JTarrou
1yr ago
Yes, up to a relatively low point, but we get into definitional territory around such a flexible term as "racism". As others have noted, noticing reality isn't racism, and neither is normal ingroup behavior.
Personally, I don't consider normal ingroup bias, nationalism, regional bigotries etc. to be "racism" proper, even if they map onto particular races. Nor do I consider stereotypes, insofar as they reference real phenomena, to be racism. I know many people disagree with this, but since everyone else gets their own bespoke definition, I might as well use my own.
If we define "racism" strictly as the belief that a particular race has less moral worth as a group than other groups, I don't support or advocate it.
I do think every culture needs a bit of ingroup bias if it is to continue, and that a well-functioning society of any sort will be somewhat skeptical of outsiders. This does not mean pogroms are ok, but a little light shit-talk is nothing to soil one's trousers over.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Funny how leftist anti-racism winds up measuring lips to see who gets government jobs, and leftist feminism winds up putting violent male sex offenders into women's prison, and leftist sexual liberation just can't keep away from the kiddie dicks. MAPs of meaning, indeed.
JTarrou
1yr ago
The other thing we learn from brazil is that the status and relative success in society of this much more "spectrum" sort of distribution is that the darker you are, the lower you rate. There's all sorts of affirmative action and skin tone policing to determine who is "black enough" to qualify as underprivileged. In short, it is not the post-racial society being sold.
JTarrou
1yr ago
To be clear, I think option 2, which is essentially what you outline here, is far more likely.
I do not think it is preferable, but it is the way of the world as I understand it.
Yes, most major issues are global, so there is pressure for a global solution. And the US is the only country who can swing it, currently. Our system is not so different from Republican Rome. We allow our "allies" their own sovereignty, so long as they provide troops and political cover. In time, they may drift closer and demand greater rights within our world order. In a couple centuries, everything we call NATO right now could be US states. As power flows into Washington, who controls it becomes increasingly fraught. Too important to be left to voters, who will be still voting, of course. Factions will form, compete. The mob in DC will be a significant player in world politics. The military will become political, and this will lead at some point to a coup. There may be several before someone makes monarchy stick under some appropriately humble title. By that time, political opposition will be primarily internal.
This is all wild speculation of course.
JTarrou
1yr ago
If you ask me, once we realize that, we have two options:
1: A reversion to federalism. We withdraw from foreign affairs slowly, push policy back down to the state and local level, become balkanized. States restrict travel and trade between themselves. Mutually warring courts try to get leverage on the other as they all lose complete control of the legal system. We lose our position as sole superpower, we are no longer the world reserve currency, standards of living drop to come in line with Europe more broadly and our national politics grinds into a multi-century quagmire.
2: Rome 2, Electric Boogaloo.
I think you miss the point?
We are assuming that an ethnicity is a grouping of people along some criteria that can legitimately claim land as a group. That has moral authority to resist being moved from that land, that has the right as a group to prevent other groups from coming in, violently if necessary. Yes? I share this assumption, but I think we might differ on the criteria.
The middle east is ridden with groups of various genetic descents, political traditions and religious faiths. Mostly everyone's pretty mixed up on all three axes. So who exactly are the "ethnicities" that have a right to claim land, kick others off it and form political nations? Should the Lebanese Shia have their own country? The bedouin or Kurds? The Druze, the Sufis, the Maronites, the Egyptian Copts? Do they all have the moral right to start murdering civilians if they don't get their own state? Where do we draw the line? Texas?
I say for the purposes of the laws of war, we set it at the nation-state. Where do you think it should be set?
JTarrou
1yr ago
Oh no, I'm all for it. The sooner the courts can get as deeply involved in politics as the intelligence agencies are, the sooner we can dispense with the stupid notions that we're a "democracy", or a "nation of laws". Inevitably, the law will be whatever Harvard Law says it is. Until it isn't, and then it will be what whoever has the biggest gun says it is.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Well, I guess that just means judges control who can run for public office. All you need is a blizzard of bad-faith lawfare and judges willing to go along with it to "fortify" up some elections. Texas better get Biden under indictment fast and start issuing some gag orders of their own.
JTarrou
1yr ago
What counts as an ethnicity deserving of a homeland with a claim on territory and the right to exclude people of other ethnicities?
Turkey wasn't always Turkish.
JTarrou
1yr ago
There are many things people thought okay that we have decided is not, and their arguments weren't that great anyways.
Everyone who lived before 2015 was not a moral monster. A lot of people put a lot of thought into the moral structure of our past societies, their conflicts and wars. So perhaps it is not all of human history that is wrong here. Perhaps, in our excessively peaceful modern society, we have lost touch with the basic facts of the world and allowed our moral theories to outrun physical and psychological reality.
JTarrou
1yr ago
There's no thunder to steal mon frere. I'm just a broke-dick old soldier telling tame stories to the civilians. You chime in whenever.
You touch on something I'll be talking about soon enough, the social transmission of masculine skill and value. The hierarchy of men, and how far it has fallen. And where, in small pockets, it still exists.
JTarrou
1yr ago
your current territory
Whose current territory? The Ottomans? They were apparently cool with it.
And the left very much supports forming ethnic enclaves within other countries, so long as they are western and (mostly) white.
JTarrou
1yr ago
falsely accusing the fuckee
Point of grammar, this should be "the fucker", presumably the accuser is "the fuckee".
Grammar Nazi awaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!
JTarrou
1yr ago
It's not a relative scale
I disagree. Legitimacy is not binary, and is mostly determined by the citizens of a country anyway, not the opinions of outsiders. I think it is very much a relative scale.
suspending the democratic process because you won is inherently delegitimizing
I agree, it's just not totally delegitimizing. Many countries don't even bother with elections, is that more or less legitimate than holding one free election, one time? How do you account for the strong legitimacy of monarchies for eons? Legitimacy is not about votes specifically, though in our modern context we often conflate the two.
Secondly, are you saying that Hiroshima would be justified under just war theory?
I'm saying it was justified by the people who ordered it under all the theories that they thought were important.
Because I disagree strongly
Truman agreed. Your opinion, and mine, is irrelevant. You can apply your interpretation of just war theory to your own use of nuclear weapons.
given that nukes are inherently not a weapon that can discriminate against non-combatants and combatants in a city.
Not a thing. Neither can a hand grenade.
JTarrou
1yr ago
If a legitimate government has invited troops in, the correct point of appeal is that government, not the person of the troops. If the government is not legitimate, or is a puppet of those troops, they may be legitimate targets.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Might makes right may have always been the underlying material truth, but it has never been broadly accepted without a superstructure of morality to motivate and justify the violence.
Yes, we humans usually find it necessary to conceal our predatory designs beneath a banner of truth and justice. We are very good at conflating our material interests and partisan politics with "right".
JTarrou
1yr ago
It's not. It controls Gaza, Fatah controls the West Bank.
Yes, this is part of what I'm talking about
Secondly, they froze elections after they came to power.
After they won an election, which is more legitimacy than many real governments can manage.
Can we start bombing them for not actively fighting the government?
Not in my opinion, but we can start bombing military targets without worrying too much about civilian casualties. At Hiroshima, we bombed a military base. The rest of the town was just in the blast radius. Not, perhaps a hugely practical distinction, but one with real bite in the theory of just war. As ever, there's a discussion to be had about proportionality and whether such actions make further conflict more or less likely.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Morals don't tend to have much support or actuality in interstate conflict. We can argue about what is "moral", but the only way that has any effect is if we manage to convince some more powerful nation (the US for instance) to put enough military force into the area to create the conditions we think preferable. This sort of thing doesn't tend to solve much.
JTarrou
1yr ago
First prior: states are actors in anarchy, there is no "right" or "wrong".
The strong do as they will and the weak suffer as they must.
We may criticize, but without a more powerful state to enforce it, everything is permitted. This is descriptive, not normative.
JTarrou
1yr ago
are average Americans valid targets because of [acts of imperialism]?
Generally speaking there is a hierarchy of legitimate targets based on the scale of conflict. In full civilizational struggles like a World War, even civilian populations become targets (not saying this is right or wrong, just seems to be the way of the world). The smaller the scale, the smaller the group of legitimate targets. Maybe just government employees, or military/police specifically. This is all controversial, of course, and hotly debated within any specific context.
I would say that American soldiers in a foreign country are legitimate targets of people who don't want US troops in their country. If you want to kill civilians on a mass scale, you best be ready to face the same in response.
JTarrou
1yr ago
A big set of questions that much of the Israel/Gaza and many other conflicts revolve around is the use of violence in the international sphere. For this, I will postulate one basic prior that informs all subsequent ones. The international order is fundamentally anarchic. Nation-states do not answer to other states, except by greater power of one over another. They cannot be tried by any court, they can only be defeated by a rival. This is part of what national sovereignty means. Might may not make right, but it does often make facts, and facts that remain factual long enough become "right" over time.
Sovereignty, in turn, implies both the right to engage in collective violence against both one's citizens (policing, putting down rebellions, civil wars etc.) and foreign powers. Sovereignty is the corporate structure of the people, and thus they bear some responsibility for it, to the degree of its legitimacy of a government. The key aspect of any government that makes it a government rather than just a claimant, is the monopoly on violence. No government can claim legitimacy if they cannot substantially police the actions of their citizens, and direct the organs of state violence. Power and responsibility are entertwined. Who is and is not a nation has large implications for who we think is legitimate in waging war.
When we map this onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we begin to see why the problem is so intractable. Israel is a conventional nation-state. They have all the powers, legitimacies and crimes of a normal government. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are not (yet?) a nation. They currently have two separate territories semi-governed by two separate and mutually hostile terrorist organizations. They have never been able to unite enough to form a government, or declare independence, or most crucially, stop other internal groups from launching military and terror attacks at Israel (and a few of their neighboring countries). Fatah doesn't even fully control their own military wing, much less Hamas. Hamas does not speak for the PLO or the West Bank. Who exactly is Israel to make a deal with, even if that were their goal?
Ordinarily, if the power differential is large enough and the terror group small-scale enough, we can use the police power rather than resorting to warfare. But the Palestinians are bigger and more organized than a simple terror organization and they control territory. They largely provide their own self-government at the internal level, even if it is fractured by faction. The Palestinian people have been formed by their resistance to Israel into a political compact that they never had historically. It may yet produce a nation.
This does not currently alter the fact that there has never been a Palestinian state. This is a part of the world traditionally ruled by Egyptian or Mesopotamian empires. In the more recent years, power passed from the Ottoman empire to the British. The british followed their usual book and partitioned the territory between Jordan and Palestine, then tried to partition the remainder before giving up and pulling out. There are strong similarities here between India/Pakistan and the middle east. The bloodletting from that split was far greater in the subcontinent, but for other reasons it is the Israel/Palestine scuffle that has drawn so much more attention.
These reasons range from anti-semitism to the large constituency of educated jews and arabs in the west. But it is also because both India and Pakistan are nation-states. They fought several wars, and state-funded terrorism is ongoing, but fundamentally this is all within the international order. Palestine, neither fish nor fowl, is more confounding. Too weak and fractured to be a country as of yet, they are too big and powerful to be policed by others, and too violent to be tolerated without response. Much of the controversy is because the nature of Palestinian quasi-statehood creates vagueness over who exactly is the legitimate representatives of Palestine, and who exactly is responsible for the actions of (Hamas/IJ/PLO etc). We can hold Israel responsible for the actions of their military, and their citizens, and we should. We seem to differ on how much we hold Palestinians and Palestine responsible for the actions of their elected governments. In my view, because they are not governments at all. At least not yet.
To the degree that Hamas is the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, the people bear responsibility for their international diplomacy (such as it is).
To the degree that Hamas is not the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, they have no right to attack a foreign country on behalf of those people.
JTarrou
1yr ago
No plans for that at the moment. I've been writing a lot on these old subjects. It's been almost twenty years, and I'm sort of re-processing a lot of it. Most of it I won't publish, or only to a few military forums. Here at the Motte, I'm sharing some of the party stories, fun anecdotes, etc. in the hope that it will be palatable enough to give some very bright people a bit more insight into a very different section of society. I do plan on doing a series of these posts, as the titles should be indicating. Going to try to edit one a week for a bit.
High stress tends to burn certain memories into your mind. I don't have complete memories of most of this stuff, it's not like I can remember everything. But a small portion of that memory is very clear, very bright. Things like the ants, and the incongruous alligator logo, and the rock. I don't remember most of the kids involved, just the two named in the story. This is generally my experience of violent memories, that you remember bits of it very clearly, and much of it not at all.
Talking to other guys I've had some of these experiences with, I've been struck by how differently we recall the same event. The bits that we remembered were all different, and the story unfolded differently to each of us because of that.
Edit: As an example, when I was writing this, I realized that the tree I had fallen out of was some short distance from the garden. I don't really remember getting from one to the other. I sort of sidestepped this with "Didn't make it past the garden", but I don't actually remember running. I remember falling, and I remember getting kicked, but I must have gotten up and run inbetween, and been caught. No recollection of that part at all.
Not at all. I think it very much does. There's a stereotype about soldiers and nurses for a reason. We both have a bone-deep understanding of life and death, and an urge to blow off the steam that the repression necessary to operate with that knowledge produces. We have perspective on the rest of our lives that most do not.
It's not exactly the same, but it is parallel.
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