiers sign up to have cupcake parties or something.

1 minute ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

Maybe you silly foreigners don't understand that schools in America have fucking pep rallies to let army mans tell children how brave it is and how much you can improve your life if you join their cult. You do know what a school is, right? The things where children go to learn about the world and tend to be impressionable upon while they're there?

The bolded is precisely why I put in the qualifiers that you then sniped at me about. I've lived in the US and I was fucking appalled the first time I went to the local supermarket and there's a full time dedicated recruiting office for the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force attached to the supermarket in small-mid sized town Idaho.

Perhaps the thing I'm ignorant on is an assumption of what was meant by "kill Iraqis and Afghans" because even if collateral damage never happened and only combatants are killed, those combatants still fall under that statement. Again the original statement wasn't mine, if you'd like a more general one

"People enlisting into the military should be doing so aware of the fact they may need to kill people in a time of war, and when you are enlisting already at war you should specifically expect the possibility of killing people from the nations you are at war with".

If you're all interpreting Bonnot's original statement as meaning "every member of the military goes around explicitly and intentionally slaughtering civilians all day" then I can see that that is indeed a very different statement to the one that was confusing me. My paragraph in quotes above is all I ever meant with my reply however.

[Martell Spy]

Quote

 

The choices for intelligence community whistleblowers are inherently limited. “You can stay silent, risk your career, or risk worse, like prison,” said David Colapinto, a whistleblower lawyer at Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto. “None of those choices are good.”

This system, in which even those who follow the rules are persecuted for talking out of turn, is not new, Radack noted. “Thomas Drake — an NSA surveillance whistleblower pre-Snowden — was prosecuted under the Espionage Act after following the procedures in the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act,” she said. Seeing what happened to Drake, she added, led “Snowden to correctly conclude that using the same channels that entrapped Drake to make his disclosures ... would be an exercise in futility.”

Snowden’s government critics should have known this better than anyone. Obama’s administration used the Espionage Act against more alleged leakers than any administration before or since. An interagency review panel later found that Ellard, the NSA inspector general who said Snowden should’ve come to him, had himself retaliated against a whistleblower. The panel, composed of inspectors general from outside the Defense Department, recommended Ellard be fired; the Defense Department later overruled that decision.

The basic problem with government whistleblowing, as Snowden noted in October 2013, is that “you have to report wrongdoing to those most responsible for it.” 

And as Snowden recognized, there are real advantages in going to the press. When journalists do their jobs, they can verify and then help lend legitimacy to complaints. Cooperating with “some kind of media organization would defend me against the worst accusations of rogue activity, and correct for whatever biases I had, whether they were conscious or unconscious, personal or professional,” Snowden writes in “Permanent Record,” his memoir published last week. 

 

The Trump Whistleblower Scandal Is Proving Edward Snowden Right
Snowden should’ve gone through “official channels,” his critics yelped. Here’s what happens when you do.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-whistleblower-edward-snowden_n_5d893bf8e4b0938b5932cde0

[DMC]

6 minutes ago, karaddin said:

"People enlisting into the military should be doing so aware of the fact they may need to kill people in a time of war, and when you are enlisting already at war you should specifically expect the possibility of killing people from the nations you are at war with".

 If you're all interpreting Bonnot's original statement as meaning "every member of the military goes around explicitly and intentionally slaughtering civilians all day" then I can see that that is indeed a very different statement to the one that was confusing me. My paragraph in quotes above is all I ever meant with my reply however.

Well then yeah it's a framing issue that can easily offend people as it's pretty obviously provocative.  Your paragraph in quotes is fine, it's when you boil that down to essentially "all U.S. armed forces volunteer to help kill muslims" that people are obviously going to object to.

[Darth Richard II]

The issue here I think is listening to any of the stupid shit that comes out of Bonnot's face anus.

[karaddin]

2 minutes ago, DMC said:

Well then yeah it's a framing issue that can easily offend people as it's pretty obviously provocative.  Your paragraph in quotes is fine, it's when you boil that down to essentially "all U.S. armed forces volunteer to help kill muslims" that people are obviously going to object to.

Ok that definitely makes more sense. My reply was predicated on reading Scot's post as rejecting the idea that people enlisting in the US military should be prepared for the idea of killing people from nations the US is at war with/operating within in a conflict against insurgency etc. I didn't consider from the context that it could read differently.

[DMC]

2 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Ok that definitely makes more sense.