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Notes -
Here is video essayist Kidology saying the quiet part out loud when it comes to political polarization and virtue signalling, especially as it applies to the Israel-Hamas conflict. https://youtube.com/watch?v=jz5k6rE-3m4?feature=shared
I understand that she's not everyone's cup of tea and has tried to tow the line of being apolitical while seemingly revolving her content around politics, but for me it was refreshing to hear what I've been feeling about what I see as performative activism and the breakdown in American political discourse.
I want to like Kidology, and I like that she's tried to position herself atop the culture wall. But Christ is she verbose, whenever I try to watch one of her videos I find myself skipping forward looking for some meat on the bone.
I watched one of her other videos on Speed Dating (with which I have some experience). I agreed with just about all of her points, but they were buried in words words words. Many more than should be required to get her point across.
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If the 'quiet' part is merely that performative activism is a common phenomenon in the context of any high profile issue, Israeli conduct included, I think it's actually a pretty widely acknowledged fact.
If the 'quiet' part is that opposition to Israeli conduct is just a hysteria and a performance, therefore illegitimate, then this assumes a consensus that does not exist.
The very first thing she says in the video is that stating her opinion on the conflict 'would make absolutely no difference to anyone'. I consider this a weaker strain of 'let them kill each other', and distrust people pushing it to western audiences. Why is it reasonable and proper for plebs to be neutral if their state supports one side?
There was actually an Israeli who made this point a few years ago:
So I think it's safe to say that it's not an especially new phenomenon. The only thing that's new are the social media platforms.
I feel like if you quoted Jesus to some of the demonstrators or to an influencer, they would denounce you or call you a distractor. That is, oddly enough, how the Pharisees perceived Jesus.
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My view is that while it is performative, their emotions are very real, and the are trying to convey them as loudly as possible, and as such they are incapable of actively listening or being civil.
And to that end, why would anyone participate in a political system that is hostile to people with nuanced opinions?
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Who is kidology and why should we care?
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Could you summarize what she is saying? I'm just not big into watching political commentary.
The woman talks about the absurdity of modern politics - people pretend to care about something because they like the attention or because they want to 'virtue signal', not because they actually care about the thing. She gives many, many examples.
I'd also add that it can be because they have been conditioned to believe in an ideology.
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Fixed that For Her. This is about as modern as agriculture. Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky were constantly involved in internecine conflicts over which branch of the revolutionaries were correct and which weren't, which were poseurs, which were just in it for the street cred or to impress chicks or because they liked robbing banks for their own reasons. So were Robespierre and Murat, so were John and Sam Adams; so were Clodius and Julius Caesar. The presence of unserious people doesn't represent a serious criticism of a political movement.
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Sure. I'll go over her main points. Her position is that:
-College students and folks on social platforms are advocating for supporting their particular side of the conflict mostly for personal gain and/or to force their political ideologies onto others.Their views often lack any nuance, charity, or civility toward those that disagree. It has resulted in hostile demonstrations on college campuses and what may be considered to be "cringey" TikToks/shorts.
-This performative activism is contributing to the continued political polarization in the US and leaves no room for said nuance, charity or civility.
-Governments are also not immune from this kind of virtue signalling. She uses the example of South Africa calling for the prosecution of Israeli leadership before the ICC for genocide and suggests that their demand was purely a political move to help the ANC stay in power. She further opines that this is hypocritical as South Africa refused to arrest then-Sudanese president Omar Al-Bashir for the mass murder of 300,000 non-Arab Sudanese people in 2015, and that they even welcomed him warmly. (For what it's worth, Kidology was born and raised in South Africa but is now a UK citizen, and her tone turned markedly more angry at the start of this segment)
-Like governments, institutions of higher education (and their students) have engaged in performative activism for their own gain. The most prestigious of them have billions of dollars in endowments, government and corporate funding and donations from the wealthy that they use not in furtherance of academic missions, but to cultivate a student body that only subscribes to certain matters of social justice. This has resulted in the rise of mass demonstrations for social justice where dissenting voices aren't welcome, where demonstrators prevent uninvolved students from simply walking to class, where it's basically just a mob of people screaming and shouting for a cause they know nothing about and have no experience dealing with.
So does she have any examples of this lack of nuance, charity and civility from people that represent positions she agrees with, or is it a phenomenon curiously concentrated in her opposition? On that matter, is she exhibiting nuance and charity herself in opining on why people she disagrees with advocate for their positions?
If you watch from 3:18 to 17:00 she shows several videos as examples.
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I think her view is pretty much my view of most protests. Most of the protesters (on any topic, mind) don’t actually know much about the things they protest. Get them off their talking points (something Ben Shapiro is pretty good at), make them defend their position without going back to slogans and references to things seen on video, and they fall apart.
The ICC and the various other countries suddenly “recognizing Palestine”, in my view have mostly their own credibility in mind, especially the ICC. They’re not serious proposals. The states recognizing Palestine have no trade agreements with Palestine. They have no trade deals with Palestine, they’re not recognizing a Palestinian passport. There’s no state to recognize, with no serious government, no exports, it is not a state to any real degree. At best it’s two reservations shooting missiles over a border completely controlled by Israel.
On the ICC side, the gain is legitimacy. It’s a toothless organization issuing meaningless “rulings” that it can’t enforce. They can’t arrest the people they want to try. No state is going to March into Jerusalem and perp-walk Netanyahu. Or nab Putin in Moscow or Biden in DC (if he gets convicted of something). They can issue calls for arrest, they can try leaders in absentia and sentence them to anything they want to. It doesn’t matter, as they cannot enforce any of that. If they sentence someone to death, it doesn’t matter because the person can live as they please within their own country. Sure, maybe if Netanyahu gets drunk and flies to Europe, something might happen. But if he stays in Israel or other friendly states, he gets to remain free and even remain PM of Israel until his base kicks him out.
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Hey fam, for future reference this would have been better as part of your top post. You came in pretty hot with a video link and not that much background information.
Thanks. Will do.
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Except that ‘white Americans’ do not, culturally, form a cohesive group by any definition which excludes black Americans, unless you’ve already decided skin color is what you care about, in which case why not include Anglo Canadians?
Italian Americans, wasps, southern whites, and ADOS- if you’re trying to group them by cultural similarity, you’d group ADOS and southern whites together, not with the two groups of Yankees.
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I don't think you can define one single reactionary right position on this topic, even leaving out the large fraction of trolls who don't take the political project seriously. There are IQ supremacists, eugenicists, tradcath integralists, etc. who don't care what race Americans are or sometimes even if there is such a thing as America, and focusing just on de facto or professed white nationalists there are increasingly vehement disagreements over whether someone counts as a true American as we go down the line from descendants of British colonists to descendants of German and Irish immigrants to Ellis Islanders to light-skinned Latin Americans and so on. The position that we need some sort of 19th century European-style nationalist project to shore up or restore an American identity is the closest to what you've outlined and might be the logical endpoint of many reactionary trains of thought, but I don't know how many have actually gotten there yet.
I also find it interesting that your hypothetical reactionary considers whites, blacks, and natives collectively to be Americans, leaving out the Asians and Hispanics who are now over a quarter of the population, because I have long been expecting some sort of racial/political realignment along those lines. It seems as though a high rate of intermarriage and low rate of civic engagement by the new arrivals may prevent this from happening however, which means that we might have to hear the same tired arguments about slavery and segregation between the white (now with added flavor) and black populations repeated ad nauseum until the end of time, or at least of America.
I live in Texas, which is majority Hispanic now and also majority white, with large black and Asian populations.
The idea that Asians and Hispanics are going to team up against legacy Americans is farcical. Hispanics mostly prefer their white bosses and coworkers to other minority groups(sometimes including different kinds of Hispanics), and whites prefer Hispanics to blacks or underclass whites. The racial politics of the future is either whites vs everyone else or whites and Hispanics vs blacks(or possibly some combination thereof where Mexicans but not Guatemalans are honorary whites).
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Boating/Fishing and Right Wing Associations.
Inspired by this post in Wellness Wednesday it took on a bit of a culture war tone as I wrote my response.
To the best of my recollection this is kind of a thing that started really turning ugly during covid. The notion guys with fish in their profile picks were all right wing anti-vaxxers because an odd amount of the posts on the hermaincainaward subreddit had a dude with a fish held high in their profile...
I've seen that "trend" other places where people have kind of sussed out a correlation of fish pictures and right wing proclivities, I just did a quick search on the tinder subreddit and others, I've found the question going back at least 6 years.. There are dozens more posts like this every year asking "Why all the fish pics" or "Stop with the fish pics".
There were also those boat parades for Trump etc...recreational power boating and ocean fishing are generally very white, sometimes wealthy. Fly fishing is even whiter and wealthier, think float plane trips to remote Alaskan camps and guided week long floats down untouched rivers. Bass fishing is white redneck hick Trump central and that is what a lot of people think of because of the televised tournaments and occasional news articles, add in a little cruelty to animals and you've got a stew going.
Some on the more extreme left, and probably a lot of young women of dating age must figure if you're fishing from shore or bass fishing you're a white trash trumper. They figure if you're fishing from a boat or racing to a sandbar to party that you're middle class to small business owner, killing animals for fun and burning gas while polluting the world, and if you're fly fishing in Kamchatka or deep sea fishing from a GT70 then you're a fat cat that needs to be eaten when the revolution comes (but maybe that won't be for a while so let's see where this goes).
https://old.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/comments/quo8p7/grandpa_catches_a_big_fish_and_a_big_virus/ https://old.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/comments/rb2tzq/update_guy_thought_he_was_a_legend_for_not_taking/ https://old.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/nyoc9z/why_do_they_all_have_boats/ https://old.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/168ivpu/when_men_hold_up_fish_in_their_dating_profile/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/u5eaiy/whats_wrong_with_fish_pictures_i_see_so_many/
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What is really the best way for a government to decide policy?
Imagine you’re the absolute monarch of a country in an alternate world that’s somewhat similar to 18th century Europe. You have just inherited the throne from your father who passed away, and have the authority to implement whatever changes you want. The peasants and the nobles and the military are all feeling happy after a couple decades of good harvests and no plague so there will not be any resistance to what’s seen as your divine mandate to rule, for the short term at least.
For the past couple centuries your country has been Mercantilist, with policies like heavy tariffs and state granted monopolies, both to raise revenue for the state and to protect domestic industry against your international rivals. There are also policies like price caps on bread to help the people and make sure they don’t starve. The state spends most of its revenue on its military for national defense, but also spends a substantial fraction on the construction of roads, plumbing, and grand monuments. Lots of people have complaints about poor service and high prices from the monopolies, and get upset at occasional bread shortages. A lot of people would like to participate in the skilled trades like smithing or woodworking but because there’s such limited economic activity and because guilds have a monopoly on such positions most people are subsistence farmers. Overall people are mostly content with the system because they don’t know anything else and with the recent decades being fairly fortunate there’s never been a major failure of the system. All the other significant countries in the world that you know of follow the same model, and you don’t have any good or reliable records of how any historical systems might’ve worked.
You’re an ethical ruler who wants the best for your people, and are considering how to go about some changes to make things better. A couple of scholars have come to beseech you to make major changes to the system, based on their theoretical ideas that they’ve come to from reasoning on first principles. Since there are no records of alternative systems to do empirical research on, all their ideas are purely theoretical. One proposes what we’d call laissez-faire economics and libertarianism, to dismantle the state monopolies and tariffs and price caps and guild system, and to keep only a minimal sales tax necessary to fund a military for national defense and maybe a few other issues of national interest such as road building and education. They say that the people exercising their self-interest will result in more of what’s needed most, and distribute goods and services to those who need them the most. It will also result in competition that ensures the cream rises to the top. It all sounds very convincing and with no academic background yourself, it sounds very plausible it would make life much better.
The other scholar proposes something very similar to what we’d call socialism, saying that the nobles and wealthy merchants are exploiting the working classes. This scholar tells you about the labour theory of value, that all added value beyond what’s found in the natural world comes from people labouring to turn natural resources into goods people want, or labouring to provide services. That nobles and wealthy merchants only have such large amounts of wealth by exploiting labour and skimming that value by charging more when selling the goods and services than they pay their labour. The academic tells you that all workers should own their means of production, such that everyone working in a guild workshop should mutually own the workshop and divide all profits between themselves, and the same for all peasants working a piece of farmland, and the same for all other economic activity. They say that not only will this be more just, giving workers the fruits of their own labour instead of it being drained away by a parasitic upper class, it will also greatly increase economic productivity because people will be focused on producing what’s really needed and production can be centrally organized based on what’s rationally needed instead of what’s merely profitable for the parasitic class. They say that without competing firms each wasting resources on secret research or trying to out-advertise each other, resources can be cooperatively spent on stuff that is actually useful to society. This academic also sounds like their theory will very plausibly make life better for everyone.
How do you decide which policy to undertake? Today, outside the hypothetical and knowing what I know now from empirical results of stuff like the USSR’s failure, I would strongly support the libertarian side if I was the monarch. Even if you’re a socialist and believe the empirical record shows the opposite for whatever reason, I think this thought experiment still applies, since you have the same problem of trying to figure out how to make the government arrive at the correct decision. How do you decide on such a big decision with such limited evidence of what’s actually better? If you just stick with Chesterton’s Fence and don’t make any big change, you’re stuck with Mercantilism, which is arguably worse than either the alternatives. If you embrace democracy and let the people decide, either in a direct democracy referendum or with representatives in a Congress or Parliament, they will quite plausibly make the wrong decision, and the people will make life worse for themselves. If your outsource your decision to “the experts” and try to be meritocratic, it’s also quite plausible “the experts” will be just straight wrong, since experts have their own biases and limited evidence to work from. I’m a fan of prediction markets and futarchy, but those can come to the wrong decision too- if they say one option has a 90% of being better, then you could always land on the 10% chance, or the people predicting could just be miscalibrated, or you could have asked it the wrong question like “What option will raise GDP more” instead of “What option will raise GDP per capita more”.
I think you’d have to be willing to run active experiments in governance and economic structure to determine the best outcomes. Like you assign 1/3 of the country to be libertarian, 1/3 to be socialist, and 1/3 to stay mercantilist, and you wait some period of time to see which turns out the best. But that has its own issues, namely that you’re quite possibly ruining many people’s livelihoods for the sake of an experiment. It’d be very tempting to just go ahead and give everyone your best guess of what’s the best outcome. But I think that would be wrong, because it would have such extreme consequences if you guess wrong. Even just running the national experiment for a short period wouldn’t be enough, because it may take some years for something like socialism to show its cracks. People under socialism may continue to work hard for some years because they’ve always been used to working hard, it may be some years before technology and consumer preference shifts in a way a central planner can’t predict, they may be able to cover gaps with debt financing for years only to enter a crisis when they enter a downturn and can’t get anymore loans. There could be a similar situation where libertarianism appears to go strong for several years before collapsing into corruption. Or perhaps one or both systems would need to take some time to ramp up, and for the first few years appear to have worse outcomes than Mercantilism.
I think, both to be morally just and in order to view people’s true preferences, you need to always ensure freedom of movement. Beyond that, you should divide the country into portions, as fairly as you can, and run different theoretical political/economic models in the different portions. If one model appears to be doing better, perhaps expand its borders, but don’t shut down weaker models entirely, since they might just need time to ramp up, and any truly bad consequences are mitigated by people being always allowed to move away if they need to. Which models to actually use should be decided using prediction markets- ensuring that anyone making those decisions has some skin in the game, and that if they consistently make good or bad predictions about outcomes, that record is tracked. The invention of models can be left to academics, or anyone else, theorizing, and if it gets enough backers then those backers can bet it up on the prediction market as worth trying. What exact question should be used to measure success I'm not sure of, but probably something could be come up with that captures the concept of "Is this theoretical system worth trying out".
Prediction market FAQ for anyone unfamiliar with the concept: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-market-faq
The issue with experiments is that you need to objectively evaluate and act on their outcomes. In principle, I think it's possible for an individual to (imperfectly, but still much better than random guessing). But any social-wide experiment will create institutions that are embedded in the conditions of the experiment, and they will do their utmost to maintain and expand the conditions they're adapted for. Maybe some won't, but those will be selected against. This would apply both in your capitalist and socialist examples (as well as any other I can think of, from anarchist collectives to feudal fiefdoms).
Any institution where the leaders get too selfish will naturally lose power from its people just leaving, that's part of why freedom of movement is so necessary. And hopefully the prediction markets can more clearly evaluate who's actually done a good job, such that people trying to uphold a flawed institution will have little credibility.
Yes but a given petri dish can have better short term outcomes whilst having poor longterm outcomes. At which point the canny punter says 'oh I'm going to go to the other state which didn't eat the seed corn'.
I recognize. A willingness of the larger state to keep petri dishes going for a while is necessary.
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To have virtuous and wise people doing the deciding, and public-spirited and moderate people doing the implementing. Personnel is policy, and all the procedural gilding in the world won't save a government made of the petty, venal, and stupid.
Angels in the form of kings -- a good policy, but famously hard to implement.
Pretty sure you could do it these days with eugenics. You'd need someone very smart who's not susceptible to narcissism and cults.
Just being smart and virtuous isn't enough to prevent being taken in by honest mistakes, and when you have absolute power an honest mistake can be very devastating.
That's why you don't want megastates.
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The two problems I see there is a) figuring out who exactly is virtuous and wise, and b) protecting the state from the virtuous and wise making well intentioned mistakes. As I laid out, something like socialism can seem quite appealing even to a wise and virtuous person, but have disastrous consequences.
There's a reason that "to err is human" is a truism. People aren't omniscient, and are going to make mistakes. You don't escape that by delegating to a committee, or prediction market. So long as people are involved, there are going to be mistakes and errors.
Well sure, but some systems make more mistakes than others. A prediction market as I view it is ultimately just a systematic way to keep track of who makes errors the most and who makes them the least, so you can put the people who make them the least into power.
Calling something like the USSR or Nazi Germany just a regular human mistake isn't an acceptable conclusion to me. I want a systemized method of how we can go about designing better governance and economic systems, since I don't think anyone's completely happy with any systems anywhere, without risking making a USSR.
Goodhart's law. You're only optimizing for the ability to game a prediction market, not the ability to be a wise ruler.
Why not? Totalitarianism and militarism are pretty common human modes of social organization. Look around the world and you'll find more dictators than not, and even putatively democratic countries can sure be repressive when they want to be (e.g. UK speech offenses, Canadian asset-freezing the trucker protests, etc). There's also a lot of military aggression even today (it just tends to take the form of gangs or paramilitaries in third world countries rather than stomping around with flags and tanks, but even there see Russia/Ukraine, Armenia/Azerbaijan, Saudi/Yemen, China/India/Pakistan's periodic kerfuffles, North & South Korea, any number of insurgencies in Africa and SE Asia, etc.) Totalitarianism and militarism are even more common if you look back more than 70 years in the past. Same for genocides. The Nazis only stand out because they came along right when mass media was first becoming a thing. The Soviets too only stand out because they were a geopolitical rival for half a century.
I think it's harder to game a prediction market than to game any other method of selecting wise rulers.
I believe that if a competent absolute ruler implemented my proposed system, like Napoleon at his height did so instead of invading Russia, governmental and economic systems like socialism, communism, fascism, and liberterianism could've been tested without the genocide. And that'd have been a much better outcome for humanity as a whole. Today, I'd prefer if we could set up lots of charter cities that implement different ideologies, each mostly free from state influence, to see which methods are most succesful.
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What if the USSR and Nazi Germany are, in fact, what normal human mistakes look like when people attempt to apply systematized methods of designing "better governance and economic systems"?
Perhaps. But I don't think so.
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There’s an obvious irreducible complexity angle, however.
If ideologue X and ideologue Y both want the same level of change to society, but ideologue X can make some small, incremental changes to demonstrate their value, and ideologue Y has to fundamentally restructure society to see any results, you should let ideologue X make a few small changes to demonstrate his ideas are good ones.
I agree, especially in practice that's probably how you'd do it instead of slicing a country up into radically different country types. But I think some division to do experiments would be good still, for when X and Y both have small changes to implement but in opposite directions.
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This was one of the original ideas behind the United States, that each state would be a separate little petri dish and people could 'vote with their feet' for the policies they liked best. Maryland was for Catholics, Pennsylvania for Quakers, Massachusetts for Lawyers and Sodomites, etc
If you didn't like the policies your state was implementing, you'd go to one you liked better. Or failing that, just start a new one (like the LDS did in Utah).
We are hilariously far removed from that idea, definitely because of the civil war, but I think also maybe in large part because of the fin-de-siecle rise of 'pop culture' where everyone in the United States began (to some degree) consuming the same media
Anyway, it was good idea. Thanks for the good post
There is an issue when some of the petri dishes go down a route the rest of the country finds abhorrent, like slavery or crimes against humanity. I think against that, there needs to be some democratic calibration of the nation's values, and some careful questions posed to prediction markets about what initiatives are worth taking. And if a region rebels against the system and starts doing things against the nation's fundamental values, hopefully the rest of the nation hasn't neglected their militaries and can put a stop to it.
Doesn't this betray the point of allowing different systems?
What determines the nation's values considering your hypothetical? Since such values might need to be established and maybe through time a system with condemned values, might perform better.
And how do you stop areas which have similar ideologies from ganging up on groups they are ideologically opposed to? Even if their way would work better, if left to their own devices.
For example, different form of antinationalists materialists (lets say socialists and pro market types), which also are more made up of certain ethnic groups, ganging up and utilizing mass migration policies in their own area and freedom of movement to help take over against an area that is more conservative, more nationalist made up of a different ethnic group because they are intolerant of this arrangement and consider it evil, fascistic, and also have some ethnic hostility towards them. Groups being offended and finding something abhorent based on their ideology is a very real possibility. This idea of military used against what is abhorent, how does it avoid the states from fighting a big ideological war> Just like the focus on ideology and countries captured by ideologies, has helped inflame antipathies and lead to real war and conflict in our own history.
Wouldn't a part that strongly identifies with an ideology, be motivated to find a way to impose it to other areas?
Actually what kind of ideologies are chosen could very well determine what ideologies dominate through such dynamics of what are the dominant similarities between them which can be different if different ideologies are chosen. Once ideologies have a foothold they would work together and evolve, not based on prediction markets, but by such ideologies finding true believers who further modify them.
My prediction of this system is that some kind of war for dominance of ideologies is more likely than some enlightened ruler disciplining this system and being easily in control, as in some videogame where you can push the slider a little to the left and a little to the right.
Through some sort of democratic process.
If ultimately a super majority of the population decides they really like slavery or genocide, I don't think really any system has a good defense against that. I'm kind of relying on slavery and genocide actually being bad ideas, so a system that rewards good ideas won't have anyone do those things.
It does take buy in from people and leaders. That's why I proposed the hypothetical of a good spirited monarch who wants to do better, and this being the solution I think the good hearted monarch should arrive at. In a scenario more resembling real life, I don't think any real world executive actually has the power to implement such experiments without also getting the masses and other elites to buy in. Ultimately people have to be willing to prove the success of their ideology through creating good conditions on the ground instead of conquering their neighbors, which is a limitation, but I don't think there's a way around that. But I don't think this is a fatal flaw; it's decently rare in developed countries at least for one province to try to impose their ideology on another province by force.
In real life, I'd really just first try to encourage prediction markets more. For every important decision the government makes, such as passing bills or spending 300 million on building an aid pier for Palestine, I'd want there to be a few prediction markets trying to measure whether it's a good idea. My hypothetical was more prompted by thinking about what I'd want to do in a time like 1920, when there were many ideologies and little evidence of what I'd actually do.
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Another week, another Tucker interview, another transcription of a juicy part by yours truly. I promise, this is unusual, I haven't listened to two in a row, at all, ever.
This week is Jeffrey Sachs. The part below is just after 1:44.
That was the first mention of Israel, that I could recall, but the whole conversation is about Ukraine, Russia, Putin, and NATO. It's not exactly new to me, but it's refreshing to hear someone so clearly say that this is a war of choice, and the choice is being made by the USA, and their puppet states involved in NATO.
And that was all before any discussion of COVID. tl;dl, it's obviously from a lab, we (USA) pretty clearly funded it, and Fauci has been running the germ warfare branch of the DoD for decades. Which lab, and how is unknown, but, in his own words:
Great interview, and I'm glad that Tucker has twitter dot com to host his stuff, rather than be consigned to the fringes of the internet.
Could we not turn this thread into /r/Tucker?
More effort than this, please.
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God forbid a topical post on the CW issues of the day.
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I don't understand the objection to posting and discussing hours-long interviews posted by a major journalist. Argument to moderation? But it seems proportional to me to have a bias towards sources which are disseminating the most information. You could similarly point out that 100% of themotte.org content is discussed on the internet, why not have an in-person or telephone portion? Because that's the medium that works.
I'm just not crazy about it becoming a regular thing. If Tucker becomes an important part of the frame everything gets discussed in this thread, this place is going to go down hill, fast.
Personally, I don't mind the occasional post that's actually topical wedged between the endless word walls about San Francisco city council zoning proposals that occupy 80% of our timeline (which is not that busy these days anyway, just sayin)
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Downvote, collapse the thread and move on.
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I'm going to post things I find interesting, you're welcome to keep your thoughts to yourself if you don't like it.
Or you could just make your own themed thread for talking about Tucker. Meanwhile, I'm 'going to post things' I'm thinking
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Didn't we just have a bunch of complaints about the lack of movement and discussion in the main threads?
Yes, I was bitchin about it last week and made a big list of things nobody had talked about
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I don't think it's accurate at all to suggest that the war in Ukraine is directly attributable to the US. Certainly, the actions of no country takes place in a vacuum - and US foreign policy has, I think, worked to encourage the start of the war and now works to extend it, and that the war is mostly to the benefit of the US and of no other country in the world. But the chief drivers of the war are Russia in choosing to attack and Ukraine in choosing to defend themselves. I think the idea that the war would just sputter out otherwise is absurd. Both nations clearly have strong interests at stake. I do not believe it is really possible for a hegemon, even the US, to create a war between others ex nihilo. The state of Ukraine, whatever it's merits, is clearly capable of inducing people to fight and die for it. That war might not last very long without NATO support, and we'd see more dying and less fighting, but it would happen.
I think there are parts of the war in Ukraine that are attributable to the US but they are far more near-term than the expansion of NATO. Russia was already de facto at war with Ukraine. That needs to be considered in any question, because Russia didn't start a new war in 2022, just massively escalate an existing one. Why did Russia choose that moment, instead of any other, to escalate? The most probable explanation to justify the timing is the spike in oil prices. It has since been weirdly memory-holed that the oil and gas price spike predates the escalation of the war in favour of the claim that the war triggered the spike. The cause for the spike was a long-term consequence of low investment in fossil fuel extraction due to environmental policies, and the medium-term consequence of the oil and gas glut that happened in 2020, which reduced production, slamming into the rise in consumption as economies got un-shuttered. The US, in part, is responsible for shuttering global economies in 2020. High oil and gas prices motivate Russia to make a move in two ways. First, by making sanctions more expensive to implement. Second, by providing the government a big budget surplus that might be put to use. However, judging by the initial invasion strategy (Russia basically trying to win in 3 days) that this was less intended to outright fund a war of attrition, and more intended to soothe over the costs of integrating captured territory into a victorious Russia while deterring sanctions long enough to make Russia's victory a fait accompli.
While it isn't quite fair to describe Russia as a Chinese client state, Putin starting a war without Xi's approval was likely to go badly. Xi didn't want the Beijing winter Olympics disrupted by a war. Putin announces that he is recognising the independence of the DPR/LPR the day after the closing ceremony and tanks cross the border three days after that.
Putin could have taken the decision to escalate at any time since Q4 2019, and between the pandemic and the need to keep China on side he ends up acting on that decision at the first opportunity. Personally, I think he took the decision shortly before publishing On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians in July 2021.
I go long stretches these days forgetting the olympics are still a thing, they really dropped the ball on that one this past decade
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There's about 8 years between the initial invasion and the escalation. The Winter Olympics would only be a factor for a small proportion of that period. And the main country responsible for disrupting them was China itself, with it's continued use of covid restrictions.
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Simple answers should ring alarm bells. Opinions framed as The Truth(tm) should have them blaring. Sachs' Ukraine comments seems to live in same epistemic universe as John Mearsheimer - expressed in his 2015 talk here, which subsequently went incredibly viral during the full invasion. So it's definitely an opinion and not The Truth. It's hard to understate the popular appeal of Mearsheimer's message (its arguably the most rapidly and widely circulated wonky political lecture in human history). Mearsheimer could be correct. I think his arguments about NATO expansion are best rebutted by the archives here, this article here, with a quick overview here
For a great steelman of Mearsheimer POV I highly recommend the rapid and very accessible 2018 book by contemporary Stephen M Walt: "The Hell of Good Intentions". I found it largely persuasive on many accounts. (FWIW, with regard specifically to "not one inch east" I think it's 60% myth, 80% rhetoric, and 100% irrelevant because no binding paperwork was ever signed, let alone with an extant entity. NATO expansion in general is more contentions IMO).
I also think those the Palestinians are animated by more than mere terrestrial concerns. Sachs stating that all Israel needs to do is assure peace and statehood is outrageous. Asserting such a wild opinion is True only redounds to my incredulity. AFAIK the intractability of the Israel / Palestine conflict is well earned.
If Israel abandoned the settlements in the west bank and ceded a strip between there and gaza to make a contiguous polity, it would not stop 100% of the Palestinians who are pissed off that Israel exists at all, but it would surely take the wind out of their sails enough to make Jihad unfashionable
I desperately want to agree with you. My proposal for something fair looks nearly identical to yours. However, the impetus for jihadism (and the settlements) is not motivated by practical, worldly concerns. Jihadists (and settlers IME) frequently describe their motivations in religious terms. They claim certainty the creator of the universe, giver of eternal life, and sole reason for existing, would be pleased if they die for the cause of removing the Jews from Israel (provided the Jews don't pay the jizya).
The iraqi people were saying similar things, then we carpet bombed them with mcdonalds and porn, now you don't hear much about Iraq anymore
(I'm being cheeky but I really do think a good contiguous chunk of land would take all the wind out of the Palestinians' sails)
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Israel ceded all settlements in Gaza and exhumed Jews buried there before fully pulling out in 2005. The Gazans elected Hamas and nineteen years later, here we are.
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Lost all credibility for me when he said that of there was a Palestinian state that the fighting would stop. "From the river to the sea Palestine will be free" means the entire area of what is now israel will be "free" of Jews. And where are these Jews supposed to go? It says in hamas's 1988 charter where they are supposed to go (to their graves) and they have never changed their tune. When Fatah renounced terrorism, Hamas became the most popular party among the people of Gaza, and they won the 2006 Palestinian elections on a platform of terror and hatred. As Douglas Murray said, it there was a Palestinian state it would be a Nazi state.
...Where are the Palestinians supposed to go?
Exactly where they are. Besides some settlement building in the west bank, which no one in Gaza actually cares about, no one's making them go anywhere.
How are you responding if you've blocked me, genuinely curious
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Where were Nazis supposed to go after World War II?
You want to send Palestinians to Argentina?
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Ideally they would be welcome in a muslim country. They could go to Egypt. No wait Egypt has a fortified barrier with Gaza -- more heavily fortified than their border with Israel -- to keep them out of Egypt. They could immigrate to Lebanon. No wait they were kicked out of Lebanon for inciting terrorism. They could go to Jordan. No wait they were kicked out of Jordan for inciting terrorism. Maybe they could to Kuwait. No wait they were kicked out of Kuwait for inciting terrorism. I'd say they can go to hell but they would probably be kicked out of there too.
Speaking of going to hell, do you reject Christ?
What is the point of this question? I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or weirdly evangelizing, but make your point clearly, if you have one.
Wasn't being sarcastic, or 'weirdly evangelizing' - my point was perfectly obvious as part of the public conscious. There is no way to the father but through Christ. If you actively reject Christ, you are going to hell.
This isn't the place for evangelizing.
If you consider that evangelizing, instead of bothering me, tell /u/NelsonRushton off for suggesting that Palestinians would probably be kicked out of hell. I wasn't the one to raise to topic
If one person is 'allowed' to bring up a topic (hell) other people are 'allowed' to participate
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I'm not sure if he's full of shit and just saying what sounds like folksy ASMR to increase his brand value or he genuinely believes this. I'm also not sure which one is worse.
I want to think anyone with even a cursory understanding of international politics would not be so hopelessly, pitifully naïve. There are real, irreconcilable differences between groups that cannot be assuaged by arriving at common truth, even if we could agree on a common truth. If Biden told the truth, he wouldn't be President. If Putin believed Biden, he wouldn't be the President of Russia. If everyone in America believed what everyone else said, there would have been dozens of civil wars, not the one.
The hypocrisy and lies as much as we may dislike them are features, not bugs. If we actually did what we said and took action based on what we believed to be true, we might live in a better world. But we might not, and there'd be piles and piles of skulls on the way there.
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The Ukraine war is a war of choice for Russia. I guess it’s a war of choice for Ukraine- they could in theory capitulate and the fighting would end, although no doubt the Russian army would sack a few cities and there’d be some terrorism. But the USA doesn’t control Russia or Ukraine. We can stop paying for Ukraine’s war effort, but there’s no indication it would get them to stop fighting as opposed to just going all Berlin, 1945 every few miles. And even with the Russian army’s apparent willingness to turn cities into Grozny, it’s going to take time to grind through that.
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I agree with Sachs general sentiment that the US government has deceived the people far too much with disastrous consequences.
I'm not sure I buy Sach's argument that if we "told the truth" about Ukraine or Israel there would be no war. Maybe less US intervention or involvement. Based on my limited knowledge and understanding maybe Putin wouldn't have invaded Ukraine to try to create proxy barrier, but Israel I doubt there could ever be a peaceful 2 state solution. Pretty sure Israel has tried multiple times throughout it's history to do exactly that and each time it was rejected by the Palestinians.
There is a question to be considered about if a government should actually tell the citizens 100% of the truth. It's easy to say we should always be truthful as a matter of principle, but there is a good reason lying exists. Most people lie, or at least only tell the partial truth, to people close to them all the time, and sometimes that lying is done with good intentions. But you know what they say about good intentions.
Government deception of recent times have done a tremendous net negative to the population, but is that because they didn't tell the truth or because they didn't tell the truth about the wrong things? Could there exist information where lying about it or not releasing it would be to the benefit of the people of the country? One example could be that a nation is engaging in conflict with another nation and lies to its own citizens to prevent crucial information from being passed on to its adversaries. Is lying to the population acceptable in times of war or conflict? And the follow-up question, is a nation as powerful as the US ever not in conflict with a nation like China which holds radically different political and cultural views? Should the US allow China to grow even stronger and bigger, or should it engage in economic and political battles to check its growth?
Edit: Edited to replace "lying" with "deception" when appropriate.
When has the US government lied about foreign policy in the last decade or so? The last major incident I can think of was the runup to the Iraq war, but that was an exception that proves the rule.
Are you just using "lying" here as a stand-in for "position I disagree with" or "unrealistically rosy assessment"?
I'm going to use the definition from John Mearsheimer's 'Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics'
There are actual technical lies, where a person makes a statement they know is false while hoping others believe it to be true. But there are also situations where you disingenuously arrange facts to tell a fictitious story to imply something is true when you know the implied conclusion is not true. He also points out spinning, where "a person telling a story emphasizes certain facts and links them together in ways that play to his advantage, while, at the same time, downplaying or ignoring inconvenient facts" and concealment, "which involves withholding information that might undermine or weaken one’s position."
What's related about all three is that the goal is deception - essentially the goal is to prevent the other party from knowing the full truth. Spinning and concealment are far more common, but the end of goal of deception is the same.
Historically speaking, the US government has used lies in matters of foreign policy. Well-known historical examples:
In more recent times, you can find no shortage of critics arguing the presidents have lied about matters of foreign policy:
The more recent the event in question, the less likely we are to know if there was a lie or not. Whether these specific examples are actually lies or fabrications from critics I'm not really going to dive into. But it's easy to find critics arguing there have been lies.
Mearsheimer also points out that he had difficulty finding examples of international lying between states compared to governments lying to their own people. He argues that governments are more likely to lie to their own citizens than to other states on matters of foreign policy. It is difficult for countries to lie to one another because there is not a lot of trust between them, especially when it is in regard to security. It's far easier to lie to your own citizens because there is more trust between governments and their citizens than between governments that are enemies of each other.
In his own words:
So when it comes to evaluating recent US actions on matters of foreign, we really have to ask ourselves and analyze what the intention was. Were they in the interest of the American people, or was it something else, like drumming up support for an election, or selfish monetary interests, or appeasing just a specific lobby group? I don't see governments ever giving up the option to lie to their citizens especially on matters of foreign policy, because of its strategic utility. It seems public reaction to these lies depends on the end result. If the outcome of telling the lie is good, the leader gets a free pass with little to no consequence. That's why Vietnam is heavily criticized while WWII is seen in a positive light. My current perception is that the outcome of recent foreign policy actions of the US government has largely been negative with little benefit for the American people, and those have largely been justified via lies and deception.
This is a pretty long, thought out comment. Thank you for engaging.
I'm familiar with Mearsheimer's work. I've argued against the man's perception of "Russia invading Ukraine is entirely the USA's fault" and was exposed by proxy to his stuff on lying.
Conflating "lying" with "spinning" is a big old motte and bailey. When you accuse someone (or an institution) of lying, that's a quite aggressive claim of something that's clearly wrong. Like 1984's "we've always been at war with Eastasia" sort of thing. Bush and Powell lying about Iraqi WMD's was a good example here, as it became clear after the fact that they were pulling stuff out of their asses, and it served as a major part of plunging us into a pointless war. Spinning, by contrast, is something that everyone does all the time. You can accuse the government of spinning facts all you want, and you'd be 100% correct, but you didn't do that, likely because you knew it lacked the same punch as an accusation of "lying".
Your examples given in the last two decades amount to very little. The link on Biden came in the runup to the Ukraine war, when a lot of people thought the US was needlessly saber-rattling by saying Russia would invade. Of course, Russia did invade a few weeks after that article was published. Other than that, it gives an example of a US strike in Afghanistan which it claimed was legitimate until the NYT wrote some articles, and then it said "oh, maybe not". The examples on Trump are likewise lacking. Yeah, he presented himself as a peace president while actively throwing a bit of gasoline on some international fires, but again that's pretty mild. The stuff on Obama is just some spinning of the benefits of the Iran Nuclear Deal. Again, calling it "spin" is fine, but I wouldn't call any of those "lies".
Bush and Powell weren’t lying about WMDs. They honestly believed they were there.
Was there a bunch of motivated reasoning and shoddy analysis of poor evidence that got them (and many others) to hold those beliefs? Yes.
The US intel community failed to resist “spin” on various reports and assessments, but it was basically taken for granted that Saddam had had a WMD program before and still was pursuing one in 2003. There wasn’t definitive evidence that he didn’t, and there was crappy evidence that he did. Motivated reasoning and the emotional environment after 9/11 did the rest.
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Mearsheimer's work came out in 2011 and he sticks mostly to examples that took decades to find the truth of the matter because it's a bad look for a government to be caught lying in the technical definition of a lie. Iraq is his most recent prominent example in his book and that's because that was such a tremendous fuck up. Do you think the government is going to release information that sheds light on recent events anytime soon unless it helps them push an agenda or policy and is so far removed from the party in power to resolve them of any legitimate criticism that would follow?
And furthermore, governments are now more sophisticated in how they propagate information to the population. Proving someone told a lie is extremely difficult because the defendant in question can always claim they thought they were telling the truth and just had the wrong facts. You'd need to be a certain level of incompetence to have a documented recording of you admitting you know something was a lie.
No, I didn't. After reading your comment I'll acknowledge I just had poor logic and was not using the word "lying" in a strict, legal-lawyer-like definition. In my head I went the opposite of truth is lies. The government is not telling the truth, therefore they are lying. I'll concede this is a technical got-ya that I'm not ready to defend because I'm mixing a lot of sentiments in that statement I made. In recent years I think the government lied about Covid, they're lying about the state of the economy to the people by saying it's better than it is with tactics such as redefining how inflation is measured, they perpetuate lies such as commemorating George Floyd and playing defense for the BLM movement, they lied about the Trump Russia collusion. You asked specifically for foreign policy examples and I don't consider myself particularly knowledgeable on matters of foreign policy.
That was me literally searching on Google and just copy-pasting the 1st example I got for each president. You asked for examples of lies in regard to policy, I did provide and then you dismiss some of them as just saying those are "mild". Are you looking specifically for a fully exhaustive list of other examples that was as disastrous as Iraq? The government is never going to fuck up on a level of Iraq ever again if they have half a brain. As much as people like to fling shit about our politicians as being incompetent idiots they're not actual literal idiots and most of them have higher IQ than the average population. They're also skilled with words and framing which is why many people find politicians to be slimy weasels.
Look, I appreciate you helping me better refine my position with more accurate words, but at this point we are just talking about technical definitions and I'm not really interested in having that conversation any further, especially since you reframed it specifically in the context of foreign policy and then dismiss some examples of actual lies as "mild". I'll edit my comment to say "deception" instead of lies. Happy? I don't think it substantially changes the core of my argument one way or the other. I'm still going to choose to believe the government is lying to the people and that we won't know the truth on many of these topics until decades later.
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Just offhand, government officials bragged publicly about lying to Trump in order to get away with disobeying his lawful orders regarding troop deployments. Does that count?
how much work is "within the last decade" doing here? We're currently discussing how government agents routinely break the law with impunity, illegally concealing their actions and deliberations from federal record-keeping, and have been for decades. To the extent that these deliberate attempts to keep the public in the dark fail, they usually take years to fail, and more years for the failures to become general knowledge. It's entirely possible that so long as you maintain a "within the last decade" standard, you can ignore an entirely arbitrary amount of malfeasance indefinitely. In fact, that conversation is itself about an example of the government lying to the public about an extremely important matter, in order to cover up their own involvement!
How do you disambiguate "unrealistically rosy assessment" from "lie"? Take Afghanistan, which started about two and a half decades ago. Were the twenty years of official pronouncements about that conflict "a lie", or were they "unrealistically rosy assessments"? Take the pullout specifically, which was less than a decade ago; no one has actually explained how such a clusterfuck occurred, or who was actually responsible for it. We have every reason to believe that particular disaster was the fault of specific actions taken by specific people, and those actions and people should be readily identifiable through the reams of paperwork the commands in question generate. And yet, nothing. It's just a thing that sorta happened, no idea why, no idea who, pay no attention, move along. Is the claim that the pullout wasn't really anyone's fault a lie? If not, why not?
Is Fauci and his underlings covering up the evidence of a lab leak a lie? If not, why not? Is the claim that six feet of separation or mask mandates or the safety and efficacy of vaccines being a matter of settled science a lie? If not, why not?
And this isn't even getting into lies laundered through private entities with the tacit support of the government, which in my view are still government lies. Does none of this register to you?
Trump's underlings lying to him to avoid implementing orders they didn't like is a clear example of insubordination, but the comment I quoted was specifically about the US government lying to the American people.
We can go to two decades if you like, but I don't think it changes much. It became clear within a few years that Bush's claims of Iraqi WMDs were BS. Nothing since really comes close to that.
I'm not sure what parts of the Afghan pullout would be classified as lies. It was handled about as well is it could have been, with 2 exceptions: 1) the Pentagon predicted it would take months for the Afghan government to fall instead of days, and 2) that one suicide bombing that occurred. #1 was pretty clearly not a lie since it's quite hard to gauge peoples' willingness to fight. The Pentagon overestimated it Afghanistan, and then underestimated it in Ukraine a few months later. Putin also misjudged it in that case. It's a tough thing to get right. Importantly, nothing about the big picture in Afghanistan was ever really hidden from the public. Some officials or generals would come out from time to time and make statements claiming "it's getting better, trust us", but anyone could look at the evidence and see it clearly wasn't. The NYT and other news organizations had a slow but steady drumbeat explaining how bad things were.
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Most government lies are laundered through various black boxes of plausible deniability. I believe the biggest problem the government is facing right now is that trust in institutions has (rightfully) fallen so low that wary citizens are starting to look at any government accounting as plausibly deniable bullshit.
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Lying and not releasing it are very different things.
Yes, but the end goal is deception. Lies in regard to foreign policy seem to be held to a different level of standard than lies on domestic policy or lies in general.
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This is my take as well. I was surprised he mentioned Israel, because the conversation had been elsewhere. Some partition of Ukraine seems inevitable now, but Israel will fight to the last.
Sachs' version of tell the truth isn't reveal all secrets, but to be honest about our past dealings and future intentions. In this he bemoans the obvious duplicity of western promises to the Soviet Union. Furthermore it's about public health, too. If you're going to tell me there's a good reason lying exists when it comes to the government telling me about public health, then I don't want to hear it. Honestly I barely read the rest of your post because it's the same arguments that got us here.
Less lying. A whole lot less lying. From everyone, especially if you think it's for the common good, I don't believe you and don't want to hear it.
As for China, the worst thing Nixon did was open China. The worst thing Clinton did was let them in WTO. Now we can't build ships for our navy any more than we can clothe ourselves, or furnish our homes, and everything is imported from elsewhere. But I'm not going to let the specter of the Orient let the lying fedgov off the hook for their lying ways.
On the matter of public health there aren't any strong arguments I've seen in support that those lies that benefited the public on the matters of public health. Maybe someone could steelman their position because I can't think of any. I was thinking more in terms of geopolitical conflicts between nations.
This better clarifies his position and I am in general agreement with that approach.
Honestly you don't have to mention this. I'm just asking questions to facilitate discussion and to better understand why governments behave the way they do, and if there is actually any value in doing so. You might not want to hear the reason, but I do, and I'm sure others do as well. Isn't that the point of this forum? To shed light and try to understand the opposition? Maybe there actually is some value in what they have to say. If not, then it better equips you (or anybody else reading) being able to point out the flaws in their reasoning.
I get your frustration, I really do. The government's fearmongering of and lies regarding Covid was an absolute disaster and I still feel the ramifications today. I feel like it robbed me of 4 years of my life, and that my life is worse today than it was at the start of 2020. But I still want to understand the line of reasoning and support of government lies (not necessarily of the response to Covid, but in general).
To fool your enemies, you must first fool your friends - this is a proverb for a reason. Now you may personally disagree with this as a matter of principle and refuse to engage with such an idea, but you cannot deny the utility it has. I think one could make a strong argument in support of such tactics in times of war. If one agrees with the argument, then it goes to reason there is some line where the cost to benefit justifies or denies it's usage. I don't think refusing to acknowledge its utility just because it can then lead to a discussion of where and when its justified is appropriate because most of the world is not black and white and most behavior of people isn't black and white.
I'm trying to recall who said it but the general idea is that the most dangerous type of people who believe they are doing something for the good of humanity. I think there are people who would vote for or be in support of governments lying to the population if they believed it was for the common good. We see people defending the government's response to Covid to this day. Getting mad at these people won't get them to change their minds. The ones that do are just as susceptible to shifting their feelings back with an equally emotional response from the other side. I seek to hone my arguments so that I can at least convince those who are willing to listen.
Sure, let's hold the government accountable for their past actions. But we live in the reality we live in. What would be the best approach to China now? Personally, I think the US could benefit from not playing world police for a decade and just focusing on solving our internal problems. But what are the potential consequences of that?
My belief is that the world can only be mostly peaceful if there is a significantly powerful force that is so powerful that it makes it not worth it for a foreign nation to cause war. In that case, I'd rather that force be the US and not China. The reason we don't have wide-scale World War 1 and 2 style conflicts anymore is because of mutually assured destruction and the fact that most of the world is now aligned with US and US interests and values. But if human history teaches us anything, it's that if someone can bully someone else out of their resources, they will do that. On a micro-scale, the only reason we don't have large portions of the population stealing from each other is because society (with the use of physical force such as police) keeps us in check. As soon as we started defunding police crime went up. I believe the same applies to larger scales. Remove the US-aligned hegemony and we will start to see more international conflicts. This is a belief I haven't really honed, so I'm open to criticism and a better alternative theory regarding minimizing international conflicts.
What are you going to do about international conflicts on which the USA plays a role at causing? Surely, you would want USA to dissuade other countries from causing trouble but be critical when USA itself causes trouble?
Do you think, we should see all the warmongering USA is responsible both in wars and including coups, funding extremist rebels as in Syria, as something that shouldn't be challenged and an acceptable sacrifice for the greater good? Because this way of thinking is exploitable and will lead to more bad behavior by the warmongering, CIA coups parts of USA.
Including those who deliberately might want conflict with other great powers so that they can be defeated and there would be American hegemony over them. If MAD is part of world peace, then that MAD includes the existence of rival powers too. Now, I don't think the way is to turn a blind eye to China, etc, but neither is to treat the American foreign policy establishment as the good guys.
I think in your model of world peace, you should not neglect to consider how American imperialist deeds, which include funding their own color revolutions/rebels should be restrained, because they actually have been the more warmongering active player around the globe.
Of course, it is also legitimate to treat the warmongering and threat of more, by non American powers as a problem.
Some part of the previous peace, relates to a different more friendly attitute of American foreign policy towards countries like Russia and China. And moreover, the fact that China was weaker, growing and not perceived as a threat while China it self also became more brazen. The Ukraine issue has been constantly debated, but certainly the Russians did have their own aggressive moves in Ukraine, in addition to the oust of their guy there from a western backed coup (with people like McCain openly supporting it). It seems to me that both the USA and the Chinese and Russians became more aggressive.
An aggressive American world dominance hegemonist perspective that seeks to dismember rival powers like Russia and China and seeks their submission as countries is itself war causing, and possibly ww3 causing. If there weren't nukes, it might have lead us there already. But international peace would require a general deescalation, not just from the USA, of course.
Sure, these are good points you bring up to criticize America, but what is the better alternative? When we consider long periods of peace, it's accomplished under a hegemony of powerful nations aligned in goals/culture or a singular empire.
I'm not defending US in all of its actions and agree there is plenty to criticize in what they have done on the global scale. But I don't think any of these things really addresses the core of my argument. The mutually assured destruction is an alternative to relative peace without needing global hegemony and even then plenty of conflict was done via proxies AKA the Cold War. It prevented full-scale war between the US and the Soviet Union. Personally, I think peace achieved via MAD is worse than peace achieved via a global hegemony. For all the wars that have existed from 1945 to today, in comparison to eras throughout human history, we exist in a relatively peaceful era.
Indeed, we should strive to be vigilant and not use this line of argument to just absolve the USA of what it has done, especially when it has negative outcomes. At the same time, it doesn't mean we shouldn't aim to preserve a powerful global presence. The best argument against focusing on that currently is that America has enough domestic problems to deal with. But it doesn't mean we should abandon our position either.
When we look at US-caused international conflicts, we have to consider, whether the primary purpose is to maintain and grow the American hegemony in service of maintaining global peace, or if that is being used as an excuse with some other primary motive in mind (fund the military-industrial complex, drum up support for an upcoming election, etc.). If the former, I think that would warrant a legitimate criticism about the pitfalls of relative peace achieved through this method and find ways to account for it. But if the latter, that's not really a criticism of the model. People will always use existing values and models to justify whatever they want to do, but it doesn't mean that it's wrong.
What do you think would be a better path to a more peaceful world, and what can be done to maintain it?
Edit: Not a response to you directly, more of my thoughts concerning people who say the US spends too much on the military and then act like we would have world peace if America just drastically cut its military budget. I think there is legitimate criticism to be had of the military-industrial complex to take into consideration, but I also feel like many people with that sentiment take this era of relative peace for granted. Do they not read history? Do they not consider human nature?
Yes, America has instigated wars with little to no benefit and should be rightly criticized. But this does not mean the military is useless or that having a military presence globally is a strictly negative thing. I acknowledge that if I wasn't an American and a foreigner, I would have reason to want to break the American-led global hegemony, especially if I was for example Chinese. But I'm an American, and I am more favorable to a world under American values than a world under Russian values or a world under Chinese values. I'm not so naive to believe that you can have hundreds of relatively equally powerful countries acting independently peacefully. What would stop one country from just using force to take the resources of another? Sanctions? Their "image"? Propaganda on the citizens to make them not want to fight? You only need a few people to maintain an army that can suppress people. These things have to be backed up by military force otherwise it's futile.
I am for maximizing human potential and development, and the countries that aligned with American values post-WWII saw tremendous economic growth and development. Now one could make arguments about how countries that didn't had their growth artificially restricted by American policies against its adversaries or how the growth of America and its allies came by extracting value unfairly from its adversaries, but for the person that is born under a richer country, does that really matter? Countries that aligned with the US and adopted positions favorable to the US are far, far better off than those that didn't. Just look at North Korea versus South Korea. If I were born in a foreign nation, I would be extremely grateful if my country chose to lick the boots of the American imperialist ambitions some 50-60 years ago and benefited greatly from it, than if they didn't and my country ended up in poverty instead.
What use is my country's culture and tradition if the average GDP per capita is $1,000 and I have to live as a farmer when it could've had a GDP per capita of $30,000 and my quality of life is vastly superior? Why do so many people leave their countries to try to come to the US if culture should matter more than economic growth and prosperity? I don't particularly care for preserving the culture of every other people in the world, especially when said culture is an active detriment to the growth and development of those people. This doesn't mean I think we should just make all of the world America, just that we shouldn't go out of our way to preserve existing cultures. And just for good measure, I'm going to repeat myself that this doesn't mean America is absolved of all its wrongdoings, or that we should be careful in adopting this perspective without criticism, but I don't see a better alternative that would realistically work without fundamentally changing human nature. I'm going to make this claim - that the world today for the average person is far better due to America taking a global position than it would have been if America chose to stay neutral during WWII and take a far more isolationist approach.
I challenged you directly if you think you should excuse blatantly immoral and destructive conduct under the idea that US hegemony is good. It seems to me that you want to do that and are just trying to promote it based on arguing that US hegemony is good actually. But you also say you accept restraint and criticism. And it doesn't seem that you really do in a substantial manner. How should current policy change if it means you accept that there are areas it has acted wrongly.
There are a few problems with this. Which is that destroying other countries and causing civil wars to cause more US hegemony will result in far more devastation.
And part of the peace has been because of existence of other powers and not adopting fully culturally marxist agenda. When Japan open its borders and follows more the cultural marxist agenda the result wouldn't be good for the Japanese but worse. Moreover, the existence of an other, helps restrain predation by Americans against their allies, and now seems less so.
Anyway, a USA that is against the immoral conduct of other countries, and restraints it self from instigating more trouble, will work better. Part of my solution includes a push for general deescalation that includes non Americans also doing that through negotiations and attempts to diplomacy being part of the process. I am not suggesting that the USA should stop having a military, but I do think that the neocons being highly representative of what I am critical of a criminal conduct, as a faction are removed from any influence.
When people like Bret Stephens arguing to replace the white working, this isn't good because higher GDP, because this agenda also comes along with massive redistribution, and quotas at expense of targeted group. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-09-30/how-corporate-america-kept-its-diversity-promise-a-week-of-big-take
The package offered by the modern GAE is also unattractive to many African countries because it comes with prioritising submission to cultural far leftist agenda. Chinese investment with less lecturing is more attractive. So, one of my alternatives is to abadon that and ideology of woke/neocon types to be abadoned. However, I don't think ideology should be absent from global politics. There is a value in certain human rights, and want those genuine rights to be protected. But the general cultural marxist conception of rights should be thrown to the garbage. And we don't need people trying indirect justifications due to GDP. It is both bad in its own right, but also alienates people who would be otherwise more positive towards USA influence.
Oh, and having a modern economy, and not aligning with American warmongering are different things. I don't want a world that doesn't trade with the USA, but one that doesn't support belligerence. Some of your rhetoric leads us to a more reductive path and makes it harder to face specific issues. Moves us away from clarity and conflates things that shouldn't be conflated. And it is anachronistic, not taking into account the massive amounts of investment that a more pro chinese aligned block is seeing.
European countries benefited much more when they traded and had more positive relations with Russia, China and USA. Being overly aligned with a neocon aggressive, arrogant USA is not a move for better economy but one were you suffer consequences at your expense. Although some protectionism is also reasonable to protect their own industries, so I am not free trade but pro trade against against trying to strongly suppress and stop trade and enact new cold wars.
In regards to American interests, there is an issue of interests of foreign lobbies, of weapon manufacturers, and of people with ideological obsessions that don't fulfill even American interests. There is also an issue of higher cost than they are worth. Much of American warmongering, has reduced American prestige, and USA can be a more credible pusher for world peace, by avoiding doing such actions, and retaining influence as the most powerful member of an actual alliance, where America treats other countries part of its alliance as allies and respects their rights. So, I genuinely think that people whose agenda is ethnically destructive are immoral on their own rights, and ironically help damage Pax Americana. They are incentivizing non Americans to correctly resist on grounds of their human rights to exist and self determination So, I would suggest you compromise and abadon trying to excuse such agendas. The cultural marxist agendas are irredeemably extreme and destructive.
This idea that with rhetoric and excuses, anything will be tolerated and people are going to accept any and all arrangements that are destructive against them, is simply not true. Hubris doesn't solve decline but accelerates it. So, a pax americana is going to rightfully end for good, or as you think for ill, if modern USA is a cultural marxist very arrogant country that has moved to a much more radical path than its previous conduct towards its allies were it was willing to compromise with the existence of nation state democracies. Indeed peace, becomes impossible under such an extreme USSA, because it promotes aggressive policy.
So, to summarize:
There is nothing wrong with an influential USA in a pro USA alliance, provided this USA avoids its substantial own bad behavior, and respects the rights of its allies which includes not trying to impose ethnically destructive and other social agendas.
There is plenty of wrong with much of American warmongering which has been destructive both economically and otherwise and it is of a different nature than countries being part of NATO or having some ties with the USA.
There is something wrong with an attempt by the USA to make the entire world aligned with it, and to succeed in destroying rival powers, will come with enormous blood and destruction.
It is better to have a multipolar world that collaborates and tries to some extend to share some principles on issues of opposing say invasions. Where good faith behavior makes it easier for principles to be taken seriously and there is more win-win entanglement. A connected world order in such ways. Trade, negotiation are key aspects of this, and there is probably a value in different blocs aligning to oppose the worst deeds of other blocs and restraining each other. So, I am not arguing here in favor of the disapperance of USA as an influential player.
Although its modern moral decline and rising extremism, is an enormous problem that needs to be corrected and not something to just dismiss. It is a massive elephant to the room of how USA became a much more radical power with its embassies promoting very extreme and destructive agenda. Although I also don't think that Russia and China with their own third world nationalist elements are an adequate solution. Cultural marxist ideology is a gigantic problem, and not part of a healthy alliance and the only solution is to be suppressed, and those elements with such ideology to not be allowed to have influence. Including outside the USA, GAE being about more than just USA. Indeed, ironically cultural marxism with its own antiwestern, anti the peoples of the alliance propaganda, helps promote Russia and China and non western countries as alternatives. Why should people support self hating west over nonwestern blocks, if they buy into this ideology? Including those outside the west? The contradictions can't be sustained by just the same tired propaganda of ww2, pretending opposition are far left, far right, promoting only the threat of Russia, and China, or claiming it is economically superior path. My conclusion, in addition to suggesting that it would be a good path for our world and the USA too, to abandon this ideology, is to note an inability for the cultural marxist GAE types to compromise. This ideological purity spiral would serve them as poorly as it served other very ideological empires which refused to compromise.
I edited this in later so you may have missed it but I believe it addresses your point:
I don't believe I am excusing "blatantly immoral and destructive conduct under the idea that US hegemony is good". Are these international conflicts strictly the result of pursuing a US hegemony, or are there some other factors at play? I'm going to say that you can have US hegemony without needing to instigate wars left and right. Or are you saying hegemony is achieved solely through military might? If I gave off the impression that is my belief then I should've been more clear and that is my fault.
You hold the people who made those decisions accountable. The mechanics of how it's done is irrelevant for this conversation. I did not say we pardon our leaders for what they have done because it was in service of the US hegemony. Your challenge was not something that I really thought important to address when you initially posted it because my question was in regards to how global peace can be achieved and maintained and you didn't really provide any alternative solutions. You later expanded your post and provided more information, which I'm grateful for. I am now challenging you that these immoral and destructive conducts is not an inevitable outcome of a pursuit of a global hegemony and that the idea of the US hegemony is being used as an excuse for other purposes.
US-based hegemony does not necessarily have to be achieved strictly through military might, although it has to be enforced by its existence. Most of Europe did not become allies of the US because USA subjugated it via force.
It feels like a big part of your argument is that the US-based support is no longer attractive due to the prevalence of the condition that it involves adopting leftist cultural marxist values. I will acknowledge I wasn't considering this and thinking more in terms of concepts such as capitalism and democracy. Yes, if US support comes at the cost of having to adopt DIE woke style culture then I am against it, because I am against those ideas within America as well. Propositioning US support would be better accomplished without that baggage tied to it. At the same time, it doesn't mean America just gives away money for free with no strings attached. Why should America provide charity to the world with no benefits? Otherwise just invest that money domestically.
How does the USA enforce punishment regarding the immoral conduct of other countries without itself maintaining a dominant position relative to that other country? A dominant position maintained by superior military and economic might? Words alone mean nothing unless there is credible threat of action behind those words. What happens when negotiations and communication fails? Or if the other side refuses to de-escalate?
Do you think the only way to grow the US hegemony or bring more countries under the US sphere of influence is done by instigating "trouble"? Because I don't think that.
It honestly doesn't sound like you're against the idea of a US hegemony, just against how it is currently being accomplished, which I think we are both in agreement with? So what's the dispute here?Okay it looks like you provided more context with the additional text, which I address below.Edit: Since you added much more to your post after what I responded to, I think my general points above still stand. I think your greatest argument against the current US Hegemony is that the US currently is suffering from being ideologically possessed by leftist cultural marxist ideas, and because of this the US hegemony itself is no longer good or has serious issues. That's why in my earlier post I suggested perhaps the US take some time to work on its issues domestically for a decade or so. Realistically it'll take longer than that, which is why I asked what are the consequences of doing that? I think the biggest cause of the difference of opinion is I'm thinking more of a direct Post-WWII American set of ideals on capitalism and democracy and you point out I did not factor in the cultural Marxist element of America today playing a part in having an alliance with the US. How much of American support is actually dependent on adopting cultural-Marxist woke ideology though? I'm just taking your word for it here.
Frankly speaking, I don't believe significantly different cultures can exist peacefully for long periods of time especially when those cultures play into system of government that run the nation. Most countries are democracies now but these democracies just so happen to mostly align in the US sphere of influence. Are most countries better off or worse off with a democratic government? How likely are the undemocratic countries to serve as a threat to democratic ones? As you add more and more different types of values into the mix, it becomes increasingly more difficult for all of these values to exist peacefully.
The reason I can say US hegemony has resulted in a era of relative peace is because we literally live in an era of peace relative to human history, with actual war occurring in much smaller scales (proportionally) than they used to. Perhaps we are seeing the cracks of such a system today with Ukraine and other conflicts.
I still believe that a long era of world peace can most likely be achieved under a global hegemony with 1 dominant culture. It doesn't have to be the US, but it is currently the US most poised to maintain that. The League of Nations post WW1 had a pathetic ability to accomplish anything and the United Nations today similarly has very little influence (although much more successful than the LoN ever was).
I think you saying I am just excusing its behavior is an extremely uncharitable take on my position. If you still believe I am doing that then I don't know what else to say and will have to end the conversation here. I still appreciate your perspective and for giving some good points for me to consider.
I won't be able to fully address everything here. I do appreciate that your response wasn't as heated as it could had been.
I would like to focus on a minor point which is that those countries that are part of a western alliance, to remain in that isn't a bad thing necessarily if USA fixes its ideological issues and doesn't push destructive demands. Indeed, what I advocate still allows room for a saner than today USA as the strongest power. Chinese and Russian ambitions can also be destructive towards other countries, like their neighbors.
An attempt by the USA for worldwide full spectrum dominance or expanding spheres of influence has had too much a destructive path already, and will continue to do so in the future. So, when I argue for multipolarism is a different thing than when the Russians or Chinese do, for in their advocation includes them having a license to expand their sphere of influence.
When for me, is about trying to retain a status quo that avoids invasions, and avoids trying to coup and dismember countries like China, and Russia, or pushing too much propaganda about them being illegitimate regimes. There is a situation where such powers try to trade and seek more win-win diplomatic paths, and one where they try to undermine each other and prepare for hotter conflict.
Anyway, while you might believe that one country dominating will lead to global peace, the position of Europe since this conflict has been a worsening one, precisely as they became more dependent to USA. The reality is any power dominating gives it more opportunity for abuse. Including promoting extreme ideologies. Although, abuse of bigger powers in alliances or even among expected protectorates does result in them seeking to disentangle themselves. UK arrests far more people for their speech than Russia does, which matters when evaluating the current trajectory of western demcoracies. Most importantly, for USA to get global hegemony and the desirable peace, and to humiliate and keep down its rivals, far more war and conflict will have to ensue, including as in Syria possible civil war within Russia and China. I don't buy that an agenda that raises risk of WW3 and nuclear war is a good way to achieve peace. Nor did the conflicts that USA was involved in the middle east, did any good of the people there. It is in fact likely, that rather than peace, the attempt for worldwide hegemony will lead to similiar misfortune for those affected, and even not succeed at providing American hegemony, but waste blood and treasure. So avoiding both expanding moves like that, and what we already saw such as with the Iraq war, Syrian war and funding the rebels, etc, etc.
The arrangement of trying to deescalate tensions where the onus isn't just on the USA and the Chinese and Russians also have their own responsibility, seems like a much better bet.
Of course in practice, global powers are going to do their proxy conflicts, and part of that will include both influences of lobbies and the struggle relating to expanding spheres of influence, and at best this can be mitigated and reduced, but too idealsitic to expect it to stop. I do think that things have escalated and things can be put in a healthier equilibrium. And it really is completely unrealistic and putting lipstick to a process of great power competition, to talk of peace and the morality of continuous hegemony. It is a bit like the communists promoted this idea that it would be the defeat of capitalism, imperialism and great if they took over the world. Like colonialism had its white man's burden, we also now had in the case of pro american imperialism, narratives promising peace. Prior to the soviet utopian dream, the Russians promoted this idea of them as protectors of Christians against the Ottomans to jsutify expanding, and both Russia and USSR promoted this idea of them as protectors of slavs. Narratives are going always to exist to defend moves in the great chess game, which on the meantime can destabilize countries and can lead to the harm even of the involved great powers through conflict, and not just the destruction of the region that is fought.
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No, you didn't. That's like asking someone if abortion is bad and then saying "I challenged you directly if you think murder is bad". You can't just assume that abortion is murder, even if you're going to argue it.
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The more America has tried to police the world as the hegemon the weaker America has become. I think prudence is a better path to ensure Pax Americana.
Yes, it seems America has dipped its toes in too many different things that had little benefit, how much of that was really due to the pursuit of expanding/maintaining the American Hegemon versus the selfish interests of actors with different goals?
America currently has enough domestic problems to deal with to be playing world police currently and could likely benefit from taking a step back from the world stage. But in terms of maintaining the Pax Americana, it leaves the question of how long and how likely a foreign bloc could form to dismantle it. I think at this point I made clear my stance is that large-scale conflict is more likely when there is no dominant force than when there is. Maybe some history buff could provide examples otherwise?
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C. S. Lewis:
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Each time I encounter this argument, I ask why Russia gets a pass. If it’s a war of choice, isn’t there an obvious actor? But there’s no leverage on Putin, there’s no alpha in agreeing with your domestic opponents, so we see contortions to put the blame on anyone else.
Oh, except when it’s time to criticize U.S. industrial capacity. Any shortfalls in that department are taken as proof of incompetence and staggering corruption rather than reluctance. We like to start fights, not win them. Winning is for the other guys.
But that can’t reflect on the bioweapons department! They’ve got to be competent enough to concoct 2020’s headline, incompetent enough to lose control of it, and then recover their moxie in time to cover their asses. Except against FOIA, which couldn’t be subverted, since it provides the scant few points of evidence needed to damn everyone in the deep state. Other, perhaps, than the bold patriots serving said FOIA requests.
In short, it sounds like a long chain of isolated demands for rigor.
Well, more generally it's good advice to seek to change your own behaviour than the behaviour of others.
I can easily believe that bioweapons developers are capable of both competence and incompetence. That would make them just like every other human being.
"I am vast, I contain multitudes."
"No, wait, don't put me back in the quarantine--"
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Isn't this what a game of "chicken" looks like from the losing side? If we're unable or unwilling to escalate far enough to deter Putin (or Hamas), then we're stuck dealing with their actions. So naive people who "don't have a side" and "just want the killing to stop" have all their brains' capacity for rationalization being applied to finding reasons why the other side should give up. Which makes them indistinguishable from people who actively want the defeat of the other side, but who have enough social skills to lie about their motivations.
I would like to believe that the current escalation would have deterred Putin if he had all the information. It fits with my sense that Russia's leadership is dysfunctional in the boring, usual, human way: overpromising and underdelivering. A one-month war against unequipped, deserting Ukrainians would have neatly dodged almost all the consequences for Russia. I recognize that this is perhaps too tidy to be true!
Hamas...if there's a level of violence which will deter them, I don't think Israel has found it yet. It's an unsettling situation.
That's a good point, although I'm not sure how much to put on NATO's current escalation, and how much to put on the Russian military's surprising weakness. I'd been solidly in the "Putin won't invade, but if he does it would be over fast" camp, so that's two big things I was wrong about, which shows you how much I knew.
I think Hamas are religious fanatics, and have found a coordination mechanism that's strong enough to allow for suicide attacks, and which justifies "holding their own people hostage" as being in those people's long-term best interest (72 virgins for martyrs and all that). I'm still on the fence as to whether that attitude is a new category of "hostis humani generis", or whether "give me liberty or give me death" is a useful bulwark against oppression. It's hard to draw the line.
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Reading those links, I think you got some pretty good answers, but apparently you disagree.
...I wrote a more detailed point-by-point reply, but honestly, I don't think it'd be very productive to post it. You're replying to a quote that is extremely idiotic. You seem to be taking that idiocy, and then spinning it out to cover other people and discussions that are, I think, a lot less dumb, and then you're spinning it even further to concerns that I do not think you can rigorously argue are dumb at all. Maybe there's a long chain of isolated demands for rigor there, if you frame it exactly the way you have. Maybe there's even someone, somewhere who's actually regurgitated that whole chain of claims, exactly the way you've framed it. I don't recognize that chain in anything I've written, and I don't recognize it in anything I've read here either.
On the other hand, if this is genuinely how the world looks to you, that's both useful to know and depressing enough that there probably isn't much point in arguing about it.
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Secular liberals have to believe this sort of thing. Because they, correctly, believe that the most likely solution that people will reach if they decide there's irreconcilable differences is ethnic cleansing.
That in no way makes it true though.
I have long believed that there is no two-state solution, there's only a one-state solution, and actually two different one-state solutions depending on which sides gets to expel the other.
No, it's worse than this. They genuinely don't believe in irreconcilable differences. They honestly believe it's all mistake theory, and that they are right and everyone will eventually work their way around to their way of thinking. Whig history is a hell of a drug.
Question:
Did Protestants and Catholics have irreconcilable differences in Europe?
Yes. They didn't kill each other for sport.
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Well, considering Catholics did stop selling indulgences, I'd say at least some of their differences were reconciled. Of course, the major difference, who should be in charge, was not.
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Yes. Obviously.
Europeans massacred each other endlessly due to those irreconcilable differences for 120+ years, huge proportions of the Europe perished in the wars of religion. A fucking third of Germany died during the thirty years war, a conflict wholly centered around these irreconcilable religious differences.
They just got tired of killing each other and in a fit of exhaustion threw together a kludge called “liberalism” which has gone from being thrown together slapdashedly to being a relatively solid institutional social technology and is now currently being held together by duct tape and saliva.
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I just don’t see either war actually stopping just because we said so. Most especially with Israel. Israel is much more likely to ramp up attacks on Palestinians if a state is announced because they understand that this is their last chance to do something about the issue before the rest of the world decides whether or not to defend Palestine. They know a state means weapons pointing at them and they won’t have it. TBH if think the bombings if Rafa are about European states recognizing Palestine as a show of resolve— if Palestine is recognized then we have to neutralize it.