Perhaps you should talk about how your beliefs have ratcheted towards the right, if that’s what you identify with. Or left. I’m not going to tell you how your beliefs evolved over the past few years or decades. I don’t pretend to know you.

I don’t know what your definition for liberalism is. So far, on Lemmy, “liberalism” seems to be anything to the right of tankie/Stalinist/Maoist. It seems to be just as broad as the right’s definition of it.

America is the arsenal of democracy. That’s as true now as it was when Franklin D Roosevelt said it.

I’d love to see NATO take over that role, or the EU take on a bigger share of it. Especially if they ensured the weapons were solely used in a defensive capacity. That would be great. But someone in “the west” needs to have a major military industrial complex.

And sure, other countries make some weapons. After all, everyone donates weapons to Ukraine. But we all know the majority is coming from the US. Nobody else has the arsenal to stand up to Russia’s USSR stockpile (though diminished) and China’s stockpile. Both Russia and China are hungry for more territory. Russia annexed Georgia, Ukraine, crushed the independence of Chechnya, and is right now trying to conquer enough of Ukraine to make a land bridge so they can go annex parts of Moldova. After that, they’re highly likely to try taking land from one of the Baltics, probably Latvia or Lithuania.

China has invasion in its past (have you already forgotten about Tibet? The Tibetans haven’t forgotten, although forced sterilization, mass famine, and insanely high rates of suicide have decreased the number of them, part of China’s campaign of Han supremacy and cultural genocide) and invasion in its future (started with Taiwan, but they are also eying Vietnam, Kazakhstan, and someday perhaps even Russia).

The world isn’t a safe place. It’s full of conflict.

If you want to see what life is like without the US military industrial complex at your back, keep your eye on Armenia. They’re working as fast as they can to build ties to the US, but I don’t think it’ll come together fast enough to save them from Russian-backed Azerbaijan.

If the whole world disarmed, then disarmament would be a great thing. But preaching disarmament while the “global threat of violence” actually exists is carrying water for the very real authoritarian dictators who currently wish to build an empire at the expense of other people’s freedom and sovereignty.

Funny, when I opposed the Iraq invasion in 2001 (and 2008 and beyond) I was called a bleeding heart liberal, but now I’m accused of supporting the Iraq war, “enhanced interrogation,” “extraordinary rendition,” “indefinite detention,” Guantanamo Bay, etc for saying there’s nothing wrong with being a liberal.

I really wish the world would pick one definition of liberalism rather than just labeling whatever they don’t like “liberalism.”

I seem to recall that the apex of Republicanism in 2008 was the Tea Party, which I never identified with in the slightest. No, that was 2009. 2008 was when Mitt Romney was campaigning on the idea of strapping the family dog to the roof of the car. Is that what you think liberalism is? A Mitt Romney republican?

The US isn’t about to be invaded by anyone. We have a very powerful military. So there is no threat in the world we live in, aside from the threat from internal extremists and asymmetrical warfare (ie terrorism). If the world were quite different, and we had no military power, we’d be at risk from a number of adversaries. Possibility the greatest threat would be foreign-backed “separatism” as occurred in Ukraine in 2014 (which is simply a covert invasion that is disguised as a civil war).

There’s literally nothing wrong with being a liberal. It’s really quite preferable to a number of the alternatives. It must kill you that the majority of people don’t remotely support your political views.

Great. What’s keeping you from moving to these free societies?

What’s this nonsense?

It’s called a question. There are two scenarios alternate. There is no supposition of cause and effect.

That imperialist country is really the leading force in pushing for LGBTQ rights globally. So keep stanning dictatorships where queer people would be bullied at best, routinely tortured and murdered at worst.

It’s obviously a joke.

Is it better to be a queer person in a nation with a strong military that respects and integrates queer people, or a queer person in a nation with a weak military that imprisons and sometimes lynches queer people?

You know what disarming leads to?

Invasion by a hostile force.

Just ask Ukraine. They’re a very peaceful people, very into disbanding the military, defunding the military industrial complex, even getting rid of fighter jets and their nuclear weapons.