northshorebamaman

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Oh boy. There's a lot of them.

Let me just give the biggest and most comprehensive one:

America is a leftist Protestant experiment and our entire history is about being liberal (in the sense of shirking what has worked for long periods of time in favor of something radically new).

In other words, leftist egalitarian abolitionist America is the real America. The current day "conservative" 1776 Americans derive their entire worldview from liberal revolutionaries who were willing to spill blood and burn down traditions/society for a radically new set of beliefs.

When your Fox News conservatives say that "those beliefs were right!" they make the exact same argument as victorious Russian Soviets in 1920. It was right because you won. Of course, American capitalism has "won" the recent history debate. And by recent I mean fewer than 100 years since 1945. But our current state is the blink of an eye in human history and it is far too early to judge its success. In fact, most conservatives will admit that our society is fraying and degrading in very important ways. The government instituted by the American founders appears to be a government suited to a very particular type of independent, literate, and adventurous people.

There are many poignant English critiques about why the American Revolution was hypocritical and disingenuous. But you will never, ever hear those arguments unless you seek them out. George Sydney Fisher's The True History of the American Revolution is a great starting point.

It really makes you wonder about what the world would look like with the combination of English empire and American power.

TL,DR: the American revolutionary story you grew up with has a lot of extremely leftist values and you never get to hear the opposing arguments.

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When was this social fabric intact, and what constituted it? Was it produced by the leftist American experiment, inherited from the traditional society that experiment supposedly destroyed, or preserved despite it? Is the present degradation caused by abandoning the founding principles or by fulfilling them?

And your appeal to conservatives admitting society is “fraying” is where the wheels really come off your argument. Fraying from what? The word necessarily describes deterioration from an earlier, more coherent condition. But wait. You just denied America any authentic conservative inheritance from which to fray, describing our entire history as a leftist project of discarding traditions for radical innovation. You cannot erase the previous fabric and then appeal to its deterioration. Well, you did, so I guess you can. But you cannot make it logical.

If the lost fabric was the constitutional and cultural order that developed after 1776, then modern conservatives are doing exactly what conservatives do: preserving an inherited national tradition. Its revolutionary origin 250 years ago does not keep it permanently revolutionary. Every tradition was new at some point. Treating a belief’s revolutionary origin as permanently determining its political character is laughable. Once a revolutionary settlement becomes the established order inherited by later generations, preserving that order is, by definition, conservative. Otherwise, no society created through revolution, reform or upheaval could ever develop a conservative tradition, regardless of how long its institutions endured.

I assume/hope you see the obvious fallacy here?

If the fraying is instead the result of America continuing its liberal and egalitarian trajectory, conservatives are not “admitting” your argument. They are condemning the consequences of the project you define as the real America. In fact, your premise goes further: if leftist egalitarianism is the only authentic American tradition, as you posit, then conservatives are not merely mistaken about America; they are opposed to America at their core. You have just ceded the definition of Americanism exclusively to the left and made liberalism the only authentic American position. By your own argument and definitions, conservatism itself is un-American.

You also define America by one standard and judge it by another. America is “really” leftist when you assign its historical identity, but its present condition is judged according to conservative standards. If overturning tradition for greater freedom and equality is America’s historical purpose, then changes conservatives call fraying would more accurately be described as your “real America” fulfilling itself. To call them degradation, you must first introduce conservative values worth preserving after already denyied that those same values have an authentic place in the American system.

Finally, your witnesses become reliable only when convenient. Today’s “conservatives” are supposedly confused when they praise the inherited order, perceptive when they notice deterioration, then confused again when they attribute that deterioration to abandoning the inherited order (Google "special pleading fallacy").

I kept rereading your post, assuming I had missed a step. Turns out I had. The missing step is any logical argument connecting your claims.

My first question remains: fraying from what?

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Agreed. And the same could be said of Great Britain. If they’d have stayed out, the war would most likely have been over before Christmas 1914 and Europe would have been spared the horrors of the Great War and everything that was to follow:

Collapse of the empires
Rise of communism
WWII

Tens of millions of deaths and unmeasurable misery of hundreds of millions more could have been avoided.

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I basically agree, and I have made some of these same arguments myself. But the more alternate-history theories I encounter, particularly about the world wars, the less confidence I have in sweeping conclusions like this. World War I is the ultimate example: an event so enormous, disruptive and consequential that it directly shaped nearly every aspect of human history afterward, from borders, governments and ideologies to technology, medicine, demographics and even the natural environment.

You can examine a particular decision and speculate reasonably about its immediate consequences. But once you begin claiming that Britain remaining neutral means the war ends by Christmas, the empires survive, communism never rises, World War II never occurs and tens of millions of people live, we have left historical analysis and entered fiction.

And if forced to make predictions I would make most of the same ones you have.

But removing an event of that scale does not leave us with the same world minus its worst consequences. It sets trillions of butterfly wings in motion across every country, institution, family, invention, birth and death for the next century. Nobody can trace those branches with any useful confidence.

Trying to predict the modern world without World War I is like trying to predict who would have won the Heisman in 1990 if a meteor had not wiped out the dinosaurs.

It probably wouldn't be Ty fricking Detmer but beyond that who knows?

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That wouldn't work on me, but I bet it works on a whole bunch.

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It isn’t going to persuade anyone to reenlist by itself, and it isn’t supposed to. It’s like going to your bank’s website, clicking the membership-benefits page, and discovering that you get 5 percent off at Honey Baked Ham. That is a mildly nice perk if you’re already buying Easter dinner, but nobody chose the bank because of it.

The reenlistment decision is driven by the bonus, duty station, retraining, and other substantive incentives. The four-day pass is just the Honey Baked Ham coupon.

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And a new counselor had a brainstorm with Army brass and now GAMING is a 4 day pass just to get enlisted quotas met? GMAFB. If a kid signed up for this pass, he should be on a short list to process.

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Jesus Christ, no one is reenlisting just to get a four-day pass. The CO simply thought this was a cool, fun way to spotlight his retention NCO’s work. The offer is basically, “If you reenlist, then on top of the real incentives available to you, such as cash, choice of duty station, job retraining, or a school option that lets you attend college for a semester, I’ll throw in a four-day pass timed with the GTA 6 release.”

Predictably, people who have no idea how Army reenlistment works stripped away all that context so they could pretend soldiers are being asked to extend their service for several years in exchange for one long weekend. Some of you are so committed to being miserable that even a commander giving soldiers an extra perk becomes something to shite on.

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What on God's green earth are we doing anymore.

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This looks like a much bigger deal than it is, and it doubtless only got coverage because the commander tied it to GTA 6. When soldiers reenlist, it is common for the local command to throw in a few three- or four-day passes. As the article itself explains, those are not the primary reenlistment benefits.

When I reenlisted in 2001, I received four four-day passes, three three-day passes, and various pieces of promotional Army swag, like a backpack and jacket.

But, more importantly, I got to choose my next duty station, Germany, and received a $40,000 cash bonus. My command even flew me to Kuwait so I could reenlist in a tax-free zone, making the bonus tax-free.

This is just one battalion commander getting creative with a routine local incentive.

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This is illustrative of the error Trump made at the beginning of the Iran war. He chose not to build a coalition but instead go at it on his own with his Robin (Israel) in tow. When he got both arms and a leg stuck in the tar baby that is Iran he started asking for help. Of course, all our allies jumped at the chance to get in on some of that sweet tar baby action as well... not. Build coalitions before you are in the shite; geopolitical war-fighting 101.

SK and Japan are two of our most important allies in Asia, ones we will need if hostilities ever break out with China. Sucking up to the NORKs and spitting in the face of the SKs is just plain stupid. We need joint military exercises with our allies, it is crucial. Getting rid of them is beyond stupid.

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Completely agree. Build the coalition before you start the war, dummy. Don't let Israel talk you into one, get bogged down, start calling allies demanding they climb into the hole with you to help dig and then retaliate when they decline.

More importantly, our forces in South Korea and Japan are not some charitable shield we provide out of the goodness of our hearts. Those alliances give us permission to keep 90,000 American troops, along with airfields, ports and logistics, forward deployed in China’s backyard. We.ve spent goddamn generations of diplomacy, money, political and actual American blood securing it because it enormously benefits us.

And contrary to MAGA cope, these are not helpless client states begging us to occupy their territory and therefore obligated to follow us into every optional war our president gets talked into. Their governments expend their own political capital just allowing us to remain there.

Publicly humiliating Seoul, punishing it for refusing to join Trump’s retarded own-goal Iran war, and rewarding Kim Jong Un by degrading the exercises is strategic vandalism bordering on treasonous betrayal of American power in Asia. China spent billions trying to weaken our position there, and here comes Trump doing it for free.

South Korea occupies irreplaceable strategic ground beside China, Russia and North Korea, fields roughly half a million active-duty troops backed by millions of reservists, and possesses a sophisticated and robust military and defense industry. We have spent more than 70 years building the command structure, logistics, intelligence sharing and operational familiarity that allow our forces to fight together.

Now we're going to toss that accumulated power, access and trust into the trashcan so one senile old narcissist can nurse his grudges, grift without shame and turn the presidency into a family business.

That's my high school. :lol:

We didn't have this course in the 90's but we did have a class called California Experience where we went to the beach every week.

Sounds a lot less fun now.

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It seems our military isn’t immune to brainwashing

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I was explicitly told by my drill sergeant that this was half the point of basic training. :lol:

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I find it’s almost always easier to say what you mean and be direct.

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That sounds exhausting. I’ve found obfuscation and lying to be quite a bit easier.

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If you have enough authority to bomb them at all, you have enough to obliterate them til they squeal.

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Name one. Just one single war in which airpower alone forced a regime from power. No invading army, no indigenous ground force capturing territory, no coup. Just bombing them until the government fell.

Name a single one.