Churro
3d ago
I don't disagree. Blockades are a longstanding and recognized act of legitimate warfare, if always controversial (re: Turnip Winter). A nation is not obligated to permit the flow of goods into its enemy, although it should keep in mind what cutting off resources like, say, food will actually achieve when compared to the long term consequences of starving a population to death. Most people tend to not appreciate mass civilian death and suffering for little real strategic gain.
But what was being suggested was something entirely different in kind. The complete destruction of all power generation is total war logic against an enemy that has posed an until now unrealized economic threat that was clearly foreseeable and avoidable by not picking this fight in this way, with so little preparation, and managed to saturate US and Israeli air defenses with enough drones and missiles to cause, so far, a few dozen deaths and a bit over 8000 injuries, of varying degrees of severity. Oh, and a nuclear weapons program weeks away from a workable bomb for decades now. An existential threat deserving of existential tactics this is not.
Churro
3d ago
The pre-electrification comparison doesn't really work. Iran before widespread electricity had somewhere around 20-30 million people, mostly rural and agrarian, and it was a society built around that reality. Modern Iran has 90 million people in a heavily urbanized country whose infrastructure, agriculture, water systems, and supply chains are all built on the assumption of a functioning power grid. The question isn't whether humans can live without electricity in the abstract. It's whether you can remove it suddenly from a modern nation of 90 million without mass death, and the answer is pretty clearly no.
The backup generator argument also assumes an intact fuel supply chain, which in turn requires functional refineries, distribution networks, and so on. If you're actually destroying all power generation infrastructure in a country, those downstream dependencies don't survive either.
Also, why are you advocating for punishing a people who recently were killed in the tens of thousands for protesting their own regime for the actions of that regime? Is getting killed in the streets by the Basij for saying "I don't want this government" a secret signal for preferring a medieval theocracy?
Churro
4d ago
I don't know, 60% disapproval of Israel's actions would seem to indicate a majority actually do care about dead Gazans, or at least the scale of civilian deaths. But I'm more curious why you think the deaths of other humans are comparable to insects. Is it just proximity? Or is it something about who they are?
Churro
4d ago
And that's worth all the civilians who will die without access to electricity to you?
Churro
13d ago
You maybe, maybe have a case with Urban II, given that he does say
From the confines of Jerusalem and the city of Constantinople a horrible tale has gone forth and very frequently has been brought to our ears, namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persians, an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God, a generation forsooth which has not directed its heart and has not entrusted its spirit to God, has invaded the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by the sword, pillage and fire; it has led away a part of the captives into its own country, and a part it has destroyed by cruel tortures; it has either entirely destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of its own religion.
But he's referring to the Seljuk Turks, who were, as the name implies, Turkic by extraction even if they assimilated Persian culture over time akin to the Yuan dynasty in China. And you'll notice that the First Crusade was not in fact an attempt to wipe out Persian civilization, nor even sold as one.
I'm going to need an affirmative case made for any of the other popes to take those claims seriously.
Churro
30d ago
Why keep asking people to participate if they cannot understand the simple stuff?
I'm sure the remnants of the Ancien Régime were asking themselves the same question all those years in Austria.
To give you a less quippy answer, I think the most persuasive argument for me is a moral one. People should have a say and a stake in how their lives are run. I'm not confident enough to claim it's a universal, but I think it's not a controversial claim to say the majority of humanity has an instinctual desire to be the masters of their own destiny, whatever compromises they have to make of their autonomy in the current socio-political-economic structure of the world. I mean, freedom is arguably the single most popular ideological concept there's ever been, with all but the most extreme authoritarians and totalitarians at least attempting to appeal to it. I think it's fundamentally a right you deserve, to at least have the modicum of political power your suffrage gives you in modern liberal democracies. I'd prefer much more devolved and local systems, though.
But for those who don't share my moral principles, how about avoiding violent, anti-elite revolutions? Do you really want to go back to killing hundreds of thousands of peasants because it's important to keep a rich, powerful guys club exclusive? Not to mention that, poor short-term electoral incentives to policy aside, democratic regimes tend to have much better long term capacity to self-correct. Whereas if dear leader decides to wage a hopeless, 13-year-long failing war to retain a pointless colonial empire, there's no formal, reliable mechanism to force a change of leadership or even policy. Have you always approved of your mayor, your governor, your president? Have you ever wanted somebody else in charge? And if the answer is yes, are you prepared to plan and execute a revolution or coup of your own, or to participate in or support one?
If not, I would suggest you are either one of the peasants, or you do, in fact, actually like the idea of democracy.
Churro
1mo ago
I feel like this is just an argument for applying a similar level of scrutiny and accountability to everybody else. Or better yet, an even harsher standard than that precedent. I rather like the idea of my leaders being too afraid of the consequences to attempt any ratfucking.
Churro
2mo ago
Sure, I won’t argue that cheap labor wasn’t available elsewhere, but that wasn’t the main point by then. The goal was creating an underclass that was systematically excluded and subordinate. The relative social status mattered as much, if not more, than the labor itself. As LBJ put it: “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Racial laws enforced both economic exploitation and a social hierarchy that made poor whites' own exploitation acceptable for them, since they could at least take comfort in knowing they're better than the blacks.
Plus, they still found ways to exploit black people to a greater degree than poor whites through disparities in sharecropping, tenant farming, and the legal loopholes that enabled forced labor via vagrancy laws and convict leasing. They got away with what they could, having just lost a war, after all.
Churro
2mo ago
To have an exploitable, dehumanized underclass? I get that overlaps a bit with stigmatizing them and keeping them down, but that was the core reason they were brought over in the first place: coerced labor. It’s also the central reason for literally the only time a significant chunk of this country rose in rebellion: because they believed that system was under threat, and they were willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people to preserve it. And a big portion of that formerly rebellious chunk then passed and vigorously supported laws designed explicitly to keep that underclass in an excluded and subordinate state long after formal slavery ended.
Sometimes people just do awful things to other people because it materially benefits them, and they and their ancestors build all sorts of moral, cultural, and legal justifications for why it’s okay, actually. I don't see why that's so hard to believe. People have literally been doing some version of this for as long as there have been people.
Churro
2mo ago
I'm sorry, but this is a profoundly historically uninformed take, and one almost hilariously so within the context of Minnesota. The Germans who settled Minnesota are, perhaps, the most decidedly non-conformist of the whole bunch, given that they're largely descendants of the failed revolutionaries, both liberal and socialist, who tried to make a constitutional German Empire back in 1848. You know, the Frankfurt Parliament, the "crown from the gutter" that Frederick Wilhelm IV rejected? That's why the Farmer-Labor Party has always had such a strong presence in Minnesotan politics, and you didn't see it go the way of the Dakotas, or Iowa or Missouri. These are the descendants of radicals and dissidents, not conformists.
Churro
2mo ago
And? They also thought staring at goat entrails would reveal mystical truths about the universe or earn favor from their gods. Old-timey people did all sorts of dumb shit. Patriarchy was just another log on the dumbass fire.
Churro
2mo ago
Who is saying that we can't deport convicted pedophiles and murderers. Who specifically? When?
Churro
2mo ago
The worst of them are now sitting in jail cells across the country, known to local authorities. And we can’t deport them because bleeding heart liberals think it’s mean. We want to deport all the criminals, we want the murderers and pedophiles gone, and your actions are preventing us.
I don't think it actually works like this, though. Correct me if I'm wrong, but federal immigration statutes require serious offenders to serve their terms here in full for local offenses before they can be subject to deportation. ICE can't just legally take some guy who's just been convicted of murder or rape and deport him. What sanctuary cities do, if what I've just researched is correct, is not cooperate with ICE detainers, which are requests to hold somebody up to 48 hours after their release once they've served their sentence.
Which, fair, if you want to criticize blue states for that, I think it's totally a valid point of argument. But if your contention is that we should instead be able to eject somebody from the country the moment they're convicted of rape or murder or drug smuggling or what have you, that's a problem with federal law, and one that Congress, not sanctuary cities, is actually capable of tackling. As far as I know, Jose Ibarra, the murderer who killed Laken Riley, is still sitting in a Georgia prison, and will be for the rest of his life. And there aren't any sanctuary jurisdictions in Georgia.
Churro
3mo ago
By that logic, the Russian people must have loved the Tsars too. After all, they were Orthodox autocrats in an Orthodox country. Clearly, that’s why the Russian Empire still exists and flourished up until this very day.
A far simpler explanation is that you’re speaking well beyond your knowledge of Muslims and Islamic societies, reducing decades of political, social, and cultural complexity to a single essentialist assumption.
So is the Times deliberately sabotaging peace on the Korean peninsula just to hurt Trump? I have no way of knowing, but the timing is a hell of a coincidence.
Isn't a much better question to ask if the Trump administration sabotaged the process on their own by authorizing a mission that killed three civilians and then mutilated their bodies so that they wouldn't be discovered? A mission that, judging by nothing serious happening due to its failure, clearly wasn't that important in the first place? Because I'm much, much more inclined to blame military/security state overreach than I am the people reporting on it. Nobody had to authorize this mission. Nobody had to give them rules of engagement that apparently left no room for even a moment to determine whether the people they spotted were security personnel or fishermen. If peace was really such an important goal (which to be clear, I don't think it is, either for this or the previous Trump administration), why do something so stupidly provocative in the first place?
To stop an active ethnic cleansing? Can you point to me the population that Iran is depopulating en masse?
This argument is "we should do war crimes because we did war crimes before".
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