This isnt anywhere near my experience at all. People don't like empire and if you look around your life and think everyone you see would be pleased to do military contracts you're in a ( really disconcerting ) bubble.
This isn’t the gotchya you think it is and I don’t think the majority of people who benefit from empire aren’t aware. The violation of common sense here is the notion that 1) these people are living the good life and 2) removal of empire would result in worse standard of living.
Based on their omission I assume you're computing these numbers with them split out but it hardly seems fair to say you're spending "900" on defense when the total cost of paying that "900" is going to be much more since you had to borrow.
It's like saying a house only costs 1M when you end up paying over 1M in interest as well as the principal for 2M.
I don't think this is your point, but semantically, doesn't this necessarily assert that either:
1. African Americans were not Americans, or
2. African Americans, the victims of slavery, somehow benefited from it?
I would disagree with both of those assertions.
Further, consider that a vast majority (90%+) did not own slaves. Were non-slave-owners beneficiaries of slavery? What about poor, unskilled whites, who had their own wages effectively suppressed due to the negligible labor costs of slavery - were they really net beneficiaries of slavery? They certainly were not the main victims, but that doesn't automatically make them beneficiaries, either. Slavery was overwhelmingly a horrific practice by wealthy elites for wealthy elites, not by all white people for all white people.
It ended with one half of a country being so mad about their standard of living changing that they had a bloody civil war about it. You're proving my point entirely.
I was never talking about right or wrong, I was talking about whether people are willing to sacrifice their standard of living substantially just to be "right" about something.
Sure, I can agree that companies using gender dysphoria as only a way to increase profit is a bad thing, and I recognize that pharmaceutical companies are this way with _every_ drug and not just ones that benefit people. However I do disagree with the idea that people should be stripped of their right to free speech if you disagree with their statements, or stripped of their right to choose how to live their own lives.
I would offer that this is entirely different than the lack of choice we have in regard to how our government uses the military to "spread democracy at the point of a gun" while taking more and more of our tax dollars and liberty without improving our lives or tackling the problems that ordinary Americans face.
Using one egregious example to illustrate how those who ID as “anti-fascist” love imperial coercion, totalitarian speech controls, and the state’s destruction of families and bodies when it suits their particular perversion. Everyone loves centralized power when it promulgates and protects what they actually care about.
