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At this point, is anybody surprised by this? It's quite clear that when it comes to sponsoring groups in the Middle East, we just throw money/weapons at anyone,

• wavefunction 9y ago
  When you have someone like Senator John McCain claim that "we can tell the bad guys from the good guys" while being photographed on his photo op tour of Syria with known mass murderers of civilians, you had to know these folks don't know what they're talking about.
  • mixmastamyk 9y ago
    We understand that bureaucrats and their institutions are quite inept when tasked with delivering the mail, for example. But they often get a pass with international relations. Might be the bikeshed effect in action.
• djsumdog 9y ago
  I've been saying this for years. "The CIA created ISIS. Not just funded, but created the situation where such organizations could come up." I constantly get criticized for this. "No, of course America isn't funding ISIS. We're fighting them." I then talk about The Bay of Pigs, the 1973 Coupe in Chile, Iranian Contras, The School of the Americas ... a criminal rap sheet that shows a pattern of sociopathhy by the US government -- and Syria fits that pattern: arm ISIS, bomb Assad and then bomb ISIS too .. we're creating and fighting all the wars. I'm not surprised, but the majority of Americas would be .. if this appeared on CNN, NPR or a major media outlet. Otherwise it's "fake news." When sales for 1984 went up after the Trump election, I was greatly disheartened. It meant the current administration had commandeered the minds of people to think that now was the age of Orwell, when in reality, we've been in 1984 long before I was born and long before my parents were born.
  • totalZero 9y ago
    Setting aside every other part of this discussion: I don't think a state actor can be accurately described as sociopathic. The expectations and interactions among nations are fundamentally different from those among people.
    • vosper 9y ago
      Nations are just groups of people, but I agree with you. I'm not generally in favour of applying terms like sociopathic to large groups.
      • ellius 9y ago
        Saying anything is "just a group" of its constituent parts is misleading and incorrect. Behaviors emerge at system levels that are not present among individual "parts."
    • duncanawoods 9y ago
      Can you make an argument for believing that? Using psychological terms in a strictly behavioural fashion for groups/countries seems to me to not just be an analogy but capturing the essence of what is observable. Many of the concepts are similar e.g. identity, cooperation, aggression, lying, betrayal, self-preservation, fear etc. You can defend this further and claim that even when examining an individual, you will see conflicting identities and traits that resembles the conflict in a group rather than a constant, simple, single identity. The underlying truth appears to not be not that a group does not have psychological behaviours its that a single simple human identity doesn't really exist and is always an emergent property of some collection of heterogeneous smaller parts identities/modes/processes etc.
    • stemc43 9y ago
      If you really look at human interactions they are exactly same as nation - level ones: constant fight for individual success with thinly cover of "moral values".
    • CapitalistCartr 9y ago
• Alex3917 9y ago
  > At this point, is anybody surprised by this? I mean it does seem weird that you have liberals cheerleading for funding a genocide, and completely losing their shit at Republicans for trying to stop it.
  • X86BSD 9y ago
    Does it really seem weird? I mean in the last 7 months we have literally watched the liberal left eating itself. Everest college. Berkeley. Antifa. BLM. Everyone disagreeing with them being silenced and called out as a bigot or racist. If I flip on the news, I seriously don't event know what country I am living in anymore. Up is down. Freedom is slavery. War is peace. I've heard that before... Oh god...
    • Alex3917 9y ago
      > Everyone disagreeing with them being silenced and called out as a bigot or racist. Well the fact that antifa and all that stuff happened within a couple months of everyone donating to the ACLU is amusing on its own.
    • notfromhere 9y ago
      oh please, save your hyperbolics. the US president went to bat for a group of white supremacists a couple weeks ago, so I think we have bigger problems than bored college kids and an overturned trashcan in Berkeley
    • enraged_camel 9y ago
      The liberal left is more vocal than ever because they see Nazis and white supremacists openly marching on the streets holding tiki torches and with assault rifles slung over their shoulders, running over and killing counterprotesters, and a President who has been exceptionally lackluster in his condemnation by blaming "both sides".
    • Top19 9y ago
      Your last words are something Bernard Knox, the famous classicist, encountered in the texts of Virgil while hiding in a bombed out villa in the Italian countryside during World War II. """After training as a parachutist, he fought with a special force organized by the O.S.S., the British and the Free French to coordinate elements of the French Resistance with advancing Allied troops after the Normandy invasion. He also instructed members of the French Maquis in the use of explosives. The O.S.S. later sent him into northern Italy for an equally dangerous mission with the Italian underground, and it was there that he rekindled his passion for the classics. Holed up in an abandoned villa, he discovered a bound copy of Virgil and opened it to a section of the first Georgic that begins, “Here right and wrong are reversed; so many wars in the world, so many faces of evil.” Professor Knox recalled, in “Essays Ancient and Modern,” “These lines, written some 30 years before the birth of Christ, expressed, more directly and passionately than any modern statement I knew of, the reality of the world I was living in: the shell-pocked, mine-infested fields, the shattered cities and the starving population of that Italy Virgil so loved, the misery of the whole world at war.”"" TRANSLATION: we've been here before, at least twice https://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/books/17knox.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/books/17knox.html
• alrs 9y ago
  And Toyotas. Lots of Toyotas. https://journal-neo.org/2015/10/09/the-mystery-of-isis-toyota-army-solved/ https://journal-neo.org/2015/10/09/the-mystery-of-isis-toyot...
  • knowaveragejoe 9y ago
    Fwiw, a site having months, even years-old, mostly conspiratorial articles promoted on their sidebars and front page should be a huge red flag. Nevermind the shoddy writing.
    • bahjoite 9y ago
      "US Officials Ask How ISIS Got So Many Toyota Trucks" http://abcnews.go.com/International/us-officials-isis-toyota-trucks/story?id=34266539 http://abcnews.go.com/International/us-officials-isis-toyota...
• alexandercrohde 9y ago
  Just a heads up to those of you with the most pessimistic views of America, you're shooting yourself in the foot when you fall on hyperbole. For somebody in the middle such as myself, if you want to make a persuasive argument you'd be most convincing by demonstrating emotional stability, rationality, and evidence (links to wikipedia will suffice).
• wil421 9y ago
  What do you think happens when you are really fighting proxy wars with Russia? The enemy of my enemy is my friend. It's not uncommon to arm enemies after fighting a war. Look at Japan and Germany.
  • shitgoose 9y ago
    you mean that after defeating Assad ISIS will become another Japan or Germany?
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • wil421 9y ago
      You should've said al qaeda instead of ISIS. They will use the rebels to destabilize Assad's government and then try to install a US favorable one. One could say they are just using al qaeda, they are a stepping stone. I doubt either Isis or al qaeda would be the favorable government, leading to another jihad with the US.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• mengibar10 9y ago
  US is giving weapons to PKK in Syria. PKK has been considered a terrorist organization both by US and EU for a very long time, I mean decades. They are giving weapons under the pretext of fighting ISIS. Among the weapons given there are surface to air anti-aircraft missiles. Strange thing is that ISIS does not have any aircraft to shoot down. The amount of weapon delivery as of last week is about 13,000 containers. Hard to believe, right?
  • forapurpose 9y ago
    The PKK is a far more complex issue. Their mission is self-determination for Kurdish people. After WWI, the Allied powers split the region where the Kurds reside, their hoped-for Kurdistan, between Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. They have faced oppression and worse (e.g., Iraq murdered Kurdish civilians with chemical weapons in the 1980s) from these governments for generations. In Iraq: In the contest with Saddam Hussein, at least beginning in the 1990s, the U.S. built a strong relationship with the Kurds there. The Kurds used U.S. support to create de facto autonomy from the Iraqi government (something they are voting on in a couple of weeks - potentially a major event in Kurdish history). They became a skilled combat force and strong allies of the U.S., fighting alongside the Americans through the Iraq War and now in the fight against ISIL. In Syria: My impression is that the relationship between the U.S. and the Iraqi Kurds extends now, with the Syrian civil war, to the Kurds in Syria. Like those in Iraq, the Syrian Kurds also have used their government's weakness to establish some autonomy. In Turkey: There is no government weakness and no autonomy, but an ongoing contest with crackdowns, terrorist attacks, and more. The Turkish government calls the PKK 'terrorists', but the government's hands are hardly clean. The Turkish government does not want autonomous Kurdish regions in Syria and Iraq, both of which would border the Kurdish region in Turkey and would encourage and support Turkish Kurds. Are the PKK terrorists? Freedom fighters? Some of each? I can't tell you. But certainly they have some argument for seeking self-determination in the face of oppression, and unlike groups such as ISIL their goal is self-determination for their own people, not to bring down governments and to take land and liberty from others.
    • mengibar10 9y ago
      In that case, can we then draw the conclusion that US is giving PKK all these weapons for a purpose beyond fighting ISIS?