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Comment by redwood | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to me to hear you say that. I would say that about Trump but not GWB in hindsight. At that time I was of the opinion you share and I remember feeling that GWB was essentially everything that was bad in the world… but in hindsight I realize how narrowly scoped my vision was and the spectrum is so much bigger and in fact I now believe it's important to be willing to find common ground with conservatives who at least believe in the free world. Trump I genuinely do not believe believed in the free world and the rule of law and in the value of our institutions

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As someone probably of similar age to you, my views on GWB have definitely changed as I've aged.

When I was younger, I actively protested, saw his presidency as the antithesis of my values, etc.

At my current age, I believe more that there is no pure "good" in the world. What is good in one way, is by definition tinged with evil in others. And that pursuing one good requires doing (or at least allowing) some evil.

And that what's probably most important is being honest about the evils you do, in pursuits of your goods, and constantly re-weighing the balance on your moral scales.

Biden abhors war and the employment of US offensive military power. That is a good. But it creates evil by providing space for unresponded-to aggression. Shipping weapons to Ukraine to defend its sovereign territory is also a good. But it creates evil by escalating battlefield lethality and depending on the service (and often sacrifice) of brave Ukrainians.

The real world sucks, and there should be no easy answers that let us sleep soundly at night.

It seems to me more like Arendt's banality of evil is mostly at work (in many cases, anyway. There are certainly some people on this planet who I would say are truly evil but they are relatively uncommon): https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-...

My own views sort of shifted but not in the same way. I was 17 when the War in Iraq started. My view at the time was of very skeptical support; having lived through the 90s I had an engrained view that the world needed to use force to help prevent ethnic cleansing. We didn't intervene early enough or strongly enough in Rwanda, and that particularly bothered me. After the beginning of the war, I pretty quickly became anti-war when it became increasingly clear to me that the pretexts (WMD, Saddam is going to attack the Kurds again) were not justified. I would say by about mid-2004 I was pretty comfortably anti-war. When Bush called for the "surge" I was definitely all the way against the War in Iraq.

Today if you asked me what I thought about it, I would say Iraq was the worst and least justified misadventure America embarked on that had some ostensible humanitarian pretext. So I guess my position would be that I still wish we could prevent genocide, but I'm increasingly convinced it's difficult to tell justified reason from pretext in time to intervene, either as a country or as as individuals trying to hold our leaders to account. I guess I would say is that Bush struck me as a person who embodied the way in which misguided motivations could lead to terrible results.

But with Trump, there was no misgivings. He had terrible motivations. His view on the use of force was two fold: (1) I don't give a fuck about any other country, why should I? (2) We're number one and I'll blow you up with my bombs.

I think it's tempting for many to look at his isolationism as a repudiation of Clinton-Bush-Obama era, but it was a repudiation only of the duty to care about others. His frequent verbal escalations and tactical willingness to disregard collateral damage (in Iraq/Syria), as well as his weird outbursts like threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons, and his constant constant constant remarks expressing praise and respect for violent autocrats justified by admiration of their will to power make it clear that he was just as willing to use force, just as militaristic, just for somehow even worse reasons. I am very thankfully that none of the bubbling tensions ever came to a true head under him.

Trump is still the only US president in this century that didn't start a war, neither directly nor indirectly. He should get some credits because of that.

As for his internal politics, as a non-American I don't care, as long as USA isn't concerned about internal and external politics of the countries I have some connection with.

And also in that regard, the best US president ever since I remember, and that goes back around to Reagan time.

> as long as USA isn't concerned about internal and external politics of the countries I have some connection with

Coolidge and Hoover?

> Shipping weapons to Ukraine to defend its sovereign territory is also a good. But it creates evil by escalating battlefield lethality and depending on the service (and often sacrifice) of brave Ukrainians.

Shipping those weapons does not create evil. The evil (Russian military aggression) is already there, the evil is responding to the weapons with escalation in an attempt to overwhelm to prevent defeat.

The proof is in not shipping the weapons: subjugation, slavery, for the Ukrainian people (quite possibly for generations to come). It can mean the complete wiping out of their culture, in the style of Tibet.

The weapons draw out a more dramatic response from the attacking evil, they do not create more evil; and they - ideally - prevent an even greater evil, which is the enslavement of the Ukrainian people if the war effort is lost. All the weapons do is pull some of the future suffering forward in time (you suffer more now, so your people hopefully suffer dramatically less later), however the trade, the potential upside, is obviously the possibility to achieve freedom and vanquish the aggressor. The aggressor creates all of the evil, all of the suffering, they're solely morally responsible for it. The weapons make a positive possible, the lack of said weapons guarantee only darkness. Putin's conquest effort isn't going to be stopped by peaceful protest (some authoritarians might bend for that under some circumstances, he won't).

The point is, the evil is already there. If you leave it alone (don't challenge it), you'll suffer more over a longer period of time. If you challenge it, you may suffer more short-term, however that challenge isn't creating any additional evil, it's creating the potential for good for the people of Ukraine. The suffering and evil can't be avoided, the only choice is whether you want to try to defeat it, or roll over and hand yourself over to its long-term chains.

This is the same logic (albeit different analogy) of closing your eyes, outstretching your arms and swinging them widely. Somebody is still going to get hurt, even if they really should get out of the way.

Strewing together moral absolutes means you stop living in the real world. Violence and war brings more evil to the world, even if it is morally justified. Your failure to acknowledge any of this is appalling.

Somebody whose lost their entire extended family and village by mortar fire because the Ukrainians fought back will be in an objectively much worse position than under a harsh Russian occupation. Weapons, in this case, escalated the conflict and created evil for this person, no amount of moral whitewashing over "freedom" and "vanquishing the aggressor" absolves this.

It may very well be the case that the net utilitarian impact of Ukraine escalating their response to the invasion justifies the resistance, but we live in the real world, and nothing is as cut and dry as you claim, not even a hostile invasion by a despotic power.

> Somebody whose lost their entire extended family and village by mortar fire because the Ukrainians fought back will be in an objectively much worse position than under a harsh Russian occupation.

Please go ahead and make the same argument for the German Nazis. I really want to hear it. I realize in the past that Godwin would be invoked at this point, but we are now in a time where 1:1 comparisons are much more apt, especially when Russians are falsely labeling Ukrainians as "Nazis".

What you're basically saying is that we should just let invaders commit their violence and trust that we will be better off laying down than standing up.

You say that someone whose lost their entire extended family and village would have been better off surrendering to the invaders who killed them. Why? Why does that follow? What is stopping the invaders from killing your friends and family and razing your village after they have conquered your country? At some point you actually have to stand up to protect your family from the people trying to kill them. Because what's to prevent them from setting up death camps at that point? What if their goal is not to occupy your country but to exterminate it?

And what of Ukraine? What happens to the country when Russia takes over? They will destroy that which makes Ukraine unique and rewrite the history for its people and the world. The Republic of Venice remembers what happens when you let the invaders take over. Hundreds of years after the republic surrendered to the invading Napoleon, the Republic of Venice still has not recovered and may never. For a lot of Ukrainians, this could mean the literal end of their country. Where do you live? Do you love your country? Would you appreciate if some people decided they wanted to erase the country you love from world maps? Would you fight to protect it or would you just let it happen?

The lesser of two evils is still evil.

Both arguments to the contrary that you've advanced, (1) that it doesn't create any more evil & (2) that any non-evil side effects are justified because of moral and/or utilitarian superiority, are slippery slopes to moral absolution of any reaction.

An action can be just, and right, and practical, and the best available option... but still be evil.

And the difference between being a despotic megalomaniac is equal parts actions undertaken and honesty about those actions.

The US is shipping weapons to Ukraine to kill Russian soldiers. I support this and believe it to be the best action possible, but I also deeply and resolutely believe it's evil.

> are slippery slopes to moral absolution of any reaction.

Calling these arguments slippery slope doesn't really do much here. We are in fact at an absolute circumstance, so the slope doesn't really have much room to slip. I think the actions of the Russians are quite extreme, and we are allowed to make some moral judgements of these actions given how horrific they are. If we can't, then morality loses a lot of meaning. To say that we can't make a moral judgement is to say that the images we are seeing are not real or are not horrific, and that's a different discussion entirely.

> The US is shipping weapons to Ukraine to kill Russian soldiers. I support this and believe it to be the best action possible, but I also deeply and resolutely believe it's evil.

If you're going to take something that can be together just, right, practical, the best option, and yet still evil, we need to have a deeper discussion of what exactly your perception of evil is, because it seems to encompass quite a lot. If everything is evil then nothing is. Because since you're using such extreme words, you really have to take your argument to the extreme. And like I said, just because it's the extreme doesn't mean that's not where we currently are, so it's appropriate to analyze the extreme. Your argument taken to its conclusion would be that the allies freeing prisoners at Nazi death camps during WWII was a justified act of evil. I don't see any other way to interpret your argument.

> We are in fact at an absolute circumstance, so the slope doesn't really have much room to slip.

E.g. "Nuking Moscow isn't evil because it will end the war in Ukraine."

> deeper discussion of what exactly your perception of evil is

The opposite of good. By my calculus, killing humans is evil.

It may be effective, in that it produces a desired outcome, and it may be just, in that the outcome promotes greater justice or lessens injustice, but those are both orthogonal measurements.

If the Red Army had murdered every guard at the Auschwitz camps in January 1945, that would have been evil. It also would have probably been just.

Not an American but similar view of GWB. However... I feel leaders should be judged by the direction they tried to move things; and the Bush Administration did not move the USA in a more lawful, democratic and humanistic direction to say the least.

There are many steps to move a democracy to a totalitarian state, and the time to hit the breaks is at earliest signs of fascist behavior.

Abstractly, the people who excused and weakened institutions may have done more to create an eventual totalitarian state than the asshole who moved the final 1% and seized power.

GWB's great sin is he gave China, and Russia time.

The 15 years USA spent running after imaginary boogeymen sowed the seeds of what we are dealing with today.

There are many aspects to this folly, but most bad were:

1. Okaying what Russia, and China were doing

2. Wasting trillions on completely pointless war

3. Squandered overnight the enormous goodwill USA carried from successful 199X

4. Stalled the wheel of democratisation around the world

Yeah it seems like the globalist mindset that much of the west adopted blinded it to the geopolitical realities that still govern international relations. Remember the "Russian reset"[1]? It was a big red button that was supposed to reset Russian relations. Remember when Obama criticized Romney for saying the biggest threat in the future would be Russia? Obama laughed it off because "this isn't the cold war anymore." Remember when Clinton gave China the NAFTA deal? GWB was cut from the same cloth as these other globalist-minded presidents.

The western globalist attitude involves giving power to our rivals in the hopes they will become our friends. Guess what...they're still our rivals.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_reset

That's a confrontational mindset. In reality, there was a window post-1990 in which we (the US, Europe, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, and the most stable African countries) could have created the means to resolve global conflicts peacefully, or at least in a shared manner. The real victory of Desert Storm wasn't the military annihilation of a regional power in a matter of months, but the fact that it was achieved under a UN mandate. That practice should have become the norm.

The major crisis right after (Yugoslavia, the first post-WW2 war in Europe which we try so hard to forget every day) still had some UN legitimacy - NATO acted somewhat unilaterally but it was arguably as protection for a UN peacekeeping operation. The Russians had to follow suit - begrudgingly, but on shared terms.

Then 2001 happened and all that strenuous effort to keep powers together was just thrown out of the window, in pursue of simple and pure vengeance - the oldest and most tribalistic instinct for violence, the biblical an-eye-for-an-eye. Even then, there was still a chance to forgive it as a temporary aberration of a young country that had never been seriously attacked on its mainland before. Instead, the US literally decided to conquer Iraq on a whim in 2002/2003. At that point, anybody who had ever seriously considered cooperation had to change course, or lost massive amounts of political capital. Areas that were slowly moving towards softer stances (Iran, China, Russia, etc) predictably reacted by rushing back to the safety of oppositional competition. And now it's what it is.

Escalating competition further and further is not the answer, and will lead the world to darker and darker places.

> That's a confrontational mindset

We need to confront the problem of blind globalism.

> Escalating competition further and further is not the answer

Blind globalism is not the answer either, but that is what we've had for decades. It has resulted in a wide variety of terrible things for the countries advocating globalism. For example: a global pandemic, a decrease in biodiversity due to invasive species, slave-like conditions in countries like China, and IP theft on a staggering scale. I'm sure there are more consequences of blind globalism. My point is, we need to have a serious conversation about whether we should be traded with certain nations, whether we should be trading in certain essential items, etc.

Edit: just thought of a couple more problems with our current global trade setup: China can manufacture outside of the west's regulations designed to protect people's health and the environment, and the west has lost so many strategic skillsets and manufacturing capacity to China.

> Squandered overnight the enormous goodwill USA carried from successful 199X

What X? Bombing Serbia in 1999?

Too many people have let their vision become consumed by the fact that Trump was an insufferable asshole. A nuanced discussion can be had about his time in office and his actual actions, without giving undue weight to the shit that comes out of the man's mouth. Just as an example of something most democrats would applaud, he signed an executive order to keep federal unemployment assistance flowing, while congress was happy to keep bickering and holding millions of Americans hostage. I'm not trying to break down the man's presidency here, but I would say that this provided more good to the average American, in a time of great need, than anything any recent president had done.

I do feel compelled to mention the following in regard to the comparison with Bush. The man, Cheney's puppet as he was, started an illegal war that killed a few hundred thousand people. Using the intelligence apparatus to manipulate Congress and the American people, in my view, is much worse than anything Trump had done. Same with enabling the domestic spying apparatus with the Patriot Act. If that's not undermining our institutions, I don't know what is.

I guess I should preempt the obvious counter argument about Trump's allegation that the election was stolen. The Democrats did the same exact thing with Russiagate. Both in terms of the accusation and pursuing it through legal channels, all based on fictional evidence to boot.

We should not allow us to miss the bigger picture while falling for the manufacrured distraction of "my party vs their party." But rather look to understand the special interests that are amplifying our division, and benefitting from it.

I think it’s too soon to make an assessment. Trump spent his whole presidency casting aspersions on NATO, and tried to cut defense aid to Ukraine. If this situation escalates further, he may be viewed as a James Buchanan figure.

And I do think things may get worse. Currently a sovereign country is being invaded and civilians are being targeted. The second order effects might be even worse

* If Russia pulls resources from Syria then the civil war might come to a head. The regime leans heavily on Russian air support

* Russian paramilitary provides defense for unpopular governments like Tanzania’s. If they got pulled these countries might go into civil war

* Ukraine and Russia are two of the worlds largest exporters of grain. Countries like Egypt are big importers (Egypt actually subsidizes the purchases heavily). If grain costs go up (and other commodities like oil) this could cause unrest

* Nuclear war

* Cyber war targeting key infrastructure. The possibility of massive collateral damage is high (see Not Petya)

Some of these things are not intrinsically bad (I have no love for despotic governments for example) but the potential sum total of events could throw the world into chaos.

The War on Terror was a massive mistake. America needs to keep the crazy evangelicals who want to bring on the end times by attacking the Middle East far from the oval office. But taking on an isolationist position in response to the 2000’s would be a massive mistake. It’s clearer than ever that power vacuums have to be filled

> The Democrats did the same exact thing with Russiagate. Both in terms of the accusation and pursuing it through legal channels, all based on fictional evidence to boot.

It’s incredible that this is still being parroted even after the Russian invasion. Go and read at the actual Muller report and Senate Intel report vol 5. The findings of the us senate and special counsel are that Russia hacked the 2016 election with the intent of helping Trump, and the Trump campaign worked willingly with them on this effort and lied about it to everyone.

Most notably, Trump’s campaign manager was sharing internal campaign data with a Russian Intel officer, who transmitted the data to the GRU. This is the collusion we had all claimed was happening, and it was found. Calling this a hoax at this point is willingly spreading Russian disinformation. This is the position of Vladimir Putin, that Russian interference in 2016 was a hoax. Think about that, as he bombs and targets civilians. Why are you still carrying their water for them on this front? What if, actually, after all these years, you are wrong about that? What evidence would it take to change your mind?

Let me ask you this, as you say the Russian scandal was based on fictional evidence, how many pages of the Mueller report and Senate Intel report have you personally actually read?

Here’s their bottom line:

  It is our conclusion, based on the facts detailed in the Committee's Report, that the Russian intelligence services' assault on the integrity of the 2016 U.S. electoral process[,] and Trump and his associates' participation in and enabling of this Russian activity, represents one of the single most grave counterintelligence threats to American national security in the modern era.

Trump and his associates participated and enabled hacking of his rivals in 2016. Russian collusion. Republicans authored that report, btw. What’s your position on the 2016 election after reading that?

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