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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   4823 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Shining Path in Peru was largely defeated militarily. The Peruvian government even armed, trained and deputized civilians with the authority to kill Shining Path members.

Generally speaking, I think people who say things like "you can't destroy a movement" or "there are no military solutions to this problem" are just people who do not want to see that particular movement or problem destroyed, and have to cloak it in the language of strategic wisdom rather than admit to their desires. I have a particular disdain for Arab liberal types like Shadi Hamid who claim destroying Hamas is complicated because Hamas isn't just a group of militants, but a government with a bureaucracy and employees and yada yada yada, we will need to find some way to live with them - the LTTE was all of these things and also considerably more advanced and sophisticated than Hamas, as pseudo-states go. ISIS had a government, a bureaucracy, courts, all of the mundane accoutrements of statehood, and somehow we managed to bomb it into oblivion. There are very few problems that violence can't actually solve, so long as you're committed to the necessary scale and force of violence required.

Similar kind of highly motivated argumentation to how you cannot possibly stop illegal immigration by protecting your borders.

Yes, the usual tactic is to present the problem as a fait accompli that must be grudgingly tolerated because nothing can be done to change it.

I wonder whether I do the same. Are there any standard conservative / libertarian / reactionary arguments that follow the same pattern?

Yes, many examples. And I think there's at least some degree of truth to these arguments:

  • There are hundreds of millions of guns in the US, so any large scale attempts at gun control cannot work.

  • The government cannot significantly tax or otherwise confiscate the wealth of the ultra-rich because they will just leave the jurisdiction.

  • Attempting to regulate carbon emissions at this point won't stop climate change, and many of the biggest carbon emitting countries won't get on board anyway.

  • It's not possible to introduce effective mass public transit in most US cities because they have already been designed around cars.

Vast amounts. Forceful arguments based on tradition, existing law, the way things are usually done, a nebulous yet permanent human nature that can never be overcome, the obvious benefits of the status quo and the horrendous costs of change. It’s somewhat less hypocritical for conservatives to use these arguments though*. Besides, they are not entirely devoid of merit, in a limited form.

edit: * although I guess it's also somewhat hypocritical for conservatives to ask for a radical change in immigration policy or whatever, when they usually abhor change.

although I guess it's also somewhat hypocritical for conservatives to ask for a radical change in immigration policy or whatever, when they usually abhor change.

I don't see how it's hypocritical, they want change to the extent that it returns things to what they deem the ideal status quo, not that even all conservatives can agree on which year that was. You might as well call liberals/progs hypocritical for not switching out the entire legal code on a monthly basis, at which point the word ceases to mean anything.

I'd say that conservatives want change to optimize toward a status quo which matches nostalgia instead of history, which is why the reaction to progression is usually reactionary. "Things were better when [annoying/dangerous/good-thing-breaking new thing] hadn't moved my cheese."

Of course, now that conservatives have Noticed the thing which steals skins eating nostalgia and shitting rainbows, and have named it Wokeness, the status quo is considered the only defensible position.

An argument I hear a lot in conservative circles is "gun control just means the only people with guns will be hardened criminals". I'm not saying this is never true, but it's a simple fact that there are many countries with strict gun control and in which even hardened criminals have a remarkably hard time getting their hands on a gun.

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