dagblog - Comments for "Bacevich and Mearsheimer on Obama’s Legacy"

[1] I don't know if he set

A Guy Called LULU — Sun, 22 Jan 2017 19:50:16 +0000

In reply to A corollary issue for Lulu

[1] I don't know if he set any records but he surely lied one hell of a lot. Enough of the American public either believed or ignored those lies and voted for him in numbers that made him the President of the United States of America

[2] Russian did have an economic fiasco largely attributed to over-committing its strained resources to military preparation and military actions. They survived but at a big price. Russia lost big time in Afghanistan. Russia's many failures caused an extreme amount of pain at home. The conditions in the nineties after the mostly peaceful breakup of the Soviet Union were so bad, probably considerably worse than in our great depression, that the moderately good economic conditions now are cementing support for the leader they credit for the turnaround.

[3] I think you, like so many others, [not to make it personal but to make a point] recognize genuine problems but tend way too much to blame bi-partisan faults and mistakes all on one side.

[4] I don't have a strong opinion on whether they believe lies more or less easily. My bet is that at least some if not most of their most influential politicians will lie to the extent that they can get away with when they think the lie will advance their interests. If they keep on getting elected then some significant part of their population must be believing them. I do believe that Europeans must have more of an awareness that a war could actually happen in their laps and that must make a difference. The big stone government buildings in Budapest for instance are still pock marked from gunshot and cannon shot suffered during WWll which many people there and most of their parents lived through and so my guess is they probably think through more carefully what they are told about the necessity of confrontations as opposed to diplomacy.

We are going through a period

PeraclesPlease — Sun, 22 Jan 2017 19:27:00 +0000

In reply to A corollary issue for Lulu

We are going through a period of information overload - one Nate Silver likens to the post-Gutenberg phase. Before that, writing was hard to come by, and mostly Bible related. Afterwards, anything and everything could be printed, and previous belief systems and basic tenets were shattered. It wasn't Martin Luther's 95 theses, he notes - it was that suddenly these theses grew wings and could be read Europe-wide. Similarly fake news, the less and less stable mainstream media versions of events, the constant need to fill the news cycle 24x7 rather than just Sunday morning talk shows, etc. - people will find structural weaknesses and exploit them. It's our job individually and as groups to fill the holes and develop a more suitable system that limits the negatives.

Both Hussein and Khomeini survived the Iraq-Iran War. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge largely survived the Vietnamese invasion and aftermath of the Killing Fields. Brezhnev arguably survived the economic disaster of his final years, along with several military blunders, only in death relinquishing power. Yeltsin resigned, but hung on for quite a long time before that, and pushed in his successor in without much challenge. Yeah, failure isn't always fatal.

The use of "Stalinist" might be controversial, but the joint 2 minutes of exhorted hate via "Lock Her Up" seemed to be lifted pretty neatly from the movie version of 1984. Yes, "power at any price" is an accurate assessment.

People in East Europe seem no more attuned to big lies or small lies than anywhere else - most have forgotten, and the new yuppie vultures have managed to adapt while the remnants of the old guard still wield an amazing amount of power. The Russians are more attuned, I think. But the power of Communism was hardly just the big lies - it was the millions of tiny lies, the cuts by a thousand swords. Every day became an effort to survive having to trade in known deceptions and little white lies and more insidious ones and the many things always left unsaid. We haven't got it near that bad in the West - yet.

A corollary issue for Lulu

NCD — Sun, 22 Jan 2017 19:16:37 +0000

In reply to That’s a thoughtful and well

A corollary issue for Lulu and Kat.

Are Americans among the easiest populations of either democracies or autocracies for leaders to successfully lie to?

Points that would support:

1. Trump candidacy and election. He and his bunch would seem to set new records in making things up, as Mearshimer notes in my quote above. Kellyanne invents new doublespeak, 'alternative facts'. If there is a word in Russian like that, it would be met with a knowing smile and a laugh as total BS. It flies in our MSM as they too seek Fox/Briebart eyeballs to keep their 8 figure corporate paychecks coming in.

2. Iraq war, would any autocratic/dictator Russian leader since Stalin and Stalinists have survived such a huge fiasco, including an economic crash, as Republicans have, coming back strong in 2010?

3. Is the problem in the US that in the last 25 years, with its own Party line media propaganda organs and anti-democratic actions, the plutocratic funded GOP has become a power at any price right wing Stalinist like entity? With a voting base not profiting from their rule but deftly exploited with racism and provided targets they are taught to hate (liberals, Kenyan Usurper, Red Queen etc)?

4. Does the not so long past history of the ruinous consequences of despotism in Europe and Russian region make people there, democracy or not, more attuned to lies, resulting in smaller lies passing but not huge destructive ones?

Dammit, Lulu, you're doing it

PeraclesPlease — Sun, 22 Jan 2017 18:26:00 +0000

In reply to Responding tomyour

Dammit, Lulu, you're doing it again - you point to an article, I foolishly respond to what's in the article, and then you say "oh, that's not that important".

Mearsheimer says, " It would make much more sense, from our perspective, if we had good relations with the Russians; but of course we don’t, and I think the principal reason is because of the West’s foreign policy—and the main force driver there has been the United States."

You say, "There is no necessity of being friends in order to work together. " So why are you pointing to an article that says the opposite?

Our reason for putting on sanctions were:

1) supplying weapons to Donbas to cause a civil war

2) unilaterally & militarily taking back Crimea from an independent country without going through proper international procedures (yes, it was a military operation, even if Ukraine decided it counter-productive to fight)

3) the support of rebel troops in shooting down a civilian airliner with no responsibility or effort at recompense - worse, lying their fucking asses off about a variety of extraterrestrials, comets, and other lame-ass excuses about what happened.

Screw them - *THEY DON'T OWN THE UKRAINE*.

I've asked you time and again to estimate the number of "hard core fascists" in its midst from any credible source. You completely ignore this, mainly because you enjoy throwing out smears knowing they can't be answered - does Poroshenko still beat his wife? You stated that these fascists were going to have a heavy influence on the Ukrainian government - fear, fear fear - 2 years later, any sign of that influence? Hell no, it was always a side-show, obviously so from the beginning - they *NEVER* had any serious influence aside from maybe 1 or 2 figures with a title in government.

Lulu: ....that in no way challenges the assertion that leaders of democracies lie a lot to their people and autocrats lie less. I don't know if what Mearsheimer said is factually accurate when applied to the most consequential lies but it seems logical. Autocrats don't have to explain much to their people, they can just say and do what they want to a greater extent than someone who has to convince the people to vote for them.

I'm sorry, my education was limited to only a few degrees, but they way I parse that is saying "it's logical that autocrats would lie less due to less reason", which I infer to mean you think autocrats probably lie less.

No, the article you linked to didn't say that - NCD pulled it from Mearsheimer's Wikipedia writeup - "His two main findings are that leaders actually do not lie very much to other countries, and that democratic leaders are actually more likely than autocrats to lie to their own people.". But you seem to agree with it. Who knows. Next time, as OceanKat suggests, please write a bit about *what* you like or dislike about a link or hint at what you expect people to take away from it. Especially since Bacevich and Mearsheimer are significantly disagreeing with each other throughout.

Bush's biggest sin wasn't

A Guy Called LULU — Sun, 22 Jan 2017 18:12:22 +0000

In reply to i guess this might make me a

Bush's biggest sin wasn't lying to go to war - half of wars have that tarnish.

That’s an attitude I can get behind. It’s like I told my kid one time; It’s okay that you lied about why you broke that window, all the kids in that neighborhood where you go to make a few bucks spending money by breaking windows also break windows for all kinds of reasons and they all lie about it. Why would I hold you to a higher standard even if your actions today might really fuck up your future? And don’t think I don’t know the real reason you broke it, it wasn’t an accident and while I admire your initiative I worry that you will make a bad, possibly fatal, mistake. If you decide to break another one and grab the wallet from the stand inside I will support you in that too just like all the other times because you are my kid and I love you. But here is a little advice to carry through life if you stay on this dangerous path. Make sure you carry a gun in case someone sees you and tries to stop you. They may think they have something worth protecting and react violently. You may have to shoot them. If it comes to that, make sure you have an alibi. Plausible deniability will be sufficient with your peers. They mostly don’t give a flying fuck what happens over there. In other words, live free and prosper.

Edited twice to correct a couple malformed sentences.

Responding tomyour

A Guy Called LULU — Sun, 22 Jan 2017 16:25:41 +0000

In reply to My response to OK was very

Responding tomyour substantive comment:

Russia has significantly different issues from us, and has little interest in liberal democracy. That can be said for a great deal of the world including significant number of Americans who apparently aren’t interested in liberal democracy. I, and many others, [not all idiots I think] believe we have been handling the tensions thus created very poorly, very counter-productively.

I don't see why we would do more to be big friends with Russia under that differing worldview. There is no necessity of being friends in order to work together. I don't see it as a problem for Ukraine to tilt more towards the EU. Ukraine is in a very unfortunate geopolitical situation. It is located both geographically and politically at the intersection of several power plays. Both sides are playing their cards with Ukraine, which has its own internal power struggle to complicate life. Ukraine is caught in the middle. Ukrain’s struggle has hard core fascists among its citizen players and they have demonstrated real power within that country. Russia, can more believably claim that its actions are for geographic defensive reasons, while the U.S. actions are for neocon ideological reasons among others though they seldom if ever admit the real reasons. I also don't see the annexation of Crimea as a big deal either - except to the Tatars - but it did give us a nice reason to put on sanctions. Yeah, a nice reason, a nice excuse. What was the real reason?

Somehow I don't see it a problem for other Mideast states that we're not BFFs with Russia - why is this a problem in the authors' eyes? I won’t try to speak for the authors, M. and B, any more than what they say for themselves in the article.

Change of subject. Do you realize yet that I never said that "autocrats lie less"?

That’s a thoughtful and well

A Guy Called LULU — Sun, 22 Jan 2017 16:10:47 +0000

In reply to I really didn't have anything

That’s a thoughtful and well constructed response OK. Thanks. While there is much I think you got right you won’t be surprised that I don’t agree with everything you say.

I have no argument with your first paragraph.

Regarding your second paragraph: I post articles “In the News” for the purpose of presenting information or views which I think are relevant and important to consider. I do not open by asking anyone to respond and I do not ask anyone to do any work for me. If someone does respond it is often to take exception to something in the article and if I disagree with them I usually say so and I say why and I use my own thoughts and/or do my own work to support my own position.

At the very least you could write the first comment on the article expressing your views on it in some substantial way.

If I were to post an article for instance that I largely disagreed with or which came from a very controversial source I would be strongly inclined to post a first comment explaining why I did so. In the case at hand I don’t see how doing a book report type blog on the interview with Mearsheimer and Bacevich could be better than offering the original. I think that is a good reason for a separate section for news produced outside of Dag. Again, with this news article being an example, if the interview had started a conversation on Obama’s foreign policy legacy rather than on a controversial statement by Mearsheimer from a completely different context and which is completely irrelevant in the article’s own context, then the article would be a good starting point. Obviously it doesn’t always, didn’t this time, work that way. This is in no way to criticize your responding to a comment which is justified whether or not you realized at the time that it did not come from the interview. Likewise, I was justified in pointing out that your response did not logically refute Mearsheimer’s stated belief that democratic leaders lie more than autocratic ones do. I could have ignored your response to NCD but I thought, I still think, that your response was logically incorrect and so I said so. But that led to the potential discussion of what actually was said in the interview going down a completely different path. Happens that way sometimes.

I agree with your final paragraph. I have said before that I wished this site had a rating system like at the old Cafe. There I only rated comments or blogs highly and tried to made my case when I thought they deserved a low mark.

We are largely in better

jollyroger — Sun, 22 Jan 2017 15:48:54 +0000

In reply to i guess this might make me a

We are largely in better shape in the Mideast than in 2001

Huh??

I know that you will enjoy deconstructing this with more granularity (hey, it's your style...)

Are you perhaps not including Af-Pak as part of the "Middle East"--(in truth, they are a different geographic region...)

By "we" I take it that you mean to subsume under "better shape" an examination of the interests of the US writ large (however those might be defined) or do you wish to include in the "we" the rest of the worlds's inhabitants and their prospects for living out their lives without pausing to ladel their children's remains into a body bag, in which case, wtf?

i guess this might make me a

PeraclesPlease — Sun, 22 Jan 2017 15:33:24 +0000

In reply to Mearscheimer was a rare

i guess this might make me a neocon, but in pool sometimes you don't have any good shots, so you just break up the table to get some better position. Bush's biggest sin wasn't lying to go to war - half of wars have that tarnish. It was lying to go to war and then diluting any potential gains by applying such incompetence as to pull out a huge defeat and money hole where there wasn't one before (or intentional collusion and cronyism - whether it was Bush or Cheney's doing...)

We are largely in better shape in the Mideast than in 2001 *despite* the huge unnecessary waste of a trillion+ dollars. We do likely have fewer unknown unknowns, and our known knowns are significantly less threatening. It is possible to have an attack much worse than 9/11, of course. But the game the last few years has been emotionally disturbing attacks that really don't kill many people, but are easier to carry out without much planning. (Fortunately the number of those has been quite small. They could get bigger, but the San Bernardino/Paris night club and the 2 or 3 truck-into-crowd attacks have shown not too much copy-cat followup.

There's a natural tendency

barefooted — Sun, 22 Jan 2017 02:20:55 +0000

In reply to I really didn't have anything

There's a natural tendency for people to only post when they disagree. Very few people post just to say I agree.

Do you really think so? Well, I suppose that might be true overall, but it seems easier to post agreement - less risk of negative engagement - than to lay out an opposing view. I'd like to think you're right since it would lead to more interesting (and possibly informative) debate. Unfortunately, you're certainly right in that it can lead to dissension and argumentative results but without that we have ... what?