MASSIVE Erection Thread 2016 - Lizard has the advantage. Trump is spiraling towards defeat.

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All discussion of the candidates, updates and results should go here

For example- here's a video of Ted Cruz vying for world domination.

Also Hilary Clinton is a crook and nobody should have sex with her.

Discuss

(Note- The title will change as we get nearer the election, previous titles will be archived in the OP)

 

[feedtheoctopus]

There's plenty of other disasters and instability in the Middle East than Iraq.

If you actually spent 2 seconds looking at Hillary Clinton's decisions as Secretary of State you'd see that every country in the Middle East she decided to get involved in went to shit and have become war zones fueled by American weapons.

"The Middle East" encompasses a lot more than Iraq, and Iraq was not Ground Zero for everything horrible that happened.

You need to understand that this is not a movie. That there is no "right" decisions when you're talking about most of this shit. There's a choice between destruction and slightly less destructive chaos. There is no "solution" to most of our problems, especially in the middle east. I will say this, the Obama administration has been more positive in the foreign policy department than all 8 years of Bush were. And I sincerely doubt Trump will come close to that standard (low as it is). The man is an idiot. He said during the last debate that killing Iranian soldiers wouldn't start a war. There's a difference between bombing Libya in the vain hope of averting a humanitarian disaster and that kind of pure stupidity. He also said we should have "taken Iraq's oil". Yes, that will defeat an insurgency, blatant imperialism. That'll surely win hearts and minds!

Hate Clinton all you want, I'm not exactly her biggest fan. But I know stupid when I see it. And Trump isn't just stupid, he's dangerously ignorant. No amount of hindsight about Libya is going to change this fact. If he was in Clinton's position at that time it wouldn't have been some bombs, it would have been ground troops and Iraq 3.0. The man is psychologically incapable of understanding these situations.

Collective guilt is not a popular idea, I should warn you, and it's actually one of the ideas sinking your favored candidate. People hate that "you are an American, therefore you you bear the guilt of everything every American before you has ever done" shtick.

Furthermore, while most people here seem to consider the Iraq war an unmitigated disaster, a lot of KF's user base is in the 20-26 age range- far too young to have voted on any politician involved with the war. They hate the war in hindsight and while we can talk about how hindsight is 20/20, I don't think its disingenuous on their part to do so. Just because they were lucky enough to come of age in an era where that shit was obvious doesn't mean they lose any points for pointing it out. To argue what they might have believed had they been adults based on statistics is pure conjecture, and also irrelevant. Clinton (and the other politicians) are supposed to be professionals. People like Curveball aren't supposed to be able to dupe them into stupid shit, and he did. The previous generation fucked up. The whole thing was damn exceptional.

Let's say you were born in 1995, you would have been eight years old at the time of the Iraq invasion. While the war was recently, speaking in geopolitical terms, it didn't exactly happen yesterday, and more than a quarter of the U.S. population is too young to have had jack shit to do with it. There are people born during the year of the invasion who are starting high school this year. Accusing the country of having "blood on its hands" is a wasted sentiment when you're talking to mostly millennials (and whether you consider it a blessing or a curse, that is the vast majority of who you have been speaking to). If you were old enough and want to blame it on your generation, go ahead. It can be your, Clinton, and George Bush's fault. But it isn't most of theirs'. It seems to bother you what happened, and it bothers me, too, but don't try to project your guilt on other people.

I don't buy that "it's not our fault" thing. At the end of the day if we were a few years older most of this current generation would have voted for Iraq just like their parents. Just like their grandparents supported Vietnam. Etc etc. We're not special nor are we immune to the flag waving jingoism bullshit that motivated the Bush years.

 

[Gym Leader Elesa]

I don't buy that "it's not our fault" thing. At the end of the day if we were a few years older most of this current generation would have voted for Iraq just like their parents. Just like their grandparents supported Vietnam. Etc etc. We're not special nor are we immune to the flag waving jingoism bullshit that motivated the Bush years.

Maybe, but we weren't and we didn't. You can argue, for instance, "if Jim were there, he would have killed him, too!" but you definitely can't charge him. The argument is meaningless.

 

[feedtheoctopus]

Maybe, but we weren't and we didn't. You can argue, for instance, "if Jim were there, he would have killed him, too!" but you definitely can't charge him. The argument is meaningless.

If I've learned anything in my life, it is that being optimistic about the American people is usually a bad idea

 

[Gym Leader Elesa]

If I've learned anything in my life, it is that being optimistic about the American people is usually a bad idea

Fair enough, but that's not my point. It struck me odd to say that you "didn't buy" that "it's not our fault thing", and yet how can something I didn't do be my fault? Or yours? Its a strange line of argument, and blaming "all of the nation" for something many of them had no part in is no different than many of the condemnations that come out of the insane far-left circlejerk. "All men are rapists because they might rape", "white people should pay reparations because they "would have" owned slaves". It's a bad line of argument. Likewise, conspiracies about the Jews and and widespread condemnation of the entire black community is very similar amongst much of the alt-right.

Do I think that many Americans would fall for the same shit again? Absolutely I do. Am I optimistic, myself? Hah, in 2016! Like Hell, I am. But your condemnation was far-reaching and unfair.

 

[Shugo]

That there is no "right" decisions when you're talking about most of this shit. There's a choice between destruction and slightly less destructive chaos. There is no "solution" to most of our problems, especially in the middle east.

Sure, I just believe the US doesn't need to be involved in outing "evil" dictators across the world such as Assad and Ghadaffi while our politicians are basically taking bribes by other dictators who execute gays and commit other human rights violations.

Hillary and Obama are both career politicians who only look out for their own interests. It is not in America's interest in my opinion to "take out" more relatively stable countries or to fuel their civil wars with arms while the death toll climbs endlessly.

I can't even fathom how it's not interfering with another country's sovereignty to give arms to rebels trying to overtake a government. Not even selling them arms: directly arming them with taxpayer money. Why not just directly bomb that government's forces at that point if you want to get it over with? What right does the US even have to interfere in Libya and Syria? UN articles are selectively enforced.

It's just more US tax dollars being spent nowhere near the USA. Maybe Israel should go and enforce UN articles in the middle east? With how many billions of dollars in military aid we give to Israel I don't see why we have to spend more tax dollars to fund a civil war personally when we have an ally perfectly capable of doing that.

We fund our greatest ally more and more every year while also spending more and more meddling in the affairs of countries around it in the name of keeping the middle east stable because they all want to destroy Israel. When will Israel become self sufficient and not require us to fund any more civil wars?

 

[feedtheoctopus]

Sure, I just believe the US doesn't need to be involved in outing "evil" dictators across the world such as Assad and Ghadaffi while our politicians are basically taking bribes by other dictators who execute gays and commit other human rights violations.

Hillary and Obama are both career politicians who only look out for their own interests. It is not in America's interest in my opinion to "take out" more relatively stable countries or to fuel their civil wars with arms while the death toll climbs endlessly.

I can't even fathom how it's not interfering with another country's sovereignty to give arms to rebels trying to overtake a government. Why not just directly bomb that government's forces at that point if you want to get it over with? What right does the US even have to interfere in Libya and Syria? UN articles are selectively enforced.

The US is involved in the middle east by geopolitical necessity. It is not a choice. Unless you think a functioning economy and cheap oil are two things you would gladly do away with in the name of abstract morality (somehow I doubt you would actually do that, never mind most of the American public), then you need to accept the fact that getting "involved" is part of the game. Nobody in the US government "likes" the Saudis, we deal with them because it's economically and militarily beneficial for us in that part of the world. Likewise Assad is a threat to US interests, as is ISIS, so we fund the enemies of both. Gaddafi was in the same boat.

People who try to act like there are good guys and bad guys in the middle east, or hell in the world in general, don't understand the actual situation. They don't understand just how complex and interconnected all this shit really is. You are never, ever, ever, going to have a non-interventionist United States. If you want to know what isolationism looks like take a quick gander at Venezuela or North Korea.

In politics every choice is about the lesser of two evils. I might add it's useless to complain politicians don't care about you, of course they don't. Me and you? We're nothing. We don't matter. We never mattered to powerful people, our ancestors didn't matter to the lord of the manor and we don't matter to the CEO of Goldmann Sachs or any of those rich fuckers. This world is theirs. You're just living in it. And this is not going to change because you elect another CEO rich silver spoon jackass.

But if you need to elect one, which alas, we do, it is better you choose one who isn't ignorant enough to believe opening fire on Iranian soldiers is somehow not a big deal.

You want to know why we're fighting a proxy war in Syria? Because our leaders for all their faults are smart enough to know that invading the place to deal with that problem would be a complete disaster and might end up causing a conflict that would spiral even worse out of control.

Trump by contrast would say "fuck it" and just invade, again.

 

[An Ounce of Vagina]

It's just more US tax dollars being spent nowhere near the USA. Maybe Israel should go and enforce UN articles in the middle east? With how many billions of dollars in military aid we give to Israel I don't see why we have to spend more tax dollars to fund a civil war personally when we have an ally perfectly capable of doing that.

Because the thinking is that the moment Israel does so every other Mid East country will attack them, Russia will get involved, and you have WWIII. True or not it's still to much of an unknown for the U.S. to risk having Israel do it themselves.

 

[Shugo]

Assad is a threat to US interests, as is ISIS, so we fund the enemies of both

This is the part I don't get. Why not dethrone Assad personally if he's that big of a threat to our interests? Why not destroy ISIS by ourselves instead of giving weapons to rebels who immediately surrender, or somehow the weapons get intercepted by ISIS themselves?

Why do we have to fund, arms, and train incompetent and in some cases horrible groups to achieve our goals?

Is the main reason we fund these organizations so we can control the world without fighting wars ourselves? We can't risk American lives fighting for American interests in the Middle East, but we can spend American dollars to fund Arab lives to die for our interests when they happen to coincide at the time? Are proxy wars just going to continue indefinitely until there's no one else in the world who are against American interests? What is the main threat to American interests posed by Assad's presidency?

When I complain about politicians only looking out for themselves, I mean more like when Clinton gets millions of dollars personally donated to her Clinton Foundation. Her decisions seem to be influenced on who pays her the most rather than actual American interests.

Because the thinking is that the moment Israel does so every other Mid East country will attack them, Russia will get involved, and you have WWIII. True or not it's still to much of an unknown for the U.S. to risk having Israel do it themselves.

This kind of stuff makes me doubt their usefulness as an ally compared to the amount of money and defense we give them.

 

[feedtheoctopus]

This is the part I don't get. Why not dethrone Assad personally if he's that big of a threat to our interests? Why not destroy ISIS by ourselves instead of giving weapons to rebels who immediately surrender, or somehow the weapons get intercepted by ISIS themselves?

Why do we have to fund, arms, and train incompetent and in some cases horrible groups to achieve our goals?

Is the main reason we fund these organizations so we can control the world without fighting wars ourselves? We can't risk American lives fighting for American interests in the Middle East, but we can spend American dollars to fund Arab lives to die for our interests when they happen to coincide at the time? Are proxy wars just going to continue indefinitely until there's no one else in the world who are against American interests? What is the main threat to American interests posed by Assad's presidency?

When I complain about politicians only looking out for themselves, I mean more like when Clinton gets millions of dollars personally donated to her Clinton Foundation. Her decisions seem to be influenced on who pays her the most rather than actual American interests.

Invading Syria would be a fucking disaster, that's why we don't do it. We learned a hard lesson from Iraq.

If you look at the actual map of Syria over the past two years you realize ISIS has been losing territory bit by bit do in large part to US support of groups like the SDF and Peshmerga in Iraq. Whatever we're doing, it's "working", inasmuch as anything in that part of the world works at all.

Assad is an Iranian and Russian ally, he funnels money and arms to groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and he's a military threat to Turkey, a member of NATO. Not only that he's a brutal piece of shit who instead of stepping down and beginning a peaceful transition to democracy in the face of the Arab Spring decided to declare war on his people. He lost all legitimacy from that alone, never mind the fact that the war has no peaceful solution unless Assad is out of power. Apologists for that idiot always leave that part out. There will be no stability in Syria until the remnants of the regime are abolished. What that stability looks like barely even matters anymore, Assad's people have rejected him and they will continue to do so.

The Clinton Foundation theories go all over the place to the point that I no longer take any of them seriously, to be perfectly honest. If only because the only sources I see on that shit are bullshit tabloids and crap like Breitbart. If some Saudis gave money to it that's all well and good, but it doesn't mean anything in and of itself. It's a charity. People donate money to charities. Rest assured the Saudis don't need to give the CF money to get the cooperation of the US. We've been giving it to them gladly for over 60 years.

 

[DuskEngine]

Invading Syria would be a fucking disaster, that's why we don't do it. We learned a hard lesson from Iraq.

If you look at the actual map of Syria over the past two years you realize ISIS has been losing territory bit by bit do in large part to US support of groups like the SDF and Peshmerga in Iraq. Whatever we're doing, it's "working", inasmuch as anything in that part of the world works at all.

Assad is an Iranian and Russian ally, he funnels money and arms to groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and he's a military threat to Turkey, a member of NATO. Not only that he's a brutal piece of shit who instead of stepping down and beginning a peaceful transition to democracy in the face of the Arab Spring decided to declare war on his people. He lost all legitimacy from that alone, never mind the fact that the war has no peaceful solution unless Assad is out of power. Apologists for that idiot always leave that part out. There will be no stability in Syria until the remnants of the regime are abolished. What that stability looks like barely even matters anymore, Assad's people have rejected him and they will continue to do so.

The Clinton Foundation theories go all over the place to the point that I no longer take any of them seriously, to be perfectly honest. If only because the only sources I see on that shit are bullshit tabloids and crap like Breitbart. If some Saudis gave money to it that's all well and good, but it doesn't mean anything in and of itself. It's a charity. People donate money to charities. Rest assured the Saudis don't need to give the CF money to get the cooperation of the US. We've been giving it to them gladly for over 60 years.

for a self-described commie you are pretty quick to defend US adventurism

 

[Spellskite]

If you look at the actual map of Syria over the past two years you realize ISIS has been losing territory bit by bit do in large part to US support of groups like the SDF and Peshmerga in Iraq. Whatever we're doing, it's "working", inasmuch as anything in that part of the world works at all.

You left out about a billion quotation marks around "working".

 

[Pikimon]

New Hillary Clinton ad using the shitshow that Trump spewed out during the debates.

 

[melty]

's say you were born in 1995, you would have been eight years old at the time of the Iraq invasion. While the war was recently, speaking in geopolitical terms, it didn't exactly happen yesterday, and more than a quarter of the U.S. population is too young to have had jack shit to do with it.

This is a good post. I was slightly older but still painfully naive. The first day of the war was really anticlimactic, and I remember asking what the big deal was.

Idk I wish the u.s. had some kind of prime directive to deal with this shit.

 

[Ineedahero]

I thought these guys were pathetic angry manchild who lived in their mom's basement?

The Clinton Foundation theories go all over the place to the point that I no longer take any of them seriously, to be perfectly honest. If only because the only sources I see on that shit are bullshit tabloids and crap like Breitbart. If some Saudis gave money to it that's all well and good, but it doesn't mean anything in and of itself. It's a charity. People donate money to charities. Rest assured the Saudis don't need to give the CF money to get the cooperation of the US. We've been giving it to them gladly for over 60 years.

Neoliberals ladies and gentlemen. 'Sure people don't like that we fund the Saudis and just chucked a shitfit at Obama for vetoing the 911 bill because they fucking hate that these scumbags have anything over us, but they have for 60 years so who cares what Hillary did!?' Let me guess, Trump would have done the same thing only worse somehow right? I mean, he didn't, but he could have! Is Glenn Greenwald left wing enough for you to take seriously, or is he too left wing to be taken seriously? It's true, he does suffer from an obvious deficit by having a coherent morality that led him, along with an apparently insignificant 30% of the population to oppose the obvious from the get go clusterfuck that was the war in Iraq, but I don't think he classifies as tabloid or breitbart.

 

[QI 541]

Hate Clinton all you want, I'm not exactly her biggest fan. But I know stupid when I see it. And Trump isn't just stupid, he's dangerously ignorant. No amount of hindsight about Libya is going to change this fact. If he was in Clinton's position at that time it wouldn't have been some bombs, it would have been ground troops and Iraq 3.0. The man is psychologically incapable of understanding these situations.

Don't worry, you can get used to dangerous ignorance being the new normal too.

 

[Male Idiot]

This is a good post. I was slightly older but still painfully naive. The first day of the war was really anticlimactic, and I remember asking what the big deal was.

Idk I wish the u.s. had some kind of prime directive to deal with this shit.

The US is the big imperialist empire of the current age. Everything it does is based on a geopolitical assumption. Whenever those are right or wrong are another topic entirely. I feel currently they are a bit too antagonistic to Russia, and are in a "cold war defense" mode as if Putin already launched an attack. This just makes the Russians even more nervous that they will get a "dose of high explosive demukhracy". As an article stated, they consider the US a foe that can not negotiate. Not unwilling, but unable to negotiate. That's scary.

Why do they dislike Best Korea? They don't want another Russian/Chinese ally, that's it. They don't give 2 cents about how the north koreans feel.
Why do they support Saudis? So that they don't try to lick up to the Russians and give them cheap oil. Do they care about the rampant mysoginy and murder of non-muslims? Course not.

This is not about "exportin muh freedum!" but maintaining their iron grip on the world. Its not something inherently evil, it is something that all giant oppressive empires do. Replace the current goverment with a puppet of your own making. Rome did it, Soviets did it, and many will do it in the coming millenia after both Russia and US are gone. I'm not saying they are going away any time soon, but centuries will eventually take their toll.

But the rest of the world is also quite in their right to dislike the US for it. Why do you think "America" is hated and reviled through the entire world save for Western Europe? Those on the receiving end do not like imperialism much, no matter what wonders their exploitations bring in Rome DC.

I don't really feel that the citizens are responsible. US is not a direct democracy where they can vote on who to go to war with and who to leave in peace. They just elect a giant douche or a shit sandwitch and hope for the best, since once voted, they got zero control over their new overlord for 4 years.

 

[Tranhuviya]

Something like 70% of the American people supported invading Iraq, including Donald Trump. Bush lied to all of us (including congress) and after 9/11 it became political suicide to disagree with the idiot. Like it or not Iraq wasn't Clinton's fault. It was either solely Bush's or all of our fault. This entire country has blood on it's hands as far as I'm concerned. Forgive me for not giving a shit about this hypocritical denunciation of our foreign military adventures. Americans love that shit at the moment and only despise it in retrospect when we see the results of our own actions. I don't know how old you are, but if this was 2003 an Collin Powell was waving his scary vial of "anthrax" in your face you would be calling for Saddam's head, statistically.

You do know Saddam was gassing his own people, right? We had reason to suspect he still had chemical weapons, because he had used them before.

 

[Lackadaisy]

The US is the big imperialist empire of the current age. Everything it does is based on a geopolitical assumption. Whenever those are right or wrong are another topic entirely. I feel currently they are a bit too antagonistic to Russia, and are in a "cold war defense" mode as if Putin already launched an attack. This just makes the Russians even more nervous that they will get a "dose of high explosive demukhracy". As an article stated, they consider the US a foe that can not negotiate. Not unwilling, but unable to negotiate. That's scary.

Why do they dislike Best Korea? They don't want another Russian/Chinese ally, that's it. They don't give 2 cents about how the north koreans feel.
Why do they support Saudis? So that they don't try to lick up to the Russians and give them cheap oil. Do they care about the rampant mysoginy and murder of non-muslims? Course not.

This is not about "exportin muh freedum!" but maintaining their iron grip on the world. Its not something inherently evil, it is something that all giant oppressive empires do. Replace the current goverment with a puppet of your own making. Rome did it, Soviets did it, and many will do it in the coming millenia after both Russia and US are gone. I'm not saying they are going away any time soon, but centuries will eventually take their toll.

But the rest of the world is also quite in their right to dislike the US for it. Why do you think "America" is hated and reviled through the entire world save for Western Europe? Those on the receiving end do not like imperialism much, no matter what wonders their exploitations bring in Rome DC.

I don't really feel that the citizens are responsible. US is not a direct democracy where they can vote on who to go to war with and who to leave in peace. They just elect a giant douche or a shit sandwitch and hope for the best, since once voted, they got zero control over their new overlord for 4 years.

Crawl back into your hellhole, commie scum.

 

[Male Idiot]

Crawl back into your hellhole, commie scum.

Now now it was actually a nice place to be, until Merkel/Hillary wanted to flood it with rapefugees.

 

[Brandobaris]

This is the part I don't get. Why not dethrone Assad personally if he's that big of a threat to our interests? Why not destroy ISIS by ourselves instead of giving weapons to rebels who immediately surrender, or somehow the weapons get intercepted by ISIS themselves?

In the 1950's the US Government staged a CIA funded coup that killed the Iranian leader at the time and then installed their own US backed leader. In the 1970's a civil war broke out and the Iranians overthrew the US backed leader and "took back" the leadership. Former deals with Western Oil companies were voided after that.

At the same time the US under Henry Kissingers advice was funding the Mujhadeen fighters in Afghanistan in order to push out the Soviets. In the 70's the geological data surveys suggested that Afghan was sitting on a literal goldmine of valuable minerals. The country had recently built the largest gas and oil pipelines in the region.

The US has a long history of funding groups which align with the geopolitical aims of the US. Whether the groups they rape or behead people, they don't care. Obama is a great admirer of Kissinger and his strategies, and used them in the same way in Iraq, Libya, and now Syria, by funding the group that they want in order to achieve their geopolitical outcome, this eventually became ISIS. Bush was far more old fashioned like his father and preferred direct military intervention.

I am far more interested in what Europes Governments think about the US essentially funding a militant Sunni - Wahabbist group that recruits more members every day, and who's sympathisers and members are flooding into their country. Rapes, Assaults, Terrorist attacks seem to be on the constant increase, and their intelligence services should be telling them why this is happening, and yet, they do nothing. They are going against what the facts and their own population is telling them. I wonder why that is?