Wanderthread Redux (Part 1)

smulder · March 31, 2019, 3:29am

I see they’re not calling leftists “totalitarian” anymore.

They used to save the word “authoritarian” for right-wing dictators, as if it were the lesser of two evils

Wanderfound · March 31, 2019, 4:28am

Wanderfound · March 31, 2019, 8:27am

“National Day of Honor”. Declared by Obama. To celebrate the invasion of Iraq.

What fucking “honor”? It was a war crime. All of it.

Wanderfound · March 31, 2019, 11:00am

Here’s another good test for politicians, one that comes from the great socialist polemicist Alexander Cockburn. When working at the Nation, Cockburn used to ask his interns: “Is your hate pure?” If they said no or seemed confused, he just shook his head. At one point a young Ed Miliband, the future British Labour leader, happened to be working at the magazine. Cockburn posed his usual question, and Miliband “replied with shock that he did not, in fact, hate anyone.” “It tells you all you need to know,” Cockburn said. And it did.

Hate? Why should anyone need “pure hate” in them? Because the world is full of terrible injustice! If that injustice doesn’t absolutely enrage you, then your moral compass is busted. You don’t have to hate people, necessarily (though when I look at George W. Bush dancing on the Ellen show, and I think about the faces of Iraqi orphans, I seethe uncontrollably). You do at the very least have to hate the things that happen to people: the way some grow up with unbelievable privilege while millions of children are homeless (in the U.S. alone), the eviction of families in winter, the way American leaders can casually destroy the lives of foreigners without a second thought, the killing of children and journalists by our allies. The bumper sticker is right: If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.

MarjaE · March 31, 2019, 6:56pm

What do you think honor is?

Membership in a militaristic ruling class, and the willingness to use violence to advance the violence of the class. Brooks beating Sumner is the visible tip of the iceberg, because Sumner was in a rival ruling class, but is of the same kind as the rest of the iceberg.

mindysan33 · March 31, 2019, 7:22pm

An interesting piece by historian Adam Tooze on the current nature of American empire, and how that is changing under the current administration:

nimelennar · April 1, 2019, 1:12am

Honor is winning a fight while playing by the rules, when:

the rules are purposely written to give the advantage to the side with the most money to spend
the rules are defined as only “the bad things that we are trained to do,” and not “things that are just as bad, but that the other guys do and we don’t,” and
no one looks too closely to check if “the good guys” are actually following the rules, while any deviation from “the bad guys” is used as further justification for attacking them.

As an example:

The Klingon High Council was willing to let the duel go ahead, with no hesitation, even though Quark wasn’t a warrior, wasn’t proficient with a bat’leth, and would have died (despite being factually correct with his accusations), because he couldn’t prove his opponent’s dishonor through combat. Had he raised his weapon instead of dropping it, D’Ghor would have killed him quickly and brutally, and no one would have seen any dishonor in any of it, despite the outcome of the duel being a foregone conclusion from the moment it was announced (or D’Ghor would never have made the challenge in the first place).

Quark only prevailed because he managed to make them, for a moment, drop all pretext that a superior military force proving their “rightness” by defeating an inferior force was anything less than murder.

Honor is the absurd claim that victory through subterfuge is somehow lesser than victory in a “fair fight,” a claim generally only made by the odds-on favorite to win. That the US feels that they have any right to use the word, while shunning the ICCC and refusing to cooperate with war crime investigations, is the worst form of hypocrisy.

Wanderfound · April 1, 2019, 1:35am

Wanderfound · April 1, 2019, 1:38am

Thread.

Wanderfound · April 1, 2019, 1:44am

Thread of doggy goodness:

Wanderfound · April 1, 2019, 4:27am

Once again, propaganda is about selection and emphasis:

Wanderfound · April 1, 2019, 4:33am

Wanderfound · April 1, 2019, 5:53am

Details in thread.

smulder · April 1, 2019, 6:19am

seems consistent with historical usage

Wanderfound · April 1, 2019, 7:26am

Wanderfound · April 1, 2019, 8:52am

Wanderfound · April 1, 2019, 8:56am

Wanderfound · April 2, 2019, 1:28am

Milano strikes again:

She’s like the platonic ideal of shitty faux “allies”.

Wanderfound · April 2, 2019, 1:58am

Wanderfound · April 2, 2019, 6:59am

It was interesting, but it was also notable that it was written from an assumption of American exceptionalism/benevolence.

America retains some huge advantages. But it would be dangerous, the argument goes, simply to count on those. Sometimes American preponderance has to be defended by a ‘war of manoeuvre’. The emerging American strategy is to use threats of trade policy sanctions and aggressive counter-espionage in the tech arena, combined with a ramping up of America’s military effort, to force Beijing to accept not just America’s global preponderance but also its terms for navigation of the South China Sea. In pursuing this course the Trump presidency has a clear precedent: the push against the Soviet Union in the early 1980s by the Reagan administration, which deployed economic and political pressure to break what was perceived to be a menacing phase of Soviet expansion in the 1970s. Despite all the risks involved, for American conservatives that episode stands as the benchmark of successful grand strategy.

“aggressive counter-espionage”.

The author strikes me as a liberal imperialist; their objection is not to the exercise and maintenance of American dominance, but rather to the thought that Trump is an incompetent manager of that power and is overly revealing of its underlying nature.