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
That's exactly what we will have if we reach peace right now. Except this state will have more living Ukrainians in it.
It won't, because it won't exist, because you can't reach peace right now.
Among the reasons you won't have peace right now is because the Russians are uninterested in peace right now that results in a European-Ukraine as opposed to maintaining what they know to be untenable and belligerent-unacceptable capitulation terms that would result in a Russia-dominated Ukraine that they know the Ukrainians will not accept.
Which is unsurprising to anyone with a vague awareness of the geopolitical calendar and the logistics of the conflict, because they would already be aware that Putin's predictable windows for a stronger hand in actual negotiations is late next year, after the results of the US presidential election are known, after a fighting year where the Russians are anticipated to have an artillery ammo supply advantage, where it's not clear if Ukraine will have enough for an offensive rather than grinding defense, and where the Russians will have a general year-long opportunity to making propaganda hay of a nominally one-sided conflict even as they are already spinning up various military-posturing dynamics to otherwise further their inevitable-victory narratives to try and have a stronger hands in relevant negotiations late next year than they do this year.
My initial bias was that Russia would score a quick victory. Then, influenced by my American media diet, I thought that the Russian economy would collapse and that the Ukraine counteroffensive, backed by advanced American weapons, would be effective.
Admitting a susceptibility to propaganda narratives for nearly the entire duration of the conflict isn't the defense of your reading between the lines that you think it is.
By contrast, the sort of people who recognized the logistical limitations of western artillery ammo were also the people predicting a long drawn out conflict (guerilla or west of the Dneiper), had no pretensions that the Russian economy would collapse, and warned against dramatic territorial expectation-metrics for the offensive.
When that didn't pan on I questioned my assumptions.
You adopted new, and in the current case old, propaganda narratives.
Reading the comments here, I believe that I have arrived at a more realistic stance than most people, who think things like reconquering Crimea are on the table still.
Your belief is irrelevant to your lack of realism, assuming that by realism you are alluding to an accurate understanding of reality of the conflict.
I hope there is a cease fire because I don't think the war is winnable by Ukraine without unacceptable costs from the U.S. Confidence level: 80%.
False appeals to probability are common in pseudo-rationalist posturing, but it only betrays a lack of understanding of what other people consider unacceptable, and acceptable, costs.
You are (allegedly) a utilitarian. Trading real costs for theoretical units of value (utils) is the core conceit of utilitarianism as a model.
That's the problem isn't it? How do value these fuzzy future utils that rest on things like predictions of future actions of dictators?
It's not a problem if you are not actually a utilitarian, but are adopting a utilitarian persona for gravitas while disclaiming the central conceit of considering abstract and future value considerations.
In such a case, the feigned confusion is an appeal to authority, in much the same way the classic 'I don't understand how one could disagree' is an appeal to the unstated reasonable-informed observer rather than an admission of personal limitation.
My prejudice is to take a "greedy algorithm" approach. Let's take the utils right in front of our face before hypothetical future utils (which might even be negative utils!). If you know finance, then think of it like a present value calculation with a high discount rate.
Your prejudice is a poor model for international conflicts in general, and Russia and Putin in particular, who neither collectively or individually follow your preferred paradigm.
Models that are not used by, not followed by, and do not predict the decisions or actions of others are useless for understanding others.
People are FAR too confidence about the future.
Clearly.
Also. Please don't be a jerk, especially to people who are making an effort to argue an unpopular opinion.
Still yawning. Repeating the latest iterations of a nearly two-year old propaganda narrative with even shoddier justifications is not a commendable effort to argue an unpopular opinion. It's simply repeating the latest iterations of a nearly two-year propaganda narrative without acknowledging or dealing with why the opinion earned it's unpopularity. In other words, trite.
No, I do not need to defend the meaning of words no matter how much confusion you try to impose on the English language.
Yes, you do need to provide studies that support the motte position you are claiming if you want to claim studies support the motte you are claiming.
Particularly when one of the more influential past works that forms a foundation of the community ethos you are posting in is on the Chinese Robbers fallacy, which is always relevant to topics that mix media posting and China and would also be applicable to gish galloping examples that do not prove population-level assumptions.
Another foundational work being I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup, which reviews why ethnic solidarity is not the pre-eminent automatic loyalty determining factor for in-group/out-group dynamics.
I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about whether relying on foreign talent left countries wide open to treachery and manipulation?
You may be, but no.
We were talking about the amusing mix of irony and self-awareness for you to argue for a presumption of suspicion of treachery and manipulation on the basis of foreign origin, when you are not only a foreigner to the majority of your audience, but you routinely express credulous confidence in foreign-controlled social media known to try and manipulate foreign audience perception at an algorithmic level, and you regularly praise foreign policy thinkers who make exceptionally blunt arguments of the properness of manipulating foreigners-to-them like yourself for their own nation's benefit.
A US government official using critical theory, misrepresentation and legendary goalpost manipulation to defend US government policy sounds like something a deceptive and disingenuous US government official would say to manipulate opinions.
This, too, sounds like something a foreigner would say to manipulate other foreigners with whom they share no shared identity or loyalties. Truly, such foreigners should be viewed with suspicion and their potential contributions to the community of one's own should be rejected out of hand as obvious manipulations to influence. Particularly when so heavy handed as with the amusingly blatant use of forum pejoratives tailored to the sub-audience.
(I shall update my list of accused pejoratives to now include 'critical theorist,' which will sit nicely next to the 'neocon,' 'neoliberal,' 'fascist,' and other such ideological slurs. Unfortunately, American was already included in my (multi)nationality mutt pedigree.)
Unfortunately, rejecting such foreigner influence out of hand would require incorporating the influence of said foreigner, which would not be rejecting the untrustworthy influence, hence categorically invalid on its own premise.
It's a particularly shameless given how well Australia has behaved as an ally. Australia shows up to even the silliest US wars, regardless of where they are. Australia provides good bases and good signals intelligence. Australia is paying for America to get its submarine production up to standard. It is not 'treacherous and manipulative' for an Australian to straightforwardly urge friendly countries to pursue national interests.
Unless you have put on an unprecedent amount of weight over Christmas feasting, you are not Australia, and no one would particularly confuse you for a continent, a nation, or about 26,000,000 other people of various ethnicities, of which only a minority are even ethnically Anglo-Celtic.
I also highly doubt you have ever in your life shown up for even a single American war, based a single American solider in your home, provided the Americans any intelligence function, or made a single decision in the Australian defense community that would warrant anyone to identify you, individually, as an 'ally' of the US, as opposed to someone who lives in the geographic landmass of Australia with a hobbyist level of interest in geopolitics.
I'll leave it to other self-identified Australians of the forum to say whether you are representative of Australians in general. You are certainly not representative of various wings of the Australian foreign policy establishment.
@The_Nybbler believes that my post was pretextual, in other words that I was falsely claiming to write a post about the US legal system as a way to conceal my hidden purpose of criticizing Trump.
Strangely, @The_Nybbler did not say that you were falsely claiming to write a post about the US legal citizen as a way to conceal your hidden purpose of criticizing Trump.
We can tell this because on reviewing what @The_Nybbler wrote, which you quoted, which was-
Or, for instance, when someone writes a long comment purporting to be about the US legal system, but is really just a vehicle to take a shot at Trump.
...which does not say you were falsely claiming to write a post about the US legal system, or that you were doing so as a way to conceal a hidden purpose, or that your purpose of critizing Trump was hidden. In fact, key framing words such as 'falsely' and 'hidden' do not appear, which the key word 'vehicle' as a metaphor in the context of a criticism of pretext is removed, thus creating substantive change of position from what Nybbler wrote and what you claim he said.
This would politely be called strawmanning, except that strawmanning is a device when engaging in an argument with someone, but you aren't engaging with Nybbler, you are deliberately re-characterizing what Nybbler said in conveyence to external audience.
Which would politely be called 'lying about what someone said to someone else.' Which is a reoccuring feature of yours.
I maintain that my real purpose was always from the beginning to write a post criticizing Trump, but given how long my intro about the US legal system was, I can understand why someone might potentially be mislead. Since I can't add a title to the comment I added a content warning to more explicitly signal what the post was about. What would you alternatively suggest for me to do to address The_Nybbler's concerns?
Delete the post, apologize for poor writing quality, and apologize to @The_Nybbler for poor conduct.
Edit: And I see he has edited back out the troll he had edited in, but no apology in the post. Typical and meeting expectations, I suppose.
Principles are only really worth anything if they meaningfully constrain behaviour,
Criteria met.
and if their application is sufficiently predictable that others can anticipate in what way behaviour will be constrained by them.
Criteria also met.
As a hypothetical country opposing the US, are there behaviours I could actually confidently predict the US would or would not take, which would not be sufficiently predicted by a model in which the US always acts to maximise its own wealth and power?
Yup. There are many ways to describe the US policies of the last century or so, but 'always act to maximize its own wealth and power' isn't a competent characterization of it.
Given how simple this opening premise was, and how you didn't even try to argue about Kosovo, I think we can move on from the US to what you actually care about.
As a concrete example, if I as a German voter were to vote in the AfD or BSW and they seek business with Russia, should I expect more US attacks on our infrastructure?
Nope. Not unless you want to insinuate AfD or BSW voters are morally obliged to subscribe to certain conspiracy theories.
They get voted in by a narrow margin, a great MR-two-point-oh rapprochement occurs, and then the pipelines and train lines start mysteriously blowing up. I have a pretty good hunch who did it, but all the Baltics stonewall us so I can't even coordinate a protest, and our economy is once again in shambles.
Do you? I'm pretty open that I think it was plausibly Ukraine, and I've written to that multiple times over the years, but then there are holdouts and you did insinuate 'more' US attacks, so your position is not particularly clear.
I am also not convinced you cannot coordinate a protest so much as your protest is sufficiently unsympathetic enough to garner support you feel you are owed in the way you want it. In so much that our economy is in shambles, some of that seems unavoidable to any reasonable agency and some of that is a well-earned consequence of sovereign prerogative to make bad macroeconomic decisions and take macroeconomic risks that turn bad, even against the advice of partners and allies.
Will the inevitable fifty-page treatise of international law theory that explains how this is actually fully in line with all professed principles be of any solace to me, after I made a decision based on a flawed world model and reaped a catastrophic outcome?
Does your solace or lack thereof serve any relevant form of proof or disproof to whether the professed principles were actually held and adhered to or not?
Not directly, but indirectly. If you see some powerful people do some terrible things, and these people just happen by sheer coincidence, to be jewish about half the time (despite only 2% of the population being jewish), who could blame you for associating the two?
Anyone with the statistical literacy, which is why I asked the question you have tried to avoid.
Again-
How can non-existent people self-reflect about why they are hated in places they don't go to?
You're correct that I have never met any of the powerful people who are actively making life worse for me. They're just jewish at surprisingly high ratios.
If you have never met any of the people who are actively making worse for you, why do you believe you know who they are well enough to determine their relative ethnic distribution?
Moreover, if you have never met any powerful jews who actively made life worse for you, then how could the number of jews you have met who were not powerful jews actively making life worse for you provide a personal experience to believe that the jews as a collective are actively making life worse for you?
By your own statistics, you'd have a 0 encounter rate of powerful jews who actively make life worse for you, versus a X number of Jews who are not powerful and making life worse for you, where X is the number of Jews you have met in your lifetime. Unless you have personally known 0 jews, 100% of all jews you would personally know would be lived experience evidence against powerful jews being responsible for your misfortunes.
And it makes sense to distrust the elite, and even to hate them, for they know the consequences of their actions. Countless books (some dating back over 100 years) warn against what's currently happening in society.
Prejudice and scapegoating on the basis of historical ignorance are among the things the venerable classics warn against. On the other hand, there are countless old books filled with nonsense, including conspiracy theories and prejudicial scapegoating that other books warn against.
Not particularly, but it's considerably less one-note and lacking. Your posting is unexceptional, but you intend to insult fewer people and ignore fewer prior discussions than when you fixate on Trump unprompted.
If you meant your writing on a technical level, I find it generally poorly structured and lacking in content, conflating a lot of words with good word choice and links for sufficient sourcing. The arguments are often too reliant on insinuation by word connotation in lieu of supporting arguments, and generally lacking in the ability to anticipate or address counter arguments completely or factor in contextually relevant history while relying on narrative momentum for an emotional climax. It's passable verboseness, and I am certainly a sucker for long-winded arguments, but also leads to basic failures like overly long intros that fail the principles of effective written communication, or speaking around past and still standing counter-arguments.
And I say this as someone who is naturally prone to comma splicing and writing essays on my hobbies, and who writes more the groggier she is.
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
Not quite. It's not that nothing is important, but rather that certain objections start to lose value when they amount to special pleading rather than an actual standard of differentiation.
Think of it as analogous to swimming in the rain. Not wanting to go outside when it's raining because you don't want to get wet is fine. Not wanting to go swimming because you don't want to get wet is fine. But if you are getting in the pool, getting out because it's raining isn't compelling on 'because rain gets you wet' grounds. There may be other grounds of leaving- a storm, a need to prepare other things for the rain, what have you- but the specific 'because I'd get wet' basis isn't compelling if you're already wet.
In decision-cost frameworks, costs cease to be disqualifying objections if they're shared across the proposed courses of action. That doesn't mean costs aren't worth controlling.
I'm Australian;
[Insert ad hominem fallacy on an account of foreigner category]/Joking.png
Am I correct in thinking that that guy, assuming he really is a US Army recruiter, will probably get in trouble for that? One would assume that this would be in flagrant violation of recruiter codes of conduct, and possibly implicate him in violations of base security protocols.
You could be correct, but you could be incorrect. It depends on more information than we have.
One of the weird things about the initial claim is that the Pentagon banned tiktok from government computers in 2023 barely a year and a half ago. In fact, there was an Army recruiting scandal in 2021 about use of TikTok when not supposed to. If an American recruiter is doing recruitment on TikTok, he is either doing something very wrong regardless of message/loyalty concern (violating policy), or may actually be operating within approved scopes (is operating within special exceptions).
If it's the later, there may be no violation at all. It may, in fact, even be the point.
More on that later, but it's not like the militaries lacks people who garner contempt for wanting to sit out specific conflicts. Kamalla Harris's vice president pick during the recent US election had the baggage that he tried to present himself as a service veteran despite possibly having arranged to get out of his reserve unit's overseas deployment. It's not exactly hard to find dissent within an institution over 2.8 million strong (standing military, reserves, support civilians), with some people shaping (or ending) their careers to not be associated with some conflict / etc. In past unpopular wars, it wasn't unknown for people to join entire other services (such as joining the Navy to avoid being drafted into the Army in Vietnam), or to unceremoniously retire to avoid deployments (in the Iraq War era there was a surge of American reserve / national guard retirements by people who were content to be in the reserves during the 90s when it was considered low/no risk).
Ultimately Ranger's argument relies on assumptions of a separate topic (presentation of loyalties, as opposed to policy adherence) where there's a perception of what sort of loyalty people think is required (members must be willing to fight all enemies and say so!) that is less absolute in practice.
It's less absolute because manpower is not only limited (there has never been an endless supply of ideal candidates), but manpower is often both fungible (one person here can free up another person to go there) and mutually exclusive (person trained for expertise A can't be used in occupation B anyway). Full-throated concurrence with all wars wasn't a requirement in the conscription era (where conscientious objectors / pacifists could sometimes be shunted to support roles, or just put in risk and expected to save themselves), nor is it typically demanded in a volunteer-service model (where service members have some significant influence over their careers as they reach higher ranks, and thus can choose areas where they're not likely to do what they really don't want to do).
There are certainly cases / issues when an expeditionary military says 'go' and the person says 'I don't want to,' but these are both very rare at the level of the recruiter in question, and, uh, wouldn't be present for someone who is a recruiter.
///
Now to return to the point passed earlier, where it could be a context of approved message. (Emphasis on could.)
Ranger's argument works from a perspective of how this is terrible because lack of loyalty and inherent untrustworthiness and mercenaries bad and yada. Ranger is also very clearly not thinking like a manpower-capability developer (i.e. recruitment at scale), but operating from a basis of purity politic demands. Purity politics is bad force generation policy. Even governments obsessed with ideological compliance, such as the Soviets, used a purity-cadre model (political officers) as opposed to a purity rank-and-file model.
Starting from the most obvious, monetary incentives are absolutely a basis of building and retaining talent. This isn't an issue of 'mercenary' pejoratives, it's a point that that in a volunteer service model the military is an employer, and as an employer they are competing with all other employers to recruit and retain. Fundamental disconnect there, and also woefully ignorant of why so many of the common US incentives include post-service benefits, like paying for college (i.e. investing in domestic talent development after getting your military use out of them). This is why in modern history the American military has been often seen approvingly as a 'way up' for underclass Americans- it provides substantial training / more structured environments / post-service education that people may not otherwise be able to afford. It's not a guarantee, but it's a powerful incentive. Someone who serves 4 years and than leaves to enjoy college is not a failure, it's a success story of how you got someone to successfully serve 4 years at the lowest runs of the military and then improved their national value potential.
Part of any recruitment pitch, in turn, comes with conveying the perception of costs for taking the job. If a recruiter says 'you may never go see your family abroad,' then that is a lot of people who might be willing to serve but not if it means they can't serve abroad. Similarly, if a recruiter says 'you must be willing to fight the Chinese state, no matter if the PRC attempts to use your family as hostages,' then again, you are winnowing the field. The US military is designed to fight on 2 different continents at any time, with at least Europe and Korea providing non-Chinese fronts.
Further, a recruiting pitch that can appeal to both hard-core joiners (the people who would be more gung-ho than the recruiter) and the wavering (ethnic Chinese who would share the sentiment of not wanting to join a war against China, but would also not want to fight the US) isn't inviting a trojan horse with the later category, it's getting an asset.
The chinese language is, in a word, hard, and there is generally a shortage in any non-Chinese government of people who can speak and/or read it. As a result, there is a demand that far exceeds the supply in people who can (a) read / speak Chinese, and (b) are willing to do it for the government. Someone who is (c) willing to do it at an enlisted soldier's pay (low) at (d) enlisted soldiers hours (no overtime pay) and in (e) enlisted soldier's living standards (non-affluent) and at a (f) enlisted soldier's 'can be moved across the world to where most conveneient (incredibly high) is incredibly good value-for-money.
There is, in other words, a great many useful / desirable roles that a government wants a Chinese-speaker for, many of them that do not require taking up arms against the PRC even in the course of a war against the PRC. Many of them require no access to sensitive material / networks / resources either.
The role of any human resources / recruiting institution is to try to match potential incoming talent to desired needs, not to refuse to accept valuable talents because it is unsuited for any particular need. 'Speaks Chinese, but is not willing to fight the Chinese state' is not a the most desirable recruit package, but it's a very useful one. The questions / investigations of loyalty / questions of what they are willing to do are real considerations, but they are more questions on how to direct talent to the best cost/benefit position after they joined, not whether to encourage them to join.
They are also, critically, questions that go on well beyond the initial recruiter pitch. As such, a recruiter who is authorized to make such a pitch agreeable to such people, may be doing nothing wrong.
I write a very fucking large check to the federal government every spring. Not one cent of it should benefit Israel or Ukraine until there are no more problems to solve here.
Okay. But how about one cent of the check of someone else willing? Would that be okay?
Dean
Flairless
1yr ago
That is an impressive number of mis-chosen historical allusions that don't quite demonstrate what you think they do and even less about nuclear deterrence, but as already noted we'll be dead before it would be disproven by not manifesting as relied upon so again, general shrug at unconvincing perception in lieu of evidence.
Dean
Flairless
10mo ago
I don't know how you can complain about weasel words and deliver this whopper in the same post...
I appreciate your pre-emptive concession of your lack of ability, which was certainly well warranted by what followed.
Oh, hey, look who evaded acknowledging the inconvenient factor of Yanukovych granting himself the right to shoot people without legislative consent.
That it was orchestrated by the US? Yeah, that's long since been established. (1, 2)
Oddly, neither of your sources indicate that the pro-European protests were orchestrated by the US as opposed to the US supporting protests that would occur from organic pro-EU support following Yanukovych's backing out of a highly popular agreement with the European Union also suppored by EU advocates well implaced.
Typical hyperagency / hypoagency framework, but American fanatics are American fanatics even if they are haters.
Further, your conspiratorial framing is outdated. Everyone who wants to trace the money and media flows knows that the Ukrainians were primarily reading German-owned media, not American.
If your historical metaphors are on par with the propagandists you find running the narrative, I see no reason to not treat them as roughly equivalent.
Fortunately they are not, and I tend to avoid them unless there's an amusing parallel, such as who in the current day might be analogous to a warmongering expansionist imperialist power with dreams of establishing itself as a global power pole against western decadence.
Personally I don't think Ukraine meets that model, but such is life.
If there's a solid historical argument in there that doesn't evade the facts of what happened, I haven't seen it. Only an egotist's internal monologue.
Again, the self-reflection.
Dean
Flairless
2yr ago
This statement is, very obviously, factually untrue, as the war will also end if enough Ukrainian soldiers die, or if Ukraine sues for peace, or of any combination of outside actors forces both sides to enter a ceasefire,
This doesn't make the state factually untrue, it adds additional truths not included in the statement. Which is true of all true statements, because there is always more true things to add.
Just by adding addition end states of the same categorization scheme, you are supporting the claim of the statement.
Dean
Flairless
2yr ago
Your motivation was already fulfilled from your own source's context. You need to make an argument that the motivation was to carry out the threat twice, not once, for the 'speaks to motivation' to be relevant to your prior argument.
Your initial and broader argument that it's important to carry out one's threats is rendered moot if the threat has already been carried out. Arguing that the NS explosion was the threat being carried out requires an implicit argument that the prior action- the German decertification under American pressure- was not the Americans carrying out their prior threat.
If it was the American carrying out their motivation, then the stated motivation/threat was already fulfilled. NS2 was stopped. It wasn't in any imminent risk of being reactivated. Further action would require a different justification, because the stated justification- 'you must carry out a threat' - is not the same as 'you much carry out a threat twice', which is required unless you reject the relevance of German decertification under pressure.
The defensible claim is 'the Americans have opposed Nord Stream in the past and threatened to work against it, and their credibility would be worsened if they didn't.' The expansive claim is 'the Americans have to be the ones blowing up the pipelines to maintain credibility, because decertification doesn't count.' This is just a motte and bailey that serves to justify a pre-arrived bias, it doesn't actually support that the (successful!) pressure to decertify and stop the Nord Stream 2 pipeline wasn't actually a proof of capability that would meet credibility needs.
But it wasn't "retroactively gerrymandered", that's my point! It was accepted at the time, and by the north, before secession, that slaves weren't citizens and couldn't vote. Nothing changed retroactively.
And the point that people who were denied representation don't get to have the legitimacy of their implicit support invoked remains. As does the point that they are, in fact, part of regional population majorities.
Franchisement and representation of non-voters was a significant aspect of the foundational american political disputes. The 3/5ths compromise resulted from the slavers wanting slaves to count as much as a citizen for legitimate representation in the political system.
Ah, so the north's government wasn't legitimate either?
Sure, why not? It's not like Union (il)legitimacy affects whether the Confederacy was or was not legitimate. Independent variables.
We could question whether legitimacy is a binary state (legitimate or not legitimate), or a status of degrees (more or less legitimate), but if you don't want to stake a position I won't force you.
Is the current US government illegitimate because illegal aliens can't vote,
If you define the scope of legitimacy to include illegal aliens, certainly. Hence why various pro-migration coalitions support things like giving Congressional representation based on non-citizen (and thus including illegal) residents, and why other parts of their coalitions are very uninterested in proof-of-citizenship requirements in elections that are routinely popular with the electorate that opponents claim to be defending against disenfranchisement.
and if they could we probably wouldn't have elected Trump?
Sure, why not?
Dean
Flairless
5mo ago
What math are you confused on?
You are not fighting a direct war with Russia or China, who can inflict considerable costs and losses against the US if engaged directly. This proposal is a proposal to instigate a direct conflict with cartels, who can inflict considerable costs and losses against the US if engaged directly.
This is a cost / math consistency: do not instigate a direct conflict against those who can inflict consider costs and losses if engaged directly.
There are certainly other arguments that can be made on how to react to someone else's instigation of a conflict, but many of these are voided if made by the same people proposing direct conflict instigation (and are generally not my position regardless).
Who follows that principle, though? Certainly the US (Kosovo, ...) and allies (Israel) don't.
Odd choice of examples if those are your examples.
Different entities may not follow the principle as you'd prefer to understand it, but that doesn't mean they don't follow it as they understand it. Being different entities naturally they would understand with their own differences, even as those entities are themselves composed of different people over time.
Kosovo is a trivial example of sovereignty-principle compliance- the American (and many others) concept of the principle sovereignty is that sovereignty is not absolute. There are decades of internal law theory and practice as to why this is not only not at odds with international law, but required by international law to not consider sovereignty absolute.
Complying with the principle of [X] as it interacts with other principles is not an abandonment of a principle just because you have your own geopolitical preferences.
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
Sure. I'll even disengage from this topic and any not reply to any replies from him for the rest of the year to clear the air.
I don't need to cite a million papers to show that many Chinese people spy for China or take steps to advance China's interests.
You do, however, need good papers to show that ethnic Chinese are Chinese people solely because they are ethnic Chinese, or that 'many' is 'most' as opposed to 'a small ratio,' let alone whether the costs of the 'many' outweighs the benefits of the other 'many' who do not.
This is the typical smuggling of the conclusion that goes on with ethnonationalist constructs, both in the self-identification (what is an 'ethnic chinese') and in the external identification (the observable versus unobservable nature of loyalty) and in the cost-benefit (whether the costs of PRC-loyal ethnic chinese outweighs the benefits of non-PRC-loyal ethnic chinese).
I don't need the most reliable sources to prove that their sympathies generally lean towards the country they have ethnic ties to.
You do, however, need reliable and accurate sources. Particularly, you need reliable sources that can accurately distinguish between 'ethnic ties' and 'familial ties,' as the former has significant organizational and societal implications than the later.
If, for example, you take an ethnicity-based caution, then there are categorical exclusions on the basis of race to positions of trust / the armed forces, which in turn comes with the social and political complications of embracing formal racial discirmination on people for potential actions regardless of guilt, even if they are avowed enemies of the regime. If you take a family-based caution, on the other hand, then perhaps you don't give security clearances to ethnic han with family members in China who can be used as leverage against them, but you can employ people who lack said families in China (or whose families were purged by the CCP).
This is particularly so when much of an ethnic diaspora is a diaspora because of the misconduct of the ethno-state, including a non-trivial number being exiles of the current ruling party for issues in the current living memory.
I can't be bothered to do a 20 second search and bring up examples for pedants, I leave that as an exercise to the reader.
It would be amusing to see you fail to a practically textbook Chinese robbers fallacy, which was memorably coined for its statistical implications of the availability of non-representative examples.
Furthermore, 'Australian' is not an ethnic group.
It is, however, a distinct cultural group, and a national group, and a political-identity group, and various other forms of groupings that make it distinct, foreign, and unreliable to other [groups] due to the divergence of identity, interests, and expected activities, despite nominal genetic commonalities.
No one is particularly confusing the Australians for the Germans, or the Brits and the French, despite their ethnic commonalities. (Not least because the vague concept of 'ethnic' stretches as far or as narrow as needed for the argument of the moment.)
There is a reason that the US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Britain are very, very closely aligned and similar in many respects. We both know what that is but one of us is choosing to ignore it to score cheap points.
A foreigner inventing caveats to claim they are not a foreigner and so benefit from in-group bias sounds like something a treacherous and manipulative foreigner would say to gain an unwarranted position of trust and persuasiveness over other people's opinions despite a lack of shared loyalties and interests (because they are a foreigner).
Real self-negating advocacy is taking a straightforward opinion 'states should focus more on national interests than profits or ideology' and trying to twist it into 'beware the Eternal Australian trying to manipulate you into... using your own state to advance national interests', as though this is a wise and useful revelation.
The irony, again, exerts itself, though I doubt you'll recognize the applicability (or nested irony) of citing your earlier post.
People are happy fighting wars to defend their nation, they are not so keen fighting for abstract causes.
Did the other guy provide proof that he sent the contract?
Thank you for demonstrating your continued retreat from your opening positions. I look forward to seeing how much of a motte you retreat to over time.
And no, for others, 17 year olds is not the limits of what one can find regarding Hamas child soldier reports.
This is barely intelligible. If you make a surprising and significant claim, you should provide a source.
And if you wish to claim that Israelis shoot children, and then launch screeds on the jews being uniquely evil, you should provide a source that accuses the Israelis of shooting children, instead of claims that children were shot without an attribution as to by whom.
Which serves as another basis of the non-linking, since the lack of relevant sourcing to support a surprising and significant claim (like 'the Jews are deliberately one-shotting children') has been a reoccuring theme of this thread.
And yes, that was left for you specifically to walk into.
Yes, your argument would still be "correct", proving its worthlessness in face of the problem people have with the institution.
Oh, heavens no. Different people have different problems, and truth is only worthless to those uninterested in acting in good faith.
For example, some people's current problems are that they believe there is a lack of funds for FEMA to use for hurricane relief. This is an error, because that hasn't been what's happened over the last week in the first place. Understanding how government appropriations work in the first place- which includes that some agencies like FEMA are normally given more money over a year, and that a lack of money for a hurricane season is not the same as a lack of money for the immediate hurricane response- addresses a misunderstanding of believing there is a crisis of funding when there is none.
Other people's problems are that they believe there is a lack funding because it was redirected to other forms of spending. This is also an error, because not only is this not how budgets work, the agencies involved are legally obligated to spend on what Congress directs them to. The truth is relevant here because criticizing an Agency for not feloniously defrauding the American taxpayer would be a rather embarrassing mistake demonstrating a lack of credibility for any good-faith actor to continue with.
For people whose problems with the institution have to do with the performance, the nature of funding streams or other forms of government funding is largely irrelevant to problems. The truth, however, still has worth to helping focus on actual problems rather than fictional framings that, if engaged, would get in the way of actually addressing relevant questions of airspace management or civil-government interaction that could improve performance.
Other people's problems is that they hate any spending that goes to people they irrationally hate. They will have interests in falsely blaming others of culpability in any disaster regardless of how much that detracts from improving response because the only improvement they care about is the one that validates their bigotries. The truth is an obstacle to them, which is why it will retain value.
Maybe next year FEMA will give $300 billion to Jewish synagogues and Jewish NGOs, for literally no reason, instead of just the $300 million they get today- while Americans facing real disaster suffer enormously. You would be there to "well ackchually" in the face of criticism of that, wouldn't you?
No matter how ridiculous you make your hypotheticals, your lies would still be lies, no matter how many more you add to the original.
No, FEMA wasn't swindled out of $300 million by da joos. No, the non-Jewish and Jewish organizations did not receive $300 million for literally no reason. No, the spending on migrants is not causing FEMA to have a hurricane response budget shortfall. And no, the American budget spending on other things in addition to hurricane relief is not the cause of FEMA getting into airspace control / charity pushback / other issues.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
Did he claim they were influential, or was he claiming a style?
If he's claiming a style, then that would actually be falsifiable, by establishing a different style is what is actually pursued.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
How are you defining "disinformation" in this context? That Russia has a project to subvert the liberal international order that the US has ran since the post-war period? They openly admit that all the time and have made formal declarations admitting as much. So presumably anybody who advances a different narrative through their own perception of events isn't pushing disinformation, unless you're setting the bar extremely low.
Why shouldn't the bar be that low for the way flailingace is using it?
Even selectively signal-boosting true-but-non-representative things can have an effect of misleading an audience. This very thread is based on someone taking something that has happened (an accusation of pushback against people wanting to help) in a way that generates outrage (FEMA is deliberately witholding help, partisan motivation?) that plausibly wouldn't exist with other potentially relevant context (the government has an interest in managing airspace, which appears to be the form of pushback being alluded to).
Nothing in it is false, but it's not information structured for building objective understanding either. It is an oppositional / antagonist information presentation, and one that- if done deliberately- can be information to promote discord rather than discourse.
flailingace's position, as I understand it, isn't that it's disinformation on the basis of truth / not truth, or 'their own' narrative, but the intended result of why the information is being presented.
If Russia is this nebulous disinformation fountainhead that some people seem think it is, then their actions prove that they're incredibly bad at it. What Russia 'has' been successful in doing is a form of national rebranding and international marketing to try and attract disaffected people in their own nations to join them. And why would such a measure be aimed at such an end? Because most of the fractious disunity in western nations has come by their own hand. The progressive left in this country has done more harm and inflicted more damage upon itself than Vladimir Putin or Osama bin Laden ever have.
Okay, I don't even disagree with you, but how does this relate to flailaingace's position?
This is a counter-argument of relative effectiveness, of relative harm done, but flailingace wasn't making an argument of relative harm / culpability / etc. Flailingace is making a point that russia will attempt to promote discord, to a person who has dismissed russian trolls as a reasonable hypothesis, to another post that also does not rest on relative effectiveness.
Remember that this branch of the conversation itself started over someone saying they felt there was a bit of an effort to manufacture an issue. Not that the issue was entirely manufactured, or that the dominant cause or concerns were manufactured.
It's absence. Not liking Trump is fine. Regularly and consistently making top-level comments about it with poor conduct towards the posters you are a moderator for is not. The dead horse doesn't become less dead if there's more of it to beat, especially when the complaint is about the stench.
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