coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
The teacher assessment was a survey on their grades, so not quite subjective. Re the second study:
substantial impacts to Roma minorities
Unfortunately, if the teachers of the Roma students are more likely to be Roma themselves (likely), then they would lie on both grades and teacher surveys, which explains their unique results. A researcher can’t come out and say “we found a significant finding, but only among Roma, therefore it should be ignored”, sadly, as there’s political correctness which prevents an academic from noting that the entire Roma culture is based on scheming and cheating and stealing. Really, Roma populations should be excluded from most studies. But if you look at this:
First, looking at short-term GPAs (Panel A), we find only small impacts which, in most cases, do not reach significance at conventional levels. There is an improvement of 2% SD, on average, for students in the self-learning treatment, but it is only marginally significant (at the 10% level)
Next, looking at medium-term and long-term GPAs (Panels B and C), we find some evidence that the impacts of our intervention on academic achievement become stronger over time, particularly for specific groups. Impacts, on average, are estimated at 3% SD (significant at the 5% level) for the teacher-delivery treatment one year post-treatment, with no significant impact for the stu- dent self-learning arm. Even if these are still small impacts, they are notable considering the short duration and relatively low intensity of our intervention and that evaluations of human capital interventions often yield fade-out effects over longer time periods (Hart et al 2023; Bailey et al 2020; Bouguen et al 2019)
There are just not many studies that have measured the effect of a grit intervention (or any proxy for “hard work” ideology) on academic performance, .
This study in Germany finds a “4% improvement in GPA”: https://media-api.suub.uni-bremen.de/api/core/bitstreams/69dec0aa-d690-4c4e-94ab-a82b460fbdc7/content
And there’s this one: https://edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/Alan%20Boneva%20Ertac%20Grit%202019.pdf which finds
In the second follow-up in Sample 2, which we administered approximately 1.5 years after the intervention, we still find a positive and significant treatment effect of 0.19 standard deviations for math (permutation p-value =0.026) and a positive albeit insignificant effect for verbal scores. Similarly, for Sample 1 where we have data from a 2.5 year follow-up, we find that the treatment has a persistent effect on standardized math performance. In particular, the treatment raises student achievement in the standardized math test by 0.23 standard deviations (permutation p-value =0.044).
A 0.23 SD change in a typical high school GPA is a change of 0.14, which translates to 1.7% higher annual earnings. That kind of sucks! Because there’s a significant wellbeing cost if somebody believes that they have an obligation to always “try their hardest” for optimal results under the belief that this secures their success. And if all that this can do is bring a 70k yearly salary up to 72k, it’s just not worth it. If you told a youth that their hardest work will only move the needle by 1.7% annual earnings, he would probably conclude in himself that it’s not worth it to be faithful to the “gospel of hard work”. Maybe there’s another study that finds a greater effect and I haven’t seen it?
The Iran War is beginning to alarm even the neocons
Robert Kagan has a new article in the Atlantic blasting Trump for the Iran War. This is somewhat significant. Kagan is an arch-neocon who supported every previous war in the Middle East. He was a major proponent of the Iraq War, acting as the media arm of the Israel Lobby. The neocons of the 00s were the mostly-Jewish “decisive voices promoting regime change in Iraq”, a pointless war that cost 3 trillion dollars, 35,000 American casualties including 4,500 dead, 200,000 direct civilian deaths by violence, and 1,000,000 excess civilian deaths in total, while indirectly leading ISIS to form among the disenfranchised and dispossessed former Ba’athist commanders (what did you think regime change consisted of?), a lapse in judgment which would cause the refugee crisis in Europe (with all the consequent rape and mayhem), the decimation of Iraqi and Syrian Christian communities, and myriad other human tragedies. It is important, I think, to continually remember how retarded that was; it is so recent, yet never sufficiently referenced in its full scope. (“Another Iraq”, yeah, but do you remember precisely how dumb that was?). Kagan’s criticism of the Iran War is interesting also because it retroactively informs us about the thinking behind the necon’s push for Iraq, given his prominence in that elite circle.
No state in the Middle East (including Iraq in 2003 and Iran today) ever posed a direct threat to the security of the American homeland. Iran has no missiles that can reach the United States and, according to American intelligence, would not until 2035. Access to Middle Eastern oil and gas has never been essential to the security of the American homeland. Today the United States is less dependent on Middle Eastern energy than in the past, which Trump has pointed out numerous times since the Strait of Hormuz was closed.
The United States has long sought to prevent Iraq or Iran from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, but not because these countries would pose a direct threat to the United States. The American nuclear arsenal would have been more than adequate to deter a first strike by either of them, as it has been for decades against far more powerful adversaries. What American administrations have feared is that an Iran in possession of nuclear weapons would be more difficult to contain in its region, because neither the United States nor Israel would be able to launch the kind of attack now under way. The Middle East’s security, not America’s, would be imperiled. As for Israel, the United States committed to its defense out of a sense of moral responsibility after the Holocaust. This never had anything to do with American national-security interests. In fact, American officials from the beginning regarded support for Israel as contrary to U.S. interests. George C. Marshall opposed recognition in 1948, and Dean Acheson said that by recognizing Israel, the United States had succeeded Britain as “the most disliked power in the Middle East.” During the Cold War, even supporters of Israel acknowledged that as a simple matter of “power politics,” the United States had “every reason for wishing that Israel had never come into existence.” But as Harry Truman put it, the decision to support the state of Israel was made “not in the light of oil, but in the light of justice.”
Even the threat of terrorism from the region was a consequence of American involvement, not the reason for it. Had the United States not been deeply and consistently involved in the Muslim world since the 1940s, Islamic militants would have little interest in attacking an indifferent nation 5,000 miles and two oceans away. Contrary to much mythology, they have hated us not so much because of “who we are” but because of where we are. In Iran’s case, the United States was deeply involved in its politics from the 1950s until the 1979 revolution, including as the main supporter of the brutal regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The surest way of avoiding Islamist terrorist attacks would have been to get out.
America’s interests in the Middle East have always been indirect and secondary to larger global aims and strategies. During World War II, the United States led a coalition of nations that depended on the greater Middle East for oil and strategic position. During the Cold War, the United States assumed responsibility not only for the defense of the Jewish state but for the defense and economic well-being of European and Asian allies who depended on Middle Eastern oil. After the Cold War, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the George H. W. Bush administration believed that failing to reverse that aggression would set an ominous precedent in the aborning “new world order.”
That sense of global responsibility is precisely what the Trump administration came to office to repudiate and undo. The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy, which has dramatically shifted the focus of American policy from world order to homeland security and hemispheric hegemony, appropriately downgraded the Middle East in the hierarchy of American concerns. A United States concerned only with defense of its homeland and the Western Hemisphere would see nothing in the region worth fighting for. In the heyday of “America First” foreign policy during the 1920s and ’30s, when Americans did not regard even Europe and Asia as vital interests, the idea that they had any security interests in the greater Middle East would have struck them as hallucinatory.
One would be hard-pressed to find any nation in the world that has been reassured by the Israeli and American war against Iran, other than Israel itself. According to The Wall Street Journal, Gulf state leaders are “privately furious” with the U.S. for “triggering a war that put them in the crosshairs.” Despite its impressive power, the United States was unable to protect these countries from Iran’s attacks; now they have to hope that Trump will not leave them to face a weakened yet intact and angry Iranian regime but will instead double down on America’s long-term military commitment to the region, including by putting ground troops in Iran. Israelis should also be asking how far they can count on the Americans’ dedication to this fight. A United States capable of abandoning long-standing allies in Europe and East Asia will be capable of abandoning Israel too. Can Israel sustain its new dominance in the region without a long and deep American commitment?
The unintended effect of the war, in fact, may be driving regional players to seek other great-power protectors in addition to the United States. Trump himself has invited the Chinese to help open the strait, and the Chinese are actively courting the Arab and Gulf states. The Gulf states are not averse to dealing with Beijing and Moscow. Neither is Israel. It sold management of a container terminal in the port of Haifa to a Chinese company, despite objections from the U.S. Navy, which uses the port. Israel, practically alone among American allies, refused to take part in sanctions against Russia when it invaded Ukraine in 2022. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ran for reelection in 2019, some of his campaign posters showed him shaking hands with Putin under the tagline a different league. No one should blame Israelis for this. They are an independent nation and can be expected to do what they feel they need to do to survive. Americans may have a sentimental or religious attachment to Israel, but Israelis cannot afford to be sentimental in return.
That is especially true given this administration’s cavalier attitude toward international responsibilities. The Iran war is global intervention “America First”–style: no public debate, no vote in Congress, no cooperation or, in many cases, even consultation with allies other than Israel, and, apparently, no concern for potential consequences to the region and the world. “They say if you break it, you own it. I don’t buy that,” Senator Lindsey Graham, arguably Trump’s most influential adviser on the war, said.
For Europeans, the problem is worse than American disregard and irresponsibility. They now face an unremittingly hostile United States—one that no longer treats its allies as allies or differentiates between allies and potential adversaries. The aggressive tariffs Washington imposed last year hit America’s erstwhile friends at least as hard as they hit Russia and China, and in some cases harder. Europeans must now wonder whether Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran makes it more or less likely that he will take similarly bold action on Greenland. The risks and costs of taking that undefended Danish territory, after all, would be far less than the risks and costs of waging the present war. Not some EU liberal but Trump’s conservative friend, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni recently warned that American actions have produced a “crisis in international law and multilateral organizations” and “the collapse of a shared world order.”
[…] Friends and allies will be ever less willing to cooperate with the United States. This time, Spain refused American use of air and naval bases in its territory. Next time, that could be Germany, Italy, or even Japan. Nations around the world will come to rely not on American commitments and permanent alliances but on ad hoc coalitions to address crises. No one will cooperate with the United States by choice, only by coercion. Without allies, the United States will have to depend on clients that it controls, such as Venezuela, or weaker powers that it can bully.
Funnily enough, one of Kagan’s last predictions just came true: Italy joined Spain in closing down its airspace this morning.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
That’s not what happened in the 60s. There was a movement that actively sought to make Western culture seem worse than it was through propaganda. The entire civil rights movement was based on the idea that White people were acting irrationally for not wanting to be around a group that was more violent and disordered, for instance. And when reality gets in the way of someone’s preconditioned beliefs, they are more apt to doubt reality rather than their social conditioning, which we see in all manner of political topics. Somebody raised to believe that everyone is absolutely equal will look at racial crime data across three continents and adjusted for income and conclude that reality is wrong, and their media-driven conditioning is correct. That’s just how conditioning works.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
for a lot of things (eg test prep) people often don't like doing it, but they will be better off if they do
Right but there’s scant evidence that hard work, as some communicated message or “gospel” or internalized value, through its enacting or though its belief, modifies a person’s ability to do this. The ceiling of the influence of grit etc when genetics are controlled is 4.4% on school performance, but even this doesn’t tell us to what extent that can be modified anyway. Some studies find very little effect / barely significant findings on GPA for interventions aimed at increasing grit / hard work. No effect longterm when a student self-learns grit in a module.
As a gospel this is a very poor gospel indeed, quite bad news in fact, because you are damning the vast hordes of the relatively unsuccessful to endless self-criticism under the false belief that it was their fault they failed — when it likely was never in their hands to begin with.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
Deliberate practice is the necessary condition for success across domains, but there’s no compelling evidence that activating “hard work” (in contrast to simply work) is a key determinant in performance. When you squint at what an elite performer means by hard work, you don’t often see a level of stress or endurance or extra care which a normal person would intuit is meant when they hear that they must “work hard” or “put more effort in”. They do not typically sustain a state of willful effort and instead there are just other factors involved. Even with SAT test prep, there are social and genetic factors which inform a person’s ability to sit down and study for long hours which seems totally uncorrelated to any manifestation of stress or vigilance or care which characterizes “harder work”. Those with the ability can sit in place for six hours with little stress; those without cannot, despite how hard they attempt it. (Usain Bolt eating 1000 chicken McNuggets in the week leading up to his Olympic Gold, where he turned around mid-win to smile always sticks out in my mind as an example of this).
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
not be woke
media which increases the positive valence of western culture at a young age (Little House on the Prarie), decreases positive valence of other cultures (old YouTube documentaries on foreign savagery), or makes fun of wokes (no idea where you’d find this, maybe there are some old cartoons out there )
gospel of success through hard work and mastery through practice
This is not real and this is also not a gospel. Why would you want them to internalize the unhappiness-generating myth that their personal effort leads to success, by which you mean income? There is no study that shows this. It’s a mix of genetic factors (personality, IQ, beauty, height), social factors outside one’s immediate control (where one is raised, early peer group), social factors in one’s immediate influence but unrelated to effort per se (networking), and luck. The notion that “hard work” is a toggleable feature in humans which has a role in their success may be a useful glue to keep poor people quiet and make the wealthy feel even prouder, but it is the least proven of all the possible factors of socioeconomic success. Terence Tao is a funny example of this mythmaking. He obviously loves math, he was raised to love it, he has the genetic features for it (including a likely +1 Racial Trait), and has a social life which revolves around math that administers all the right social reinforcements. He will tell you to work hard, but when you actually look at what that means, it involves only working when he wants to, and not working when he is tired or unmotivated. It’s, like, an hour of hard work followed by a nap and a pleasant stroll. And you look at his interviews and he has no stress while working and clearly loves it. But of course, when a person loves his work and its accompanying frustrations he often calls it “hard work”, even when the whole thing was pleasant and a preferable experience (even gamers and climbers do this). And it is the socially-ascribed way of taking about one’s productivity. Similarly you can look at Magnus Carlsen: little toggleable effort that he pressed to succeed, it’s in his DNA, and when truly stressful “hard work” actually became required to win competitions he gave up competing.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
Which anime or manga, if any, do you think has a profound art style? Not just interesting, detailed, or cute, but deeper than that?
If Israel wanted to bring us to war with Iran the most, yet could only get us to invade Iraq at the least, then they bear a portion of responsibility for bringing us to war all the same. The reason it is “making the rounds” is because it is the assessment of impartial experts who have investigated the topic, for instance Mearsheimer’s the Israel Lobby, which articulates that the Israel Lobby was a critical element bringing us to war: https://appext.hks.harvard.edu/publications/getFile.aspx?Id=209
You can find their influence in contemporaneous reporting, where they sought to fabricate a connection between the anthrax attacks and Iraq: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-oct-27-mn-62270-story.html
Israeli intelligence officials also reportedly have been pushing the possibility of an Iraqi connection to the terrorist attacks. It could be in Israel’s security interests to see the U.S. take a more aggressive stance against Iraq.
Germany’s mass-circulation Bild newspaper Thursday quoted unidentified Israeli intelligence sources as saying Atta received anthrax spores from Iraqi agents in Prague.
We also have contemporaneous evidence of Israeli lobbyist groups promoting propaganda against Iraq before the war:
AIPAC did take positions and provided talking points for its members to lobby members of Congress on the Iraq War. It removed evidence of these activities from its website but Archive.org has the evidence, showing that AIPAC’s leadership is misleading journalists about support the group provided for the war and the bad intelligence justifying military action.
A “briefing book” for AIPAC’s membership and Congressional offices - viewable on Archive.org in snapshots from December, 22, 2001, until December 2004 — the period in which the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution was approved by Congress and the Iraq War began — argued in favor of regime change in Baghdad, in apparent contradiction to what AIPAC’s leadership claims.
The document said, “As long as Saddam Hussein is in power, any containment of Iraq will only be temporary until the next crisis or act of aggression.” That’s not the only example of AIPAC appearing to push for war. AIPAC’s newsletter, Near East Report, led with a lengthy “editor’s comments” on October 7, 2002, repeating the George W. Bush administration’s erroneous claim that Saddam Hussein was in league with al Qaeda and is “maintaining contact with the vile perpetrators of 9/11.”
FDD was founded in April 2001 as EMET (Hebrew for “truth”) “to provide education to enhance Israel’s image in North America and the public’s understanding of issues affecting Israeli-Arab relations.” Clifford May, its founder, quickly went about pushing for war. In April 2002, he described Iran and Iraq as “terrorist-sponsoring regimes attempting to develop weapons of mass destruction.”
And in January 2002, May wrote, “That Saddam still has weapons of mass destruction cannot be seriously doubted,” in National Review Online.
According to Lawrence Wilkerson the chief of staff for Colin Powell, Mossad was in Douglas Feith’s office 24/7 in the lead up to the Iraq invasion (7:00), and was so influential at the Pentagon that Rumsfeld once reportedly complained that Mossad was running the whole office (7:30). Feith was the number three at the Pentagon and was once investigated for leaking classified information to Israel via AIPAC. Feith was responsible for fabricating the false intelligence about Iraq.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
I am skeptical that the person you are replying to has a sincere interest in discussing this issue with objectivity in mind. He is mixing up the actions of Jordan in 1948 with the Palestinians as a whole. Anyone claiming that Jews get to steal the whole West Bank because 1% of the West Bank prior to 1948 was Jewish (many having arrived only a few years earlier at that), and thus their flight during the war retroactively grants them full ownership of the West Bank (?), is probably not arguing in good faith. Because that’s a genuinely insane line of argument to make.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
Do you think we don’t have statements from the entire USIC apparatus?
The IC [[Intelligence Community]] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamanei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003
Our testimony offers the collective assessment of the 18 U.S. intelligence elements making up the U.S. Intelligence Community and draws on intelligence collection, information available to the IC from open-source and the private sector, and the expertise of our analysts.
And from 2026. As far as I can find, there is not even one single official dissention from the leadership of any of the 18 USIC agencies with respect to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. They are unanimous, “of one opinion”. Again, I’m somewhat puzzled at how a patriotic American can ignore the intelligence assessment of the most powerful nation in the world, to trust the assessment of… Israel. Perhaps the least trustworthy country. A country with a history of feeding presidents false intelligence on WMDs. A country which has the strongest motive to lie to us about Iran. A foreign country, speaking a foreign tongue, waving a different flag, 6000 miles away. (Now if you were distrusting the USIC because you figured they were too war-hungry, then that would be understandable, at least). Regarding Joe Kent: he is the one person in America who would know the most about this as he oversaw all American intelligence on foreign terror threats, which would include possible Iranian attacks and WMD acquisition. And before that, he was the chief of staff for the DNI, which is the intermediary between the WH and the IC. Hard to think of anyone more trustworthy than Joe Kent.
You were very confident that the USIC was not “of one opinion” on Iranian nuclear ambitions. Will you update your views now that you’re aware the USIC was in agreement? Do you have a reason for believing Israel over America or shall I assume the worst?
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
Philip Zekilow, someone who would know more than anyone about the true motivations for the war, admitted it was just for Israel:
https://archive.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/justify/2004/0329israel.htm
Third. The unstated threat. And here I criticise the [Bush] administration a little, because the argument that they make over and over again is that this is about a threat to the United States. And then everybody says: ‘Show me an imminent threat from Iraq to America. Show me, why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us?’ So I’ll tell you what I think the real threat is, and actually has been since 1990. It’s the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don’t care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it’s not a popular sell.
We are replaying many of the soundbytes used for Iraq: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021007-8.html
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seeking nuclear weapons
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supports terrorism
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practices terror against its own people
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“possesses ballistic missiles”
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
I think you’ve given the game away. When it is convenient to argue that toppling Iran promotes American power, you put on that argument, but you don’t have a response to someone pointing out that toppling Israel also promotes American power — perhaps even more than toppling Iran, in light of the subversive influence of Israel on American decision-making. You resort to calling negative things about the Israeli regime “conspiracies”, including what our own head of terror-related intelligence says! Yet you apparently believe whatever a particular foreign Middle Eastern regime says about Iranian nukes. This does not read to me like loyalty. What loyal American trusts a Middle Eastern regime 5000 miles away over their own institutions and experts?
Let me get this straight. We are talking about a regime in the Middle East that has circumvented the entire American intelligence establishment to push our president to start a war. They used a senator who was trained with Mossad talking points, a religiously-radical loyalist stepson, and advisors who were hand-picked by their own Middle Eastern lobbyists. Because of our support for this Middle Eastern regime, passage through the Suez Canal has fallen to a fraction of what it once was, and now the Strait of Hormuz is closed. We have harmed the global economy while our allies in Europe and Asia are baffled at our decision-making. This Middle Eastern regime employed Jeffrey Epstein to mass-rape Americans to secure blackmail on important figures including former President Bill Clinton and current President Donald Trump. They sell our secrets to our greatest global adversary, China. They disrupt America’s ability to negotiate with Iran, and sought to destroy our important alliance with Qatar (a true friend who has pledged to invest 1 trillion dollars in America) by violating all semblance of international norms and launching an attack on a negotiating team. Meanwhile, important American technology and military jobs are siphoned off to this middle eastern nation state while they enjoy free college and medical care.
It seems clear to me that American power is being curtailed by this regime, and that — per your power-loving guiding philosophy — America is essentially obliged to enact regime change therein. If the United States Military reigns white phosphorus down on Haifa today and cluster munitions down on Tel Aviv tomorrow, then within a few weeks we would have secured free transit along the Suez Canal and the Strait of Hormuz, opened up trade opportunities with Iran (a country 9x bigger than Israel), gained more allies across the Middle East, loosened a perfidious influence on our Body Politic, and returned essential defense work back to Americans.
I can’t conceive why you are not advocating for the USM to strike Israel, unless perhaps you do not really want America to be more powerful against her enemies, but instead favor Israel for some other reason.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
Palestinian Christians in particular (a genetically-distinct subpopulation of Palestinians) are the closest DNA match to ~2nd century Galilean DNA according to Global25 Coordinates.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
I would consider their military competency a byproduct of their civilization, if not just a part of their civilization. I mean, without their military all Sparta had was pithy quotes.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
Hypothetically, would you support allying with Iran and bombing Israel is it advanced American power and interests? If what you want is American power, then a destroyed Israel means that many tech and defense jobs come back to America. We can also poach high IQ Israeli AI developers. Or if the math shows that the best way to maximize American power is to arm both Iran and Israel to bomb each other to the abyss, so that we can poach their highest IQ talent, would you support this? (This may entail allowing Iran to turn Tel Aviv into Gaza). This is a very serious consideration for a person who loves the notion of maximizing power, as future wars will be decided by drones and AI; we can exploit Iran’s smart drone tech and Israel’s smart STEM talent by pitting them against each other.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
In the proxy conflict for control of the Middle East, a conflict which Iran did not start, Iran has held on to influence in the region despite Israel dragging the hegemonic world superpower into the conflict. And despite Israel’s great tactics against Hezbollah, they still appear able to launch powerful attacks.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
Iran seized a couple oil tankers (not owned or flagged by America) which were on their way to America in response to the US seizing the Suez Rajan. So, not at all incomparable.
The bombartment of Algiers occurred after diplomacy failed to make progress to end the practice of enslaving Europeans, and after the execution of 200 European sailors. And even then, the request for surrender reads —
Sir, for your atrocities at Bona on defenceless Christians [[massacring hundreds]] and your unbecoming disregard of the demands I made yesterday in the name of the Prince Regent of England, the fleet under my orders has given you a signal chastisement, by the total destruction of your navy, storehouse, and arsenal, with half your batteries. As England does not war for the destruction of cities, I am unwilling to visit your personal cruelties upon the unoffending inhabitants of the country, and I therefore offer you the same terms of peace which I conveyed to you yesterday in my Sovereign's name. Without the acceptance of these terms, you can have no peace with England
This is another case of just and necessary war, and even though Algiers was massacring and enslaving Europeans, the British commander did not see it fit to target innocent inhabitants of a city.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
We fought those wars because they were illegally seizing our vessels and then enslaving our sailors. That is a perfect case of just war, and we behaved in a perfectly moral fashion. We requested a treaty, compensation, and the return of captured sailors. We did not assassinate the ruler of Algeria and his family while they were sleeping, or set the entire city ablaze. We secured our interests with little bloodshed. The wars were just (!), necesssary (!), in furtherance of our commerce (!) and directly impacted American citizens and property (!).
You want your enemies to have power over you? Do you think this makes you stronger?
I don’t worship power, maybe because of my portion of old American heritage. Most of us have worshipped God, and this means understanding certain acts as beneath us. When George Washington was accused by the French of allowing the assassination of a negotiating party, it was a severe mark of disgrace that haunted him for the rest of his life and stained his reputation across Europe. This is my culture, and I think any foreign value system that worships power is a fundamentally anti-American influence that must be excised, just as much as any dangerous entanglement in foreign nations must be excised. I don’t know if you’re familiar with American culture so I will quote to you something from our first President and Founding Father:
As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils. Such an attachment of a small or weak towards a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter.
Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.
The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.
even our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing nothing; establishing (with powers so disposed, in order to give trade a stable course, to define the rights of our merchants, and to enable the government to support them) conventional rules of intercourse, the best that present circumstances and mutual opinion will permit, but temporary, and liable to be from time to time abandoned or varied, as experience and circumstances shall dictate; constantly keeping in view that it is folly in one nation to look for disinterested favors from another; that it must pay with a portion of its independence for whatever it may accept under that character; that, by such acceptance, it may place itself in the condition of having given equivalents for nominal favors, and yet of being reproached with ingratitude for not giving more.
Real patriots — in the eyes of the Founding Fathers — don’t start unjust and unnecessary wars for a random foreign tribe 6000 miles away. This is just not what we do. That’s why none of the American security apparatus supported this war. That’s why Israel had to put pressure on Trump to start the war. That’s why the #1 authority on terrorism in the American security state, Joe Kent, resigned to speak to Americans on the dangerous and subversive influence of Israel on American soil. Allowing Iran to become a little stronger is a great punishment and deterrence against the foreign tribe bringing us to war, but even more importantly, it is something that future powers will read about when deciding whether to commit acts of aggression.
I don’t know if you’re trolling when you ask whether history informs the decision of modern nations to go to war. That’s the basic curricula at any war college. I also don’t know if you’re trolling when you say Iran was building nuclear weapons, because that’s not the assessment of American intelligence, which means you trust Israel more than America, which seems slightly treasonous to me and very strange. But perhaps you’re not an American, I don’t know. But if you’re not an American, why are you pretending to speak for our nation?
If you are Christian the most important thing in the world is getting right with God. Justice and peace are secondary to that ultimate goal
No, in this religion justice and peace are getting right with God; they are one and the same thing; we will be judged by how we treat strangers and neighbors and others. There is a long history of Christian Just War philosophy, and it all concurs that our act of war against Iran was unjustified. And the Just God may punish those who support it; He will certainly punish those who promote “no mercy” and “no quarter”.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
6d ago
There’s ample evidence that the Chinese consult history to a greater degree in their foreign policy deliberations. In 2126, in the First AI War, when China considers how to strike our techies (being the invaluable engine to the American war machine), they may decide on a strategy of targetting them in their sleep along with their wives and children and neighbors, because this is the exact strategy that America signed off on against the Persians. The Chinese would simply be following America’s rendition of customary international law and applying it against its very authors. Consider Kissinger:
Their history is longer than ours, but they have a different sense of history. I mention in the book, for example, that when Mao notified his associates that he was going to go to war with India in 1962, he did so by invoking a war that had been fought between China and India in the Tang Dynasty, which was a thousand years earlier, and then another war that had been fought 600 years earlier. And he told his assembled generals, from the first war, you can learn these lessons. From the second war you can learn the following lessons. Not even Europeans who have a more developed sense of history than we do, would you find a leader who says, let’s learn the following lessons from Charlemagne and an American president who would say, we can learn the following lessons from President Polk. Yes, it wouldn’t be conceivable.
I don’t know if our conduct comes from a certainty that we will always be on top (despite demographic-dysgenic catastrophe), or a hardness of heart for our own descendants, or just a general disregard for longterm thinking, but the acts committed today are written down as the standards applied against us tomorrow. And this is a decent stand-in thought for those who have dehumanized Iranians or otherwise can’t empathize with anyone outside their fold. If the Iranians are “third worldists”, then at least imagine your own great grandchildren preferring not to be destroyed by China in their sleep in the next century.
I think it would be great for mankind if Iran winds up controlling the strait, as this would constitute a powerful deterrence against future powers that plot unjustified wars without regard for humanitarian consequences. If this deterrence is permanently inked into history, then it could save millions of lives in the future when leaders read about the aggression of America and Israel against the underdog Iran. This would be good for Americans in America, because we will not be top dog forever; in a century or two we may find ourselves in Iran’s place with a more powerful China attempting to oppress us and conquer us. Giving Iran the strait would be a great reparative act for a country that does not deserve the families of its scientists blown up and its economy placed under crippling sanctions just because their civilization makes Israelis and Zionists uncomfortable and envious.
Ultimately there is nothing more important than justice and securing peace, at least not if you’re a member of the Christian West called to be peacemakers. If this reduces our power and prosperity, then that’s an adequate sacrifice for twenty years of mistakes we refuse to learn from. So perhaps we can learn from this one and boot the warmongers out of power. Obviously, we did not learn anything from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, and Palestine. So maybe those who worship power will learn something from a decline in American power, and maybe Israelis will learn something from relentless missile strikes on their cities. I’m doubtful, but it’s possible.
This is an area where I find utilitarianism helpful. What’s the purpose of art? If art is to increase collective wellbeing, however indirectly, then a lot of literature is worthless. It’s endless yapping and bickering, shilled by a class of people with a high verbal IQ who are paid to professionally yap and have no interest in considering the longterm outcome of their recommendations, and yet somehow have authority on what people should read. The great cathedrals were built by men who had no concept of literature, and every horrible monstrosity of today was designed by some pretentious bespectacled architect who surely claims to love “literature”. All of my civilizational enemies are well-read.
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