Bloodless Coup

I haven't followed this much at all b/c of "B". That's so simplistic and immediately recognizeable as an inadequate explanation that, well, I have too much else to read that looks more promising (in terms of what's likely to actually make deep insights).

I wonder if some of these attacks though have something to do with the authors and nothing whatsoever to do with this paper. As surely a few of the bigger brains on the right might remember these guys wrote a very strong piece from the Realist perspective on why the US shouldn't go to war in Iraq before our March 2003 invasion. No that it's looking like those who opposed invasion were "right", well, perhaps this is an underhanded way to cut the legs out from under anyone using that paper now to show that Bush etc. were blind to perfectly obvious points, and acted against the national interest in choosing to go to war when they did.

I find this whole thing interesting, especially as I pointed out over at the thread on this over at Mikevotes' place, this is precisely the argument people use to explain the grip of "Miami" on foreign policy, and people rarely get even half as bent as they are about Israel.

And Armand, I believe your are talking about this? But since the original letter site is down, see Roger Payne.

Regarding the "Mearsheimer and Walt" article, I would like to add my two bits. It may sound unsophisticated and naive to even mention this but no one seems interested in the ethical considerations regarding the arab/Israeli relationship. The arabs have attacked the Israelis on three different occasions. They have an ongoing commitment to destroy the Israeli people. On a personal legal basis in the U.S. this is a criminal offense. Likewise the British have now prosecuted an Imam for encouraging the murder of westerners and their supporters. In contrast, the Israelis have shown an admirable restraint in response,considering their possession of nuclear weapons(with credit to the U.S. government for encouraging and supporting this policy). If the positions were reverse Israel wouldn't last a day. So any reasonable person would conclude that the Israelis hold the high moral ground.
But all nations currently look to their own interests regardless of these ethical considerations, as we see every day with respect to even so-called friendly western governments.
But I believe that ultimately all nations will have to deal fairly and ethically with all others countries if ever there is to be any peace on earth. It will undoubtedely take decades of murder and mayhem before the world finally learns this lesson.

We really should never listen to the realists. After all, if we did, we would not be involved in this wonderful war in Iraq.

Why can't supporters of Israel simply make the case for Israel? Instead, they rely on attack, smear, and invective. effectively making Mearhseimer's and Walt's point. Are they afraid of even opening the discussion on the US?Israel relationship?

And therein lies the rub:

But I believe that ultimately all nations will have to deal fairly and ethically with all others countries if ever there is to be any peace on earth

You realize, of course, that realists don't believe in fairness, ethics, or peace on earth as goals of nation-states?

And Realist, if you read that link I put in above, you'll see that there were a good number of realists who opposed the war in Iraq.

Of course, you might be being sarcastic, and already recognize that, and I am just too tired to catch it. At least I hope so.

Mr. Backus,

Morals and ethics have nothing to do with the realists position; I thought I made that clear.

I suppose what is unclear (and this is my fault) is to note that "realism" (as well as most other theories in international relations) seeks to explain why states take certain actions (and fail to take other actions), and makes absolutely no attempt to explain what states should do. In other words, realists argue that they can explain all of the history of states through power relations and power interactions; realists (like Mearsheimer and Walt) use "auxilliary theories" (theories that aren't realist, but seek to explain away things that realism can't) to fill in the holes that realism can't.

I'm not arguing about what the moral course of action is (I would argue, in that vein, that no President has been moral, and the most moral President (Carter) has been the most vilified), but trying to showcase the limits of realism to effectively explain anything, including poodles.

Realist, to echo binky's point, the theory called "realism" actually would argue against the invasion of Iraq (given that it has no WMD); Mearsheimer and Walt did exactly that three years ago.As for why supporters rely on "attack, smear, and invective", I'm not sure I agree with that premise. Israel is the only functional democracy with rights/western-values in the region. Supporters can often argue real benefits to a relationship between the US and Israel. That is less so today than it was decades ago, but not completely illogical.

Uh, fucntional democracy for some people. Doesn't Israel always get a 10 in the Polity score? It always strikes me as strange that they manage that (read all the way to the bottom).

Well, yeah, these guys and most of the Realist foreign policy establishment (and of course lots of major IR scholars who aren't Realists) signed on to that letter and/or thought going to war in March 2003 was a bad idea.

But I was talking about their piece "An Unnecessary War" that ran in the January/February 2003 issue of Foreign Policy:

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/bush/walt.htm

Btw, that's got a Condi line from 2000 that shows how different her views were then.

Excellent piece. I agree with both of your points -- it's a dumbass paper, and it isn't a lefty one. One quibble: Instapundit hasn't commented on this that I can find except to note in passing that David Duke was speaking out in support of the analysis, which would not seem to support your contention. (I don't read the others.) Reynolds really isn't a righty -- he's a pro-war small-l libertarian technogeek. He's only sporadically capable of a non-superficial analysis, but sometimes he makes a good point. His new book is probably worth reading.

If you tell me insty's new book is worth reading, I'll give it a try (it does look interesting). However, I'll wait for your review before attempting it.

It's en route to me from AMZN, but it'll probably be a few weeks until I get to it. I'll let you know. Did you read Ray Kurzweil's singularity book?

Baltar,
It seems your original post is simply confusion about why these realists are seen as left wingers by right wingers, when to you realists are the ultimate in callous, cold hearted decision makers, so they should be right wingers. Think about it in terms of a relationship with money and perception of evil. Liberals believe if money is left in its natural state, it will be scooped up and kept from the poor by the rich (Republicans). This is evil to liberals, so they crusade against it with everything from social programs to minimum wage laws to socialism. Of course, this doesn't work too well because even socialists don't like being poor, so the corruption returns, and now it's woven into the fabric of the state, and the state is stamped with the values of being best for equality and justice, even though it often claims amorality. This claim of amorality, that can show up as banning religion, is probably why right wingers see such amorality as leftist. Of course, liberals don't understand this because they think if right wingers were truly moral they would be struggling for social justice through state redistribution of funds. Since they don't, leftists see right wingers as corrupt and essentially amoral, without consideration for the poor, when in fact right wingers believe that it is a sense of entitlement resutling from a state's enabling behavior that is the reason people are poor. This is obvious today in that the less than 5% who are unemployed as well as their liberal commiserators bitch about the "Bush economy," and so do the ones who work for minimum wage because they believe they are entitled to a plasma TV, which they can't afford. A right winger in that same situation would ideally place the responsibility for getting a better job on himself or herself, not on a failure of the system. Hence, from such a world view, Bush does not suck, Bush has provided economic opportunities for 19 of 20 people despite the economy being in a recession when he took office, the stock market being overvalued, and 9/11. The key word here is opportunity, because a true liberal would place the responsibility for their having a job with the system, with Bush. They would think they deserve a job, where a right winger thinks even in a bad economy they deserve the opportunity to find one. To right wingers, the natural state of things is just that becomes unjust when the state messes around with it, to liberals it's the opposite.

You are so presumptuous and arrogant (not to mention wrong) sometimes that it's a little hard to get my head around it. You start with one presumption, and then all this offended and put-out nonsense just cascades out of you.

It must be an amazing power to know what all the rest of us think. And who knew that even though there are close to 300 million Americans, we all apparently think one of two things?

Morris, you are projecting. Rather than callous and cold-hearted, you might note that the way we describe realists is much more consistent with something like, oh, rational actor.

As for "so they should be right wingers," you must have missed the factual reference: the main realist in question (and quite a few others) are known to be republicans. It's not some made up fantasy. Baltar was refuting the idea that the guy is a flaming commie, because, he is, in fact, a [edit] conservative.

"Liberals believe if money is left in its natural state, it will be scooped up and kept from the poor by the rich (Republicans)."

and here i was thinking it had been a while since you had gone completely off the deep end.

in it's natural state? like, for example, pouring out of the treasure to bail out corporations the free market can't sustain? like, for example, lining CEO's pockets so they can fiddle it with one hand while their other hand signs massive layoffs and letters to the government asking them to bail them out of their contractual pension commitments? like, for example, financing a pointless war for enough money to radically retool auto manufacture and power generation in a way that would radically reduce both our dependence on foreign oil and our heedless damage to the environment (with enough left over to pay teachers as much as, i don't know, they need to own a home in their school districts)?

money in its natural state is value neutral, morris. there's nothing value neutral about the right wing's priorities and hypocrisy when it comes to money. it's not the natural state that the left worries about, but the incessant, transparent mismanagement and self-dealing that goes on when contemporary republicans have power.

i'll take egalitarian goals with attendant bureacratic inefficiency over upward redistribution (ironically called "trickle down") any day.

Binky,
My apologies. Far be it for me to presume that just because you have to edit yourself when describing conservatives, that you could possibly think of them as callous and cold hearted, as my brother does (he's mocked that conservatives are actually compassionate). To be purely ratinal is in fact to be cold hearted and callous, because pure reason is without emotion or value. I wasn't refuting the position he held as being one possible for a right winger because as my last sentence says, "To right wingers, the natural state of things is just...." I was attempting to alleviate Baltar's confusion regarding how it is possible for one right winger to see another right winger as a leftist because they equate amorality with communism (as I said above, via banning religion as happened in the Soviet Socialist Republic). And don't get too caught up in labeling projecting, unless you're willing to figure out how anyone would use anything but their own past experiences and state of mind to understand their own present experience.
Bro,
What would be amazing is if you could show me how to use words like "conservative" and "liberal" and "right wing" and "left wing" without presuming to know what other people think. Unless you become a conservative, how do you know what and how conservatives think, unless you're a mind reader. I'm sure there is some conservative somewhere who disagrees with every policy position and attitude you ascribe to conservatives, just as there's some liberal who disagrees with my take on liberalism. This is a problem with language more than a problem with reading minds.

so e.g. you can only talk about existentialism, or identify with it, if you have a window into the subjective mindstates of existentialists? better call philosophy departments around the world, because they've been getting it wrong for quite a while.

what a bizarre proposition: one can only subscribe to a philosophy by identifying with the peculiar brainstates of its adherents.

as for conservatism, you're right and armand's wrong -- conservatism is compassionate. the problem isn't its lack of compassion, but rather the fact that it reserves its greatest compassion for those who need it least.

Moon's theoretical response to Morris's assertion is of course correct.

Morris which bit of the things I mocked is it that you don't find callous and cold-hearted? In the links you reference I was discussing particular behaviors - are some of those more cuddly than I realized? They strike me as callous. And they were advocated by conservatives, and in some cases by conservatives who'd repeatedly advertised themselves as compassionate individuals.

Hah, good. Glad to see you are exercising your "jackass" muscles. I edited out "GOP member" and replaced it with conservative - and then tried to conceal my dastardly move by GASP! drawing your attention to the fact that I had indeed edited by GASP! inserting an edit tag to GASP! show where I had edited - because I was referencing what Baltar said and I realized that he had called Mearscheimer "right of center" and not "GOP member."

Regarding projection... I can't help it if your state of mind leads you to persist in a delusion about supposed persecution of "callous cold" scholars. It's really a pity that whatever liberal it was who kicked your ass in your past experience, leads you to constantly feel the need to keep attacking him (her?) with us as the proxy.

You enjoy it though. Have fun now. Buh-bye!

[EDIT]Oh, wait, one more thing. Moon, I think part of the thing the is too difficult for Morris to grasp here is that the overlapping sets "realist" and "conservative" are not identical. Some prominent realists are conservatives (and we've been talking about one above). Even if the majority of realists are conservatives, or, a better description would likely be hawkish, that doesn't necessarily mean they are all republican partisans though some (many?) might be (or given the climate, might have been). There is no way that most conservatives (in the general sense) or republicans are realists. Most of them, most members of the population in general, don't even know what realists are.

but wait, i thought everyone, intellectual, man on the street, could be reliably identified either as liberal or conservative and respectively villified or praised accordingly. this is all way too complicated for me. ;-)

Moon,
Maybe my point was too subtle. Unless my brother and I have a similar understanding on what it means to be a conservative, unless I have some idea what he thinks it means to be a conservative, there's no discourse because I might as well be talking about rocks (no jokes). Unless the idea of conservative that I hold and the idea of conservative that he holds mesh in some ways, there's no connection in the argument. Now, it's true that my idea of what it means to be a rock and my Bro's may be two separate things, one sedimentary and the other igneus, one black and smooth the other grey and bumpy. But he and I can talk about rocks without limiting ourselves to that particular rock, even though those particular rocks are what springs to mind for each of us when we hear the word rock. That is to say, our ideas can incorporate many different ideas, our idea of rock can be very differentiated. Yet without some generalized concept, I'm talking about conservatives (albeit if I want to talk in detail I will talk about my idea of a conservative, with its details, and not someone else's, obviously) and my brother's talking about rocks. Our experience of the world is by its nature subjective (my brother and I's differences provide quite a demonstration of that). The point is that whenever anyone speaks, there is going to be a level of presumption about meanings of words that may be different from the presumptions of another, such as the word huevos in spanish, which can mean eggs or something else entirely. This is why decorators have to deal with 50 different names for blue or green, because one person's blue is not another person's blue. To put it another way, can you accurately judge what kind of conservative a conservative is if you haven't walked a mile in his moccasins? And if you can't, is it worthwile to nonetheless engage in discourse when some assumptions will inevitable be mistaken regarding some conservatives? No and yes. And presumptuous or not, you may note that your last response fits in with perception of liberals I described above.
To your above post, money in its natural state may in fact be value neutral, but it is perceived by liberals as evil and it is perceived by conservatives as good. I agree a hundred percent that these values are a result of their systems of thought.

Why do you think liberals think money is evil? What, you think all liberals want to go back to the barter system?

Something about those liberals, ("perceived by liberals as evil")... I think I know who their mother is.

Bro,
If a compassionate person saw a spider, what would they do? Do they fill their heart with love and let the spider go on and poison the next person along its path who doesn't see it, or do they stomp it quickly as a means of protecting others from that poison? Both of these acts are conservative from a certain point of view, and both are ruthless from a certain point of view. Why do you choose to look at them as ruthless when you have another option? I've known someone going through chemo, so I support medicinal marijuana based on that experience. But if I hadn't had that experience, I might support banning it because there's already such a mixed message sent to young people about marijuana, and most users don't grow up to be President. I have a very bright friend from my high school days who could be contributing a great deal to our world, but he prefers to sit around and smoke pot. From that perspective, it would be better to ban even medicinal marijuana so that people like him might see it as more clear cut and not try it in the first place. You can choose to see compassion in the actions of others, or you can choose not to. Compassion, too, is in the eye of the beholder.
Binky,
My point above is that you need to learn to see through the psychoanalytic projection idea. There's absolutely no error free, observable way to tell what a person's motivation at a given moment is. It makes sense that the way most people perceive the world, that is to say filtered through a thought system that was based on a past (cognitive or affective) experience, is what the psychoanalytics would call transference. How do you make decisions? Where did you learn that? If you learned any part of it (even the words with which you'd describe it)anytime besides this moment, then according to the psychoanalysts, that's transference. They believe in solving problems by coming to understand what's behind them, what I'd call the ego defense mechanism of intellectualizing. Everybody engages in transference all the time, and the idea that a person can and should somehow wash away their past influences is nihilistic. But it does make the psychoanalysts a lot of money. Of course, someone like Freud prone to cocaine use and insulting his genius friends after they died is someone we should really look to as a wellspring of human wisdom.

You're absolutely right.

There's absolutely no error free, observable way to tell what a person's motivation at a given moment

Which is why I generally just assume you are here to stir shit. It's a lot easier.

:P

Bro,
That's not what I said. Liberals perceive the rich having money as evil, they perceive the poor having money as good. Conservatives would be more likely to perceive money in the hands of those who worked it as good, and money in the hands of those who didn't do anything for it as bad. Of course, this is just one popular kind of conservatism, and one with which I'd disagree because of those value attachments. I know you may not agree with applying the value attachments either, so think of it this way: what makes you angrier, a rich person (but not John Edwards) getting a tax refund or a poor person getting entitlements? Most liberals would be angrier about the rich one (because the poor one continues to suffer and the rich one doesn't need more money), most conservatives angrier about the poor one (because the rich one earned his money by working).

These are two entirely different things, and you've provided support for neither one:

money in its natural state may in fact be value neutral, but it is perceived by liberals as evil and it is perceived by conservatives as good

Liberals perceive the rich having money as evil, they perceive the poor having money as good

And, I might add, what in hell does any of this have to do with Mearscheimer?

1) Binky responded to you Mo, not me.
2) Why do you assume all rich people "earned" their money?
3) You are rewording what you said above - above you said liberals saw money as evil, and that's just silly.
4) Medicinal marijuana IS illegal in most of the country, so what the hell does that have to do with anything?
5) And even in your completely subjective universe (when it comes to language, when it comes to right and morality you tend to see things much less subjectively), how in the hell is this line (which you reference above as something I'm unfairly calling callous) - "An assault against a homosexual is no more a crime than an assault against an elderly person" - compassionate.

And sure, why are we discussing this in this thread?

"To your above post, money in its natural state may in fact be value neutral, but it is perceived by liberals as evil and it is perceived by conservatives as good. "

hey wittgenstein, i'm liberal, and i don't perceive money as evil.

"Maybe my point was too subtle."

doubt it. incoherent, more likely, or nihilistic relativist tripe.

i'm content when rich people have money, in some sense i am one and i like my money (though i look better off on paper than i feel), as long as they're content (and i am) to repay the country with a share of said income proportionate to the riches this country has enabled them to gather (or, just as often, someone two generations ago in their family to gather) so that, in turn, our government can help out the less fortunate in direct proportion to their importance to all those rich people. somebody's got to work to make something consumable out of all that capital, and insofar as capitalism appears to require that the lower quartile of the populace get pissed on, i think it's those who benefit most who should pay for the umbrellas.

in short, money isn't evil and rich people aren't evil. rich people who hoard every penny in defiance of the trivial proposition that without poor people they'd have none, now they are evil. and poor people who are fooled into voting for rich people who hold poor people in contempt, well, they just make me sad.

My subtle comment was a bit of sarcastic, self deprecating humor. I did not say "money is perceived by liberals as evil," I said "money in its natural state," the idea of a capitalistic system that does not redistribute money, or as Moon would say umbrellas (why does the image of Wile. E. Coyote come to mind?) to the poor. The original thread's content may appear to have drifted, but the original post's first point regarded confusion as to how realists can appear as leftists:
"1. Realists don't make good left-wing-squishy-fruitballs. Before you call someone any form of "lefty", see if they really are one."
Bro,
I don't assume all rich people earned their money. Most conservatives do see a direct relationship between work and money, at some point. That is, maybe it wasn't you that worked, but if you have money because your father worked, then it should be yours because you inherit what your father worked for. Money is in such a way viewed as grace earned by personal effort, and in this way has value. Money received without work doesn't fit, in the mind of many conservatives, because money is supposed to come about from work (of course not limited to physical labor, land speculation etc. could also be seen as personal effort). To give someone money if they didn't work for it creates disorder in an orderly system.
On the other hand, liberals see disorder as coming from the the rich standing idly by while the poor starve. They have a more sentimental vision of what worthy effort is, one that places personal responsibility in the hands of elites, where conservatives would more likely say everyone has responsibility for themselves and their own families. Of course, the liberal version enables those who don't contribute to society, and preaches to them that they deserve a plasma TV without effort. It also preaches (by not directly connecting work and money) that just because they're poor and don't work is no reason they shouldn't have as good a life as those who do have money and work, setting up (barrying a socialist state) unreasonable expectations, especially for the lower working class without the knowledge to obtain a job that would pay such a wage. And the conservative version ignores that there will be some unemployment even for people who want to work, life saving needs in excess of certain people's salaries, and it doesn't account for people who may contribute to our society in worthy, yet unconventional ways.
My point regarding means/ends with medicinal marijuana is an example of how what appears cold from one perspective can be compassionate given another context of life experience.
I believe that everyone sees the world from their own perspective (it is subjectively experienced), but I don't see that as a reason to abandon the importance of life. I do believe I have my path (one that is right for me), and from my perspective I have an idea of what is right for society. Just because a child would see the world differently doesn't mean that they know what they're doing if they chase a bouncing ball into the street. It doesn't mean it's evil, it just makes a different kind of sense to them, yet to me it might make sense to get their attention, stop traffic, etc. And just because there are aspects of life we perceive according to our own perspective doesn't mean that there isn't a shared experience of which we are aware (collective unconscious as Jung would say). And, no, I don't think that line is compassionate, but if that person is coming from a place of fear (which seems certain), then their is a kind of compassion in destroying that which they fear. It's certainly far from how I live my life, but that's only because I'm not as afraid as that person. Within their frame of reference, it is the most compassion of which they're capable at this time. From my perspective, I'd rather see a terrorist bomber die that blow a bunch of other people up, to me that's compassionate. To someone in Palestine, they may prefer the bomber to succeed, because they believe that success will make life better for their neighbors. But it's not the way I see it, and I think I see more of the world than they do, so I'm going to proceed under that presumption, just as I would in the case you cited above.

You are making shit up. Turn off FoxNews and actually talk to some liberals about what their beliefs are about economic policy. I know a lot of liberals and none of them believe this claptrap you are parroting. Or at least I hope you are parroting this stuff. If you are making it up - yikes.

Armand, this reminds me of having a conversation with a colleague about political economy, this and that, blah de blah, and then he said, "but you don't really believe in the free market anyway, so..." I was like.."Wha...? I don't believe in the free market?

"Most conservatives do see a direct relationship between work and money, at some point."

And so they should, because for so many of them to acknowledge how clearly carved out from early childhood their path to wealth was would be to acknowledge that they're lucky rather than especially smart or capable.

Just for the record, I'm no big fan of the welfare state for itself or of capable people getting money for nothing when there is an alternative. When I talk about redistribution, I'm mostly thinking in terms of social services, education funding, and so on, so that the people who work harder than many conservatives (many of the privileged generally) can even conceive don't have to live in utter squalor, can feed their familes, and can at least hold out some shred of hope that their children will be able to find their ways into the middle class.

And it's not just redistribution, either. Free markets gave us the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. And nota bene, most conservatives despise labor unions, the only way the pissed upon have every been able to look out for themselves when government closes its eyes to rampant exploitation.

($20 says you just contemplated calling me a communist. But unions haven't pooled their power in any way that employers didn't do first. That is to say, if believing in labor combining to increase their collective power is communist, than so it communistic when corporations make tacit or explicit arrangements to artifically suppress salaries, benefits, and retirement perqs that are nonexistent for all too many workers. The "free" market's a bitch, ain't it?)

That is the welfare state. The "everyone on welfare" welfare state is the straw-welfare state.

Right, why should I think that a movement towards economic redistribution may eventually lead to the "straw welfare state"? Maybe it's for the same reason Binky thinks any move toward restrictions on abortion will lead to banning all birth control, or for the same reason my brother thinks any use of executive power by our President will lead to him becoming an emperor, or the same reason any balance of security concerns with 4th ammendment liberties will lead to the loss of all civil liberties. Why is it again that these are all slippery slopes, but the "straw welfare state" isn't?

Uh well at least as far as your attack on me goes, it's b/c the president, particularly now that he's named pro-government sychophants to mant of the nation's courts CAN (and DOES) use executive power despotic ways. As Scalia's dissent in the independent cousel case says, all executive power resides in the executive. So when it comes to crushing civil liberties, he's got lots of tools at his disposal.

However, completely redesigning the nation's economic system - well, even King George couldn't do that. He doesn't have the resource base or power.

But could we please try to get back to what this thread was actually about in the first place?

Highly doubtful.

Aside from the fact that as you state it, this is not the argument I have made, (I see the steps themselves as a danger, not some looming slippery slope that they might indicate), there is a major difference in that there are active political groups with the support and cooperation of the ruling political party working to ban birth control. Not all of them, of course. The most progressive (hah! I laugh even typing that word) ones merely remain silent on the issue. On the other hand, there is no group advocating for communism with similar political ties to the left. And don't bother throwing up the "commies working on the protest march" thing, because a) the mainstream ducks that association as fast as it ca and b) the association with an economic program resembling the straw welfare state is virtually non-existent.

I'll let Armand make his case of the fourth amendment, because I have reading to do today.

Eliot Cohen has a decent piece on their gooberosity in today's WaPo.

Cohen's piece seems a weak attack. His argument seems to be "it's anti-semetic because Jews are prominent in a story on Israel." Eh.

I think the strongest attack on Mearsheimer and Walt is the one I made: it's shoddy social science. Allowing the "it's anti-semitic" attack implies that Mearshiemer and Walt have found something to explain, but that they are focusing on Jews as an explanation. That's just plain wrong: they haven't found anything that needs explanation. Cohen gives their article greater encouragement than it needs by taking it seriously enough to attack it.