2016 U.S. Presidential Elections: The Circus Is In Full Swing

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I am very open to the possibility that American military operations are underscrutinised, and unnecessarily kill more civilians than they could. But I also dislike the lazy attitude of drone=warcrime without any constructive suggestions. For example what these people were suggesting around 2015? Letting ISIS expand and genocide people?
 
History guys are often hardcore determinists. They argue that everything has a causal explanation. It's senseless to hold a Viet Cong combatant that can't even write his name to some sort of moral standard that you and I have. All moral agents work on the basis of the information available to them, which is usually simply determined by where you're born, and what values you've been instilled in that environment; from there on you just pick the path of least resistance to maximizing your wellbeing. Other people read that perspective as if they're excusing terrorists. You're just miscommunicating, I think. He sometimes uses loaded terms that imply virtue or lack thereof (e.g., bad/good president), which you catch onto but have a different understanding of.

Likewise, MAGA crowd are just working on the basis of the information they have. The solution he's proposing is not one where no one has any responsibility or accountability, but one where MAGA people don't want to turn to fake news because they don't have to, because they're materially satisfied, because no one can exploit their fears, because they're no longer afraid. He's suggesting that sustainable stability would be achieved by focusing on holding different people responsible and accountable (e.g., by pressing leaders to act more proactive to ensure employment, redistribution of wealth, etc.). It's smarter to hold the news outlet accountable that told uncle Tom that refugees want to come to his country to kill him instead of uncle Tom when he goes on to threaten refugees. It's smarter to hold legislators accountable to regulating the news outlet. The maybe more nuanced take is that responsibility is divided between all the actors, with everyone playing an important part.

Not sure if that's a good explanation.
 
@History bros, what's your take on Kraut's history? (Does he misrepresent anything?)

"He said/She said" level, but IIRC, he does screw the pooch on historical matters at least a couple times, and then run with said screw up through the whole hour-long video. So I'd take him with a salt mine on things I'm not intimately familiar with.
*Specific example I know of was his take on Chinese and British diplomacy being done in Latin.
 
pick the path of least resistance to maximizing your wellbeing.
hardcore determinists
Do you feel very determined today?
If only humans were deterministic automatons chasing their best interest...

A more interesting tidbit for me about historical determinism is that people tend to look for and find causes that might explain current events (it's some kind of psychological bias) while disregarding all other information that doesn't support the eventual outcome. While looking for causes is a normal and welcome practice, I feel it sometimes is carried too far to its extreme, to a kind of deterministic fatalism.
"Trump is only a symptom of deeper stuff blah blah" takes you only so far. There are also chances and probabilities that some stuff might happen or might happen in a certain way.
For example, I'm convinced that Trump didn't have to be elected President and the social forces that put him there got very lucky. By no means it was pre-determined that his base would get its man into the top job, they might have remained a strong faction in the conservative party represented by part of the elected politicians.
This version of events would have profoundly altered our reality today and that's something the determinists/fatalists hate to entertain. There can be different outcomes and chance plays an important part.
 
I getchu and I'm super open-minded, but the fact of the matter is that Trump did get elected by the EC majority. Trump did do significant damage. We can measure departures from moderate politics to more extremes even before Trump. We can measure a very similar phenomenon everywhere else in the world. The way we talk, and where we get our news from, which form our worldview has changed. Politicians are further away from their constituents than in the past. Globalism has given us a lot but also has hurt people. People do get afraid and frustrated when they have to deal with increasingly more complicated systems. People do make up conspiracy theories about things they don't understand because it's not explained properly to them.

There are a few graphs that show how comfortable people are with a military dictator for a leader over the past few decennia, and the numbers are ****ing depressing. Something along the line of only 10% being comfortable with a military-style dictatorship in 1980 to like 40% in 2019. And this is true in Europe as well. We can either err on the side of ''it was all circumstance, chill'' or on ''we should be more proactive, at the least until we understand things better''. Idk, man.
 



>European putting on a posh english accent with classical music in the background ????

He does a very weird sleight of hand here, making out as if the end of the cold war led to 9/11, as if 9/11 was a state action of allies against other allies. More broadly he ignores all the infighting within NATO before 1989 even at the height of the cold war. Pakistan going behind their back to make nukes and deal with China has almost nothing to do with the fall of the USSR, just like Israel and Saudi Arabia being unruly allies has been a problem for the USA for decades before 1989. In the 70s bloody Iceland almost tried to drag the USA into a war with the UK over fish. It's arguably a lot more coherent alliance with fewer internal disputes now than it was then, precisely because the USSR is gone and there is no counterweight.

"Trump is only a symptom of deeper stuff blah blah" takes you only so far. There are also chances and probabilities that some stuff might happen or might happen in a certain way.
For example, I'm convinced that Trump didn't have to be elected President and the social forces that put him there got very lucky. By no means it was pre-determined that his base would get its man into the top job, they might have remained a strong faction in the conservative party represented by part of the elected politicians.

No "determinist" thinks that Trump himself was bound to happen. Literally anything can happen, it's just that some things really aren't surprising if you look at trends and can basically be predicted. Anyone who was fundamentally shocked by Trump's victory in 2016 wasn't paying attention, just like some of the responses to Brexit by the establishment were as if they had their heads in the sand the last 5 years. Trying to pin his success on anything smaller than long term trends is silly because he basically rode those trends like a wave.
 
Monty, Your statement about "random People" is either stupid or blind. Random people were not targeted, hence why no Canadians were killed.
Monty paints terrorists as paragons of virtue
i know reading is hard but when you literally have folks saying "we often don't really know who's being killed or if they deserved it" it strikes me as misguided to keep trying to insist they were all terrorists. (unless you're going the path of "they were all terrorists because brown" which is more racist than i would expect from you)

pointing out that no, murdering random groups of people because you think some maybe might be terrorists is not in fact a good strategy is quite different to saying "terrorists are paragons of virtue".

you would know this had you read what i wrote, but you clearly didn't so i'll give you a pass.


(from the latin monstrum, which was mainly used to indicate something exceptional and completely out of the ordinary), the mere fact that he is overshadowed by others kind of prevents him from truly being a monster.
he's still exceptional in his crimes compared to for example most non-presidents if you want to argue the semantic point.


the lazy attitude of drone=warcrime
is explicitly not the point. the argument here is not about drones in general as you imply but specifically about all the random murder-strikes based on poor intelligence that result in mass civilian casualties and whether they are criminal (which they are).
 
Where is your evidence of poor intelligence that you feature so prominently? US had people on the ground near where the drones struck. Where is your evidence of mass civilian casualties?

Also where is your evidence of the monstrosity of the other US presidents you haven't named yet?
 
lmao

again, do try reading what was written. maybe click through to an article or two. i did link them for a reason.

Also where is your evidence of the monstrosity of the other US presidents you haven't named yet?
i already answered this. genocide, imperialism. slavery. etc. literally all of them. some did more of it than others, but every single one did. it's part of the job description. i could go through each individually but since you clearly aren't actually reading my posts that seems like a waste of time.
(except maybe will harrison, because he died too soon to **** much up during his term. he was still a bad person before then.)
 
You're laughing about your lack of evidence for anything you claim. Sweet. Also, US was very late to the Imperialism game, even later than Germany. Your proclamation of genocide pales by comparison to your own country's so pot, call another kettle.
 
uh.. not to defend germany's history and all, but you do realise that native americans are a thing.. right? granted, less of a thing than they were, say, five hundred years ago, but that's literally the point.

and as said, i know you aren't reading my posts (which you should, btw, that's also where the evidence is), but i did explicitly say already that yes, german leaders are also all criminals. this isn't the gotcha you think it is.
 
Of course, you know that the vast majority of interactions between European settlers in America and later actual Americans were non-hostile? Most of the deaths caused among native Americans was caused by disease. Of course you don't know that because it doesn't fit your agenda. My own family is a good example. Arrived New Amsterdam in 1638. His grandson, born 1660 moved to the frontier, bought land access from the locals, signed a mutual defense pact, even exchanged brides. Don't believe Hollywood stories.
 
i would like to remind you that i literally studied this at university. hollywood my ass.

what you are doing is genocide denial, and it is reprehensible.

both the "vast majority of non-hostile interactions" and the "most deaths caused by disease" are well known to be parts of a revisionist myth to whitewash the conquest.

specifically, the disease thing is a misapplication to the whole of the americas of a statistic specific to a region of mexico, and is simply not true when said of the americas as a whole. and even in that specific region of mexico it isn't as simple as "disease killed them". yes, many millions of people did die as a result of the epidemics, but the magnitude of the death toll was only possible as a result of the intentional actions of the colonisers, who made things worse with slavery, forced labour, and other atrocities.

the fact that there were many non-hostile interactions meanwhile does not in fact make the specific intentional genocide somehow not genocide. these murderous efforts were ongoing well into the 19th century, and involved both deportations, mass murders, disruptions of food supplies, sterilisation, cultural genocide, and others.

even someone your age should have heard of for example the trail of tears, and that's just one of the most well known individual events

if your ancestors in particular really are innocent of any individual wrongdoing (which would be great!, and there were some who were in fact innocent in that way), that doesn't somehow make the overall deprivations visited on the natives by the colonisers not genocidal.
 
Your own revisionist history is full of ****. Atrocities, my ass. Yes, I've heard of the Trail of Tears where most of the Cherokee returned to their homes in North Carolina. And nobody thought to stop them? There was very little conquest, despite whatever crap you learned in school. Sorry. Very few, if any, native Americans were made into slaves and despite the crap you were taught disease was a factor throughout the Americas, wherever natives and Europeans came in contact. Wounded Knee may be one instance of genocide but instances like that are very rare.
Also your crap about mass murder and sterilisation is pure ignorance of the actual circumstances. Did you get a degree from learning this crap?
 
I'm not sure what value there is going around calling politicians murderers and whatnot. Unless you're a breatharian who spins their own cotton, living in the Western world necessarily entails living on top of a mountain of corpses. I never particularly understood the need to endlessly hang-wring and navel-gaze about it beyond that which is necessary to prevent further atrocity.
 
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