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Tree Bucket posted:Yeah, what on earth is going on? Have things always been this mad, or are we just more aware of it? I keep getting the very distinct and very unpleasant sensation that we are living through History. There's a dreadful resonance in all those old stories of civilisations bickering about last century's fight while next century's disaster creeps up on them. (I need to stop reading the news for a while.) Things have been unbelievably worse than they are now many times in history, this is just a relatively minor uptick from the most peaceful time in human history. Obviously none of that is worth a poo poo if nuclear powers ever get drawn into conflict and poo poo gets real again, but while there are a lot of awful things happening in the world (and a combination of instantaneous communication and availability bias makes it seem like everything's going to poo poo), this is still a great time to be alive by historical standards, at least until global warming and overpopulation make this uptick look more like a hockey stick.
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Nov 21, 2017 23:44
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Well relations between NATO and Russian are improving. https://twitter.com/Brasco_Aad/status/933066453686857728
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Nov 22, 2017 00:03
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What we're witnessing is a return to normalcy and a collapse of a clearly unstable world order dominated by the United States. I actually agree with the position that the world must become multi polar to prevent atrocities such as the Iraq Invasion from occurring again but I'm highly skeptical that the way it's been undertaken is actually going to result in a more stable world order, especially once climate change kicks into full gear. Whatever settlement concludes the Syrian conflict will grant insight but ~~something~~ tells me that this is the first stage of a broader conflict.
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Nov 22, 2017 01:14
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Tree Bucket posted:Yeah, what on earth is going on? Have things always been this mad, or are we just more aware of it? I keep getting the very distinct and very unpleasant sensation that we are living through History. There's a dreadful resonance in all those old stories of civilisations bickering about last century's fight while next century's disaster creeps up on them. (I need to stop reading the news for a while.) Things are always (usually) mad. 16 years ago was 9/11, a world-changing event. 10 years before that the Soviet Union was falling apart and newly independent countries coming into being. You can always move further back. We're always at the center of our own histories. But when I said WW2 earlier, it wasn't for emphasis, it was me trying to be specific. To a large extent we still live in a post WW2 world. The geopolitical situation is a direct result of the war. The global order is basically the one the US and the allies built, with institutions like the world bank, WTO, NATO and many more. These institutions have been maintained mostly by US diplomatic, economic, and military power (by getting countries on-side, by providing loans, by keeping seas open for shipping and blowing poo poo up). "The West" as it exists today, operates under this system, and to a large extent the rest of the world does too. Communism was all that really opposed it, and that collapsed after the 80s. After the USSR fell, some people thought this order would basically prevail forever, since it was so clearly superior. Nobody thinks that anymore. The US is relatively less powerful than it was in past decades. It is both less able and especially under Trump less willing to enforce this global order. Other countries' relative power increases. All sorts of other changes contribute to this: shifts in demographics, and the rapid advance of technology being very big ones. To me, the whole notion of the nation state isn't all that solid, based as it was on shared linguistic/ethnic heritage, in our world of people moving and everywhere. The internet lets people very neatly bypass existing power structures-- much as Luther's texts spread thanks to the printing press, the internet allows dangerous (to some) ideas to propagate rapidly, and ideas can be world changing. Even when it seem like the sky is falling, these things usually move a lot more slowly than you'd think. Short of a large war, this global order I describe won't fall apart anytime soon. But its steadily unraveling before our eyes.
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Nov 22, 2017 01:20
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Tree Bucket posted:Yeah, what on earth is going on? Have things always been this mad, or are we just more aware of it? I keep getting the very distinct and very unpleasant sensation that we are living through History. There's a dreadful resonance in all those old stories of civilisations bickering about last century's fight while next century's disaster creeps up on them. (I need to stop reading the news for a while.) It was ever thus. The 90s were a weird time of false stability where the west seemed ascendant and untouchable and all the chaos was happening "over there" and a lot of milennials are nostalgic for that feeling (despite it being the era of "ethnic cleansing," "oligarchs," "narcoterror," and "suicide bombers"). I think people were just glad that the threat of nuclear annihilation wasn't hanging over them anymore (unless you lived in India or Pakistan). In the Middle East, there was a veneer of progress -- the "success" of the Oslo accords, victory in the Gulf War and the isolation of Saddam's "rogue state" through sanctions and air strikes, and the deescalation of Lebanon's ruinous civil war -- that I think helped conceal the ongoing crisis in the MENA region. It's easy to forget about the civil war and attempted genocide in Iraq, the Taliban's reign of terror in Afghanistan, the intifada and the settlement building and rise of Hamas that undermined Oslo as soon as it was signed. Hezballah was gaining power, the PKK never went away, Al Qaeda was fanning the flames of jihad, and all over the region, corrupt dictators and venal theocrats were brutalizing their own people in the name of "stability" and laying the groundwork for the revolutions, coups, and civil wars to come. The lesson is, it's easy to ignore how bad things are when people are telling you it's getting better. It's when things get worse that all the problems come into focus and you realize they were there all along. History runs in cycles of optimism and pessimism. Hope and fear. After WW2, there was a period where things seemed to be getting better (how could they not?). The United Nations was born, Europe and Japan were getting rebuilt even as their empires were freeing themselves, the new zeitgeist was all about "human rights," "self-determination," and "cooperation." Then the USSR and China got nukes and the world was split into thirds, people learned what "partition" really meant, and "liberation" became the trojan horse for coups and proxy wars. After the Vietnam war ended and Nixon went to China, there was another era where things seemed to be getting better, but the hopefullness that elected Jimmy Carter couldn't survive the OPEC embargo, the Iranian revolution, and Soviets in Afghanistan. It's not wrong to hope. The optimism of the Arab Spring and the "pre-9/11era" didn't cause the disasters that followed. Cynicism and despair won't shield you from life's miseries. They'll only rob you of life's joys. However, optimism, like pessimism, has to be put into perspective. Things are always getting better and they're always getting worse. The big swings of history from good times to bad ones, golden years and dark ages, are illusions created by an incomplete understanding of historical forces. It's hard to be Zen about this stuff and I'm no model of contemplative detatchment or positive thinking, but try to remember that the future is unknowable and our hopes and dreads say more about where we are than where we're going.
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Nov 22, 2017 02:10
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Count Roland posted:Things are always (usually) mad. It's fair to be wary of making the USA the center of everything, but it's also objectively true that since the Iranian Revolution, almost everything the US has touched in the Middle East and every initiative it has launched has been a catastrophic failure. The US either started wars in Iraq and Syria or made them much worse by providing arms and money to the combatants, inflamed domestic politics in other Arab countries by schizophrenically supporting Arab Spring uprisings at the same time as Gulf autocracies, and providing aid and defense to the Israeli apartheid regime at every step For the US to then look at the disaster that results and simply say "Well, that's the power of ideas and the Information Age! What can you do?" like Tom Friedman and deny any responsibility is loving hilarious
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Nov 22, 2017 03:37
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I can see why Americans themselves may be more pessimistic for a while, it is going to be pretty much impossible for the US to reclaim the power and influence it had from 1991-2008 if anything that era might have been the closest thing the US has had to a golden age geopolitically speaking. I think Trump silently played off this development (although it is obviously accelerating it at the same time). Also, periods of "hope" were often very different for the US/West and the USSR/Russia/China respectively. For US, the 1980s/1990s were a period of prosperity, and growing influence...that generally came at the cost of the Russians. For China, since the 1980s to now, things have generally been looking up and if anything by all accounts there is a new confidence in China. Power itself is generally a zero-sum game, it is just we (the US) got used to holding all the cards. The preferable result if anything is eventually equilibrium, but that is going to require the West, in general, to realize it is in a different situation than it once was and that will require a generational change in leadership. It is hard to generalize, but there does seem to be a massive leadership gap in the West at the moment and the fact that Merkel (literally entitled the "leader of the free world" just a few months ago) can't even form a government should give us some pause. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 03:44 on Nov 22, 2017 |
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Nov 22, 2017 03:42
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https://twitter.com/joyce_karam/status/932983929438687234
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Nov 22, 2017 04:01
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Big parade in Lebanon tomorrow, with Hariri attending. Watch it get bombed.
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Nov 22, 2017 04:20
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Count Roland posted:After the USSR fell, some people thought this order would basically prevail forever, since it was so clearly superior. Nobody thinks that anymore. That anyone ever took Francis Fukuyama seriously at any point is mind boggling to me. Count Roland posted:Big parade in Lebanon tomorrow, with Hariri attending. Watch it get bombed. The reason Hariri was a ghost in his interview was that he was told he was going to return and die in a false flag  guidoanselmi fucked around with this message at 06:13 on Nov 22, 2017 |
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Nov 22, 2017 06:10
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guidoanselmi posted:That anyone ever took Francis Fukuyama seriously at any point is mind boggling to me. There's always a market for the story powerful people want to hear. That's why there's a whole cottage industry of think tank minions who specialize in finding a nice juice trend line and projecting it toward the sky. E. It's also why, every few years, someone wins an Oscar for making a magical movie about the magic of movie making. Duckbox fucked around with this message at 10:28 on Nov 22, 2017 |
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Nov 22, 2017 10:22
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guidoanselmi posted:That anyone ever took Francis Fukuyama seriously at any point is mind boggling to me. It is pretty intoxicating to hear "we won guys." As far as DC goes, there are plenty of people there (maybe most of them?) that literally believe the 1990s continued on forever. They will literally shrug off reality at a whim. Living in DC for several years forced me to realize that yes...the system is completely and utterly hosed under these people.
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Nov 22, 2017 10:31
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Hariri is back at home, and announced that he 'suspends' his resignation. http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient...18315_3218.html She cannot drive yet, so that was the next best thing.
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Nov 22, 2017 15:03
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did no-one warn her of the dangers of radical islam? she nearly hit that car!
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Nov 22, 2017 18:41
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https://twitter.com/MicahZenko/status/932600210634739712
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Nov 22, 2017 19:05
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Cat Mattress posted:Hariri is back at home, and announced that he 'suspends' his resignation. So is there a betting pool on whether or not MBS orders accidents to happen to Hariri’s two children who are captive in Saudi Arabia, or will he just take all of the Saudi-based money of Hariri and his companies?
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Nov 22, 2017 19:09
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https://twitter.com/rulajebreal/status/933399724446666759 Once again, arab fascists lose every strategic challenge place it, and once again it is their people who will pay the highest price, Al-Saqr fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Nov 22, 2017 |
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Nov 22, 2017 19:31
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What could congress do about it, anyway? Isn't their only real tool in these kind of situations the power of the purse? No matter how much they'd theoretically oppose an increased US presence in the region, I don't see any scenario where they'd stop sending food and bullets and paychecks
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Nov 22, 2017 19:47
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Bohemian Nights posted:What could congress do about it, anyway? My concern is that it lends some weight to the flailing about the US attacking Iran, or sticking its dick somewhere else. Talk is cheap, especially coming from Trump, but troop movements are not.
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Nov 22, 2017 20:01
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Interesting: https://twitter.com/sayed_ridha/status/933345143574298630 quote:Syrian Interior Ministry bans religious rituals (prob. aimed at Ashura) in public spaces and roads, punishable with up to 2 years in prison Probable reasoning: https://www.reddit.com/r/syriancivilwar/comments/7erg1w/syrian_interior_ministry_bans_religious_rituals/ reddit posted:Probably security reasons. These rites attract suicide bombers in the crazy world we live in now.
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Nov 22, 2017 20:11
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Saladin Rising posted:Interesting: Or wanting to discourage sectarian celebrations.
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Nov 22, 2017 20:25
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I dont get why the syrian government would have objections to their own policies of bombing public spaces, bread lines and religious sites all the time.
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Nov 22, 2017 20:26
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Al-Saqr posted:Once again, arab fascists lose every strategic challenge place it, and once again it is their Sudanese, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi mercenaries who will pay the highest price, ftfy. TBH I wonder if articles like the FP one make it up to MBS and just egg him on more. Saladin Rising posted:Probable reasoning: but martyrdom is a blessing 
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Nov 22, 2017 20:34
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Brother Friendship posted:What we're witnessing is a return to normalcy and a collapse of a clearly unstable world order dominated by the United States. I actually agree with the position that the world must become multi polar to prevent atrocities such as the Iraq Invasion from occurring again but I'm highly skeptical that the way it's been undertaken is actually going to result in a more stable world order, especially once climate change kicks into full gear. Whatever settlement concludes the Syrian conflict will grant insight but ~~something~~ tells me that this is the first stage of a broader conflict. A multi-polar world doesn't mean something like Iraq won't occur again, it just means a higher price might be paid for conducting it. The number of wars and atrocities committed by the US, USSR, and China during the Cold War are evidence enough of that.
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Nov 22, 2017 21:06
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Sorry for drive by post, but can someone recommend me a good book about Syria's occupation of Lebanon? Also possibly just the civil war in general?
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Nov 22, 2017 22:08
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Vernii posted:A multi-polar world doesn't mean something like Iraq won't occur again, it just means a higher price might be paid for conducting it. The number of wars and atrocities committed by the US, USSR, and China during the Cold War are evidence enough of that. We already know what war in a multipolar world looks like. It looks like Syria. The US made the political decision to stop playing world police for a while, so all the regional powers waded in and cocked things up.
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Nov 22, 2017 23:04
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Saladin Rising posted:Interesting: Not surprising. Traditionally, the Syrian regime went to great lengths to stifle any sectarian divisions. Their textbooks for example made no mention of Sunnis or Shias but rather "Muslims" and the Assad's themselves suppressed the more "eccentric" aspects of the Alawite sect.
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Nov 22, 2017 23:10
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Duckbox posted:We already know what war in a multipolar world looks like. It looks like Syria. The US made the political decision to stop playing world police for a while, so all the regional powers waded in and cocked things up. The US provided TOWs and actively participated in loving things up though?
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Nov 22, 2017 23:11
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Is Ashura Twelver-only or do the 7ers, Alawites, Alevis, and Houthis celebrate as well?
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Nov 22, 2017 23:13
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The Alawites don't celebrate anything, remember they aren't actually Shi'ites at all except for political expediency, the other sects don't even consider them to be Muslims.
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Nov 22, 2017 23:20
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OctaMurk posted:The US provided TOWs and actively participated in loving things up though? Oh for sure. What I mean is the US never set out to dominate Syria like Iraq and Afghanistan and that left the the door open for everyone with guns to sell to get involved. The actual coalition didn't emerge until after ISIS exploded. By then, it was already a free for all.
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Nov 22, 2017 23:27
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Nevermind, I don't even know what point I'm trying to make anymore.
Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Nov 23, 2017 |
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Nov 23, 2017 01:54
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OctaMurk posted:The US provided TOWs and actively participated in loving things up though? Hell of a step down from outright invading and poo poo.
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Nov 23, 2017 02:23
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Duckbox posted:Oh for sure. What I mean is the US never set out to dominate Syria like Iraq and Afghanistan and that left the the door open for everyone with guns to sell to get involved. The actual coalition didn't emerge until after ISIS exploded. By then, it was already a free for all. Lol what? The US foreign policy establishment was full-tilt for regime change, which would have resulted in a Sunni government dominated by the US and its allies. It was only Obama choosing not to pull the final trigger that stopped that course of action, and even then we funneled lots of money and arms to the rebels. I suppose you can argue as to how much worse the US indirect support for the rebels made things, but it's simply counterfactual to say that the US was not involved in a meaningful way or did not seek to "dominate" the country
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Nov 23, 2017 02:24
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fishmech posted:Hell of a step down from outright invading and poo poo. Yes we were only complicit in making a major clusterfuck this time, instead of total shitshow.
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Nov 23, 2017 02:26
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Vernii posted:A multi-polar world doesn't mean something like Iraq won't occur again, it just means a higher price might be paid for conducting it. The number of wars and atrocities committed by the US, USSR, and China during the Cold War are evidence enough of that. Atrocities if you do, atrocities if you don't, it's unrealistic for one nation to dominate the globe in the nuclear age and the cost of our empire is crushing the United States domestically. Just look at how strangling Iran has turned out over the past four decades. We've spent trillions on bases, invasions and sanctions and yet now Iran is the ascendant power in the Middle East. What was the point? What did it accomplish? We can't just retreat from the region as shown by Obama's withdrawal from Iraq that was followed by an immediate retrenchment and neither can we dictate the course of the region through force of arms. The best we can do is to use our influence to unwind our position in the Middle East in a way that might produce peace and stability going forward. In Syria that means using our position east of the Euphrates to pressure a negotiated settlement that prevents that region from falling under the grip of the secret police and having a large degree of autonomy from the central government without triggering Erdogan's bloodlust. In Iraq it means using our influence to prevent it from becoming an Iranian vassal state. It means pushing Iran, Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia to accept a political framework that doesn't conclude with them annihilating their opposition. Ideally it means using soft power to encourage governmental reforms and pushing for the expansion of human rights and liberties in the region. I understand how unlikely it is for that to happen and how naive it is to even think that it's possible. It's just my guess on what to do in the region that doesn't involve staying there forever because the most that can accomplish is freezing the framework of the region at an incalculable cost to my country.
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Nov 23, 2017 02:30
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icantfindaname posted:Lol what? The US foreign policy establishment was full-tilt for regime change, which would have resulted in a Sunni government dominated by the US and its allies. It was only Obama choosing not to pull the final trigger that stopped that course of action, and even then we funneled lots of money and arms to the rebels. I suppose you can argue as to how much worse the US indirect support for the rebels made things, but it's simply counterfactual to say that the US was not involved in a meaningful way or did not seek to "dominate" the country "Dominate" means like what we did to Iraq and Afganistan, which is obvious from the context.
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Nov 23, 2017 02:31
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OctaMurk posted:Yes we were only complicit in making a major clusterfuck this time, instead of total shitshow. As a global power, America would be just as complicit if we'd done absolutely nothing, just in a different way.
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Nov 23, 2017 02:36
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Bishounen Bonanza posted:"Dominate" means like what we did to Iraq and Afganistan, which is obvious from the context. The US intended to dominate Iraq but instead it's now an Iranian ally. The US intended to dominate Afghanistan but the Taliban is as strong today as it was 15 years ago. Intentions and results don't match up very often, so I don't think those really count as counter-examples Vincent Van Goatse posted:As a global power, America would be just as complicit if we'd done absolutely nothing, just in a different way. You're assuming the war would have been as bad/the same if we did nothing. I think you can argue that but it's a stretch, IMO the US actively made things worse
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Nov 23, 2017 03:15
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Bishounen Bonanza posted:"Dominate" means like what we did to Iraq and Afganistan, which is obvious from the context. I think they were implying it was a course of action that was considered. I imagine things might have played closer to this if Clinton were SecState through '14. Brother Friendship posted:We can't just retreat from the region as shown by Obama's withdrawal from Iraq that was followed by an immediate retrenchment and neither can we dictate the course of the region through force of arms. The best we can do is to use our influence to unwind our position in the Middle East in a way that might produce peace and stability going forward. Imagine if there were joint investment with Iran, Syria, Iraq, etc to invest in sectors beyond energy rather than spending money on war. e: to be clear, ofc that's never happening. just imagining a different world guidoanselmi fucked around with this message at 04:36 on Nov 23, 2017 |
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Nov 23, 2017 03:24
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