comment: >
  
  Quality comment
context: It's difficult to see how Clarence can with a straight face participate in any politics-related issues put before the court. >
  
  We call this "corruption" when it happens in countries we don't like. >
  
  Those are called shithole countries, mind you. >
  
  United Shitstain of America? >
  
  United ShitHOLE of ‘Murica, get it right or pay the price. >
  
  "Now we will share a lifetime of the fondest memories..." 🎶 >
  
  This thing came apart >
  
  Did not expect a Salute Your Shorts reference here of all places, but I’m happy nonetheless >
  
  This is the second SYS reference I've seen in under 24 hours - the other being in the megathread yesterday evening. >
  
  I love how these extremists love to use the term CONSERVATIVE, but they never explain what the fuck that means.  Fiscal Conservative, Religious Conservative? Authoritarian conservative?  And WTF is a SCOTUS wtfe involved in any of the politics?  Such a total conflict of interest . >
  
  “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
  
  John Galbraith >
  
  Precisely. Selfishness recast as virtue.
  I watched It's a Wonderful Life, at Christmas and it's so sad, because the world of miserly greed and selfishness, masquerading as "realism", that the antagonist inhabits (and is counterposed with the generosity and community spirit of James Stewart's character) is now the world we now all live in.
  Selfishness is winning. >
  
  Don't kid yourself, it was the world they lived in as well. There's a reason it's set in a fictional town >
  
  I'm not so sure. The film was released in 1946, two years before the Marshall plan in the US and the establishment of the NHS in the UK.
  It would be difficult to imagine programmes such as these being delivered today, because of, frankly, ingrained societal selfishness. >
  
  The Marshall plan was a strategic military program, I'm sure it would have little trouble passing today so long as the right companies profited an it could be sold as whatever the modern global equivalent of "anticommunism" is today. We didn't institute it out of the goodness of our hearts, and the opening line of the bill makes that perfectly clear:
  
  An Act 
  To promote world peace and the general welfare, national interest, and foreign policy of the United States through economic-financial and other measures necessary to the maintenance of the conditions abroad in which free institutions may survive and consistent with the maintenance of the strength and stability of the United States.
  
  An economic collapse in Europe would be terrible for the US, and helping them financially was a huge geopolitical win. I think even in our broken political climate this would be a no brainer >
  
  We'll have to agree to disagree, but right now Republicans don't want to foot the bill for weapons to allow a democratic country desperate to join NATO to defend itself against an authoritarian enemy that admitted meddling in a US election, and has vowed to do so again. A Marshall plan would seem rather out of reach. 
  1946 was also the year after the UN was established and 3 years before NATO was established. The US under Trump took a dim view of both institutions, preferring America First unilateralism. Notwithstanding Biden's return to multilateralism over the last 2 years, its hard to imagine the US creating these institutions today.
  1948 - Treaty of Brussels. 2016 - Brexit. 
  Similar story. >
  
  I'm not quite sure where to begin with this list. You are cherry picking foreign policy from two wildly different situations and making an apples to apples comparison that just is not valid. Sure, Ukrainian aid and the Marshall Plan are both foreign aid plans, and Russia is a player in both, but that's where the similarities end.
  There is no looming economic collapse if Russia is allowed to annex Ukraine. Similarly Russia has no ideological influence on the world at large like Communism did in the 40s. The self interested capitalists in 1946 were terrified that communism would become popular and threaten their profits at home and abroad, whereas their counterparts in 2023 couldn't give less of a shit if Russia takes over Ukraine.  Sending a few APCs to Ukraine does not present the same economic opportunity to US Capital like a $120B foreign investment does. 
  Similarly, the people resisting sending that aide to Ukraine are the same ones that benefited from that Russian interference, so I'm not sure why you're holding that up as a "noninterventionist" stance. 
  Sure Trump bashed international organizations and pulled us out of the Paris accords. Biden put us back in. These are not indications of societal views or even views of the government as a whole. When the League of Nations was formed after WWI, The US never even joined it despite President Wilson winning a Nobel Peace Prize for his role in establishing it. Not exactly the spirit of community and cooperation.
  All of this is to say: don't romanticize the past. People have always been selfish. It's just that in the 20th century some people in power thought it prudent to throw a bone to the average person, and even then it took one of the most tumultuous time periods in human history to get there (the two largest scale conflicts and one of if not the worst economic catastrophe in history). These concessions are largely anomalous in Western politics, particularly in the US. And while the backlash to the policies of FDR continues to this very day in the anti-socialism rhetoric of conservatives, even at the time they were met with resistance (see The Business Plot). Self interest is so key to US identity we coined the term "Rugged Individualism", and here's what Hoover's Secretary of the Interior had to say about collective economic security:
  
  It is common talk that every individual is entitled to economic security. The only animals and birds I know that have economic security are those that have been domesticated—and the economic security they have is controlled by the barbed-wire fence, the butcher's knife and the desire of others. They are milked, skinned, egged or eaten up by their protectors
  
  Bedford Falls is a fairytale land, and it's ok to want to live in George Bailey's world. But don't get it twisted, American society, and particularly American Government at large was never that.