site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31379 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I think we’re lead by incompetent people. We just plain lack the ability to solve any of these kinds of problems. Biden gave an interview and claimed to be leading from the beach because he’d been on the phone with Homeland Security for two hours. That’s barely trying in my opinion. What amazes me is that we have a lot of disaster relief programs out of Fort Bragg (or whatever it’s been renamed to) and nobody seems interested in using those resources at all.

Very huge issue if true.

The fact that 100% of the anons promoting this meme insist on misnaming Fort Liberty in honour of a slaveholding traitor strongly suggests that it is partisan bullshit. Unless you favour calling it Fort Bragg in honour of Braxton Bragg's noteworthy contribution to the Union victory in the Civil War, which I suppose would kind of make sense.

For what it’s worth, I have heard of Ft Bragg before and this thread is the first I’ve ever heard of a Ft Liberty, let alone that it’s a renaming of a prior base.

I can’t speak to the writer’s intentions but it’s worth considering that using an older, more widely known term could be just about avoiding confusion.

Being a traitor is underrated. George Washington was a traitor to his King.

And there is a reason why the British armed forces do not name bases after him, and in general monuments to him in the United Kingdom are discreet and found in places associated with his family.

FWIW I am with Cecil Rhodes on this point - the American Revolution was an avoidable mistake on the part of the British, and had it been avoided we would have seen earlier and more complete Anglosphere supremacy, which would have been a net benefit for humanity.

And there is a reason why the British armed forces do not name bases after him

Because the territory controlled by the British today doesn't overlap very much with the places where Washington did stuff, not because Washington was a traitor.

There are several statues of Mahatma Gandhi in prominent places in the UK.

That seems...well, not to go full Jared Diamond, but do you (and/or did Cecil Rhodes) really think that America would never have eclipsed Britain and striven for hegemony, or that Britain would have let it come to pass without resistance?

Cecil Rhodes favoured reforming the British Empire to be a federation of equals with all parts of the Empire represented in the Imperial Parliament. (Rhodes' views on how this incorporated non-whites are a matter of dispute.) He spent a lot of money promoting constitutional Irish nationalism and Home Rule, hoping that an internally self-governing Ireland within the Empire would be a proof of concept. He thought that a future generation of American leadership heavy with Rhodes scholars could be persuaded to join this reformed British Empire voluntarily. In a world where Rhodes' plan happens and the Anglosphere is a loose federation including the US by 1930,

  • The structure of the federation would be designed to prevent one member being hegemonic
  • Relative power of the constituents would be such that the US would be primus inter pares rather than a hegemon in any case
  • My read is that Rhodes believed that the various Anglosphere countries were sufficiently similar that the kind of competition which makes "hegemony" a useful concept would not be relevant - for example (not from Rhodes), if the Imperial Parliament broke down into a Tory/Dixiecrat faction, a Liberal/Republican faction and a Labour/New Deal Democrat faction then which part of the federation was "hegemon" wasn't relevant because politics would be ideological, not sectional.
  • In any case, given that his political career was almost entirely in South African "colonial" politics and he made no attempt to get seriously involved with Westminster politics beyond his Irish scheme, I don't think Rhodes cared about his bit of the Anglosphere being dominant - he cared about the Anglo-Saxon master race being dominant over the lesser breeds without the law.

Various reform schemes of a kind that would have appealed to Rhodes were proposed during the lead-up to the American Revolution, of which the one that came closest to being adopted was Galloway's Plan. Supporters included Benjamin Franklin on the American side and Edmund Burke and Pitt the Elder on the British side - i.e. it wasn't a fringe position. If something like this had been done, then eventually the American colonies would have become the tail that wags the dog. But the same provisos apply with the added bonus that sectional divisions among the American colonies mean that there isn't a united "America" competing against Britain for "hegemony" at all.

And of course something what did happen with the development of Dominion status is that the Dominions gradually became de facto independent while remaining close friends and allies of the UK. I think this is proof of concept that something similar could have happened to British North America a century earlier, meaning that the "special relationship" was baked in from day one rather than being forged in the fire of WW2. The Commonwealth is exactly the sort of thing that Rhodes would have approved of, although he would obviously prefer it to be more significant to its members that it is.

Even in our timeline, where Britain and the US are separate countries without the kind of close ties that the UK retained with the former Dominions, the attempt by the British to resist American hegemony was pretty nugatory. British naval supremacy begins with a battle (Quiberon Bay in reality, but Trafalgar per schoolboy history) but it is significant that it doesn't end with one.

This is nuts. I love it, and I want to see it represented in alt-history fiction.

The Louisiana Purchase would probably look quite different if we were still a British subject. Does that put a damper on any industrial snowball? No doubt Napoleon still does Napoleonic things, so I expect we end up with it eventually, unless Britain springs for a separate colony.

We probably delay the English abolition of slavery, and I would expect we have a civil war over it anyway. But the export-reliant, heavily coastal Confederacy of our timeline stands no chance against peak Victorian England. Unless they're committed in India or, I dunno, Russia at that point, the war is much shorter and favors the Union.

Russia probably ends up in the same mess over the 19th century. Their problems didn't depend on Napoleonic devastation or the Continental balancing act. I don't know nearly enough about German and Italian unification to say where that derails. Bonus points if Marx gets lost to the butterflies, though I suppose something like communism was bound to happen.

And that's before we even get to renegotiating WWI.

The Louisiana Purchase would probably look quite different if we were still a British subject. Does that put a damper on any industrial snowball? No doubt Napoleon still does Napoleonic things, so I expect we end up with it eventually, unless Britain springs for a separate colony.

Assuming that the French Revolution and ensuing Anglo-French wars happen on schedule, North America is a theatre in the same way it was in all the previous Anglo-French wars. The War of 1812 equivalent in that timeline is a "British" invasion of Louisiana (presumably with local troops led by Jackson and a modicum of Royal Naval support). Given that the UK and allies win the Napoleonic wars, I suspect British North America incorporates the Louisiana Purchase by conquest.

But the biggest question about a "No American War of Independence" timeline is how the French Revolution is affected. As @ToaKraka points out below, the natural assumption from a US-centric perspective is that with the radical ideas of e.g. Thomas Paine discredited and the French spending less money helping the Americans, the French Revolution doesn't happen. And essentially everything in non-US political history is downstream of the French Revolution - and possibly more American history than you think is too given that the main "real issue" in the First Party System was which side the new US should take in the Napoleonic Wars. I could defend the proposition that no French Revolution means no drive to universal white male suffrage in the US. But this depends on whether we are in a timeline where the Americans were defeated or one where a deal was done - if the Galloway plan happens then Thomas Paine is a prominent British statesman by 1789 and proto-democratic Whiggery is the dominant politics of the British Empire.

But from a non-US-centric perspective, the US as of 1776 is too small to determine the fate of France. Something like the Anglo-French War of 1778 happens roughly on schedule because the British and the French have unfinished business, and the British can still run the bill up until the French cry uncle. (The British cope for losing the American War of Independence is that we took a tactical drop in what we wrongly believed was the least important theatre of a three-ocean war against France - the larger Anglo-French war was a true World War).

If I do an alt-history timeline, it would be one where Cecil Rhodes makes a miraculous recovery from his chronic disease, returns to the UK triumphant after his victories in Africa, and enters UK politics as a Liberal Imperialist. He was born in 1853 so you can easily have him in the cabinet through WW1 and alive as an elder statesman into WW2. I agree with you that the "successful Galloway plan" timeline would be a lot of fun too.

For Want of a Nail:

  • The US loses the Battle of Saratoga. France and Spain develop no faith in the rebels' ability to win the war, and refuse to provide aid, so the US then loses the war. However, Britain recognizes its errors and reforms the US and Canada into a dominion-ish Confederation of North America.

  • With no extra debt from fighting Britain in the American Revolution, France does not collapse into revolution (though it comes close after losing a war to Prussia and Britain in 1799), and Louisiana remains under Spanish, and then Mexican, control.

  • The American rebels that have not been executed for treason emigrate to form the Republic of Jefferson (Texas fifty years early). In 1816, Jefferson (led by Andrew Jackson) intervenes in a Mexican civil war to form a United States of Mexico that later degenerates into dictatorship.

  • The CNA abolishes slavery in 1841, after an economic depression with roots in London bank failures causes the price of cotton to plummet, making owning slaves uneconomical.

  • Republicanism in Europe is crushed by the failure of the American rebels, and is not revived until 1879, when, after Louis XX abdicates in the face of advancing German troops, socialist rioters in Paris execute the royal family and, aided by defecting French troops, beat back the Germans. The ensuing continent-wide wave of republican/socialist spirit in 1880 (comparable to OTL's Springtime of Nations) overtakes all the major powers except Britain and Russia.

  • Russia collapses in 1900, after losing Alaska and eastern Siberia to the USM in a conflict analogous to OTL's Russo-Japanese War.

Et cetera. The book extends to year 1970. It is written in the style of a textbook, with hundreds of footnotes and fake citations.

You know, renaming something "Liberty" has been a central example of overly-politically-correct euphemism since WWII's "Liberty sausage", "Liberty cabbage", "Liberty steak".

I agree with your points on the merits of "Fort Liberty". "Fort Sherman" or "Fort Burnside" would have been better given both generals won important victories for the USA in the area. But ostentatiously refusing to use the official name of the base is clearly an attempt to dogwhistle something, and the rules of this board require me to charitably assume that what they are dogwhistling is support for the MAGA campaign to retain military bases named after white supremacist traitors, rather than actual support for white supremacism or treason.

In any case, "Troops from nearby Fort Liberty have not been deployed to the relief effort. Does anyone know why not?" is an attempt to "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion." "Fort Bragg or whatever it's been renamed to" (when the correct name is well-known and can be found with thirty seconds' Googling) is what you say if the only audience you care about is the kind of person who cares strongly about naming military bases after white supremacist traitors.

For calibration purposes: In your view, is Ken Burns a supporter of white supremacism and/or treason?

This makes an awesome bookend to the recent discussion of Marxism, and whether the term is too widely applied. More generally, another brick in the "there is no 'we'" wall.

For calibration purposes: In your view, is Ken Burns a supporter of white supremacism and/or treason?

Assuming the secondary sources about The Civil War are roughly correct, Ken Burns was a useful idiot of Shelby Foote. Burns was not a historian, and was not aware that the Dunning School history he had learned in high school was largely bogus. So when Foote basically recounts the high school history Burns is familiar with added military detail and colour, Burns doesn't feel the need to consult a second historian. I think both Burns and Foote would have preferred to make a film that treated the Civil War as a series of battles between two groups of martially virtuous men with no underlying political causes, but obviously you can't do that and have it make sense.

Shelby Foote was unambiguously a supporter of treason (he said in 1997, "I would fight for the Confederacy today if the circumstances were similar.") but was probably not a white supremacist - I think an argument whether a Nathan Bedford Forrest fanboi who nevertheless supported Civil Rights is a white supremacist or not would quickly degenerate into a futile argument about the meaning of words.

about The Civil War are roughly correct, Ken Burns was a useful idiot of Shelby Foote.

...And PBS as well, of course? No one involved in the large bureaucratic government organization knew any better?

Burns was not a historian, and was not aware that the Dunning School history he had learned in high school was largely bogus. So when Foote basically recounts the high school history Burns is familiar with added military detail and colour, Burns doesn't feel the need to consult a second historian.

...Like the black historian prominently featured in the series, who talks at length in multiple segments about the black perspective on the war and its surrounding events? Further, my understanding of the standard Dunning School narrative is that the Civil War wasn't actually fought over slavery, that slavery wasn't actually all that bad and so on. My recollection is that PBS's The Civil War very explicitly claims that the civil war was fought over slavery, and is very explicit about the many ways in which slavery was barbaric and horrifying. So what exactly is the "largely bogus" history they're supposed to be communicating?

I think both Burns and Foote would have preferred to make a film that treated the Civil War as a series of battles between two groups of martially virtuous men with no underlying political causes, but obviously you can't do that and have it make sense.

And the fact that the series they actually produced heavily engaged with the underlying political causes leads you to this conclusion how? Certainly they did not cover all the intricacies; just for one example, they portray John Brown as an honorable man driven to extremism by principle, glossing over the part where he and his companions engaged in straight-up terrorist murder of innocent civilians. Nevertheless, having read deeper into the details, it seems to me that their account does a good job of capturing the essence. John Brown was, in fact, a murderous terrorist, but he was also driven to extremism by recognizable principles, and his actions are understandable for the same reasons that, say, a person car-bombing a Blue Tribe office building over abortion would be understandable: at some point, the blood of the innocent must be answered for.

And by the same token, I can extend sympathy to the Confederates for the same reasons I can extend sympathy to current Blues: the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. No one is simply "evil", and the misery of humanity is not simply the fault of "bad people". We all have it coming, one way or the other, and we should at least consider valuing mercy over swift justice, because swift justice means not an axe in our hands, but our head on a block.

If I could summarize the narrative of the series, it would be that our society's embrace of evil brought ruin on a vast scale, but through the conflict people found a way to both end some of that evil and to restore peace again. The bloodletting was probably unavoidable, and given that it resulted in the end of slavery, pretty clearly a net-positive. The people on both sides had many admirable and many deplorable qualities, but in the end the admirable qualities came to the fore, and peace was restored. The result was not a just utopia, or even a particularly good society; as in our own time, the price of peace was the toleration of considerable evil. Nonetheless, it's hard to argue that things weren't better at the end than they were at the beginning, and in the history of warfare that is in fact a fairly notable outcome.

To the extent that this is not good enough for you, I think you are quite foolish, but we all make our own choices freely.

Shelby Foote was unambiguously a supporter of treason (he said in 1997, "I would fight for the Confederacy today if the circumstances were similar.")

Hypothetical support based on "the circumstances" from a guy who, as you've noted, supported the civil rights act actually seems at least somewhat ambiguous; if he'd fight for slavery, why support the civil rights act? If he'd side with his state in a fight against the federal government over some actual present point of conflict, that would also be "similar circumstances", wouldn't it? Your entire case against him is that he has opinions on history and on hypotheticals that you don't like, not on anything of consequence he actually did.

Or perhaps I'm splitting hairs. Maybe you're right, and Shelby Foote was a Traitor. Presumably then, negative affect accrues, and we all join together to condemn his name and works, and to look with disfavor on those foolish enough to associate with him. Obviously this stance is principled, and not merely word games to exploit perceived vulnerabilities in those considered to be intellectual inferiors. So, just to be really clear here:

Bill Ayers: Traitor, or not? Worse than Foote, or not?
Angela Davis: Traitor, or not? Worse than Foote, or not?

It's hard to escape the impression that you are using "Traitor" and "Treason" as a conditioned call to obedience, as though you can apply the label and conservative types like me will fall in line because The Rules Are The Rules and we're All In This Together. It's an appeal to a system we share, and of course, you'll totally have our backs when the shoe is on the other foot; it's our turn to tear down the properly designated Bad Person, and of course, unquestionably, you also will do the same when we apply the label to someone in your general vicinity, because The Rules Are The Rules. This labeling-of-bad-people process is a thing we mutually share and respect, right?

Right?

Do you believe that a significant portion of Reds still recognize some degree of binding loyalty to your tribe, such that a concept like "treason" is meaningful? Do you think if a plane hits an office building in New York tomorrow, Reds are going to be lining up at the recruitment offices to avenge their "murdered brethren"?

After the Civil war, there was a "We" again. We made peace, and slowly, painfully, we tried to make a better society together. We weren't perfect at it, or even particularly good; I wish the southern Blacks had been armed en masse, and the KKK had gutted itself on organized community defenses rather than being allowed to dwindle into a jobs program for federal snitches. On the other hand, we actually made some pretty good progress, and The Civil War does a reasonable encapsulation of how we did it: we accepted that people in the past were neither saints nor monsters, and we tried to mourn the bad and move on with the good. And after much struggle and conflict, and after no small measure of injustice, things were legitimately pretty good there for a couple decades, Confederate statues and Confederate flags and all.

And now, because of arguments of the sort you're advancing here, the confederate statues and flags are gone, and all it cost us is a few thousand extra black people murdered every year for the last four years and continuing indefinitely into the future, a price that was predicted in advance, and that Blues here appear to find more or less acceptable. Respect for the valor of a defeated opponent wasn't killing massive numbers of black people, but deliberately spreading lies about how our whole society is based on "white supremacy" absolutely has. Blues needed a scapegoat for their own failures, and they didn't much care who got hurt so long as they could keep portraying themselves as the good guys.

For this and similar reasons, there is not really a "We" any more. Things are much worse than they were a mere decade ago, and they seem likely to continue to get worse for the foreseeable future. Another massive bloodletting is a distinct possibility. Like last time, people can see it coming, but cannot figure out a way to avoid it, or even properly understand the mechanisms of its arrival.

I, like you, blame Traitors. We would probably not agree on who they are, though.

This is a serious post and deserves a serious response, which I don't have time to write tonight. But one thing I will say right now is that I put the disclaimer "Assuming the secondary sources about The Civil War are roughly correct" in for a reason. The movie you are discussing bares no resemblance to the one discussed by Wikipedia and the most updooted reviews on IMDB. I would not be that surprised if I have been misled by wokestupid propaganda on IMDB, and not surprised at all in the case of Wikipedia.

This is a serious post and deserves a serious response, which I don't have time to write tonight. But one thing I will say right now is that I put the disclaimer "Assuming the secondary sources about The Civil War are roughly correct" in for a reason.

Fair enough.

Grah.

The proper way to have a serious discussion is to get to know a person really well, and then have an intimate meeting of the minds. That isn't really practical in a forum like this one, so to a greater or lesser extent, I find myself building a model of the person I'm talking to, and then arguing against that model. I can update the model as the conversation progresses, but it's a lossy process at the best of times, and it's prone to bleed-through when having a very similar part of a conversation with multiple people.

I've argued this particular issue a number of times with a number of people, and it's entirely possible that I'm rounding you to positions you don't have. If that's the case, you have my apologies. If you want to continue this later, I'll be interested in reading your thoughts.

If you ever get the chance, you should watch "Civil War". It is one of my favorite documentaries, and I think it is an excellent example of actual "civil religion", in the sense the rationalists use the term.

Too antagonistic by half.

Your original comment is fine. Maiq’s comment is fine. But Nybbler is right—insisting that your interlocutor is dogwhistling is not particularly charitable.

Look I’ll just cut in here and say that really the reason I worded that name as I did was that I was aware of the fact that the name had been changed, but wasn’t precisely sure what it had been changed too. The sources of the information were still calling the base Fort Bragg. I figured that was more clear than googling the new name and having everyone confused about which base I’m referring to as most people would likely know Ft. Bragg is an American military base in North Carolina. If I’m creating confusion, I’ll edit if needed. I tend to go for clarity over anything else.

Hm? No, you did fine, in my opinion.

You’re allowed to call it what you want, @MadMonzer is allowed to question the credibility of the xitters, all good. It’s only the last response that pushed too far, and it’s because of tone more than content.

One can object to the practice of renaming things to fit modern political sensibilities without supporting the politics or the actions of the people they were originally named after. The idea that this sort of renaming is required arises from a a whole constellation of beliefs about the scope of politics, the role of language, the lens through which history should be interpreted, etc. that many people simply don't share.

It was renamed in 2023. You don't think it takes a while for this name update to course through the public consciousness? People will still call it Fort Bragg out of reflex. It also sounds cooler than 'Fort Liberty'.

And is there anything truly terrible about consciously refusing to use its new name if you think the entire sentiment animating "NAME CHANGE FOR JUSTICE NOW" is toxic?

It was renamed in 2023. You don't think it takes a while for this name update to course through the public consciousness?

I was not aware that it was renamed, but at least one of the people @MadMonzer linked to was very clearly aware, as they made an explicit point of refusing to use the current name.

It's not a dog whistle, it's a train whistle; everyone can hear it. And no, you're not being charitable by implying your opponents are white supremacist traitors.

Roads around me get renamed from time to time. Decades go by and all the locals still refer to them by the old names, because that's what they called them for 30-60 years.

Once upon a time, the way the Soviet Union renamed cities and shit every time the political winds changed was looked down on with mockery.

Twitter has been renamed X for over a year now. I've yet to encounter a person who actually calls it X except with sarcasm.

Names are sticky, stop reading so damned much into it.

You missed the best one, The iconic Lake Shore Drive in chicago got renamed to Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable Lake Shore Drive during BLM. Dusable was a french black man who maybe discovered Chicago but probably didn't and has a half dozen other things in the city named after him.

I assume Chicagoans still call it "Lake Shore Drive" and nothing else?

There's also the case of the bridge over a wide part of the Hudson River in New York, originally named for that widening -- the Tappan Zee (from Dutch for "Sea") Bridge. It had the name "Governor Malcolm Wilson" prepended to it, but nobody cared and nobody used it. Then it was replaced by another bridge, which is named the "Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge". They managed to get the traffic reports on the local news station to call it that (I assume the Cuomos have stock), but no one else does. Even the signs indicating directions to the bridge in New Jersey still say "Tappan Zee Bridge". People call the new bridge by the old name of the former bridge.

Yeah, LSD is too icon to actually change the name, it's just a trap for out of towners using voice gps navigation now when it suddenly interrupts their song for like 10 seconds while it says the fake name.

Ask someone in New York about the Avenue of the Americas, or in Philly about Columbus Boulevard, Martin Luther King Drive, or the Avenue of the Arts. (The only renaming Philadelphians accept is Kelly Drive)

Rumors, but it seems deliberate.

ETA: More evidence that it's deliberate

Woah these links are super concerning. For people not on twitter, basically none of the military units at nearby Fort Bragg are being deployed, even though they were deployed for Hurricane Katrina, Sandy, etc. pretty much immediately.

Very huge issue if true.

Or—hear me out—Twitter randos don’t actually have the scoop?

https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3921723/statement-from-pentagon-press-secretary-maj-gen-pat-ryder-on-dod-support-to-hur/

Yes, but also Tennessee NG is deploying to fight in the Middle East (on Israel's behalf) this week.

Interesting. I didn’t know we sent the Guard overseas.

Looks like it’s part of a rotation dating back to 2012. Operation Spartan Shield. Where does Israel come into it?

What else would we be doing in the Middle East for the last year?

What else would we be doing in the Middle East for the last decade?

There are exactly three reason why American cares about the Middle East. In no particular order, they are the Suez Canal, the Petrodollar, and defense of Israel. The first two can be explained by rational self-interest, but the latter only makes sense when you consider AIPAC. I consider Israel to be the primary driver of American intervention in the area since at least the 2003 invasion of Iraq, if not Desert Storm a decade prior.

Given that this deployment involves parking in Kuwait, I’d think the petrodollar more likely than either of the others.

The operation started right before Obama was reelected. We’d just pulled out of Iraq and planned a draw-down in Afghanistan. Advisory roles and “capacity building” were the buzzwords. That’s not a focus on Israel.

It’s building up Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saud, along with extra of suppressing stuff in Syria.

I mean, the government is also at a low point in competency. The top job is a vegetable, the cabinet level positions are diversity hires who weren't very dedicated to their jobs at the best of times and are currently in campaign mode.

Setting aside the debate over Biden’s personal acuity, who do you think is a diversity hire to the cabinet? And who do you think is neglecting the job to campaign?

I was waiting for someone to bring up the fact that, outside of Buncombe and Watauga* counties, the affected areas are deep red, very very white, and very very poor.

*it's only blue because of the university located there, which is also the main economic driver in the county

Counterpoint: I have always felt and continue to feel that the top leadership can't actually do much that's useful in the immediate aftermath. Right? It's the type of thing that reliably happens somewhere at some point in the US every. single. year. Without fail! Most people whose job it is to help, are helping, and I don't really think that someone with very little background in disaster relief is going to be much help, and in fact might just hurt responses by doing the equivalent of C-suite meddling.

A governor can probably do something useful, but the President? Their job is mostly in the aftermath: if they can pass a recovery bill, and if so how much $?

You're thinking in purely material terms, this isn't all that leadership is about. All of the material good that could have been managed already has been, but there are immaterial ways to act out leadership.

Corny impassioned speeches about thinking of your fellow countryman, denouncing the inhumane looters and calling onto the charity of everyone in these trying times; these do not require years of prep time, and they can help both your political standing and the spirits of those that are helping or being helped. For all their sins, Dubya and Obama were clearly good at this part of the job.

Biden doesn't have the constitution to be in the muck delivering supplies even for a photo-op, but he sure could start touring the US collecting donations for disaster relief and using the silly charm he clearly still has to enjoin solidarity.

I bet he'd be remembered more fondly by history if he did it too.

Personally, I am not a big fan of politicians doing photo ops after disasters.

In Germany, Gerhard Schroeder won an election this way, standing in rubber boots near some flooded village. Ever since, whenever there is a flood, politicians will decent on the affected areas like vultures on a carcass looking serious. Armin Laschet famously lost his bid at chancellorship because a photograph of him laughing at one of these events surfaced.

Perhaps I am cynical, but I generally find this disgusting. These poor people have already been visited by one plague, do we really have to subject them to a torrent of politicians as well? I mean, if a politician said 'as a sign of solidarity, I will live a month with them in an emergency shelter' that would be some serious commitment (but still net negative for the victims in the case of quite some politicians). But arriving by helicopter, getting helped into your rubber boots, making a short speech and then returning to whatever upper class home you have does not feel like a show of solidarity, but just turns the flood victims into extras in your election ad.

You don’t have to literally go there to make a speech. Hell you don’t even need to leave the resort your in (he’s on vacation). Any hotel will have some sort of conference room, and you could easily give a speech from there. Just something reassuring the people that he’s actually working on the problem. The thing he actually did, not only isn’t reassuring, but honestly gives the opposite impression. If he’s only in touch on this issue by phone for 2 hours, how can that make a person living through that confident in the response? Really, entire towns destroyed is worth stopping your vacation for two whole hours? It’s almost a show of indifference to give an answer like that.

For that matter, I’m sure you can get a computer with connection to the White House and check in at some point.

The president controls air assets that could be used to airlift supplies to isolated mountain communities.

Probably it’s the sort of thing where once we know who needs what and where then conditions have improved enough that normal emergency responders can get through.

For what it’s worth, we’re already doing that through the state national guard. And other states, apparently. I think there’s diminishing returns on number of helicopters.

From the link:

In addition, a total of 550 National Guard personnel were deployed to the region to assist first responders with search and rescue missions, delivering supplies and working to restore infrastructure to the affected areas.

From a naive perspective, 550 NG personnel seems low. commitments from the other states list three helicopters with 17 crew. Again, that seems kinda low.

Since it's the comparison people are drawing, here's the numbers for the 2010 Haiti earthquake:

The response included personnel from all branches of the military.[3] The U.S. Navy listed its resources in the area on 19 January [One week after the event] as "17 ships, 48 helicopters and 12 fixed-wing aircraft" in addition to 10,000 sailors and Marines.[4] By 26 January, the U.S. military had 17,000 personnel in and around Haiti.[5] Between the beginning of relief efforts and 18 February the US Air Force had delivered nearly 6,000 support members and 19 million pounds of cargo while evacuating 15,000 American citizens and conducted aeromedical evacuations for 223 critical Haitian patients.[6]

Naively, it sounds like they're sending ~1/10th the resources, and that does seem a bit surprising. Maybe the state and federal resources have things under control, so there's no need for NG resources, but that's not what I would expect for a very large and highly unexpected natural disaster.

Either way, I imagine we'll know the truth soon enough: either they'll handle the situation swiftly and in good order, or this will become another insignificant event not worth talking about.

That quake hit about 3M people living in ridiculously poor and dense conditions. It’s a terrible comparison for the electrified, paved, American-standard-of-living Southeast.

Most of the region can receive supplies by road. Same for repairs and evacuations. Areas which are only accessible by air are the exception rather than the rule.

The worst damage is localized to places like Asheville, a tourist city with less than 100,000 residents. As of this afternoon, ~60 were unaccounted for. More people were killed in the Haiti quake than lived in Asheville!

That quake hit about 3M people living in ridiculously poor and dense conditions. It’s a terrible comparison for the electrified, paved, American-standard-of-living Southeast.

This is an excellent point.

Is your general sense that the cleanup and rescue efforts are proceeding more or less as well as we could ask for? I've heard complaints, but I haven't seen strong evidence either way, nor had the time to track down the details to a level where I could be confident that I understand the actual situation.

On the one hand, partisanship obviously dominates from both ends; the people running things have every incentive to present everything as fine, and the people opposing them have every incentive to present everything as a total disaster. This is complicated by heavy bias in the media, so the default narrative is definately going to favor the people running things in the current situation; the flipside is that any complaints are going to come from the opposition ghetto, which observably has poor quality control.

On the other hand, this is a time-sensitive issue; the three days between your comment and this reply could have been quite significant. If there is actually a problem, it would have been imperative to identify and correct it as quickly as possible.

On the gripping hand, I have no expectation that this can actually be done in a timely manner in the present environment. I mainly want to discuss it now as a marker, and check back in a month or two as the facts present themselves. The problem there, as I snarkily alluded to, is that it seems to me that after-the-fact, sober assessments of what really happened don't actually penetrate, even here. They become old news and people move on, even if the weight of evidence falls hard on one side or the other. There are exceptions; Ymeshkout did what seemed to me to be a very good job hammering election fraud claims, for example, but exceptions don't seem like they're enough.

My sister is currently visiting from an affected, neighboring city.

She reports most of that city was without power and there were lots of downed trees. Still, traffic was redirected rather than stopped, so people were able to get back to work or get out of town quickly.

One of her neighbors was picked up from Asheville Monday because it was in terrible shape. Looters and still no power or water. But it’s worth mentioning that she could be picked up without Katrina- or Haiti-scale congestion.

The death toll remains under 300, and I expect it to stay low. Maybe sub 500. There are no stadiums full of refugees. Water access is still poor, but on the other hand, it’s much easier to get in and out of the area. Regional infrastructure is relatively intact even in cities directly on the path, so long as the geography didn’t funnel water.

I think relief is going about as well as expected. That’s not to say we couldn’t spend more to do more—this is America, after all—but that we aren’t being negligent or incompetent. Not sure how to formalize that as predictions, not ones which would satisfy a conspiracy theorist.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats