Commenter: That loops back to something I was saying in another thread about the warmongers in the US not being animals, but having a disconnect between their statements and understanding the consequences of said statements. I don’t see a means of repairing the disconnect without hard times ahead.
Exactly. The warmongers in the US are usually not evil. They have simply convinced themselves that they are fighting on the side of right and good and the enemy is fighting on the side of bad and evil. Then they dismiss all negative reports of their side and amplify all negative reports, even falsehoods, of the other side. and when some of those lies are proven to be not true, they simply reject the finding in some way or another, usually by shooting the messenger.
My brother is a total warmonger for the Empire. He’s a Centrist Democrat and there are so many people like this! He never believes we are doing this for some sleazy Von Clausewitzian objective. He sincerely believes that we are always just fighting the evildoers.
I’ve been studying him for a long time. He categorically rejects any and every report that makes his side look bad and uncritically accepts every single report that makes the other guys look bad, even the lies.
I’ve also noticed that he thinks he wins an argument when I admit that my side does bad things too. To him, his side is 100
This is literally how people think. I’ve also heard him give arguments in favor of Assad gassing his people like this:
I say,
Well, Assad did a lot of bad things. He drops barrel bombs. He arrests peaceful opposition folks. And he has probably arrested 50,000 armed rebels and killed them in his prisons. They are put in prisons in horrible conditions, tortured, denied medical care, are poorly fed and clothed, and many die in their cells.
However, many did not and I believe he has hung up to 50,000 rebels in gallows outside his prisons. There were also a lot of photos released of people Assad tortured to death. I acknowledge all of these things. Somehow this ends the gassing argument and proves he gassed his people!
This is the truth:
Assad did lots of terrible thing, sure. But one thing he did not do was gas people. That’s just not the way he rolls. He also doesn’t do civilian massacres in towns. All of those, including most that were blamed on Assad, were done by the rebels, who also chopped people up.
Well Assad just doesn’t roll that way. They just don’t go into villages and line up all the residents and murder them, especially in the most gruesome ways. If they were going to do anything to civilians in a village, they would just arrest them and take them to a jail or prison. He doesn’t do line em up civilian massacres or chop civilians to pieces attacks. However, he does drop barrel bombs on them!
My brother thinks,
If Assad did all this other evil stuff that you now admit, then obviously he did all the massacres, the chopping people up, and the gassing. Because if he does those other evil things then that means he’s an evildoer who obviously does all those other evil things too.
He literally thinks like this. There must be tens of millions of people who think like this in the US alone.
My father and mother were the same way. My brother and mother had IQ’s of over 140! My father had an IQ of 129. These are very smart people. If this is how smart people think, I shudder to think how less intelligent people think. They must be just as bad or even worse.
Commenter: I’d point out that problem-solving intelligence, the kind measured by standard intelligence tests, probably doesn’t correlate fully with self-awareness. Empathy also isn’t measured, and that may or may not be useful here. Sympathizing with one side or another isn’t going to get you far in evaluating a situation objectively.
Your brother is typical of a lot of I have met.
Even within the MIC, even within the ranks of the DoD, there are objective thinkers who would recognize your point about Assad as valid. But a lot who wouldn’t. Some are very intelligent.
My response is
“Why does gassing as a mode of killing matter? How is that worse than shooting 50k people or hanging them or cooking them over an open fire? They are all just as dead. The gassing may be more humane. I wouldn’t know as I haven’t died.”
As you point out, the reason why they were killed is very much more important. Armed rebels? You kinda asked for that. Civilians? Reprehensible.
Your point about his emotional reaction is noted, that seems to be the driving force behind so much of the propaganda. Cringe-worthy detail to make you think we’re all in the right dropping bombs and shooting people. Which of course is precisely that, propaganda to convince you to perform what are, objectively, inhumane acts.
I don’t think people really think this. I think they’ve been propagandized to at least ignore the detail so as to give the government a free hand to do this awful stuff in their name. Once they took a sip of the kool-aid, they’re never going to challenge their viewpoint again. To challenge it would imply they were complicit in ‘evil’.
The failure to acknowledge the truth of your words is not the only place in life where you will find this attitude. Try talking to any unrecovered addict about their addiction and you get the same crap, circular arguments and failure to acknowledge their faults. The bottom line was that your brother was never going to acknowledge anything wrong with his point of view. It didn’t matter what you said.
Maybe so! I know that in certain ways they can understand what others are feeling, and they are able to abstract away a lot of emotional junk to try to understand others, even others that they hate. I’ve seen very intelligent people offer sympathy for the mentally ill, non-offending pedophiles, trannies, etc.
My Mom even had deep sympathy for incels, once I described their plight to her. And she was a feminist!
Commenter: Even within the MIC, even within the ranks of the DoD, there are objective thinkers who would recognize your point about Assad as valid.
Interesting. So there are intelligent thinkers in the MIC. They certainly don’t write articles. However, my work (I write for peer reviewed academic journals) has recently been quoted in Parameters, which looks like the academic journal of one of the US military branches. These people are super-cerebral and a lot of them would understand the point about Assad. They are very fine-grained intellectual thinkers, and there’s not a lot of emotionalism going on.
I work a lot with an illness called OCD. It’s extremely hard to wrap your mind around what is happening in this illness, and almost all people of average intelligence can make no sense of it and get it all wrong. The only people where a light bulb blinks on, as in they get it, have often been people of very high intelligence, often over 120-130. They manage to somehow wrap their minds around it. Everyone else, just forget it. Give it up.
About self-awareness, I don’t think anyone has any self-awareness. Show me a person with self-awareness. I’m waiting to meet one. I know there are a few, but they’re quite rare.
None of those genius IQ folks in my family ever had the tiniest dollop of it, sorry. They were all perfect, no exceptions.
I remember once I worked in a whole room full of legal coders. After a while I figured out that everyone in the room was perfect, or at least that’s what they told me. Not one person would own up to any deficiency.
You know why they made up the gassing charges, right? A very von Clausewitzian reason. It seems that if someone is using WMD’s, which means nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, then other countries get to invade them, attack them, or even declare war on them without getting UN permission. We wanted a reason to get involved in that war in a boots on the ground or bombs in the sky sense, so we made up the chemical weapons BS.
Assad was a perfect target as he did have chemical weapons. He got rid of them, the UN ratified it, but it didn’t matter. No one seems to realize that the Assad “WMD’s!” bullshit is exactly the same as the Saddam “WMD’s!” bullshit.
Saddam didn’t have any WMD’s so he couldn’t use any.
Assad didn’t have any either so he couldn’t use them either.
I can’t believe so many people who said,
“Oh we fell for the WMD bullshit, how gullible!”
were then right away to jump on the exact same WMD scam when Assad was labeled with it. How about fool me once? Fool me twice? People seem like they never learn.
Commenter: Your point about his emotional reaction is noted, that seems to be the driving force behind so much of the propaganda.
Sure. As if what Hamas did was not vile enough, they’ve had to pile on. The most successful propaganda in this war is all bullshit.
Babies were beheaded!
That’s starting to look like it’s just not true. But babies may well have been shot.
What happened was a report that said,
Babies were killed and people were beheaded.
Those are both facts. But somehow that statement got turned into “babies were beheaded” though it doesn’t say that.
Perhaps the only beheaded people were IDF soldiers beheaded after they were killed. Still messed up but not even as bad as beheading people when they are alive. In this case, it’s basically mutilating a corpse.
Women were raped!
There’s zero evidence that any woman was raped so far.
One case of reported rape is a scene where a female IDF solider is removed from the back of a jeep and shoved into a back seat. Everyone says she’s a civilian being manhandled. She’s not.
A dark stain appears on her butt. Everyone says it’s evidence of multiple gang rapes.
First of all, we know she’s a soldier. She’s all over TikTok posing videos in her uniform. There’s also a video of three IDF soldiers being taken prisoner, and she looks like one of them. In addition, we now know her name and her own parents are saying she was a soldier. So the argument’s over.
The stain. She shit her pants in terror apparently. I saw another case of a group of Israeli soldiers taking cover from a rocket attack and another soldier girl had shit her pants in terror in that photo.
I agree that they’re being rough with her. Par for the course with POW’s. She’s lucky they didn’t kill her.
After all the awful stuff Hamas did, it just wasn’t enough, so they had to make up lies about raped women and beheaded children. If you notice most of the screamers talking about wiping Gaza off the map are repeatedly mentioning these two highly emotional accusations, both of which are false.
I don’t this is something Jews only do. A Hell of a lot of Gentiles all over the world are chanting these lies also.
Iraqi Arabs and Anglo Gentiles made up WMD lies about the Iraq War (WMD’s again).
Gentile editors in WW2 made up lies about Huns bayoneting babies (Notice the babies again?).
The Kuwaiti ambassador to the US’ daughter made up a lie about Iraqi soldiers pulling the plugs on babies‘ incubators so they would die (See? Babies again).
Syria? US Gentiles made up lies about Assad gassing and massacring his people (WMD’s again).
Look at Ukraine. The Jews have hardly been involved in all the lying about that war, unless you mean the one at the head of the government. It’s almost all been Gentiles in Ukraine and the West. Remember all the rape stories about Russian soldiers, including Russians raping babies (Here we get both babies and rape conflated into one lie)? Turns out none of those rape stories were true. But they’re still bandied about. The massacre in Bucha was completely fake. That lie was made up by British MI6 and Ukrainian Gentiles.
All those fake murders and attacks on Russian dissidents with nuclear and chemical weapons (WMD’s again)? Made up by MI6 and US intelligence agents, all Gentiles.
I’m just pointing out that making up war propaganda isn’t something that Jews and Jews alone do? It’s something many groups of people do, especially the sharper or craftier ones like White Gentiles, Arabs, and, yeah, Jews.
