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 -
The point I am trying to get at as regards executions is that appearances are important, and executing people in secret is a bad appearance. Even if you don't think people's executions should be public, you shouldn't want witnesses removed. Even if you can secretly torture people without leaving marks (which yes, we can) you should not act in such a way as to needlessly arouse suspicion that you are doing so.
The problem with Nidal Hasan's target wasn't that he targeted soldiers. Iran has killed somewhere between a dozen and two dozen soldiers in our war with them and none of the American commentators on here have acted like that was illegitimate in the same way that Hasan's was (or as far as I can remember, at all) because Hasan is an American who turned his gun on his countrymen.
I don't think you can point me to a single star-spangled flag waver on the Motte that has argued that Artesh soldiers, acting in the normal course of their duties, should be executed for the deaths of US soldiers. I think you are mistaking your own ideas about what Americans think with what they actually say they believe. Perhaps you have had other experiences off of the Motte that I can't speak to, but what you are describing of your experiences here does not comport with what I recognize.
If you are a soldier and particularly an officer, then yes, a military base is a place of trust, and generally stateside on a military base US soldiers are disarmed, and will go to jail if they carry a weapon on base. (This is a sorry and facile state of affairs, and I think the current admin may be working to change it, which is good).
I am not sure I would say Hasan is a coward but shooting unarmed people is not generally what is associated with courage. I don't think Hasan acted much differently in terms of personal courage than any mass shooter, in the sense that he was brave enough to accept being shot by cops but not brave enough or willing enough to accept defeat to engage armed people from the start. I think that his target set could in some sense be seen as more "legitimate" than bin Laden's in the sense that they were primarily military, but also that his infamy should be greater because he betrayed a position of trust and violated the oath he took.
Did American troops kill close to half a million civilians during the Global War on Terror? No, they did not. The majority of civilian casualties throughout the Global War on Terror were not caused by US troops. I suspect you know this, which is why you used the phrase "through war campaigns" thus absolving the people who actually literally did kill civilians of their actions and rhetorically placing it on people who were innocent of their deaths, while at the same time providing a defense (a motte, if you will) if someone pointed out the inaccuracy.
I think it is completely fine to criticize the outcome of the Global War on Terror (indeed, I have done it myself) and to say that the GWOT led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. I think it is wrong to completely ignore consequentialist reasoning. But saying that the United States killed half a million citizens across the Middle East is no more sensible than saying Al Qaeda killed hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners through war campaigns across the globe – arguably less sensible, since after all Al Qaeda attacked the States.
Off of the top of my head, there are only two Americans who could reasonably qualify, and I don't think either of them felt bad about what they did, or ever pretended to.
Very well. I shall expect you, then, in the spirit of self-consistency, to refer to Trump as a European leader going forward :)
We agree that appearances are important. What we don't agree on is whether or not killing someone in private is 'secret' or not. How you could maintain that it would be, despite the American legal system is beyond me still. You keep asserting these caveats and scenarios that just aren't necessitated by anything. You can execute someone with witnesses and not have the event be public and without any risk of that person being tortured. There is no elevated arousal of suspicion regarding torture. You just keep asserting that there is and it's completely baseless beyond the average torture conditions in US prisons.
No, this is you looking at things from your American perspective. From the perspective of a Palestinian who is of a different ideological persuasion, America is still factually engaged in active warfare against people in the middle East. The soldiers in Fort Hood were not his countrymen or comrades but enemy combatants who play an active role in a military organization that has killed countless civilians in pursuit of an evil zionist ideology.
Regardless of him being a 'traitor', is a US army base a valid target? Does the US army kill innocent civilians? If the answer to these questions is yes, then what is this even about? The sympathy argument made in the Fox News interview is now even more inane than it was prior. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Inshallah.
I don't understand the point here. Iranian solders don't get to decide on when the war begins. The US just bombs them at an opportune time to the celebration of plenty of Americans. To the US that's a legitimate act of war. Why would Nidal have to operate by different rules?
If you are a combatant and see an enemy military base, it's a target. Do you see how you're just not engaging with a perspective that's not American? How the only way many Americans parse events is through American eyes? And how you repeatedly assert this frame again and again and never engage with anything beyond it?
Some might even say that killing the innocent makes you a valid target for just retribution. But many Americans seem incapable of understanding that other people also feel that way when they conceptualize of all the innocents killed by Americans.
Maybe this is a point of confusion but the exact number doesn't matter. Pick any number of thousand that you want. Are you pretending you don't understand the moral culpability of soldiers in service of an evil regime? How does America justify killing Iranian soldiers? The same way Nidal does when justifying the killing of American soldiers.
We were talking about public opinion. Maybe I can rephrase it so you better understand:
It's actually quite perverted to support the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people and then read a book about how horrifying that was for the victims. And then make a big deal about how bad you feel about that. But then just repeat the process as soon as some foreign policy idiot theorists conception of America's hegemony gets threatened.
If you were serious about that conversation I would consider it, considering how ethnically split America is. It was basically complex colony of a wide range of Europeans. Held together by a common capacity to cooperate. Now it's unraveling through a host of ethnic contradictions as the share of non-Europeans who can't cooperate weigh the entire project down. I'd still prefer to refer to people of European ancestry who have lived in America for some time as Americans, for the same reason I don't refer to Germans as Europeans. But there's nuance there.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link