Tankies have made quite a lot of idiotic statements since Assad has fallen, where do I even start. Some are worried that night clubs might disappear in Syria. As if the existence of night clubs canceled out the existence of torture chambers.
The claims they make are inconsistent and false (atrocity-washing propaganda) but I’m not following you on the ‘deeper theory’ behind them. They could just be dupes believing some ridiculous justification, or stupidly inconsistent in their reasoning. [Also, as someone suggests below—they might be working for pay.]
Their reasoning is stupid, but that stupidity follows a pattern - one where regimes perceived as victims of the West are exempt from guilt, while the West and its allies are eternally perpetrators. As for the money part, yes, some do accept money. But it's hard to promote views for profit that one doesn't believe; the cognitive dissonance is tough to endure. So, to the extent that they do get paid, I suspect they adjust their beliefs in accordance with the propaganda they're promoting.
Of course, I’ve noticed this also—but I don’t know that there’s a grand theory. Possibly more about who is reacting to whom perhaps? So if you thought ‘these regimes are all attempting to block control by the West’ and saw the West as the more powerful actor (which it certainly is) then you would blame the West. That seems more like a lacunae or a bizarre blind spot—you imagine some situation where all the countries are free if only the meddlesome West did not interfere but ignore what the regimes actually do. I agree it’s absurd. Maybe the background view is ‘this nightmare path is their only path to sovereignty’? I’m not sure. How stupid, if so.
Even if one DOES believe that though, it doesn’t make any sense if you clam your guiding concern is the suffering of various populations in the conflicts, which is what they always claim—because Assad, Putin and others CAUSE that suffering. So maybe you’re right. I don’t know. It’s certainly very incoherent, whatever it is.
Their ‘assessment’ is vile since it excuses something so shocking. I’m not sure what effect it has politically though. There’s some noise made—-but do they influence anyone but a handful of people? Does it have any real political impact? (I honestly don’t know. Who listens to them?)
When it comes to responsibility—a person is responsible for things like this— for lying, for making propaganda for monsters.
But insofar as your larger claims—personally, I don’t know what to make of the idea of ‘responsibility’ when it comes to populations and war. My country has been involved in a lot of atrocities the population doesn’t always appear to want, but can’t stop. Are Americans all responsible? Some individuals might be responsible. They probably tell themselves if they didn’t do it, someone else would. People lie to themselves quite a lot but they also enable these things even when they believe they are wrong. It’s not easy to understand any of it. It doesn’t even clearly seem to serve the ‘national interest’ much of the time.
It remains very difficult to explain why so many people go along with it.
When the US engages in injustice, can we even hold soldiers responsible for fighting? (We could for war crimes, most of the time.) How the hell are they going to know what’s going on, and if they did—what can they, as individuals, do about it?
Does this make me not modern, that I have these doubts about collective responsibility? Of course, we must act as if we are responsible—even if nobody is held accountable. We should act that way, but on the deeper level, I’m not sure what it means at the collective level.
I’m also not sure what we can ever do about these larger events. That’s not to excuse the tankies, of course. The bare minimum level of decency requires a person to object to these actions. So excusing or lying to cover them up remains indecent.
When I talk about Enlightenment individualism I’m not referring to individual responsibility but rather to an individual’s inherent value and the rights which flow from that. It’s their denial of individual value and rights, I argue, that make them anti-modern.
Yes, I agree. They don’t believe in that. That idea seems to have been torched in many quarters right now, and it’s very frightening. Maybe few have done it as explicitly as these people but we see it being ignored all over.
Yep. The right does it too. They have exactly the same belief-system as tankies do; you just need to replace "regimes" with "communities." For them, certain cultural/racial/ethnic communities are eternally victimized while others are eternally guilty of victimizing them.
I agree they are similar but I don’t see the value and rights and freedoms of the individual is being upheld by many right now. Everything is getting a lot worse.
I liked this piece because the tankers make me ill and your intellectual take-down of them was intellectually satisfying to me.
Except for one thing: your glib suggestion that Israel has been far more destructive than Hamas has been. Just looking at Oct. 7 through now, how do you measure destruction? Buildings? Displaced persons? What about the fact that any Jew worldwide who’s paying attention no longer feels safe and no longer feels that Israel is their failsafe? Do you suggest that Israel didn’t have a responsibility to ensure that Oct. 7 wouldn’t happen again? In making such an argument, you yourself sound kind of tankie.
The relevant question, I think, is whether there is any conceivable metric on which Israel’s assault is *not* more destructive than Hamas’s attack. As for Israel defending itself, of course it has that right. What it doesn’t have the right to do is to violate international humanitarian law and the Genocide Convention in the process.
Genocide is defined in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. As for your other question, only one side in this conflict (1) has the power to carry out its genocidal aims and (2) is currently doing so, and it’s not Hamas. That’s why I didn’t mention it.
To suggest 40,000 people killed and a whole region destroyed, is justified because of one day of violence (after 80 years of oppression) is evil.
And it's exactly the reason why everybody hates Israel. Also stop conflating the whole of Judaism with Israel that's highly anti-semitic. Israel and its government and military are made up of people of all different ethnicities, it doesn't speak for all Jews!
> Q: You're going interplanetary, but you're not going international. When are you going to hire people from other countries than the US?
> Musk:
Yeah… so I think people are a bit confused about this, unfortunately. This is not up to us. So, the US government regulations < > but if you’re working on rocket technology that's considered an advanced weapons technology so even a normal work visa isn’t sufficient um unless you get a special permission from the Secretary of Defense or the or the Secretary of State. I want to be clear: this is not some out of desire of SpaceX to just hire people with green cards it’s because we are not allowed to do anything else.
> I mean, I think, this is not a wise policy for uh you know for the US, because there’s so many talented people all around the world uh that we would love to have work at our company, but unless they can somehow get a green card, we can't we’re… just we’re legally prevented from hiring anyone.
> But for example, this is not the case at Tesla. Tesla um We about a quarter of our engineering team um is from outside the US and… um maybe even 30%. Because we don't have the ITAR restrictions. So, I really wish we could do more. Just our hands are tied.
True enough most of these people are scum, but there is zero reason to believe Syria's post Assad future is going to be any brighter for significant portions of it's people. Israel is snatching up Golan while the SNA tries to genocide Kurds in the north and HTS isnt gonna lift a finger to stop either
Wyatt Reed's link to dilshadkhalaf (https://x.com/dilshadkhalaf/status/1866176314295943560) is not available.
Are those tankies just not making living? I mean, you are giving them too much of ideas to hold in their heads.
Been waiting for your analysis, Neil. Thanks, right on time.
The tankies are just mad that Russia packed up and left Syria without nuking anybody.
Tankies have made quite a lot of idiotic statements since Assad has fallen, where do I even start. Some are worried that night clubs might disappear in Syria. As if the existence of night clubs canceled out the existence of torture chambers.
This was great and cleared up so much for me.
The claims they make are inconsistent and false (atrocity-washing propaganda) but I’m not following you on the ‘deeper theory’ behind them. They could just be dupes believing some ridiculous justification, or stupidly inconsistent in their reasoning. [Also, as someone suggests below—they might be working for pay.]
Their reasoning is stupid, but that stupidity follows a pattern - one where regimes perceived as victims of the West are exempt from guilt, while the West and its allies are eternally perpetrators. As for the money part, yes, some do accept money. But it's hard to promote views for profit that one doesn't believe; the cognitive dissonance is tough to endure. So, to the extent that they do get paid, I suspect they adjust their beliefs in accordance with the propaganda they're promoting.
Of course, I’ve noticed this also—but I don’t know that there’s a grand theory. Possibly more about who is reacting to whom perhaps? So if you thought ‘these regimes are all attempting to block control by the West’ and saw the West as the more powerful actor (which it certainly is) then you would blame the West. That seems more like a lacunae or a bizarre blind spot—you imagine some situation where all the countries are free if only the meddlesome West did not interfere but ignore what the regimes actually do. I agree it’s absurd. Maybe the background view is ‘this nightmare path is their only path to sovereignty’? I’m not sure. How stupid, if so.
Even if one DOES believe that though, it doesn’t make any sense if you clam your guiding concern is the suffering of various populations in the conflicts, which is what they always claim—because Assad, Putin and others CAUSE that suffering. So maybe you’re right. I don’t know. It’s certainly very incoherent, whatever it is.
Their ‘assessment’ is vile since it excuses something so shocking. I’m not sure what effect it has politically though. There’s some noise made—-but do they influence anyone but a handful of people? Does it have any real political impact? (I honestly don’t know. Who listens to them?)
When it comes to responsibility—a person is responsible for things like this— for lying, for making propaganda for monsters.
But insofar as your larger claims—personally, I don’t know what to make of the idea of ‘responsibility’ when it comes to populations and war. My country has been involved in a lot of atrocities the population doesn’t always appear to want, but can’t stop. Are Americans all responsible? Some individuals might be responsible. They probably tell themselves if they didn’t do it, someone else would. People lie to themselves quite a lot but they also enable these things even when they believe they are wrong. It’s not easy to understand any of it. It doesn’t even clearly seem to serve the ‘national interest’ much of the time.
It remains very difficult to explain why so many people go along with it.
When the US engages in injustice, can we even hold soldiers responsible for fighting? (We could for war crimes, most of the time.) How the hell are they going to know what’s going on, and if they did—what can they, as individuals, do about it?
Does this make me not modern, that I have these doubts about collective responsibility? Of course, we must act as if we are responsible—even if nobody is held accountable. We should act that way, but on the deeper level, I’m not sure what it means at the collective level.
I’m also not sure what we can ever do about these larger events. That’s not to excuse the tankies, of course. The bare minimum level of decency requires a person to object to these actions. So excusing or lying to cover them up remains indecent.
When I talk about Enlightenment individualism I’m not referring to individual responsibility but rather to an individual’s inherent value and the rights which flow from that. It’s their denial of individual value and rights, I argue, that make them anti-modern.
Yes, I agree. They don’t believe in that. That idea seems to have been torched in many quarters right now, and it’s very frightening. Maybe few have done it as explicitly as these people but we see it being ignored all over.
Yep. The right does it too. They have exactly the same belief-system as tankies do; you just need to replace "regimes" with "communities." For them, certain cultural/racial/ethnic communities are eternally victimized while others are eternally guilty of victimizing them.
I agree they are similar but I don’t see the value and rights and freedoms of the individual is being upheld by many right now. Everything is getting a lot worse.
I liked this piece because the tankers make me ill and your intellectual take-down of them was intellectually satisfying to me.
Except for one thing: your glib suggestion that Israel has been far more destructive than Hamas has been. Just looking at Oct. 7 through now, how do you measure destruction? Buildings? Displaced persons? What about the fact that any Jew worldwide who’s paying attention no longer feels safe and no longer feels that Israel is their failsafe? Do you suggest that Israel didn’t have a responsibility to ensure that Oct. 7 wouldn’t happen again? In making such an argument, you yourself sound kind of tankie.
The relevant question, I think, is whether there is any conceivable metric on which Israel’s assault is *not* more destructive than Hamas’s attack. As for Israel defending itself, of course it has that right. What it doesn’t have the right to do is to violate international humanitarian law and the Genocide Convention in the process.
Here, the issue would be “what is a genocide”? Why no condemnation of Hamas’ platform of genocide against Jews?
Genocide is defined in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. As for your other question, only one side in this conflict (1) has the power to carry out its genocidal aims and (2) is currently doing so, and it’s not Hamas. That’s why I didn’t mention it.
And I also stated—quite explicitly in the final section—that Hamas’s terrorist attack should be condemned.
Genocide requires intent. Hamas has it; Israel doesn’t.
There are a whole lot of actual genocide experts, including Israeli ones, who disagree with you. They are hyperlinked in the text.
To suggest 40,000 people killed and a whole region destroyed, is justified because of one day of violence (after 80 years of oppression) is evil.
And it's exactly the reason why everybody hates Israel. Also stop conflating the whole of Judaism with Israel that's highly anti-semitic. Israel and its government and military are made up of people of all different ethnicities, it doesn't speak for all Jews!
Ewww. Blocked.
By the way, could you evaluate this shift of Elon Musk in regard to his immigration rhetoric?
We remember Elon Musk in 2016 talking that he would be happier to hire more foreigners but can't because of the US federal restrictions. https://youtu.be/CIvtiNpKEY0?si=FSGI0T4sFgjr_XAs
Now Musk is a full-scale MAGA fascist.
> Q: You're going interplanetary, but you're not going international. When are you going to hire people from other countries than the US?
> Musk:
Yeah… so I think people are a bit confused about this, unfortunately. This is not up to us. So, the US government regulations < > but if you’re working on rocket technology that's considered an advanced weapons technology so even a normal work visa isn’t sufficient um unless you get a special permission from the Secretary of Defense or the or the Secretary of State. I want to be clear: this is not some out of desire of SpaceX to just hire people with green cards it’s because we are not allowed to do anything else.
> I mean, I think, this is not a wise policy for uh you know for the US, because there’s so many talented people all around the world uh that we would love to have work at our company, but unless they can somehow get a green card, we can't we’re… just we’re legally prevented from hiring anyone.
> But for example, this is not the case at Tesla. Tesla um We about a quarter of our engineering team um is from outside the US and… um maybe even 30%. Because we don't have the ITAR restrictions. So, I really wish we could do more. Just our hands are tied.
Tyrants are the victims bc the people hate them
True enough most of these people are scum, but there is zero reason to believe Syria's post Assad future is going to be any brighter for significant portions of it's people. Israel is snatching up Golan while the SNA tries to genocide Kurds in the north and HTS isnt gonna lift a finger to stop either
At this point it's looking more likely that HTS will join in while continuing to ignore the Israeli occupiers