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We often see complaints and questions about the Iran War in regards to what the US's victory conditions and objectives there even are supposed to be. Despite the inconsistency on many given reasons, the US has stayed pretty consistent on one reason, Iran was working towards nukes and we gotta stop them.
But was Iran actually working towards nukes at the time? The "Former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent" (the guy who resigned in protest) has revealed that the intelligence community apparently believed otherwise.
So this begs the question, what is the real reason? Kent says Israel, and everything seems to be pointing towards that as the true cause. Bibi has been pushing hard towards this goal of attacking Iran for at least three admins considering he's given the same pitch to Obama.
And as I've pointed out before, even the US's own official explanations are heavily pointing towards Israel as their main focus.
Literally, they say it themselves in this press release.
Mike Johnson has said it. and Rubio has said it. Lindsey Graham is blatant about it. This war is for Israel. Rubio and Mike Johnson later denied their own words, and mayve it's true they both made a mistake. Interesting that two high ranking officials apparently both made the same mistake in saying Israel brought us into the war, and this same mistake was then repeated in the official press releases.
And they say it's not just Israel, and sure maybe it's not the only thing, but it is strange that it's both their first listed reason and most of the release is focused specifically on Israel and Israeli interests. And Israel being listed first happens quite a bit here.
It's not in alphabetical order, so can't be that. Why is the focus quite consistently putting Israel before the US like this in the USG's own official justification press release?
So if we didn't actually get into this war over Iran building nukes, is there any other explanations actually left? That's the only thing the Admin seems to be actually consistent about, and it's apparently completely fabricated.
And the White House's response to Fox News about this seems to be really interesting in how they worded it. For example
You see, it didn't actually address what Kent said.
They took "Iran building nukes" and made it into "Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism and could pose a threat to the US". They took "Israel was the main reason for the operation" and made it into "Israel forced the president". Why did they dodge it like this?
Likewise again, this doesn't address the claims about US intelligence! In fact, this statement is also perfectly in line with the "Israel was going to attack Iran and Trump felt they had to also do strikes beforehand then because of retaliation" story given before. But at least it wasn't literally forced so that's good news, despite no one claiming that.
Do you actually believe in anything? In the space of a couple posts we've gone from "trust Principled Conservative Erick Erickson" to "trust America First Joe Kent." The only common throughline in all your top-levels is that you want to pick an internet fight with themotte's Trump contingent, and are happy to dance between positions, arguments, and sets of facts in order to do so. Kudos to the guys who have the patience to fisk your posts, I guess.
If that's what he's doing, what's the problem? If anything I think it has been to the detriment of this place that arguments have come to be dominated by true believers of some cause, whose local feeling of success, identity and tribal interests are all tied up in "winning the argument" and not ceding any ground.
I can't help but notice that it's never people on the receiving end of these tactics that make these sort of arguments, only people like watching it being done to others. For the good of the forum, of course.
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Tolerating bad faith actors inevitably ends in an equilibrium where bad faith is the norm.
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That's also the case with people who are arguing in purely negative bad-faith, except that their local sense of identity is even more purely tied up in winning the argument. Darwin2500 arguing with MAGApede2016 is a failure mode, certainly, but so is this - the non-failure mode is when people bring sincere theses to their top-levels, after exploring and considering the evidence on their own, and then debate things with other users as individuals. Some people are too tribal to be psychologically capable of doing that, and some just don't find it fun enough, but it's possible.
It seems like youre defining this though through "person making arguments and points I don't like to see".
Like hell look at your actual complaint here
What is bad faith exactly here? That I'm not blindly partisan and don't consider Erickson (who I disagree with on a lot of topics) as trash whose opinions and views are unusable? I think he can be a very stupid man sometimes, but I also recognize he is a guy who is rather principled and has interesting input sometimes. This is exactly what good faith should be like!
Likewise I think Joe Kent has a number of idiot views. I also recognize that he is a former top official who left his influential and powerful position over his principles, and acknowledge that he has some value when he talks about stuff he personally dealt with in his role. I do not dismiss Kent's input on counterterrorism and US intelligence because he's for example, an anti vaxxer. A stance I literally think is hurting and killing children!
You're complaining about tribalism, and yet seemingly mad that I'm not tribal enough.
And also what tribe am I supposedly loyal to anyway? I'm a Reagan stan who advocates for individualism, laissez-faire capitalism, small government. Does this sound like a "blue tribe"? No. But it's also not the "red tribe" either, at least not anymore.
To a partisan who can't comprehend the world beyond tribalism, of course I look bad faith, because they can't grasp a person who doesn't participate in tribal partisanship and doesn't radically change their views based off what Current Party Leader decides.
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How do you define "bad faith"? If it's merely "doesn't truly believe the point he/she is arguing", then I think the term is loaded and the case that it's a bad thing has not been made, because trying to make the most convincing argument for something you don't actually believe is an interesting exercise, both for the person making the argument and for any bystanders. If it is more about the "bad-faith" arguer experiencing personal disdain for their interlocutors in the process of the exchange, I think it would capture a lot more posters here than just those who try on different positions for sport.
"Bad faith" covers a broad spectrum, from straw men and weak men to gish gallops and gotcha questions to outright trolling.
Since we're not mind readers, it's necessarily a judgment call and if we don't mod someone who people think is obviously posting in bad faith, it's because our threshold for pulling the trigger is higher than the threshold of people being triggered.
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Defining bad faith is something like defining pornography, but when you spend enough time here you get a sense of what motivates whom. We've had an influx of low-quality, trollish posters doing the exact same schtick as MKC (AlexanderTurok is the last one I recall), though he's certainly the most literate of them so far. I suspect largely a meta-contrarian reaction to the 2024 Vibe Shift, as exemplified by Hanania/Karlin/Spencer/etc.; it'll pass like all the other motte fads ('member the civil war we were going to have in 2020? I 'member!)
When done as an exercise, that's entirely good-faith, and rationalists do that all the time. You should be able to do that! The key is as an exercise.
I think you're almost there. The key is that bad-faith posters are, psychologically, not posting to make arguments with some sneers attached. They're typing up arguments so that they are able to sneer. It's like the difference between someone who goes out to a bar and has a drink, and someone who goes out to a bar so that they can have a drink. Tribally-motivated sneering is pretty easy to spot because it's usually so ham-fisted, compared to a poster who puts real effort into his sneers.
Yeah, this seems like confirmation your usage of bad faith is along the lines of "when they disagree with me". Why do you think these writers aren't being serious when they say things that are unpopular? They could be way more financially successful grifting the populist vibes only saying a bunch of low quality stuff that everyone wants.
Or is it that possible perhaps that when people say things you don't like and don't agree with, maybe sometimes they believe those things? Maybe the world isn't filled with everyone secretly knowing that you're right and the only reason why someone like me or Hanania would have a different view is because we want to be contrarian.
You are welcome to pattern-match me to as many caricatures as you like. Apologies if I'm impugning any of your actual heroes, as opposed to Erick Erickson.
Ok for real, is this intentional trolling? This is a pretty big case of pot calling the kettle black if not, your whole thing here has been making up caricatures to assume about me.
Really, it's hard to see this as anything but trolling. You either don't grasp the concept of being able to take someone's ideas seriously without looking down on them or you're being intentionally daft. This is like Rationalist 101 shit. Scott Alexander, basically the guy of rationalist discourse illustrates this all the time and constantly references people who he disagrees with constantly like Freddie Deboer, Hanania or Tyler Cowen. That doesn't mean you view them as "heroes".
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What part of magicalkitty's posting history makes you think they are trying to make the most convincing argument they can as an exercise, as opposed to the best arguments-as-soldiers for their latest culture war stand or poke at others, to be abandoned as irrelevant when the topic passes?
I love me a good jawboning and devil's advocacy, but there is a difference between treating debate as a sport and using debate to make sport of others. Faith is as good a distinction as others- after all, if the other person has no faith to believe you're interested in the sport as opposed to making sport of them, there's not going to be a sport with them because it takes two to debate in good faith.
One of the ways to demonstrate good faith, in turn, is to hold to present and maintain sincere positions. Sincerity in turn can be demonstrated not just by elaboration upon request- as in someone who sincerely wants to be understood as opposed to someone deliberately trying to instigate misunderstandings and conflict- but also by maintaining consistency across iterations. You can absolutely provide devil's advocate / steelman positions distinct from your own position, but only if you actually have a position of your own.
To my knowledge, magicalkitty has denied being darwin / guesswho/ whatever other alts that person had. But Darwin was a bad faith interlocuter par excellence, and he had his own history of defending or deflecting accusations of his bad faith arguments on the grounds of 'just trying to adopt a position he didn't believe.' That was the demonstration, not defense, of his sort of bad faith.
The counter to that Darwin-esque behavior, in turn, is pressing the person to make clear their sincere position, and seeing if / how they either directly answer it or try to wiggle out of that challenge.
I don't see a lot of object-level opinion overlap between darwin and magicalkittycat. One example: Darwin was constantly pushing idpol and I haven't seen that from magicalkittycat.
Hence the Darwin-esuqe, as opposed to Darwin-specific. It was always the style of argument, not merely the position, that made Darwin bad faith.
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You can make whatever vague accusations you want, they're practically unable to be disputed because they're vague and meaningless.
But if you're going to claim I'm unreasonably inconsistent in my values, maybe you can show it. Should be easy to provide obvious and nondebateable examples if you aren't just making things in your head. There's plenty of deep principles I've said I support that you could look for me being hypocritical on too!
I say I believe in free trade, laissez-faire capitalism, individualism > collectivism, that people who complain about the modern world are typically just historically illiterate, that government should generally be small and stay out of people's lives (and that government oppression differs significantly in severity from "social oppression" which I don't care about as much because government claims the monopoly on violence), and that people should generally have near maximal freedom including doing things to themselves that others think is bad or unhealthy like drugs. Or whatever else.
Your choice, should be easy after all.
Given the phrase "he had his own history", it seems you are implying that I also have some big history of "just trying to adopt a position I didn't believe". So again, a specific allegation against me that you should be easily able to show right?
Right??! It should super easy to show all the times I've said I don't have any belief in the things I've said and are just being a devil's advocate on things I don't think at all or see logic in.
Cause certainly I've done that, you wouldn't just make things up I hope. Would be really bad faith to just make shit up about someone like that.
There's nothing particularly vague about my view of you. I think you regularly exhibit many of the not-late Darwin's worse tropes in your posting style, regardless of whether you are another sockpuppet of his or not.
This includes his propensity to fight the culture war by fronting a position only to drop or even deny it when inconvenient for the current culture war. Darwin also had a habit to quibble that he never did such a change even when provided past evidence, invite people to engage on his framing of the issue, and then ignore their actual position (and, routinely, follow-up posts' positions).
Like, say, taking a post on ways to counter Darwin-esque evasiveness and demonstrating a difference from Darwin-esque tactics, and then claiming that it is a personal accusation. And then challenging that the reasonableness of such a personal accusation should be demonstrated reasonable through past history to be pulled and cited. A history review which has nothing to do with demonstrating the good faith in arguments provided as a way to distinguish good and bad.
That is very much the sort of implicit accusation and argument deflection Darwin liked to pull.
I'm not gonna lie dawg, I've read this entire exchange and I'm 1) incredibly confused and 2) completely unconvinced Magical here (who I thought was a a pro-DEI lib) is Darwin or adjacent to Darwin
You've accused them of being a bad faith argument shifter here to troll but produced 0 evidence of this despite claiming it exists...
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I invited you to provide some of this unexplainable hypocrisy I apparently do if it's so common. I invite you to do it again. Should be easy.
Wait was it not about me?
Then why did you say
Is there another person with a name like this you were actually referring to? It sure seems like your comment was about me first and foremost!
Now I don't know who you're talking about still, but you do realize "we couldn't provide any actual proof with this other guy either" is a very unconvincing argument to be making. But hey, I realize I'm actually just the completely unrelated third person because the "magical kitty" you were referring to was apparently someone else.
I don't normally report comments but I'm definitely going it here. This "I'm not talking about you, I just said your name multiple times" gimmick doesn't have a good explanation beyond actual bad faith. Extremely childish, reflect on yourself.
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My increasingly regular agreement with you on forum culture is starting to feel like the Franco-Ottoman Alliance of themotte. Allah Allah!
I'm not sure how I resemble that remark, but I feel like I should be offended by the comparison!
The joke was, specifically, that you and I have very different styles of thought but agree on something strategically key. I like the Turks and have been known, in unguarded moments, to give grudging praise to the French.
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I trust different people in different contexts.
Believing that Erick Erickson is a principled guy is not the same as believing he is right about everything. I think he truly believes that it is for the best if the US meddles with Iran and follows Israel's lead into war. He probably truly believes the claims by the Israeli and US governments that Iran was building nukes any day now and we had to strike them. Erickson is not sitting in these classified intelligence meetings getting the details like Kent was, he just trusts the propaganda.
Same thing, do I trust Joe Kent on every single topic ever? Probably not, I don't think he would have say, great information on whether or not some local restaurant chain plans on expanding into North Dakota next month. But Joe Kent does (or at least did) have access to all classified information and discussions during his role as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. When he says something there, it's a lot more meaningful.
I have reason to believe the CEO of local restaurant chain on their expansion plans, but not on info regarding the Iran War. I have reason to believe the former head of counterterrorism on the Iran War, but not on the expansion plans of a local restaurant chain.
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