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Notes -
Iran - US - Israel War Flareup
“Israel says it has launched attack on Iran, as explosions reported in Tehran”
“The US has begun Major Combat Operations in Iran” - Donald Trump (headline flashed up just now on my phone, no link yet)
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More to follow but thought I’d post quickly for any commenting.
The ultra feminists on hacker news are busy downvoting me after I pointed out that the way Iranian regime treat its women makes the regime the worse side compared to US and Israel. That is all one needs to know about the current situation honestly.
Probably because it's transparently a bad faith argument. I'm guessing neither you nor trump care that much how $arbitrary_regime treats women and even if you did, would never advocate for starting military action on any nation that basis. if you did care about the women, starting a war is obviously not the most productive way to fix that, nor is there any guarantee that the women will be better off afterwards.
So this war is not about the women and your attempt to collapse the whole issue into "better or worse for women" is a cheap rhetorical trick to paint your adversaries as hypocrites for opposing it.
Calling it a "cheap rhetorical trick" is itself a cheap rhetorical trick to try to dodge a hypocrisy killshot. The alliance between Western feminist progressives and Islamic fundamentalists was always completely psychotic under any ideological framework other than "they just hate the West and don't believe any of their own bullshit". Rubbing their noses in it and taking the opportunity to diminish the extent that anyone takes progressive feminists seriously is points fairly scored.
It isn't, it's calling a spade a spade.
I'm confident it's a cheap rhetorical trick, because if the form of the argument were used against you, you would call it out as a low grade gotcha. "If you care about X, and Y is bad for X, then you should in all cases oppose Y and support any action whatsoever that harms Y" is obvious nonsense of the highest order. Just substitute "children" for X and imagine all of the policy positions that would result.
Uncharitable at best. Failure to model your opponents at worst. I think there's definitely an aspect of hypocrisy here but characterizing the situation as psychotic is not true. There are mechanisistic reasons we see this play out. It does have its own internal logic.
Ahh. So it is just arguments as soldiers then.
Gonna have to bow out here, I don't see any further exchange between us on this topic being productive.
It's nonsense because you're going with absolutes. The widespread inability to explicitly think in terms of trade-offs and hierarchies of values is a common leftwinger/Sith mistake. What we instead see is progressive feminists almost entirely ignoring the plight of women under Islam (or British girls being mass raped in the UK) because they have no real ability to engage with the nuances of something having both good and bad qualities under a leftist intellectual framework, which pushes hard in a Manichean black/white, good/evil, oppressor/oppressed dynamic. Muslims are [oppressed category], and so dwelling on their failings is haram.
Compare that to libertarian or conservatives, who are much more comfortable talking about tradeoffs. You can't trick them into banning swimming pools because ~50 kids drown per year and THINK OF THE CHILDREN.
The underlying internal logic is "we just hate daddy, I mean the West/America/capitalism/white people". The higher level pretend logic is "Muslims are an oppressed group and we have no ability to consider, much less address, crippling and dangerous flaws in oppressed groups". The highest level is just stop thinking about it, omg
Nope. Older waves of feminism won so hard that even most conservatives genuinely think Islam's treatment of women is fucked up. Then they see progressive feminists going apeshit over white men being mildly less than perfect doormats, while refusing to even talk about Islam. Progfems get more upset about white Christians because of the Handmaid's Tale (a made-up story literally inspired by Iran) than the 10k girls raped in the UK.
This is pretty fucked up. And beyond that it is a massive, ruinous hypocrisy, and until it's addressed, it's entirely fair to dismiss surface claims and motivations from people doing it. Anyone can escape that trap just by saying that Islam is wrong about women.
Which won't happen, for the same reason those people can't bring themselves to say itt's OK to be white.
Set aside what could and should Western "progressive feminists" do about plight of women under Islam.
Would you also ask, for example, first world labor union organizers:
"Why you care about such trifle as lunch breaks and pay raises for already spoiled first world workers? Do you know that millions of workers in Africa are actual slaves? Why you do not fight against slavery in Africa?"
The same for every first world problem - the problem is much worse in third world, do you want everyone to be effective altruist concentrating all their efforts on the most dowtrodden people of the world?
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