-snip-
Fair enough, I overreacted a little bit. Still, I'm rather afraid of Republicans. I don't remember a
single good thing they did, and plenty of bad ones.
The West supported those revolutions because it benefited our power bloc, and for no other reason. Nobody in politics actually believes in this kind of rhetoric, which is why I've been so skeptical of your seriousness.
I'm pretty sure they do, actually, or else they wouldn't try implementing democratic systems in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. They could've done anything else, like set up a dictator, or just up and leave away after a few month, but they chose a democracy, and they chose the nation-building route, because as I see it, they do care about the spread of liberalism in the world. Not as much as one would hope they would be, but still.
It's also terrifying rhetoric. The rule of law isn't something to get abandoned for shits and giggles. America has, as a democracy, had a longer run of peaceful transfers of power than *anyone*. You don't piss away the most robust liberal political document and structure ever on the basis of your super-fuzzy, future-looking "survival, liberal justice, and Western Civilization" claims.
Unfortunately enough, USA has already pissed that away with electing Donald fucking Trump, whose understanding of Presidency appears to be on the level of an above-the-law-Emperor. Oh wait, it has been pissed away 8 years ago, when Republicans decided that "Nobama" was a good strategy and that politically-motivated obstructionism was a bigger priority than making the country work (government shutdown, anyone?). And really, the only reason why there were so many peaceful transfers of power was because the two parties were almost literally the same deal up until very recently:
Unfortunately, that has ended, so now there's a situation where you have a party that's clearly good and a party that's clearly evil. And there can not - should not - be any equal treatment of both good and evil.
In response to/agree-ance with @MetalSlimeHunt's last point, my question is, when did people start seeing the US as the Land of Moral High Ground? This is a country that has, at different points in history, used guerrilla warfare, promoted Imperialism, committed genocide on a scale you would think impossible, actively used overwhelming force to coerce other nations and groups into deals which lopsidedly benefitted the US, supported notorious terrorist and insurgent groups all over the world, and has invaded countries with no more pretext than to ensure their economic interests are safe.
Since it defeated the greatest international evil that has ever been unleashed on Earth, i.e. Communism, by forcing the countries which were ruled by said evil to spend too much on military and breaking their economies apart as a result, at the very least. Probably a few decades before that, too.
I suspect this might be short-lived thanks to Trump, but it's still good news.
In a post-truth world, it's much more accurate to say "it's still news I prefer" - after all, what is "good"?
Seriously though - that is not intended to bash that particular viewpoint - the whole notion of "good" is at the core of this whole political discussion in the first place. There is some group of people who think their ideas are "right" and "good" and some other group who thinks different (and often opposite) views are good.
The only laws of the universe are physics - and those don't have "good" ratings. So as much as some folks like to bash religions or the supernatural, at least those belief systems provide some system for defining "good" that is external to popular opinion or base physical laws. Hard as I might, I can't figure out how humanists or atheists or anyone else can rationally claim any justification for any moral stance - because the law of the universe is basically "strongest local force wins, and entropy, yo." There is no justification for saying "we should protect sapient beings" or "we should protect the environment" or "we should try and preserver the human race". Why? What's the point? Why is hurting other beings bad? Why is depleting the earth's resources bad? The universe doesn't care. Does the universe think there is a difference between a sapient race blowing itself up with nukes and that same civilization dying off because a comet hit their planet?
The way I see it - there are only a few logical paths: - you become something like a Nietzchian "the will to power" kind of person, which is "Whatever I can get away with is by definition right", or you end up in some kind of nihilism or "there is no point to anything" or you end up with "there is some kind of supernatural principle that defines good". I can't see any other stance as fundamentally logical. That isn't to say the supernatural approach is easy, because then you have the mess of figuring out which supernatural belief is the correct one - especially because by definition, the "supernatural" is not able to be pinned down by the scientific method.
The idea behind defining good is simple - anyone who doesn't believe in good, becomes irrelevant or simply dies out in the long-term, due to inherent inefficiency of evil behavior. That's why all societies of Earth have about the same understanding of good - and the ones who're deviant from the mainstream are backwards shitholes that are the first in a row to the chopping block.
It's not a fucking coincidence that most societies we think as evil have been either destroyed, collapsed on their own, or have been made thoroughly irrelevant through evil-induced economy failures, and the longest-surviving with continuous government, as well as the most successful by far in all areas, country on Earth, USA, is the one that is more good than everyone else.
Universe does care about good, even if it's not immediately obvious.
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Topic: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: T+0 (Read 1424989 times)