As I said, I hate talking about conservatives on here because I feel like I'm saying the obvious. Bad things are bad but half the country doesn't seem to realize bad things are bad so we keep repeating history in the worst possible ways.
Now we're just straight up invading countries, kidnapping their leaders, charging them with crimes where we have no jurisdiction, and taking over so we can seize the oil. And Trump, unlike Bush, is explicit, it's about the oil. He's talked about how Bush's biggest mistake in Iraq is not just taking the oil, even though people would argue that's the core reason we were there, and here Trump is going on about taking the fricking oil. We just invaded a country, and took over, because we wanted the oil. Full stop. This is imperialism.
To be fair, im not sure how much better it is when we did have a pretext. Bush lied us into Iraq, that didn't make it much better, but at least we had the pretense of building democracy. Trump doesn't care about democracy. He just wants oil. To be fair, we don't really care about democracy much either, we'll put up with dictators as long as they play ball with us, but we'll just invade countries with democratically elected socialist leaders because they won't let us exploit their natural resources.
I'm not gonna act like if I had my way, we wouldnt care at all about natural resources. After all, we don't just get involved in places out of the goodness of our hearts. There needs to be a strategic benefit involved, like natural resources or other geopolitical goals, but ideally, that should just be the bonus and we should be there for the right reasons. And even then, we should want to rehabilitate nations into being democratic. Socialist or capitalist, I dont really care. But I do support liberal democracy. And we should govern based on those ideals and not JUST look at the raw realpolitik of things. Trump, this IS just all realpolitik. No justification, just invasion.
I wanna be honest, I dont like Maduro much. I mean, he was legitimately democratically elected but then suspended his country's democratic process. I can see why leftists defend him given our interventionist streak, but I also ain't really a fan of him either. I don't like authoritarians for any reason. And if you cant have socialism without authoritarianism, well, maybe it isn't the best of ideas. I am pretty flexible on economics. My ideal economy is more a mix between the two. Like a social democracy. Just with UBI and more outright libertarian philosophy behind my thinking. Which is kind of like an American take on social democracy given how pro freedom we're supposed to be. But yeah. I dont like pure capitalism, I dont like authoritarian capitalism, and I think the far right is just...feudalism again. Rich people owning everything while the poor are reduced to wage slaves struggling to get by in a system hostile to their interests. And quite frankly, that seems to be what we wanna impose on venezuela and the rest of the world. Imperialism is still alive, let's not act like it isn't, and I quite frankly don't support our foreign policy goals of imposing right wing capitalism on people whether they like it or not.
This was a raw and unjustified act of aggression toward another nationstate. What we are doing is, or should be illegal under international law, and it makes us look like the bad guy, because we are the bad guy. And it's just gonna strengthen our real enemies of russia and china long term. Because russia wants Ukraine, China wants Taiwan, and we just lost all moral high ground with this very obvious land grab. Even the less politically intelligent people in my life are saying the obvious to me today, like "hey doesn't this just mean people can just take us over in theory now?" It wont happen since we have the biggest stick, BUT...yeah. Once you throw out international law and the institutional norms that have held world politics together since 1945, everything is on the table. This was a catastrophically stupid move by a catastrophically stupid president, and as some have said to me today, we just opened pandora's box here.
So yeah. Bad things bad. Do we have to say bad things are bad? I cant believe I have to write that bad things are bad. But here we are. BAD THINGS ARE BAD! Wtf is this timeline, like seriously.
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