No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Yep! Plenty of people here have already talked about reasons we have bases specifically in Jordan. I thought it was worth remembering the big picture, that we dot the world with our military presence to shore up our various imperial interests.
Imperialism is when you conquer a region. If Jordan didn't want us there, they can kick us out. So its really not Imperialism at all.
If this were Roman times or other such actual Empires or rule of Imperialism, we'd be forcing these states to be paying us directly and they wouldn't be allowed to kick us out.
Empires still have allies and aligned interests. It makes sense for Jordan to host a US base because we're the most powerful imperial power on the planet.
The roman empire is a great example because their forts were all up and down their trade routes.
Even the dictionary defines imperialism much more broadly:
We absolutely have economic and political dominance - and massive military dominance - over other nations.
My favorite definition of an empire is a military, economic or bureaucratic institution that siphons resources from the periphery to the center. That can be done with a military, like we did in iraq, but it's much smoother to do by offering reasons for local elites to buy in and only deploying force when unavoidable.
The Iraqi Constitution says that Iraq is in charge of the oil, and what US imported we paid a fair price for.
And most of Iraq's exports is oil. So how is this imperialism? Iraq keeps it's most precious resource and we pay a fair price for it despite militarily enforcing the area. In fact, there is a lot of criticism from the Republican base that we didn't take advantage of the Iraqis.
Are you saying that we SHOULD have take the oil??
We overthrew their government and the government we put in power is more friendly toward us. How is that not imperialism?
I'm not denying that we got rid of Saddam. What I'm saying is that the move isn't as self-serving as many critics try to force. The earlier post is trying to argue that we've somehow stolen the resources of Iraq, but no such thing has happened.
Its kind of like sexual assault when there's an imbalance of power.
Technically, the CEO asked for a blowjob, but you still want to have a job on Monday.
But in this case, its Jordan who wants to have its border defended from ISIS, and the USA also wants to kill ISIS, so why not make a deal between us where we can have a military base that does both?
Win-win for both parties. This is more like the CEO wanting to give a pay-raise to the employee, and the employee accepting it. Both sides are happy.
Just because there's a power imbalance doesn't mean that there's any ill-will or problem. US-Jordan relations are very close, and have been great for decades.
Its not US troops who'd destroy Jordan though. Its all their neighbors (ISIS, Syria, and Iranian Militia).
That's my point. US Troops are the source of stability here. A good thing for everyone. Meanwhile, actual Imperials were like... I dunno... how the Soviet Union treated the Polish.
There are US troops across Europe, as well. Wtf is all this talk of imperialism when the US was invited?