TheTechnician27

Would you describe a person being annoyed by mosquitoes as having “hurt feelings”? I have no respect for you and therefore no concern for the minimal amount of time you deign to spend crafting a cogent argument for me.

What I do care about is a tankie propagandist coming into an ancom community and shitting it up with disinformation. Ancoms are friends; you are not.

The spreadsheet (source here) literally says the number of sites as of 30 September 2024. Do you understand that “site” and “military base” are different things? Here are their definitions if you want to play illiterate. A foreign site in this context can be any foreign property run by the DoD, including e.g. an office building. In your version of events, the Congressional Research Service says it’s 128 as of mid-2024, WBW using an extremely lax definition of what constitutes the US operating a military base arrived at 844, and I’m supposed to believe the CRS and the DoD differ by nearly 10x and that the WBW totally missed this public report showing that they came up with less than 3/4 of the actual number…

… Is what I would say if you weren’t completely misreading this spreadsheet anyway. 1143 represents the “grand total” of “land-only sites” in the US, US Territories, and overseas combined.

You’re. Just. Lying. Stop being disingenuous or fuck off.

US military confirmed operaring zero military bases?? 😱😱 (Except when helping Eastern Europe against Russia; they’re pretty based then.)

So I guess we have three options:

• The Congressional Research Service lied two years ago about the number of foreign military bases as 128.
• The US in 1.5 years sextupled its number of foreign military bases.
• World Beyond War’s criteria of “any installation, facility, or site located outside the operating country that is financed, operated, leased, rented, or temporarily accessed by that country” to define a “foreign military base” is majorly misleading when taken out of context for a shitty meme.

Wonder which it is.

(Actual argument done, I can insult you without it being ad hom: fuck off, tankie. I disagree with ancoms sometimes on pragmatics, but their ethics are sound; not yours.)

“If begging the question worked, we wouldn’t need it smuggled in through a shitty meme.”

“Over 900 military bases around the world” is doing a lot of heavy lifting considering a) the 900 figure is pulled out of their ass and more importantly b) it’s more like 130 outside the US, mostly concentrated in a few countries – unless the meme is suggesting US military bases on its own soil are there primarily as a bulwark against socialism.

More importantly, though, as someone else pointed out: it’s about hegemony generically. If US foreign military bases exist not to further US hegemony but in the interest of worshipping capitalism, why are there bases in Europe standing in defense of social democratic countries against – what has now been for decades – one of the world’s most hypercapitalist shitholes? Genuinely what work are these bases doing to uphold specifically capitalism? Did I wake up in 1983? Is the 82nd Airborne on its way to Grenada?