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As FpUser pointed out, why cherry-pick stats for the first six months? Why only Iraq? Was the Iraqi campaign vilified domestically in the first six months too o

As FpUser pointed out, why cherry-pick stats for the first six months? Why only Iraq? Was the Iraqi campaign vilified domestically in the first six months too or was it a rah-rah ‘Mission accomplished’/‘We got him’ type of situation in the beginning? I can understand the selective blindness. After all everyone wants to believe they’re on the good guys side. We invade for the good reasons, they invade because they’re imperialist. We cause collateral damage that we’re very sorry about, they just downright target civilians. And on and on the justification goes. When you don’t have a dog in this race and treat both sides’ media as propaganda outlets, it becomes really easy to compare and see who’s worse on what time scale and why. And it’s easy to see that discriminating regular Joes (or Ivans) isn’t an act of solidarity with the victim, but a bigoted way to release misplaced anger. A little bit of self awareness goes a long way.

deaddodo 4y ago
> Why first six month? Because the Russian offensive hasn't been going on for 10 years. > I can understand the selective blindness. After all everyone wants to believe they’re on the good guys side. I don't live in the US nor represent American interests, so your strawman is useless and futile. Especially when I went to pains to paint the Iraq War as a bad thing, not a good one. Russia is simply worse.
- meeuwer 4y ago
  One doesn’t have to be American to consider themselves to be in the US camp. I live in a NATO country and the pro-US propaganda here is even worse than in American outlets and much more consolidated because of the de facto media monopoly. Here, ’us’ means the US with the rest of NATO and ‘them’—Russia, China, Iran, etc. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion when it comes to moral judgement. My opinion is that on the global bully scale the US is much higher than any other country. Which of course doesn’t excuse the lesser bullies, but it’s puzzling to see the extent of mental gymnastics one has to go through to argue that Russia is worse than the US in the invasions department. The country that has a history of being a serial invader with the overall (by far) higher civilian death toll is still better because the first six months of Iraq invasion were reportedly less brutal than the first six months of Ukraine invasion? I don’t buy the idea that there can be only one Bully we should all focus on and the moment you get a worse one the previous bully can walk away scot-free. If one starts punishing people for their government’s actions (as Ken does), at least they should be consistent in their folly and treat the ally bullies the same way as the enemy ones.

deaddodo 4y ago

> Why first six month? Because the Russian offensive hasn't been going on for 10 years. > I can understand the selective blindness. After all everyone wants to believe they’re on the good guys side. I don't live in the US nor represent American interests, so your strawman is useless and futile. Especially when I went to pains to paint the Iraq War as a bad thing, not a good one. Russia is simply worse.

meeuwer 4y ago
One doesn’t have to be American to consider themselves to be in the US camp. I live in a NATO country and the pro-US propaganda here is even worse than in American outlets and much more consolidated because of the de facto media monopoly. Here, ’us’ means the US with the rest of NATO and ‘them’—Russia, China, Iran, etc. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion when it comes to moral judgement. My opinion is that on the global bully scale the US is much higher than any other country. Which of course doesn’t excuse the lesser bullies, but it’s puzzling to see the extent of mental gymnastics one has to go through to argue that Russia is worse than the US in the invasions department. The country that has a history of being a serial invader with the overall (by far) higher civilian death toll is still better because the first six months of Iraq invasion were reportedly less brutal than the first six months of Ukraine invasion? I don’t buy the idea that there can be only one Bully we should all focus on and the moment you get a worse one the previous bully can walk away scot-free. If one starts punishing people for their government’s actions (as Ken does), at least they should be consistent in their folly and treat the ally bullies the same way as the enemy ones.