racketcon2089

Neither Ukraine nor Israel have reached this hypothetical technological era in which a draft is not required, and those facts are inescapable to any American in those countries observing it.

One reason the US military doesn't need a draft is because its proxy forces which are supplied by US equipment do have a military draft.

This is not a complex argument nor are there any facts which are not mutually agreed upon by all parties here.

I'm not able to follow the ideological contortions that would be required to not understand something as simple as:

"The US supplies the equipment, and the local US-backed government uses a draft to supply its army with the number of soldiers it needs to use the equipment."

A more sophisticated thinker would ask questions like "from which people's perspective?" and "at what point in time?"

These questions would give you access to critical insights, one of them is that it's never persuasive to take a rough estimate of hypothetical aggregate good and bad and then attempt to weigh it using one's personal intuitions at present to derive a universal claim.

Peoples who were ethnically cleansed at scale to facilitate settler or US commercial expansion or currently suffer under US-backed dictatorships will tend to have a negative view of the US as an empire.

People whose countries need the US as an ally to protect them from an aggressive regional power and/or currently experience economic prosperity and political stability within a democratic government because of the US will tend to have a positive view of the US as an empire.

Telling a Guatemalan whose entire family was massacred by US-trained death squads in the Guatemalan civil war that you've done the math from a god's eye view and the US is the best possible hegemon in aggregate is unpersuasive, bordering on absurd.

It would be like arguing to a Polish person whose entire family was executed in stalinist trials of the 1940s that the Soviet Union was in aggregate benign because of all the aid they gave out to peoples fighting wars of liberation from european colonial dictatorships, which in aggregate killed far more people than Stalin did.

If you can't understand that the second example and the first are equally absurd, you are wearing ideological blinkers that make it hard for people outside the US to take you seriously.

Attributing malice to other empires but "good intentions gone awry" to your own is a fundamental attribution error, and one you should be wary of to avoid unpleasant surprises in foreign policy outcomes.

>But you're delusional if you think some alternative power would have been gentler.

You're saying that people who don't agree with a non-falsifiable claim about hypothetical alternatives are delusional. That suggests a closed system of thought which has left behind empiricism and must now be considered metaphysical. I'm a plain materialist so I can't go any further with any statements that assert definite knowledge of things outside of material reality.

>I too wish for a world power that never resolves to violence and never does any mistake

This has nothing to do with what I said and is not an opinion I hold so you must've meant to respond to someone else, I definitely wouldn't want to say that you're irrational, overly emotional, and have become accustomed to arguing by intentionally mischaracterizing what other people say to preserve your existing psychological commitments in a fundamentally juvenile and dishonest way.

I can tell you're not in Ukraine or Israel right now. Would you like to know how?

Would the abstract "one" you're thinking of happen to be a middle class college educated American who has never been on the receiving end of American benevolence in the form of saturated bombing of civilian areas, nor been at risk of being drafted to fight overseas?

Is your point that those people's lives are somehow inherently less valuable or is your point that you're willing to sacrifice as many of them as it takes to get a good outcome for you?

"All we did was fulfill a contract for a government agency" is the enterprise tech Nuremberg defense.

> overall the world is a better place with American hegemony expressed through her military superiority.

This seems like a non-falsifiable claim about the future, even if it can be argued for rationally with regard to the past.

Have you ever been somewhere that you needed to defend this belief rationally, or does it appear to you as self-evident?

I think we can evaluate how far the discourse is fallen by the reflex to attempt to hide questions that the hegemon's apologists don't like instead of answering them.

Perhaps this bullying attitude is one of the many reasons that most of the world does not feel that it's better off today with American hegemony.

For whom?

Nothing says "we're concerned about AI risk and harm to human life" quite like partnering with the military-industrial complex.

It's even better timing to do this while the Pentagon is providing material and intelligence support to a government whose decisonmakers' public statements are explicit admissions of intent to commit war crimes and also convey genocidal intent.

Glad we spent all that time talking about AGI and Roko's Basilisk, those should be top of mind always, never the current actions of the humans in charge at both OpenAI and the US government.

As you said, innocent suffering in a conflict is inevitable. Is the logical axiom that international shipping which is connected to the US and Israeli economies is more innocent than Palestinian children? Is any cargo ship crew more innocent and less culpable than say, an infant?

If you want to make an argument that some groups of people are inherently evil and subhuman and must be destroyed, just go ahead and make it.

What does the word honest mean, I have no choice but to post here instead of using a search engine

This makes perfect sense when you consider that all of the people who will benefit from this will be dead or far away in very large estates by the time the negative externalities become undeniable from a liability perspective.

We're talking about Israel intentionally killing their own hostages, right?

I don't understand what you're saying: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/13/world/reagan-demands-end-...

Are you saying that Israel has received less military and economic aid since? Are you saying that President of the United States is unavailable for some reason? Or are you saying that the newspaper article from 42 years ago is false or misleading?

Saying that supporting a government which has made dozens of public statements that convey unambigious genocidal intent with the actions that seem in line with this intent is one wrong.

Taking military action to apply pressure the first group to stop is not considered an equal wrong by governments which represent approximately 96% of people on earth.

If you think the vast majority of humanity is engaged in passively or actively allowing a second wrong, is the 4% justified in using violence to stop the second wrong while providing critical military, economic, and political assistance for the first one?

I wonder if it's possible to describe this as a series of logical axioms or if there's some kind of special pleading going on here. It doesn't seem to be a logically consistent position to me, and since that's also the position of an overwhelming supermajority of people who have reviewed public statements made by Israeli decsionmakers, I'd say the burden of proof is on you.

It's been over 2 whole years since they removed the confederate stars and bars from the state flag, why always with the prying questions?

> These things happen.

"It's not a placed to dump inconvenient bodies, it's just a place where at least some of the bodies are people of known identity who were killed by police or corrections officers that cleared themselves of wrongdoing and somehow forgot to tell anyone."

Very reassuring. I think we can all agree that this isn't worth investigating because Mississippi has always been a place bereft of racial bias and government corruption.

We all only have a coinflip chance of inferring tone online so I wouldn't feel bad. It's also possible I misinterpreted both your comment and the OP to a degree.

There's a lot of politically driven economic boosterism in the air right now (more than usual even) and I may have lazily assigned you to that camp with scant basis.

It's natural for politicians and their adherents to cherry-pick the data and intentionally withhold context on it to make themselves look as good as possible, while their opponents do the reverse. Then everyone accuses the other side of ignoring their numbers which they say are the true reflection of "reality."

Ever was it thus, but it's more exaggerated in these conditions where both the "good numbers" and the "bad numbers" break records and can zig-zag suddenly.

I think your reading is uncharitable.

Luxembourg has a 6% unemployment rate, the US has a 3.7% unemployment rate, and North Korea has a 0% unemployment rate.

Those unemployment numbers are objective realities in terms of being a reflection of a set of collection methods and definitions. But those are not merely a poor proxy for the population's overall wellbeing, they are actively _misleading_.

Prices for food, housing, medical care, education, and used cars going up in the US by 20-50% in a 3 year period while corporate profit margin percentages are at historical highs does not inspire confidence in the future.

Throw in an ongoing decline in life expectancy that puts the US firmly in the category of developing countries while paying 250-400% more GDP for medical care than other industrialized countries, two costly proxy wars which threaten to continue growing in scope, outright state and regulatory capture...

...and worst of all, a political, economic, judicial, and cultural elite with a fairly bipartisan mainstream consensus which doesn't appear to be willing or able to seriously address these issues with policy favored by suparmajorities of the voting public but not by the largest donors.

When the people in charge have been pissing on your leg for decades and tell you that it's just raining when you never see them get wet, you can't expect the abuse to stop in the future, not even if you elect the alternative from one of the two oligarch-backed choices.

No apology needed, and I can believe it! I happen to have some personal contacts in Hue who are in middle but in the divide between northern and southern communists they were treated as part of the south. I know there's some real bitterness even among just the communists, in part because the Hanoi-driven war strategy led to the formations in the south taking incredibly heavy casualties which then further cemented their political subordination in the postwar era.

From what little I know, both the center of the country and the south, party and non-party alike, generally feel that the northern elite is clannish and doesn't allocate jobs and investment fairly, which is kind of a big deal for a country with such a large state sector.

In the American case most of the state of Mississippi did not celebrate the 4th of July until 1945 because they considered themselves to be occupied confederate territory for 81 years: https://www.visitvicksburg.com/blog/celebrating-independence...

I can well understand some feeling persisting a mere 65 years later.

That said, for American southern irredentists of past, present and future, they're stuck with the confederacy alone, which is inextricably connected to slavery even for people like Robert E. Lee who was personally but not politically opposed to slavery. That's simply a much harder thing to identify with morally and practically, especially when 30-40% of the population of the south are descended from freed slaves.

The Republic of Vietnam flag stands for the hundreds of thousands of ARVN soldiers and administration and their families, but it also stands for things like a catholic dictatorship attacking temples in a 90% buddhist country, rigged elections, coups, and being the junior partner of a foreign power that carried out a brutal and dehumanizing counter-insurgency.

Unlike the American south, the southern Vietnamese have a much older identity and much richer history to draw upon. So, I wonder if in time a prior symbol/flag/something from their distinct history will become more resonant for them in the future, which conveys the identity without the baggage.

>In my experience, northern Kosovo and Republika Srpska are the very hotbeds of banging on about Serb identity and national character in the region, more than Beograd.

Most definitely! Not coincidentally, they also are dirt poor, ruled by the biggest crooks, and generally have limited opportunities for educational or economic mobility. The alliance that drove Serbia to war was between the resentful and opportunistic minority in the capital and the resentful and ignorant in the periphery.

Vojvodina is a great example of what the real tragedy is for Serbia. The Serbs were not united and their legitimate concerns about the future of Serb minorities was abducted by brutal people who cared about their own power only, effectively dooming not only those Serbs over the republic borders but also tainting the entire nation with their crimes.

Some of the most politically sophisticated people now are the men who started as country bumpkins taken in by Milosevic, served in the JNA or ancillary serb forces, and saw that it was all bullshit. Incompetence, drunkenness, and horrifying crimes against civilians for purposes of simple theft. They saw that the best of Serbia was against what they were doing and they were serving amoral people of low character, limited intelligence, who would shoot not only the enemy but anyone who got in the way of their ransacking. Yet now that they're in this dead end and the bridges have all been burned, how to go forward?

When I go elsewhere, I like to transmit these stories to people who (understandably) would not feel comfortable going to where those stories are told. At times there is a spark of recognition and solidarity in the shared problems, a willingness to reconcile if it comes first with full accounting and sincere apology that will never come from the political class.

And on the way back to serbian areas, I pass on the stories of not just random destruction but personal betrayal. How when the serbian paramilitaries came into a majority albanian village, they had kill lists provided for them by a local with names and addresses: the mayor, doctors, journalists, and anyone whose prominence had bred resentment. How after that, it makes simple tolerance of the western liberal type impossible, even basic trust impossible for a generation.

It certainly makes it hard for them to even pretend to care about Serbian families who experienced similar or historical Serbian architecture, because while everyone committed ethnic crimes, they did not all do so first or on the same scale.

And yet, all the refugee children of any ethnicity or religion who have become adults have much in common with each other: the feeling of being driven out of their home, hated for who they are, betrayed by neighbors they had grown up with, beset by economic uncertainty, and being continuously used in the most cynical way by politicians who make no real effort to provision their country for the future.

It should go without saying that neither "The West" in the form of the EU/Nato/KFor nor Russia have any interest in acting as honest brokers for untangling the complexity. If the conflict is reignited in earnest by local intragisence, everyone involved will likely become a tool of foreign powers who see the people there as little more than disposable proxies in a larger conflict.

I benefit from not just being an outsider but from being sincere in my sympathy for everyone. There is nothing more disrespectful than to tell someone in pain that their pain is not real, or that they deserved it because of what their government did, or that it's so proportionally insignificant compared to someone else's that they shouldn't even express it.

Telling people to shut up and get over it is (as is common among emigres and westerners) is so incredibly destructive. Refusing to listen is greatest gift to those who want to radicalize and dehumanize, it gives them an endless source of legitimacy as "the only one that cares" no matter what lies they tell.

You sound like you’re from Belgrade and have never been to Kosova or Bosnia or even to the countryside. Would you prefer to say “western Balkans” or do you presume to also speak for Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians, etc.

I would engage with your sources rather than once again retreat into claims of irreducible essence of identity that can never be understood by outsiders. If the Balkans has a curse, it’s that dishonest rhetoric being peddled by corrupt westernizers and corrupt nationalists.

The ownership class will do anything to stop fascism except allow the public to vote on the continuous upward transfer of wealth from the workforce to the already wealthy. War and nationalism are a surefire way to distract the public and muzzle critics, to tell a story about national greatness stolen by outsiders instead of by your very own titans of industry and politicians who have more in common with their opposite number in other countries than with anyone foolish or unlucky enough to be born outside of the circles of capital and access to capital.

I could say the same as an American southerner! The existence of distinct regional identity preexists the state and continues after reunification. The North dominates in their politics just as in ours and there’s resentment about it in both countries, but it does not follow that there is no national identity or that a regional dictatorship created and funded foreign powers which could not survive without their indefinite aid is true expression of regional identity.

At no point did it exist as an independent entity with popular support, it was first created by the French and propped up by the US. It’s about as credible as saying the Soviet war in Afghanistan was between two competing regimes or that the liberation of France in WW2 was a conflict between pro-German and pro-American regimes.

Formally true, but not a meaningful distinction given the massive disparity in capabilities and supporters.

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Vietnam won decisively and Serbia lost decisively; measured in destruction it was incomparably worse for Vietnam, but they have no outstanding border conflicts while experiencing peaceful economic development and national sovereignty since the last war in 1979. When your story has a happy ending (and your government needs the US to counterbalance China) it's a lot easier to move on.

This is essentially the reverse of former Yugoslavia where things were fairly placid from 1945-1980 then fell apart.

There's a tendency to equate the grievances of a generation with immutable national character because it makes analysis easy and change impossible. But this gets used for purposes of denigration of peoples or excuses for policy failures, if not by race and culture, then by economic class and individual good fortune.

I'm guessing you were born to educated professionals who immigrated or helped you do so, rather than say, grew up in a refugee camp with a non-citizen passport.

I've also lived in the balkans and my work involved tourism, I have to say this does sound like a complaint made primarily by germans and americans. I'm not sure if it's because germans and americans are the ones who get an earful of it most often due to heavier national involvement in the yugoslav wars and/or if we take it as a more of a personal affront.

The triumphal liberal cosmopolitanism of the 90s is starting to fade in Europe and the US, what's left looks more and more like cynical window dressing for brutal realpolitik. Nationalism, irredentist attitudes, ethnic cleansing and military conflict seem to be very much back on the menu as of late.

I see all of those as negative developments, but it's maybe time to wonder who's living in the past, them or us.

Is this your opinion as an attorney who is licensed to practice in Texas and has tried cases in this district before or are you speaking as a layperson?

As a layperson I might agree with you, but in these sorts of cases the judges tend to play a pivotal role, as do both the economic power of the plaintiff and the existing reputation of the defendants.

Many any engineer has been run aground by privileging the predictive power of their own literal interpretation over the case law and disposition of the actual judges.

I think the complaint is worth reading, not because everything in it has already been proven true, but it's important to understand the claims being made: https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/3428af84caea0c21...

It's also useful to understand the origin of Media Matters and know a little about its founder, David Brock. He's a lifetime "dirty tricks" political agent who by his own admission in his 2002 memoir has knowingly and repeatedly put not just misleading statements but outright lies in print before.

Elon Musk also has a record making misleading statements and in some cases outright lies, but what's under discussion is the observable behavior of the platform which leaves behind a wealth of empirical evidence; logs, humans in the loop, third party caching and scraping, etc.

If the outcome of this case becomes available to a prediction market, I would bet 10:1 against Media Matters prevailing absent a full retraction and apology which leads to the suit being dropped.