News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. 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. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Wild idea, how about taking care of the trust funds instead of paying for bombs for Israel?
My thoughts exactly. Somehow, year after year, we can always come up with $800B+ for the offense budget ($842B FY2024) and that never gets seriously questioned, despite the US not being technically at war with any other major or minor powers. The offense budget is always a "must pass" proposition, whereas spending that actually helps Americans, like Medicare, Medicaid, and SS, are treated/portrayed as some sort of obscene "entitlements" that only the most profligate and immoral nations would ever direct tax money to. Those, and any kind of non-military infrastructure, are just examples of coddling the undeserving citizenry. Investing in the means to kill "foreigners", in contrast, is money well spent!
The whole "standing army" paradigm needs to be scrapped and the sooner the better.
On the flip side, the DoD is the biggest socialist organization in the government and employs literally millions of Americans. And while the US isn't at war, they have a lot of international allies that they support and prop up. (that being said, the defense budget is pretty obscene. And the support of Israel is maybe not the best way to spend it.)
Yes, the Department of Offense IS a socialist organization. But the fact that it has to do with offense and killing and 'projecting power' and bribing 'friendlies' with money and weapons while scaring 'unfriendlies' with the same, does not whitewash it into acceptability. We could, and should, take that roughly $850B/yr and plow it into domestic infrastructure, public R&D (no patents or other encumbrances), education, public health care, social supports (such as Medicare/SS), the Arts, basic research, the sciences (climate, space, etc), public housing and clean energy generation to name a few things. We could do all this if it weren't for the fact that in the US the only acceptable form of public spending is public spending on weapons of war, on the means of bullying and killing those who we don't like or who won't cooperate with us. By all means, we should keep up the socialist spending, but it should be directed in such a way as to improve the lives of the citizens directly, not just as hypothetical trickle-down improvements from making ever more deadly and expensive killing technologies.
Just a few hours from me is the Grand Coulee Dam, built in the 1930s and one of the Wonders of the World. There's no reason that we couldn't be engaged on projects of this scope and size all the time, but nope, that's evil socialism, and big government-funded projects are only acceptable in America if they directly have to do with providing us with new or better weapons to wield against Those People (foreigners mainly).