Because when the average person hears “the government owes x Billion Dollars” the assumption is “they will be handing over X billion in cash”. It’s like the Ukraine military support - people hear “3 billion USD in military aid for Ukraine” and think the US is handing over 3 billion dollars, not handing over about 3 billion worth of old soon-to-be-retired equipment.
Which makes conversations about government debt really fun. It’s just a lack of understanding.
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These are the “right by accident” people that make it so hard to have meaningful discussions.
You’re absolutely correct and we shouldn’t ignore genuine acts of antisemitism just because Israel’s government is doing terrible things.
That’s not true. Tankies love to shit on the US for “meddling” in Africa when a lot of the time its providing funding and weapons for regimes where the opponents are funded by Russia/Wagner/China. Depending on which way the wind blows, the US is either “overthrowing a legitimate regime” or “restoring the democratic process”.
It’s a no win. Africa is too weak to stabilize by itself after centuries of meddling, and if the US goes hands-off, Russia and China will just economically enslave them via predatory loans, like how neoliberal policies economically enslaved South/Central America to the US. I’d trust the US installed people for their own populace over Chinese/Russia installed people, given the respective human rights records of all involved.
Anyways, while 2003 onwards was a huge fuck up and absolutely abhorrent, Desert Shield/Storm was incredibly justified defending an ally under armed occupation and still gets shit on by Tankies.
One man’s humanitarian mission to shut down a warlord is another man’s mission to overthrow a regime and install US-friendly government.
I honestly think it’s the internet as a whole that’s done that to us.
You used to be able to not know things, but now I’m expected to have encyclopedic knowledge of every factor going into any individual choice I make as though I’ve gotta min/max my life. I think the expectation that everyone needs to have an opinion on everything because “the information is available, just Google it!”, combined with the fact that we have a limited rate of knowledge consumption and limited bandwidth has led to people just skimming information. Shortest path to having an “informed” opinion on every topic, because God forbid you don’t know something online.
I think in order to increase our media literacy we must return to partial ignorance.