“banning Muslim immigration will only increase terrorism!”
I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such an outburst.
it’s literally “the terrorism will continue until immigration improves”
Consider what it says about Muslims. It isn’t good. It only reinforces the Conservative viewpoint, much like some of the reaction to Charlie Hebdo did.
so yeah the obvious reason why the left shouldn’t justify its policies for non-leftist reasons is that short-term justifications are slippery and can twist in your hands, and you don’t want to put effort into undermining your own ideology.
for example, say you justified an extensive recycling program on environment grounds, then later it turned out that it actually had a higher environmental cost than straight landfill- wait shit this is a terrible example let me come in again.
say I strongly believe that these propositions are true:
A
A → B
A → C
A → D
…
perhaps proposition A is that everyone deserves equal opportunity in life, and from that I draw B (open borders!) and C (public healthcare!) and D (antiracism!) and all kinds of other things.
now perhaps I can’t convince someone of proposition A, or I’m too gutless to try, so instead I construct alternative justifications and try to sell those instead:
X → B
Y → C
Z → D
…
perhaps proposition X is we should strengthen the country (by boosting skilled immigration!), and Y is that we should strive for efficiency (public healthcare!), and Z is that we shouldn’t make Jesus cry so much (fight racism!).
but wait, these alternative justifications might prove much more than I intended! investing heavily in the military might also strengthen the country, and clamping down on premarital sex might also stop Jesus crying.
or the implications may not be factual: someone might decide that actually the country isn’t strengthened by increased immigration, and then we have a pickle on our hands; by ceding our true motivations we’ve compromised our entire political program.
this doesn’t mean you can’t mention when a policy has multiple benefits, and something can be win-win on more than one axis. but it’s almost impossible to be a win on every axis and anyone who says otherwise is lying, although typically to themselves.
Sometimes people may also not agree on the A→B, however. I’m not a Nationalist because I think my country is always correct, but for more Consequentialist reasons. Same thing for rejecting open borders. Antiracism seemed to be a good thing but as practically implemented by activists it’s a lot more mixed (see: Bernie got accused of being White Supremacist, numerous attempts to redefine both “Racism” and “Violence”.) My opposition to Communism is not because I’m against redistribution from an inherent perspective - I believe property is useful but not true - but based on how it turned out.
Anonymous asked:
argumate answered:
There is a broader question here: to what degree are political movements about outcomes over emotional affiliations.
(And of course, “being about outcomes” is another emotional affiliation!)
Keep in mind that people will see through these kinds of cynical ploys, Anon.
The Left (at least in the US) has parts that have been actively cheering for the death-by-aging and demographic destruction of the native population. The native population, quite frankly, has little reason to believe that movements that treat them as a fulcrum for leveraging the identity politics of all other groups will actually work for their benefit, so why should they believe them? Especially when increasing the supply of labor will increase their competition, not just for jobs, but also for real estate, etc? For that matter, why should they believe it’s in their interests to bring in immigrants on behalf of anti-assimilationists, who want a “salad bowl” instead of a “melting pot” model? Who have shown no reluctance to throw the word “racist” at any criticism of immigration? Who give free passes to actions influenced by foreign religions and ideologies that they wouldn’t to actions influenced by local ones?
Trust will have to be reestablished with actions, not branding. And reestablishing trust is costly. The Left must become willing to actually pay that cost.
Right now, I don’t see a reason to believe that will happen.
I think China’s gonna get stuck in the late-Soviet productivity trap, you guys
like, the problem with Beijing crushing Hong Kong and Taipei is that the non-communists were the only folks who knew how to coordinate investment, marketize innovations, and reward efficiency
letting Beijing and Shanghai coordinate investment while promoting SOEs, starving private firms of capital, and distorting financial markets is a recipe for disaster
I’ve gradually become convinced that the 21st century is going to remain the American century until some other region of the world can pull its head out of its butt and craft some decent institutions.
Europe and Asia might have just had a disastrous run of own goals, but now America’s working hard to even the score
meanwhile on Earth Prime, President Clinton has opened the borders with Mexico and Canada and is negotiating a global free trade deal
on Earth Prime, Stein and Johnson and Sanders voters are all very smug
(more interesting is Earth 3, where Bernie presides over the killing of Nawar al-Awlaki and years of legislative gridlock)
opposition to Trump seems a lot wider and more unified than opposition to Dubya; we’re barely three weeks in and the people are preparing to march on the White House.
maybe because Dubya passed the “bloke you’d have a beer with” test, and we all know Trump has no hope in hell of ever passing that.
even after the Iraq War kicked off, a lot of people who opposed it were still iffy about opposing Bush’s whole agenda, whereas it’s harder to believe that Trump has some hidden reserve of Good Policies he’s going to wheel out any day now.
Also, W has already happened, informing current political discourse.
(noting again: I’m not an ancap, and don’t think it’s a realistic or even necessarily desirable outcome)
The amusing thing here is that Syria is one of the places that shows what happens when you get a collapse of the state
You can also pretty easily label syria as an example of what happens when you get a collision of four states, all shitty to different degrees (the old syrian regime, their russian backers, ISIL, and the us coalition proxy state).
History suggests almost nobody actually wants to live in this atomized state, they will form associations and thus attempt to reform the state almost immediately. Although that state could be one of aristocrats or warlords.
I agree, statelessness is probably not stable and this one of the reasons I am not an ancap. However, this still leaves 95% of the ancap position intact, even if it ruins their sound bytes. There are ancaps who will admit that statelessness may be unachievable, but that this has no real bearing on the rest of their platform.
The whole anarcho-capitalist idea set is filled with such astonishingly unrealistic projections on what people will do it astounds me.
I don’t think this is a reasonable criticism. Sure, the bottom 95% of ancaps are hugely unrealistic, but this is true of every ideology. I’ve not read the literature widely, but in his book, the thing about david friedman (one of the more important ancap writers) that impressed me the most was how realistic he was.
I disagree with him in a number of places (I wrote an entire series of posts mostly criticizing him!) but his arguments were mostly well thought out and set realistic expectations for how successful such policies could be.
One of the things that tends to draw me to libertarian policies is that they are often the only people in the room who are actually paying attention to incentive systems and how people actually act. The places where I most often disagree with libertarians are, in my estimation, the places where they’ve failed to consider historical precedent, but this is not the most common case.
See, I think incentives are the problem with their system. One of the main times you see this is when they think of everything in property rights. You can see that’s the primitive they use to manipulate the world. The problem is, it’s a legal construct. It’s this whole idea that society is governed by rules and not power. The attempts they try to use to patch this are ridiculous, and without it the whole system falls apart instantly into violence.
I see these incentives, but I see these incentive arguments as ridiculous because there is so much they fail to consider. It’s the classic libertarian-arguing point, when they say “Let us suppose“ you have to say “Let’s absolutely not suppose“ because the whole thing is often based on unrealistic assumptions. These synthetic problems are constrained to give the result that they want and these toy problems are used to show how great their system is.
I’m of the opinion that “incentives“ is not a good system to use, because you can construct problems such to give any incentive you want. People take actions because they have an incentive, opium knocks people out because it has a dormitive power. These arguments have the problem of unfalsifiability, I prefer to pay attention to what people do than make arguments about incentives. You can tell just-so stories to give anyone any incentive you want, doesn’t mean that corresponds to any reality. Much better to observe what people actually do.
It isn’t even that incentives are a terrible way to predict actions, it’s just that AnCaps are so horrible at using them that their analysis is useless. You can do analysis with incentives, but not if you chop half of them out. I would also have to say that my experience is the opposite of rustingbridges’ - AnCaps are way worse at predicting how people actually act than boring centrists, and the shear gap between how they think people act and how people actually act is part of why I find their neofeudal ideological system so frustrating.
(noting again: I’m not an ancap, and don’t think it’s a realistic or even necessarily desirable outcome)
The amusing thing here is that Syria is one of the places that shows what happens when you get a collapse of the state
You can also pretty easily label syria as an example of what happens when you get a collision of four states, all shitty to different degrees (the old syrian regime, their russian backers, ISIL, and the us coalition proxy state).
History suggests almost nobody actually wants to live in this atomized state, they will form associations and thus attempt to reform the state almost immediately. Although that state could be one of aristocrats or warlords.
I agree, statelessness is probably not stable and this one of the reasons I am not an ancap. However, this still leaves 95% of the ancap position intact, even if it ruins their sound bytes. There are ancaps who will admit that statelessness may be unachievable, but that this has no real bearing on the rest of their platform.
The whole anarcho-capitalist idea set is filled with such astonishingly unrealistic projections on what people will do it astounds me.
I don’t think this is a reasonable criticism. Sure, the bottom 95% of ancaps are hugely unrealistic, but this is true of every ideology. I’ve not read the literature widely, but in his book, the thing about david friedman (one of the more important ancap writers) that impressed me the most was how realistic he was.
I disagree with him in a number of places (I wrote an entire series of posts mostly criticizing him!) but his arguments were mostly well thought out and set realistic expectations for how successful such policies could be.
One of the things that tends to draw me to libertarian policies is that they are often the only people in the room who are actually paying attention to incentive systems and how people actually act. The places where I most often disagree with libertarians are, in my estimation, the places where they’ve failed to consider historical precedent, but this is not the most common case.
See, I think incentives are the problem with their system. One of the main times you see this is when they think of everything in property rights. You can see that’s the primitive they use to manipulate the world. The problem is, it’s a legal construct. It’s this whole idea that society is governed by rules and not power. The attempts they try to use to patch this are ridiculous, and without it the whole system falls apart instantly into violence.
I see these incentives, but I see these incentive arguments as ridiculous because there is so much they fail to consider. It’s the classic libertarian-arguing point, when they say “Let us suppose“ you have to say “Let’s absolutely not suppose“ because the whole thing is often based on unrealistic assumptions. These synthetic problems are constrained to give the result that they want and these toy problems are used to show how great their system is.
I’m of the opinion that “incentives“ is not a good system to use, because you can construct problems such to give any incentive you want. People take actions because they have an incentive, opium knocks people out because it has a dormitive power. These arguments have the problem of unfalsifiability, I prefer to pay attention to what people do than make arguments about incentives. You can tell just-so stories to give anyone any incentive you want, doesn’t mean that corresponds to any reality. Much better to observe what people actually do.
It isn’t even that incentives are a terrible way to predict actions, it’s just that AnCaps are so horroble
One of the reasons that’s generally given for Trump wanting a war against Iran, China, or somewhere else is the idea that it will unify the nation behind him. Could prove unpopular in the long run, but as long as the long run after re-election that’s not too much of a problem.
This time though, I’m not sure if a war would be unifying barring a Chinese attack on Japan or something equally extreme. I can’t think of a scenario that both doesn’t involve Xi acting like an extreme dumbass that gets war without massive day one opposition. Maybe I’m just comically naive though.
The 2003 Iraq war had massive opposition from day one, and it still bumped Bush’s approval rating from 55% to 75% overnight.
From eyeballing the graph, it’s seems that the 20% boost basically persisted (the approval decays at the same rate, but from a higher starting point), which if true was probably enough to carry the 2004 election?
“I oppose no war; I opposed one once and it ruined me. Henceforth I’m for war, pestilence, and famine!” —Justin Butterfield
Yeah, this is why you could think it could unify, but I’m thinking the opposition here could be on a different level. At least then it was tacitly accepted that Bush had the authority to take the US to war and we had the 9/11 attacks. Even people against the war felt we had to “support our troops.” Don’t think that’s the case for Trump, the war would be not just bad, but illegitimate.
Don’t really know though.
Speaking as someone who did not oppose the Iraq War (I was too young to realize the implications), and who has never attended a protest - I have never forgiven the Republicans for the Iraq War, and I will be out in the streets if they try to start some fake war with Iran or China. I, who rolls eyes at protesters and have never protested. Keep in mind the new President denounced the Iraq War, too.
Anonymous asked:
kontextmaschine answered:
Well what’s true about urban warfare is you can fortify prepared positions against bullets and use local knowledge and interior lines well enough that the defender’s at a huge advantage if you’re limited to small arms. You’d want air support or artillery, howitzers at least. Maybe you could do it with support weapons or explosive charges for breaching, but that’s very expensive in time and men, and explosives aren’t just lying around anymore. (Tannerite?)
I’m thinking of Vienna in the Austrian Civil War, the Karl-Marx-Hof housing development that leftists held against trained soldiers. Until they brought cannons in.
Which is the thing, when you line up your logistics and your politics (in a civil war, the besieger often starts off wanting to capture intact) to the point where you have heavy weapons, things change.
The MOVE bombing in Philadelphia - that was a group that had fortified their base, which was in a rowhouse block with party walls that could be tunneled through, and explicitly planned a dramatic final stand, but the Philly police had the logistical and political support to bring in a helicopter and bombs and they won it in a rout.
Guernica, you remember the Picasso painting, that’s from the Spanish Civil War, that’s a thing a right-insurrection pulled against a left-held town when it got bomber planes and worked up a “gloves are off” ideology.
The Siege of Sarajevo, that went on for years and there was hostile artillery in the hills encircling the town, but the New World Order crimped the besiegers’ materiel supply, denied airspace, and resupplied the city with UN convoys, you’d need US or Russian government patronage to pull that off.
The food supply - yeah, on one hand the just-in-time supply system cuts down stocks but from the French and Russian Revolutions we know cities are perfectly capable of fielding expeditionary forces of sufficient mass to seize food from more thinly populated areas.
(when it looked like Trump was going to lose and things might get rough in that direction, I looked up the location of nearby distribution centers, not the worst idea)
On the other hand, the idea that rightist forces would be able to lay sieges on cities strong enough to contain breakout attempts, long enough to force submission, prevent resupply by air or sea, either prevent reinforcements from elsewhere from breaking the siege or siege all leftist centers simultaneously while holding off any external intervention, but at that point we’re still talking militia guys with ARs and not an actual military, what scenario is that?
Re: The besieger still wanting to capture intact: I want to stress that’s most common in cases where the idea of you winning militarily is utterly ridiculous, at least for cases like the MOVE bombing anyway- where I should note the entire thing was handled by the Philadelphia police rather than the U.S. military, and even then the police used much less force than they could potentially have sued. I think this bears stressing because while a civil war is very unlikely, tiny groups who murder a handful of random police officers and maybe some civilians before getting themselves killed happen all the time and will continue to happen.
But more importantly, seconding the last sentence; we’re very unlikely to have a true civil war which comes down to grassroot leftists vs. grassroot rightists; any even slightly possible situations would be one or the other rising against the U.S. government- and would probably lose eventually. I could maybe see a situation in which a big chunk of the military splits off, which… would get pretty bad, probably in new and interesting ways that have never been seen before. The only way I could really picture that happening though if a president openly suspended the constitution and declared themselves King.
