problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
This was in response to an argument that America isn't part of Western Civilization.
This was in response to a claim of moral relativism that criticized American attempts to be moral in war as a pretention.
I am aware what these quotes were in response to. However, it's hard to ignore the original answer you gave, that both commenters were in turn responding to:
"Western Civilization is better than the Third World and America is better than Iran. Even for all our flaws America at her best is and can be a force for good. Putting America and Iran on the same moral plane is actually a form of weakness because -- well, if it's all the same anyways who cares if Iran conquers? Who cares if barbarism or civilization prevails? It's all predicated on violence anyways right? Well no, I assert that the ends towards which I apply violence are actually more moral than theirs. I do prefer my civilization to theirs. I'm not a neutral third-party observer, I'm not a nihilist. My values are better than theirs and it's justified for me to use violence to defend what's mine."
I don't think I'm misrepresenting you at all.
My argument is that this is not a mere pretention, America has a righteous claim to morality over Iran, it's actually ridiculous to put America and a terrorist Islamic regime on the same moral plane.
Yes, exactly the outline of the argument I was criticising. America is good, Iran is evil, the violence America inflicts on Iran is justified and the violence Iran inflicts on America is unjustified. Nevermind that both these states include many people who have pretty much nothing to do with the regime in question, and the regime falling apart often means power vacuums, significant instability in the region, massive civil war and other super moral outcomes. It's like collateral doesn't exist to you: the Iranian regime is Evil and therefore Evil must be destroyed. Nevermind that the Iranian regime might be the best of the options currently available to the Iranians, nevermind that American-style Democracy, Whiskey and Sexy is probably not feasible in much of the Middle East as it stands.
You are raining hellfire down on a people, causing instability and destruction in a region which isn't even in your immediate geopolitical sphere that frankly you shouldn't even be involved in, and claiming it is perfectly moral, that as the "good guys" you are entitled to use violence against your enemies. There isn't even a figleaf of pretence that you're "bringing stability to the region" (it may well destabilise it further and is already doing so); you're basking and preening and cheering on the destruction of a country.
I make no apologies for actually believing in good and evil and using my sense of them to advance my arguments. I think anyone not doing this, out of a misguided sense of sophistication, is kidding themselves.
No, I'm not a moral relativist; I do believe in good and evil. I wouldn't be able to believe that this war and its supporters are evil otherwise.
No my argument has been and remains that America won the war already in every meaningful sense. We destroyed Iran's military-industrial complex, we destroyed their nuclear program, we alienated them from their neighbors and potential allies, we won.
And the fact that this is your goal says everything anyone needs to know about your "theory" of military victory. Not only that, I think you're underestimating costs for the US and just how much Iran is holding on, and your argument ignores significant uncertainties around any of the data. That being said your interceptors have been burned through hugely whereas Iranian missile stockpiles as of May were estimated to be approximately still 70% of their prewar total, and they have regained access to 90% of their underground missile storage and launch facilities. Granted it is possible these are conservative overestimates, but I would not be so quick to declare Iran dead in the water yet; the idea that Iran is obviously out of options and hanging on by a thread is wishful thinking and they may well have a good amount of freedom of action left if they want to keep causing pain.
Now it's clear that a lot of traffic can still transit the strait, because the American military is that much more powerful than the Iranian military, and I'm starting to hear that maybe the Americans started winning recently, who can really say?
X to doubt. The strait is currently incredibly operationally disrupted and the idea that it's "clear" that "a lot" of traffic is transiting is capeshit Amerikaposting of the highest order. Only six ships went through the strait on Sunday, and I don't know about you but that doesn't sound anywhere close to a lot to me. There are multiple estimates of this, and all show significantly and catastrophically reduced shipping through the strait; as long as that is the case the supply shocks will continue. I frankly do not know where you are getting your information diet from, but you're very clearly ignoring any data that contradicts your extremely jingoistic cries of victory.
America is justified to fight Iran and America is winning against Iran.
I'm sure the more you say this, the more true it will become.
I just don't take it seriously when someone does, er, literally exactly what you're accusing Shakes of doing - shameless, jingoistic boosterism that doesn't even try to make a serious analysis of their situation.
In that case, kindly point to a comment that Dase has made regarding his China-boosterism that doesn't include any "serious analysis of their situation", and is situated in the context of a thread where he hasn't made any serious analysis. That would help prove your charge against him. I follow the guy, and while he can be needlessly inflammatory I have to say his comments are routinely more well-informed than the America First crowd here. And on Xitter there are a good number of tweets where he criticises China (I think he has requested that his account not be shared here though), so I don't think your model of him as a jingoistic unconditional booster is accurate.
This is far more true of Shakes regarding America, who talks about the war in cartoon-villain ways like "Now I advance the argument that Bestern Civilization is better than the Third world, and better than Iran, so I support our moral claims against theirs etc. etc. etc. etc." and "It's good to destroy evil and it's evil to destroy good" which just translates to an unconditional support of America against its enemies regardless of what they do and how many second- or third-order effects it may have. In spite of how inflammatory Dase can be I don't think he has said anything to the effect of "China blowing up its evil, disgusting enemies is Good Actually and I support it unconditionally". It is low-quality tribalism par excellence, it is disturbing, and it is the farthest thing from "self-aware and humble" I can think of.
Also where did you get the idea that Dase was living in China? Since many of your comments appear to imply he currently does, I'd like to see where that was indicated. I am genuinely curious FWIW.
It sounds like you're trying to manifest a conclusion via sheer memery, rather than making any effort to understand - particularly when even the most jingoistic Americans (Shakes) are making meaningful admissions.
Okay, what "meaningful admissions" is Shakes making? He's doing exactly what you're accusing the "America lost" crowd of doing - claiming "America won" when what he actually means is "America caused damage to Iran without achieving many of their larger strategic goals in the timeframe they expected, has likely burned through a significant portion of their interceptors, and is now trying to find a way out of a costly war it can't back out from without losing face and ceding ground it's not willing to cede". The idea that this constitutes "winning" is quite ridiculous; they might win yet (and they may not), but Shakes keeps proclaiming victory every time there is any shadow of an agreement and when these agreements fall apart he predicts victory any time soon. It's tiresome and it's like gleefully proclaiming that Libya was a victory in any meaningful sense because the US fucked them up so bad. It is not a reasonable metric through which to measure foreign policy, and if wanton destruction is the sole endgoal of all your engagements you should expect pushback from those who don't revel in turning countries into Somalia.
There's a reason I assume he's trying to ingratiate himself with his new overlords. Legit sounds like a classier translation of racist xanxia slop.
Given the kind of patriotic preening Shakes routinely engages in, his unconditional and triumphant support for yet another war of aggression in the Middle East, his constant tendency to claim US victory under virtually any circumstances including the now-defunct MoU (his theory of victory seems to reduce to "We fucked them up! We fucked them up so bad"), and considering the brainrotted knee-jerk condemnation of everything China that you and many other posters routinely engage in, I'm most certainly not convinced that Dase is anywhere near as shameless as half of the posters here.
It's almost as if US hawks have no barometer for how insane they look to the rest of the world, and consider any China-bullishness as "ingratiation" because nobody could possibly ever like that country for any reason at all.
There are currently extant Chinese salvationist religions, they're not extinct and are quite alive and well. Falun Gong is a prominent example of a currently-extant salvationist religion, and it's only one among a crop that emerged throughout the Sinosphere in the 20th century; Weixinism, Tiandiism, Shanrendao and so on. There's also those which trace their roots all the way back to the Ming and Qing dynasties, such as the Luoist religious sects, Jiugongdao, the Eight Trigram teachings and Sanyi teachings. They tend to be syncretic and have some focus on personal and social redemption. It's difficult to really "give thoughts" on these religions given the broad nature of the category, the term encapsulates quite literally hundreds of different unaffiliated religious strands.
In general Chinese religions are very heterogenous, non-exclusivist and difficult to pin down, and once you look beyond the oversimplified Buddhism-Confucianism-Taoism trifecta there are a million unique local sects with different sets of beliefs, gods and practices which aren't really amenable to broad analysis (the level of heterogeneity is to such a degree that there are literally extant practicing Manichaeans in the hills of Fujian). Throughout ancient and modern Chinese history alike the state tended to police these societies due to the risk of a Taiping situation if left unchecked, but the creation of local religious movements still goes on nevertheless.
To be quite honest this is maximally uncharitable salacious conjecture about the motives of a dead man who can't defend himself. I was never some great fan of Anthony Bourdain, but to trash his suicide as a "narcissistic act" done out of spite in a thread where he is already being dogpiled is impressively distasteful.
I'm disappointed, if not surprised, that it took 15 hours for this comment to appear. The blatant attempt at pathologising anyone who doesn't live a straight-and-narrow life is frustrating and I think inaccurate. There has always been a place in society for transients; in premodern times they would have been your merchants and traders and nomads, and the notion that nobody's psychology could be suited for that and it has to be motivated by some kind of deep spiritual brokenness is impressively provincial. Hell, Diogenes was a semi-revered figure in ancient Greece, and all the way on the other end of the world there was a prominent and respected hermit tradition in ancient China (which actually continues to this day), vagabondism has held sway for a long time.
I think there is a good point hidden somewhere in that post about the vaunting of alternative lifestyles that in practice won't be suitable for the majority of the population and the demonisation of lifestyles that do work for the majority of the population such as the supposedly "conformist" life so lambasted by the counterculture of the 70s (who were just reflexively in favour of anything hoe-scaring), and if the post had just made that argument I would consider that a fair enough point. But it loses the plot once OP tries to imply that nobody could ever be happy living transiently, using the case study of Anthony Bourdain as if it's necessarily the norm for people who do choose to live that way. It's very possible that some of the people who do so are trying to run from something, and it's also very possible that many of the people who do this just possess outlier levels of openness to experience and aren't "broken" in any meaningful sense except being weird. So much of the argument appears to almost be a definitional one - if you are not doing Normal Things then you are not normal and that indicates something wrong with you.
Also to add to the list of TheMotte cliches that this post appears to be attempting to speedrun through, there's that one obligatory throwaway line about the Third World. I have to say that my experiences in many third world countries in Asia have led me to conclude that much of the "third world" is badly miscategorised; it's a sloppy category error to lump them in with places mired in a horrific, almost Hobbesian state-of-nature, which I think represents a far smaller proportion of the world than most here appear to believe.
I'm starting to notice that a lot of online discourse is just p-hacking.
First time?
It would be really fascinating to know what actually happened. What's the largest or most recent city in Eurasia to be completely abandoned like that?
Many good examples in Southeast Asia. One of the examples that comes to mind for me is the Khmer capital of Angkor, which at its height in the 13th century boasted a population of approximately 900,000 people (London at that time had a population of approx 80,000; Angkor's population was over 11 times larger). It's likely to have been the most populous city in the world during its heyday. There isn't consensus about the causes of the empire's decline and the city's eventual abandonment; some explanations I've seen relate to increasing competition by neighbouring kingdoms such as Sukhothai and Ayutthaya who would regularly conduct raids and incursions onto Khmer territory, others stress the effect of environmental shifts that resulted in poor harvests and clogging of the canals that irrigated the city, causing out-migration from the area. Certain other hypotheses suggest that elites freely moved elsewhere to take advantage of burgeoning trade networks accessible from the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers. The coup de grace that spelled the end for Angkor was when the Thai sacked and burned the city in the 15th century, at which point the remnants of the Khmer court moved south to Phnom Penh.
Funnily enough this would later happen to the Thai as well in an act of historical karma - the city of Ayutthaya eventually ended up amassing a population totalling 1,000,000 around 1700 (one of the world's largest cities at the time) but they were then sieged by the Burmese Konbaung dynasty in 1767 and destroyed. It's a less compelling candidate than Angkor though, since the city was not fully abandoned and is still a provincial capital.
It depends on the region, I think. In East and (most of) Southeast Asia I'm generally comfortable with the idea of living in the bigger cities; as overwhelming as they can sometimes be there's a lower baseline level of dysfunction, lower crime rates, less urban decay and a much lower chance of having run-ins with junkies, fent zombies and other such unsavoury characters. To be quite honest if I was fully capable of freely moving elsewhere without having to incur extra costs, I would go somewhere in Asia (I currently live in Australia as well, and while I like Sydney enough there are a couple reasons why I would not stay here long term).
In most Western countries I would definitely prefer not to live in most of the cities; granted it depends on the country but the level of dysfunction in many of the urban cores is hard to stomach. The smaller cities and towns are consistently much nicer.
You’re going to receive a pretty large barrage of responses filled with hair-splitting that supposedly illustrates the notion of American exceptionalism. Highly patriotic Americans view themselves as distinct from and superior to pretty much every other country on Earth, they view themselves as uniquely meritocratic, uniquely free, uniquely honest and uniquely stable as a society.
However, as someone who has lived in and travelled to a dizzying number of places you can put me in as one of those people who has no desire ever to live in America, and you would have to pay me to go. As far as I am concerned if they want their country to themselves, they can have it (nor is it their obligation to take in any immigrants). But the idea that America isn’t already subject to “endless subsidies, bureaucratic bloating and clientelism” is a fantasy, and has been for a long time.
I would love to talk to anyone who relates at all to being in this boat.
Not only am I pretty certain I'm autistic (undiagnosed but the constellation of social deficits, special interests, executive function disorder and intense catastrophic burnout fits me all too well to ignore), I have independently written about coming across the normifying tendency in my own life and steadfastly refusing to succumb to it. Most of your comment could have been written by me, and fucking hell I also write massive unreadable blocks of text which then get trimmed down to something more manageable.
The primary difference is that I don't live in "merry-go-round cycles" as you describe them - I am now sustainably functional, though currently working in a job that threatens to burn me out a lot. And neither do I swing back and forth in terms of the actual opinions I hold; I have always been rather politically radical from young and very strongly police any such tendency to just moderate my opinions since I view that as stultifying one's own intellectual development for the sake of social harmony. What has varied over time is my ability to argue my positions, and the amount of energy I have to care about them and articulate them.
When it comes to keeping myself intellectually honest, I personally find that hashing things out with people and participating in places like this one helps; actually trying to test your opinions and rearticulate them via debate really helps clarify and sharpen your point of view. It can change your point of view too, but at least reasoned debate is an actually valid means through which to shape your beliefs as opposed to simply succumbing to a zeitgeist.
Epistemic status: Stream of consciousness ramblings written at work.
Or in other words, the larger/denser the city, the more authoritarian the populace must be for it to function, for the raw density of assholes per square mile is far higher in a megatropolis than it is anywhere else on Earth.
East Asia is weird in this regard, actually. Asian city-dwellers are extremely low in NIMBYism and you generally don’t see the same kind of hyperregulation that you find in the West when it comes to zoning laws, building height restrictions, street food regulations, etc. Even when they exist, enforcement is spotty to say the least (China is a great example of a country where there’s a huge and seemingly-contradictory gulf between “the rules on paper” and “what happens in practice”; in practice many supposed infractions aren’t strongly policed on the local level). Things like road rules are for the most part regarded as just a suggestion. The result is that Asian cities are much more bustling and loud, Chinese and Southeast Asian ones in particular, and you often have to negotiate your way through a city. Mixed-use spaces are the norm; in Malaysia, China, South Korea, Vietnam and so on it’s normal to find a historic temple, a large park, a street market and a major shopping centre all right beside each other. Traffic is pretty much always wild beyond belief and motorcycles/electric scooters will wind their way through streets clogged with vendors. Generally in practice there’s also less focus on enforcing banal aesthetic matters such as trying to make sure everyone’s lawns are trimmed to the Correct Height and so on, in this sense the vibe is in some ways less authoritarian and regulated than American cities.
The way in which they are more authoritarian is in their policing of crime, in particular drug-related offences, and as a result you don’t end up seeing dealers, junkies and other such seedy shit on the streets. Their power to investigate and punish these offences is much greater than it is in the West, and often policy-makers are very mindful of ghettoisation and take serious steps to prevent it from happening. China’s hukou system, which they used to control rural inflow into the cities so as to prevent the creation of large slums during their rapid modernisation, is probably the most radical solution to that, though that system has relaxed considerably as of late. All of this is reinforced by social attitudes as well - there’s more of a competitive, hard-nosed “get to work” attitude in Asia which very much relies on pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, not relying on handouts, and staying on the straight and narrow - if you take drugs you get ostracised socially. There’s just not the same kind of self-destructive, crabs-in-a-bucket inner-city mindset you find in many Western countries. This results in a general lack of crime and bad behaviour since you don’t really end up with a large, disenfranchised, heavily substance-dependent segment of the population that goes on to cause further issues. In America there is a political push to protect this class of citizen at the expense of others, an idea which your average Asian likely would find repellent if not outright incomprehensible.
In other words Asia is both more authoritarian and more laissez-faire at the same time. You don’t have to be uniformly more authoritarian on the whole to maintain a stable society, rather, you have to be authoritarian about the right things. I have to say that I generally agree with the Asian approach on what they have chosen to prioritise and police, I like night markets, I like mixed-use spaces and hate seeing hobos crawl onto a train just to piss all over the floor, but I grew up in Asia too so perhaps I’m biased. My family travelled from Malaysia to the UK recently and were generally just appalled at the level of dysfunction in London (from what I hear, within three days they witnessed two robberies, and saw beggars in many of the shopping streets); it’s a meme here that much of Asia is low-trust but frankly the “low-trust” Asians are often shocked at the state of many Western cities.
I do not like this argument of “that’s just living in the city bro” either but to be fair, this specific issue really does appear to be a bit of an intractable problem when you live in high-density environments - which a city necessarily is. Other things that libs hand wave as just being part of Living In Da City are clearly and obviously avoidable and to a large extent concern how people behave; East Asian cities for example lack much of the issues with violence, theft and drug use that is pervasive in many North American and some European urban cores, but there isn’t really much you can do about a physical lack of space and the sardine-like parking conditions that results from it. It may be the one context where that argument is actually applicable.
This is why I'm not using the word "winning" to describe what occurred with Iran; they were capable of creating enough attrition to force the US to give up. The US, however, did not achieve the overwhelming bulk of its aims even in the best-case scenario for the US going forward, even the purported "gains" trotted out likely could have been achieved via diplomacy instead without incurring so much cost, and that is the relevant metric when trying to assess a statement like "The US has so much global power that it can effortlessly topple every regime, and nobody can do anything in response". It doesn't matter what word you assign to the whole sorry situation, though it's more accurately described as "US failure" than "Iranian victory".
I just don't really know what people are updating on in this conflict with respect to military might.
Quite evidently people who believed the previous statement about practically unchecked US power certainly need to update! That is not a hallucination; it was an actual position which was triumphantly and openly stated by some users, as the links provided by Dase illustrate.
American defeat was well outside my model, so this is "winning too much", as it were.
I did not necessarily expect this outcome either, and I remember arguing with users here at the start of this war who were pre-emptively gloating about America having global unrestricted power to bulldoze everybody Chyna decided to associate with, that the good ol' US of A enjoyed such an overwhelming military dominance over virtually everyone else that they could just walk in, topple regimes and replace them with puppets, then walk away in slow motion while explosions detonated behind them.
Turns out none of these takes aged well at all. It was ridiculous hubris then and it's ridiculous hubris now, and at this point one would expect to see grovelling mea culpas from anybody remotely capable of updating their priors.
Honestly, the only thing I've played for a while is online Scrabble, which I have become very good at for no particular reason. There is literally no practical use to knowing things like "what are all the admissible two letter words in the American Scrabble dictionary" and yet I continue.
The latter. You have a semi-separate nervous system of sorts in your gut, called the enteric nervous system, which orchestrates the entire digestive process (including peristalsis) and has a sleep-wake cycle of its own regulated by your circadian rhythm. It's a large collection of neurons that's about as sizeable as a cat's brain, and can operate by itself if disconnected from the rest of your nervous system.
The real philosophical question is whether such a thing is independently conscious to some degree, but that line of questioning leads nowhere good.
What kind of differences would even need to be reconciled between people who don’t live with each other?
These aren't religious disagreements, and I didn't cut this family member off entirely, merely reduced contact with her. It didn't get so bad I would fully initiate NC, though I do have a lot of annoyance over a lot of things. It's not on the level of some of the horror stories I believe some others in this forum could tell.
To answer your question, I did live with the family member in question; circa two years ago my elder sister moved back in with me after her then-boyfriend of five years called a temporary pause on the relationship, which eventually led to a break-up. It's hard to give a full picture of why I soured so heavily on her without massively long essays (longer than this one) detailing the pattern of behaviour that eroded my sanity overtime, but the reason for trying to reduce contact was simply that I started to notice just how aggressively one sided my relationship with her was.
Note that for several years I suffered from a chronic illness that made it extremely difficult for me to work (which I have written about before here) and she would constantly lambast me; she barely even cared to talk to me then - she had a stable job then and a relationship and I had none of these things. After I recovered, found stable employment, and generally began to pull my life back on track, she suddenly became more interested in spending time with me. She wanted to go out together, talk more often, and generally have a closer relationship, presumably because I had finally become someone Worthy Of Attention. Then, when her own relationship collapsed and she moved back in with me, the dynamic shifted again, and suddenly she wanted emotional support. And despite the fact I was still getting back on my feet then I did provide it, to the point that my own mental health seriously began to suffer (and if I tried to withdraw after spending hours reassuring her, she'd often follow me and continue the conversation). But it soon became clear that there was a lot of underlying behaviour from her that would simply not change, and persisted long after she had gotten over the breakup.
Her general hygiene was awful. During this period she quit her job and started pursuing self-employment, which gave her a far more flexible schedule than I had, yet I would always see dishes in the sink left out for days on end, clutter in the hallway so thick one could barely walk, and hair clogs in her shower drain that resulted in standing water; eventually there was a carpet of black mold growing on the bathroom floor. I was the one who scrubbed the floor after getting back from work (the drain would clog and the mold would always accumulate again though), and at one point the mold had even spread to the blinds and pillows, which I also had to clean. Keep in mind I am not a tidy person at all and do not believe that everybody must kowtow to the member of the household with the lowest tolerance for clutter, but when you end up with black mold everywhere that's a sign that the situation was ridiculous.
In general I always felt as if she often displayed an intense lack of reciprocal care or interest in other people's lives, except when she wanted to tell you that you were Doing Things Wrong, and she would not prioritise you if it caused her inconvenience (though you would have to deal with many of her neuroses, in contrast). One prominent example of the sheer lack of consideration involved a holiday I was planning, where I made the mistake of asking whether she wanted to come, and what should have been a simple yes-or-no decision somehow remained unresolved for months. Every time I asked, she treated me like I was pestering her, and my planning was delayed repeatedly because I had no idea whether she was joining. Eventually she decided to come, something I never forced her to do, and then spent much of the latter half of the trip constantly complaining over every little annoyance in spite of the fact that my leave was limited and hers was not. So many little instances when she was living with me showed she just did not care about my time and did not appreciate the extent to which every other family member put their lives on hold to accommodate her when she needed it.
She could be good, even fun, to be around. But the problem I think was that she felt at liberty to embrace some of her most indulgent tendencies because she thought she would never be dropped like a hot potato by family members. Eventually the sneaking suspicion that she just did not give much thought to my wellbeing looked too plausible to ignore, and when she moved out I took the opportunity to give myself some space from her.
Have any of you intentionally reduced contact with/outright cut off a family member you used to have a good relationship with due to irreconcilable differences? If so, how did it go and do you feel regret about it?
I did so recently and can't stop feeling guilt (and also a lot of anger) about it.
problem_redditor
18d ago
Are any of your friends named Barney Stinson, by any chance?
(I kid, of course.)
I can have a quiet cocktail (what was offered as an alternative) or read a book in bed any evening.
I agree, but being in Mexico opens up a constellation of other options you could capitalise on, all of which may offer you more utility than going to a soccer game it doesn’t seem that even you’re particularly interested in. It’s not a choice between “soccer match” and “reading a book in bed” (that I concur is an awful value proposition when you’re in a foreign country), it’s a choice between “soccer match” and “seeing Teotihuacan” (which is all lit up at night) or “wandering the historic centre trying out the local food” or “watching the mariachis in Plaza Garibaldi” or any number of other very local things you could be doing.
Coolness per se doesn’t matter as much to me as enjoyability does. If you’d enjoy the match, then yeah, go for it. But there are other options you can avail yourself of which might be better for you, depending on your bent.
problem_redditor
19d ago
Just a question:
Why?
Why should he go? Sounds like negative utility to me. Straits-dwellers have a pejorative word for this behaviour: kiasu, which roughly translates to FOMO on steroids.
Seriously who cares if you’re cool or not only losers care about that.
problem_redditor
19d ago
A nitpick, but the Chinese state’s capital back in the days of Rome would have been Chang’an (modern day Xi’an) or Luoyang, not Beijing. Beijing has really only been the Chinese capital ever since the Ming.
'Careers' with very short times, nearly as bad as professional sports stars, and not likely to return the same high incomes.
There are many careers with limited shelf-lives, and I would also note that the vast majority (read: virtually all) of athletes do not earn high incomes and are nowhere near likely to do so in the future, outside of statistical outliers that represent less than a fraction of a percent of the total. For example in my country, Australia, half of elite adult athletes live below the poverty line, considering incomes from all sources including other jobs, and that sample reflects the top percentage of athletes in terms of skill level. Your chances of earning high incomes in sports is close to nothing; hell many Olympians are in dire financial straits and leave the games riddled with debt since they are responsible for their own training, travel and coaching expenses. That is, of course, assuming they even make it there. The vast majority of people in sports must work side hustles to live, and it carries a far higher possibility of bodily injury than any modelling job. To point to "professional sports stars" is like pointing to supermodels as representative of your average modelling career. They are the tip of a very large iceberg.
While I certainly do not think they're the best longterm career choices, given that I do not morally object to people being athletes, I do not see modelling as something so incredibly and uniquely distinct that I think it warrants any sort of special treatment. If you're canny it is certainly also possible to build connections while modelling and then pivot into adjacent roles such as styling or talent management, and it's certainly not unheard of for people to pursue modelling or modelling-adjacent work while obtaining education, especially given its nonstandard and flexible nature. Most people who find work in modelling or sports won't do so as their primary source of income, and this is fine - the idea that the only jobs that should exist is stuff that you can do full-time for your whole life isn't true. There is a valid place in the economy for jobs that allow people to earn some income on the side or for a temporary period, and I am certainly not about to start policing people's choices and preferences like some kind of moral busybody.
EDIT: added more
The point is that the costs of such military action (human lives, further destabilisation of the region) should make war somewhere close to a last resort once all diplomatic action has failed and when there is strong proof of a present threat. That condition has not manifested in the case of the Iran war, where there is no evidence they were producing warheads. I do not believe that this war was started prudently at all; they really just appear to have attacked once they thought Iran was showing any signs of weakness.
I am not arguing regime change was The Goal, I’m arguing that absent an explicit regime-change goal you can badly destabilise and destroy the region. Regarding regime change, I think the instigators of the war had many different objectives; Netanyahu certainly wanted regime change. Trump was very wishy-washy on this, but many of his statements suggest it was a goal among others.
"Finally, to the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don't leave your home. It's very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations. For many years, you have asked for America's help. But you never got it. No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight." Unlike how you’ve portrayed it, he did not say it was “not essential” and alongside what Dase posted about Unconditional Surrender, sure sounds like regime change was on the menu.
The narrative on regime change is really quite funny, to be honest. The later statements are this contradictory mix of “Regime change was never our goal, but also it if was we achieved it”, somewhat akin to “It’s not happening and if it is it’s good”. Trump wants to back out at this point, and in spite of trumpeting the idea of regime change prominently early on he has reneged on the idea to save face if he decides to cut his losses, since the goal is a lot more definite and less weaselly and open-ended than “depleting missile stocks” and “harming Iranian military-industrial complex” - which frankly is not that meaningful of a war goal in itself; you’re always guaranteed to run down your enemy’s war resources (at the cost of your own). The question is always one of cost-benefit; do the interceptors and other war resources you lost, limiting your ability to project power elsewhere, outweigh the benefit you get from a less battle-ready Iranian regime, especially considering the economic shocks and regional instability the whole affair caused? That is how victory is measured, not some chimp-brained metric of how you fucked them up so bad.
No shit lol, I thought that was clear the second I proclaimed your moral system to be disturbing. There is no way to discuss morality without operating on moral priors. And I never criticised you simply for proclaiming on good and evil, my criticism is that you believe your proclamations of good and evil justify all action against The Evil, regardless of the collateral costs it brings. Just because you don’t like something and believe it is evil doesn’t mean it automatically becomes moral or high-minded for you to utilise any violence you want to achieve your aims, no matter how outsized.
US intelligence is a pro-IRGC source now, okay.
Besides, you’ve been the one trumpeting American victory uncritically by believing “pro-America sources” and not “pro-IRGC sources”, whereas I have been relatively cautious in my assessments, for you to accuse me of that is projection to the highest degree. Your confidence that Iranian capabilities have been completely decimated should not be anywhere near as high as it is.
And there you go again proclaiming victory based on nothing but your own jingoistic fanfictions. Six ships and massive supply chain disruptions is not something to be uproariously gleeful about.
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