I agree fully that understanding nuance is one thing many people won't (or possibly can't) do. A related (but slightly different) version of this is "accepting that tradeoff relationships exist". I can't even get to this point with certain friends, let alone them *weighing* a given tradeoff relationship.
Had a discussion with one of these friends about remote schooling during COVID. He was certain the health reasons for enacting such policies were important. Independently, he agreed these policies had negative effects on various things.
He could not weigh these two together.
Instead, he picked the issue he cared about more (health concerns) and dismissed everything else. Around and around we went, for 3 hours, and he refused to perform this slightly uncomfortable, but entirely necessary, mental exercise.
Do you think that Al Gore would have still done PEPFAR just like Bush did?
As for Iraq, you gotta understand that while execution was awful, Bush and his advisers did have a noble concept in mind: Specifically, to give Muslims an alternative to both Islamism and brutal authoritarianism. Specifically liberal democracy. Reality didn't fully work out that way, of course, but the idea was certainly noble.
No, PEPFAR was pretty peculiar to Bush. It probably also helped that Bush had credibility as a Christian conservative and could get Republicans in Congress to support it.
As for Iraq, it pretty clearly wasn't about democracy, and even if it was that wouldn't make it any better. Nobody was talking about democracy until the WMDs story was utterly eviscerated.
I stand corrected, then. Although I'd have to see several people high up in the administration talking privately about democratizing Iraq before the war started to believe that was the Bush admin's motivation.
It’s been a while since I’ve read Mazarr’s Leap of Faith, but if I’m remembering it correctly: within the administration Cheney and Rumsfeld were chiefly responsible for promoting the war as a policy and selling it to Bush, and neither of them particularly believed in or cared about democracy in Iraq. However some of their subordinates did have more optimistic/ambitious attitudes about introducing democracy in the Middle East, and Bush himself largely adopted those views because he was more comfortable with the war and with his role in it if it could be justified in broad moral/ideological terms. My impression is that it is difficult to talk about the administration’s motivations w/r/t the war in general terms because different people within the administration had substantially different understandings of why the war was happening, how it should have gone, etc, and no serious effort to harmonize those understandings government-wide was ever made-that’s one of the reasons why the war went as badly as it did.
What annoys me most about Tiedrich-heads is not that they fail to live up to some intellectual standard but that they're not even trying! To them politics is just a sort of group bonding exercise.
Hope you're doing okay. It can't be pleasant to be steamrolled by an internet mob no matter how dumb they are.
Reality is rarely black and white. Very rarely, you get something close to pure black, and even more rarely you get something like pure white. Usually though, you get people with complex motivations, both good and bad, affecting similarly complex effects on the world— often ones they don’t even intend.
The Bush admin, along with others, worked to start a process of de-industrialization in many developing countries in Africa, literally putting them in reverse, they did a could of nice aid projects, but most so called "aid" projects have exercises in extraction in disguise
"So the liberals think I’m MAGA. MAGA thinks I’m a communist. Communists think I’m a libertarian. And libertarians—well, the few libertarians I run into are actually pretty high decouplers, so they tend to understand what’s going on." -- ha ha, my experience too.
>No matter what you believe, I’m sure you must agree with at least something he did.
He quite probably saved Ukraine. He toured Europe and bullied our cheap asses to increase military spending. There would be fewer Leopards in Ukraine without it.
Bush indisputably involved us in a completely unnecessary war in Iraq, squandering much treasure and many lives. The consequences have been and will continue to be very harsh for us, and for the region.
He also created yet another enormous, unionized federal bureaucracy, "Homeland Security", which at it's best was on par with the Keystone cops and is now in the hands of a feckless, leftist reprobate being wielded against us all.
But wait. It's not all black and white, there's a good side to Bush; the side that slows the spread of AIDS in Africa.
Super.
And what has Africa done with this welcome respite? Revitalized their economies? Quelled tribal violence? Increased literacy? Lol, no.
The most apparent result of a newly invigorated and long lived population has been the wholesale export of African ignorance, violence and dependency to heretofore thriving Western countries.
Rape in Nordic countries has become an epidemic.
Pestilence and violence in France and Germany.
Once bucolic Italian seashore communities turned into crime ridden tent cities.
Growing dissidence among the indigenous populations in England and Ireland, resulting in draconian crackdowns by increasingly totalitarian governments.
I've yet to hear a cogent explanation of what benefit the mass migration of the 3rd world has been bestowed upon the industrialized West.
All in all it's a pretty dismal legacy, nuance not withstanding.
Immigrant workers have been vital to supporting the general economies, and several specific industries, in developed countries with declining birth rates. Construction, food, child care, and health care, for starters, would all cost significantly more without immigrants.
"Migrant workers have been vital to supporting the general economies, and several specific industries, in developed countries with declining birth rates. Construction, food, child care, and health care, for starters, would all cost significantly more without migrants."
Fixed that for you. Many countries, especially in the Middle East and Pacific Rim invite migrants (mostly from Africa) to come and work on projects. None offer long term residence, and certainly not citizenship. I know this because I have worked on those projects for many years.
Even closer to home, countries treat their borders with more respect than leftists treat ours.
5 years ago I was sent to Mexico to work at a LNG regassification plant near Tampico. Before I could get a work visa, a lawyer had to write a letter explaining why a Mexican engineer couldn't do the work. I was given a 2 month visa, and when it expired, I had to return to the States and reapply.
That is how a country protects it's people.
I am all for green card employment to fill unskilled labor jobs. Come fix roofs after hurricanes, harvest crops, process turkeys...get paid and go home until next season.
Come take skilled jobs for 1/2 the salary? Come harvest those tomatoes and then apply for asylum? Nope.
I get the exact opposite takeaway Mexican wages and production are low, their natural resources industry is inefficient, and throwing a whole bunch of red tape and admin busybodies to gum things up and waste tax money.
Would you have applied a similar approach to the US in the pre-WWI era? Much more immigration restrictions and a much harder path to citizenship?
BTW, Israel hasn't fared all that badly and it has accepted a lot of both low-skilled and high-skilled immigrants over the decades and gave all of them immediate Israeli citizenship.
In order to make Aliyah one has to be Jewish. They do not allow people from disparate cultures to settle there and in doing so make their country a home for the world.
Jewish or of close Jewish descent (25+% Jewish and their immediate family members). But the US equivalent of this would be anyone who is 25+% European or the immediate family member of someone who is. That includes most Latin Americans.
that’s supporting the point. If you take blood as a corollary for culture then Israel’s immigration strategy is not just different for completely opposite to that of the west.
With regard to the final paragraph... Do you really think those exercising political power historically have been any more capable of nuance than the average voter simply because of their educational pedigree? Seems at least a touch elitist and rather removed from the reality which is that most people are motivated to seek office for personal gain and are able to do so because of their educational/family pedigree rather than because of any commendable character traits either learned or innate.
I think we can be pretty sure that think tanks, academia, the media, and politics select for people with high verbal intelligence. It’s not the same as intellectualism but it’s almost certainly highly correlated.
I agree fully that understanding nuance is one thing many people won't (or possibly can't) do. A related (but slightly different) version of this is "accepting that tradeoff relationships exist". I can't even get to this point with certain friends, let alone them *weighing* a given tradeoff relationship.
Had a discussion with one of these friends about remote schooling during COVID. He was certain the health reasons for enacting such policies were important. Independently, he agreed these policies had negative effects on various things.
He could not weigh these two together.
Instead, he picked the issue he cared about more (health concerns) and dismissed everything else. Around and around we went, for 3 hours, and he refused to perform this slightly uncomfortable, but entirely necessary, mental exercise.
Was he really dismissimg everything else, or just valuing lives and health much more than the educational effects?
Careful, if Jeff or his sage followers see this they'll intellectually dismantle you, like last time
I’d be so owned!!!
It’s not that Jeff sucks, it’s that he’s elevated mediocrity into high art.
Say what you will about Jeff Tiedrich but at least he puts his full name out there, Glenn.
Elliott Rodger published under his own name too. It's not exactly an achievement. Of course, he was a better man than me, since I'm anonymous :(
I like Jeff Tiedrich and have just discovered your Substack. If I told you I enjoy reading both, would that be nuanced enough?
And can I congratulate myself for being intellectually elite now?
Do you think that Al Gore would have still done PEPFAR just like Bush did?
As for Iraq, you gotta understand that while execution was awful, Bush and his advisers did have a noble concept in mind: Specifically, to give Muslims an alternative to both Islamism and brutal authoritarianism. Specifically liberal democracy. Reality didn't fully work out that way, of course, but the idea was certainly noble.
No, PEPFAR was pretty peculiar to Bush. It probably also helped that Bush had credibility as a Christian conservative and could get Republicans in Congress to support it.
As for Iraq, it pretty clearly wasn't about democracy, and even if it was that wouldn't make it any better. Nobody was talking about democracy until the WMDs story was utterly eviscerated.
Thanks!
BTW, it seems like Thomas Friedman was already talking about the possibility—and viability—of democracy in Iraq as early as 2002:
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/01/opinion/iraq-without-saddam.html
I stand corrected, then. Although I'd have to see several people high up in the administration talking privately about democratizing Iraq before the war started to believe that was the Bush admin's motivation.
It’s been a while since I’ve read Mazarr’s Leap of Faith, but if I’m remembering it correctly: within the administration Cheney and Rumsfeld were chiefly responsible for promoting the war as a policy and selling it to Bush, and neither of them particularly believed in or cared about democracy in Iraq. However some of their subordinates did have more optimistic/ambitious attitudes about introducing democracy in the Middle East, and Bush himself largely adopted those views because he was more comfortable with the war and with his role in it if it could be justified in broad moral/ideological terms. My impression is that it is difficult to talk about the administration’s motivations w/r/t the war in general terms because different people within the administration had substantially different understandings of why the war was happening, how it should have gone, etc, and no serious effort to harmonize those understandings government-wide was ever made-that’s one of the reasons why the war went as badly as it did.
I think that the biggest motivation was the WMDs but that they genuinely believed that the democracy would be a very nice side effect of this.
I think it was the oil
Did we get control of Iraq's oil after we overthrew Saddam?
What annoys me most about Tiedrich-heads is not that they fail to live up to some intellectual standard but that they're not even trying! To them politics is just a sort of group bonding exercise.
Hope you're doing okay. It can't be pleasant to be steamrolled by an internet mob no matter how dumb they are.
Reality is rarely black and white. Very rarely, you get something close to pure black, and even more rarely you get something like pure white. Usually though, you get people with complex motivations, both good and bad, affecting similarly complex effects on the world— often ones they don’t even intend.
writing about it doesn't improve their grip.
The Bush admin, along with others, worked to start a process of de-industrialization in many developing countries in Africa, literally putting them in reverse, they did a could of nice aid projects, but most so called "aid" projects have exercises in extraction in disguise
"So the liberals think I’m MAGA. MAGA thinks I’m a communist. Communists think I’m a libertarian. And libertarians—well, the few libertarians I run into are actually pretty high decouplers, so they tend to understand what’s going on." -- ha ha, my experience too.
>No matter what you believe, I’m sure you must agree with at least something he did.
He quite probably saved Ukraine. He toured Europe and bullied our cheap asses to increase military spending. There would be fewer Leopards in Ukraine without it.
Ah, nuance. Yes, let's delve into nuance.
Bush indisputably involved us in a completely unnecessary war in Iraq, squandering much treasure and many lives. The consequences have been and will continue to be very harsh for us, and for the region.
He also created yet another enormous, unionized federal bureaucracy, "Homeland Security", which at it's best was on par with the Keystone cops and is now in the hands of a feckless, leftist reprobate being wielded against us all.
But wait. It's not all black and white, there's a good side to Bush; the side that slows the spread of AIDS in Africa.
Super.
And what has Africa done with this welcome respite? Revitalized their economies? Quelled tribal violence? Increased literacy? Lol, no.
The most apparent result of a newly invigorated and long lived population has been the wholesale export of African ignorance, violence and dependency to heretofore thriving Western countries.
Rape in Nordic countries has become an epidemic.
Pestilence and violence in France and Germany.
Once bucolic Italian seashore communities turned into crime ridden tent cities.
Growing dissidence among the indigenous populations in England and Ireland, resulting in draconian crackdowns by increasingly totalitarian governments.
I've yet to hear a cogent explanation of what benefit the mass migration of the 3rd world has been bestowed upon the industrialized West.
All in all it's a pretty dismal legacy, nuance not withstanding.
Immigrant workers have been vital to supporting the general economies, and several specific industries, in developed countries with declining birth rates. Construction, food, child care, and health care, for starters, would all cost significantly more without immigrants.
"Migrant workers have been vital to supporting the general economies, and several specific industries, in developed countries with declining birth rates. Construction, food, child care, and health care, for starters, would all cost significantly more without migrants."
Fixed that for you. Many countries, especially in the Middle East and Pacific Rim invite migrants (mostly from Africa) to come and work on projects. None offer long term residence, and certainly not citizenship. I know this because I have worked on those projects for many years.
Even closer to home, countries treat their borders with more respect than leftists treat ours.
5 years ago I was sent to Mexico to work at a LNG regassification plant near Tampico. Before I could get a work visa, a lawyer had to write a letter explaining why a Mexican engineer couldn't do the work. I was given a 2 month visa, and when it expired, I had to return to the States and reapply.
That is how a country protects it's people.
I am all for green card employment to fill unskilled labor jobs. Come fix roofs after hurricanes, harvest crops, process turkeys...get paid and go home until next season.
Come take skilled jobs for 1/2 the salary? Come harvest those tomatoes and then apply for asylum? Nope.
I get the exact opposite takeaway Mexican wages and production are low, their natural resources industry is inefficient, and throwing a whole bunch of red tape and admin busybodies to gum things up and waste tax money.
Would you have applied a similar approach to the US in the pre-WWI era? Much more immigration restrictions and a much harder path to citizenship?
BTW, Israel hasn't fared all that badly and it has accepted a lot of both low-skilled and high-skilled immigrants over the decades and gave all of them immediate Israeli citizenship.
This is a false parallel.
In order to make Aliyah one has to be Jewish. They do not allow people from disparate cultures to settle there and in doing so make their country a home for the world.
Jewish or of close Jewish descent (25+% Jewish and their immediate family members). But the US equivalent of this would be anyone who is 25+% European or the immediate family member of someone who is. That includes most Latin Americans.
that’s supporting the point. If you take blood as a corollary for culture then Israel’s immigration strategy is not just different for completely opposite to that of the west.
With regard to the final paragraph... Do you really think those exercising political power historically have been any more capable of nuance than the average voter simply because of their educational pedigree? Seems at least a touch elitist and rather removed from the reality which is that most people are motivated to seek office for personal gain and are able to do so because of their educational/family pedigree rather than because of any commendable character traits either learned or innate.
I think we can be pretty sure that think tanks, academia, the media, and politics select for people with high verbal intelligence. It’s not the same as intellectualism but it’s almost certainly highly correlated.