honorentheos wrote: ↑Mon Sep 12, 2022 3:21 am
If your response to practically every participant is they fail to grasp your point, and suggest it is due to their biases causing them to ignore what you have actually been saying, you are doing something wrong.
So on the one hand I'm verbose, but on the other hand my only response to "practically every participant" is to say that people don't grasp my point. I wonder why it takes so many words for me to say that. I must not be as magical as you thought.
As you yourself said "many posters here have likely read your comments as echoing Russian propoganda for reasons other than the ones you propose." Yes, that indeed is an issue, because the initial responses to any critical look at what we are doing there largely consisted of emotive statements about how bad Russians are because of their atrocities, and how they are wrong for invading. That is understandable, given the highly charged media environment in the US. That is also the general way that Will Shryver, the ostensible subject of this thread, has been attacked: he's a Putler shill. We are in a "support the troops or you support the terrorists" kind of environment. I understand that, and am attempting to navigate a difficult terrain. If I say that the definition of an atrocity is not always clear-cut, the media reports usually aren't that reliable, and that this whole thing is soaked in propaganda—openly so—I run the risk of being interpreted as saying that Russians are justified or that they aren't committing/haven't committed atrocities. Analytics got that, though I didn't necessarily agree with his framing of it. Others did too eventually. You're the only one who is trying to keep it up as a debate.
As I responded, some people acknowledged my points while still feeling that the moral questions overrode any others (Kishkumen and Chap, for example); we just have a difference of view, then, and I am not sure there is much to discuss when the difference is settled like that. I am not trying to win them over to a position. But I had perfectly normal conversations with others (Morley), even though we didn't fully agree. Some people just quickly resorted to name calling, and I pretty much that left that alone ("I a libertarian!? Take that back sir!").
The only one that has proved tiresome and lacking in understanding is you, because you are not actually interested in having a dialogue but in winning a non-existent debate, or you can't tell the difference. When I discuss a problem from multiple points of view, you see that as "shifts around on the points you wish to make the most heat out of." I am not "making heat" out of points; things come up naturally in a discussion. But this is the position of me you settled on:
Your statements early in the thread posited that the equivalency between them would be more obvious to someone who could read Russian and Ukrainian and was seeking out those sources directly.
Never argued for any equivalency; I openly said that I was not about establishing equivalency or justifying anything.
The result being it likely matters little what our policies or intentions are, we are likely to repeat the mistakes of the past by doing more harm than good.
Never said any such thing about what we are likely to do. I gave no prescriptions.
With Russia being a nuclear power, the risk involved in a misstep is greater.
Finally, something accurate: yes I did say that I think this is the danger.
The US would probably do the most good by sitting this out and letting what's going to happen otherwise just happen as it will likely resolve itself in ways at least no more harmful than if we continued to support a prolonged war.
You completely made this up. Never said any of this.
So, out of your characterization of my position, you reflected only one thing that I actually wrote. I took you seriously from the beginning and responded sincerely, as well as in great depth, to everything you raised. You have ignored almost everything I have written in reply to issues
you have brought up—probably because you realized that you know little about a lot of the stuff you introduced into the discussion—you gradually dialed up the personal insults, the attempted "gotchas," the moral superiority ("you're just cynical"), and the attempted intellectual put down ("your naïve"). That's because you thought there was a debate, and you started reaching for the kinds of tactics that debaters use when they think they are losing.
I don't think you are succeeding because your argument is essentially born from cynicism towards the US.
What arguments? I keep saying what my problem is: I don't see what the overall goals of this are. It's a statement of my perception, and that perception has many parts that I have tried to explore with people who have responded to my posts. I have discussed all of this just fine with others.
That's not what you say you said and I'm putting you in a box so I can dismiss you. Alternatively, what you've expressed fits in the box of cynicism and all you've done when that was pointed out was protest and claim you are misunderstood by people conveniently fitting into the box you claim for them. Funny how that works.
In the characterization you posted that I just went through, almost all of it was pulled from somewhere other than my posts here. You ascribed to me positions I don't hold and statement I haven't made. Other than that Russia's nuclear status should give us pause, I have said literally none of these other things. You invented fictitious opinions and put them in the mind of fictitious Symmachus.
If putting me in a box weren't your objective, then it wouldn't matter whether or not I was cynical.
The canal issue turn out to not be about atrocities being committed against ethnic Russians but a rather obvious matter of cross border infrastructure. You protested that from multiple angles,
I discussed it from multiple angles, including the Russian one. You keep wanting to turn this into a gotcha by making this a debate wherein you are arguing that it is a straightforward issue that is completely legal, and I am arguing that it is an ethnically motivated attack by Ukrainians on Russians. I have never argued that and am not interested in that debate. I used it as an example of a phenomenon I was talking about.
including calling it cynical and positivist
I said your reduction of this to an issue of statute interpretation is cynical and positivist, which it is. It works for your debate, though.
and most recently dismissing the questions your own point raised as failing to attempt to understand how others view the propaganda being fed to them
No word-magic can make sense of this for me.
Apparently it was a feint to suggest there were actual Ukrainian atrocities involved there.
Again, it's a question of being able to look at multiple sides of an issue: "I can see why Russians look at that way" is the extent of the point. You have taken that to mean that I am the pro-Russian debater versus you, the pro-Ukrainian debater.
Or, given the discussion around it, you overreached and ended up falling back
This is literally the kind of language one uses to describe a debate, not a dialogue. You think I am having a debate with you; I thought I was having a discussion, which is my mistake, and that's the problem that confronts us. Look at Morley's exchange with me to see what a discussion looks like.
on the post-modern claim what mattered all along is just that ethnic Russians believe the Ukraine is out to rid the world of Russians.
It's hardly post-modern (yet another reference you don't understand but throw out anyway to impress your imagined audience watching you debate). Yes, I have shown how ethnic Russians take a real thing that has happened and is immoral (i.e. a choice to commit harm against innocent people for a strategic aim) and interpret it as an atrocity against them. I think Ukraine did it for the reasons they stated; one must do immoral things in war, but that doesn't make them moral just because the cause is just. I can see too why Ukrainians place their artillery in civilian areas. The only thing I draw from all that is that I am not going to let moral revulsion guide how I should understand what we are doing there, because one can find moral revulsion everywhere. That is not the same as moral equivalence. Moral equivalence requires tabulating moral revulsions, which I am not doing.
You know, banning their language, giving shelter to fascists, and playing all the tried and true hits.
Again, I have no idea where you are getting most of this from. I did mention the banning of Russian, which is a fact and would in other contexts be treated in our media as sub-genocidal. That is how many Russians view it, and I can understand why, given the other the ethnic discourse around Russians in Ukrainian media. Those too have obviously understandable roots. That doesn't assume a moral equivalency between Ukrainians responding to an invasion and Russian's making it; it does help to understand why this happening, which is what interests me more than being your debating partner.
I haven't said anything about "Giving shelter to fascists," either, but clearly you are now saying that I'm just parroting Russian propaganda—a debating tactic again.
Did you know one of your links, when chased down, ultimately led to a staged Russian IED attack that used cadavers to make grim claims the Ukrainians were targeting Russians in their borders before the invasion?
Again, you think I'm stealthily trying to argue that Ukrainians as just as bad as Russians. If that is what I were doing, this would be relevant. Since I'm not, it's not.
What matters isn't that Russia pulled a Gulf a Tonkin.
You keep making the mistake of introducing historical references which, when I take your bait and pursue them, end up making you look like a poseur. Here you go again...
What matters is the US clarify its long term, realistic aims to Symmachus
That kind of juvenile sarcasm is what happens when someone thinks they are losing a debate. Maybe you should just stop responding to me like an opponent in a debate.
who is totally not a dude whose world view is warmed over US skepticism having come of age in the Bush years and absorbed the attitude because we've failed to be moral on enough fronts we should shut up and stay home.
More juvenile skepticism, and this is a literal ad hominem—another debating tactic.
Once again, you just keep attributing things to me that aren't my position and are not matched in anything that I have said. When I came of age or what my attitudes might be register exactly 0 on the relevance scale. Your whole tack with me is equivalent to the response I would get if I were debating a linguistics point with John Gee: "Symmachus is ultimately not a believer and places secular evidence above spiritual knowledge, and that taints everything he has to say about the placement of accent in Egyptian verbs."
I'm not having a debate though. If you want to have a discussion with me, the only thing you need do is understand what I am saying, not who I am or when I reached majority. But that's not what you're interested in, and that's why you come off as not understanding anything. It took me some to figure it out, and that's my fault. I took you seriously and responded sincerely. But you decided when you jumped into this thread that you had
me all figured out, and since you have
me figured out, you don't need to bother trying to understand anything: knowing what category I fit in tells you which prepackaged cliches to use and what tricks to deploy. One after the other of these cliches and debating tricks just doesn't register, so you make grand statements that I start pursuing and show to be completely nonsensical, contradictory, or historically illiterate, so then you go back to the personality test you administered to me in your head to figure out what you think the most effective put-downs will be.
Can you pantomime being in a box for me, mouthamagician?
Not as well as you pantomime reading.
The fact that you ultimately just resorted to personal insults shows you that you are trying to win a debate. Consider yourself the winner if you wish; I don't care. I only wish that I had been as cynical as you need me to be for your little debate, because then I would have seen you for the intellectual poseur I suspected you to be and that you have been in this thread. A little cynicism on my part would have saved me a lot of time.
