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Each time I encounter this argument, I ask why Russia gets a pass. If it’s a war of choice, isn’t there an obvious actor? But there’s no leverage on Putin, there’s no alpha in agreeing with your domestic opponents, so we see contortions to put the blame on anyone else.
Oh, except when it’s time to criticize U.S. industrial capacity. Any shortfalls in that department are taken as proof of incompetence and staggering corruption rather than reluctance. We like to start fights, not win them. Winning is for the other guys.
But that can’t reflect on the bioweapons department! They’ve got to be competent enough to concoct 2020’s headline, incompetent enough to lose control of it, and then recover their moxie in time to cover their asses. Except against FOIA, which couldn’t be subverted, since it provides the scant few points of evidence needed to damn everyone in the deep state. Other, perhaps, than the bold patriots serving said FOIA requests.
In short, it sounds like a long chain of isolated demands for rigor.
Reading those links, I think you got some pretty good answers, but apparently you disagree.
...I wrote a more detailed point-by-point reply, but honestly, I don't think it'd be very productive to post it. You're replying to a quote that is extremely idiotic. You seem to be taking that idiocy, and then spinning it out to cover other people and discussions that are, I think, a lot less dumb, and then you're spinning it even further to concerns that I do not think you can rigorously argue are dumb at all. Maybe there's a long chain of isolated demands for rigor there, if you frame it exactly the way you have. Maybe there's even someone, somewhere who's actually regurgitated that whole chain of claims, exactly the way you've framed it. I don't recognize that chain in anything I've written, and I don't recognize it in anything I've read here either.
On the other hand, if this is genuinely how the world looks to you, that's both useful to know and depressing enough that there probably isn't much point in arguing about it.
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Isn't this what a game of "chicken" looks like from the losing side? If we're unable or unwilling to escalate far enough to deter Putin (or Hamas), then we're stuck dealing with their actions. So naive people who "don't have a side" and "just want the killing to stop" have all their brains' capacity for rationalization being applied to finding reasons why the other side should give up. Which makes them indistinguishable from people who actively want the defeat of the other side, but who have enough social skills to lie about their motivations.
I would like to believe that the current escalation would have deterred Putin if he had all the information. It fits with my sense that Russia's leadership is dysfunctional in the boring, usual, human way: overpromising and underdelivering. A one-month war against unequipped, deserting Ukrainians would have neatly dodged almost all the consequences for Russia. I recognize that this is perhaps too tidy to be true!
Hamas...if there's a level of violence which will deter them, I don't think Israel has found it yet. It's an unsettling situation.
That's a good point, although I'm not sure how much to put on NATO's current escalation, and how much to put on the Russian military's surprising weakness. I'd been solidly in the "Putin won't invade, but if he does it would be over fast" camp, so that's two big things I was wrong about, which shows you how much I knew.
I think Hamas are religious fanatics, and have found a coordination mechanism that's strong enough to allow for suicide attacks, and which justifies "holding their own people hostage" as being in those people's long-term best interest (72 virgins for martyrs and all that). I'm still on the fence as to whether that attitude is a new category of "hostis humani generis", or whether "give me liberty or give me death" is a useful bulwark against oppression. It's hard to draw the line.
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Well, more generally it's good advice to seek to change your own behaviour than the behaviour of others.
I can easily believe that bioweapons developers are capable of both competence and incompetence. That would make them just like every other human being.
"I am vast, I contain multitudes."
"No, wait, don't put me back in the quarantine--"
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