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The following is an adaptation/repost of something that I posted to /r/theMotte a few years back. I had intended to post it yesterday but real life intervened. It feels strange to think that it has since been 10 years.
For me, as I sit in an airport lobby writing this, it is around mid-day September 11th. In Mecca it is late evening, the Sun has gone down and in the eyes of the more conservative/orthodox clerics it is already the 12th. The 11th and 12th of September are auspicious dates in political Islam as they represent the Caliphate's "high water mark" and end of the Islamic golden age. While it has largely passed from conscious memory in the West, the day that King Sobieski of Poland broke the Siege of Vienna (September 12th 1683) is remembered by many in the Islamic world as a bloody and shameful anniversary, the day that Islam lost it's way.
It is poetic, and likely intended by the attack's perpetrators, that the date of September 11th is now remembered by many Americans in much the same way. The end of a perceived golden age, the day we lost our way. That said, while the the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon in 2001 have overshadowed it is the twelfth that comes to mind when I think "bloody and shameful anniversary", and that I find more personally significant.
As I mentioned in /u/mcjunker's 9/11 memory thread, September 11th 2001 is the day I "picked a side". The towers went down on a Tuesday and I was talking to a US Navy recruiter the following Monday. While my feelings about the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are complicated I don't regret any of the choices I made. Solzhenitsyn said "Prosperity breeds idiots". I don't think that's right. What prosperity breeds is forgetfulness. To quote Lee Harris in the opening to Civilization and it's Enemies...
September 11th 2012 was also a Tuesday. When the attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi began at 9:40 PM local time I would have been eating lunch, maybe knocking out a last-minute homework assignment for my 2:00 PM class. As I said above it was on 9/11 that "I chose a side" but I don't think truly grokked or appreciated what that meant before those months leading up to the 2012 Election and September 12th 2012 in particular.
By this point I had already completed two enlistments where in I'd served as a rescue swimmer and combat medic, as well as the first of several shorter stints I would spend as a private military contractor for a large humanitarian NGO. I was, at this time, serving in the reserves as an instructor and range safety officer while going to college on the GI Bill. I was also the regional rep for a national-level veterans' organization and on a first name basis with my congressman. I'd gone into the Navy a pissed off 20-something looking for a fight, and come out almost a decade later still believing in the cause, but deeply pessimistic about the US in general and the current administration in particular's ability to see it through. It was clear to me that the sort of idealized liberal democracy that the administration seemed to have in mind wasn't going to work in Iraq. There just wasn't the sense of legitimacy or cultural background to support it.
It's a popular refrain that we all want the same things. To be warm and safe with full bellies and for our kids to have a better life than we did. To a degree this is true, I think it's fair to say that almost everyone wants these things. That said, different people will prioritize them differently. So even in discussing these fundamentals there is the potential for disagreement, and that is before we start talking about the best course of action to attain our fundamental wants. This is where the "disbelief in foreigners" comes in. Culture matters and it runs deep. Culture is not just about how one dresses or what they eat. It carries assumptions of language, social structures, flora, fauna, climate, and all sorts of unexamined axioms and assumptions about how the world works.
On Paper, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Rod Dhrer are much the same. They're both conservatives. They're both journalists. They're both Orthodox Catholics. They both lived in the American north-east. And they both made thier names writing about the crimes of Communism and the Soviet Union. That said Solzhenitsyn was Russian to his bones and Russians expect to get screwed. One of my favorite bits in Scott's Unsong was when Lake Baikal was revealed to be a portal to Hell and the Russian response is basically "whelp, that figures". That moment cracked me up because it really does figure. When viewed from ground level Russian history is basically a long string of things going wrong in new and revolutionary ways. When Jesus returns to Earth in The Grand Inquisitor he doesn't save the righteous or establish the kingdom of heaven, no Russian would've bought that, least of all Dostoevsky.
A sense of something akin to "the mandate of heaven" is baked into Iraqi culture the way "things go wrong" is baked into Russian culture. It's there in how they talk. "Inish Allah" literally "if God wills it", is used as a standard greeting/parting phrase, and at times almost like a punctuation mark. I'll see you again tomorrow if God wills it. Enjoy your lunch if God wills it. The train will arrive at 10:00 if God wills it. /u/HlynkaCG will share his stash of hot-sauce with us if God wills it. Emphasis on the If. Fact of the matter is that there is little in the Iraqis' history to suggest that they can trust a government to abide by it's word simply because it gave it's word. Yet we expected them to trust the government, and we expected a government comprised of Iraqis to be trustworthy. That was pretty stupid in hindsight, but understandable because we were thinking like Americans. People from a country that has had 200+ years of reasonably stable government that, even when it's corrupt, tends to be corrupt in fairly banal and predictable ways.
Coming back to 2012, my position gave me something of a front row seat to Romney's presidential bid and access to some of his advisors as well as state politicians. I had previously been aware of the Gell-mann Amnesia effect but hadn't really considered the implication of it. Namely that those who are supposed to be "in the know" often aren't. Having spent time in field some level of cluelessness and/or fecklessness on the part of politicians, pundits, and State Department weenies was assumed on my part. That said, I repeatedly found myself flummoxed by the ignorance and stupidity of highly intelligent people. Some corporate big-wig trying to get a pipeline built would be going on about how lazy the local workers were because they wouldn't work through the day. Meanwhile I'm thinking lets drop you in a place with 105 degree weather and no AC and see how much you feel like working. Someone else would be talking about backing some "moderate" Islamic group or another but then their rep would be a bearded Sunni man wearing a taqiyah and a black sash without a mustache. To translate this into a more familiar cultural equivalent here is a picture of some allegedly "moderate" American Jews. I used to joke about how HQ wanted me dead but the truth was in Hanlon's Razor. Don't attribute to malice that which can be explained by ignorance and/or stupidity. This may come across as me complaining. Something to the effect of "If only they had listened, disaster could have been averted". That's not my intention, if anything listening to me would have fucked things up in a completely different way. Instead remember that you are ignorant.
I may have joked that my superiors wanted me dead, but there was also an understanding. It was right there on page 13 of my service jacket. I had formally volunteered for hazardous duty in exchange for additional pay. The numerology was not lost on me, and I suspect it was intentional. I would be asked to do something stupid and dangerous and I would do it, in return my Chain of Command would have my back. This is something that I feel like a lot of Americans, especially those who haven't been in the military or haven't worked a specifically dangerous job don't really grasp. There are two key elements to a functional hierarchy. The shit rolling down hill, and the fire climbing up it. Yes the guys at the bottom get shit on, so it goes. The Task forced commander tells a captain that observation post X needs item Y. That captain tells a lieutenant to make it so. That lieutenant talks to his Platoon Sgt and eventually the shit comes to a rest at the bottom of the hill when some Corporal tells some PFC "Hey, Abe I need I need you and Garcia to hump this heavy-ass box up the hill to OP X-ray". This aspect is well known as most people have some experience with being at the bottom of the pecking order if only from childhood. What gets less attention is the fire. If a PFC has a problem his team leader has a problem. If the team leader can't solve with it the resources he has on hand, his platoon/detachment leader has a problem, and so on up the chain till the fire reaches the appropriate level and the officer responsible drops a new load of shit.
To be continued...
edit: fixed broken link.
Apologies for low-effort response to your beautiful prose, but: how did you, back in 2001-2003, connect 9/11 (Saudis' effort, if anything) to invading Iraq and building a democracy by gunfire there? You say you still believe in the cause. Has it ever crossed your mind, now or back then, that the princess might have been in another mosque and the entire cause is, charitably, a bit of a cope, specifically displacement?
Yes, it crossed my mind.
And my response is that killing Uday, Qusay, and Saddam Hussein al Tikritti was a service to the world. That the failure was in the state department believing that it was sufficient to knock down the existing power structures and not provide a replacement. Actually trying to improve the situation and give people a leg up would be imperialism, and we cant have that can we?
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Is The Grand Inquisitor typically interpreted as being representative of Dostoevsky's views? My read has always been that Ivan represents the secular philosophy that Dostoevsky opposes.
I believe a certain inevitability was granted to the Grand Inquisitor's program, and in 2022, it's hard for me to disagree with that. While I believe personally Dostoyevsky opposed it, he acknowledged its unstoppable inevitability- the cold iron logic of history.
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To an extent, but it's also kind of a revealed preferences thing isn't it? Dostoyevsky wrote both characters, and both monologues. A lot of people find The Grand Inquisitor to be the more persuasive of the two. Dostoyevsky himself worried that he had written Ivan's argument so much more persuasively that Alyosha couldn't persuasively counter it, in many ways he felt that he believed Ivan's argument even though he didn't. Dostoyevsky was a complicated man, even if he said that he believed Alyosha, if from his heart he wrote Ivan more persuasively, doesn't that mean in his heart and his unconscious maybe he did believe Ivan? Sort of the opposite of various stories about Judges who reasoned that the law required a certain outcome, but found they just couldn't write the opinion, and so ultimately changed their judgment.
Yes, the Inquisitor is logical and persuasive but that does not make him righteous or correct which is what I feel Dostoyevsky was actually trying to get at. Reason and rigor favor the Pharisees, not Christ.
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Not directly, no. But illustrative.
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Obligatory Sabaton song link.
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Do you have a source for that? Because that sounds very unlikely, given that the battles at the end of the Siege of Vienna happened on the 19th and 20th of Ramadan 1094 (9/19) and 9/11 happened on the 23rd of Jumada al-Thani 1422 (6/23) in the Islamic calendar. The correct date would have been the 5th of December 2001 (19th of Ramadan 1422) if the terrorists were after a symbolic message.
You mean aside from assorted Muslims that I've spoken to? No not really, but I could just as readily, ask you the same question. The downhill cavalry charge into the Ottoman flank that inspired both Tolkien and Sabaton is generally agreed by both sides to have happened on the morning of September 12th per the Georgian Calendar. Sure there are other calendars, but if the intent is to send a message you're going to use the one that is mutually intelligible.
Searching the web I can find literally no Muslim accounts while the only two sources supporting your interpretation are Lawrence Wright and Christopher Hitchens, who both present no direct evidence (e.g. statements by bin-Laden, Muslim scholars discussing the significance of the date etc.). In fact, your paragraph in the OP comes suspiciously close to simply remixing their claims with a bit of rhetorical flair.
That's only part of your original claim. I can buy that a westernized radical Muslim like Atta chose the 9/11 date for its historical significance in the struggle between Christendom and Islam, even if no direct evidence exists. What I take issue with and would like to see concrete proof for is the idea that 9/11 ..
How did 9/11 become a cultural touchstone for historical/geopolitical thinking east of the Bosporus when nobody outside of a tiny number of scholars concerned with calendars would even have a clue what the Gregorian date for it is, pre-1917? Further, we'd expect people who are especially concerned with the fate of Islam to be less likely to use a Western calendar than their traditional one. The main calendar for Saudi-Arabia, where the supermajority of the hijackers came from, is still the Islamic one, they switched to the Gregorian one for matters of paying civil servants only in 2016.
Have you ever had the occasion to sit down and actually talk to a Jihadi or Revivalist Sunni face-to-face? Not some westernized Muslim living in some big cosmopolitan center, or edgy teenager posting music videos to /r/combatfootage, but an honest to
GodAllah, chin-strapped, true believer.I ask because you seem weirdly wound up about this topic. So much so that you appear to be grasping at straws. For instance, where the fuck is this idiotic nonsense about "nobody outside of a tiny number of scholars concerned with calendars" knowing the date coming from? The Gregorian Calendar, that is the Calendar in use today throughout the English and Romance language speaking world, was codified and adopted by the Catholic Church and by extension most of the major governments in Europe back in 1582, a full century before the Siege of Vienna. Yes the Ottomans continued to maintain their own separate Calendar up into the 20th century (as did Imperial Russia for that matter) but that doesn't mean they were unaware of the Gregorian Calendar or what date a given event happened on.
Likewise, you say you didn't find anything on the web. Well no shit. Wahhabis don't exactly maintain much of an online presence, something about the internet being a Satanic construct. What presence they do maintain is typically in Arabic rather than English.
You can demand "proof" from me, but your attitude is giving me the distinct impression that there is nothing I can provide that you would accept. So with that in mind, what is your alternative theory?
Let me be precise about what my position is: of course there were lots of people in the Muslim world pre-modernity that understood the Gregorian calendar. However, the great majority of intellectuals and the general population would at most be aware of its existence, but not of how to use it or convert their own dates in the Hijri calendar that everyone of them would be using, just as I or about 99,9% of all westerners can't tell the Julian date of a particular day without consulting an expert or a web app. Because of this, the idea that the numbers or the date 9/11 hold special significance for Muslims is suspect to me. The date would have been announced as Ramadan 19 as heralds spread the news throughout the Middle East. Where would a tradition of assigning 9/11 with special importance have organically come from instead of 10/19, the actual date almost everyone would have been thinking about before the 20th century?
Sure, but people translating and writing about them might. I can't read classic Greek, yet I still have access to a great deal of Greek thinking and commentary on it. For example, the original writings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab survive and are available in English.
What exactly gave you that impression? I did directly mention things that would convince me: a statement by bin-Laden or someone else from the group responsible referencing Vienna and the context of the 9/11 date, writing by Muslim historians or scholars about the importance of the Battle of Vienna and particularly the (Gregorian) date it was on, basically anything that provides some evidence for the notion that the Gregorian date itself is really something that people paid attention to in the Islamic world other than hearsay or statements by outsiders like Hitchens or Lawrence.
I don't really have an alternative theory. My best guess would be that it was just random chance. For example, here on the Wiki it says that in a meeting in Spain in July 2001, a middleman expressed that bin-Laden wished for the operation to go ahead ASAP. This old CNN article about an Al-Jazeera documentary that talked with the same middleman before he was captured by US forces recounts the anecdote of how Atta revealed the final date of the attack to him, which has no mention at all of the significance of the date (while it does confirm that the date was in given in the Gregorian calendar). Both of these taken together imply to me that there was no or little group-wide discussion and that the date was chosen for practical reasons.
First I think you need to remember that I am an American writing to a predominantly American and English-speaking European audience. Using Hijri dates in my OP would've been pointless and the opposite of "speaking clearly". Second, I think you need to go back and reread the OP. I never claimed the the numbers 9/11 held special significance to Muslims. I claimed that the date, that is the anniversary of the siege, was significant. Speaking of which your dates are wrong. The date would not have been announced as Ramadan 19, it would have been the 22nd or 23rd of Jumada depending on your time zone. Likewise we're not talking about "pre-modern Muslims" either we're talking about Muslims in the 21st century.
As to your question of "What exactly gave you that impression?"
These sorts of weirdly specific assumptions/misreadings described above coupled with a generally confrontational attitude are what gave me that impression.
You ask me why I think a Wahhabi or some other flavor of Sunni Revivalist would care about the Seige of Vienna and that's how I can tell that you've never actually talked to one and that your alleged "web search" must have been half-assed or non-existant because when given the opportunity to talk about this stuff it seems like half of them wont shut up.
First off, if my posts come across as confrontational or angry I apologize and will try to tone it down. My thought process wasn't "ha, I'm gonna nail him down on a potential minor mistake in a huge effortpost" but more like "huh, this sounds interesting but conflicts with my background knowledge (i.e. Muslim calendar vs Western ones), let's do a quick search to see if it checks out". FWIW, I upvoted and appreciated the original post.
But the Muslim anniversary would have been on December 5, 2001, because that's Ramadan 19, 1422 and the battle at the end of the Siege of Vienna was on September 11/12, 1683 Gregorian or Ramadan 19/20, 1094 Hijri, unless my date conversion is mistaken (see below). That's where I got skeptical: I understand that it's not about the numbers but about the anniversary, but using the calendar religious Muslims follow there is no anniversary to speak of on 9/11, 2001. If Muslims care about the anniversary (and I can buy that there are Muslims who do), I'd expect them to do so on wherever Ramadan 19 happens to fall on in a given Gregorian year.
You did already mention that it might be about sending a mutually understandable message and that does make sense. However, I'd still like to see more direct proof that this is a thing in these circles. The conversations you had with people on the ground are no doubt illustrative, but not accessible by me. I had simply hoped that there would be more material evidence out there to support that statement, something like a famous cleric writing a fatwa specifically referencing the Gregorian anniversary or something like that.
I'm using this website for conversion and it spits out the dates I mentioned above. I double-checked by typing "september 11 1683 in hijri" into Google and it concurs. 22nd and 23rd of Jumada[al-Thani/al-Akhirah probably] seem to be 9/11 2001. It's probably because the way I worded it was bad writing, but in that paragraph I was always talking about the date of the siege, not the terrorist attacks. Accordingly, the news I mentioned would be that of the defeat at Vienna, not of the Twin Towers.
That's a bit of a misread of what I meant, most likely due to clumsy writing on my part. It's not the idea that such people would care about the siege that I'm skeptical about, in fact I find such obsessions rather likely given other things we know about e.g. al-Qaeda in particular, it's the notion that they would do so under the label 9/11 instead of thinking about the date in their own native tradition, which given the above should be Ramadan 19 or 9/19 (unless I'm mistaken).
I did search for about 20 minutes and found several forum/stackoverflow-clone-for-history threads talking about the same idea, which is how I found the contributions by Lawrence and Hitchens as well as the CNN article. I don't speak Arabic and accordingly don't have unfiltered access to the ideas from that part of the world. If you have a link to some kind of source, Western or Middle Eastern, to share I'd genuinely appreciate it, I'm a sucker for these kind of minor historical anecdotes and connections.
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Could be a Julian vs. Gregorian calendar conversion issue?
Apparently, the Battle of Vienna happened on the 1st of September 1682/83 in the Julian calendar (both years are possible depending on where the locality in question puts the date border between years). Mistakenly treating this as a Gregorian date and converting it to the Islamic calendar yields either Shaban 29, 1093 (8/29) or Ramadan 10, 1094 (9/10). However, as stated above 9/11 2001 is 6/23 in the calendar that matters for the terrorists and the Islamic world that is supposedly aggrieved about this date, so neither one fits.
The other way around also doesn't work: mistaking September 11, 1683 for a Julian date converts to Shawwal 3, 1094 (10/3) or Shawwal 15, 1095 (10/15) Islamic.
Maybe I'm getting something wrong or there's another way to spin this, but I don't see it.
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How'd that age in 10 years? I'm not sure if it's gotten worse, or I've gotten more aware of it, but the level of corruption in the US government appears to me to have reached an extinction level event. They've sold off our proverbial seed corn to our strategic enemies, and are oblivious the suffering they've unleashed on the people they purport to represent from their mansions and yachts.
It's remarkable how even now, when people are starting to realize how truly fucked we are with Russia and China doing breath play with our economy, our elites are still mostly selling out to them. Last I heard all our tariff's on Russian oil have just allowed middle men to buy it at a higher price from Russia, enriching Russia, jack up the price even more enriching themselves, and selling it to Europe and America impoverishing us.
Apparently we've enormously depleted our stocks of many vital munitions sending them willy nilly to Ukraine, with zero accountable or tracking what so ever. Stocks that will take years to even begin un-mothballing the assembly lines for, because apparently we believed we never needed to make stinger missiles ever again?
It's hard for me to even count all the ways our government has fucked us, personally, tactically, strategically. It's like they are trying to end the nation, and our lives as we know it. And that they might be doing it to enrich themselves is literally the best case. The worst case is they are beholden to a cult of fucking Malthusians.
The world to me now is unrecognizable from before 9/11. Before 9/11, political correctness was more or less defeated. Now it dominates my life more than ever. Before 9/11 I actually had some sense of freedom and liberty, even in the most simple of acts of loitering almost wherever I pleased, and nobody had to know my business. Even before COVID, security theatre around shopping and entertainment, to say nothing of travel, was overbearing. The fever pitch of masks and vaccines being mandatory to do nearly anything has passed, but I don't trust it. I feel like after midterms, the D's will bust it right back out again because fuck you, that's why.
Pretty well I'd say. China still needs us more than we need them, Russia is in the process of commiting national suicide, and the US Government while corrupt, remains corrupt in relatively banal and predictable ways that aren't going to surprise anyone who was paying attention back in the 90s.
Meanwhile, the US president has recently decreed that he believes most Republican voters to be 'threats to democracy' and 'national security threats'. He is also apparently moving to have the obvious Republican candidate banned from running for next presidential elections.
This is not at all ominous, and no grief will come out of this.
Sure, you can posit some good outcome out of this if e.g. Trump gets banned but then de Santis wins and nothing happens, but between the tone of the debate and the absolutely bugfuck bonkers election procedures US has, I expect the elections to be deemed illegitimate by whomever loses and fun times to commence.
Does it ? They're getting their own electronics now, just a few years behind the bleeding edge. They are biggest trading partner for almost the entire world. Do they really need you that much ? For what.. credit ?
nope, you are conflating trump fans and republicans. Sure there is some overlap but biden was pretty clearly not making the claim that you are crediting to him.
That is "some" understatement there.
the overlap probably seems bigger when you are inside of it.
I am not inside of anything. Not even an American. I am just able to see that he is the front runner republican candidate by a large margin and the only competition is basically Trump-but-better-at-politics. That says something right?
You can't be a trump fan or pro-US-republican if you aren't american? I disagree with your observation that Desantis (i assume) is Trump-but-different. I also would argue that some quantity of trump voters aren't republicans in the traditional (pre 2016) sense of the word, and probably wouldn't vote if it wasn't for Trump.
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Which for anyone old enough to have clear memories of Clinton's first two years in office comes as no surprise. That's kind of my point.
So, you think it's all a big nothingburger, all the prosecutions, all the extra IRS agents, the new rules on credit card gun payment related data.
Nobody is going to tighten the screws and start kicking the dog till it bites, right, so he can shoot it then.
Basically what @JTarrou said below. Not that this is a "nothingburger" per se, more that this is not my first lap around around this particular course, and that I don't see the point in loosing my shit over something that hasn't happened yet.
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Do you remember Clinton's presidency? Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Federal Building bombing?
We have a ways to go before we get there again. Or take it back to the '70s and the Days of Rage.
That, I think, is the point. Not that things are so good now, but that they were much worse relatively recently. Biden is setting the stage for that sort of repression, but he hasn't actually done much yet. Maybe he'll sack up on the rhetoric and we'll get to fuck around and find out. Or maybe he won't. No sense catastrophizing before the fact. Just keep your head on straight and https://youtube.com/watch?v=O_3_-UrhZH0
Political polarisation is way, way higher than it was in either of these eras.
You're wrong
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Is it? People vent more online, but there was no online really in previous eras. I remember the '90s being pretty polarized, the 80s too. Clinton was impeached, so was Bush. You can still meet old leftists as pissed off about Reagan as modern lefties are about Trump. If political violence is our measure, the '80s and '90s were much worse. Reagan was shot, the feds murdered a bunch of people (Waco saw 76 dead) and some militia terrorists blew up a federal building in retribution (body count 168). And that's just the headlines.
Seems to me that people are pretty angry, but over less and less. The '80s had all the banana republic wars, Iran/Contra, AIDS, homelessness, the Cold War etc. The '90s had the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Gulf War, Kosovo etc. The oughts had Iraq and Afghanistan. What are people freaking out about now? Neopronouns and hysterical conspiracy theories? The Overton Window has never been smaller, yet people are as pissed off as ever.
I'm open to being wrong here, but your assertion just doesn't ring true to me. If you have a measure of polarization in practical terms, I'd love to see it.
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I think your dislike of political enemies is spilling into your assessment of geopolitics. I can’t see the last few year’s events as anything but a win for US hegemony. Russia’s prestige is at its lowest point since the fall of the USSR, and China, wih its turn to dogmatic authoritarianism exemplified by its zero covid policy, and looming real estate crisis, is losing influence and slowing down. From their tepid response to western sanctions towards their ally, it doesn’t look like they think they have a great deal of leverage in an economic war against the west.
Being self-sufficient, high oil prices shouldn’t concern you, they’re probably good for you relatively speaking, they hurt china and makes europe more dependent on you. Only russia could benefit, but they’ve helpfully decided to waste it all on some lost cause.
You’ve depleted munitions, but unless you were planning on the mother of all land battles against china for control over eurasia in the next five years, I don’t see how that should affect you. Medium term, you’ve gained greater capacity and more committed allies.
Yes, I mentioned back on the previous place that the Ukraine invasion seemed to be benefiting the US most of all -- China is still chasing its tail over its own virus (and honestly calling China an ally of Russia is vastly overstating the case), European industry is crippled by loss of natural gas, and the US proper is relatively unaffected. The US would likely be absolutely better off if the invasion (and certainly COVID) had not happened, but relatively, the US is ahead.
I don't believe the shadowy rulers of the American hegemony planned this; they just ain't that bright. But it sure is curious it worked out that way.
Yeah, I've never been much convinced by that take that the Ukraine invasion is Good For China because, now that Russia is an international pariah, it's more dependent on China. Inasmuch as they had a good relationship before, it would seem like Russia losing ability to pull its own weight wouldn't be a good thing for the two of them.
As an analogy, if the UK made itself an international pariah, would that be Good For America because now the UK was more dependent on it? No, I expect the take would be this would mean a shameful weakening of the entire Anglo power block.
'Anglo power block' is laughable. The entire world has known and been laughing at Britain as America's lapdog since Tony Blair. It became that obvious. Brits have been relegated to America's sinister lackeys in the eyes of non-westerns.
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Perhaps I was overly sensitive, or my youth in Washington State was different, but from my view political correctness has has a pretty near linear rise from the 70s to 20s. I'm curious what convinced you it was dying around the turn of the century after it had recently claimed a senator's career and been the central focus of a president's impeachment?
I'd like to know as well. My impression is that it was rising steadily through the 90s, and while it lost a fair bit of steam in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 it didn't stay down for long.
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You're right, but it's also true that there were periods when PC appeared to be dormant even to people politically savvier than average. Generally speaking, I think the Culture War is waged in relatively short waves, and then remains dormant/hibernated for years. I also think this generally benefits the Left, because it provides an ideal environment for slowly but surely capturing institutions. The usual mistake of Conservative normies is that they become complacent and clueless, because they mistakenly think that their enemies are ludicrous loons. They were prone to think that they are winning, especially after 9/11, and that PC is just a laughingstock to be ignored.
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There are no tariffs on Russia oil. Europeans want to start with a price cap. The US restricted import of Russia oil, which was only a 2-3 % and not for domestic consumption (the US is a net exporter), but for refining (refining is a huge value added industry) and then reexport. You do realize that the US is the world's largest oil producer and the energy industry is making a killing right now? Europe is suffering, yes. Not from tariffs, as they don't exist, but because they just stopped accepting Russian oil and allowed Saudis and Indians to buy and reexport it to Europe. That's not the US government's doing and doesn't affect the US...
The US hadn't bought a stinger in 18 years. The components aren't produced anymore. Raytheon started preparing for production last year due to an international order.
Are there any publicly documented incidents in which US forces have fired a Stinger (introduced in 1981) in anger? In all of the conflicts I can think of, the boots on the ground have basically never encountered low-flying enemy aircraft or helicopters. In all the incidents I can think of -- the Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq 2003, even various smaller incidents -- the US Air Force and Navy have completely removed enemy air assets from the equation. Things may be starting to change with drones, but even then it's not clear that MANPADS are the weapon of choice there.
As far as I can tell, Stinger missiles have largely been donated to "friendly causes" (allied nations, and notably Afghanistan against the Soviets and Ukraine more recently). Not that our troops don't carry them, but running low at a time we were already looking to replace the platform is not an existential concern. Similarly for HIMARS: guided MLRS are cool and game-changing for Ukraine, but they aren't really the preferred way for American troops to call in precision bombardment like JDAMS or cruise missiles from high-flying bombers.
High flying bombers and strategic level anti-air missiles: a match made in heaven.
Note that there hasn't been much of an actual conflict involving those, what happens is pretty much unknown unless you are a very canny air defense / air force officer in respective militaries.
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Continued:
My chain of command have been shitting on me and occasionally acting as though they were trying to get me killed but they were also on my side. How can that be you ask? It comes down to the "functional" in there being two key elements to a functional hierarchy. So long as the fire keeps climbs up the hill, the needs of an isolated individual can mobilize the might of a nation. At the most fundamental level, the answer to what it means to be on "a side" is the same as what makes a tribe or a nation. Your side is not your culture your ethnicity or your religion. Your side, your tribe, and your nation, is who's back you have in a crisis and who has yours.
Tyrone Woods had many friends. Friends in the military and veterans' communities, friends in the EMS community, friends in the So-Cal surfing community, friends amongst the surfers musicians bikers and drunks who inhabited the dive bars of San Diego. Many people who would have had his back, flown a plane to get him out, or taken up arms beside him if granted the opportunity. Unfortunately he didn't have any friends where it really counted, The White House or the State Department. Simply put Hillary got her 3:00 am call and let it go to voicemail. And as all these well meaning very intelligent people who said they loved America and wanted my help to put a Republican in the white house, also told me I was over reacting, being silly, that we shouldn't allow a mere four deaths (how many die in car accidents again?) influence national policy. ...and in that moment I understood, these people were not going to be on my side.
It is often interesting reading your perspective, thanks for writing this up. I look back at my best themotte posts that gets QQ contributions and its often something involving my own perspective. It is truly the hardest thing to get a sense of, and to communicate to others.
I find it interesting hearing this, because I was just having a talk with one of my good friends a while back. His daughter was a teenager in highschool and they were arguing about some of the complexities of modern gender issues. He eventually asked her "how do you define a man?" She didn't have a response. But my friend and I (who have never been in the military) immediately thought to define a man as a singular entity that is often at odds with the world around them. Its not a great definition, but I found it odd that we both had such similar definitions. Our backgrounds are highly different, I grew up in Charlottesville Virginia, easily upper middle class, white, atheist, and soft as hell. He grew up in Compton in the 80's, barely lower middle class, black, part of a group he described as a Christian cult, and hard as nails.
What we did have in common was almost a decade of working in the corporate world and for private companies. You have to be kind of dense working at a corporate gig for so long and not realize that shit rolls down hill, and so does fire. But the trick is that you don't have to take it. The companies are mercenary, but so are the smart employees. There are suckers and naive ones that don't get it. But they either learn or burn out. My friend and I both knew these things. We saw the world as cruel and mercenary. It would not support you, it would not save you. You have to save yourself. You have to look out for yourself. At least you do in the corporate world.
When I see politicians being mercenary, ruthless, and not protecting the people they have downhill I feel totally unsurprised. It happens all the time in the corporate world. Why would they behave any differently? It is only when I have the sinking realization that I will always be downhill from them that the real horror sets in. In the military it sounds like you have an expectation of 'in it together'. In the corporate world I could always leave and escape. In US politics we get neither.
Regarding your latter two paragraphs, I feel like this ties into a lot of the stuff I wrote for SSC and /r/theMotte about Hobbes vs Rousseau and fundamental differences in mindset.
What you and your friend both "got" was Hobbes' thesis about the the default state of man is "bellum omni contra omnes", that is everyone vs everyone, or as you put it "cruel and mercenary".
I hesitate to say that there was an expectation of being "in it together" because there often wasn't. The expectation was that the world, society, national policy etc... would be cruel and mercenary and that's precisely why it's important to look out for your own. No one else will. At the same time I feel like this is where the specification of a functional hierarchy is most important because I feel like a lot of people genuinely don't grasp the distinction and thus don't understand that they are playing with fire.
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