US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5957

On November 07 2016 10:19 LegalLord wrote:
Most of you are probably aware of my policy regarding kwizach and his posts - that I will ignore them by default based on my perceptions of his honesty as a poster. Well today I will be briefly departing from that philosophy to address one of his posts. In recent times there are one, two, three major mega-posts he made which he consistently references and frequently asks for a response to. The first is on the issue of civilian casualties (and civilian targeting) in the context of Middle Eastern war, the other two are on the issue of NATO, its expansion, and its function. I will be addressing the first of these posts here.

For the other two, I originally planned on giving a response similar to this one, but I have since changed my stance. This is not due to any question of whether or not such a response would be feasible - it is simply a testament to the fact that the process of responding to kwizach posts is not very pleasant and I simply don't want to bother with that again after this one. Furthermore, while I have no doubt that kwizach will eventually respond to this post (unless he magically acquired some new ability to let an issue go), I will not be giving him yet another response. Besides the tedium involved in these posts, certain posting habits of low-content thread participants make it clear that the length of these discussions just tend to lead people to uncritically accepting the positions they were already predisposed to take, and to instantaneously assume that there is a counterargument to the positions they don't like. Since there is no intellectual merit to debating kwizach in and of itself and little merit in educating others in replying to a kwizach post, the value of addressing these posts is close to zero.

Kwizach has often made a big deal out of the idea that we should "just debate the issues, not posting habits." Unfortunately, this is simply not possible for this discussion; a focus on debating "just the issues" has the implicit requirement that all participants argue in good faith and do not distort the argument with dishonest techniques. I have made it clear that I do not believe that kwizach meets this requirement, and the posts cross-linked in the preceding link (made primarily by xDaunt and myself) reference exactly why this is the position I hold. This is why I ignore him - not because of the length of his posts or the quality of his arguments. I will further make the claim that I believe that, despite an obvious involvement in the issues discussed that would provide one with a substantial base of knowledge from which to debate the issues, that kwizach himself has been intellectually dishonest in his conduct; I will demonstrate my rationale for this claim over the course of this response.

Now, this specific post is actually the only one of the three that kwizach addressed directly to xDaunt rather than to me, so it is in a way an odd-one-out to reply to. However, besides being chronologically first, it is also an issue that xDaunt and I seem to mostly be of one position on, or at least it appears close enough that I feel it reasonable to argue on behalf of the point he was making. That will, however, leave the major NATO posts entirely unanswered, and I will note that it could appear to some observers that I am dodging the issue of engaging him on the NATO issue by refusing to answer either of his NATO points because I cannot give him a proper response there. That is not the case; at the proper time I will address the points of contention that kwizach brought up in a way that should be satisfactory. I will not be doing it in the form of a direct response to kwizach, however; that process is simply an exercise in wasting my time giving credibility to a dishonest poster not worth my time. But the content of his objection to my comments will be addressed at an appropriate time with an appropriate response. I would simply prefer to do so without the overhead that comes with having to address the unique unpleasantries that accompany replying to a post made by kwizach - the kwizach overhead, if you will.

But before we start with that, I will address the minor point within the second NATO mega-post by kwizach, that was particularly interesting and noteworthy.

An opinion poll. How cute. It wasn't really relevant to the point in the original post, but there was one rather striking aspect of this poll I wanted to mention.

What might be worth looking at is the questions about the TPP and Hillary Clinton's support of it. The overwhelming majority of these "FP experts" that you cite both support the TPP and at the same time believe that Hillary supports it too but is hiding that fact for political reasons. So they are all overwhelmingly in support of a candidate who is very much willing to subvert the voterbase and pass an agenda. One may question whether or not this is a tacit endorsement of an undemocratic approach to policy-making by the cited "FP experts" in the poll. A justification, perhaps, of my earlier statement that the support of the FP community of Hillary Clinton is less in question than the soundness of the judgment of said FP community.

And with that, let's begin by linking both the original xDaunt posts kwizach was replying to (context preserved since it is relevant for reference), and his full response.








I'm going to address the entire thing in one long response without explicitly splitting it up by paragraphs. It should be pretty clear which part corresponds to what.

So to start, let's provide some context. This entire discussion started with a discussion about Trump's off-hand remarks about that "you have to take out their families" as a means to defeat terrorists. If your concern is taking this statement at face value, then sure, I think it's very objectionable. You will find that Trump says many things which are morally questionable and without nuance, yet that cut deep into an issue that is largely neglected by the mainstream. This is one of those, in that it gets at the issue of how to deal with civilian damage - both collateral and deliberate - in responding to terrorist threats. The more nuanced version of the Trump opinion, that could actually be reasonably pushed, is that you have to be willing to target the civilian base of support that is allowing the terrorists to conduct their operations. Indeed, one of the earliest posts by xDaunt that explicitly address this issue seems to be saying as much.



This line of policy thought (as posted by xDaunt and as described in the paragraph above) certainly deserves some degree of qualification. In terms of potential liability for war crimes, the most relevant piece of international law is the Protocol I amendment to the Geneva Conventions (wiki overview and giant Library of Congress document) and specifically Articles 51 and 54. Article 51 deals with deliberate targeting of civilians and how the parties in a military conflict must make an effort to reduce those casualties (the attackers by providing means for civilians to escape the conflict, the defenders by making an effort to distance themselves from civilians). It also stipulates that indiscriminate warfare (e.g. chemical weapons, which will harm civilians and militants alike) is not allowed. Article 54 prevents deliberate targeting of infrastructure that is critical to the survival of civilians, which deals primarily with food and water supplies.

Now of course the big point of contention is what happens when there isn't a means to separate the civilians from the militants, often because explicitly hiding among the population is a strategy that they choose to employ. It goes without saying that that is a failure to abide by the Protocol I stipulations on the part of the militants, but the question is how the attacking force should respond. And Article 51 provides some decent guidance for that. Civilian casualties are obviously going to pile up if you attack an area populated by both civilians and militants, and you can and should do what needs to be done to limit those casualties (by providing safe routes out of the conflict zone, not attacking in a manner disproportionate to military objectives, and not attacking civilians directly). Nevertheless, attacking such civilian-military targets is certainly permitted under the article, as the use of civilian shields for military objectives is not considered to be a reason not to allow military operations to take place.

What is being advocated here, and what is also closely tied to my point, is that given this less-than-ideal scenario (civilians used as a shield for military operations), in the case of terrorism (and many other military-civilian scenarios) it is best to take the more aggressive approach which is morally questionable, but nevertheless effective for fighting terrorism. Indeed, a reluctance to be willing to accept civilian casualties in the performance of military operations is a very strong factor in what allows terrorists to continue to use (sympathetic, but noncombatant) civilians as a shield for their operations. So the willingness to allow civilian casualties within the framework of reasonable attempts to save civilians is what works.

A contentious, yet highly relevant example is this short article on Israel in Gaza - in which Israel is accused of killing 44 civilians in school during the Gaza war, but the UN report which claims that also notes Hamas was using human shields during the Israeli offensive. To be able to stop terrorist attacks, Israel necessarily has to retaliate when attacked, but it is constrained by the tendency of news articles in the aftermath to skew strongly towards "Israel murders innocent civilians in its foolish wars of conquest." And yet that kind of aggressive push is how you have to retaliate to be able to effectively stop terrorism, which pits Israel against a hostile media intending to paint it as a villain. The rather substantial contortions that Israel is forced into employing in the wake of the media war it is subject to (e.g. building Iron Dome to shoot down rockets when the obvious solution would be to bomb the rocket launchers) shows the result of being forced into a less aggressive approach to fighting terrorism: allowing it to exist in perpetuity.

Now, you could say that xDaunt certainly went further than this in his posts. The fourth one above (about destroying opposing societies) is the most notable one. So this post certainly does come off as one with an even more aggressive assertion than the ones made earlier about willingness to accept civilian casualties - such as killing the families of terrorists - in war. It's certainly one that deserves, at the very least, some thorough qualification, which is lost when you stick to short posts. Yet it very definitely does refer directly to mass subjugation, rather than ethnic cleansing (read the comment chain and it should be pretty clear). And it's also the most aggressive post in that entire discussion chain. More on the validity of that later when we get into the main argument.

The claim that the suggestions here are genocidal is very hyperbolic in nature, since active and brutal repression of opposing ideologies (in context, the more directly supported interpretation of xDaunt's posts) is reasonably far removed from an open advocacy of genocide. If there were mentions of mass killings or the like, then certainly, that would be a reasonable way to interpret his posts. And certainly, these posts do skirt the edge between aggressive and morally questionable counterinsurgency policy and outright war crimes - something that would absolutely require further clarification (given xDaunt's rather concise posting habits, certainly a factor that is a legitimate concern). Indeed, even xDaunt would probably agree that there is plenty one could find objectionable about what he advocates. However, it is clear that what happened here was an instantaneous assumption of the least charitable interpretation of these posts and a response that ran with that least charitable view of what one could imagine that xDaunt might mean with his post.

Indeed, kwizach is one of the posters who seem to believe that they are "context wizards" who can instantaneously correctly assume substantially more about the position that someone else holds than what is posted - and to defeat that expanded position. An impressive amount of assumption-of-context went into this response, and it does rather resemble the previously mentioned concerns of strawmanning and taking things out of context that are common with every response made by kwizach. This assertion of "genocide is the only way" by kwizach of the content of xDaunt's post is not supported directly by anything that xDaunt actually says, and serves primarily as a way to attempt to discredit the post made. Indeed, this "advocating genocide" claim does color the direction of kwizach's response, culminating in a severely far-removed claim about the possibility of using nuclear weapons in the Middle East to destroy everything.

Now, after setting the context for this discussion and addressing the issue with the opening "advocating genocide" remark, we can start to get into what is wrong with the meat of the post that kwizach made. We will, as kwizach did, mostly set aside the issue of morality, in the sense that we will not ask "what is the right thing to do in the absence of pressure to conform to certain rules?" We will discuss the effectiveness of a less civilian-friendly approach to military involvement on its own merits. However, even though we do not discuss morality, we will discuss the issue of human rights violations and the consequences, because there are direct political consequences in the modern international framework for being accused of staging human rights violations in a conflict in the world.

As they always do, kwizach's list of sources certainly look particularly impressive at first glance. Indeed, that "first glance" appearance is what he relies on to give the appearance of being well-sourced in the positions he holds. However, a critical analysis of each of these sources will give a particularly different interpretation of the merits of the position kwizach holds. In short order, that is what we will be doing - although, be warned, even short summaries of all the posts he made will be particularly lengthy to read through.

Before we get into that, however, I would like to get into an issue with the style of the argument here. If one were to characterize the style of kwizach's posts, I am sure that "academic" would be a very common descriptor. However, in the case of this post and in most others, either "dishonest academic" or "lazy academic," depending on how charitable you wish to be, would be the more accurate descriptor of the style. Why? Because while kwizach does have the academic style of providing many sources for his positions, he entirely fails to do what academics are meant to do when using all those sources: to make a piece of writing that stands on its own and defends its own assertions with the help of those sources. What kwizach did here was basically just to throw out a lot of sources and said that those sources prove the position that he makes. The problems with these are multiple.

The first is one of accessibility; many of these sources are either books which are not publicly available for free, or research papers/theses which are only available for free to academic institutions. Indeed, to acquire all of the source material, I had to ask among my academic friends to give me the source materials in question, and I also had to acquire a few books that he sourced. Indeed, it is perhaps fortunate that in the case of this post in specific, all of the source materials could either be obtained for an almost inconsequential price (a few dollars at most) or were available among friends who have an academic institution's access. I have looked through every single source referenced in any of the three kwizach posts cited - some of them cost upwards of $200, and many of them have so little material referencing them that there is little in the way of independent means to verify the validity and contextual relevance of those sources. That would mean that we all have a choice either to spend significant money on kwizach's sources (not happening), or to take him at his word. The latter is what most people do, but it is also an unjustifiable position based on his track record of academic dishonesty.

The second issue is one of volume. This is a simple one: few if any people (including, perhaps, kwizach himself, given how far removed his posts are from the conclusions of the pieces he cites) actually go through the trouble of reading through all the sources that kwizach posted to analyze to what extent they are accurate and valid. I would estimate that the average length of his sources is in the 150-200 range - some are 30-page research papers, the rest are 200+ page books or dissertations. Though the term itself may not be entirely applicable since this isn't a spoken, real-time discussion, what he is doing is akin to a Gish gallop. His posts are an attempt to drown out any valid discussion by providing such depth that no one at all would be willing to respond to it. The result is that people basically believe what they want to believe. If someone is inclined to support the argument that kwizach is making, then they choose simply to presume that his mega-responses are entirely valid. If not, then not, although said people would not be wrong to note that the general issues with his academic posting is solid grounds for dismissal of his responses as "not credible" as arguments.

The third issue is one of actually making the argument. In this post, by citing a lot of sources kwizach simply intends to imply "academic consensus" on the validity of his position. The problems with this are twofold. The first is that his list cannot possibly be exhaustive (since it is generally impossible to summarize "the opinion of all credible academics" in any reasonable list), so it would be extremely valid to question whether or not kwizach is merely cherry-picking the ones that seem to line up most closely with his opinion. The second reason is that kwizach seems to believe that citing all the sources he does absolves him of the responsibility of actually making the argument. This is a through-and-through appeal to authority, pure and simple. Kwizach intends to imply that "these academics say you're wrong, so you're wrong" is valid. No dice; if you wish to say that xDaunt is wrong, then you have to explain why exactly it is that he is wrong, not just list a bunch of people who you claim will say that he is wrong. It is perfectly valid to cite those people in making that claim (indeed - that is what academic writing is founded upon) but the argument still has to be made and still has to be your own.

And now, at long last, we get to the sources themselves. I will simply summarize the sources themselves in the order that they were presented, then provide context on how they relate to the argument at hand, and then give an overall summary at the very end. I will provide some sourcing so that people will know how they could possibly acquire the source being questioned. For books, Amazon sources will be given - you can buy the book if you like, but also you can read the preview version (including, most notably, the table of contents) and the reviews. In addition, I will reference a few reviews on the books he posted, because some of them are very relevant.

Reference 1: Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (book)
Source: Amazon
As the title indicates, this book covers the issue of air power (specifically, bombardment) and using coercive means to win wars. It makes the argument that military, not civilian, targets are the proper targets that need to be hit in the pursuit of a military victory. The idea is that military defeat is a far more effective means of pushing a government to concede than by bombing its civilians and expecting that those civilians will pressure the government into conceding in order to save their own (civilian) lives. Instead, direct targeting of civilians is more likely to convince those civilians to more strongly side against their attackers, making that targeting an ineffective means by which to coerce an opposing government to concede. The exception made is the one for nuclear weapons, in which that threat really is something that can convince civilians to push for their government to stand down in order to save themselves from the fallout of that threat.

Anything particularly wrong with the argument that this book is making? Not really; for the most part it is a fair assessment, and I don't think too many people would be surprised by the idea that civilians being bombed would not be so inclined to pressure their own government into conceding to the attackers. The problem is that this argument is taken fully out of context to support kwizach's point. It should be clear that the context of this book is that of conflicts between nation-states, but kwizach co-opts it for the completely orthogonal topic of terrorism. You can read the table of contents to see clearly for yourself what kinds of conflicts they talk about. To save you the trouble, I'll list the ones they talk about: Japan (WWII), Germany (WWII), Korea (Korean War), Vietnam (Vietnam War), and Iraq (Gulf War). Very little about this source is even relevant to the issue of terrorism and how to fight against it. Perhaps if it focused more on strategic bombardment in the case of fighting between a nation-state and a decentralized guerrilla group - such as in the colonial revolutionary movements following WWII, Chechen conflict, Hungarian revolt in the USSR, and so on - then it might be much more poignant. Certainly, the book is a bit dated - being published in 1996 - but it does seem valid for the purpose it was written for. The problem is that it was used by kwizach to make a completely different argument.

Reference 2: In The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians (book)
Co-Reference: Barbarians at the Gates (review of book above)
Source: Amazon and NY Times
This source, finally, does actually focus on terrorism, at least broadly so. The basic argument is simply that terrorism doesn't work; it's counterproductive in achieving the goals it intends to achieve. The interesting thing about this book, though, is how it actually goes about defining terrorism. Its definition is somewhat expansive, including both the "obvious" terrorists and also state actors who target civilians. It's also remarkably preachy, something you could see if you went only as far as to look at the title.

Unlike with the previous book, this one is well worthy of criticism. One flash judgment of it is in nothing that its Amazon price is 0.01 (literally not worth the paper it's printed on), and its rating is middling. Even the positive reviews of the book are remarkably middling in their praise, crediting it with providing an interesting overview of history more so than its ability to justify its argument. Also, the previously mentioned "preachy" quality is quite universally panned, and the author is accused often enough of letting his absolutist view on this topic cloud his judgment on the effectiveness of terrorism. Indeed, even kwizach acknowledges that this book has received quite a bit of criticism, which makes it questionable why he would believe it would be a good source (except for the obvious reason that no one is meant to read it).

However, the NY Times review makes a much more effective case against the central theses of this book than any of the Amazon reviewers do - in that it does convincingly discredit many of the author's assertions. Specifically, the review shows many examples of where terrorism by guerillas against governments (e.g. French Algerian revolt) does work, and it also shows how ludicrous this expansive definition of terrorism is in calling more standard military involvements terrorism (e.g. certain Civil War campaigns, US War in Afghanistan). In short, the credibility of this book is rather wanting, and so its applicability as a source is not very high.

Reference 3: The [F]utility of Barbarism: Assessing the Impact of the Systematic Harm of Non-Combatants in War (research paper)
Source: Harvard
Reference 4: "Draining the Sea": Mass Killing and Guerrilla Warfare
Source: Ibrarian
I'm going to address the two of these simultaneously because they are pretty closely tied in terms of both what they address and what their issues are. Both are more or less preliminary studies, in that they are quite cognizant about the incompleteness of their approach and that they spend quite a lot of time outlining where their research needs improvement. Both make significant use of statistical models to push their point, and show a correlation between their term of choice (barbarism, mass killing) and failure in a military sense, though it would be perfectly valid to question definitions of both their terms and the working definition of success and failure that they use for their models. And both spend quite a bit of effort in defining their term of choice, although colloquially we could simply stick to "genocide" or "deliberate murder of noncombatant civilians" as the gist of what they're really talking about.

It's interesting to note that, given how much attention is given to definitions in these papers, that kwizach just takes an out-of-context quote, one each from both papers, and without qualification uses their definitions as if it's immediately obvious what they mean and what they're talking about. What's more, this is symptomatic of his previously noted fixation with saying that xDaunt supports genocide, and he is addressing that straw man of an argument by citing sources that, for our intents and purposes, might as well just be saying "genocide doesn't work." Ok.

Reference 5: Targeting civilians to win? Examining the military effectiveness of civilian victimization in interstate war (research paper)
Source: None that are readily available. Closely related book: Amazon
Reference 6: Draining the Sea by Filling the Graves: Investigating the Effectiveness of Indiscriminate Violence as a Counterinsurgency Strategy (research paper)
Source: George Washington University
These two sources are grouped together because they are by the same author, but this commentary will focus mostly on the former piece. Despite having some notable issues that I will note, the first piece is probably the best source cited in terms of a combination of relevance and credibility out of all the sources that kwizach has provided.

The first piece is an interesting analysis of the issue of civilian targeting that asks the question of what situations civilian targeting can work under. He has a statistical analysis that shows a positive correlation between civilian targeting and success, but notes confounding factors in the form of reverse causality (victory causes civilian targeting), being completely unrelated to success, and dependent on the form of war (attrition vs. territorial conquest). He also notes a temporal effect, in that civilian targeting was more effective before than it is now, considering various factors which time could be a proxy for (technology, international law and humanitarian intervention, formation of nation-states rather than smaller independent governments, and so on). Overall, the gist of it is that civilian targeting sometimes works, but sometimes doesn't.

The second piece expands on this analysis by justifying some of the examples he gives for situations where indiscriminate civilian targeting can work - in wars of conquest, in wars where opposing factions are isolated, and/or when the opponent is small (e.g. a city-state). He even takes a stance against softer forms of indiscriminate targeting such as sanctions and notes their unimpressive track record in coercing results. Instead, he notes that discriminate civilian targeting can be effective, which is much more relevant to even the remarkably un-nuanced position of Trump that "we should target their families," which is still stronger than xDaunt's real point as it was written (that it's necessary to destroy the terrorist base of support to win and that there is historical precedence for successful approaches involving civilian targeting).

Reference 7: The treatment of civilians in effective counterinsurgency operations (Ph.D. dissertation)
Source: None that are readily available
Well I'm actually just going to post the abstract for this one and highlight the most interesting parts.

Basically saying more or less what has already been established so far. Again, kwizach's objection here is centered on his assertion that xDaunt is supporting genocide, despite the fact that there is literally nothing in his post that says that he openly advocates genocide - and direct support for saying otherwise. I did look quite deep into the posting history, and I did find that at one point xDaunt did suggest that total war could, under some circumstances including historical ones, be effective. Also many statements about how ludicrous this entire "he supports genocide" strawman is.

Reference 8: Military Hones a New Strategy on Insurgency (news article)
Source: NY Times
It's a tangent. Read it if you like - it's not that long. But it's also pretty much irrelevant to the point discussed.

In short, kwizach's entire point is predicated on a strawman - that there is an implied support for genocide and mass murder within the position that xDaunt advocated. He then cites a slew of academic sources, some of which are questionable, most of which are taken out of context, many of which are relatively in line with what xDaunt actually supported but which tend to discourage the caricatured position (mass genocide). Then to add icing to the cake, he ends his post with the insane hyperbole of talking about nuking the entire Middle East.

In context of an extensive history of intellectually dishonest posting, I have found that there is little merit in having any substantial discussion with kwizach on any issue. This is before getting into the other issues of kwizach overhead, including the tendency to collect every single mention of himself over the past few months and write gigantic posts replying to those mentions. While he has managed to make himself appear to be well-sourced and well-thought-out in his argument, under scrutiny you will see an endless tendency to strawman and take both the positions of others and of his sources out of context. These issues ensure that his participation in any discussion is thoroughly unpleasant and explain why I have taken the position of refusing to respond to his points.

In any case, I consider this to be my last personal entry in the kwizach chronicles - I will not acknowledge the existence of any more of his posts, nor will I respond to anyone who mentions them in any substantive way. He has proven himself unfit to have a good discussion with, so I will move onto discussing with other people who are significantly less troublesome and poisonous. This post will hopefully serve as a thorough enough explanation of the issues with kwizach's posting for anyone who has as of yet been unconvinced about the validity of the objections that those who have ever debated any issues with him have of his posting style.

My next long posts, when I have the time, will focus on some issues that have come up frequently in the past that I really haven't spent a lot of time addressing. As a preliminary list, TPP/globalization and a NATO follow-up are topics that I intend to get to sooner or later.