this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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Wait I'm lost, are we talking foreign invasions done by the US vs foreign invasions done by China? Or the number of victims of Hamas vs the victims of the IDF? What are we counting here? Military bases abroad?
Evil policies supported by democrats vs evil policies supported by republicans
what evil polices do dems support that the republicans don't?
There have been many at various times, and it also depends on your values, obviously. It also depends on whether you're looking at things in specific times as opposed to generally.
There have been many times when many mainstream Democrats were pro-censorship but most Republicans were not.
Then there are other situations that I think are edge cases and therefore interesting. For example, Obamacare did make life better for real numbers of Americans, but it also guaranteed that we wouldn't be looking at universal healthcare for a few more decades, if ever. And that was a law pushed for and passed by Democrats. Of course you could argue that it's better than nothing, maybe it was, but medical debt is far worse now than it ever has been, and predictably so. So then you wonder why Democrats pushed for it, and we all know the answer to that, corruption. Of course they would say that it's the best they could do, but is that even true? We'll never find out, cuz they didn't try.
So how do you rate rate these gray area situations? Things that are better than nothing but worse than a lot, but the politicians are only voting for them because they are corrupt.
So can you name a few?
Policies can be checked on both sides
Sure, but on average when some self proclaimed leftist's opening is "Democrats did a bad thing" in a vacuum my immediate assumption is they're a campist/tankie, accelerationist, or a rightwing psyop and my instinct is to immediately challenge them (most of the time... sometimes its me critiquing the dems)
Sometimes it turns out they're giving an earnest critique but usually not.
What in the word salad are you talking about.
Leftists say funding Israel's war crimes is bad. Check mark in both columns.
That's not a critique of democrats, that's a critique of a portion of democrats and all of republicans.
It's a critique of the democrats that were in the running for president
Who made you the arbiter of another person's earnestness? Can you read minds? And if you're the one criticizing the Dems, does someone else take over?
I'm the arbiter of who I trust is arguing coherently or in good faith and I am ultimately not trusting of the average internet poster by default.
I've been arguing on dedicated internet debate spaces for a very very large portion of my life and I have a good eye for when someone isn't worth being taken seriously.
I'll take your word for it.
Drone strike deaths under Obama vs under Trump?
Talking about how some people deny or justify the horrendous things done by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the Kim Dynastie, Malenkov, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Ulbricht, Honecker, Guevara, Ho Chi Min, and so on and all their helpers, because others also did horrendous things and both have to be called out for it. Justification of unneccesary murdering shows you are in favor for that which is unacceptable
Are the people justifying these things in the room with us?
If the room is .ml, yes.
Who killed more Asians: US or Mao?
Hamas are arguably a gift for Israel.
If we take "kill" to mean like manslaughter through poor policy and famine, probably Mao, by an order of magnitude. But I'm guessing that's not what you're thinking about, because that's kind of a silly comparison. It's like asking "who killed more Americans, Mao or the US", to which the answer is both obvious and completely uninteresting.
So I'm gonna take it to mean "murder", like the killing of landlords during the cultural revolution. And then it's actually kind of close, and I'm not sure who's killed more Asians. So the most liberal estimates for Mao there are 7 million, but the range is pretty big. The most conservative estimates put him at 2 million.
Let's look at the US' kill count. I know of bombing campaigns in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Respectively, the ranges here are 300k-2M, 1.5M-3.1M, 80k-350k, 50k-150k. So that's a range of 1.9M-5.6M. Then there's the suppression of the movement for independence in colonized phillipines, which adds 200k, and Afghanistan, 250k. So that puts us at 2.5M-6M for the US to 2-7 for Mao.
It should be noted that I'm not counting indirect deaths via training and arming dictatorships (if someone hands an assassin a gun, and the assassin kills your mother, the first person is not a murderer, but they are culpable in some way. If we add these, you get Timor, and the murder of leftists in Indonesia in the 60s, among others, which adds another 1-1.5M to the US count.
So I guess it's kind of close. I gotta say, I'm a little surprised, I always thought Mao was much worse, but the US is a strong contender.
Woah! We skipped over the Pacific theater of WWII entirely it looks like.
Also skipping all MidEast action, but that can be considered a different tally for purposes of this exercise.
But realistically we should also have approximately similar timeframes for both- otherwise we just inflate US counts artificially.
You're welcome to include Iraq, Iran, South America, Africa, Gaza, Turkish Kurds, and so on. You're welcome to restrict to some arbitrary timeframe, you're welcome to exclude indirect fatalities. Ultimately it's a fairly futile exercise. But I do know that if we restrict to the period including the invasion of Vietnam by China and onward, the US "wins" very, very comfortably.
And I object to your use of the word artificial. These are human lives that were snuffed out for the sake of greed. These were people, like your father, your mother, your friends. There's nothing artificial about these numbers.
That's a good reply. 😁
Thank you. 🙂
It's only a gift if you get it for free. Israel funded Hamas to make themselves look more sympathetic.
Israel got a good R.O.I.
Hard disagree.
Gaza was under siege by Israel, but it was coping.
Hamas then did their stupid attack on Putin's 71st birthday, inflicting relatively insignificant damage to Israel;
but it was an excuse that Israel used/is using for the current bulldozing of Gaza (and, IIUC, more of the West Bank).
Perhaps when the Riviera has been fully developed, Netanyahu should send the leaders of Hamas some gift baskets.
The world is turning against Israel. Netanyahu is headed for a jail cell.
IIUC, 50 years ago, the UN GA passed a motion that Zionism was racism.
Did that scare the people of Israel?
I predict that Israel will still have relations with much of the world as dealing with Israel is more profitable than dealing with Arabs in Golan, West Bank, and Gaza; and Netanyahu won't go to jail, particularly as his 80th birthday is less than 60 months away.