Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a hilarious insufferable 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 idiosyncratic party-line Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
25d ago
...and this is why I believe that that the infamous "bad ending" is the canonically correct ending for Jason's story, and that the people who complain about how the game "punishes the player" for making the thematic choice by wanting to keep playing are missing the forest for the trees. The fact that game gives you one last chance to reject the path of violence is what makes the ending so impactful.
Well darn. Now you make me want to dig out my own personal screed of a time when the game 'punishing the player' was actually the better writing. For me it's Mass Effect 3.
For those not familiar, ME3 was the divisive end for the Mass Effect trilogy which premised a meta-narrative of your choices mattering and having consequences over a trilogy of games with choice carry-over being designed from the start. Except many of the characters were a mix of woobie and sycophant, and the developers hadn't actually written out or designed a trilogy structure, or even figured out how they were going to overcome their own overpowering arch enemy. They were making up a series and key lore as they went along, and wrote themselves into a corner where the end-game solution to an unstoppable fleet was a macguffin from precursors that, if built, can kill them before they kill you. This culminated in ME3's controversial ending of the player basically choosing to nuke galactic civilization in one of three colors of techno-magic. And the only ending where survival was potentially implied was the one where galactic civilization couldn't be put back together again via an army of genocidal squid-machines or the involuntary organic-AI interfusion of everyone.
For a series that to date had basically no blow back to any of the moral highroad / 'damn the risks, I'm doing what's right' decisions that were the audience and writer's preferred Paragon playstyle, it was a sharp whiplash of tone. Mass Effect to date had rarely been about having to make hard decisions, because it had always let you avoid the hard parts if you just picked the golden route / nice thing, while the most common consequence of not doing the nice thing in a previous game was less content in the next. Hard consequences were the consequence of being a jerk, which is why surviving a suicide mission with no casualties was by far the most common import state between ME2 and ME3.
But if you were willing to take the less-than-golden route from the start...
To this day, I maintain Mass Effect 3 works best as a war story if you go into it with a lot of the fan-favorite characters dead from the previous games. Doing so denied players the opportunity for golden-path 'flawless' successes along the way, and so reframed the ME3 ending from being an out-of-place anamoly to tonally and thematically consistent.
A large part of this was the lack of trilogy design though put into the cast of characters introduced into ME2, a game built around recruiting and exploring a cast of characters for a suicide mission where Anyone Can Die. A lot of thought and care went into the character designs and their missions and such, but at a design level the mere fact that they could die meant that any sequel had to be designed around the possibility that they would not be there. No one could be entirely load-carrying for the plot, because the plot has to happen. So if they are to play a role in a later game, they need a substitute who can do it for them.
This can be done by using other characters already existing in the narrative. In Mass Effect 1, for example, one of the genuinely best choices of the series is when you can only save one of your two starting marine companions on a planet called Virmire, made juicier that one of them may be your primary love interest. There is no golden way to save both, and it can be gripping. However, post-Virmire the Virmire Survivors collapse into a single character in the narrative, and fulfill eachother's roles almost identically. So in ME2 they are a cameo character investigating the big bad and your mysterious post-death return, whether they are your former flame or not, in ME3 there's a generally identical reconciliation arc (or not), and so on.
But you can also fill the narrative hole by introducing new characters. For example, another ME1 character is Wrex, a jaded warlord of a species that's been genocided for warmongering by a bioweapon known as the genophage. It basically reduces the once hyper-fertility race that overwhelmed with numbers to such a degree that the race's own disregard for life is dooming it to extinction. Wrex has matured past the worst of the species hyper-aggressive warmongering ways, but in ME1 when he hears the antagonist has been working on a cure he sees the salvation of his species as too precious to lose. You can talk him down if you've invested enough in the persuasion / morality system, but if it's your first run you may have to put him down- or your marine companion may put him down. This is also on Virmire, so this is the mission that could kill two companions, and your Virmire survivor decision may be shaped by who puts Wrex down.
But if Wrex dies, he is replaced by his otherwise-never-referenced brother Wreave. And Wreave is as awesome a narrative foil as he is a terrible person. He is the sort of short-sighted, hyper-aggresive, civilizationally ruinous warlord that makes you understand why the genophage was employed in the first place. Where Wrex has mellowed out and likes a good brawl but will try things like 'diplomacy' and 'restraint,' Wreave is a vicious and brutal warlord with the sort of cunning to also rise in power, but makes it clear any good relations are transactional and probably temporary. Put another way- Wrex is a noble-savage king who might ally with a female clan in a deliberate breeding alliance that is barely breakinng above replacement rates by reigning in their worst impulses, and Wreave is a savage-savage who monopolizes the females with all that implies.
Which makes the ME3 core plot arc of 'build a galactic alliance against the Reapers' so much more juicy, since both Wrex and Wreave are basically holding out on alliance in exchange for the same bribe: a cure to the genophage. This is pure crisis bartering for both of them, a demand they know will only be given in an existential crisis. They'll be your army if you remove the shackles driving them to extinction, except the extinction is because they'd be able to survive regardless if they weren't so self-destructive. But while Wrex is a guy you can see has been trying to make a society that maybe you could trust to not rampage across the galaxy, Wreave makes no such pretensions- it's just that that is the next generation's problem if you can survive the current apocalypse.
Which is what makes the story arc's big decision- do you sabotage the genophage cure- such an interesting option. You have the option to secretly sabotage the genophage, but let the Krogan think it worked for a time. Eventually the evidence will be clear, but that is the next generation's problem if they can survive the current apocalypse.
Saving Wrex and delivering the genuine genophage clear is part of that paragon golden route, and it's not even subtle about it. Basically all the cultural drawbacks and survival-through-reform themes from before are thrown out and not mentioned again. The morally nuanced and internally conflicted alien doctor Mordin, from the species that made- and re-enforced- the genophage, goes from grappling with his conscience and competing ethical complications and responsibility to a moral certainty that this is the right thing. There's even a 2010s feminist Krogan female who's introduced, subtly named Eve, who is wise and virtuous and the key to saving the hyper-masculine testosterone-poisoned species. If you do this golden route, despite the genophage being about reigning in massive broods, the post-credits slide (after the 'improved' endings post-controversy) show a nuclear family of two parents and a single child. All is good, and nothing is implied to happen.
Have Wreave, though, and the context changes. He's clearly not interested in listening to the advice of the wonderful woman that is Eve. He fantasizes of the wars he's going to fight. He is a giant alarm bell of the future, and even the guilt-plagued genophage doctor Mordin can be convinced that, no, sabotaging the cure is for the best. This is treachery, no doubt about it, but it's for the best. It doesn't hurt that Wreave is an idiot. He won't know until it's well, well too late.
But Wrex isn't an idiot. And the best / most deliciously painful writing in the arc comes from if you betray him. Your friend. Your homeboy. And your other homeboy, Mordin.
See, Mordin's character arc has always been grappling with the genophage, something he felt was necessary because of how bad the Krogan had become, but regretted all the same. With the golden route of Wrex and Eve, he doesn't think it's necessary anymore. In the culmination of the genophage arc, if you try to sabotage the genophage, Mordin does something almost no companion character franchise does-
He defies you, and disregards your choice. Rather than submit to your take-as-long-as-you-need dialogue option to decide the fate of the species, Mordin goes 'no,' and moves to cure the genophage anyway. The actual choice to sabotage the golden path is if you literally shoot your companion in the back via a special in-cutscene decision. He dies, gasping, in the fires that consume his hopes for the krogan species. Your sacrifice for a bitter-sweet betrayal of the golden path.
And when Wrex puts the pieces together, he is furious, and tries to murder you in the middle of the galactic capital. No evasion, no dialogue checks. He even brings up how you talked your way out of that Virmire situation long ago. He's throw accusations, and you've really no choice (other than death) but to kill him. Two friends lost to the same narrative decision.
But what makes it best? The local police chief (who you know) who comes to assist asks what's going on. And accepts a lie because, well, everyone knows Krogan are irrationally aggressive. There was no helping it. Life goes on, despite the loss. This is the sort of narrative tone for the early and into mid-game that makes the ME3 ending feel in place, and not shoehorned in for 'forced tragedy.'
But the meta-mechanics of 'why' this tension worked- why Wrex was better than Wreave- apply elsewhere.
Go back to survivability design. If a character can die, future stories must exist without them. If the character is absent, another must fill in. Put another way, though, the future plots exist without the killable-character, and the returning character is just a cameo in their own episode plot.
But, Mass Effect was a franchise built around the characters. They are the central appeal in otherwise middling writing. Moreover, the characters from ME2 were introduced as 'the best of the best.' They are awesome, far more awesome than random replacements. But they've also generally arrived at the end of their character arcs, since most characters from ME2 had self-contained character arcs that were concluded by the suicide mission they could die in. Because, for narrative purposes, helping them find closure is the secret ingredient for them surviving the suicide mission.
So you have characters, who have already concluded their character arcs, who may or may not be coming back as cameos. How do you make those cameos the fan-servicey things they are?
In short, by making things turn out better when they are around. New sympathetic characters who have to be introduced in ME3 can survive if fan-favorite returns from ME2. Menacing threats can be dealt with just in time with returning champion. The AI who learned what it meant to have friends becomes the key to saving two species from an AI-vs-organic war. ME2 cameo characters, in other words, become the key to the golden path.
But the golden path leads to narrative dissonance with the ending. And often isn't better writing, as much as saccharine.
For another example- take the character of Jack.
Jack is the ultimate woobie, destroyer of worlds. If you remember that scene from the first Deadpool movie where Deadpool and his love interest trade who has the worse childhood abuse backstory, that's Jack, except played striaght instead of laughs. Jack has the most powerful space-magic telekenitics in the galaxy because of how much she was abused as a child by inhuman experiments, which were done for the sake of giving her the most powerful space-magic telekenitcs in the galaxy. Don't ask how human child abuse by human specist-extremists makes a woman strong, it's symbolic and characteristic of that era of Bioware. Jack's ME2 character arc is about overcoming personal trauma and starting to heal. (Naturally, this progresses most explicitly comes out in the romance scene if you sleep with the traumatized girl.)
Jack's ME3 cameo is that she goes to a school for other space-telekinetics, and became the cool teacher. The school is attacked by the same human-extremist that kidnapped and traumatized her, and whose current style is to take people and make cybernentic slave-soldiers out of them. Its up to you and Jack to save the kids, but really this is Jack's epilogue story and you're just enabling her. With Jack on board, the mission is a triumph over past abusers, an unmitigated victory, and Jack basks in the adoration of her adoring students. Those students exist merely as background cheerleaders as she trounces the enemies, and at the very end one over-eager one has to be saved to give Jack her big goddamn hero moments. At the end, the moral decision is whether your conscript these young adult-age level telekinetics into the space army against the apocalypse, which Jack doesn't like the thought of but hey, she'll be there to make sure the worst doesn't happen.
If Jack is dead, the academy is still attacked, and those students have to save themselves, learning to fight for themselves or be enslaved to fight for others. A cathartic victory romp is instead becomes a harrowing school shooting / hostage rescue, as the students band together to try and resist an overpowering opponent systemically dismantling their defenses. The students are cracking, but under pressure from adversity the models that would have been caricatures of adoring fans in another timeline have to develop into actual characters in another. It's not the longest mission, but it's long enough for one of them to stand up and emerge as a potential leader, someone who can hold the team together and get them safe.
In another timeline, this is the student who Jack saves in her big goddamn hero moment. In this timeline, he still needs a big goddamn hero of his own, as he's being a hero to others. But Jack isn't here, and he is shot. The other students are saved, but traumatized all over again- the rising hero that was inspiring them cut down, as so many are in the greater apocalyptic war.
Now do you conscript these traumatized, but blooded, teens to be soldiers instead of students during the apocalypse?
As with the genophage, this is the sort of writing that makes a hail-mary play with no ideal outcomes feel tonally consistent.
In your golden route paths, nuking civilization galaxy-wide is so jarring because it feels it should be unnecessary. You basically roll from victory to victory, and if it's not enough that just means you should just keep playing and saving the day more. You've always taken the high road to date- why should it fail you now? It's only when it fails that the saccharine sweetness becomes apparent.
But in your 'inferior' routes, the routes you get by 'failing' to save people before, you are already steeped in losses. Your world is 'objectively worse' than the golden route, but also much more visceral and gripping. You get character drama and tragedy, as competing visions of greater goods leads to betrayal, and as the promising potential of the future dies and the survivors are scarred/corrupted just to keep fighting. Survival at a cost, at almost any cost, without losing your humanity even if human nature isn't as noble as you'd like.
But then, I'm also one of the minority of people who unironically enjoyed Mass Effect: Andromeda as a deliberately campy B-flick story of alien first contact and exploration, so what do I know.
Dean
Flairless
28d ago
It's been a meme for years that some of the best waifus of the souls franchise have long dresses and bare feet.
Dean
Flairless
29d ago
And this one became high octane culture war fuel because of all the videos of women streamers having their ovaries take the wheel on stream while playing the game.
If you're going to put it like this, now I want you to elaborate.
Dean
Flairless
29d ago
Ah yes, she has bare ankles and a coat that's too big for her. How scandalous.
Truly Miyazaki tapped innto something with Dark Souls.
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
Ah well that probably is overreaching then. Regardless it doesn't change much as my claim has never been that government doesn't do unconstitutional things, it's that they do it at the margins.
When you make an appeal to reasonable deference due to a lack of systemic overreach, it is no longer 'regardless' if the systemic overreach is at what you dismiss as the margins. Your outgroup is by its nature at the margins of your consideration.
'I do not mind constitutional rights being revoked for my outgroup' is not a defense.
We have two choices here. Presume government is acting legally until ruled otherwise by courts or presume government they're acting illegally and prevent government from doing anything until they affirmatively prove their case. Our founding fathers decided the former is preferable in the design of US government.
Why only two? Why are you unable to come up with other choices of how to perceive and proceed?
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
Even for that we would prefer more than just someone rushing to be the first to post the news.
Total nuclear war? Sure, post your good-byes while you can.
Last!
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
Only if you make distinctions without a difference, which would merely be a skill issue.
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
They can have multiple reasons to want it. Among which is the IRGC's reputation for being corrupt incredibly closely intertwined at all levels of the politically-managed economy, such that each potential new revenue flow is also money for people who like having money and regional patronage networks.
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
Why are those the only three explanations you could come up with?
You insert two or three conditional cluses per explanation. You could increase your explanations merely by modifying those.
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
In all honesty I'm not sure if this criticism is being aimed at me or pro-Iran posters who are confusing me.
Neither. It's just a pet peeve I've wanted to express for some time now, but rarely had a chance to express without it being unprompted or an implicit accusation of bad faith (which this was not meant to be against you).
If someone wants to be pro-Iranian, that's a completely different thing. And the Trump administration did itself no favors for not presenting its own case to the public for a 'why,' which I am on records as believing is a perfectly valid/legitimate expectation to ahve. As I said before, if the explainer does a bad job explaining their position, the problem is on the presenter, not the recipient of a bad presentation. I'll also maintain that 'understand' and 'agree' are different issues- you can understand / reasonably characterize someone's position without agreeing or conceding to it. Both confusion and opposition to the war are perfectly reasonable, even if there are unreasonable reasons smuggled in / not being challenged.
The particular rhetorical flourish you describe, which I eventually attribute to bad faith if it goes on after reasonable explanations, just brings out a waspish part of me. After a point, I'm less inclined to go along with faux incredulity which frames the bad faith individual as the one to set the standard of reasonableness, and instead counter it with faux credulity of their claim. If they want to claim inability to understand what's been given to them, ask what how they intend to overcome their self-professed limitations.
Which is not in line with the ethos of this forum, but it is the inclination, and thus the pet peeve.
What bothers me is the posters who don't seem to have any idea what the claims and circumstances are, either out of genuine ignorance or for need of rhetorical flourish. This is the first time in years I've felt mainstream media reporting is more reliable and informative than this forum and it's gross.
'I can't understand the reason for -position X-' is a bit of a peeve of mine when used as a rhetorical tool as opposed to confession of ignorance. If someone wants to understand, by all means, and if an explainer can't be clear that issue is on them. But when people who do understand and simply don't agree with underlying premise use it with the connotations of 'and if I don't understand it it's not reasonable,' it's just a form of consensus building via a implied reasonable person standard that smuggles in the person's standards in lieu of actually engaging other positions.
It's particularly recognizable when someone repeats the premise on the same topic. There's only so many times people can profess to having never heard a respectable counterargument until it's clear the lack of respect is on their end, not the interlocuters.
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
Their claimed conditions for peace before the ceasefire, for some. Reparations from the US, reparations from the Arab countries, the end of sanctions, and right to toll the strait of hormuz were all demands rather indicative of a state that sees money streams as a significant aspect of what they want.
Seems that Iran has closed the strait again, because the US blocked their ships.
'Again' implies that they had stopped closing the strait to regional traffic.
Aside from some high-visibility propoganda passages, the open commercial data of, say, Iraqi trade does not show any such unblocking.
To be honest, seems fair. A blockade is an act of war. A ceasefire where one side blocks economic activity while the other does not seems unbalanced.
Why NaN, I wasn't expecting a defense of the Trump's blockade from you of all people. Normally I'd have expected a pithy 'but Trump said the strait was open!' to deny the Iranian role in blocking the economic activity they weren't letting pass.
'Wasted' here only makes sense from a strategic perspective of 'we shouldn't be striking Iranian targets to begin with' - in other words, your reasoning is circular. The war is bad because we're wasting munitions, and the munitions are wasted because the war is bad.
It does have the echo of the totally-not-pro-Russians of yesteryear who were very adamant that the west was giving too much aid to Ukraine, and very evasive about what an 'appropriate' amount of aid was.
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
What, are you suggesting that Iran, leader of the axis of resistance that routinely hides military assets in restricted sites, might... lie for propaganda purposes?
Or exaggerate a real but smaller number of casualties? Or obfuscate if there was a valid military objective moved inside the school during the pre-war dispersals? Or benignly omit any past history or context of the infrastructure that might lead non-psychopaths to believe something nefarious?
Surely not. If you can't believe the government that months prior was killing thousands to over ten thousand citizens in the streets, who can you trust?
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
A Democratic media organ presenting a highly inflammatory allegation with salacious details without source and treating it as credible despite no one else seemingly able to verify?
Say it ain't so.
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
In my view, this is conflating regime leadership with regime type, which is what I'd consider 'regime change' to generally refer to.
This is understandable in more personalist systems, such as dictatorships built around specific individuals with minimal backbench of successors. In these cases, so much of the regime is tied to the individual that removing the individual removes a key driver of many of the distinct policies of the regime. An example here is Russia, where while whoever follows Putin is likely to be someone at least tolerable to Putin's security state, there's no institutional driver compelling them to follow Putin's desire to be a Great Man of History.
Iran has many issues, but that is not / was not one of them. Iran had a large backbench of clerics with government or military experience, just as it hard large cadres of Revolutionary old guard who could fill in if the old guard died suddenly or gradually. In turn, the system has spent a lot more time and effort trying to ensure that potential successors will be of a type. The clerical government's vetting and veto process is what has made even 'moderate' and often sidelied official opposition amount to 'I agree with your goals but think this is a bad way to pursue it,' while the IRGC is its own self-selecting force with get-along-to-get-along patronage networks.
With the IRGC's own influence now (and predictably) shaping the supreme leader succession, that is and was predictable grounds for expecting a change of leadership leading to a change of personalities, not a change in regime type.
This aligns with my thoughts in a general sense, with different caveats and less finality. Information sphere wise, easy Iranian victory. Underlying structural power factors, though... the war doesn't have to be a US 'win' to have bad effects on Iran.
My biggest caveat is that I personally don't think regime change or even a uprising was actually an early war goal of the Americans or Israelis. I think it was a sort of hoped-for outcome that served as a public justification that they wanted to encourage, and would absolutely have taken credit for if there was any sort of anti-regime movement, but I suspect it mostly was about putting people (particularly the Iranians) in a state of mind to, well, believe that regime change was actually the intention of what was basically a month-long (air) raid.
Which is a forest I think a lot (most) of the wartime discussion missed for the trees of individual leadership strikes. Almost everyone in the region had a general sense of what the US and Israelis had in theater, which was a lot of airpower and precious few maneuver formations. And yet, discussion for so long went from Kurdish invasions to Kharg island to what have you. Some people may believe the Iranians deterred and forced each invasion attempt to fail... or, possibly, there wasn't an invasion attempt at all. At which point it's not quite axiomatic to claim victory in repelling the invaders, but that's mostly because sometimes raiders won't leave on their own accord.
As far as a type of military operation go, though, raids are used to kill people or destroy things, and possibly bring something back. It doesn't seem like there was any raid of the nuclear sites to bring back uranium, but there was absolutely a lot of IRGC (and not-so-IRGC) military-industrial-economic infrastructure hit. Just how much and how severely remains to be see, but the growth curve has definitely been set back a bit, so to speak. Almost as impactfully, the most significant people killed were generally a leadership generation that had a lifetime of lived experience that waging proxy war could stay below the level of major combat operations, or at least stay largely safe themselves (at least until about a year or two prior). Their successors (probably) won't have that same mindset, even as they will have the reduced MIE-base to work with.
I think one of the more interesting potential long-term changes / harms to Iran will be what the impacts of the leadership succession will be. The previous Ayatollah had a lot of regional legitimacy with Shia because he was a cleric first, a ruler second. In so much that the IRGC took the reigns to run the country during the conflict and has become even stronger within Iran, the war has converted Iran from a theocracy with a praetorian guards to a praetorian guard with a theocracy. There are a number of longer-term implications of that, from religious legitimacy to rationalization of the security state and the increasing resilience of a state-within-the-state that is less bound to the clerics. It may take years to decades, but I suspect the revolutionary Islam cred will degrade compared to what it would have been, particularly if the IRGC-dominated Iran gets equated to with corruption and desires for wealth... which the current list of demands centering around money aren't exactly working against.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
While I agree that there's definitely criticisms to be made of the war even from a neocon perspective, this does read like TDS. The war on Iran is easily justifiable from a Neocon perspective(we invaded Iraq over less), and there is an international coalition- it happens to be middle eastern countries rather than European ones, but it's there.
I suspect part of the issue is a paradigm difference between the sort of people who view wars as discrete, self-contained periods of violence, and those who view the current conflict as just the latest campaign of a longer war that neither started or expected to end (hence why the war is basically an extended air raid). I don't think 'neocon' implies one way or the other, but I firmly suspect Kagan is among the former and the current war leaders are among the later.
It's a paradigm difference that matters because a Kagan-style neocon might have a binary view of war based on the expected ability to decisively win, but otherwise see themselves at peace otherwise. It struggles when put into a context where decisive victory is not possible (and thus would prefer peace), but also is also denied peace (because the enemy gets to vote and can engage in sustained asymmetric warfare).
This is why military science discussions over the last few decades have shifted away from war as a binary to the conceptualization of conflict continuums of degrees of intensity/lethality that can be moved between more easily. But that evolution in the literature was after Kagan established his professional persona, and there's no indication he's tried or wanted to update his own models, especially when TDS-posting gives him steady employment and prestigious placings.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
In the mainstream (TV etc) "discourse", that US is a reliable ally and a positive force in the world used to be near axiomatic, not anymore.
I suppose if we ignore not just Trump I, but also Bush II, Reagan, Nixon, and of course Eisenhower over the whole Suez Crisis.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but praise for the US was never axiomatic even from Europe, let alone other places.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
Thank you. I'll not hold it against someone to not know about a particular media personality's long-established personality, but it was confusing seeing the equivalent someone pointing at the The Guardian and positing it as evidence that even Britain was lost. Kagan has ever been part of the Trump coalition. A person who for a decade has campaigned for the Democrats against the current Republican, writing for a generally Democratic media outlet, continuing to do so is about as surprising as water being wet.
Heck, it's not even good TDS-Kagan stuff, and it's filled with the sort of shallow geopolitical, historical, or strategic analysis that's either unserious or seriously phoning it in. There are a lot of reasons why various people in the US support the Israeli, but we have the Cold War records and deliberations of why the US started supporting Israel when it did, and 'a sense of moral responsibility after the Holocaust' is not a particularly competent summation of them... or why the US support started after a period, rather than consistent. Again, we have records from the leader deliberations at the time. Or the bit about 'Israelis should question the US's dedication to this fight' in the short but also longer term. This not only treats as an error the rather obvious limiting factor in the air campaign that the Israelis clearly helped and advocated for the US to do- the factor being that raids are by their nature shorter in duration and have more limited goals- but also ignores the elephant donkey in the room of the changing Democratic Party establishment's, shall we say, anti-commitment to Israeli support. Which would be providing the perspective for the Israelis in any now-or-later consideration. And going by his last paragraph, you'd think Kagan thinks the US never faced shifting basing basing or overflight permission shifts or adhoc coalition making in the past... as opposed to it being the standard practice (and difficulty) depending on the state and their interests at the time.
As far as rigor goes, it's slop. Comfortable slop, depending on one's taste, but it is very much served to satiate (or instigate) an emotional state rather than going for analytic or even historical accuracy. Which has been par for course for Kagan in the Trump era, so eh.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
Honorable mention to GuessWho the Darwin alt who got so throughly destroyed that they didn't even make a huffy flounce post, but instead slunk away in shame.
Truly the legend of Amadan lives to this day, and shall never be forgotten.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
For whatever it's worth, and whatever else I may observe or opine on this or any other conflict in the future, I do fundamentally agree / sympathize / consider this a valid position on how it should be.
What part of magicalkitty's posting history makes you think they are trying to make the most convincing argument they can as an exercise, as opposed to the best arguments-as-soldiers for their latest culture war stand or poke at others, to be abandoned as irrelevant when the topic passes?
I love me a good jawboning and devil's advocacy, but there is a difference between treating debate as a sport and using debate to make sport of others. Faith is as good a distinction as others- after all, if the other person has no faith to believe you're interested in the sport as opposed to making sport of them, there's not going to be a sport with them because it takes two to debate in good faith.
One of the ways to demonstrate good faith, in turn, is to hold to present and maintain sincere positions. Sincerity in turn can be demonstrated not just by elaboration upon request- as in someone who sincerely wants to be understood as opposed to someone deliberately trying to instigate misunderstandings and conflict- but also by maintaining consistency across iterations. You can absolutely provide devil's advocate / steelman positions distinct from your own position, but only if you actually have a position of your own.
To my knowledge, magicalkitty has denied being darwin / guesswho/ whatever other alts that person had. But Darwin was a bad faith interlocuter par excellence, and he had his own history of defending or deflecting accusations of his bad faith arguments on the grounds of 'just trying to adopt a position he didn't believe.' That was the demonstration, not defense, of his sort of bad faith.
The counter to that Darwin-esque behavior, in turn, is pressing the person to make clear their sincere position, and seeing if / how they either directly answer it or try to wiggle out of that challenge.
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