This is a dumb and bad strawman, and you are dumb and bad for having employed it.

Why would you make the leap to absolution? “’White supremacy’ is not the only or even most important cause of environmental destruction” =/ “hey someone else raped it worse, so we’re cool.”

Wrong. I never once made excuses for flouting international law, in contrast to you,

I’d rather say that the horseshit is on your part. But yeah, I know, facts, science, international law... all that stupid stuff is nothing but an antiamerican conspiracy.

Fine, anti-American tu-quoque horseshit. It works out the same way. The first step is always making a bunch of excuses for anyone who might compare unfavorably to the United States, or who might threaten America’s position as some uniquely monstrous bugaboo, unmatched in the history of civilized countries.

You said…

You replied to a post about how Russia is not a serious threat to the United States outside of its nuclear arsenal with a single sentence about how they have a big population and are increasing the size of their military. The answer to that non-point is the same as the answer to your larger post: So?

Russia’s…

China is actually behind Vietnam and the Philippines in regards to the island count in the SCS.

Russia “basically invaded” areas of Ukraine with largely ethnic Russian population. Hardly comparable with the all-out conquest of entire nations with no direct relationship to the US.

Russia has less than half the population of the United States, and its population growth rate is low to stagnant. Not too long ago it had one of the most dramatic rates of negative population growth in the world. US military spending is 7 times that of Russia. Once you tally NATO manpower and materiel, the balance…

No, I don’t think they could fuck up Europe, at least, not in the sense that they could start a war and win it. Their nuclear arsenal is a global threat, just like ours: they can hit us just as easily as Europe, so the calculation is basically the same there.

In terms of raw, non-nuclear military power though, Europe…

Russia has invaded two separate countries since 2008, and it continues to manage its acquisitions via puppet states if not just outright, nineteenth-century style annexation. Russia has been every bit as aggressive as the US lately, and the best you can say for it is that doesn’t have our reach.

China is just as much…

You should be embarrassed to be throwing around the term “war mongers” while making excuses for Putin invading and annexing parts of a sovereign country. It’s the same play people make when they attack the First Gulf War—step one is to make a bunch of excuses for a straight-up, naked act of aggression.

Ukraine isn’t…

I don’t know what your point is here. Of course nukes are a decent trump card, that was my point. They make concerns over lower-order acquisitions like fighter aircraft fairly irrelevant when trying to compare relative strength.

Whether or not we successfully built friendly states in the countries whose militaries we…

Putin’s Russia is only a threat because it has a nuclear arsenal. None of our travails in re: fighters or anything else affects the real balance of power with Russian in a meaningful way. Without nukes, Russia is a declining power with an economy the size of Italy and precious few friends.

Men in the Netherlands hire prostitutes at about the same rate that men in the US do. People don’t hire sex workers because its taboo, they hire them because they’re horny and they aren’t getting laid right then for free.

To the body count and the frequency, yeah.

The fact that you guys gave the world Nickelback and Justin Bieber is how I console myself every time I think about the Iraq war.

Exactly. The detective whose instincts got us stop and frisk was a 62-year-old veteran and had been patrolling that specific neighborhood for years. Somehow the lesson learned from that case was to deliberately expand police harassment instead of getting people out of their cars for extended foot patrols.

Man, if that term gets picked up by too many people you know they’re just gonna wring all the value and meaning from it. How overused is “privilege” now?

You don’t have to believe: the only patrol tactic with a body of research that shows it deterring neighborhood crime is the two-man foot patrol. Vehicle drives-throughs don’t do jack shit.