Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being an 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 Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Yeah, seeing just the non-secret developments in new drone and satellite technologies makes this completely non-credible for me.
And that judgement from those developments are why your friend is right to take issue with your proposal.
The most significant point of the developments in new drone and satellite technologies is that the benefits of drone and satellite technologies are no longer a near-monopoly of the American government. Commercial satellite technology gives anyone with internet access imagery on par with what the American government fought not just the first iraq war with, but the iraqi insurgency. Commercial drone technology has introduced an ongoing revolution in military affairs, as the ability to have a militarily effective airpower is no longer something only states can afford to procure. Twenty years ago, the US military's greatest fear was land-based IEDs, and that was a considerable challenge even when the only drone strike fear was of friendly fire.
The fact that Americans have significant satellite and drone technologies isn't what is decisive anymore. The fact that all parties have satellite and drone technologies are what makes it far harder. I fully expect it to take a mauling for American public opinion to catch up with that fact that the Russians aren't uniquely bad or vulnerable to drone warfare, but I would prefer they learn from the Russian example in this respect.
Is this about the Zetas? I don't want to relitigate shit from the 1800s about how America is a bad neighbor. Please let me know when and how the United States has fucked over Mexico to the tune of trillions of dollars of cumulative economic damage, enriching themselves in the process.
If you need to ask, you are demonstrating the lack of awareness- on top of the rather unsubtle dodge of that time of a conquest of a third of Mexico including one of the most economically productive regions of north america.
Afghanistan is 7,300 miles away, Mexico we share a border with. Afghanistan was also a while ago, we have learned lots of lessons, we have much better technology. Will this stupid comparison never die?
I question how many of the lessons of Afghanistan were learned by anyone who dismisses a conflict of nearly 20 of the last 25 years as 'a while ago' and irrelevant.
Based on your proposal so far, I am going to make a very measured guess that you have either never read the Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency before, or the source document behind it, or else you found much to disagree with them both.
My plan is that the cartel bosses that continue to not play nice with the United States will keep dying. Sooner rather than later they will learn to order their thugs to wind down certain operations. Maybe just a few to start. @FCfromSSC puts it much eloquently below.
You seemed to have missed FC's satire. -Edit- Correction- It seems to not have been satire. I will leave the rest of this post as is, but acknowledge my misunderstanding of his intent.
Or did you think 'massacring dozens via drone strike' followed by 'release video evidence on 4chan while claiming it was totally jihadis' was a serious proposal from FC, when delivered with language like 'sprinkle in some Allahu Akbar'?
Moreover, I return to the point that you do not have a good model of cartel bosses. I will attempt to provide a metaphor via a stick comic by Rich Burlew. [Spoilers for Order of the Stick- which is dated, but still quite good.]
In the webcomic Order of the Stick, one of our protagonists, a chaotic-good bard named Elan, learns that his recently-discovered/long-lost father, the subtly named Tarquin, no relation to that one, is actually a lawful-evil tyrant in the equally subtly named Empire of Blood, which is nominally ruled by an evil red dragon. The discovery that his father is actually evil comes after the further unsubtle act of burning a bunch of prisoners alive as part of a birthday gift.
Being the good-aligned and narratively-savvy bard he is, our protagonist attempts to rationally convince his father to stop because, per the tropes of fiction they both subscribe to, the hero always wins and the evil overlord always loses, and thus his father's doom is assured if he chooses to be the evil overlord. Clearly it would be irrational to take a doomed position that will end with his certain defeat (and death).
Tarquin makes the counter-argument that, you know, you can't just be so negative all the time, and you should be more optimistic.
Tarquin: If someone conquers an empire and rules it with an iron fist for thirty long years, and then some paladin breaks into his throne room and kills him, what do you think he's going to remember as he lays dying?
Elan: ...that good triumphed over evil?
Tarquin: No, that he got to live like a god for three decades! Sure, the last ten minutes sucked, but you can't have everything.
Elan: But in the end-
Tarquin: The end of what, Son? The story? There is no end, there's just the point where the storytellers stop talking.
Tarquin: Somewhere between "villain of the week" and "good triumphs over evil," there's a sweet spot where guys like me get to rule the roost for years. As long as I go into this accepting the price I may eventually pay, then I win- no matter what actually happens.
In this metaphor, your plan works on the premise that if a few more of them die to righteous American paladins/airstrikes, they will be replaced by people who will change their minds, when drug cartels are filled with people who get into the business knowing it is both lucrative and likely to get them killed, and accepted that long ago.
You are not introducing a risk of death to these people- they have been killing eachother over blood-money spoils for decades, and death by americans is no different than death by other gangs / ambitious subordinates / Mexican actors / etc. You may believe you are willing to kill a lot more than 'a few,' but the number of people willing to risk death for money- particularly the sort of money that Americans are willing to give for that risk- far outweighs the American political capacity to run open-ended interventions.
In exchange, maybe they can receive certain protections, and be guided to switch to economically productive governance.
Lad, you just praised the eloquence of a modest proposal to massacre people by drone strikes and post it online with implausible deniability.
Not only is this attempt at a carrot undercut by the threat, the Americans are not the most bloodthirsty/intimidating people in this scenario.
What does it mean, if anything, allowing you and your neighbors to be abused by some of the most objectively evil criminal enterprises in existence?
That you have a very limited awareness of the span of objective evils and criminal enterprises in existence, and are quite willing to conduct your own evils on the basis of moral relativity.
It also means that you probably have a worldview which views the evilness of the enemy as the determining factor of the wisdom of a policy to attack them. This is not an uncommon instinct, but the neocons were discredited not because their targets were not evil, but because the consequences of their advocated invasions were not only bad, but predictably so.
The neocons dismissed these warnings because they knew better / had learned the lessons of history / were going to do something about the evils and they didn't find any warnings against their moral cause to be credible.
Bad consequences are being predicted.
What does it mean about the sovereignty of Mexico that it's been infiltrated by and protects these psychopathic paramilitary gangs as they flood their neighbors with the most evil drugs?
It means that Americans should probably stop paying so much for drugs that it funds black markets dedicated to meeting American demand.
The American drug problem is not a result of the sovereignty of Mexico, which is primarily a transit point rather than a source anyway. It is a result of market forces of supply and demand, specifically the American demand for drugs. If you remember your economics, you should also remember that prices are both a signal and an incentive for suppliers to meet that demand.
What do you think the incentive will be as a result of your incursion? Will you be making the price go up for people already willing to risk death for money, or will you be making the prince-incentive go up for people already willing to risk death for money?
But then why the fuck does this argument not apply to China or Russia?
Who says it doesn't?
The Russians and the Chinese both put up with great deals of neighborly behavior they find unneighborly. The Chinese have what they consider an entire secessionist province with substantial foreign smuggling and arms trafficking as a neighbor, and the argument that no, they should not conquer said island is the basis of the most plausible global power war since the cold war. And the Russians have an entire military alliance dedicated to the argument that they should not get to do what they want to the people who dislike them who are right fucking there, and the last time the Russians decided to 'do something' about 'the most vile people' on earth (Nazis!), they are still in fighting that war to great personal detriment as many of their neighbors make the argument that, yes, this argument against intervention does apply to them.
I know you're more of an expert on armed forces and geopolitics than I am, would love to heart some scenarios.
You send multi-million dollars worth of equipment into Northern Mexico. Drones costing a few hundred to thousand dollars blow them up. Rinse and repeat until the American taxpayer gets tired of seeing the celebratory videos on the internet while foreigners simultaneously mock them and highlight every American-caused casualty as an atrocity.
But it feels like as far as neighborliness goes, Mexico has been hitting defect pretty insistently. It ain't no Mr. Rogers. Well actually we've always been fucking you over slowly seems like a weak argument.
Assuming you are an American- please show some self-awareness when accusing who of fucking over who, particularly when you are advocating an act of war against a neighbor.
This sort of behavior from a neighbor that's the junior partner seems intolerable. It would never be accepted by Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, or any sane country.
I repeat the earlier point: you are making poor geopolitical analogies.
Or rather- when Russia decided it wouldn't tolerate a sovereign neighbor doing sovereign policy things, it led to one of the biggest blunders of post-WW2 Russian strategic policy, costing over a million casualties and the loss of significant global power and standing. When China wouldn't tolerate Vietnam's behavior, it invaded the north and had such an embarrassing lack of success that Vietnam has sparked not just a detente, but budding partnership, with China's main strategic rival.
These were both terribly stupid policies by the 'senior' partner, neither of which actually got what they wanted as a result.
The other countries have been less incompetent, and so have generally let their disgruntlement with troublesome neighbors remain disgruntlements rather than casus belli.
I guess the real disconnect is that I think if it does escalate to combat between one or more cartels and the US, the cartels would capitulate in less than 60 days, making it a fait accompli.
That would indeed be a real disconnect, and one that strongly suggests a lack of attention to the experiences of the Iraq and Afghan wars.
The Americans have not been able to make organized criminal groups inside the US 'capitulate' in 60 years. The US lasted about 20 years in Afghanistan, and considerably less in Mogadishu against worse-equipped criminal warlords. The idea that you would be able to totally defeat inernational cartels in 60 days by occuping a fraction of a country, in a country that you do not speak the language of, over a border zone you have never been able to seal, is not serious.
And even if you can initially disrupt, what then? Say you somehow clear them from area X in 60 day, but on day 61 you go home. What do you think happens on day 62? Or day 63? Or [however many days you stay]+1? What- besides grabbing clay and building forts to compel indefinite military threats- is your compliance plan?
Yes, I know, four day operation to Kyiv and all, but we're not threatening their nationhood or trying to grab clay. If they're at all businessmen they'll realize that we can make them bleed and lose treasure very hard very fast.
And you think this achieves anything... why?
You're not thinking like a cartel. Or rather, you seem to think cartels are unitary actors who a singular 'they' can capture, as opposed to coalitions of autonomous rivals who often fight over profit share. Life is cheap, and the cartel's losses are not your own- instead, the cartel's loss is a chance for your own gang to take out rivals and maneuver yourself for a bigger cut of the American drug-purchasing money. As long as there are americans willing to pay tons of money to buy the drugs, then there is a lot of money to be made selling despite the risks. That other people in the business lose out isn't an issue, it's an opportunity- especially if you can use the American intervention as a way to knock out rivals / settle scores / make way for yourself.
If the individual cartels test each other out and have areas of control and neutral zones, does not pushing back on their expansion mean you're just rolling over?
No, it does not.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
I guess what I want to know is, Am I The Asshole?
Yes, though anyone who ironically proposes a special military operation deserves one. (This is a joke, but do be kind to your friend.)
More to the point- your friend is raising relevant points, and you are raising bad geopolitical analogies. There are contexts where it is not war to conduct strikes in a neighboring country's territory, but these are generally limited to very specific contexts- namely imminent threats of which 'routine drug smuggling' generally does not qualify. If you do so anyway, there are many, many, many ways it can go badly, particularly if the sovereign state doesn't give you permission. Given how many things in diplomacy rest of voluntary cooperation, there are many ways for an unwanting state to make their neighbor's life difficult, even without armed resistance, and in the modern era there are also easy ways for that to go very, very costly. (See- drones.) This doesn't even touch how foreign state actors could partake and interfere- such as smuggling weapons (see- drones) to cartels for use against the Americans.
There are a number of reasons an armed intervention would be a bad idea, but let's focus on why it's not a good idea: it's not 1917, Mexico is not in a civil war, the cartels are not Pancho Villa doing cross-border raids into the US, and the Pancho Villa expedition failed anyways.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
In what way? What is the motte, and what is the bailey here?
The Nazi salute was, notably, not unique to the Nazis. They have no particular historical claim to inventing it, or monopoly on it at the time, or exclusivity on the meaning of 'arm outstretched, slightly elevated'- hence the many defenses of Democrat politicians being photographed in a similar outstretch being 'well, you need to look at the video for context to see otherwise,' which is not coincidentally very similar to the context of if you add what Musk was saying to the context of the image (or video) of him. Context can remove the Nazi criteria.
It would seem to me that what makes a Nazi salute a Nazi salute is if it is done for, in alignment with, or in the context of Nazi activities. If it is not done in a Nazi format, it is not a Nazi salute, just a salute (or gesture), the sort of which 'well, you just need to look at the context to see otherwise' is a valid defense.
'You just need context to see this isn't Nazi' does not seem to be the defendable motte, but the more expansive bailey- and one strong enough to not require a retreat to 'actually the Nazi salute is just fine,' which is less defensible, and thus not a motte.
Instead, the motte-and-bailey seems to be more in the accusation side of things- where 'that is a Nazi salute' is the expansive claim, which is forced to retreat into a more defensible 'well, maybe it's not actually Nazi, but it looks bad so should be condemned regardless.'
Which, coincidentally, is a very similar argument structure to the 'the OK sign is a white supremacist gesture' craze of a few years ago.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
Frankly if you could achieve that it would be considerably beneficial- the volume differences are just that much- but I have a hard time believing that the Americans would want (a) a Russian kinetic entry into the war on the side of China, or (b) attack Indian vessels.
Rather than 'war will end trade between opposing sides,' a lesson of the Ukraine War should probably be the opposite- that vast amounts of trade will continue. The Russians lost a naval blockade to a country with no navy from a far greater position, and second-party smuggling was such that sanction-restrictions really amount to an cost-increase rather than cutoff of contraband goods.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
China is hugely dependent on foreign trade, which functionally stops as soon as they’re in a conventional war with the US. No merchant ship will risk going to China and no merchant insurance company will insure it if they have to risk the most powerful blue water navy on Earth sinking it.
This hinges on your belief that the modern American political system would be willing to sustain a total naval warfare sinking neutral nation shipping in the face of both domestic and international blowback. Consider me less than convinced.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
And the second lesson should be that you can learn as many contradictory lessons from history as you care to look for, which no one ever bothers to after the first lesson they want.
Jimmy Carter died.
When former US presidents or notables die, it's normal for the US to have a period of half-mast flags.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
McCain and Romeny both were both broadly regarded as highly moral and above-the-board fellows able to rise above mere partisanship, at least outside of the period of their presidential campaigns at which point they were warmongering sexist racists. Afterwards they were once again respected statesmen, at least as long as they criticized Republicans.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
Or even "I know they keep firing on your position. But from my position, well safe and far away, that doesn't make it right for you to shoot people."
Counter-point- pardons are not a bug, but a feature, of governmental design.
The point of American governmental powers is not as a tool for angelic figures, but as a check against other branches. That it can be used to block investigations / prosecutions of 'legitimate' crimes is a merit, not evidence of failure, because 'I'm just cracking down on corruption' is an archetypical basis for political purges of political opponents. The checks and balances of government are far more concerned about the later- the abuse of judicial processes- than they are the former- the ability of guilty people to get off free.
The Pardon-power is an executive check against both the legislature (which could legislate unreasonable laws that none could fail to break, and then use said breaks arbitrarily to disqualify), but just as importantly the judiciary (whose power revolves around process conclusions). Just from a system design, if you want to remove a check on the executive against other branches, you are implicitly either replacing it with a new- and as to date not norms-established power- against the other branches, or you are refusing to replace it. Either of these are destablizing changes to a system.
In turn, the guardrails against veto abuse aren't just voters (note the lame-duck rush as opposed to the years before Biden lost the election), but inter-party and inter-branch politics. If the President, Congress, and Judiciary are on board with the same abuse, there's no particular limit (or need) for the veto regardless. The challenge comes when the President and Judiciary are at odds, and Congress is the wavering party. If Congress supports the President, the Judiciary is at a loss regardless, and the veto is just a means by which it is done. But if Congress opposes the President, the limitation on the veto is the limitation of the President's relationship with Congress- the president needs Congressional support for other things, and even outgoing presidents have political considerations.
In this week's context, the Pardon worked twice as a balancing function limiting the capacity to carry out and sustain politically motivated prosecutions. That mitigation can be a way to limit future politically-motivated prosecutions (Trump against Biden; more historically, the Nixon pardon), and mitigate past politically-motivated prosecutions (Biden against Jan 6 rioters, when the Jan 6 cases are contrasted against BLM / 2016 rioters). That you can view both of these (or neither of these) as 'actual' crimes does not change the politically charged nature of the prosecution (or potential prosecution) as viewed by substantial amounts of the public.
By contrast, limiting the ability of a President to grant clemency doesn't prevent the politically motivated prosecutions in the first place, but would make them harder to undo, which is less preventing future abuses as much as protecting them more if not even a change of governing party could reverse them.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
Particularly since the Cold War and Cuban-sponsored regional insurgencies were still a thing.
As long as the Panama Canal was an American imperialist asset, it was a target of anti-American / pro-latin-american groups across the region. When it became a Panamanian sovereign asset, the later half of that interest-coalition disengaged, and became far more supportive, particularly in Panama where national self-interest aligned with keeping the canal running smoothly. Come the 1990 Just Cause invasion, a vast majority of the Panamanians supported the US intervention
Moreover, the turnover of the canal was a significant element on the United States transition from the early cold war period- where the conflicts were often remnants of imperial system breakdowns of managing post-imperial transitions amidst Soviet-backed peasant uprising- to the later cold war, where increasingly established / self-coherent governments gradually garnered more legitimacy. The Panama Canal turnover decreased perception of sovereignty-threat from the US, since if the US was willing to give up a strategic asset like the panama canal then there was almost certainly no asset / port / resource of your own that would be more appetizing to strategic greed.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
Pretty much, and even this doesn't get into the issues of the cyber-vulnerabilities of someone who already controls the computer networks and what that can mean, or the ability to scuttle a ship already within the canal, or the fact that Panama is within drone attack range of various low-governance/hostile-to-the-US regional actors...
...and that none of those really go away if you capture the canal intact, since cyber-vulnerabilities are always there to be found, the whole point of the canal is to bring ships through, and, of course, regional reaction.
Anyone who thinks the Americans seizing the panama canal by force would be quick and easy and good is about as high on their own supply as the pro-Russians going into Ukraine.
I think that there are solid reasons why democracies have developed cultural antibodies against Nazi aesthetics.
To better generate political accusations against political opponents while deflecting accusations of behavioral comparisons on aesthetic dis-similarity are certainly solid reasons, but they are not good reasons.
It certainly doesn't have much to do with protecting the rights and liberties of the individual, hence why the antibodies are about aesthetics and not practices such as government attitudes towards political-opposition speech (including use of organized political violence and ostracism to intimidate bystanders into non-resistance), political structure dynamics (incredibly strong governmental influence on private commercial actors to leverage nominally independent entities as tools of the party-state), social engineering at the race-composition level.
Moreover, it is and was particularly important that the cultural antibodies be against Nazi aesthetics, as opposed to the aesthetics of anyone who shared in Nazi-behavior, because during the Cold War when those antibodies were developed antibodies against behavior-aesthetics instead of Nazi-aesthetics would have implicated a not-inconsiderable portion of the Soviet-sympathizing socialist-leaning classes. Who, coincidentally, were significant influences in the cultural-antibody process and many of whom still keep their Communist-derived aesthetics.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
Plausible? Sure. Feasible? Not really. It's one of those things that is technically do able, but so inefficient it begs the question of why other than ideology.
All 'we'll store on green energy when it's on for use when it stops' schemes fundamentally require (a) excess capacity when the weather is 'on' (or else there is nothing to store), and (b) so much excess capacity that the energy-ecology 'savings' of the green production aren't outweighed by the energy/ecological costs of the energy storage infrastructure.
Consider your chemical storage premise. Your wind power / solar power / whatever power has to be so much savings that it can not only cover the utility of the off-cycle power load, but also the ecological costs of the storage system. If this is chemical, this means all the ecological costs of producing the chemicals, moving the chemicals on-site, storing the chemicals, utilizing the chemicals, dealing with the chemical byproducts, and all the human personnel / infrastructure upkeep associated with running the site.
And if this does pan out... it's useful for precisely one geographic location, and all the green energy infrastructure inputs (rare earths, etc.) that could have been used elsewhere, aren't, because you're building over-capacity for the storage system.
By contrast, you could just... have a single power planet capable of meeting baseload power, and then let the same green-material inputs be used elswhere.
And this doesn't get into the questions like 'how can I get the most efficient use of my limited green tech input materials.'
There is far more energy demand than there is green energy supply, and in any combination of 'clean' and 'dirty' fuels, your ecological maximization isn't 'how do I get a specific city green,' but 'how do I minimize the total amount of dirty outputs.' It turns out, this is often best done by... targeting the least efficient dirty-fuel economies first, not the most.
As a general rule, bigger / more capital-intense generator plants are more efficient per volume of fossil fuel than smaller / cheaper engines. XYZ gallons of fuel in a generator plan will produce more energy, and at less greenhouse gas, than XYZ gallons of fuel distributed to cars. Since electric power grid charged vehicles are still getting their power from the generator plant regardless, you'd rather fuel-generators / battery cars than battery-generators / fuel cars.
Now consider that your chemical-storage thought is really just an awkward battery, and the feasibility should be clearer. Could it be done? Sure. Would it be better for the environment than not? Probably not, given that the 'not' isn't 'nothing is done' but the alternatives that could be done.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
If you want good-faith engagements, it would probably help not to poison the well by categorically dismissing all previous (but ambiguous) engagements as bad-faith and aligned with a general political tribe.
Particularly when you base it on a conclusion as a settled point (relative financial cost) without even making a position on the elements that make it a disputed premise. (I.E., what the relative costs are by what metric, what you believe the relative costs would be if you remove imposed regulatory burdens from one side and regulatory subsidies/requirements on the alternatives, what the relative costs of the political advocacy/opposition dynamics were reversed, etc.).
The crux of pro-nuclear arguments is that the technology provably exists and does not require assumptions of future technological breakthroughs, many of the more often cited relative costs are either imposed (regulatory over-engineering requirements no other power sector has to fail) or selective (concerns over nuclear-related costs in excess to equivalent welfare risks from others), that nuclear is effective baseload power (which is needed for sustained industrial economics at scale) rather than intermittent (which functionally requires additional baseload generation regardless for load-balancing, see Germany), and that many of the premises of 'low emission' energy sources just smuggle away the relative costs (such as not considering the extraction / processing / recycling / end-of-lifecycle costs) or have never been feasible requirements for the goals they were meant to support (i.e. the required amounts of rare earth minerals to supported estimates being magnitudes beyond actual rare earth mineral production) in ways that are both highly grift-able and grifted (see carbon credit markets relations to organized crime).
China is developing methods to target Starlink satellites
This one was funny.
'If we had a hundred militarized satelites in orbit with lasers and EMP we don't have, we could take less than 1500 satellites in 12 hours. Out of a satellite constellation expected to rise to over 42,000. Assuming there were no Americans anti-satellite systems trying to inhibit ours.'
Similarly, if you assume the enemy has no air defense capabilities, you can simulate a lot of bombing runs with your own airforce.
It was also a near-disaster: no reports of injuries, but (unconfirmed) reports of property damage from shrapnel, and aircraft having to do emergency diversions away from the hazard area, are not things that should ever be consequences of a launch failure.
...what? No- that's the standard precaution of a missile launch (or re-entry) failure. It's literally a 'something my fall through the air in this zipcode we already warned you about.' It's the physical consequence of things that are high up falling down, and the predictability of which is why airspace is routinely categorized with restrictions when missile tests and such are going on. Your 'emergency' diversion is just a standard precaution when different airspace needs overlap, same as how divergences of aircraft to specific airports (whether from mechanical or medical emergency) lead to redirections of aircraft intending to go there. This has literally been going on since the advent of space travel, where failures (and successes!) on the way up or back down leave bits to come back down.
Saying that shrapnel should not fall through airspace or onto property as a consequence of orbital transition failure (going up or down) is either a demand that there should be no failure, or else a demand of inversion of physics (such as that things should not fall due to gravity).
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
Indeed. Pan-Arabism was well towards dying at that point, but it's hard to find a better case of screwing over one's co-ethnic co-religionists for the sake of national interest.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
We'll see. There has been a lot of talk over the last year and a quarter of ceasefire / hostage release deals, and while I wouldn't be surprised if Hamas were to time a deal with the US presidential transition, I also don't believe that the American politics angle is the most relevant to either Hamas or its key foreign enablers, some of whom have more FU-feelings for the incoming Trump administration than the outgoing Biden administration.
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.
I'm not defending the terrorists, as in the people actually firing rockets, I'm defending everyone else.
I would dispute that you are actually defending the non-terrorists. (Which- if it seemed otherwise- you weren't being accused of. Apologies if that seemed so.) Rather, I would present that your attempted framing is a form of moral malpractice- not because it defends terrorists, but precisely because it does not defend non-terrorists, and instead leads to greater risk to them.
The question was posed to you with the expectation you'd avoid it, but also to demonstrate its limits: the humanity argument's tolerance for casualties goes up significantly when the populace has agency that they use to support actors, and even higher when the actor in question is the government. Simple humanity is willing to both kill and watch a lot more people get killed when it's a result of an inept aggressor than a helpless bystander. You can see demonstrations of this in everything from fiction, to group social dynamics, to- of course- security politics both domestic and inter-state.
As such, appeals to humanity that imply the former (humanity has a low tolerance limit for violence) is in play rather than the later (humanity has a high tolerance limit for violence against aggressors), appeals which are used by bystanders in rationalizing acceptance of the 'actual terrorists' who use such appeals as the basis of their strategy, are placing more people at risk, rather than a less.
Including, yes, people who hate the Israelis and hope that Hamas wins, which I imagine is just about everybody at this point, as well as the people who pack their lunch boxes.
This would be a great deal of wishful projection.
Sadly, most people in the world don't particularly care about the Israeli-Hamas conflict, any more than they could be forced to care about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. It wasn't a dominant factor in recent Western democratic elections. It has notably not set the Arabic street ablaze as middle eastern states have not merely maintained neutrality, but even increased cooperation with Israel. It certainly hasn't been a particularly captivating issue in Asia or sub-saharan Africa, where sympathy for far away non-co-religionists is in short supply and where you can often find non-trivial examples of even sympathy for Israel on anti-islamic grounds.
The dominant trend of anti-Israeli international politics over this war is how few of them outside of the normal muslim world religious sympathies are about Israel, and how many of them have American or domestic political motives. Whether it's a low-cost/high-visibility way to raise a middle flick off the US (always popular in Latin America), a way to counter-balance/win some favor with American strategic rivals by signaling partial alignment with them / against the US (often overlapping), a way to discredit international law advocates/bodies that might challenge them (Nicaragua), or a way for electorally unstable ruling parties to try and rally support by appealing to narrative origins (South Africa, Ireland), it quite often has little to do with Israel or Hamas themselves.
People who believe the world is on their side on any issue, let alone this one, are going to be disappointed, much as the Europeans were disappointed when 'the world' and 'the international community' were not particularly on their side in the Ukraine War.
Incidentally I disagree with this, and discussed it further here. Until WW2, it was almost always understood that those giving orders would be held responsible for the results of those orders being carried out, providing that the actions taken corresponded roughly to the orders given. Like so many load-bearing aspects of our society, we jettisoned this so that we could jump up and down on the Nazis a bit more.
And WW2 was also where the pre-WW2 era of geopolitical dominance by European monarchies and empires was broken, and with it the artificial imposition of European monarchist political norms which tied sovereign immunity to the legal identity of the Sovereign and their enabling actors which helped lead to said world wars.
Whether your post-WW2 political tradition holds more in the individualist western political traditions (in which the individual agency permits guilt, even as it can protect from collective judgements), a familial/clan-centric model (in which membership of the oppressive ethnic-clan group allows guilt), religious-identitarian models (in which case participation in the religious-administrative group permits disposition), class-ideological models (in which case membership to the relevant oppressor classes enables class-based action), or other more collective-responsibility models in general, the pre-WW2 models of European monarchial-sovereign supremacy of responsibility have globally been replaced by traditions that- for various reasons- recognize the agency and culpability of various non-central actors.
Given that one of the enabling factors of WW2 (and even WW1) was precisely how load-bearing 'it's not my responsibility' was on enablers to the wars that (repeatedly) self-destructed the European political system, there was a fair deal more reason to jettisoning that presumption than just Nazi-jumping.
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