ZanarkandAbesFan
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User ID: 2935
ZanarkandAbesFan
21hr ago
Well that's tough for the Qataris then. If you're going to fund proxies to try to militarily destroy another nation, that nation might decide they don't want to play by your particular rules of engagement.
I don't know what the situation was like for you growing up, but my sense is that there's currently a clear asymmetry. I believe you if you say that individual right-wingers said those sorts of things around you, but the difference as far as I see is that you have close to entire mainstream platforms like reddit and branches of academia that openly celebrate things like this in a way there's no real right-wing equivalent for.
IME the biggest difference is that when there's left-wing political violence, normie liberals will usually say "that's terrible"
It's meaningless for 80% of liberals to say "that's terrible" when they refuse to disassociate from the 20% who say "that's awesome" and when that latter group has outsize influence in left-wing politics.
and when there's right-wing political violence, normie conservatives will split into thirds along the lines of "it's good, actually", blaming the left, and just pretending it didn't happen.
Do you have evidence of this? I don't live in the US so my exposure to American media is limited, but I can't think of any non-fringe right-wing group that celebrates political violence on the right. You'd have to go to really marginal groups with tiny numbers like white supremacist or incel forums. There are multiple often-violent groups often have the tacit if not explicit support of much of the American left: Antifa, the Punch A Terf crowd, the pro-Hamas people, the Defund the police contingent, BLM etc.
One difference is that it seems to be acceptable among much broader swathes of the left to celebrate violence against the outgroup it is on the right. Look at how many people expressed admiration for Luigi Mangione, for example. It doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that the left has far more of a problem with tacitly supporting violence than the right.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1d ago
It's usually pretty similar regardless of the country, although the minor variations are interesting (three of the suggestions for "Do French women" are questions about what they wear, while three of them for "Do German women" are about where they shave). The exception was trying the above with Welsh women, where autocomplete comes up with somewhat less expected results (the two that caught my eye were "can welsh women's teams play in england" and "where do welsh women go to prison").
ZanarkandAbesFan
1d ago
I've never followed the young conservative influencers much, but Kirk always seemed like the moderate, respectable sort -- it's wild that he would be the victim of political violence and not someone like Fuentes.
Fuentes isn't getting invited to speak at large public events.
ZanarkandAbesFan
2d ago
avocados
TIL
ZanarkandAbesFan
2d ago
It's still imperfect, because the hazard of drugs isn't just that they can kill you, but that they can ruin your life and the lives of people around you long before you die.
Having read a few books about Hitler, one thing that struck me was a key part of his drive for control was street thuggery. Brownshirts brawling with Communists but later suppressing more general protest.
Has Trump tried to encourage anything like this? Maybe I'm not plugged-in enough but I can't think of any semi-organised street thuggery that could be called right-wing or meaningfully tied to Trump. The only things that come to mind are explicitly left-wing groups like Antifa and parts of the Free Palestine crowd.
There are a lot of reasons why some people are horrified by Trump but I think an under-explored angle is the attitude that different groups of people have towards society as something that can be managed, tinkered with and engineered. This might have no bearing on your wife's feelings towards him but it's been in my head for a while so I thought I'd share.
Very broadly speaking, and using these terms in the American context, liberals and conservatives are fine-grained and coarse-grained thinkers respectively. Liberals tend to believe that the machine of society can be manipulated at every level to produce desirable outcomes (it's not a surprise that more educated people tend towards this political orientation). An extreme example of this for instance is the energy that a non-trivial number of people in academia and the media devote to the intricate rules of what counts as racism sexism. Conservatives OTOH are more inclined to view society as a collection of fudges that more or less function to keep the anarchy of nature at bay. They're consequently typically concerned with much more coarse-grained issues: things like crime or illegal immigration.
This difference also reveals itself when it comes to how these different groups understand the nature of societal problems and the sorts of solutions they favour. Conservatives will see things like crime and illegal immigration as the inevitable consequences of living in a chaotic world and consequently favour relatively blunt approaches: arresting more people or physically preventing migrants from entering. Liberals OTOH see such issues as evidence of subtle bugs in the code somewhere, or some poorly chosen initial conditions (see the focus many liberals place on "root causes" of crime). Doing something as basic as throwing more criminals in prison is both an admission that they can't "solve" the problem of crime and an abandonment of the project of a perfect society where everyone is happy.
When thought of from this perspective, the antipathy that Trump provokes in many liberals makes a lot of sense: his chaotic and anti-intellectual nature represents a complete repudiation of their philosophy. Even those that agree that problems like crime need to be taken seriously tend to view the damage he's causing to their project of a perfectly designed society as outweighing any benefit he might bring about. They're building beautiful sandcastles on the beach while conservatives tell them there's a tidal wave approaching. Even the liberals that concede that they need to do something about this are convinced there has to be way to keep everyone safe that doesn't destroy the intricate work they've devoted years to. They'll recoil from anyone who suggests sprinting to higher ground if that means knocking over their sculptures.
ZanarkandAbesFan
13d ago
Fair enough
ZanarkandAbesFan
13d ago
I wasn't clear (or I misunderstood what you meant by elite buy-in). Of course I understand that the elites need to want the military to perform well, but in the modern world do you really need to provide special positions in the military for the upper classes in order for the government to make sure there's adequate funding? Are senators going to stop supporting the army if their kids aren't getting officer roles?
ZanarkandAbesFan
13d ago
How necessary is elite buy-in for modern first world militaries? Are there not enough soldiers that the best can be selected and promoted into officer roles?
It just seems bizarre to me that you can have people making on-the-ground military decisions who have no actual fighting experience.
ZanarkandAbesFan
13d ago
Thanks for the explanation.
ZanarkandAbesFan
14d ago
I know embarrassingly little about the military, but don't officers typically start out as soldiers? Or are full-on wars these days so rare that by the time they're promoted to officers, most of them haven't actually done much fighting?
ZanarkandAbesFan
14d ago
Something I find interesting is the relative lack of interest in, or ability to, self-police among progressive groups. Of course this happens on the right as well but such groups tend to be much smaller and further from respectable politics (like groypers). I wonder if it's got to do with deeper psychological factors such as respect for authority hierarchy.
ZanarkandAbesFan
14d ago
Was the comparison you made between Christianity and radical Islam deliberate? Is non-radical Islam less harmful in your view than Christianity?
Didn't Sydney Sweeney do something like that too?
ZanarkandAbesFan
14d ago
Somehow I doubt the "understanding of insurgency" that you imagine exists actually works in any real sense. More violence or no violence are the only two answers.
How much of modern "theory of war" (for want of a better term) ever gets empirically confirmed or rejected by military practice? I used to assume the sort of people who wrote for Foreign Policy/Foreign Affairs knew what they were talking about, but after browsing /r/geopolitics over the past two years and constantly seeing similar headlines from those sorts of sources that always end up proving laughably wrong I'm beginning to wonder how much insight these people really have.
ZanarkandAbesFan
14d ago
When we got to the car, my mother, God love her, offered to drive. I very gently pointed out that the sole reason I was there was to save her the trouble of having to drive.
To be fair, I assume the main reason they took you up on the offer was to see you.
ZanarkandAbesFan
14d ago
Breaking Bad but where Walter White uses OF for money laundering instead of a car wash.
ZanarkandAbesFan
15d ago
It makes WW2 look nice by comparison.
This is a bit extreme, even if you were going for hyperbole. I mean, WW2 ended with the US dropping two nukes on Japan lol
I think you're assuming quite a bit here. FWIW, I'm not especially convinced one way or the other that this was a migrant sex attack. I really have no idea. I just don't think the BBC or the police releasing a statement represents a particularly high standard of evidence against the possibility.
ZanarkandAbesFan
15d ago
I would like to believe that this clarification settles things, but I am also not naïve. If your epistemic filter is tuned to maximum paranoia, then the absence of evidence is merely further evidence of a cover-up. For everyone else, the police statement, local skepticism, and sociological context should nudge your priors at least a little.
Of course, if you prefer your axes in the hands of twelve-year-olds fighting imaginary Bulgarian sex pests, I suppose nothing I write will convince you otherwise.
I think the deeper issue is that while you're correct that someone refusing to accept any possible evidence that contradicts their position isn't approaching the topic rationally, it's not unreasonable to consider sources like the BBC and the UK police largely discredited when it comes to issues like these. That people might therefore hold practically unfalsifiable beliefs about the nature of this incident is more a reflection of lack of trust in the establishment than people desperately clinging to their priors.
ZanarkandAbesFan
30d ago
I realise this doesn’t sound correct to you, because the UK criticises America (especially Trump and MAGA) so much, but it’s still true. The UK sees its criticism as coming from a colleague in the same tent, and will never side with China or Russia or really any other power on a matter of serious geopolitics. All we ask for in return is some subsidies and some head pats but we will make do even without.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if europhiles in the UK would rather be part of Macron's vision of "Strategic autonomy" than America's junior partner when it comes to foreign policy(perhaps to the extent of preferring neutrality in the case of a Taiwan-based active conflict). Whether something like this ever happens is impossible to say but I don't think it's at all impossible, particularly if elite anti-America messaging continues at the same level of intensity.
There are maniac Leftists of course, even in the government, but they hold no influence on these matters and they will certainly not support Russia/China over America.
The forthcoming UK recognition of Palestine is I think an example that leftist anti-western opinion definitely has a role in UK policy-making.
The article is paywalled. Nevertheless, I'm willing to concede this particular subject may not be as simple as I thought.
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