> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.