As the Republican Party’s blockade of aid to Ukraine drags into its fourth month, the U.S. government under Pres. Joe Biden has found a clever new way to give Ukraine’s forces the weapons and ammunition they need to defend their country.
It is, in essence, an American version of Germany’s circular weapons trade—the so-called Ringtausch. The United States is gifting older surplus weapons to Greece with the understanding that Greece donates to Ukraine some of its own surplus weapons.
Greek media broke the news last week. According to the newspaper Kathimerini and other media, the Biden administration offered the Greek government three 87-foot Protector-class patrol boats, two Lockheed Martin C-130H airlifters, 10 Allison T56 turboprop engines for Lockheed P-3 patrol planes plus 60 M-2 Bradley fighting vehicles and a consignment of transport trucks.
All this hardware is U.S. military surplus—and is available to Greece, free of charge, under a U.S. legal authority called “excess defense articles.” Federal law allows an American president to declare military systems surplus to need, assign them a value—potentially zero dollars—and give them away on the condition that the recipient transport them.
Interesting, I would guess that you are probably right, but I have been at an utter loss as to what happened to these people that they went from reasonable to completely unreasonable.
I dont even try to share the part where NATO/US were the main pressure at to why this war is happening, I think it would make their heads explode. I just try to point out how with the median (or maybe mean) age of the Ukrainian troops is 43, the war is going to be over soon.
If you haven’t, read Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent”. Just as applicable today, just the science on how to manipulate people got more advanced. Newspapers are full of bias, and it made me feel isolated until I understood the mechanisms (see propaganda model) of why this is so. But I’m at a bit of a loss too why reddit has been “taken over” this rabidly. Pacifist notions are now buried in “controversial”.
And 43, wow. I would have thought that as long as the US and Europe are pumping weapons into Ukraine the war will keep going.
@CableMonster@lemmy.ml, I’m an admin on lemmy.ml, and we’re getting complaints of you trolling this post. After dozens of comments, maybe you’ve had your say and it’s time to stop threadsitting on the conversation. I approved your account request this week, please don’t make me regret it.
If I am responding to people that are responding to me how is that a problem? Maybe the people claiming I am a troll are the problem not me.
Maybe you don’t know how to take a hint and want your account to be temporarily banned.
I suppose you can do what you want, but I would think it would be fair to directly tell me what I did that was wrong if you expect my behavior to change.
It is not, as you said, that you’re dissenting from the standard narrative, at least not to me. It is threadsitting and making rather rude comments.
You may or may not have noticed that lemmy.world mods/admins have removed some of your comments already: https://lemmy.ml/u/CableMonster That is often a precursor to them banning you from the !News@lemmy.world community or even the entire lemmy.world instance.
As an aside, most Lemmy instances consist predominantly of imperial core liberals, and lemmy.world is no exception. It’s a tough crowd over there in terms of this proxy war.