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I think this is the problem. I don't suppose to read Trump's mind at all. Moreover, I don't understand why we assume that Trump's only goal is regime change through bombing -- the speech he himself made at the start of the war lists several other objectives, such as destroying Iran's ability to produce missiles and project force in the Middle East.
I'm rambling about this here because I see this as a case of a kind of "degenerate case" we can't ever really argue out of.
Everything is a matter of taste. Basically, you think something is plausible. I don't. We can argue and butt heads about the underlying facts or methods or fallacies and such. But you think your interpretation of the world is plausible, and I don't. You think that not even because of one news story about Donald Trump and Iran or a month's worth of coverage. It's your entire life and experience that inform your point of view. Likewise mine. For you it's reasonable to imagine Trump acting rashly on a gamble and to interpret everything subsequent as bullshitting. I imagine that comes through not just a decade of interpreting Trump but, e.g. --: honing your personal sense of "bullshit" arguing with partners and family and coworkers; matching the news with your own expertise and intuiting when you can believe your eyes and when you can't; values about what's important in the world and a related sense of who you can trust as allies to inform you about the world; etc. etc. etc. Well, we probably have very different life experiences.
I can say, for instance, that I have some familiarity with military intelligence, and that informs what I believe. And I don't think it's possible e.g. that Trump just hit launch by the seat of his pants because there must exist detailed plans that have been drafted for decades for every contingency. But if I'm being honest, it's not as though I have direct experience of the (putative) Situation Room. I don't actually know Donald Trump. It's possible I'm wrong about everything, I'm only filling in the blanks of things I can never possibly know with my imagination. And hoping that my imagination is quite powerful.
Opinions are primarily formed through life experience. And the vast majority of life experience is media consumption.
When I used to have these arguments with Yassine, I think he perceived my skepticism of Truth to be quite radical. I would say that, well, ultimately, we don't really know that. That story is something that happened in the Oval Office and was witnessed by maybe six people, and one (or two of them) with an axe to grind talked to a reporter, who was edited by his boss, until a story was written up with a headline eye for drama, posted for twitter without any context, except whatever context it is we're all of us each carrying with us all the time. And you're not even considering the stories twitter surfaced to me but not to you. Yassine would say, well, sure, but isn't it convenient that you don't believe whatever isn't convenient for you? I think he thought I was arguing some post-truth magical realism, concomitant with Donald Trump crying "Fake News" and dumb conservacon talking head punditry. And maybe there was some sense in what I was saying as a kind of trivial philosophy, but, well, it's awfully convenient, isn't it?
I'm rambling about this because it does strike me as a particular problem and not a general one. We could be having an argument about facts and figures. We could be debating radically different visions of The Good and how society should operate. I think most Culture War debates tend into these categories, and are much more acrimonious in that way.
Well, I believe that Donald Trump is the most successful man alive and has total control over Iran and everything is going to work out fine. But I can't really be mad at anybody for seeing things differently or even thinking this is the craziest thing they've ever heard in their life. So it goes, right?
So, in that spirit, I'm not sure we can ever really understand each other; Because everything was formed through experience. I can't put you under the fluorescent light where my dentist swore that it was true that my father used to get his teeth drilled without anesthetic, where he would say that pain was a choice and he could choose not to feel it. I can't put you on the chair where my aunt's girlfriend waved her arms over my head like a jedi mindtrick and an image of a clogged sink flashed through my head and my chronic neuropathy dissolved forever, although a friend calls that a placebo and I suppose his imagination is as good as mine. And I'm not sure where I learned to love America or believe in God except that I observe these feelings bubbling up from within me as plainly as I obviously feel the rain when I forget my umbrella during a storm, etc. etc. Maybe you have had good Chinese food and will sympathize when I declare it one of the great cuisines, and when my friends who have only tasted Kung Pao and the general can only titter and laugh about bats all I can do is shine. But I'm sure the reverse is true as well and I want to maintain a little humility when all I've done so far is talk about myself without ever really trying to understand you.
So I appreciate that we are, after all, just arguing to kill time and there's nothing personal about it.
And it's better actually to have these "arguments of the imagination" because we can at least acknowledge the gap and -- shrug? smile? As opposed to the other kinds of arguments where we have to do battle in some sense.
This is my problem with the phrase "bombing brown people". It's the kind of thing that transforms an imaginative gap into a personal one. Or at least it feels that way to me, I can't really propose that it's the same for everyone. But I feel as though people didn't talk this way when I was a kid. There were white people and black people, but nobody used the phrase "brown people" until the last Obama years and it felt vulgar to me then like some new viral load. I think the Progressives were using it in some sense to say, well, society is racist and it reduces people to colors, and it's important for us to talk in these terms so we can examine what is happening invisibly and unsaid. Maybe so but it always felt to me as though some words were being put in my mouth, because I never thought in these kinds of terms as far as I could tell. Or maybe this term preceded me and I was too young to notice and my perception that it's a new and vulgar insertion is totally without basis. I can't really know, you could show me Google N-Gram proof that it's been there all along, but I've also read somewhere that the moon landing was fake, and I don't really believe that either. Because all I'm doing is believing whatever feels convenient to me, exactly as Yassine said all along.
Anyways there's nothing for it but taste, everything is a matter of taste. And maybe time makes more converts than reason and time will tell and we can wait and see and one of us will be right and one of us will be wrong. But my experience tells me that even then we'll be debating what it all means anyways forever and ever, like Vonnegut on Hamlet, a drama that never resolves. So there's nothing personal.
This is one of the best comments I've ever read on this site.
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