4 ms·

at least with a pandemic there is a clear end goal of "no more pandemic," and we're not entirely reliant on the government to get us there. even if the journey

at least with a pandemic there is a clear end goal of "no more pandemic," and we're not entirely reliant on the government to get us there. even if the journey ends up being way way way way way more painful than it should have been, with far too many lives lost, we do have a path to eradicating the disease through widespread vaccination etc and people in the private/academic sectors can push on making progress there. With the war and the trade war though, those are quagmires the government got us into (with the citizens vocal support for the wars), and it really mattered that there that our leadership didn't know what it wanted to achieve. At least we have a long term goal in fighting covid, even if our leadership doesn't know what short term success should look like...

throwawaygh 6y ago
The long-term goal in Iraq/Afghanistan was "peaceful muslim-majority western-values democracies in the middle east". In other words, a literal pipe dream. The long-term goal of the trade war with China is... QoL that costs low six figure salaries plus a pension and union protection for every high school grad in the midwest willing to work in a factory, even as the rest of the world surpasses us in labor productivty. In other words, a literal pipe dream. We always have some pipe dream. We just never have an actual sober-minded mission with realistic expectations. Maybe America needs a war on the drug of American exceptionalism. idk. I know war is always the answer, though. :-\ If we weren't drunk on exceptionalism, we would be containing the virus and we would have a Manhattan project-level investment in vaccine research. We don't. Calling a spade a spade literally sounds like trolling these days.
- bitbckt 6y ago
  > Calling a spade a spade literally sounds like trolling these days. Maybe not the best way to phrase that these days.
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    TIL: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/19/224183763/is-it-racist-to-call-a-spade-a-spade https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/19/224183763... Until the 20th century phrase had exclusively the meaning I always thought it had, and that meaning dates back to the 1500s (spade = gardening tool). In the 1920s some people started using "spade" to mean "person with dark-toned skin" (because spades are black in a deck of cards, so spade the gardnening tool => spade the suit in a deck of cards => poc). I've never heard "spade" used like that before, and the article suggests that use of "spade" remains fairly esoteric, but it's apparently in wide enough use that dictionaries have picked up on this meaning. The article doesn't ever establish that the phrase itself is used as a double entendre. In a quick saerch, I can't find any in-the-wild uses of "Call a spade a spade" that evoke the double meaning. TBH I think the article's advice is sound but also extremely jaded ("Rather than taking the chance of unintentionally offending someone or of being misunderstood, it is best to relinquish the old innocuous proverbial expression all together"). I'll stop using the phrase, but doing so feels like assuming the worst of my interlocutors' intelligence and intent.
- random314 6y ago
  > he long-term goal in Iraq/Afghanistan was "peaceful muslim-majority western-values democracies in the middle east". This has never been the goal of the United states
  - wahern 6y ago
    I guess it depends on who (if any person or group in particular) we recognize as setting U.S. policy, but if it's the President then I think you're wrong: https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/11/17/bush-on-nation-building-and-afghanistan/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/11/17/bush-on-nation-building... Here's the full speech quoted early in that article: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/04/20020417-1.html https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/20...
    - random314 6y ago
      There is a whole lot of difference between actions and words. US Presidents typically have a lot of problems with democracies/democratic movements in Iran, Venezuela, Haiti, Egypt etc but very much liked the dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Chile, Brazil, El Salvador. I judge governments and people by their actions and not their words.
- harry8 6y ago
  How sure are you that the goal in Iraq/Afghanistan wasn't purely and simply to get an unpopular president a patriotic polling boost and a seeminly unlikely second term with the bonus of putting money in the pockets of the military-industrial complex and owners of big media while providing a distraction from the endemic corruption of washington? I dunno, I'd like to be a lot more sure of that than I am. Does that really sound like a conspiracy theory now we know that the regime deliberately and knowingly lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction? If you think that possible then perhaps the "long-term goal" wasn't really what the liars were lying at the time? There are those who believer endless war was the precise goal. There hasn't been a lot of anti-corruption impetus in washington since that distraction was launched - save for Trump pretending he was anti-corruption at the last minute before the lasrt election. That last minute inspiration might have won it for him too. Anyway if you have an unclear goal you can just move the goalposts and declare success, which is the kind of the point, right? And why the goals are unclear because otherwise America might lose and you'd be the loser president. Out of interest how do Americans feel about the Vietnam war? Did America lose that war?
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    Neoconservatives genuinely wanted regime change in the middle east, and I think GWB was a genuine neoconservative. Certainly most of the people who voted for GWB and who expressed support for the wars in polls were true believers, in the sense that they weren't doing so in order to enrich chief executives of military contractors. At some point the electorate takes responsibility for the course of the nation, no?
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > How sure are you that the goal in Iraq/Afghanistan wasn't purely and simply to get an unpopular president a patriotic polling boost and a seeminly unlikely second term with the bonus of putting money in the pockets of the military-industrial complex and owners of big media while providing a distraction from the endemic corruption of washington? Pretty sure of all of most of that for both, though not the same parts for Iraq and Afghanistan. The political imperative for Afghanistan after 9/11 is pretty unmistakable. The long-term neocon objective with Iraq also was unmistakable. There's also pretty solid indication that factions I. The Administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to execute the latter but were delayed by the political imperative for the former. > Does that really sound like a conspiracy theory now we know that the regime deliberately and knowingly lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction? Yes, the ascriptions of the motives cited to both Afghanistan and Iraq still sounds like a conspiracy theory. And I’m not sure what you mean by “now that we know”; that the claims were being advanced were false and that the administration had the information which showed them to be false was widely reported in the major media at the time the claims were made. > If you think that possible then perhaps the "long-term goal" wasn't really what the liars were lying at the time? No, but in the case of Iraq, it's what the leading figures of the neocon movement were telling the truth about the desires for right up to the moment the whole gang became the defense and foreign policy apparatus (and hyper-empowered VP) of the Bush 43 administration. > There are those who believer endless war was the precise goal. “There are those who believe” is not an argument that makes your position sound less like a conspiracy theory. > There hasn't been a lot of anti-corruption impetus in washington since that distraction was launched There wasn't a lot in the two decades before that, either. So unless the distraction was as effective backwards in time as forwards, I don't think it was really a significant factor. > Out of interest how do Americans feel about the Vietnam war? Did America lose that war? Most recognize that we lost the war; there are those who cling to loudly propounding the fact that we militarily defeated the VC before the NVA took over the main fighting as if that somehow negates losing the war.

throwawaygh 6y ago

The long-term goal in Iraq/Afghanistan was "peaceful muslim-majority western-values democracies in the middle east". In other words, a literal pipe dream. The long-term goal of the trade war with China is... QoL that costs low six figure salaries plus a pension and union protection for every high school grad in the midwest willing to work in a factory, even as the rest of the world surpasses us in labor productivty. In other words, a literal pipe dream. We always have some pipe dream. We just never have an actual sober-minded mission with realistic expectations. Maybe America needs a war on the drug of American exceptionalism. idk. I know war is always the answer, though. :-\ If we weren't drunk on exceptionalism, we would be containing the virus and we would have a Manhattan project-level investment in vaccine research. We don't. Calling a spade a spade literally sounds like trolling these days.

bitbckt 6y ago
> Calling a spade a spade literally sounds like trolling these days. Maybe not the best way to phrase that these days.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  TIL: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/19/224183763/is-it-racist-to-call-a-spade-a-spade https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/19/224183763... Until the 20th century phrase had exclusively the meaning I always thought it had, and that meaning dates back to the 1500s (spade = gardening tool). In the 1920s some people started using "spade" to mean "person with dark-toned skin" (because spades are black in a deck of cards, so spade the gardnening tool => spade the suit in a deck of cards => poc). I've never heard "spade" used like that before, and the article suggests that use of "spade" remains fairly esoteric, but it's apparently in wide enough use that dictionaries have picked up on this meaning. The article doesn't ever establish that the phrase itself is used as a double entendre. In a quick saerch, I can't find any in-the-wild uses of "Call a spade a spade" that evoke the double meaning. TBH I think the article's advice is sound but also extremely jaded ("Rather than taking the chance of unintentionally offending someone or of being misunderstood, it is best to relinquish the old innocuous proverbial expression all together"). I'll stop using the phrase, but doing so feels like assuming the worst of my interlocutors' intelligence and intent.
random314 6y ago
> he long-term goal in Iraq/Afghanistan was "peaceful muslim-majority western-values democracies in the middle east". This has never been the goal of the United states
- wahern 6y ago
  I guess it depends on who (if any person or group in particular) we recognize as setting U.S. policy, but if it's the President then I think you're wrong: https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/11/17/bush-on-nation-building-and-afghanistan/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/11/17/bush-on-nation-building... Here's the full speech quoted early in that article: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/04/20020417-1.html https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/20...
  - random314 6y ago
    There is a whole lot of difference between actions and words. US Presidents typically have a lot of problems with democracies/democratic movements in Iran, Venezuela, Haiti, Egypt etc but very much liked the dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Chile, Brazil, El Salvador. I judge governments and people by their actions and not their words.
harry8 6y ago
How sure are you that the goal in Iraq/Afghanistan wasn't purely and simply to get an unpopular president a patriotic polling boost and a seeminly unlikely second term with the bonus of putting money in the pockets of the military-industrial complex and owners of big media while providing a distraction from the endemic corruption of washington? I dunno, I'd like to be a lot more sure of that than I am. Does that really sound like a conspiracy theory now we know that the regime deliberately and knowingly lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction? If you think that possible then perhaps the "long-term goal" wasn't really what the liars were lying at the time? There are those who believer endless war was the precise goal. There hasn't been a lot of anti-corruption impetus in washington since that distraction was launched - save for Trump pretending he was anti-corruption at the last minute before the lasrt election. That last minute inspiration might have won it for him too. Anyway if you have an unclear goal you can just move the goalposts and declare success, which is the kind of the point, right? And why the goals are unclear because otherwise America might lose and you'd be the loser president. Out of interest how do Americans feel about the Vietnam war? Did America lose that war?
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  Neoconservatives genuinely wanted regime change in the middle east, and I think GWB was a genuine neoconservative. Certainly most of the people who voted for GWB and who expressed support for the wars in polls were true believers, in the sense that they weren't doing so in order to enrich chief executives of military contractors. At some point the electorate takes responsibility for the course of the nation, no?
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > How sure are you that the goal in Iraq/Afghanistan wasn't purely and simply to get an unpopular president a patriotic polling boost and a seeminly unlikely second term with the bonus of putting money in the pockets of the military-industrial complex and owners of big media while providing a distraction from the endemic corruption of washington? Pretty sure of all of most of that for both, though not the same parts for Iraq and Afghanistan. The political imperative for Afghanistan after 9/11 is pretty unmistakable. The long-term neocon objective with Iraq also was unmistakable. There's also pretty solid indication that factions I. The Administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to execute the latter but were delayed by the political imperative for the former. > Does that really sound like a conspiracy theory now we know that the regime deliberately and knowingly lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction? Yes, the ascriptions of the motives cited to both Afghanistan and Iraq still sounds like a conspiracy theory. And I’m not sure what you mean by “now that we know”; that the claims were being advanced were false and that the administration had the information which showed them to be false was widely reported in the major media at the time the claims were made. > If you think that possible then perhaps the "long-term goal" wasn't really what the liars were lying at the time? No, but in the case of Iraq, it's what the leading figures of the neocon movement were telling the truth about the desires for right up to the moment the whole gang became the defense and foreign policy apparatus (and hyper-empowered VP) of the Bush 43 administration. > There are those who believer endless war was the precise goal. “There are those who believe” is not an argument that makes your position sound less like a conspiracy theory. > There hasn't been a lot of anti-corruption impetus in washington since that distraction was launched There wasn't a lot in the two decades before that, either. So unless the distraction was as effective backwards in time as forwards, I don't think it was really a significant factor. > Out of interest how do Americans feel about the Vietnam war? Did America lose that war? Most recognize that we lost the war; there are those who cling to loudly propounding the fact that we militarily defeated the VC before the NVA took over the main fighting as if that somehow negates losing the war.