Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
As a general note, it kind of makes me sad to see how strange the thinking patterns had become, I think maybe because to incessant electoral campaigning. Everybody should have an ultimate plan to solve everything, forever, perfectly, or it's even not worth talking about. And if the solution takes more than a week, we don't have enough attention span to comprehend what is going on.
The saddest part is everybody knows literally 100% of people who propose these nice rounded-up solutions are liars - we know it is not going to work this way, they know it is not going to work this way, and it never ever worked this way. It will always be more complicated, more chaotic, things will change and go to off directions, unexpected things will arise and all plans will have to be changed or abandoned altogether. But somehow still everybody demands A Man With A Plan - even fully knowing (though frequently not realizing) that any such plan must be bullshit, no one can have a perfect plan for decades forward for 90 millions of people, especially those same people submerged in an ocean of 9 billion other people. If we can do something that will make the picture a little more predictable and less dangerous for a little forward, if we cut off some of the ugliest branches on the possibility tree (such as "Iran gets nukes and uses them to initiate the coming of the Twelfth Imam") that's already a huge achievement. But imagining you can control the whole tree and shape it to your will - isn't it a bit too much to expect? And yet, though we know it's impossible, we routinely demand our leaders to pretend they can do it easily and routinely.
I guess that's what attracts people to socialism - they promise there would be a Plan. Maybe some people will starve, and some will have to be killed, but look - we have a Plan! Nobody has a better Plan than we do! No matter this plan is never achieved - having it is enough, somehow.
This is a reverse Nirvana fallacy, justifying predictable missteps with a shrug and saying 'nobody is perfect'.
People demand a credible justification, a coherent goal, and a plausible argument that the goal is achievable. Comparing OIF to OEF is illustrative, in that Bush leveraged high public confidence and made a huge effort to sell the endeavor both domestically and internationally: Saddam is developing WMDs, we can stop this by getting rid of him, and we have the military force to do that (a lot of people still called BS and it turned out they were right, but public support at the time was high). By contrast, Trump has had his officials contradict themselves and each other several times a week as to why we're doing this, the goal is pretty vague, and their plans, such as they are, seem very reactive to extremely predictable problems. And this was carried out with zero effort to build support during a time when public trust is incredibly low.
The appeal of socialism is primarily that it promises
free stuffeconomic security and remediation against exploitative elites. Nobody cares about the plan.The word "credible" is load-bearing here - you just declare any justification "not credible" and demand another, can go forever this way.
Same here. Is a goal "diminish Iran's capacity of stirring shit up for years to go as much as possible" "coherent" or it must be "bring peace and happiness to all the world forever"?
Is the argument "this is actually being achieved in front of our own eyes" "plausible" or not? Of course you always can say no, not plausible, gimme another.
Wait wait, you're saying the fact that they are reacting to things that happen and actually change their actions in accordance with actual events that happen - is a bad thing? How do you usually handle it - do you ignore things that happen and never change any initial plan no matter what?
Support from whom? Would France or Germany go for war with Iran if we asked really nice? Or maybe the Islamic Republic of Britain would? Maybe Spain? Italy? There's a lot of support from one ally - Israel - who do a lot of the work, but that leads only to various conspiracy accusations.
If the plan works, that is. Which it never does.
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