vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
Ok, with that in mind, and assuming that there were a brutal 10/7 style terrorist attack planned for Canada, what percentage of Americans would lift a finger to stop it?
Elsewhere in this thread, I already conceded I may be wrong on the Americans-saving-Canadians question, depending on the level of inconvenience involved.
But we shouldn't just judge ourselves or others purely on on how we treat our friends or allies.
I'm willing to grant for the sake of argument that Iranians wouldn't make a phone call to prevent American deaths in a terrorist attack. But I would again ask how many Americans would make such a call for terrorist attacks against Russian or Chinese citizens? I don't believe that the general sentiment here in the US is "Death to China" or "Death to Russia", and yet I think even our more tempered animosity towards these geopolitical rivals is enough that I have serious doubts about how many Americans would make a phone call to try and save Russian and Chinese lives.
Don't get me wrong. I actually think the bigger the consequences, the more do-gooder Americans would try to stick their necks out for Russian and Chinese civilian lives. That is, if it were 30 lives at stake, I think there's a reasonable chance a majority of Americans wouldn't make the call. But if it were 3000 lives or 30,000 lives of innocent Russian or Chinese civilians, I think Americans would be more likely to make the call despite our animosity.
But I actually would guess that that is also the case for Iranians to some degree. Don't get me wrong, I am far from believing I have a good read on their general mindset, but I suspect that as the potential death toll in a terrorist attack rises, so too would the odds of an Iranian citizen making the call to try and save American civilian lives rise. Though I have no idea if it would be anywhere close to the rate of American do-gooders in similar circumstances. We could be talking moving from a lizardman's constant of 7% of Iranians for 30 American civilian deaths, to 8% of Iranians for 3000 American deaths.
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
I think by changing it to a 911 call you warp the question being asked.
I doubt that most Iranians are ever in a position that a 1 hour phone call could guarantee the safety of Americans from a would-be terrorist attack. My personal guess is that if an Iranian became aware of a terrorist attack against Americans, and wanted to prevent it, it would take a lot more personal effort and research than a mere hour-long phone call, and they might not even succeed at preventing it.
Just turning the question around. If the information about a terrorist attack in Russia next week fell into your lap, how much time would you estimate it would take you to ensure that the right people got that that information, and how sure are you that your effort would actually prevent the terrorist attack? Do you think the vast majority of Americans would be willing to expend that effort for the citizenry of our geopolitical rivals?
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
I guess some of the question is: is 10% of your savings enough to materially impact your standard of living much? If you scaled your income to "average American" levels, is that a candy bar or a car for you?
Do you think the 30% of Americans who have their health care costs paid for by Medicaid would be willing to give 10% of their savings to prevent a 30+ person terrorist attack in Canada?
If I'm wrong on the Americans-saving-Canadian point specifically, then fair enough. But I still maintain that regardless of the Canada angle, the vast majority of Americans wouldn't even slightly inconvenience themselves to save Russians or Chinese people from terrorist attacks. Am I supposed to think worse of Iranians when they have the same hang up about saving Americans?
Agreed, and I would also ask the following: Of the people who say "death to America," but really only mean "down with America," what percentage would inconvenience themselves to prevent a terrorist attack on Americans?
That actually seems like a surprisingly high standard. What percentage of Americans do you think would inconvenience themselves to prevent a terrorist attack on Canadians? We mostly don't even hate Canada, and I don't think you'd get more than, say, 30% of Americans actually willing to materially inconvenience themselves to prevent a terrorist attack on Canadians.
I guess it matters how much of an inconvenience we're talking about here, though. If it was something like, "would you be willing to spend $1 more in taxes to prevent terrorist attacks on Canadians", I suppose I could believe that possibly a majority of Americans would be willing to make that sacrifice. But if you turn it around and ask about a rival nation like Russia and China, I'm not sure how many Americans you could get to voluntarily pay $1 more in taxes to prevent a terrorist attack against Russian or Chinese citizens, and I don't think the prevailing sentiment is exactly "Death to Russia" or "Death to China."
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
I am once again reminded that right-wing political violence is completely invisible to many. Either it's excused because it's carried out under a veneer or law enforcement or the perpetrator is written off as a crazy person who in no way reflects on the right more generally. Or the perp gets a pardon. The history of political violence in America did not begin on 9/10/25.
I think more generally it's that you remember and internalize what offended and outraged you, and not what didn't. I'm sure there's a certain kind of trans skeptical person that can cite chapter and verse of every bad thing a trans person has done in the United States over the last 10 years, while your average trans-friendly progressive either didn't hear about such incidents or even if they did hear about them, they weren't horribly offended by them or were happy to say something like, "Yeah, trans people are human, they do bad things just like everyone else," and moved on with their lives.
In a way, it is a form of political myopia that basically everyone who sees themselves as part of a larger political coalition ends up experiencing. The only way to avoid it is to feel in your bones that neither the Right nor the Left are "us", and to instead center your "us" in some completely orthogonal grouping. Otherwise, it will take constant effort to correct for this "myopia" due to then nature of human psychology. And most people don't want to correct the myopia because righteous fury feels good.
I mean, the whole point of our mixed constitution is to get all of the benefits of the good aspects of rule by the one, few and many, with as few of their downsides (tyranny, corrupt oligarchy, and mobocracy) as possible. Whether the United States actually accomplished that goal is a separate question, but a major idea of our system is that for a small handful of protected rights we don't just let the mob do whatever they want, but force them to achieve a broader societal consensus before we change anything major.
For less important issues, we allow a simple majority (or really, their elected representatives) to determine government policy. Maybe that could be called tyranny, since we'll always be forcing 49% of the population to listen to whatever 50%+1 of the population has decided, but I'm not sure I buy that argument.
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
But I also only see push-back on this one from the conservative side of aisle: the Roberts court has a continuing theme in its jurisprudence of telling Congress that it actually has to govern (overturning Chevron, the Major Questions Doctrine), and some of its most prominent members were nominated by Trump himself and confirmed by a right-leaning Senate.
I think there's a real sense in which conservatism in the United States is just right liberalism dressed up as conservatism. Classical liberalism was once (and arguably still is) one of the most radical ideologies in the history of politics, and it is the Foundation of the United States and how we think about ourselves.
While we do have a mythical past conservatives can pine for, I think one of the basic issues is that the freedom afforded by liberalism is what got us here to the present moment step by step. Unless you are some form of reactionary who thinks we need to forcefully return to some past social arrangement, it will be very hard to "hold on" to any particular era of US politics. (I once knew an older gentleman who pined for the left liberalism of the 1960's and JFK, and I had to point out to him that all of the contradictions and craziness of that era are what eventually led to to the "bridge too far" of today that he considered absurd from trans kids to social media.)
Even in glorious past eras, a lot of the problems were caused by groups people today want to idolize. Like, when people bring up something like the 13/50 statistic around black people, I feel like they forget that if that is a real concern, it can be laid entirely at the feet of the ruling elites at the Founding (and reaffirmed on down through time by the post-Civil War amendments, and the reactions of "heritage American" elites and their successors at every step of the process.) I suppose an actually fascist president could just "deport" all of the black people in the United States to Liberia or something at this point, but Trump certainly has no appetite for that sort of thing.
What I'm confused by is MSM who prefer "feminine" men. Naively, you'd expect that they'd want the most masculine gay men they could find. If you like femininity that much, why not just sleep with women? Why seem out "passing" transwomen or ladyboys or twinks or...
I feel like the butch and femme dynamic among lesbians is similar. While I get the feeling it is a lot less prevalent as a dynamic in modern lesbian spaces in the West, I have seen plenty of Tumblr posts where lesbian women fawn over tall, muscular women presenting in a mannish style, so there must be something to it.
My best guess is that the human brain generally tries to detect two things in mates: man/woman and masculine/feminine (or perhaps dominant/submissive.) In most people they are attracted to a congruent set (man+masculine/dominant or woman+feminine/submissive), but a minority of the population end up attracted to an incongruent set (man+feminine or woman+masculine.) This is why a small percentage of men love the idea of Amazon warrior women, or orcish women. And why you get some gay men attracted to femboys, and some lesbian women attracted to butch lumberjack women.
But even when the US didn't formally declare war, Congress has generally implicitly consented to military actions by the president by agreeing to fund them.
Congress didn't do that here.
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