BANNED USER: antagonistic and personal
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remzem
No bio...
User ID: 642
Banned by: @Amadan
remzem
1yr ago
Because what was written doesn't make sense
If you indirectly force or empower someone to wage a conflict they could not, or would not, do without your support, that's a proxy war.
Let's pick out parts of this by excluding some of the not relevant or's.
If you empower someone to wage a conflict they could not do (wage) without your support, that's a proxy war.
If someone wages a conflict that they would want to as long as you were not outright stopping them, that is not a proxy war.
These statements contradict, the second is too broad. If you're enabling them or encouraging them but they want to do it anyways it's both not a proxy war and a proxy war.
Reduces to basically any conflict in which a powerful foreign country influences the conflict, while w/e party within the state they're enabling wants to wage a conflict, not being a proxy war. So nothing can be a proxy war as long as you can find some faction within a country that doesn't like current leadership.
remzem
1yr ago
Maybe if you hadn't spent the last 30 years destabilizing every region (including your own country) for pure greed people would have a bit more trust?
remzem
1yr ago
By that definition there has never been and can never be a proxy war, as no one has zero agency, all groups the US has employed in its proxy wars had a choice to say no. Convenient for someone that is such a US foreign policy apologist.
I got through two pages of your post history with every single post (on here, reddit is dead) being a post defending US foreign policy. I have a life man, I can't be expected to spend all of it reading effort posts, and if you want to be seen as not a neocon you really should maybe try and not do everything in your power to appear as a neocon? Sometimes it can be hard to square the image we project to the public with our interior views of ourselves I guess. What label do you prefer? US imperialist? Atlanticist? Someone Russia touched in a no-no spot?
I mean someone in the small scale question thread asks if Sudan is a proxy war, something that could be answered by a simple, "There is a lot of incentive foreign powers could be involved but we can't for sure say this it is or isn't." Instead you write up a 5 page rebuttal on how there is no way the US could possibly be involved in another proxy war after it's history of endless proxy wars, when there are actors involved that are already in proxy wars by info dumping a Wikipedia article on recent Sudanese history.
The problem with this sort of argument and a problem that persists with motte style arguments, is that the information that is most valuable in international relations, is also the information you are least likely to have. Long ass effort post write ups summarizing easily available facts are almost always worthless and the endless gaslighting by the "experts" to trust the bare facts and ignore your "conspiratorial" instincts is obnoxious. Which is why it's terribly misleading to just rattle off a bunch of known facts about recent Sudanese history without pointing out the very obvious incentives foreign actors would have to be involved. Are foreign countries perfectly capable of fucking themselves? Yeah. Do foreign actors often give them a push when it's in their interests? Yeah. In the interconnectedness of the modern world and the power certain states have within it, it's almost impossible for any war to not have at least some hint of proxy war to it. That isn't chauvinism, that's just how power works.
Also, how is Obama letting the middle east handle (offshoring) it's proxy wars not just some inception tier proxy warring?
remzem
1yr ago
I mean you should take this write up with a grain of salt as Dean is pretty openly a pro US neocon, who regularly argues pretty loudly for US foreign military interests. Before I get dogpiled just read their posting history, it's almost all they comment on while staying out of all the other juicy western culture war topics the rest of us are suckers for. All countries involved in proxy wars have their own internal issues and politics that factor.
On the other hand there are 3 places in the world in which Russia has / plans to have a foreign naval base. Sevastopol in Crimea, Tartus in Syria and a planned base in Sudan. Syria was clearly a proxy war, Ukraine is, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
The red sea sees a trillion dollars pass through each year and is of huge geostrategic importance. I think the 1st and only foreign naval base China has in in Djibouti. So there is plenty of incentive for the US to be manipulating things behind the scenes. Even if they haven't clearly backed a specific separatist force yet.
remzem
1yr ago
I always saw it as a way to maximize soft power gains after the allied victory in ww2. It wasn't enough that their victory was a sign that the allies were stronger, it had to become a symbol of how virtuous they are/were. The nazis practiced eugenics and were race obsessed, the nazis were evil. The allies are post-racial and blank slatist, the allies are good. That sort of thing.
It was probably important given the rise of the USSR as well. The US and other western countries iirc Britain needed to put distance between themselves and their own eugenics programs to maximize soft power gains after the war. Didn't the nazis even argue that western countries had similar programs to try and get off the hook for crimes? I don't remember tbh.
I think the other posters are right about other trends, industrialization, nation states etc. already at work, but when it comes to the bump after ww2 specifically this makes more sense to me. Might makes right was a hard sell after a war as ugly as ww2 so to continue with the aggressive expansion and feed the military-industrial devil they'd made a pact with in the west they needed to paint themselves as the good guys righting the world's wrongs.
It being mostly virtue signalling also fits with the large gaps in stated and revealed preferences when it comes to interracial marriage, school and neighborhood choice etc.
remzem
1yr ago
Makes sense if you see the lawsuit as being actually about the company recouping losses and reputation. If you see it as the Cathedral trying to destroy anything that threatens them i.e. wanting to destroy fox news in general, then going after their top show makes more sense.
remzem
1yr ago
You might not, but the left certainly cares based on all the cancelings: Netflix protests around Dave Chapelle, Spotify around Joe Rogan, the insane backlash to J.K. Rowling, and those are people that barely stepped out of line and were/are basically leftist in most other ways. Pretty much any right wing personality online has a hate mob that seems to be more obsessed with them than their own following is. Look at Andrew Tate recently or the other one whose name I can't remember and didn't manage to find online because a search for 'right wing twitch streamers' just brought up nytimes and cbs hit pieces complaining about them in general.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/technology/twitch-livestream-extremists.html
Controlling the culture is power, it's clear the left understands this, not surprising that the right is starting to. Giving an inch was their biggest mistake in the first place.
I thought it was clear that I don't think he is wrong he is just being misleading. Like a magician that draws attention to something else while they put a card in your pocket or w/e. He's infodumping a lot of factual information that is true, but leaving out that there are some pretty big incentives for foreign powers that are currently not on best of terms to be getting involved. And also the nature of these situations means that the bare facts are never the whole story. Countries just don't announce to the public their coup attempts or w/e. Unless it's on accident or leaked it's not information that ever gets out. So I felt it needed context.
I mean he's wrong on other things like Syria not being a US proxy war, but that was further down thread and not part of the initial post.
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