Yeah, but 9/11 isn’t a tragedy that simply befell the United States. Consistent effort had been put towards trying to “get” bin Ladin throughout the Clinton administration (e.g., Operation Infinite Reach), and when Bush came into power, Condi Rice, his NSC advisor, dismantled much of the infrastructure/operations that had been put in place to combat and thwart Al Qaida (who’d attacked the US Embassy in Kenya and the USS Cole in Yemen during the late 90s). In other words, as is well known, 9/11 was likely preventable, but the Bush administration didn’t take the threat seriously. (We all know it overlooked that famous intelligence report that said an attack was imminent.) There are many reasons why, but it can be partially attributed to the typical arrogance of incoming administrations, who often do the opposite of whatever the previous administration did. Another factor is that Condi Rice was a Russia expert, for that reason and was disinclined to see non-state actors as serious security threats. There are other factors as well.

So yeah, Bush got “hit” with some graver challenges than Clinton, but Clinton had had Al-Qaida as an issue too, and addressed it far more responsibly than Bush. It’s true that Clinton got to bask in the glow of post-Cold War American triumphalism, and that it gave Clinton a material boost in foreign policy (e.g., many people don’t appreciate how it was a primary motivating factor in securing the Oslo Accords). But Bush would have benefited from it too, had Bush not spoiled the good will the US received from the international community and engaged in the Iraq War, which almost singlehandedly destroyed the international perception of American hegemony and global leadership. (It should be noted too that the Iraq War was itself a product of that triumphalism, seeing as the optimism about regime change in Iraq was a consequence of the rapid and successful democratization of many post-Soviet states.)

I agree, however, that the full significance of the bipartisan support for the war is often downplayed by Democratic partisans. It’s not merely that Democrats voted for the war because our politics at the time was less polarized, and Democrats were passively willing to assent to a Republican president’s leadership, out of collegiality, or something like that. There was also a firmly felt bipartisan conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad guy who needed to be dealt with, which was largely responsible for Democratic support for the war.



Definitely. The post-Obama whiplash has been “cray.”

I liked the part where Goff wrote how on his home planet, fathers send their sons to military boarding school to teach them toxic masculinity. On our planet it's mostly because they start barbecuing cats.

Yesterday I watched a TED talk by some game theorist that seems pertinent to the discussion that wasn't about the feminist writer. I'm interested in whether the idea has any utility to you guys.

Now, I understand these TEDs just scrape the surface of any topic so I don't pretend to have learned much. First the guy laid out the concept of game theory. That was helpful because I hadn't really looked into it. I mean, his rudimentary explanation made me google more to truly establish what was meant by game theory.

I realize I'm taking my time getting to the point, and that almost all of what I just wrote is redundant. And so is this part. I'm going to keep it all in, anyway, maybe because I have OCD. But that's just my lousy justification for putting you through all of that if you're reading this message.

Anyway. He said there are two types of games: finite and infinite. A finite game is one where there is a more concrete objective, and where the first player to reach that objective is the winner of the game. Like chess, for instance: the game ends when one player captures the king, and that player wins.

In an infinite game, there is no winner as such. There are only players who drop out of the game, leaving the rest to continue playing. The "objective" is to perpetuate the game, to keep playing. This is where the TED talker introduced the idea that the Cold War between the US and Soviet Union was an infinite game. He then pointed out that the US didn't "win", although Americans acted as though they did (which he suggests was a big mistake). It was not a finite game but an infinite one, so instead of America winning, it was the Soviet Union who dropped out of the game.

And then, he suggests, the game never ended. In fact, new players emerged. The Cold War tension was maintained via three main components:

1. The ideology of capitalism vs. the ideology of communism, the latter of which was replaced by radical Islam.

2. Nuclear weapons, or the status quo of mutually assured destruction. The Soviet side of this was replaced by smaller states hostile to America that have nuclear arsenal, namely North Korea and possibly Iran.

3. The economic belligerence between the two superpowers. The USSR's role in this has been replaced by China.

According to this guy, the problem for the US is that they're trying to fight this infinite game on finite terms. When America invades a country in the Middle East, for example, they do so in order to protect finite interests. Get rid of terrorists, for example. Let's do that and we win the game, they presuppose (for the sake of at least a modicum of brevity, let's not get into more nefarious motives behind the US invading a country). But this doesn't work, and yet America continues to make the mistake.

Conversely, America's adversaries have the clear objective of eliminating America from the game. Achieving that is not in the foreseeable future due to the current balance of power, but it enables the US's adversaries to come together with said objective. For example, it enables the spread of radicalism against that which America perceivably stands for.

Ultimately, the game theorist proposed that instead of trying to play a finite game (by simply trying to secure its interests abroad) America should predicate its actions on ethical values that are idealistically thought of as core American ones. Liberty, humaneness, justice, that sort of thing. Values, he says, are perfectly suited for this infinite game, because values are an infinite resource. Guantanamo Bay or the Iraq War, for instance, are symptomatic of trying to play the finite game. Had US foreign policy been filtered through the mentioned idealistic values, such mistakes could have been avoided.

Or maybe game theory is irrelevant and the above is all just a superfluous way of saying that America shouldn't be so interventionist because it hurts America more than it does its adversaries.

“Finite game” sounds a lot like “milestone” to me

I personally can't justify a distinction in this context. I'm putting forth the ideas of the talk, or at least how I understood them, here because I can't figure out whether that application of game theory has any value. The last sentence of my post spells out my suspicion.

I mean, yeah, Bush did drop the ball on Bin Laden, but the proportional impact was way higher than could have been expected, and way worse than most presidents have had to deal with for similar decisions. I mean, realistically, if another 93 WTC Bombing had happened, it'd have been, "Oh that sucks, I guess we were wrong about that." To a pre-9/11 world, that scale of attack is pretty far fetched. It sounds more like a Tom Clancy novel than reality. I think it does go along way to explaining why Bush went so overboard with invading Iraq and everything else. He spent his whole tenure paranoid and terrified that it'd happen again, and was trying to compensate for a mistake he made at the very beginning of his administration.





I think it'll be at least another generation before we could possibly see American boots on the ground in the middle east, but probably much longer. Everyone is extremely disillusioned by Afghanistan and Iraq. The last Republican debates involved all the candidates trying to one up each other on how much Bush's foreign policy sucked. Everyone keeps talking about Trump wanting to invade Iran. It just won't happen. Trump panders to his base, and even though his base hates Iran, they don't want boots on the ground. Plus all of his advisers have probably told him that a ground war would be bloody, and the last thing he wants is to be compared to Bush.

I definitely agree that the Bush admin has adopted the mentality that dramatic actions are worth taking even if only to prevent things with a small possibility of occurring, because 9/11 demonstrated the potential scale of damage was so great. The concern that next time the attack will be even larger was also a factor in making Iraq a target, as the admin feared use of WMDs were an obvious way to increase the scale of the attack. These days we forget, but the fear wasn’t only that Saddam would use WMDs against the US. It was also that, since totalitarian regimes are generally brittle, his regime might fall, and the weapons would fall into the wrong hands in the instability that would follow. It’s not always clear to me that the counter factual world where the Iraq War doesn’t happen is a better, safer world. It probably is, but it’s not a no-brainer.

It does seem a little incoherent too me. I’m not sure why “get the US to leave the region” is fundamentally different in kind as an objective from “stop terrorism” or “dismantle Al Qaida and other terrorist groups that pose a threat to the US homeland.” Like, maybe the former seems somehow like a more attainable goal than the latter because the terrorist groups have more skin in the game. But both sides have to connect their proximate, short-term goals with long-term, big picture objectives. The general theory is kind of neat, though, in how it describes the continuities between the Cold War and the War on Terrorism.

Based on what kroko described I think the “infinite game” is basically along the lines of achieving or sustaining global hegemony, and the argument is basically that the US is in that game and playing it poorly, rather than some other game and playing it well.

I mean I get the idea of the difference is one game has a clearly defined “victory condition” and the other doesn’t, except for being the last participant to withdraw. But I think you could define the US’ objectives as either type of game, and the same applies to the “terrorists” (for lack of a better nomenclature). Like, don’t the “the terrorists” also win by being the last man standing, just as the US “won” the infinite game of the Cold War, by being the last man standing? Alternatively, if the US eliminated the terrorists, it wouldn’t be playing an infinite game on finite terms. It would just be winning an infinite game, wouldn’t it? It seems like the distinction doesn’t hold very well.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=0bFs6ZiynSU

It's possible that I even got the main thrust of the talk wrong. I don't know if anyone cares about the video, but there it is in case someone wants to see if he's making more sense than I am in trying to explain it. Also, it's actually almost ten minutes so I remembered it was shorter than it is.

Basically what I’m getting at here is that I don’t think Americans are honesty defining the goals of US foreign policy. Or, more generally, there seems to be an assumption that global hegemony is really something countries want for the sake of it, rather than being stuck with global hegemony because it was accidentally achieved in pursuit of other goals.

Like, did the US really ever want to rule the world, or did it just want to sell **** to other countries? Because pretty much everything the US accomplished worldwide is consistent with selling ****, not with domination for the sake of domination. Now that the world is sufficiently liberal and tolerant of American ownership, and the US no longer has to actively fight for things like... being able to exchange currencies, having safe water ways, having to maintain its hegemony smells an awful lot like subsidizing the rest of the worlds’ corporations. But if the US stops doing it, they don’t “rule the world” anymore.

Mark “shockingly not a socialist” Blyth posits that the purpose of a nation is to service the rich, so if you accept that I’m not sure the US is actually playing the game at all. Maybe the Soviet Union and the terrorists are playing the “get America to quit the infinite game” game, but it’s probably ok to take at face value that the US was trying to contain the Soviet Union (where Americans weren’t allowed to invest) and slaughter Arab terrorists (who murdered a bunch of bankers).

Heh.

I mean that’s effectively the same as when Chomsky defines the de facto “national interests” of the US as whatever the interests of the financial class is. (Not that that makes Blyth any more or less socialist.)

Anyway, that seems right to me, especially regarding how the US and so-called “revisionist powers” are playing different games. I don’t think you can entirely discount the ideological dimension, though. I do think that a lesson of both World Wars was that the US and the world are both better served by a more militarily assertive and non-isolationist US, and not merely because it means more markets for US businesses, but because world war is just really bad (and I think it’s also worth taking seriously the ostensive motivation that authoritarianism is really bad).

Good, it was bad. Goff seemed the most reasonable guy there though.

I lied actually, it wasn't when the national guard dude referenced on killing and on combat, it was when he said that when people in the military say getting smoked they mean when you exercise so hard that your head is literally smoking.[/b] wtf?

ahah yeah. I was waiting for a punch-line there but then wtf is right

"literally"

If I can go full evopsych on the author: the reason humans are capable of war is none other than evolution makes it a good behavioral trait to pass on:



There ain't no weird recursive causal loop. It's that killing your competition when there isn't enough to go around will make you more likely to survive, so that kind of behavior is selected for. War is just an extension of this instinct into society.

What I found amusing was how Freudian Goff was. I had to link that Dr. Strangelove opening (with the highly suggestive airborne 'refueling') when he likened nipples and vaginas to the "permeable membranes" of social power structures that men are afraid to penetrate because they enjoy the benefits of patriarchy, which (he claims) also explains their "disgust reaction" to female sexuality.

That said, I'm undecided if I should be more disgusted by Freudian or EvoPsych reductionism.

(Btw, from what I've read, the whole Strangelove movie is pretty Freudian in its themes. The ending was supposed to be a giant cream pie fight, but the actors couldn't stop laughing and they had to cut it.)

I think that's Kubrick's whole body of work is some sort of high evopsych art.

I mean Strangelove is entirely a takedown of the sexual hangups and obsessions of men in power

Just accept both reductionisms, and write about the interplay between them. Then it's a complexity.



Lots of Kubrick films are about male impotence.. in fact nearly all. Except 2001.

Lol so I just did a random search of evopsych and /r/evopsych turned up. This stuff is pretty ripe for satire, e.g.,

https://www.reddit.com/r/evopsych/comments/bqnx2h/why_do_women_prefer_muscular_men/

I for one prefer men with muscles because they're capable of being food.[/FONT][/COLOR]

"What's it mean to be GI Joe?"

"America's number one fighting force, sir!"

"And that means?

"Big muscles, sir!"

"And?"

"Big missiles, sir!"

World war is really bad, but at the same time I’m not willing to accept as axioms that the US 1.) is guaranteed to always be better than world war when uncontested, and 2.) actually has a motive to avoid world war when not.

So while we might debate exactly whose interests are paramount to the United States government, we can probably agree that my interests, as a random non-American dude living in not-America, aren’t (and, to be fair, shouldn’t be). Currently the US seems fine with projecting their cultural and economic hegemony (“ideology”) via using their military hegemony to subsidize other countries’ economies, and that’s just... well, peachy. But even if you’re convinced the United States will never change their mind about the value of doing that, it’s not remotely given that the United States can afford to do it forever.

Dainty little no muscle only pick three berry. Big man many muscle pick much berry. Big man good.

i eath three gramsof protein per pound of bodyweight a day

When the next world war happens we'll look back fondly on the era where you could hide safely in a trench and your biggest problems were trenchfoot and artillery.

Probably not. Probably look back on when your biggest problems were Cinnabon, Burger King, or Pizza Hut.

Storyboards. Pizza Hut made me happy.

This is what I've been thinking, but then I'm not entirely sure. There seems to be a lot of will in the Trump administration to invade Iran, from people like John Bolton. Then again, Trump himself, and I'd imagine many others in the administration, appears to be against it. I do see it as highly potential political suicide, anyway.




I just want to acknowledge that these are good points. I didn't have any input on them so I didn't comment earlier, but I don't want it to appear as though I'd dismissed these posts (since I was the one who brought up the theory which was presented by that guy in the video I talked about).

but how does one choose if you have no preference

I'll look back fondly on free samples from Costco and Trader Joe's.

For some people having no preference is a drug.

Quick question: what will the GOP's explanation to self-employed Americans having a "pre-existing health condition" be if / when the GOP eliminates the ACA ahead of the next big spike in unemployment (i.e., when the coming recession rolls around)? You're going to have some unhappy people if their only way to avoid being denied eligibility for private health insurance is to get a now non-existent job through a traditional employer-employee relationship.

Maybe if they are super rich they can self-incorporate and buy themselves a group policy with exactly one member??

Conservatives don’t really believe in anything, they’re pro-hierarchy sadists. So really they won’t have to say anything, it will be implicitly understood that “it hurts black people more than it hurts you” and conservatives will be on board.