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
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.
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
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.
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.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
There is this thing called the Constitution that does ban discrimination against citizens of another US state.
Well, okay, but, like. Bukele is a dictator and the prison is a human-rights-violating hellhole, right?
No.
Not right. Partisan hyperbole squared, even, due to how much of the American media that carries that tune gets it in turn from Bukele's own political opposition. That political opposition in turn has its own partisan interests in characterizing their defeat as illegitimate, in hopes that a sympathetic US administration will overthrow the popularly elected leader to their partisan benefit.
Dean
Flairless
3mo ago
Can you explain what the Hobbesian premise is that's being rejected/forgotten?
Sure. You not mentioning Hobbes at all, let alone Hlynka's position on Hobbes, is the Hobbesian premise that is being rejected / forgotten.
How I would characterize Hobbes doesn't matter. My position is that you can't properly characterize Hlynka's position if you don't address such a significant part of the position. Which is rather hard to do without mentioning them, which is generally a precondition to accurately characterizing. If you aren't accurately characterizing Hlynka's arguments, there's reason to doubt the validity of your argument.
The lack of mention in your rebuttal-argument is itself the hole.
Your appeal to your own credulity and counter-proposal is committing forces where the enemy is strongest, already had advantageous positionings which enable a preponderance of fires, where counter-attacks would have been into their fortifications and air defenses, for a straight up fight in unfavorable logistical contexts.
Oy vey, someone did not pay attention to Art of War.
Dean
Flairless
4mo ago
Iran, perhaps?
Depends how much you want the US in the middle east.
In the nicest possible way, if you would like a discussion I would appreciate it if you made your point simply and clearly.
You give bad moral framing arguments that, if internalized, gets more people needlessly killed.
As a result, it is not a good defensive argument, since it does not defend (minimize costs to) recipients internalizing it, particularly in the context of the Hamas-Israel War.
Not intentionally. I didn't realise what you were getting at. Yes, obviously, if someone is defending you then you have to defend yourself against them, which may well mean killing them. It's unfortunate. I'm quite capable of feeling pity for the soldiers of an aggressor. And, yes, a little bit for actual Hamas terrorists, depending on exactly how vile they are - I remember the al Qaeda child suicide bombings and whoever set that up deserves to burn in hell. But I hate the insistence that because the Russians/Nazis/Napelonic forces are the enemy then they must be evil monsters with no soul.
There is no insistence that the enemy must be evil monsters with no soul.
The proximate argument regarding souls or lack thereof (lack of humanity) was one that was leveraged unliterally against one side of a conflict, and not even the conflict's aggressor.
I am not a combatant in a propaganda war, nor a lawyer.
You are the former, by virtue of adopting and propagating metaphors and paradigms that are part of the propaganda war. You may not be a witting propaganda war combatant, but this is both a purpose of propaganda and a mechanical means of how propaganda wars work.
I meant in Gaza,
The hatred within Gaza for the Israelis has little to do with the post-2023 conflict, far predating it, nor would it have reasonably been expected to decrease from its pre-2023 levels under the governance structure of the aggressors of the October 2023 conflict, who were initially met with significant public and political support both domestically and from many of their current-war-supporters on the success of the October 7 initiation.
Far more relevant factors of anti-Israeli sentiment in Gaza include the decades of ideological shaping, including religious, educational, information, youth-mobilization, and even refugee policies, that were constructed to build and sustain an ethnic conflict. These were factors which substantially contributed to not only the October 7 conflict which has seen a lot of Palestinians killed, but for the Gazan political acceptance of governors like Hamas preceeding it.
Whereas American geopolitical dominance is natural and snuggly, of course. In any case, you seem to be agreeing with me: the understood laws of moral responsibility were destroyed retroactively to justify what our new overlords wanted. All hail.
You would misunderstand the argument: 'our' new overlords did not retroactively destroy 'our' understood laws of moral responsibilities, the old-overlords were destroyed by the consequence of their self-justifying framing of moral responsibilities, which then led to their inability to continue brutally suppressing subjugated peoples around the globe and arbitrarily impose their model of moral responsibilities onto them.
The culture shock of WW1 and WW2 was that the Europeans were not, in fact, more civilized and moral than the rest of the world they justified imposing their empires and values upon on the basis of cultural and moral superiority. It was a great culture shock, but the trench warfare of WW1 and the industrialized slaughterhouses and eradication camps of WW2 were not the result of quote-unquote 'civilized' peoples, even as they were done by people who both prided themselves and considered each other civilized. It also broke the ability of the European empires to maintain control of their empires, and their increasing reliance on force itself seemed less and less the action of civilized cultures and more banal evils motivated by greed and pride cloaked in sovereignty.
The question of 'how do we never have a war of such scale in Europe again' became the defining political question in Europe for generations, and part of the eventual answer of what led to those tragedies was the role that a lack of moral responsibility- and thus moral duties- of those who not only acted in an immoral sovereign's name, but also those who supported and enabled the immoral sovereign. In order for there to be more duties / responsibilities, however, required the space for consequences for failure to meet those duties / responsibilities- consequences prohibited by prior understandings of sovereign immunity, and which were invoked and had been used to protect the perpetrators of the delusion-shattering world wars.
The sense of cultural superiority and thus appropriateness of normalization was not destroyed retroactively- it was destroyed contemporarily, repeatedly, by the European sovereigns themselves.
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
Thank you for further demonstrating your habit of misrepresenting the position of others by insisting they make claims they have not made.
You are arguing that USA is innocent by default of its warmongering because it chooses to not accept the sovereignty of international courts.
Alas, international courts do not have sovereignty.
I will submit that this attempt to reach for a trumping buzzword is demonstrative of why you do not understand the argument being presented, or even the nature of international law.
The reality is that obviously you want to support USA and Israel to commit any and all criminal actions and to oppose any valid criticism of such. While you also desire to promote one sided narrative as you have done towards other countries.
This would be incorrect. My want is to highlight that your position is not based on international law, but the sort of selective and increasingly emotional appeals to international law that see it so often misused as a geopolitical cudgel.
In a few posts you have-
-Mis-identified the legal international bodies taking actions
-Mis-identified the legal actions taken by international bodies
-Mis-identified the conclusions of international bodies
-Mis-identified the legal basis for international bodies
-Mis-identified the legal limits of international bodies
-Mis-identified the legal responses to the actions of international bodies
-Mis-identified the legal implications of certain states not abiding by certain international bodies
-Mis-identified the provided legal basis of non-compliance with international bodies.
Upon correction, rather than even contest disputes by counter-citations, you have transitioned to ad hominem attacks that ignore the arguments provided.
This is not atypical of people with less interest in international law than in making strong claims about international law.
You seem to try to impose your own corrupt understanding on others. It isn't mine or anyone's idea but there is an objective criteria into which warcrimes, genocide, causing civil wars, can be defined and understood.
Except, of course, there are not objective criteria- hence why ICC claims jurisdiction over territory not a part of any ICC member despite the objective limitations of the ICC's jurisdictions under its own laws to its own members and their territory, and why the advocates of the case against Israel in the ICJ submitted alternative and broader definitions of genocide, rather than the older and more established forms.
Which is why textualism is so important for advocates of law. Acknowledging the limits of the law- what you deride as the loophole or innocence- is what protects against corrupt re-interpretations of law by taking items beyond their scope, or ignoring what is there.
By contrast, ignoring the text of what is or is not provided for in international law as convenient (or inconvenient) to advance your desires is the paradigm that leads to systemic abuse of the international law by powers that have more power to shape when and what sort of selective interpretations are advanced more often.
So, I would encourage those who care about the truth of the matter to not treat as even a tiny bit impartial what are essentially extreme 100% partisans for Globalist American Empire and Israel. Because they will always support their actions, no matter the consequences and what moral rule or laws they violate. When you break it down, they are completely against international rule of law but completely in favor of abusing the concept against their targets and for their supported regimes and their actions. And that is all there is to it.
My encouragement for the audience is to consider whether Belisarius is making a legal argument on the nature and nuances of laws, or an emotional appeal more motivated by their geopolitical hostilities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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