Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man. No one yet has guessed multiple people, or a scholar. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
I'm pretty sure we can find many historical examples beginning / ending hostilities within the same generation.
I'm also pretty sure you can admit that Iran specifically is already in its second, leaning into third, generation of participants.
If you want to go by senior leaders, they already are in the second senior leader generation and are well staged for a hardliner to lead the third. If you want to go by major institutional leaders, the late Soleimani of the IRGC was around 20 during the revolution and 60 when he died as the head of the IRGC, which is to say that most of the revolutionary paramilitary types are being done by younger men of post-revolution generations. The Iranian Revolution is about 46 years old, which is to say a child born after the 'new' Iran has had time to grow under up, be properly educated, fight, have kids, and for those kids to have been properly educated and in their fighting / parenting years as well. The Iranian theocracy absolutely has a revolutionary veteran ingroup for people who were involved in the revolution from the start, but the age of the average iranian- 34- means that most of the actual feuding-execution has been conducted by considerably younger people for a generation or two already.
When we look at historical examples of participants ending a feud in any generation, the proponents for ending it are generally not both declaring themselves an enemy while continuing to conduct routine hostilities to their end-of-life years. Almost as importantly, their key pillars of support tend not to gained their privileges with joining in on the feud, and don't stand to lose substantial influence and wealth if they let the feud go away.
Iran is the sort of structure you'd expect to see continue on a conflict across leadership generations. Both the autocrat-level senior leader selection processes and the state-within-the-state role and incentives of the IRGC support continuing the conflict. The senior leaders select for, and remove on a basis of a lack of, commitment to the Cause. Even the nominally elected representatives are pre-screened at the candidate selection level, and the non-elected power centers are even more deliberately managed.
This selection structure is in turn enforced by an institution that would lose its perks and privileges if the hostilities were to end. The IRGC is both a revolutionary-enforcer private army, but also a state-within-a-state whose privileges are justified by defending the revolution and executing the feud by, yes, bringing death to Americans. (And others.) This is the 'worst' of three worlds in terms of 'ending hostilities within the same generation'- selection for revolutionary fervor, material incentive for continuing, but also the prospect of punishment if a non-revolutionary successor took over. Then the IRGC would get fewer perks, and possibly more prison sentences for those things like domestic detentions and torture of political dissidents opposed to the revolution.
if we want to characterize Iran's leadership structure, they'd be closer to historical analogs of Imperial Japan- where being insufficiently hardline could get someone assassinated or the government functionally self-couped- rather than, say, Gaddafi in Libya, who happily engaged in European terrorism before trying to reconcile later. Japan notably continued its feuding until its government was forcibly resolved, and Gaddafi's feud was not as over as he might have thought when the European successor-governments saw an opportunity to strike back at him with US support.
I thought the question they were discussing was whether or not Iran has a blood feud with the US?
They were, but your question was not that question.
You quoted the section about believing someone who declares themselves an enemy, as opposed to Nybbler's characterization of a blood feud. Your response questioned why to believe a self-declaration of enemyship by comparing it to any other political slogan, as opposed to any other kind of conflict. Your basis of argument specifically ignorred the sort of validating actions (that would give slogans credibility) that is the understood background context of the US-Iranian feud.
Maybe I misunderstood something, but how would you describe the concept if not a 'burning, irreconcilable hatred'?
I wouldn't.
Partly because even irreconciliable feuds can be reconciled, because 'irreconciliable' is a judgement of the involved people's character, not an objective fact of nature. People's characters change with time and context, such that things that were impossible for them at one point are imminently possible at another. Reconciliation is usually by the descendants (future generations) rather than the initiators (the current Iranian leadership generation), and the more degrees of separation the better. I do not recognize / subscribe to a fundamental distinction between an irreconcilable geopolitical and a feud that could eventually ends, for the same reason I do not hold the same for any other 'unending' human relationship. There are no unending human relationships, because there are no unending and unchanging humans to have them. There are no permanent geopolitical conflicts, because the people having the conflicts change out.
The other part is I don't think 'blood feud' is a coherent enough concept to be meaningfully definable. I would certainly recognize as a metaphor for multi-generational hostility. I would also recognize it as a metaphor for hostility-on-general principle. But because 'blood feud' is so nebulous, it is also non-falsifiable. If your concept of blood feud is [A] and Nybbler's is [B], and Phailoor's is [C], Nybbler is not wrong for not being aligned with [A], or even in asserting [B] when rejecting [C].
Given that Nybbler's argument uses blood feud in the way Phailoor was using it- namely as Phailoor's short-hand for a conflict that is (as he put it) mostly a response to the US and which would end if the US stopped acting- and that Nybbler's point was far more about 'believe what they say' than 'there is a blood feud specifically because they say there is'- I also wouldn't read into blood feud as any sort of specific concept by either of them.
Dean
Flairless
14hr ago
But do the observed actions of Iran indicate a burning irreconcilable hatred, or standard-issue hostility, the likes of which various states have entered into, and exited from, countless times throughout history?
Setting aside that both degrees are the likes of which various states have entered into, and exited from, countless times throughout history-
-and that distinction is largely irrelevant when you working within a single leadership generation, which Iran still is for the founding revolutionary leadership class whose personal vendettas still apply even if their successors in a few generations change their mind and shift category-
-either would suffice for what Nybbler said.
This is the position Nybbler made that you quoted to dispute-
When someone tells you in no uncertain terms that they are your enemy, it makes sense to believe them.
-and no part of this position on the nature of animosity, which makes it a distinction without a difference. Whether the Iranians elites have a 'burning, irreconcilable hatred' or not doesn't challenge the premise.
If someone with 'standard-issue hostility,' where 'standard' includes decades of terrorism in foreign countries against US institutions and directly supporting attacks on US forces when the US and Iran are not at war, is telling you in no uncertain terms that they are your enemy, it (still) makes sense to believe them.
Dean
Flairless
14hr ago
The bigger difference between their era and ours is that we’re much more narcissistic and see political opinions as parts of our identity. In 1824, you wouldn’t have made an identity of your policy positions. A person’s lifestyle and hobbies were not affected by their politics. People might have interests, but being in favor of the fugitive slave law had nothing to do with how you saw yourself as a person. You didn’t pick up or drop interests because they were coded “other team”. Nobody stopped drinking tea because it was marketed to the Southern people. We dropped Bud Light because it was marketed to trans people.
I must dissent. Of all the years to pick to claim identity didn't shape politics, picking a period right in the midst of the rise of nationalism as a mass movement (1789 French Revolution, fundamentally changing the relation between the people and the state based on identity) and the publication of the communist manifest (1848, formalizing an economic-class based approach to politics in addition to already existing national/religious identities) is certainly a place to start claiming that people weren't identifying or acting according to their identified category interest.
Even in the American system, identity-driven interest politics is not exactly hard to find. The dominance of state-identity interests (what is good for my state, the team I identify with) forged fundamental characteristics of the US political system (Senate versus House), major landmark legislations (the various new-state compromises over slavery balance), regional interest economic policies (north-east favored protectionism vis-a-vis the south-favored freer trade), and was regular motivation for which side of the civil war various people aligned with (check the generals).
There was never a halcyon period where people didn't have their politics shaped by their affiliation, and each individual made their judgements out of sincerity unbothered by allegiance. The affiliations that mattered most change by time and context- religious identitarianism, dynastic alliance structures, employment contexts- but they certainly existed, whether it's remembered or not.
Dean
Flairless
15hr ago
The idea that we should keep bombing the middle east because they hate us because we bomb them is silly logic.
I would agree. Who besides you is using this logic?
Dean
Flairless
15hr ago
Because not only are those slogans backed by authoritative position statements from senior members of the Iranian state, they are backed by decades of observed actions, including state sponsorship of terrorism and proxy-militia attacks on American civilian, military, and diplomatic efforts in other countries.
'You should not believe any given political slogan' is not the same as 'you should not believe any political slogan.' Many political slogans are, in fact, generally accurate indicators of policy direction. Nybbler made the appropriate calibration from taking a statement to the directionional.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
You saw 'proven' as if anything has settled, as opposed to there being regular ebbs and flows of various forms of underhanded tactics and political violence mixed in amongst other strategies. Any given tactic, underhanded or not, has diminishing returns.
It's not exactly hard to find evidence even in US history of when political violence was part of the public confrontations of the day. Your memory and/or awareness may be shaped by institutional efforts to downplay the existence- there is a reason that the American self-history of the civil rights movement hyper-focuses on peaceful protestor leaders like MLK while diminishing / downplaying / ommitting violent actors- but pick a 25 year period, and it's not exactly hard to find acts of terrorism mixed with general unrest or political controversy movements.
A lot of these are ignored / people are unaware of for a variety of reasons, including self-interest of partisans to downplay/disassociate themselves with ideological cousins or ancestors, but among the reasons is that movements that tried to capitalize on them often hit their limits and failed.
Why not bother?
By the sounds of it, you've become disillusioned by a sense of your impotence at changing others to your preferred views. Congratulations! You are recognizing a truth that already existed.
Be at ease. You have not become less persuasive over time, nor have humans become more unreasonable. Political tribalism did not begin in the last decades. The internet just brought the filters that already existed into clearer focus, by putting people who were previously behind regional media filters in contact with each other. The nature of connecting people is that you can now disagree with people who you previously never would have known strenuously disagreed with you.
But again, this was already the case. What has changed isn't the circumstances, but your cognition. If you only bothered to talk rather than fight because of a flawed and faulty cognition let you convince yourself that you were cleverer and more persuasive than you actually were, then perhaps you should not bother. (With either, obviously- if you can't trust your judgement on how well you can talk, you certainly shouldn't trust your judgement on whether and when to fight.)
But bothering doesn't require that sort of self-importance. And thanks to that, even if you can't force others to change, you can change your own thinking, and thus your reason to bother.
Why bother continuing to argue (and especially why bother continuing to argue online- an exercise in futility if I ever heard one!) when doing so is unlikely to change the other person's mind?
Why do you believe changing the other person's mind is the point of a public argument, as opposed to shaping the audience's opinion?
An internet forum is called a forum precisely because it involves more than two people. There are the debaters, and there is the audience, and the prize of any public debate has always been the opinion of the people not directly speaking. This is why the public fora have long been the political centers, and why part of rhetoric has been how to manage the appeals to the audience's sensibility.
The audience is almost never the opponent in the exchange. The audience is, by its nature, curious enough to pay attention, but ambivalent enough to not be taking part in the first place. The stage of a forum is for those who show up to speak, but the audience is many times larger. The prize is when successful arguments get echoed by people other than your opponent at the time, and/or when someone else re-iterates your previous rebuttal if the opponent tries that same line of argument again. Or, in a specific argument, when someone else enters with an unexpected concurrence, because you've written in a way that gives them something to build off of rather than focus on a solely personal bickering.
However, it is very hard to sway the audience if you do not bother to show up and try.
Why bother continuing to argue when the people I'm disagreeing with seem to have beliefs & experiences so wildly opposite of my own that I have to wonder if we're even living in the same country?
Because you live in the same country regardless of what you wonder, and your audience knows it.
If you are posting on this forum, you are part of a continental-scale civilization. There is no 'everyone has the same experience' commonality when some people face burning summers and others freezing winters, let alone more nuanced local institutional effects. Local political machines, dominant themes and trends in schools, different religiosity (let alone which religion), and so on. If you are only able to bother disagreeing with people who you have very similar beliefs and experiences, that is a limitation on your ability to persuade.
This limitation on persuading the audience is best addressed by.... interacting more with people whose beliefs and experiences contrast with your own.
Why bother continuing to argue when people I disagree with just seem like they fundamentally can't be reasoned with at all?
Because the validity of fundamental reasonableness is a judgement for the audience, not the arguer.
To paraphrase a certain book, if a man accuses his fellow of being fundamentally unreasonable, one of them is. If there are specific people you want to write off as being in bad faith, then by all means do so. The ignore feature is there for a reason. But when speaking with categories of people, part of intellectual humility is recognizing that we can stand accused of the same things. You can make any accusation you want, but the merit / weight it has comes from the people needing to be convinced. Namely, you have to convince the audience that you are not the unreasonable one.
Fortunately, the best way to win a challenge of reasonableness, and thus disqualify the other person's influence on the audience, is to publicly and persuasively be a more reasonable person.
And especially why bother continuing to argue when doing so is only likely to be """rewarded""" with mass-downvotes and distributed dogpiles by commentators on a forum you don't even really like, and only stick around on out of some sort of... IDK, perverse masochism, I guess?
Because there is an audience here that will recognize good effort, and good rhetoric.
The Motte is a place of contrarians, not conservatives. It is not hard to be north-of-neutral on even contentious topics if you phrase well. Distributed dogpiles, on the other hand, are consistent indicators of often substantial issues. This could be a lazy pejorative, blatant bias, or letting your personal contempt for others show through.
This is valuable insight to learn about one's self. If one actually wants to become persuasive, then they need to learn to recognize, and mitigate, their bad habits.
So I ask again- why bother?
Why not?
Are you the sort of person who only bothers to engage people you disagree with when you expect to win?
Is the time for talking over?
If the time for talking wasn't over during much larger and more violent political violence years ago, why would it be over now?
Dean
Flairless
10d ago
Are there enough Dems who genuinely want infrastructure / railroad / whatever funding to pass a bipartisan budget?
My recollection of the last decades was that the Democratic Congressionals were more than happy to raze the commons they might have shared with Trump, and that this inclination has only gotten stronger.
Dean
Flairless
11d ago
It wouldn't be a singular benefit, but benefits. As long as both parties have their own interests being advanced, they don't need a singular.
As for specific potential benefits: the clearest benefit is for Elon getting to politically distance himself from Trump and Doge as he returns back to being 'just' a business man and the various other actors who might want to capitalize on a Trump-Musk 'split.' Benefits to Trump are more nuanced, but could serve an internal political party management- the nominal straw that is breaking Trump-Musk is the budget, annd this could be used as a circle-the-wages call (demand) to get the Republicans on board to pass the bill despite the fiscal conservative objections.
If this was a coordinated break, however, I imagine it would be to bait the Democrats in Congress towards the Epstein file that Musk called attention to. This feud is the insinuation that it incriminates Trump, which is catnip to the Dems, but if this were coordinated, then both parties could know that Trump himself is not condemned, but also that other (mutual) political opponents might be. If the Epstein file was released by Trump directly, it could be dismissed as a political attack fabrication. If the Democrats 'force' it open during Congressional hearing discovery, they'd be owning the responsibility / consequence for any fallout. When you consider how MeToo ended up scalping more notable Democrats than Republicans....
(And- at the same time- the previous individual benefits listed above.)
To be clear- this isn't saying/claiming this is the reason. Merely that this is an example of a political ploy a fake falling out could serve.
Dean
Flairless
11d ago
If the Democrats were capable of that level of self-control, they would have worked with the 90s-era democrat who got elected in a repudiation to the Republican establishment a decade ago.
This, more. Seeing the Bannon position (which- to be clear- is really old) being passed / smuggled as 'Trump is seriously feuding with Musk' has put this firmly in the 'can't trust initial reporting: ignore for now and come back in a few days to see what, specifically, has changed' zone. Both Bannon and the democratic media have been trying to meme a Musk-Trump blowup into happening for some time, and the information environment is already contaminated. Maybe that's what's happening now, but then Musk has been distancing from DOGE since its disruption phase was done in the first two months, reporting already indicated his allies were/are still there, and he's been reportedly wanting to go back to focusing on his business. It's not exactly hard to think of various kayfabe reasons* for a quote-unquote 'staged' breakup fight in a way that serves both his and Trump's political interests.
Or he could be ketamine-influenced and this will spiral. Who knows. I'll wait regardless.
Key things I'll look for to validate this being a Big Deal include-
- Are Musk's allies purged from DOGE?
- Are Musk's contracts frozen / suspended?
- Any immigration-specific action against Musk.
*One amusing proposal from a friend: the Dems demanding the Epstein file log, which will be less damning to Trump than hoped, but catch some Democratic VIPs in a way that leads to inter-Democrat fratricide.
Dean
Flairless
11d ago
Say what you will about them, but what they were not lacking in is/was ideology.
I note you conspicuous avoid attesting to any of us having 'morality' here.
(Wink / nudge / laughing at self in good humor.)
Dean
Flairless
11d ago
This is all occurring while the Democrats have loudly signaled, and been mocked relentlessly for, plans to find inroads into the minds of young men.
On one hand, I can understand this, but on the other, I have to question the idea that somehow young, disengaged, skeptical men will respond positively if the Democrats only... checks notes... force paid advertisements into youtube videos, in-game video game ads, and sports and gaming podcasts.
These are three hobby spaces that are notoriously known for being escapist hobby vectors for people who do not want to be bothered with Serious Things. Paid ads are not exactly popular in any of them, and the anti-ad industry that, by its nature, is skeptical of establishment forces (that would prefer such bypasses not exist).
One of those spaces in particlar- video gaming spaces- was the subject of a multi-year culture war in which Democratic party allies circled the wagons against a non-trivial part of the consumer base who, among other grievances, felt their hobby space was being encroached upon by partisans who didn't care for them.
It really begs the question of if the person making the proposal had any awareness of Gamergate back in the day, or if they remember the progressive framing but think this is a good idea anyway, or... just what this is supposed to be besides a grift for a wave of blocked/skipped ads that people allready block/skip in mass.
Dean
Flairless
12d ago
A number of people did, but DOGE being bounded and only able to work in a department with the consent of the department secretary was the thrust of a couple of AAQCs in February / March.
Dean
Flairless
13d ago
Dean
Flairless
13d ago
Assets that, if some reports are to be believed, were in some locations recently relocated and possibly preparing for an upcoming major strike that would coincide with the peace talks ongoing offensive.
Dean
Flairless
15d ago
I had to get this done a day early, or it wouldn't get done until several days late.
Thank you for doing so. The 1st of the month roundup is, well, a highlight of the month. The new month wouldn't start off right without it.
Dean
Flairless
16d ago
Why does it seem like so many conservatives
Glenn Greenwald is a 'conservative' in the same way that Cindy Sheehan was a conservative for running against Nancy Pelosi.
Which is to say- he was a highly acclaimed / respected public voice when he was criticizing the Bush administration and Iraq War, and then quickly lost support when his criticisms continued despite the party in power changing.
Can you quite where anyone said that Unikowsky's argument is correct based on who he is?
Can you quote where I made any claim that Unikosky's argument is incorrect based on who he is?
Congratulations on wasting so much of my time. I sincerely believe that was your sole intent.
And this is why sincere belief is no a substitute for accurate understanding.
You just chose to ignore in favor of arguing their identity.
Questioning who the OP is appealing to and why they should be is taken as an arguer-by-proxy is the antithesis of an argument over their identity. It is an invitation for their identity to be established in ways to improve their credibility beyond poor stereotypes.
Variously people have done so poorly, appealing to credentialism of a distrusted profession or the smuggled assumption of a former employer, but that is the issue with poor stereotypes instead of individualized endorsement.
Blah, blah. Still refusing to make an argument that 12 hours is sufficient for the Supreme court's order. Shame on you, and shame on the Motte for not having drummed you out with laughter.
'Blah, blah' is certainly an amusing dismissal warning of increasing habeas harms to people claiming a need for habeaus relief for non-habeas motives.
C.S. Lewis remains a remarkable writer of timeless trends.
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