politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
Why do I feel like some has gotten lost over the years and we're just gonna "find" it if we ever get into another world war? Or we got rid of the weapons, but it was juuuust long enough to make sure we stored the info on how to make them?
Don't get me wrong, I'm super happy if we did get rid of them, I'm just skeptical.
We absolutely still know how to make them and in fact still have small stockpiles of them.
What we have kept are far below international agreements and are used to test PPE for soldiers who may find themselves being attacked with these bio/chem threats.
Isn't that a little bit charitable for the country that blackbagged and drugged criminal and non-criminal civilians with LSD, deliberately circulated drugs both inside and outside our own borders, taught animals with bombs strapped to them to seek out rival personnel and infrastructure, infiltrated and assassinated members of social justice movements, deliberately exported indiscriminate murder to countries that looked like they might be starting to think about not being the right kind of democratic, used guns to back corporations quashing striking workers, poisoned the earth in Vietnam with agent orange, and far, far more, all in violation of our own Democratic process, the trust of our people, or the nations we interact with?
We can't move forward if we can't get past the past. You have brought nothing to this conversation except being a troll. Nobody is saying that the USA is without fault.
Doesn’t the recent nomination of a guy like Eliott Abrams—by an ostensibly liberal administration—suggest that the U.S. has not gotten past its past?
Many of these things are still ongoing today, and many more (possibly all?) have never been apologized for or have even been denied. Why are you calling that the past?
Propose a solution to move forward.
Isn't that what why we elect people? So they can do that for us
What is "that"? The other person is mad things in the past, unrelated to the destruction of chemical weapons, are bad.
What would these politicians do? Invent time travel and change history?
How about moving forward, acknowledging the past, and trying to do things right... Like destroying chemical weapons stockpiles?
"You can't point out any problems unless you have a solution to them" is such a tired thought terminating cliché. I have plenty of ideas about solutions, but my contribution here is meaningful without me having to go to all of the trouble of explaining them all.
Your contribution is nothing more than whataboutism.
At what date do you think the United States just stopped doing all that evil bad stuff and got its act together?
The point being made is that the present contains the past and there has been no attempt to break with the past. The CIA hacked into the state-owned computers of Congressional staffers who were writing up the report on torture findings and destroyed most of their report permanently. The CIA was ordered not destroy video evidence. The woman who then destroyed the evidence against court order was unpunished and she was appointed to oversee the case against the CIA hackers, who she absolved of any wrong doing.
It's literally not the past. The US is constantly and continuously doing these things.
there is a saying I think you might consider
miss the forest for the trees
Is your statement meant to imply that one might miss the forest of US atrocities if one looks at every tree of genocide or civilian assassination or unjust imperial war as individual and unrelated incidents?
Do you want things to improve or do you want to stay right?
You can’t have both.
Yes I can, if the US loses its power to treat the rest of the world like this, things will improve and also the atrocities of its past will remain relevant.
Chemical weapons are pretty strategically bad for how the US engages in warfare. Chemical weapons are great for driving up civilian body count. The US doesn't really do that as a strategic goal. On the battlefield they have a really high chance of killing and/or permanently disabling your own soldiers. It's really more of a guerilla's/terrorist's class of weapon because it's good for area denial and wreaking havoc on soft targets.
Uhhh, Agent Orange, White Phosphorous, Depleted Uranium. Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq... The US absolutely engages in driving civilian casualties in a way that can only be described as strategic. The number of civilians they kill even with conventional weapons is so high. Agent Orange poisoned generations of people, reducing birth rates and increasing mortality for an entire country. And then after they figured that out, they still decided to develop and deploy DU rounds that leave radioactive waste pulverized over vast stretches of land that can effectively never be cleaned up. Almost like it's a deliberate strategy....
Meanwhile, we never see terrorists use anything even close to what the US has done and continues to do.
What does the “depleted” mean?
Depleted uranium https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium
that makes sense, what with the US being a country of over 300 million people
not that the use of chemical weapons in terrorist attacks is particularly unheard of
opinion discarded
Utopian indeed
We had (literal) tons of chemical weapons during WW2 and never resorted to them.
Truth be told, chemical weapons are generally actually pretty shit. They're hard to control (which creates potential for both civilian AND friendly casualties), they don't kill or otherwise put enemies hors de combat particularly reliably, and if both sides end up using them, all that ends up with is a lot of infantry in NBC gear being miserable and not actually increasing the ability of offensives or defensives in any meaningful way.
Anyway, there's no need to store the info on how to make them because it's quite literally public knowledge for the most useful and widely used/stored chemical weapons.
We got rid of the "finished and assembled" chemical weapons. The precursors are all ready to be mixed.
Why would we need a long time to store info on how to make them?
US did not use chemical weapons since WW I. Why would we start using them in future wars?
What are you talking about?!
Agent Orange, White Phosphorous, crowd control conpounds (like tear gas, "pepper" munitions, etc). Napalm was used in Iraq and Kuwait.
What you're talking about is the US not using a very specific list of very specific weapons that are effective due to their chemical properties and the way those chemicals interact with human bodies. It is by no means a comprehensive list of munitions with similar chemical properties.
And it is a classic imperialist move to make a list of some chemical weapons, call the list The List Of Chemical Weapons and they develop new chemical weapons that aren't on the list and say "These aren't chemical weapons because they aren't on the list".