@ArguingWAristotleTiff: "Less than a day after President Donald Trump bragged to supporters at a campaign-style rally in Minnesota Thursday that he was working hard to bring U.S. soldiers home from foreign wars, the Pentagon announced Friday that 1,800 troops and advanced weapons systems have been ordered to Saudi Arabia"

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/10/11/less-24-hours-after-saying-time-bring-em-home-trump-orders-1800-us-troops-saudi

@ArguingWAristotleTiff:

"The desire to remove U.S. troops from Middle East wars is laudable, and shared by many of those criticizing Trump this week. But ... Trump’s announcement was less that he is bringing the troops home than that he is ordering those troops not to stand in the way as Turkey wipes out the Kurdish allies they have been working with to fight ISIS.

What Trump’s action did do was effectively blow up months of intensive negotiations to avert a Turkish offensive by establishing a safe zone that would be monitored by joint U.S.-Turkish patrols, between Kurdish-controlled territory and the border. The tentative deal reached in August required the Kurds to remove fortifications from the border, meaning that not only did the U.S. invite Turkey to attack its allies—it persuaded those allies to remove their own defenses before doing so.

...If Trump is serious about lessening U.S. military involvement in the Middle East, he has missed some clear opportunities. The president’s views on America’s role in Syria have focused entirely on military power. The idea that the U.S. could be exercising its influence with something other than bombs never seems to enter the calculation. The administration has shown little inclination to engage in a sustained way with diplomacy in Syria, effectively letting Russia, Iran, and Turkey take the lead.."

(cite)

Tiff you're simply dreaming if you think this has anything to do with a larger American backdown. This is Trump being played by a foreign leader, and then appealing to the fantasy of an American backdown to justify it - and in turn leading dupes to think such a backdown has anything to do with it. The Americans fucking off from Saudi Arabia - the no.1 exporter to Wahabi Islam and origin of most of the 9/11 attackers - might actually count as a move worth calling a backdown. This is just a weak president playing people like you to justify a fatally bad decision, impulsively made. You owe yourself better than the fiddle you currently are.

an attempt to end a war. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

By enabling a literal military invasion? Sorry Tiff, this is too stupid.

What is the solution? — ArguingWAristotleTiff

To a problem wholly precipitated by a weak, ignorant, president who, probably with little to no understanding of the strategic situation in Syria, rolled over like bitch after Turkey's president - incidentally a hugely corrupt autocrat-in-the-making (the kind of friends that Trump keeps) - made a single phone call, against any advice from his own military and intelligence service - and his own party no less - and whose subsequent actions even have US special forces stationed in Syria feeling ashamed of themselves? I dunno, maybe a bullet to his fucking head would be nice. In lieu of that, maybe taking a stand against an Islamist nationalist like Erdogan and supporting US allies with a minimal - almost nominal - investment of troops in order to prevent already occurring civilian deaths that might well displace nearly 300,000 people as a result, while at the same time probably precipitating the release of ISIS prisoners?

Fucking coward of a president. Even Israel - Netanyahu specifically - thinks this is horrible.

I mean, I'm curious, do you think that Nixon should have been impeached? I would assume no, then? — Maw

To be clear, I don't think impeachment is inherently anti-democratic or anything. In fact it's obviously an important mechanism for guaranteeing it. I'm just saying that it should be wielded strategically. At a time in which trust in government is at an all time low, and where wide-scale cynicism rules the demos, an impeachment process - one over Ukrainian telephone calls and the Bidens, no less - has the very real chance of deepening the democratic deficit, not shoring it up. I don't at all think the conditions that prevailed during Nixon's impeachment are at work right now. And those conditions matter. Which is again just to say that I'm not speaking at the level of principles (what ought to happen in ideal conditions) but at the level of strategy, given what the US has got right now.

And by way of reply to @ZhouBoTong: I'm not dealing in hypotheticals.

But this isn't true!!! And he should know this!!! — Maw

Yes, yes, adjusted for the undemocratic bullshit that is the electoral college and so on. The point I take away is that it's no good to respond to these world events by doubling down on undemocratic measures ('if the people are dumb and ignorant, then we'll do the right thing for them'). The people must be built. They must be constituted. And we do that by engagement.

I do think its naive to say that race was not a factor - perhaps and likely the most important factor - in what's been going on. But even racism is differential - that it mattered here does not mean it has to matter in the future. But the only way to bring out that result is, again, engagement. I qualify this by saying that 'engagement' is not a solution but itself a problem: engage how, where, and in what manner? These are tactical questions. But as far as strategy goes? More democracy, not less.

. I am looking to support a responsible way out. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

What Maw said. And this isn't a 'suffering contest'. That implies some kind of game. This isn't a game. People. Will. Die. Your allies will die. Don't obfuscate that with gaming metaphors to make yourself feel better.

Tell that to the thousands of families of Kurds, to whom the US has broken their promises (granted thanks to their fighting alongside US forces to eliminate ISIS), and will now die.

I am glad he is backing down from the world scene as well I just wonder how much chaos will come with us pulling back. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

To be clear, the withdrawal is about 50 US soldiers. That's it. The rest of the 950 or so still remain in Syria, just not on the Northern border. So while I said previously that I was somewhat torn (precisely because I agree that the US ought to simply leave where possible), I no longer have such qualms. This was Trump being played by a foreign leader, and it's going to kill what used to be US allies because of it. 50 troops out of a thousand is not anything like a backing down from the world scene, however much that would be nice.

The instinct to have as small and loyal a staff as possible is something you might expect from a dictator wannabe though. — praxis

Loyalty is good. Competency is better. And he lacks the latter is spades. And this includes his family. The legislative moves that he has been most successful at making have largely been those of the Republican party at large - McConnell's agenda, and not his.

And yet what have the Democrats done? They've just pointed out how bad a person he is, even after Trump explained to them his supporters just don't care. — Hanover

The mind boggles that three years in, the refrain that "orange man is bad!" is supposed to make any political headway at all.

What would you make of a Bernie or Warren candidacy?

I can only go by what he said in the Ch4 interview — Amity

That much is clear.

By stone-walling Congress, Trump is producing a problem that has to be addressed. Maybe a few steps before that, it would have made sense to ride it out into 2020. — frank

I don't disagree. I just think it's the worst possible outcome. Even in getting impeached, Trump will have made things worse for everyone.

The argument that there exists a type of fascism in the form of Trump is not an extreme hysterical reaction. Also, this is dismissive of objective, academic analysis as explained here — Amity

Synder is not particularly bright when it comes to political analysis. He just happened to write a bestseller that played perfectly into liberal fears and made everyone feel better about themselves. This was written a while back, and the numbers are outdated, but the trends outlined there largely hold true to today:

"If Trump were actually serious about consolidating his power, he might start by, oh, I don’t know, consolidating his power. ... [Instead, Trump] has failed to fill 85% of the positions in the executive branch that he needs to fill in order to run the government to his specifications. It’s a strange kind of authoritarian who fails, as the first order of business, to seize control of the state apparatus: not because there’s been pushback from the Senate but because, in most instances, he hasn’t even tried.

...In March, I was on a panel of liberal scholars and writers where it was the universal consensus that Trump had an almost intuitive grasp of and control over public opinion – as evidenced by his tweets, which were held to be the invisible puppet strings of the American mind. This was not long after Trump’s travel ban had been overturned by the courts and Trump had responded by tweeting his contempt for and hostility toward the judges involved."

I mean the fact is that Trump is horrible at statecraft. I mean possibly the most incompetent organizational head of state that the US has ever seen. To think that he's an authoritarian is an insult to authoritarians everywhere.

Cheers! I need a good righteous rant every once in a while. The hysteria around impeachment (did no one learn from the Muller inquiry?) seemed a good a time as any.

I really enjoyed this. I think some of the most hard hitting stuff was from Lowry, the economist, near the end of the video. Worth quoting at length for those who won't watch the whole thing:

"I do hear this argument that this is a proto-Nazi, a kind of fascist development in American society, that one must stand in opposition to it. It's an extreme, almost hysterical reaction, I think. It's an indication of people who have for too long have had their way at the editorial pages and in college classrooms and so on. And they've been accustomed to winning without arguing. The sky is not falling, I want to say to those people. Rather, the tectonic plates of American politics are shifting, they're shifting in ways that people you'd rather not hear from are now having a voice. Some of those people don't agree with your suppositions."

"The notion that we got to get him out at all cost worries me deeply. I worry about this because those people are not going to go away, even if president Trump goes away. If you don't defeat those people at the ballot box, if you usurp their expression of democratic intent through extraordinary means, you invite the reaction. The way to defeat Trump is to get 50.1% of the vote, and vote him and those who support him out of office".

Turkey is our ally — NOS4A2

This doesn't appear to mean all that much.

"For a brief moment after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in 2001, it seemed as if the shock of these events might bring about a general process of reflection by Americans on the place of the United States in the wider world. Unfortunately, the form this reflection eventually took was self-defeating. One normal way of going about determining why someone did something is to ask the person in question. The question why Al-Qaeda bombed the Pentagon and the World Trade Center has a relatively clear answer: “They say they did it because of U.S. support for the corrupt Saudi monarchy and the garrisoning of American troops in Saudi Arabia."

One might then expect people to start asking why U.S. troops should be in Saudi Arabia anyway, why exactly control of this region is so important, and finally, how much real power the United States has and how it can be best deployed. Instead public discussion almost immediately began to focus on elaborating various fantasies about Islamic fundamentalism, “their” hatred of “our” values, freedom, and way of life, etc. The creation of imaginary hate figures may give some immediate psychic satisfaction, but in the long run it only spreads and increases confusion and aggression. Troops can in principle be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia, policy toward the Saudi monarchy can change, but how can one deal in a satisfactory way with inherently spectral “Islamic terror”?

It no doubt suits some political circles in the United States that the population continue to be fearful, mystified, and frustrated, the better to gain their acquiescence in various further military operations, but it is hard to believe that this kind of emotional and cognitive derangement of the population contributes to increasing U.S. political power."

-Raymond Geuss, "The Politics of Managing Decline"

I think a good think ought to be had about American interventionism and its role as "policeman" of the world. — Benkei

The US has been a force of net ill in the world for a long time now. 9/11 had the effect of unleashing and amplifying that force in a way completely unhinged to any strategic vision other than a kind of need to claw back the decline of American empire with nothing but the weakness of sheer force. Trump was never going to be anything other than yet another multiplier of that nihilism on the international stage. Without the anchor of a Cold War Russia, the US has effectively been in a paranoic state, unable to trust any other world actor and in turn wreaking any trust it might have offered to anyone else. The time to rethink America's international role was at least present already back at the turn of the millennium. What's happened since has been nothing but a rear-guard action to stave off the recognition of degeneration, and great swathes of the world have had to pay the price in blood and misery while the US continues to adjust its spectacles.

Oh a much better world. I moderate even my fantasies, apparently.

If there's anything the result of "the system" it is this. It's just surprising it took this long really. — Benkei

A stochastic tragedy, with Trump as attractor (@fdrake). I can appreciate that. Still, while in the long run this was of course prefigured by the lethal touch of long-running US foreign policy, I think it makes a strategic sense to lay this at the bloodied feet of Trump. With impeachment in play, anything that turns his allies against him - as it is doing - is worth exploiting.

But yes. This leaves the Kurds exactly where they are. I don't have anything to say - it leaves one speechleess, miserable, and helpless.

To be fair, I think this does have bearing on Trump because this looks to be a decision unilaterally made on his part - most of the intelligence service seem to have been caught off-guard, and even the Republican party leaders seem to have turned on him, from McConnell to Lindsay Graham to Nikki Haley (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/07/trump-syria-us-troop-withdrawal-turkey). This is probably one of the few instances in which people will die directly because of Trump's personal decisions - people who have been staunch US allies - and not due to 'just' US imperialist warmongering. In a better world, this ought to the the grounds from which Trump is truly thrown under the bus, and not some obscure phone calls that bear on the fates of some millionaires.

"To the despisers of the body will I speak my word. Not so that they may learn or teach differently but simply so that they may say farewell to their own bodies— and thus fall silent. "I am a body and a soul"— thus speaks a child. And why should one not speak like children? But the awakened, the enlightened man says: "I am only body and nothing more; and soul is merely a word for something in the body." The body is a great intelligence, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd.

...Even in your folly and despising, you despisers of the body, you serve your Self. I say to you: your Self wants to die and turns away from life. No longer is it capable of doing that which it desires the most— to create beyond itself. That is what it desires the most; that is its entire passion. But now it has become too late for that— so your Self wishes to die, you despisers of the body. Your Self wishes to die, and therefore you have become despisers of the body! For you are no longer able to create beyond yourselves. And that is why you now angry with life and with the earth. There is an unconcious envy lurking beneath the grimaces of your despite. I will not walk your path, you despisers of the body! You are no bridges for me to the Superman! — Thus spoke Zarathustra."

- Nietzsche, "The Despisers of the Body", TSZ.

There is so much out there about the body if you're willing to look for it! The most obvious place to look is Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, which gives primacy to the body in a way that we still have yet to appreciate. If you're interested in sociological aspects of the body - which any good philosopher ought to be - Chris Shilling's The Body and Social Theory is a classic that covers some of the most important theorizing on the body in contemporary research (I just saw that he also recently wrote one of those 'Very Short Introduction' guides to the body, which might be a useful first foray into theories of the body).

The body also figures massively in feminist, disability, and race studies, many of which, by bringing out the specificity of gendered, racialized, and disabled bodies, aim to contest the implicit universality of alot of prior philosophical work (see, as exemplary instances of each: Iris Marion Young - Throwing Like a Girl; Franz Fanon - Black Skin, White Masks; Tom Shakespeare - Disability Rights and Wrongs).

And of course the body plays a massive role in understandings of cognition more generally (as pointed out by @Pfhorrest), where you can look to works like George Lakoff and Mark Johnston's Philosophy in the Flesh, Evan Thompson's Mind In Life, or one of my favourites, Maxine Sheets-Johnston's The Primacy of Movement. Alot of contemporary Spinozist's have also placed a great deal of focus on the body and it's role in thinking ethics - an example here being something like Heidi Ravven's The Self Beyond Itself.

This is all just a tiny, tiny snippet of philosophical work that focuses on the body, and there's heaps to look into if you're interested.

Yeah WaPo is a bit of a joke.

via internet people

The idea that main stream media and the entertainment industry have been taken over by "the left" is actually somewhat laughable. — Echarmion

"As of 2019, 90% of the United States's media is controlled by five media conglomerates: Comcast (via NBCUniversal), Disney, Viacom & CBS (both controlled by National Amusements), and AT&T (via WarnerMedia)" (cite)

The revolutionary leftist takeover of the media, everyone.

Sure, ok buddy.

And the point was that your question was misconceived and ill-thought.

Regarding power positions, the Left has supposedly taken higher education, the arts and entertainment industry, most news networks. — praxis

Two points. First, most of the 'leftism' espoused by these institutions is a kind of effete liberalism that has little if not nothing to do with mass mobilization and democratic participation, concerned far more with crafting feel-good stories than actually challenging anything of the status quo. Second, you just need to follow the money: arts, entertainment, and news are mostly run by billionaire classes funding millionaire patrons, much of which is hugely anti-competitive and reeks at every point with the waft of privilege. If these are the bastions of the left, then the left is truly dead. Higher education is not too different, with universities increasingly run as for-profit vocational training institutions even as they remain largely committed to freedom and diversity of research. And this to say nothing about the function of higher education - in the US at least - as plunging students and their families into crippling debt right at the beginning of their adult lives. Mark Fisher's writings on the bureaucratization of higher-education ought to dispel any sense in which the left has any kind of control here.

These places constitute the zombie left, one mostly utterly enchained to the most brutal workings of capital, reproducing at every level the current state of affairs. And what little leftism is there is largely entirely ineffectual, reduced to woketivism that has been perfectly integrated into advertising and marketing. They nonetheless serve as a nice foil to the right, who have always despised the intellectual and the artistic, if merely on principle, regardless of what comes out of those institutions.

This will sound terribly obvious but it appears to be the case that the Left is just as adept at taking control of institutions, getting their leaders in positions of power, etc. — praxis

News to me.

I'm a tad torn on this. On the one hand the US should quite clearly fuck off from anywhere in the world where possible, and this might count as a nice step toward that. On the other hand, it's infuriating that of all the places to abandon, it's this one, in which the US is basically leaving their closest allies (literally, the Kurds have done more to fight ISIS than anyone else in the region, and successfully) to rot. And for the sake of Erdogan, that slimy piece of shit, no less. It's actually pretty disgusting.

I'm wondering what a sensible way forward is, strategically speaking, for the protesters. — Benkei

Not being there, it's hard to presume to say. But what they've been doing - the relative discipline of sustained, unyielding demand(s) - seems to be working very well. The mask ban - as much as it is a cynical exercise to incite violence - seems to me to speak to an underlying desperation and insecurity on the part of the authorities (which can cut either way - the desperate are the most dangerous).

One cannot serve one's principles without power, but if power is the only principle then one is a slave to a black hole indeed. Politics is made of power, but it is not about power. Only princes are addressed, not democrats. — unenlightened

All true. An understanding of power doesn't lead to any particular manner of its wielding in one way or another - but it does help a great deal in leading to its wielding at all. I'm just arguing that we cannot afford to be naive about this stuff, and that if we do, we're not merely ineffective, but counter-effective - we make things worse.

The “conservative” party is by nature less receptive to change, is un-progressive, so how can it be that they appreciate “altering the landscape” better than progressives? — praxis

The point is that the right understands that politics is about power - taking control of institutions, putting 'their man' or men in positions to exert that power, legislating, using the courts, etc. They understand that politics is not a matter of mere knowledge, it isn't some kind of shallow epistemic game where 'getting the knowledge right' will transform things on its own, nor some kind of axiological effort where if only everybody thought 'correctly' things would magically fall into place.

Jerry Falwell exemplified this in one of his tweets a little while ago: "Conservatives & Christians need to stop electing ‘nice guys’. They might make great Christian leaders but the US needs street fighters like @realDonaldTrump at every level of government". There are entire swathes of Trump critics who would be quite satisfied if they got themselves a 'nice guy', someone who 'acts presidential', and who adheres with dignified airs to 'norms'. They can all go fuck off.

'Twas I, banner of Nadia.

Who is not bery bright, apparently, having messaged me directly too.

Maybe take a look at Graham Harman's Tool Being, if you can get your hands on a copy.

Dunno what they expected with the mask ban. Watch them use this to (more) violently crack down.

However, I remain unconvinced that a Trump presidency has been, in hindsight, 'desirable' for the Left, given the substantive damage done by the Trump administration, and more generally, a GOP controlled government to the lives of people. The conceptual tools for critiquing Capitalism remain as relevant as ever (if not more so than in decades past), with or without Trump. — Maw

True. The damage done will not have been redeemed, whatever follows. It's probably unfair to expect an 'on the balance' assessment - but, I'll look to what silver linings there might be.

Trump’s very presence and his contrast to previous politicians has forced many to think about politics again (some, it seems, for the first time in their lives), leading to a stronger left and right on the American political field. — NOS4A2

This, though, is entirely right. Trump has been an incredible force of galvanization, for the right and left alike. The left certainly has alot to thank him for. Zizek was right, imo, of seeing a Trump presidency as a far better prospect for the left than a Clinton one, even though he got railroaded by the left for it.

Sorry I mean the focus on impeachment.