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
And yet you didn't articulate it directly.
Because it was historically illiterate for missing key relevant context that contradicts the desired framing. For example, this was additional historical context that you neglected-
Setting aside that the Minsk agreement did not actually propose to restore Ukrainian's sovereignty due Russian-demanded poison pill provisions that would give its proxies vetoes over Ukrainian national institutions, which would lose the ability to govern the country as a whole even as the Russian-separatist regions could engage in diplomatic agreement with Russia (thus giving the Russian-supported proxy groups more foreign power sovereignty than the government) while proposing elective systems that did not require Russia give up proxy control (which they did not relinquish)-
-and this was your evasion of that context.
In 2019 Zelensky got elected on a peace platform to resolve the conflict between Eastern Ukraine and Russia. He began to move forward on it and tried to go to the Donbass. What it would have meant was a kind of federalization of Ukraine that gave a degree of autonomy for the Donbass, which is exactly what they wanted. Something like Switzerland or Belgium, but he was blocked by right-wing militias which threatened to murder him if he persisted with his effort. If you're essentially telling me that the inhabitants of that part of Eastern Ukraine don't have a right to their own freedom and self-determination because it would mean their interests would play into the hands and service the objectives of Russia, that exposes the prejudice of your personal political views on the matter; but does little to address what the source of the conflict was actually about.
Note, audience, that he does not actually challenge the existence of the sovereignty-sabotaging clauses, or that it would give the autonomous region more autonomy than the central government as a whole. It does try to claim a new equivalence instead with other countries- but does not acknowledge that neither government has the sort of diplomatic veto and autonomy to enter into its own agreements that the Russian interpretation of Minsk insisted. Nor has he addressed the role of Russian military proxies as the in place, and to be still in place in the system due to the autonomy protections preventing the central government to allow free and fair elections that would empose on the 'self-determination' of the Russian supplied, and Russian-manned, proxies.
You're actually thinking Japan has this much autonomy and independence in its foreign policy establishment? It's widely accepted in most foreign policy circles that its own foreign policy conduct is ultimately subordinated and dependent upon continued American economic and military support.
You also widely deride the foreign policy establishment as inaccurate and untrue, yet now you appeal to them even as you'd be wiser not to. People who are unable to understand the difference between a choice of alignment and an inability to choose otherwise are poor foreign policy experts, and believing that the current warm US-Japanese relationship is a direct continuation of the American occupation-state is negligent of several decades of intervening history that saw the US and Japan reconsider their relationship multiple times.
The ultimate Russian justification against Ukraine is NATO's military expansion up to the borders of Russia.
This is not a justification against Ukraine, as Ukraine is not a part of NATO, was not close to becoming a part of NATO, and multiple NATO members had for nearly a decade been actively blocking Ukraine's ability to formally become a part of NATO. A successful conquest of Ukraine doesn't even reduce the NATO borders to Russia- it expands the NATO - de-facto-Russian border.
It is also completely unrelated to the reason for Japan's subjugation to American reconstruction, which was not planned to deny or destroy Japanese national identity.
You can appeal to undetectable, subliminal and nefarious ulterior motives all day, but short of having direct access to his mind, all you're left with in the end are Putin's own statements on the matter. And that fundamentally hasn't changed since he began talking about it.
Sure they have. Putin's Russia's position on NATO and Ukraine has evolved numerous times over the years, including when he wanted to be a part of NATO and when he explicitly avowed that he had no territorial designs on Ukraine.
Putin's posture on NATO shifts with the narrative wind. There's a reason that there was a multi-month pre-invasion buildup focusing on non-immeninet prospects of Ukraine in NATO, and virtually no significant reaction to the largest expansion of Russia-NATO borders as a third of Russia's naval forces found themselves in a NATO lake. In one context Russia was building a pretext for war that was already determined over a notional threat that wasn't a threat, and in the other it was also not a threat.
You completely missed the point I was making.
No, I got the point you were making, it was just historically illiterate.
The Minsk II agreement was initially adopted by France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine in 2015, and endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council. It presupposed withdrawal of George W. Bush’s invitation to Ukraine to join NATO and was reaffirmed by Obama, then vetoed by France and Germany. It called for disarmament of the separatist Russia-oriented region (Donbass) and withdrawal of Russian forces and spelled out 3 mutually dependent parts: demilitarization; a restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty that included control of the border with Russia and complete autonomy for the Donbass in the context of the decentralization of power in Ukraine as a whole. Which wasn't at all unlike the conditions the US imposed on Japan in the postwar period, by banning Japan from having an army, called for disarmament and economic integration with the western powers.
Setting aside that the Minsk agreement did not actually propose to restore Ukrainian's sovereignty due Russian-demanded poison pill provisions that would give its proxies vetoes over Ukrainian national institutions, which would lose the ability to govern the country as a whole even as the Russian-separatist regions could engage in diplomatic agreement with Russia (thus giving the Russian-supported proxy groups more foreign power sovereignty than the government) while proposing elective systems that did not require Russia give up proxy control (which they did not relinquish)-
-this was not only significantly different from the US government design for Japan, which not only did not enshrine foreign proxy sub-states at a constitutional level, but the post-war Japanese occupation also was in no way a respectful recognition of Japanese sovereignty to negotiate, but a result of unconditional surrender. The American occupation system was imposed, not a result of amicable negotiation, and there was no pretense of Japanese sovereignty until a good deal after the US occupation forces left and Japanese elections were able to be held without American occupation shaping permissable conduct.
Nor, and this is also relevant, does the comparison acknowledge the context of the imposition: that Japan was denied sovereign rights and agency due to having just lost a war of regional conquest in which Japan was an imperialist aggressor against most of its neighbors including the US itself. Whereas the Russian justification is that Ukraine warrants a Japanese-style submission because... America bad, or the Ukrainians were killing fewer Russian-speaking civilians over a decade than the Russians did in a few months, or something equally heinious.
Again, as for reasons why the positions emerge, Russia in a future defeat and occupation to the US would be far more analogous to Japan occupation than Ukraine is to Russia.
It seems you don't even understand my position enough to coherently disagree with it, sadly.
Understanding your position doesn't mean it's a good position, sadly.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
There is this thing called the Constitution that does ban discrimination against citizens of another US state.
Well, okay, but, like. Bukele is a dictator and the prison is a human-rights-violating hellhole, right?
No.
Not right. Partisan hyperbole squared, even, due to how much of the American media that carries that tune gets it in turn from Bukele's own political opposition. That political opposition in turn has its own partisan interests in characterizing their defeat as illegitimate, in hopes that a sympathetic US administration will overthrow the popularly elected leader to their partisan benefit.
Dean
Flairless
3mo ago
Can you explain what the Hobbesian premise is that's being rejected/forgotten?
Sure. You not mentioning Hobbes at all, let alone Hlynka's position on Hobbes, is the Hobbesian premise that is being rejected / forgotten.
How I would characterize Hobbes doesn't matter. My position is that you can't properly characterize Hlynka's position if you don't address such a significant part of the position. Which is rather hard to do without mentioning them, which is generally a precondition to accurately characterizing. If you aren't accurately characterizing Hlynka's arguments, there's reason to doubt the validity of your argument.
The lack of mention in your rebuttal-argument is itself the hole.
Your appeal to your own credulity and counter-proposal is committing forces where the enemy is strongest, already had advantageous positionings which enable a preponderance of fires, where counter-attacks would have been into their fortifications and air defenses, for a straight up fight in unfavorable logistical contexts.
Oy vey, someone did not pay attention to Art of War.
Dean
Flairless
4mo ago
Iran, perhaps?
Depends how much you want the US in the middle east.
In the nicest possible way, if you would like a discussion I would appreciate it if you made your point simply and clearly.
You give bad moral framing arguments that, if internalized, gets more people needlessly killed.
As a result, it is not a good defensive argument, since it does not defend (minimize costs to) recipients internalizing it, particularly in the context of the Hamas-Israel War.
Not intentionally. I didn't realise what you were getting at. Yes, obviously, if someone is defending you then you have to defend yourself against them, which may well mean killing them. It's unfortunate. I'm quite capable of feeling pity for the soldiers of an aggressor. And, yes, a little bit for actual Hamas terrorists, depending on exactly how vile they are - I remember the al Qaeda child suicide bombings and whoever set that up deserves to burn in hell. But I hate the insistence that because the Russians/Nazis/Napelonic forces are the enemy then they must be evil monsters with no soul.
There is no insistence that the enemy must be evil monsters with no soul.
The proximate argument regarding souls or lack thereof (lack of humanity) was one that was leveraged unliterally against one side of a conflict, and not even the conflict's aggressor.
I am not a combatant in a propaganda war, nor a lawyer.
You are the former, by virtue of adopting and propagating metaphors and paradigms that are part of the propaganda war. You may not be a witting propaganda war combatant, but this is both a purpose of propaganda and a mechanical means of how propaganda wars work.
I meant in Gaza,
The hatred within Gaza for the Israelis has little to do with the post-2023 conflict, far predating it, nor would it have reasonably been expected to decrease from its pre-2023 levels under the governance structure of the aggressors of the October 2023 conflict, who were initially met with significant public and political support both domestically and from many of their current-war-supporters on the success of the October 7 initiation.
Far more relevant factors of anti-Israeli sentiment in Gaza include the decades of ideological shaping, including religious, educational, information, youth-mobilization, and even refugee policies, that were constructed to build and sustain an ethnic conflict. These were factors which substantially contributed to not only the October 7 conflict which has seen a lot of Palestinians killed, but for the Gazan political acceptance of governors like Hamas preceeding it.
Whereas American geopolitical dominance is natural and snuggly, of course. In any case, you seem to be agreeing with me: the understood laws of moral responsibility were destroyed retroactively to justify what our new overlords wanted. All hail.
You would misunderstand the argument: 'our' new overlords did not retroactively destroy 'our' understood laws of moral responsibilities, the old-overlords were destroyed by the consequence of their self-justifying framing of moral responsibilities, which then led to their inability to continue brutally suppressing subjugated peoples around the globe and arbitrarily impose their model of moral responsibilities onto them.
The culture shock of WW1 and WW2 was that the Europeans were not, in fact, more civilized and moral than the rest of the world they justified imposing their empires and values upon on the basis of cultural and moral superiority. It was a great culture shock, but the trench warfare of WW1 and the industrialized slaughterhouses and eradication camps of WW2 were not the result of quote-unquote 'civilized' peoples, even as they were done by people who both prided themselves and considered each other civilized. It also broke the ability of the European empires to maintain control of their empires, and their increasing reliance on force itself seemed less and less the action of civilized cultures and more banal evils motivated by greed and pride cloaked in sovereignty.
The question of 'how do we never have a war of such scale in Europe again' became the defining political question in Europe for generations, and part of the eventual answer of what led to those tragedies was the role that a lack of moral responsibility- and thus moral duties- of those who not only acted in an immoral sovereign's name, but also those who supported and enabled the immoral sovereign. In order for there to be more duties / responsibilities, however, required the space for consequences for failure to meet those duties / responsibilities- consequences prohibited by prior understandings of sovereign immunity, and which were invoked and had been used to protect the perpetrators of the delusion-shattering world wars.
The sense of cultural superiority and thus appropriateness of normalization was not destroyed retroactively- it was destroyed contemporarily, repeatedly, by the European sovereigns themselves.
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
Thank you for further demonstrating your habit of misrepresenting the position of others by insisting they make claims they have not made.
You are arguing that USA is innocent by default of its warmongering because it chooses to not accept the sovereignty of international courts.
Alas, international courts do not have sovereignty.
I will submit that this attempt to reach for a trumping buzzword is demonstrative of why you do not understand the argument being presented, or even the nature of international law.
The reality is that obviously you want to support USA and Israel to commit any and all criminal actions and to oppose any valid criticism of such. While you also desire to promote one sided narrative as you have done towards other countries.
This would be incorrect. My want is to highlight that your position is not based on international law, but the sort of selective and increasingly emotional appeals to international law that see it so often misused as a geopolitical cudgel.
In a few posts you have-
-Mis-identified the legal international bodies taking actions
-Mis-identified the legal actions taken by international bodies
-Mis-identified the conclusions of international bodies
-Mis-identified the legal basis for international bodies
-Mis-identified the legal limits of international bodies
-Mis-identified the legal responses to the actions of international bodies
-Mis-identified the legal implications of certain states not abiding by certain international bodies
-Mis-identified the provided legal basis of non-compliance with international bodies.
Upon correction, rather than even contest disputes by counter-citations, you have transitioned to ad hominem attacks that ignore the arguments provided.
This is not atypical of people with less interest in international law than in making strong claims about international law.
You seem to try to impose your own corrupt understanding on others. It isn't mine or anyone's idea but there is an objective criteria into which warcrimes, genocide, causing civil wars, can be defined and understood.
Except, of course, there are not objective criteria- hence why ICC claims jurisdiction over territory not a part of any ICC member despite the objective limitations of the ICC's jurisdictions under its own laws to its own members and their territory, and why the advocates of the case against Israel in the ICJ submitted alternative and broader definitions of genocide, rather than the older and more established forms.
Which is why textualism is so important for advocates of law. Acknowledging the limits of the law- what you deride as the loophole or innocence- is what protects against corrupt re-interpretations of law by taking items beyond their scope, or ignoring what is there.
By contrast, ignoring the text of what is or is not provided for in international law as convenient (or inconvenient) to advance your desires is the paradigm that leads to systemic abuse of the international law by powers that have more power to shape when and what sort of selective interpretations are advanced more often.
So, I would encourage those who care about the truth of the matter to not treat as even a tiny bit impartial what are essentially extreme 100% partisans for Globalist American Empire and Israel. Because they will always support their actions, no matter the consequences and what moral rule or laws they violate. When you break it down, they are completely against international rule of law but completely in favor of abusing the concept against their targets and for their supported regimes and their actions. And that is all there is to it.
My encouragement for the audience is to consider whether Belisarius is making a legal argument on the nature and nuances of laws, or an emotional appeal more motivated by their geopolitical hostilities.
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
I've always felt that one also pairs nicely with Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers
Most people think of stereotyping as “Here’s one example I heard of where the out-group does something bad,” and then you correct it with “But we can’t generalize about an entire group just from one example!” It’s less obvious that you may be able to provide literally one million examples of your false stereotype and still have it be a false stereotype. If you spend twelve hours a day on the task and can describe one crime every ten seconds, you can spend four months doing nothing but providing examples of burglarous Chinese – and still have absolutely no point.
Chinese robbers is very relevant to the Outgroup bias when dealing with social media and groups of scale, as with enough scale you can always find outliers and then signal boost their prominence, particularly when there's availability bias shaping access to information.
Dean
Flairless
7mo ago
I'm sorry, I may misunderstand. You think that Trump or his administration is going to reduce government spending?
I supposed we will have to agree to disagree that it is unfair to request evidence to substantiate an accusation, particularly when that accusation is a form of argument.
'The accused did not defend themselves' is so flawed a standard for determining truth that Americans prohibit it as a legal standard at a Constitutional level as an element of self-incrimination protections (you cannot be forced to testify, but also your refusal to testify is not itself self-incrimination), and while we are not a court of law it does lead to why it's a poor argument on grounds of reputational damage. Even Nate defending himself in this twitter at this point can inflict reputation damage to Nate- after all, it could be presented / accused as Nate lying / trying to deflect from the poling-result mismatch / doing a condemnable thing in and of itself. General decorum is to not air legal conflicts on your pseudo-business reputational Twitter account, particularly when they are about a prediction that you got wrong- just re-raising the topic is causing reputational harm.
And this is without other possible reasons of reputational harm for not going into detail of why an offer might not have been carried through. Like, say, the fact that Nate Silver is a married men, and married women are often quite willing to have strong words with their husbands when said husbands start offering 5-figure bets. Or maybe his finances are not so liquid and stable as to set a 5-figure risk. Or that he was drunk and not in a good state of mind when he made the offer. Nate is already suffering reputational harm for coming off as a bet-welcher, but he could suffer more reputational harm if he provided more context... and this is regardless of whether there was an actual acceptance-offer made.
It's also a defense that doesn't really acknowledge the shifts in which reputations are being challenged how.
Note here that Nate's reputation isn't regarding whether he would fail to pay a bet. It's not even about if he made a bet. The reputation in question is if Nate's reputation as a political data analyst, i.e. whether his analysis of election, is sound enough to warrant respect.
Whether Nate is willing to actually to make a bet or not isn't actually a failure of his analytic capacity (i.e. whether he should be considered valuable input), it's a failure of an additional standard introduced as a basis of dismissal (if Nate Silver is not willing to go through with a bet, his work can be dismissed). Nate Silver's [Reputation as a political scientist] and [Reputation as a confident better] are two different reputations, which are being conflated to use the one that is easier to condemn [reputation as a betting man] to dismiss the other [reputation as a political scientist].
Since the [reputation as a betting man] is being used as a proxy argument for [Nate Silver's arguments can be dismissed without addressing], the role of evidence is in turn strengthening or weakening the proxy argument. This seems like a reasonable request, but I will admit that is my own opinion.
That would not be fair. In the absence of Nate confirming that he refused to sign a contract, a claim of having sent the contract is just a claim absent further evidence.
My curiosity / eyebrow is raised because Ranger is raising this bet as a character failure on the part of Nate Silver, but the proffered evidence is of the conditional offer of a bet, not that the bet was accepted as offered but that Silver refused to sign it.
This leads to a couple of issues for which more information than has been provided is needed.
-Did the other person actually accept the bet, or are they just claiming so with post-election hindsight? (i.e. is he talking the talk after the election is decided?)
-Did the person try to modify the terms of the bet offered that would render the offer void? (i.e. did he refuse to walk the walk when it mattered?)
-Did the person fail to meet the conditions of the offer of bet? (i.e. did they not have their lawyer do it, but tried to make their own contract- thus invoking the payment risk issue raised?)
I've no particular strong feeling on Nate Silver one way or another, but if someone wants to make a character failure accusation with linked evidence I'd generally prefer the links to be evidence of a character failure.
Because the argument wouldn't be as effective if I were the one to provide a link.
If someone is actually interested in whether Hamas uses child soldiers, they can very trivially google "Hamas Child Soldiers" and find multiple reports on the history by organizations including Amnesty International, Child Soldiers International, and the United Nations, among others. This doesn't even include self-publicized material such as from the Hamas Youth Wing. These aren't even 'new' reporting- there are easily observable reports from the early 2000s during the tail end of the Intifada years to late last decade, well before the current conflict. Any observer of the conflict with any significant experience has read any one of these over the last few decades- they are old news, not particularly controversial, and numerous.
The reminder of the existence of such reporting isn't just the function any link would provide- it is remind the reader of past reports they've heard of and can easily find again (thus appealing to their own understanding of the conflict), and thus the contrast to the OP's dogmatic dismissal of contrary evidence published over the last decades. Their own trust in their own memories and experience is the legitimizer of the position.
While nominally the target doesn't work as well on people not as experienced in the topic, the prompt that they could easily search for it serves a second level of argument, in which if they do look they will find, and their ability to find evidence of child soldiers if they choose to look for it will be contrasted with the OP's dismissal. This, too, utilizes their agency in the search to bolster the argument.
People who refused to do the search, as a third category, in turn expose themselves to audiences one and two, and thus discredit the OP's objection even fuller when people who are aware recognize they are denying international records that aren't obscure.
None of these three layers of effect would be as effective if a link is simply provided, which can be dismissed on the basis of coming from a partisan regardless of what reference was linked to. The searcher's own agency is what legitimizes the discovery.
Additionally, there is a fourth level, which is a rhetorical trap for the less aware if someone tries to do a surface-level search. One of the easy top-searches is a past UN report that also criticizes Israel for 'child soldier' use (primarily in the context of proximity when searching tunnels / etc.). If this were to be raised in a way to try and establish moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel, not only would a choice to focus on that report validate the relevance of child soldiers as a mitigating circumstance (by acknowledging that the children are not necessarily automatically moral innocents in a combatant sense), but it would also be a demonstratation of a motive for why someone besides Israel might have shot the children (as in, rather than be shot by the Israelis, they are shot because they are associated with the Israelis).
This snare was non-central to the point on the ease of finding evidence that the OP looked to, but was on hand to use if pulled, which again would not work as well if proactively linked to and explained by myself.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
A difference in what?
When states do deficit spending, they take on debt to meet the desired expenditures, they don't spend to match the debt assumed.
The distinction is that if you cut X money from the budget, it doesn't mean X more money is spent on other things. It means X less debt is assumed. That's fine and well if the debt is the difference you care about, but the argument in the current context isn't that there's a debt issue preventing more funds from being taken.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
Counter-point, "Remind yourself that overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer."
Which has the merit and utility of being actually useful advice. Overconfidence is a risk factor, and it can take a long time to take detrimental effect. You could dismiss the warning on the same grounds of falsifiability- if overconfidence does get you killed here then you were right and if it doesn't you're just being careful and careful is good- but this ignores that sustaining carefulness is an enduring good in and of itself.
This is a relatively common form of warning for harms that can come with unclear immediate impacts. Don't just eat mushrooms you find in a forest, they may be poisonous. Walk slower on just-mopped floors, they may be slippery. Don't trust strangers on the internet, they might be bad. The fact that these warnings don't have to come in a context where the element of danger is immediate or guaranteed doesn't make them non-falsifiable, and their value can come because the warned against function is rare. When an element of danger is rare, it's easy to ignore the possibility of something that could be prevented with diligence.
By contrast, 'look both ways because a plane could fall on you' has no link between cause of warning and effect of warning. Looking both ways does nothing to warn you of the danger that comes with 'up,' so there's no merit of dilligent reminder. It also an argument of a specific instance (planes crashing into crosswalks is so singular that it can't really be claimed as a trend) as opposed to a trend-consequence of mounting risks (overconfidence may not get you killed this time, but the reoccuring and persistent nature can lead the threat to grow over time).
Which simile is better for "the danger of the Russian style of disinformation" is up for debate, but I'd wager (and right) on the comparison to overconfidence than to airplanes-on-crosswalks.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
You can personally set the bar wherever you want. But in that case, I'm struggling to understand why people say this like it's some kind of surprise. What am I supposed to be made to think or feel upon hearing that?
That yourself and others should think on what you are feeling, and why, before you act upon what you are feeling, in case someone is trying to deceptively manipulate your feelings to cause you to act in their interests rather than yours.
That the lesson may be unnecessary to you personally does not mean the lesson is not needed for other people. Some people may not recognize that they are being targetted for manipulation. Others may dismiss the existence of relevant actors to focus on other grievances.
Well put it this way then. Anyone who would want to hold Russia or anyone else for that matter guilty of disinformation and not the media complex in the west which IMO is far worse by comparison, has a very hard sell to convince me of some kind of moral indictment, because anyone who wouldn't also hang the whole of CNN, Fox, MSNBC, CBS and everyone else from lampposts outside their headquarters for also being guilty of disinformation, is just being a partisan hack.
Noted, but where do you get the belief that flailingace or myself wouldn't agree that those aren't also disinformation actors?
Granted, I don't believe in hanging disinformation actors in general, so I suppose I fail that purity test if that's the standard you want to make.
And RussiaToday can also make similar claims in some of their reports as well as far as exposing disinformation. So what?
So you should consider what, how, and why RT chooses to cover what it covering in the way it does before taking what it says as substantially true, the same as you should have bounded skepticism of any source...
...but also that you should recognize that RT, and countless actors like it, will continue to try and execute their motives in any given case, regardless of how much traction they have in general...
...so that if you start getting a suspicion that your intake of social media on something feels like it's being manipulated to try and encourage an impression, you're not being crazy, you are having a reasonable grounds of wanting to think more critically before you decide how to feel.
And, by extension, so are other people.
Are people calling for them to be restored to YouTube now on grounds of their occasional fairness?
Yes, and why would you think there aren't any? The topic has died away from public awareness with time and distance, but there were and still are people who would agree that banning RT from youtube was bad on various grounds.
One of the general reasons for maximal free speech stances is that even malefactors can bring up good points and challenge/compel better actors to clean themselves up in ways they wouldn't if the 'better' people could exclude them from the public stage, and that it's easier to hone the counter-arguments / strengthen your own when you can openly engage them.
Even completely unfair media actors have their defenders on why they should be allowed to have a public position. For example, North Korea is one of the extreme examples of 'bad media actor,' but it's youtube presence was (and, to a lesser degree, still is) a resource for researchers trying to understand.
And this doesn't even touch on grounds of national interest, ideology, or various forms of strategy. Russia took a decent black eye in the early Ukraine War when several hosts who had previously been taking the party line that the warnings of invasion were an American russophobic hoax publicly quit / were fired in objection. It was a self-harm / 'even their own propagandists couldn't support it' that could not have discredited the pro-Russian factions in various western governments had RT been restricted from that sort of public awareness earlier.
Meaning what? If they're doing it for a good cause or something they agree with then its okay then?
Less 'okay' and more of 'categorical difference in actor intent.'
Let's stick to 'just' true things, as in someone who never tells a direct falsehood.
If someone says true things because they value truth as an abstract concept in and of itself, we call them a truth-seeker and can recognize their errors may be out of ignorance but not deliberate distortion of context.
If someone says true things because they dislike deception even when it would benefit them, we call them honest, and can take them at their word. Their word may be limited, and unllike the truth seeker they may not be interested in actively establishing context and understanding, but they can be trusted within the bounds of that.
If someone would say true things but only selectively and with the intent to ruin others relationships, we would call them a manipulator, and recognize that they deserve extra scrutiny. Because their intent is what determines what they say and why, it behooves an audience to consider if there is additional context, missing information, or other truths that simply aren't being provided before believing what the manipulator tries to lead us to feel.
And this is before outright lies and other forms of dishonesty are included. A truth-seeker may have a motivated interest in what they focus on and find, an honest person may selectively try to avoid being questioned in certain ways to let a misunderstanding continue, but a manipulator who doesn't limit themselves to just truths can do even more to meet their interest.
Intent matters, and as such recognizing who's intent for what is a relevant piece of meta-context. 'Disinformation' may be an abused term, but 'Russian disinformation' is as good enough term as any other for characterizing a system intent by a coherent actor for information that is ambivalent about truth/accuracy but which is systemically proferred to try and shape public discourse in ways hoped to be systemically detrimental to the national target. This is a categorically different intent of, say, 'Partisan disinformation'- which wants what is bad for the opposition but good for the party- or 'ideological disinformation'- which wants what is good for cause and willing to tear down the obstacles.
You may feel the impact is grossly overestimated- and not only would I agree, but there was a very recent article last week pointing out a Russian incentive to overestimate their own impact which has interesting implications for if western leaders are accurately reflecting western intelligence accurately reporting on Russian self-assessments that are themselves incorrect for reasons of self-interested motivated reasoning- but again, what you are responding to isn't about 'relative' impact.
Dean
Flairless
10mo ago
If the hypothetical manager of company A cannot, then said hypothetical manager is replaced by hypothetical manager of company B, unless you believe there are no industries that can find use for low-skill labor in 21st century America.
Dean
Flairless
10mo ago
And that's for no reason other than because it's inconvenient to your argument.
Or that your categorization scheme is structurally unsound and anachronistically selective.
You either haven't internalized that there is no meaningful difference between war and diplomacy, or you have and you're lying.
Or you failed the lesson on spectrums. The expression that war is the extension of politics by other means is that they are related and interconnecting, not that they are the same thing with no meaningful differences in their conduct or in the decisions or decision makers that are involved in them.
Whether you believe there is no meaningful difference between war and diplomacy or not, there are very substantial differences in who leads the efforts organized under them and who is lead of who at any given time and what their intent for them is, and this is without circumstances changing in the passage of time.
You think the US strategic position would be better if the Islamic State was still straddling the Syria-Iraq Border,
The Islamic State was literally created by specific decisions the Americans made in Gulf 2 and Syria. If they didn't have this silly belief that the middle east can be democratic and US aligned, none of this would have happened.
'None of this matters because different people should have made different circumstances in a different decade' is an evasion, not an answer.
The Obama-era elites were not the elites who could choose Gulf 2, nor were they even the same nationality of elites who chose to make southeastern Syria an insurgency supply line. They weren't even the decisive elites for supporting anti-Assad rebels in Syria, which was practically a regional orgy of interventions.
Korea had to be fought, but the US stalled as soon as China got involved.
And?
Setting aside that the Korea War did not have to be fought, you have yet to make the case that the US being stalled by China in Korea is a inferior strategic output than the choices and consequences that would have been required to push the Chinese military out of North Korea into China by an expeditionary military force of a power still recovering from WW2 over-extension and needing to prepare for a potential European conflict- a preference that can claim historical validation because the US demonstratably did not get so bogged down in an Asia conflict that it was unable to maintain deterence or its alliance networks in Europe.
Which goes back to categorically excluding successes. The US stalling as soon as China got involved is presented as a failure, rather than US policy makers making an appropriate decision in the face of a Chinese intervention on the appropriate scope of the war and war goals to pursue.
This most of all is a complete failure of American diplomacy. They controlled Iraq militarily and we're kicked out of institutions they themselves created.
I was actually referring to the Iran-Iraq War, not the post-war, but I concede I forgot the time clarification and muddled the topic.
All in all, if there's strategic competence at play here, I don't see it.
Sure- because you gerrymander categories to dismiss successes and then conflate decisions and consequences decades apart to disqualify decisions without regarding their own circumstances and purposes.
As for the claim that Europe is a better ally now than before the war, it is the most ridiculous of all. The US had to shoot German industry in the kneecap to ensure its loyalty and France, Britain and Germany are experiencing levels of political instability unheard of since the 50s right now because of it. Not to mention they now have insignificant military capacity and would be unable to help even if they are utterly loyal to NATO.
This is a particularly inept series of characterizations. The US did not shoot the German industry in the knee cap, the current dominant causes of European instability (migration, demographic age-out, post-financial crisis stagnation, Covid aftershocks, rise of the far right) well predate the war in Ukraine, as did their military insignificance in a China scenario.
Yes I believe either your eyes are closed or you're a sophist.
Whatever makes you feel self-assured, I suppose.
Dean
Flairless
10mo ago
Sure, but we're not talking about whose cultural paradigm is exerting itself. We're talking about which baseball team is better.
No, the OP is talking about which cultural paradigm is better. Hence why it is Eastern vs Western media while trying to characterize the products as culturally eastern even when only their production or publishing is, and not Eastern-made Western media versus Western-made Western media.
Sure stature is subjective. Popularity isn't, but stature isn't just popularity, it's reputation. In any case, the games you're talking about aren't the same genre, and one doesn't need to gerrymander a soulslike genre to do so. I was actually thinking of 3rd person action open world RPG for Elden Ring, and 3rd person crazy stylish action game for DMC. Again, for either, I can't think of any Western made games of the same genre that come even close.
Without knowing what sort of metrics you're using to make the claim of stature or genre, and with you dismissing popularity, I can't think of any way to disprove the position at all, or to prove it in the first place.
DMC is high-stature based on... what? Helping establish a niche sub-genre that most players don't care about? Elden Ring's stature water point, at least, was based on its immediate release popularity- but a non-trivial part of that just-release hype was popularity benefiting from the advertising emphasizing Game of Thrones as a bridge for the non-Soulsborne, and the player base dropped precipitously when most of those non-Soulsbourne dropped. Is Stature supposed to piggy back on the initial popularity, but not enduring popularity?
What does this category 'Stature' mean beyond 'I respect it, and I think a lot of other people do too' versus 'I don't respect it, and so it doesn't matter how many others do'?
Or, to put it another way- why, besides snobery, should I be more impressed by the DMC franchise (30 million sales worldwide) than the Civilization (40 million worldwide franchise sales) or Call of Duty (425 million copies, 100 million active monthly players in 2023)?
It's not like there's lack of established western franchises that meet your broad categories. Far Cry, Assassin's Creed, Red Dead, and Grand Theft Auto are all open world action games of note, some with far more RPG credentials that Elden Ring which is JRPG in the mechanical build sense rather than story-changes-according-to-actions RPG. Depending on what you mean by 'stylish' action games, Helldivers, God of War, Fortnight, Gears of War, or even Doom. Call of Duty has been a spectacle shooter for over a decade at this point- is that not stylish because it relies on gunplay and grenades and setpieces rather than melee combos and stylized cutscenes?
Well, no. This is where we go back to rhetorical gerrymandering, and using winnowing language to remove comparisons. Elden Ring and SWTOR are both open world RPGs, but one is action with 'press X to act' parkour gameplay and a non-linear narrative delivery structure, and one is MMO with 'press hotkey to act' non-parkour to activate with at least 9 novel-scale storylines, ranging from hero's journey to revenge journey to a spy thriller. Both are open-world RPGs with considerable quality, but only one is dismissed by adding yet another qualifier.
And that's when the qualifier is clear. Helldivers and DMC are not the same sort of stylish action games, but they are both action games with an emphasis on style. However, the lack of a western equivalent to DMC specifically is evidence of failure, while the eastern equivalent to Helldivers 2's brand of dystopian-parody sci-fi team-killing we're-the-baddies co-op chaos is...?
If the argument just wants to be that certain sub-genres are dominated by non-western countries, sure. That's banaly true, and can even be narrowed down to 'certain sub-genres are dominated by specific non-western companies.' No one of note outside of Koei is making Dynasty Warrior successes. But it's equally true that there are sub-genres dominated by western companies, and arguing over the stature just turns into a 'my luxury playtime toy is higher class than your crass and low-class luxury playtime toy.'
Dean
Flairless
1yr ago
I would disagree with your conclusion, and affirm your opening question. I think the variations you see do exist, as Putin runs a personalist system and so his personal foilables show themselves (including his desire for historical reputation, his propensity for aggression when he perceives it as a safe i.e. easy win), but there is a distinction between someone who is pursuing a strategy badly (Putin is, I have asserted for many a year, strategically inept), versus not having a strategy at all.
Putin is in many respects incompetent at various strategic factors, but that's a matter of capability, not intent.
Dean
Flairless
1yr ago
What's your ingroup?
Counter examples would require ingroup to be identified, but give us one of reasonable scale and it's generally trivial to find some policy or practice that can framed as an act of aggression towards others. Even hobbyists can rightfully be accused of taking money that could spent to benefit starving people and squandering it on unnecessary self-satisfaction instead.
And it says quite a bit about the integrity of one side of the argument when they won't even fully and accurate represent what the position of the other side is.
Fortunately I am still willing to engage you as to why anti-globalization conspiracy theorist is not a full or accurate representation of what the US State Department position is.
I'm still waiting on the counterargument. If we're essentially at a standoff where either side at liberty to disregard an argument by calling it's proponent a moron, then expect the same kind of dismissive, low effort diatribe from me in return. Otherwise, I see no rebuttal to evaluate.
If you choose to call Chomsky a moron, that's on you. I call him a tribalist and a sophist, but fully recognize his intelligence in his field of competence- which is not geopolitics, but linguistics. (Though I have heard from others in the field that he devolved to non-falsifiables in defense of his fame-earning theories, so it's not particularly relevant.)
Let me try the same thing in kind.
"Lol. Sounds like some bullshit to me."
Good ma'am, clearly you've never had to deal with both French and Government officials in the same conference room presenting why their strategy is the better one.
They'd never be so crass as to swear, but the knives of politeness are all the sharper.
Evidently I did miss the satire. I figured your statements were worth taking seriously and not given in bad faith. I stand corrected.
See? There's the learned language issue. You're using the words, but not matching them to the right contexts and so create the unintended ironies. A more native speaker wouldn't make the prior mistake of making an accusation of not representing another's position after citing a conspiracy theorist deriding another's position.
That would be the micro-aggressions that the woke-americans claim are being conducted, obviously.
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