F-22 Raptor Cancelled

BayaWeaver writes "Slate reports that the F-22 Raptor has been cancelled by the Senate. At an estimated price tag of $339 million per aircraft, even the powerful military-industrial-congressional complex couldn't keep this Cold War program alive in these hard times. They look very cool though and have appeared in movies like Hulk and Transformers. But not to worry too much about the future of the military-industrial-congressional complex: the F-35 Lightning II begins production next year! As a side note, in 2007 a squadron of Raptors became deaf, dumb and blind when they flew over the International Date Line."

Comments

We can't help it the world is retarded..

[tjstork]

A good way to solve this would be to stop being the world police and pissing everyone off. If we were just cool with people we easily get by with 10% of the defense budget we have now. Besides, I am sure that if we spent less on military and more on social programs we can save more civilians than we would lose soldiers. This whole nationalist, jingoist, fascist thing that the neo-Cons call Patriotism makes me throw up a little

You can call it jingoism and patriotism as much as you want, but the way I see things, half the world lines up each morning to try and dump products onto American consumers to earn their living because their own cultures and countries are too screwed up to provide one for them. How can you sit there and say, "oh, all these poor people around the world don't have running water...", like, how stupid is that? You're like probably in the same breath crying that Americans should buy birth control for third world people because they are too stupid to have safe sex.

I agree that we shouldn't be policing the world. In fact, I think we should be withdrawing some of the defense obligations we already have.

Jingoism is valid. Patriotism is true. Nationalism is just. When you see one country succeeding, and, many others roiling in their own stupidity, [despite trillions of dollars in foreign aid, btw], you have to ask, why have we been successful, what are those values that made us that way, and adopt institutions and civic rules to preserve them. But of course in your mind its wrong to not preserve that which makes your country better, and really, underlying your heart is more a desire for the destruction of your country than the benefit of humanity. If everyone was a jingoistic patriotic nationalist, their countries would be better, and the world would be better.