Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3hr ago
The trouble with comparing Soviet and Nazi atrocities is that the Soviets did what they were going to do while the Nazis were stopped. There really isn't a serious counterfactual where the Soviets do a whole lot worse than they actually did. By contrast, the Nazis plans for if they won in the East involved tens of millions of deaths on top of everything they actually did, and we have every reason to think they meant it.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8hr ago
Eventually. Maybe. Decades later. And only if they're heterosexual.
I'm confused - are they not canceling people for sexual misconduct? If all the consequences are low probability and delayed by decades, why were so many people worked up about this?
The entire backlash against #MeToo only makes sense in the context of it actively going after currently prominent individuals.
It says something about the psychology of this particular ideology that so many prominent lefty leaders turn out to be rapists and/or pedophiles.
I think it's more that left-of-center people are significantly more likely to care if a prominent member of their organization turns out to be a sexual predator. A remarkable number of right-wingers seem to think that banging dubiously consenting 16 year olds and sexually harassing your subordinates is just the Big Man's due (and are generally significantly more prone to dismissing/denying claims of sexual abuse).
The fact that these interrogations are being carried out even against dead icons suggests there's an actual principle at play - pushes against living figures could be argued to be power plays, and going after the other team's heroes is just playing politics, but there's really no reason to go digging up these kinds of skeletons unless this is something you actually care about.
I think I'm gesturing off in the direction of "right wingers tend not to elevate rapists and pedos as leaders, and are certainly NOT prone to censoring or rewriting history to cover up such traits in their leaders."
Umm... ah... what?
Let's leave aside the allegations against Mr. Trump or people like Matt Gaetz for a moment. Remember Mark Foley or Dennis Hastert? The fact that a long-serving GOP Speaker was a pedophile has been largely consigned to the memoryhole. How about Roy Moore? The Catholic Church has had a parade of scandals (though they're woke now, so idk if that counts anymore). Southern Baptist churches have been subject to a slew of sexual abuse scandals. I know I could do some actual research and come up with more examples, but the point is less to establish who has more pedos and more to illustrate the existence of a history of right-wing leaders getting caught up in sex abuse scandals and the conservative movement downplaying or forgetting about it.
The actual pattern I can discern is that if you put men in a position of power, influence, or prestige, a significant subset of them will try to exploit it for sex (whatever prior commitments they may have re: celibacy or marriage). Of those, many will get outright coercive or direct their attentions towards inappropriate subjects (e.g. minors, subordinates).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
Once upon a time Germans were stereotyped as romantic and sentimental while the French were seen rationalist and bureaucratic rules-followers.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
If it's any consolation, the proliferation of factoids is endemic and not a particular defect of this forum; basically the only way around it is to assume everyone you talk to is either lying or doesn't know what they're talking about (granted, this assumption is usually true, but it's a hard way to live life).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
Iran is a democracy, full stop, with certain elements that manage democratic change, similar for the most part to the US Judiciary. The Supreme Leader is chosen by the Assembly of Experts, who are directly elected. The Guardian Council, which vets candidates (including the Assembly of Experts) are appointed by the Supreme Leader.
That does not sound particularly democratic. It sounds vaguely reminiscent of "democracy" in the Soviet Union, where you could vote for any Communist-approved candidate you wanted and all actual power routed through unelected figures in the Party or executive.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
These comparisons are laughable. One off comments, random local issues, and material complaints about voting access are being compared to a top-down campaign by the Republican Party's elite.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
The Vietnam War was the last time anyone deliberately took on the US military in a conventional fight (Noriega and Saddam Hussein made some very bad decisions that led to a conventional confrontation, but that was very much not what they expected to happen). North Vietnam a) got pasted in basically every head-to-head engagement with US forces (and that while quality of the US military was at a low ebb) b) ultimately succeeded.
One of the consequences of US conventional dominance is that no one wants to fight us. This is good, but it also means that the amount of foreign policy problems the US has that can be solved by the brute application of conventional force is fairly low. This is compounded by the accumulated psychic damage of Vietnam and Iraq, which has greatly attenuated the ability of the USG to count on popular trust to justify a sustained war effort (which is to say, I think complaints that the public has gotten soft are misunderstanding the problem).
That is a major stumbling block for people who want the US to pursue an aggressive, hard power-oriented foreign policy. Most potential adversaries know that even if the US goes ham in the air, it isn't going to put troops on the ground to force the issue. So if you can bunker down and ideally turn up the heat in response, America will lose interest because Americans do not believe in US foreign policy. Hell, one of the reasons the US foreign policy community has been guzzling the special forces kool-aid is because promises results without the cost, footprint, or media attention of large (whether or not it delivers is another matter).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
yet it's easier to identify cattle than people. Why?
Because cattle don't have rights (well, very few rights, and great difficulty exercising them). And because there are a lot of people who feel the population should be as illegible as possible to the government.
How could anyone be against that?
Whenever you ask "how could anyone be against this?" you should follow up by asking yourself "how could someone acting in bad faith leverage 'how could anyone be against this?'-style arguments?" That will usually provide a starting point for how someone could be against it.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
This assumes that it's a both-sides problem, when the root issue is that Republican (and even more specifically Trumpist) political elites have found it useful to raise bad-faith claims of vote fraud. This renders attempts to satisfy their concerns largely pointless: the only way to convince their followers will be to convince their leaders, and their leaders know what they are saying isn't true.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
I am quite left wing you might say, and I am against it for now; given who is asking for it and how they are asking. Mister ""find 11,780 votes" wants to put his spoon in? I wonder why.
More or less summarizes my view on this. Voter ID proposals are facially reasonable, but the details inevitably end up being extremely questionable. The motte is "of course we should have voter ID, are you crazy?" and the bailey is a parade of capricious provisions aimed at making it harder to vote.
A perennial problem in US politics is that a lot of people simultaneously want the population to be less legible so the government has a harder time doing stuff they don't like but also want to do things that require making the population more legible.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
I think you misunderstand me. If the plan was to have the Marines seize Kharg Island, you probably wouldn't send them in right away. But you'd have them staged nearby; you wouldn't wait two weeks then move them in from the Pacific.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5d ago
Because they're not significantly at risk and they're actually ready to go.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5d ago
I'd imagine if the plan was always to seize islands in the Gulf that you wouldn't wait two weeks after the beginning of your air campaign to start transferring Marines in from out of theater.
Conversely, we have a lot of reason to think the current administration thinks in terms of short news cycles and poasting.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
I'm not quite sure I agree with that - I think the preference for inaction results from the combination of prioritizing harm avoidance and a (nearly universal) moral intuition that not doing something implies less culpability than doing something, even if the outcomes are similar in human cost (e.g. very few people think the US withdrawing humanitarian aid, leading to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, is really equivalent to the US directly killing hundreds of thousands of people).
I confess that I'm also not sure what you mean by neoliberalism here.
The reason my priors are strongly against war, even though I am not a pacifist or even against initiating force in principle, is that war is chaotic in the extreme. There is a long, long, long history of foolish and overconfident war planners thinking they're going to get away with a short, victorious war and walking into disaster. Even the best planners make critical mistakes and those mistakes can have enormous human costs.
The US is powerful and secure enough that the consequences overwhelmingly fall on others, but I feel like that should make us more cautious. The lack of skin in the game makes reckless overconfidence easy. There are a lot of cases where the choice between action and inaction is not obvious or should be biased towards action, but war is not one of them.
A little of column A, a little of column B. Back during the Civil Rights Movement, organizers and protestors absolutely knew the goal was to get the shit kicked out of you - the point was to quite literally say "come and see the violence inherent in the system." This time around, there's a noticeable mix of people who understand this and cargo cultists who are just aping the form of the CRM (tbh, there were probably similar people back in the day).
That said, I doubt there were a lot of people specifically anticipating someone getting shot.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7d ago
When you look at things through this lens everything explains itself perfectly.
Does it? Lazy justifications (and, indeed, enthusiasm) for brutality seem to be a pervasive disease of human thought. Certainly, 'civilized' cultures have never struggled to commit superlative acts of barbarism.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7d ago
Ok - what is the acceptable rate of school situated in former military barracks bombings in such a massive campaign.
It depends on what you are trying to achieve.
Look, I thinking the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaski were justified. It was horrific, but weighed against the alternatives and the enormity the problem, it was probably the least bad option. It is, at the very least, highly arguable. If circumstances were different, however, it might not have been justified. Or, to take another example from the Middle East: there was a US airstrike in 2017 that killed ~200 civilians. Not great, and it is important to (sincerely) investigate why it happened and how it could be avoided in the future (and simply shrug and say 'oops'). But in the context of defeating ISIS, grudgingly tolerable.
What I see in the responses here is people using the mere existence of this problem of tradeoffs as an excuse not to care. If someone, questioned about the atomic bombings (or Tokyo, or Allied strategic bombing more generally), waved off the issue by saying "shit happens in war", I would take that as a very worrying sign regarding their instincts even if I agreed that the actions were ultimately justified. I certainly wouldn't want them making targeting decisions.
Iran itself does way more indiscriminate targeting from what I have observed. It is just that their weapons are shitty.
True, but also: irrelevant. The moral inadequacy of others is not an excuse for your own behavior.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7d ago
You can't use the general existence of unpleasant tradeoffs to justify a particular set of actions; you need to actually articulate a defense of why a particular tradeoff is worth it. Here we have a bunch of people saying "I don't care, shit happens."
This is, at best, callous and least. It very easily turns into self-justifying brutality.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7d ago
The only reasonable response to that is the maximum response.
This is demonstrably not true. We know because it has happened. The punitive expedition in Mexico did not involve any such tactics, and the US invasion of Afghanistan was not a brutal scorched earth campaign in the slightest.
And if you asked any American President or Speaker of the House 1865-2000
I'm sure some would agree with you, but most of them would call you an absolute barbarian.
The problem in the US, and Israel, and indeed basically every country, is that there is a significant subset of the population with incorrigibly brutal instincts. It is incumbent on the rest of us not to indulge them, however much they try to promise that their methods are the key to success. Their instincts are terrible, and will constantly lead you to doing appalling things that will make your situation worse in most cases.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7d ago
The messaging from these people basically seems to have been "Yes 10/7 was a terrible thing, but Israel shouldn't actually have done anything about it".
chadyes.jpg
Or, to elaborate and contradict myself: Israel should have done something about it, but not what they did. Israeli leadership wants this conflict to have the moral logic of a war for survival rather than a policing action; they simultaneously want to deny the sovereignty of Palestine and deny any responsibility for Palestinian welfare. The problem is that these positions are incoherent and unjustifiable. Israel occupies a position of near-total superiority over Hamas and other Palestinian militants. Even in the worst case, it does not face anything even remotely approach an existential threat from these groups.
It's been two and a half years of high intensity conflict in an extremely confined geographical space; the victims of 10/7 have been avenged seventyfold, and yet Israel's position is, basically, that they are going to keep bombing Gaza so long as there is evil in the hearts of men (or the President pardons Netanyahu). If they are conducting this war in a good faith effort to end Palestinian militancy (which I question), they should contemplate whether there is some flaw in their strategy.
The whole MSM/NGO machine was primed from the outset to hyper-focus on every negative outcome the war had on Gazans
Was it, though?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7d ago
There are an amazing number of people responding with, essentially, "shit happens in war", seemingly with giving any further thought to questions like "can we make shit happen less in war?", "does what we're trying to achieve justify this shit?", and "should the fact that shit happens in war make us more cautious about going to war?"
Christ
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7d ago
But he's right that the military's job is to be lethal.
He's not. The military's job is to employ military force effectively in pursuit of state objectives. Given US conventional superiority, lethalitymaxxing is often pointless or counterproductive. Like, the problem of the US military in Iraq or Afghanistan was not that it wasn't lethal enough, and missions that require more sophistication than firepower are not going away.
I'm not really sure how that's relevant to the question of whether or not left-wingers are uniquely prone to elevating sexual predators to positions of authority.
(Also, Hastert did have stuff named in his honor. Not so much any more).
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