291–298 of 298 posts
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Yes! A military coup in China would not be democratic. How complicated is this to understand? A military coup implies government by a military junta.
Even when the military runs an election soon after taking power?
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The tactics used by ISIS are quite barbaric. But so are the tactics used by the US. The two are not equivalent, but I'd hope that the side with millionfold more resources would hold itself to a slightly higher standard. What criteria would you impose upon a grassroots political movement in the middle east? Is it allowed to use force? Should it invest in smart bombs before proceeding to get involved in conflict? There…
ISIS isn't much of a grassroots political movement http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3190314/The-secret-I...
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> This jumping Not sure where you perceive this jump as having occurred. My point is just that force is a part of any government, arguably a necessary part, which is why fledgling governments often focus on it.
All that sophomoric doubletalk about 'lethal force' thrown in there for effect I guess
- supply police and military with weapons and authorize killing during conflict (defensive or offensive)
- perform executions of those sentenced to death
- punish those who try to use lethal force without permission (murderers)
- to wield and threaten the use of force in order to achieve some objective (domestically or internationally). The presidential motorcade is essentially a parade of tanks that happen to look like limousines.
Hence, transitioning from a state of relative anarchy to a state of governance requires the institutionalization of lethal force.
There is a great deal of variability in the ways force is used, some of which we view as just and others as unjust. The details of this are not relevant to my broader point, which is simply that force and governance are deeply intertwined.
If you are a high class member of society, the force generally all works on your behalf. If you are a low class member, it may often work against you. The edge cases (a cop shooting someone at a traffic stop) tend to effect lower class members disproportionally.
It's idealistic to believe that in a majoritarian democracy, even the democratically chosen reasonable uses of force are fair to everyone they impact.
I'm not sure which specific points you disagree with, so it is difficult to address them, but if you still disagree I'm willing to try.
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That is beside the point. The point is why do we need to be involved in fighting ISIS? The US botched a Trillion dollar nation building project in Iraq and created the beginnings of ISIS, and now thanks to ISIS videos and our own government's promoting them we get tons of propaganda telling us to fear them. All governments start out looking like mafias and slowly gain legitimacy as they become powerful enough to star…
Well, each to their own. Personally I don't like rape slavery and genocide and am just fine with killing the fuckers.
We don't consider our leaders and luminaries rapists and slavemasters, or our past military conflicts genocides, precisely because we killed all the people who viewed them that way.
We have the luxury of moralistically judging ISIS because it is not our homeland that we are fighting to preserve. We get to participate in a rather silly exercise in smugness in which we pretend our nation lives by a consistent and principled moral code.
This is not an argument for relativism. My point is that our view of ISIS is through the lens of quite a bit of propaganda, which is very hard to filter out. Many of the regimes of our allies do equally horrible things. I'm not arguing that we should love ISIS, just that we should be consistent in our approach and not let our leaders propagandize us.
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All that sophomoric doubletalk about 'lethal force' thrown in there for effect I guess
I don't see how it's sophomoric or "double talk". Control/institutionalization of lethal force is something governments do in the following ways: - supply police and military with weapons and authorize killing during conflict (defensive or offensive) - perform executions of those sentenced to death - punish those who try to use lethal force without permission (murderers) - to wield and threaten the use of force in or…
To blow 'use of lethal force' into the be-all and end-all of the purpose of government is over the top rhetoric.
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I don't see how it's sophomoric or "double talk". Control/institutionalization of lethal force is something governments do in the following ways: - supply police and military with weapons and authorize killing during conflict (defensive or offensive) - perform executions of those sentenced to death - punish those who try to use lethal force without permission (murderers) - to wield and threaten the use of force in or…
No 'hence' about it. Those are just a tiny listing of what government does. Tribesmen in the jungle govern themselves without doing any of those things. Some current nations, for whatever reason, don't do those things. Yet they are certainly governed. To blow 'use of lethal force' into the be-all and end-all of the purpose of government is over the top rhetoric.
If your counterexample is what tribesmen in the jungle allegedly do, I think that's evidence that I've hit upon a fairly universal quality :)
I'm not sure how you perceive my use of the point as a rhetorical ploy. I introduced the idea into the discussion to emphasize a key similarity between ISIS and other governments... Except in anarchy (or perhaps in jungle tribes) someone will control lethal force. In a majoritarian democracy the majority does, sometimes tyrannically.
In a fledgling grassroots Islamist movement, the same requirement exists, but it's handled differently... so differently that my analogy seems inappropriate to some.
Political groups are aggregators of power. Those who want power gravitate toward them. I de-emphasize whether the sort of power desired is financial, coercive (force oriented), sexual, or ideological... all scratch the same primitive itch.
So it follows that ISIS will seek all of these kinds of power in order to become a respected and dominant institution in the region.
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> I do not see how his support of ISIS is necessarily harmful. // How about because they are unlawfully killing, raping, torturing, people and using violence to impose their form of Islamic Caliphate on unwilling people - doesn't that make it harmful in your opinion?
> using violence to impose their... Isn't the US using violence (bombs, drones, etc.) to impose its version of things on the region too? I'm not sure how the two are different, other than that the US has a LOT more resources and can spend money on things like "smart bombs" that help convince Americans that we are carefully avoiding civilian casualties -- when in fact the goal is to scare the civilians shitless so the…
So that makes it right for ISIS? It's such a feeble argument which IMO when unwrapped is pretty disingenuous wrt to this situation too.