Cuba: Maybe We Should Give Them a Chance

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Hey, Raptor, you don't care if the rest of the world hates you, well, I hope you are accepting of being killed by "the rest of the world" should that possibility become clearly imminent. "I accepted that we played a game entailing risks of this happening, so I accept my death in the name of the American Empire".

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Oh I'm just so scared.

He does have a broader point:

Basically, as 1000Knives said, parts of the world are mad with the US. And cases have been shown by different people, included me, where the US screws over other nations and their people for it's own benefit. Such countries have good reasons to be mad at the US then. And rightly so, I hope you can see that.

The US gets away with it thanks to the military; that's where my comparison with a bully, came from. Most countries can't hope to win against it, but they still resent it, and will try to get back at it in some way. Many terrorist acts and insurgency come from there; many Iraqui insurgents, for example, are not in it because Jihad, but because from their point of view the US has invaded their land and taken their resources and ruined their life. Although I abhor terrorist acts that kill and harm innocent people in order to archieve some goal (the US has historically supported their fair share of those too, mind you, as Kjas said) the motivations behind some of those terrorists are sometimes genuine, they just want to be left alone, and the US won't give them that, and then they turn to whatever means they can even if they are wrong.

The US is not "right". Sure, it's the land of Liberty and Free Speech and such, and in fact I must admit it's commendable how free US citizens are compared to many other parts of the word, but the keyword here is "US citizens". Because the rest of the world can get screwed for all the US seems to care, and I'm sure it doesn't give a s*** about the freedom of, let's say, sugar plantation workers in Latin-America during the past century, or about rare-earth miners in Africa, if they did things would get way too expensive and that would be bad for the economy. The scary part is that I can see how for you, an American citizen, would this state of affairs be advantageous. The US is a selfish country in this regard, and I guess that would make you selfish, but I wonder, do you think being selfish is a bad thing? Do you believe it is justifiable screwing over other countries, and the human beings that live in them, if it is on your country's interests?

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Actually I don't lose much sleep over it and never have.
That aside, we give out our fair share of foreign aid to include humanitarian .
That and our potential as a protector.

By now it should be obvious that your attempt to make me fell like a naughty American isn't working.

I got called a Bolshevik by an elderly relative when I was 12,I think it was from reading Dostoevsky.I thought she meant something about bull$hit.

Not really, one of my main goals was establishing some things about just how comfortable you felt with being a "naughty american", and one of the possible outcomes had always been that you could be perfectly fine with it. Selfishness makes logical sense. But there are some logical consequences too, which I already described, and you should be prepared to deal with them. Wouldn't be too hard, actually, that huge military must be certainly helpful in that regard. And also, it would make your country the righteous one only to the extent that "might is right" is true.

It's a matter of emotion, of being able to empathize with others and treat other humans as we wish we were treated ourselves. If you don't have that, I can see how maximizing one's happiness and well-being without taking into account other people's may make for an optimal strategy, and how caring for anything other than the self is therefore suboptimal.

Should we care about other people? Yes or no? I think that one thought goes to the category of core beliefs, kind of an axiom, where you either believe in it or not, a priori, and can't really explain why. In my case the answer is yes, and in your case it appears to be no. And if our axioms are different, then we are bound to disagree in everything that comes after them, even if we use the same logic.

Then your rightness doesn't have any value, it's just conditional to the size of your stick.

ruveyn: treating well the people one has something to do makes logical sense and can be justified by selfish reasons too, if I mistreated my friends and family they would cut off contact and leave me alone, therefore it is in my best interests to treat them well and care for them. Although this matter is not clear cut for me, between that yes and that no there is a lot of space.

Then I have nothing more to say.