This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Help me understand an argument about the US-Mexico relationship
A friend and old-coworker recently posted in a group chat an article quote
They think that if that were to happen “both the general population and government unofficially would side with the narcos (for different reasons).” Radicalization and bad things would follow. Firstly, I thought these things already happened. Was Sicaro not just exaggerated for effect, but complete fiction?
We diverted for a bit into the politics of Mexico under the cartels. It was fun to be reminded that there still are areas not even the military will go into without cartel approval, that AMLO used to visit El Chapo’s mother regularly, that any information given to federal agencies or even directly to the president was pretty much immediately relayed to the cartels. Apparently, cartel-unfriendly political candidates are routinely assassinated. So the state seems to have been completely captured by the cartels. They have also deeply infiltrated the local and federal law enforcement agencies. The cartels have their own military equipment, intelligence agencies maybe, air force?, submaries (not armed though I hope?)
Still, even without local police or federal government involvement (who I understand most are assets of or actual narcos) I assumed the DEA/CIA/FBI still did shit to keep things in check, at least around the border and inside the US. Well actually, cartels are expanding into Colorado these days.
Enter Trump's executive order Designating Cartels and Other Organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists.
My friend was incensed, thinks that any action by special forces would be war, that the Mexican people and government will rally around the cartels, there would be terrorist attacks and sabotage by cartels/Mexican immigrants.
I’m afraid here is where I lost my cool a little bit. Paraphrasing:
I guess what I want to know is, Am I The Asshole?
Yes, though anyone who ironically proposes a special military operation deserves one. (This is a joke, but do be kind to your friend.)
More to the point- your friend is raising relevant points, and you are raising bad geopolitical analogies. There are contexts where it is not war to conduct strikes in a neighboring country's territory, but these are generally limited to very specific contexts- namely imminent threats of which 'routine drug smuggling' generally does not qualify. If you do so anyway, there are many, many, many ways it can go badly, particularly if the sovereign state doesn't give you permission. Given how many things in diplomacy rest of voluntary cooperation, there are many ways for an unwanting state to make their neighbor's life difficult, even without armed resistance, and in the modern era there are also easy ways for that to go very, very costly. (See- drones.) This doesn't even touch how foreign state actors could partake and interfere- such as smuggling weapons (see- drones) to cartels for use against the Americans.
There are a number of reasons an armed intervention would be a bad idea, but let's focus on why it's not a good idea: it's not 1917, Mexico is not in a civil war, the cartels are not Pancho Villa doing cross-border raids into the US, and the Pancho Villa expedition failed anyways.
Thank you for the pushback, even though I'm not convinced.
I know you're more of an expert on armed forces and geopolitics than I am, would love to heart some scenarios.
But it feels like as far as neighborliness goes, Mexico has been hitting defect pretty insistently. It ain't no Mr. Rogers. Well actually we've always been fucking you over slowly seems like a weak argument.
This sort of behavior from a neighbor that's the junior partner seems intolerable. It would never be accepted by Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, or any sane country.
It would be a pretty mask off moment for those foreign state actors. Russia/Iran/NK are sorta busy. China would rather bide its time and build up for a few more years, and it would focus on Taiwan anyways. Maybe some South American countries would consider getting involved?
I guess the real disconnect is that I think if it does escalate to combat between one or more cartels and the US, the cartels would capitulate in less than 60 days, making it a fait accompli.
Yes, I know, four day operation to Kyiv and all, but we're not threatening their nationhood or trying to grab clay. If they're at all businessmen they'll realize that we can make them bleed and lose treasure very hard very fast. If the individual cartels test each other out and have areas of control and neutral zones, does not pushing back on their expansion mean you're just rolling over?
You send multi-million dollars worth of equipment into Northern Mexico. Drones costing a few hundred to thousand dollars blow them up. Rinse and repeat until the American taxpayer gets tired of seeing the celebratory videos on the internet while foreigners simultaneously mock them and highlight every American-caused casualty as an atrocity.
Assuming you are an American- please show some self-awareness when accusing who of fucking over who, particularly when you are advocating an act of war against a neighbor.
I repeat the earlier point: you are making poor geopolitical analogies.
Or rather- when Russia decided it wouldn't tolerate a sovereign neighbor doing sovereign policy things, it led to one of the biggest blunders of post-WW2 Russian strategic policy, costing over a million casualties and the loss of significant global power and standing. When China wouldn't tolerate Vietnam's behavior, it invaded the north and had such an embarrassing lack of success that Vietnam has sparked not just a detente, but budding partnership, with China's main strategic rival.
These were both terribly stupid policies by the 'senior' partner, neither of which actually got what they wanted as a result.
The other countries have been less incompetent, and so have generally let their disgruntlement with troublesome neighbors remain disgruntlements rather than casus belli.
That would indeed be a real disconnect, and one that strongly suggests a lack of attention to the experiences of the Iraq and Afghan wars.
The Americans have not been able to make organized criminal groups inside the US 'capitulate' in 60 years. The US lasted about 20 years in Afghanistan, and considerably less in Mogadishu against worse-equipped criminal warlords. The idea that you would be able to totally defeat inernational cartels in 60 days by occuping a fraction of a country, in a country that you do not speak the language of, over a border zone you have never been able to seal, is not serious.
And even if you can initially disrupt, what then? Say you somehow clear them from area X in 60 day, but on day 61 you go home. What do you think happens on day 62? Or day 63? Or [however many days you stay]+1? What- besides grabbing clay and building forts to compel indefinite military threats- is your compliance plan?
And you think this achieves anything... why?
You're not thinking like a cartel. Or rather, you seem to think cartels are unitary actors who a singular 'they' can capture, as opposed to coalitions of autonomous rivals who often fight over profit share. Life is cheap, and the cartel's losses are not your own- instead, the cartel's loss is a chance for your own gang to take out rivals and maneuver yourself for a bigger cut of the American drug-purchasing money. As long as there are americans willing to pay tons of money to buy the drugs, then there is a lot of money to be made selling despite the risks. That other people in the business lose out isn't an issue, it's an opportunity- especially if you can use the American intervention as a way to knock out rivals / settle scores / make way for yourself.
No, it does not.
Yeah, seeing just the non-secret developments in new drone and satellite technologies makes this completely non-credible for me.
Is this about the Zetas? I don't want to relitigate shit from the 1800s about how America is a bad neighbor. Please let me know when and how the United States has fucked over Mexico to the tune of trillions of dollars of cumulative economic damage, enriching themselves in the process.
Your analogies look bad to me too. Criminal groups inside the US have a lot of legal protections. They, of course, act with impunity, and their bosses can retreat to Mexico and go neener neener, you can't hit me.
Afghanistan is 7,300 miles away, Mexico we share a border with. Afghanistan was also a while ago, we have learned lots of lessons, we have much better technology. Will this stupid comparison never die?
You also seem to think no American citizens speak Spanish and are tired of drugs and cartels fucking up their communities.
My plan is that the cartel bosses that continue to not play nice with the United States will keep dying. Sooner rather than later they will learn to order their thugs to wind down certain operations. Maybe just a few to start. @FCfromSSC puts it much eloquently below.
In exchange, maybe they can receive certain protections, and be guided to switch to economically productive governance.
These autonomous rivals living in Morelia or Gonzalez or Durango or wherever all seem to know exactly who their boss is. Let's make sure the ones near the border know that their boss' boss is American.
What does it mean, if anything, allowing you and your neighbors to be abused by some of the most objectively evil criminal enterprises in existence?
What does it mean about the sovereignty of Mexico that it's been infiltrated by and protects these psychopathic paramilitary gangs as they flood their neighbors with the most evil drugs?
And that judgement from those developments are why your friend is right to take issue with your proposal.
The most significant point of the developments in new drone and satellite technologies is that the benefits of drone and satellite technologies are no longer a near-monopoly of the American government. Commercial satellite technology gives anyone with internet access imagery on par with what the American government fought not just the first iraq war with, but the iraqi insurgency. Commercial drone technology has introduced an ongoing revolution in military affairs, as the ability to have a militarily effective airpower is no longer something only states can afford to procure. Twenty years ago, the US military's greatest fear was land-based IEDs, and that was a considerable challenge even when the only drone strike fear was of friendly fire.
The fact that Americans have significant satellite and drone technologies isn't what is decisive anymore. The fact that all parties have satellite and drone technologies are what makes it far harder. I fully expect it to take a mauling for American public opinion to catch up with that fact that the Russians aren't uniquely bad or vulnerable to drone warfare, but I would prefer they learn from the Russian example in this respect.
If you need to ask, you are demonstrating the lack of awareness- on top of the rather unsubtle dodge of that time of a conquest of a third of Mexico including one of the most economically productive regions of north america.
I question how many of the lessons of Afghanistan were learned by anyone who dismisses a conflict of nearly 20 of the last 25 years as 'a while ago' and irrelevant.
Based on your proposal so far, I am going to make a very measured guess that you have either never read the Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency before, or the source document behind it, or else you found much to disagree with them both.
You seemed to have missed FC's satire. -Edit- Correction- It seems to not have been satire. I will leave the rest of this post as is, but acknowledge my misunderstanding of his intent.
Or did you think 'massacring dozens via drone strike' followed by 'release video evidence on 4chan while claiming it was totally jihadis' was a serious proposal from FC, when delivered with language like 'sprinkle in some Allahu Akbar'?
Moreover, I return to the point that you do not have a good model of cartel bosses. I will attempt to provide a metaphor via a stick comic by Rich Burlew. [Spoilers for Order of the Stick- which is dated, but still quite good.]
In the webcomic Order of the Stick, one of our protagonists, a chaotic-good bard named Elan, learns that his recently-discovered/long-lost father, the subtly named Tarquin, no relation to that one, is actually a lawful-evil tyrant in the equally subtly named Empire of Blood, which is nominally ruled by an evil red dragon. The discovery that his father is actually evil comes after the further unsubtle act of burning a bunch of prisoners alive as part of a birthday gift.
Being the good-aligned and narratively-savvy bard he is, our protagonist attempts to rationally convince his father to stop because, per the tropes of fiction they both subscribe to, the hero always wins and the evil overlord always loses, and thus his father's doom is assured if he chooses to be the evil overlord. Clearly it would be irrational to take a doomed position that will end with his certain defeat (and death).
Tarquin makes the counter-argument that, you know, you can't just be so negative all the time, and you should be more optimistic.
In this metaphor, your plan works on the premise that if a few more of them die to righteous American paladins/airstrikes, they will be replaced by people who will change their minds, when drug cartels are filled with people who get into the business knowing it is both lucrative and likely to get them killed, and accepted that long ago.
You are not introducing a risk of death to these people- they have been killing eachother over blood-money spoils for decades, and death by americans is no different than death by other gangs / ambitious subordinates / Mexican actors / etc. You may believe you are willing to kill a lot more than 'a few,' but the number of people willing to risk death for money- particularly the sort of money that Americans are willing to give for that risk- far outweighs the American political capacity to run open-ended interventions.
Lad, you just praised the eloquence of a modest proposal to massacre people by drone strikes and post it online with implausible deniability.
Not only is this attempt at a carrot undercut by the threat, the Americans are not the most bloodthirsty/intimidating people in this scenario.
That you have a very limited awareness of the span of objective evils and criminal enterprises in existence, and are quite willing to conduct your own evils on the basis of moral relativity.
It also means that you probably have a worldview which views the evilness of the enemy as the determining factor of the wisdom of a policy to attack them. This is not an uncommon instinct, but the neocons were discredited not because their targets were not evil, but because the consequences of their advocated invasions were not only bad, but predictably so.
The neocons dismissed these warnings because they knew better / had learned the lessons of history / were going to do something about the evils and they didn't find any warnings against their moral cause to be credible.
Bad consequences are being predicted.
It means that Americans should probably stop paying so much for drugs that it funds black markets dedicated to meeting American demand.
The American drug problem is not a result of the sovereignty of Mexico, which is primarily a transit point rather than a source anyway. It is a result of market forces of supply and demand, specifically the American demand for drugs. If you remember your economics, you should also remember that prices are both a signal and an incentive for suppliers to meet that demand.
What do you think the incentive will be as a result of your incursion? Will you be making the price go up for people already willing to risk death for money, or will you be making the prince-incentive go up for people already willing to risk death for money?
The name "Tarquin" as a metonym for tyrants is literally thousands of years older than Star Wars. I won't say the name's entirely separate from Tarkin given the extreme number of Star Wars references in that arc of Order of the Stick, but they're at least to a fair degree just referencing the same thing - and certainly it's "Tarkin" that's the variant spelling.
Obviously, this only emphasises how unsubtle the name is.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link