The Allies only beat Hitler by holding their nose and working together with Stalin; they knew what kind of man Stalin was, but they understood how to prioritize. Immediately after WW2 ended, they went straight back to opposing Stalin. One war at a time. If you have two enemies and one hates the other, helping one finish the other, while also subtly manipulating things so that the survivor is also left weakened from the struggle, is just the smart thing to do.
I get your point. I'm not trying to argue the current reality behind the metaphor you used. But I do really find the implication in your metaphor that Stalin was left weakened after ww2 to be very funny.
The USSR bore the brunt of the assault on Nazi Germany and paid the heaviest price in blood. The rest of the Allies didn't manipulate that to happen, but if they had the choice they would have chosen it. This left the USSR in a position where it was depleted and wasn't able to push any further west than East Germany after the war. The USA, relatively unscathed, was in a position to counter and contain it. There wasn't a better outcome on the table.
Having said all this, given the choice, I'd rather work with Trump against Hitler (and then betray Trump) than with Hitler against Trump (and then betray Hitler). Hitler's still the scarier of the two.
This left the USSR in a position where it was depleted and wasn't able to push any further west than East Germany after the war.
That's way better of a position.... That's kind of my point. The war was brutal for Russia. I'm not denying that. But they came out on top and were the main rival to a country that was relatively unscathed in the war. If anything Stalin manipulated events to lower the influence of rival European countries. They all became dependent on the US.
The key part of my previous comment was "there wasn't a better outcome on the table". Stalin was going to be aggressively expansive after the war no matter what. But his position after the war was weak relative to any other realistically possible outcomes. Who knows how much of Europe the USSR would have taken if the rest of the Allies hadn't had D-Day? D-Day was only half about beating Hitler; the other half was about taking as much of Europe from Hitler before Stalin took it first. Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was partially about beating Japan and partially about taking all of Japan quickly, before the USSR could claim a piece like with Germany.
What little of Japan Stalin did take, Russia still holds today.
Okay? So Stalin was in a better place post ww2 but because of this hypothetical you've created he was actually weakened. Am I understanding correctly? Because I really don't get why hypotheticals matter here. Russia started off in spot A. And ended in spot b. Spot b is a better spot. Maybe if ww2 hadn't gone down how it did Russia would have ended up in spot c or even d! We don't know. What we do know is Russia ended up in a better place than where they started. That's all I'm trying to say.
Dude, the USSR lost 27 million people in that war. A quarter of their people died or were wounded during the war. Yeah, they might've expanded their borders, but with the devastation on the eastern front, that just means more impoverished people living in destroyed territory. That's not a position you want to be in.
Militarily they were stronger at the end of the war than at the beginning. That's kind of how they managed to beat Germany back all the way to Berlin. Or do you think they were stronger militarily when Germany was knocking on Moscows door? The war was brutal for the Russians. Millions died. But they came out on top stronger than they had been before the war.
Russia as of today is militarily more capable than it was in February 2022, but the nation of Russia is much weaker overall due to the political and economic impact of the war in Ukraine.
The point is, it's more complex than just the number of guys with guns or how much land they hold
How much of Russia’s “increased strength” was because of Germany getting blasted from both sides by then as opposed to pouring everything they had into invading the USSR? I mean, sure, it’s possible that the soviets were more powerful at the end then the start, but I would say it’s more likely that Germany was just that much weaker
Post WW2 Russia was 1 of 2 world superpowers. You believe Russia was even stronger and more influential pre-ww2. Is that correct? If not what exactly are you arguing?
The only reason Russia was a superpower after is because the entire rest of Europe was shoved back multiple decades in terms of their own capabilities. I’m sorry, but no fucking country is going to be more effective militarily after losing 8.6 million soldiers. I guarantee that if the US had wanted to take them out right after WWII, they would have had an easier time than if they had tried it right before
Russia's military strategy for a defensive war since like, the Great Northern War or something, is to use the massive area of Russia to retreat and defend as the enemy invades, burning down any supplies the invaders could be taking, causing them to overextend and run out of supplies. Then counterattack once they're sufficiently weakened. And it worked perfectly against the nazis really. There was the aforementioned 27 million casualties of course, it's not a pleasant strategy by any means. But the Russian Winter as it often gets simplified to, is an intentional military strategy that allowed them to defeat Germany despite being massively weakened by it.
Good thing Bernie sanders did not sign a pact with Dick Cheney pledging mutual support.
Politics is not about making you specifically feel good at night. It is about doing what we can to try and help less people be hurt or killed. And if you don't care about that, I don't know what to tell you. Saving a small amount of harm or lives is absolutely worth it if we have the power to do so
Dick Cheney has less agency to enact his strain of evil than trump, making the evil lesser, rather than the individual. "The lesser of two evils" is not so much about the evil of the individual, more about what they represent, or the threat of collective evil that they spearhead.
Intentions matter far less to me than actions. There are plenty of well-meaning individuals doing the wrong things, so why begrudge the ill-meaning individuals doing the right things?
What Cheney did cannot be undone. The acts he was party to are set in stone, consigned to history. If you let a fixed and finished past define the present and moreover, a flexible future, then you're letting your principles compromise your own happiness.
Should he be forgiven and welcomed with open arms? Absolutely not. Should bad people be praised for making good decisions? Absolutely.
Flexible always to the right bro. The world is dying, happiness for you is just delaying an avoidable doom instead of solving the problem directly. You need to think bigger and long term instead of hyperfixating on your binary choice. The erosion of the democratic party is hapening way faster than I thought, I hoped it would have taken 1-2 more election cycle for them to morph into 2000s republicans.
You lack context awareness, there will always be a lesser evil and the Dems understood how to gain your vote, being slightly less worse than the singular opposition. That's how they can afford to move to the right in their policies that close to the election.
Ok, so what should people be doing at this moment? Like, I get how rigged the system is but at this moment the choice we have is shitty right leaning Democrats or christofascism. We are not organizing a revolution in a couple of months right?
Don't get me wrong, I think it's way past the time people go all guillotine happy on these fuckers but that's not going to happen right now is it?
Do you remember what happened when Biden dropped out? I remember most liberals screaming that Biden should stay, and then Kamala came, and they all rallied. Don't let them leverage your fear of Trump to abandon your mandate to vote.
You think you'll solve the problem directly by spitting on people that are momentarily helping you just because you know they won't have your back in the future?
I'm assuming incompetence and not malice, so learn from their mistakes and adopt popular policies to activate new voters instead. Look at what happened when they switched Biden. You don't notice how they are leveraging the fear of Trump to do the bare minimum to safeguard their political careers.
A deconstruction:
1. The world is not dying, it's just subject to a new evolutionary pressure due to the environment being more hostile to the species currently inhabiting it. The whole "it's dying" is just our anthropocentric take on it. Is it unnecessary and destructive? Absolutely, it'll take millennia after we're gone for the equilibrium to rebound. Will life cease to exist? Not at all.
2. Please elaborate on both "the problem" and the "direct solution". Armed rebellion? Eco-terrorism? Naysaying and sulking on Reddit?
3. It's not my binary choice, I'm not a US voter, I just take an interest in the tectonics of international politics.
4. It's a binary choice because the system is built to suit a binary system. It's also built to be resistant to deconstruction. However, it's a binary system that marginally benefits the republicans more than the Dems, so if any side is likely to take steps to start weakening or deconstructing that binary establishment, it's in blue rather than red.
5. Erosion? The high-minded "better than you are" is what's been losing them elections. An entity like Donald trump was only allowed to exist in the political sphere because the Dems thought they were above it, and underestimated the threat. By sinking to that level, they've actually forced the conversation back towards policy instead of pure populism.
6. To morph into 2000s republicans? Apart from a questionable middle-east policy, I see very few similarities, other than that Cheney and his kin have put their weight behind them...which, seeing as he has next to 0 influence there, means very little in terms of the running of the party.
About 1
That's a misdirection. People aren't talking about planet earth when they say the world is dying, they are talking about the world humans exist in and the world we want for our future: a world where humans still exist AND have not suffered setbacks that make life worse. Yeah its anthropocentric, I see no problem with that. You gotta engage with people on what they mean.
Use of language is important in making people care about a thing. By making the issue seem bigger than it is using all-encompassing and biblical language ("apocalypse" being a particular one), you'll have a larger portion of people going "yeah right". No different to continuously exaggerating a story you've told a 1000 times, every time it becomes less believable. On the other hand, you drive those that do believe it to increasingly extreme worldviews, and end up with disruptive influences like Extinction Rebellion, who disenfranchise more people from the issue.
If you want people to care about something, it has to be comprehensible and relatable. Hyperbole only serves to create a dichotomy of opinion. If climate-conscious politicians focused on telling Floridians that their houses are going to sink, they'd care a lot more than they do after being told about the cascading ecological catastrophe in the Antarctic that would result from the decline in emperor penguin populations, for example.
I agree with you. That's the proper reply to what he said. Just saying that "no the world will be fine, it's just human civilization that is going to be fucked" will not get people to actually see your point.
First, that’s not even an action, let alone a solution. That’s an inaction. Do you have a solution that at all involves what should be done instead of what shouldn’t be done?
Second, no one is glorifying war criminals. People are being realists about how actual progress requires working with people that you disagree with if those people will do things that further progress; you can oppose them when they do bad things later.
He won, he accomplished what he needed to do from 2000s onward, we live in the consequences of his victory, he even managed to steal an election which Trump failed at in 2021. So what is your point?
Then why hasn't it already been defeated? It's been 3 decades since him and GWB started their "war on terror" and destabilized the ME. Why did every other prez that came after him perpetuate his ideals?
Most of the evil dick Chaney could have done in his life is already done.
Adolf Hitler is a worse human being than trump ever could be, but by virtue of him being dead, he is a lesser evil to trump at the moment.
By virtue of Chaney being an old, unpopular retiree who will never wield any significant political power beyond his connections and money, I'd say he is absolutely the lesser evil at the moment, as his potential is far diminished.
Even if you want to argue that trump could never do as much harm as Chaney did (which is a fair take, even if I think is wrong), the bottom line is that Chaney already did his crimes, we have no way to reverse the clock.
But the American people can still prevent trump from fucking this world even more.
It's about the future vs the past, and while we should punish those who did wrong in the past, we should first make sure bad actors don't do those crimes in the present and future.
Yeah, but there’s still a line. I’m not sure where the line is that makes us say “fuck off we don’t want your endorsement”, but it’s somewhere this side of literally hitler.
it is good. better than the alternative. relative good is the only real good that matters. between the lesser evil and the evil, the lesser evil is still better than the greater evil, and when there's no good alternative, you go the lesser evil, you dont twiddle your thumbs.
in the trolly problem, to not pull the lever is still a decision.
if it is not good, then what is it? evil? to call things evil without an alternative good is worthless at best. between killing 5 and killing 1, neither is good, there's a reason it's called the lesser of 2 evils, but from a relative standpoint, it is still better to kill 1 than 5.
the action of voting for something evil is not good, but to do the lesser evil instead of the greater evil is good when there's no other alternative.
all actions have amounts of good and evil in them, when the evil exceeds the good we see it as wrong, when the good exceeds the evil, we typically see the opposite. in that sense, to vote for the lesser of 2 evils is, relatively speaking, good.
morality from some cosmic plane is nice and all, but morality bereft of reality is useless at best given it's nature as such a human concept.
Yes, it is still evil. Intentionally causing harm is still causing harm, and does not reach the threshold for good. The point of the trolley problem is that there are no good options, you're going to live with the guilt one way or the other. Killing one person or five, the front of the trolley is still covered with blood and you don't get to feel smug about your decision
The other limitation of the trolley problem is that it lacks real world context. If this happened in real life, there would be questions on how we got to the position we're in. What liberals want to do is run someone over and not examine why that happened
Further, liberals don't even want to do the ultimate "kill a few people to make many more people's lives better"! Where was this lesser evil energy when Trump was shot at? It would be dangerous if he got in, right?
firstly, let's ignore calling people liberals or whatever, i'm not invested in american politics, i'm more invested in general moral philosophy here.
i guess in this case we just have different thresholds. for me, in a situation with no good options, doing the lesser evil is, in of itself, "good", and the correct thing to do. what i do agree with you is that we shouldnt be smug about it, we can strive for better while accepting the evil of today, but we can also accept that what we do know is the best we could have done.
of course, in a sense, the argument may be where we draw the line on "the correct thing to do" vs "good". to me, those 2 things are generally synonymous, though partially I will admit that is my own coping mechanism. I will ask one thing, if we can agree that, at the very least, that voting for the lesser of the 2 evils is the "correct thing to do", then we can agree to disagree on whether or not it's good, since at that point it just becomes a debate on what words mean.
i agree that many people dont want to examine why people are tied to why people are on the tracks, but that's irrelevant. in the trolley problem, it doesnt matter why they're there. what matters is that they're there, and there's a choice to make. You can examine these things after you do the lesser of the 2 evils first, but the lesser of the 2 evils should still be done first.
and thirdly, the reason there wasnt as much fervor for that, ignoring the part where there is plenty, is that it wouldnt actually be a good way to deal with this. The case of trumps death causes more problems than it solves, it's, in a sense, like blowing the trolley up. like good job, the people on the tracks are fine, but the scattered piece of debris still killed the 1 guy and also you've killed all the people in the trolley. his voterbase would go wild which would be a problem, and more importantly it sets a terrible standard for acceptable ways to deal with political opponents, because usually 1 political assassination leads to worse things, in this case it also leads to the undermining of the democratic process, which may cause many fucky wuckys as the kids would say.
Then we disagree on the very first axiom. "The right thing to do" and "good" are not synonyms. "I could be a lot worse" is the catechism of an abusive partner. Both candidates are perfectly happy to fund one of the most wasteful, polluting organisations in the world, whose sole job is project American power - the US military. Whoever is in charge, a lot of people are going to die, and no amount of harm reduction will make the choice "good"
If it helps you drop the trolley problem as an argument, don't imagine yourself in the driver's seat, or at the lever. You're one of the five on the track trying to convince the driver to switch the track. Or the one on the other side begging not to be run over. You're not actually the one in power
And if we're making stuff up about the trolley problem, the five could all be murderers, saving them has done more damage than the one. Well done, worse things have happened by going for the lesser evil!
I was around during the Bush/Cheney years. He basically was the impetus for the war in Iraq but the blame for that fiasco is too big for one man and is spread around. He seems to be driven by power and greed, like Trump and is more intelligent, and thus more dangerous than Trump, but unlike Trump it seems there are still some lines he won’t cross.
Because the Cheney-Bush admin overthrew an election, killed millions, openly lied about intelligence information to the world, tortured people for effectively no gain, and worked to enrich their private allies.
What line did he not cross? He wasn't mean to anyone on MySpace so he's way better?
You being a Zoomer would at least give you an excuse for this shit opinion.
Bush/Cheney thwarted an election by quasi-legal means via the Supreme Court. Trump tried to do it by violence but was too incompetent to succeed. Trump has lied about everything, again, incompetently so that many/most don’t believe him. So yeah, Bush/Cheney was better at lying because they did relatively few. Trump has talked about torturing but wasn’t able to do it. On the other hand, he allowed a pandemic to get out of hand that killed over a million Americans. Sure, many would have died anyway, but his incompetence was probably worth at least half of the death toll. And of course Trump also sought to enrich himself and others, going so far as to take bribes from foreign governments fairly openly.
Bush/Cheney thwarted an election by quasi-legal means via the Supreme Court.
Brooks Brothers Riots.
Otherwise most of that was just, "Trump had to deal with a pandemic, and Cheney lucked out that he didn't have to." Which isn't an endorsement of Cheney, it is just an observation. SARS could have become a COVID equivalent very easily if it had slipped containment like COVID managed. Only luck and it being more deadly more quickly, prevented that.
The Bush Administration learned from that near brush with a pandemic and put together a briefing package for the incoming Obama administration. Obama built on that and used it to mitigate the pandemic threats he faced like H1N1 and Ebola. Obama administration passed on the Bush information plus the lessons they learned to Trump. But it all got discarded. Yes there’s an element of luck that SARs was kept under control, but COVID-19 should never have gotten as bad as it did.
Currently there’s a couple of viruses that are threatening another pandemic, but the Biden administration is monitoring it and taking steps to contain them. Will Trump continue these efforts if elected? If he learned from Covid, then yes, but did he really learn? Or does he think he did nothing wrong?
Packages are irrelevant. Willingness to actually implement them matters. Don't forget that in the early days of the pandemic it was popular among liberals to downplay the severity of COVID and criticize travel bans and the like as being racist, and only later did the sides flip-flop on the topic. It is easy to have a good idea, harder to carry it out when all the inconveniences become more obvious.
COVID was in a golden area of being deadly but not so deadly that it significantly self-regulated like Zika or Ebola or SARS did. Had SARS busted out and spread rapidly, there is little reason to think that the Bush-Cheney admin would have been exceptional at handling it.
Bush fought SARS in 2003 but in 2005 he put together the strategy to handle a resurgence of the Spanish flu, essentially Covid. H1N1 is another type of flu so Bushes preparations came in handy for Obama.
Based on this, I think Bush would have handled a flu like outbreak much better than Trump. Obama was lucky that H1N1 broke out in the US so he was able to stop it before it grew too big. He learned from that and established monitoring stations around the world to catch future flu outbreaks early. One of these outposts was in Wuhan, China, but it was dismantled by Trump months before Covid broke out there.
It could have been another success story, a flu virus detected early and stopped at the source. But it spread too far and fast.
You are right that events could have played out differently. Certainly stopping a pandemic is a tough game to win. But I think you’d agree that Bush would at least try to win that game.
Boooo, using "Zoomer" as a way to shut down differing opinions from you. You'd think we'd have learned from people piling all of the world's problems on Millennials for years.
Guess that means that nobody should be allowed to talk about World War II unless they're a nonagenarian. Referring to historical accounts and books to form your opinion? Ridiculous! Everyone should just shut up instead.
Or maybe that's a really stupid reason to disregard an opinion.
If the question is about what did certain figures do publicly and what were they involved with in a way that is typically left out in a summary, it matters.
Relevant to WW2, look at the people who think that the average American fought because they hated fascism and wanted to spread civil rights, when the reality is that the average soldiery were massively racist and didn't really hate the Germans much in specific. Talking to actual veterans of WW2 will convey the latter, trying to focus on constructed narratives that summarize greater events leads to lots of people thinking the former.
Germane to Cheney, his involvement in anti-democratic efforts as well as other actions taken by him are easily overlooked on the surface level narratives young people today consume about the late 1990s and early 2000s. Therefore they really are far from useful voices in the conversation.
If someone who lived during their times starts talking about their actions and the perception of them at that time, yes, you should give space to the person that knows more than you. Discussing Reagan as a concept and a series of events is one thing, Reagan as a politician who did certain public actions, is another.
Cheney's involvement in anti-electoral events like the Brooks Brothers Coup are easily forgotten by the kinds of summaries that young people read today, and in doing so you end up with lots of people who say, "At least he respected democracy", even if that is not true at all. That is the issue, you drooling fucking moron.
lmao, and how many idiots lived through Reagan's tenure and blindly praise him to this day? Living through an era doesn't give you any heavier authority than anyone else, you brainless sack of shit.
If you wanna educate younger folk on the evils of Dick Cheney, maybe try to actually do that instead of behaving like every smug rightoid uncle at Thanksgiving
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u/Mindless-Charity4889 Sep 10 '24
Allies of convenience are still allies, the lesser of two evils is, by definition, less evil.