The Awesome Obama Thread II

Have a link?Not doubting you in general - what I've heard and read of medical treatment for soldiers in America, particularly mental health treatment, is pretty abhorrent.Of course, that's the case with American health insurance in general.But the real question would be how much of this is due to the Obama administration's policies, and how much is due to Congress not providing adequate funding to military healthcare and mental health? Don't forget the fact that military service can sometimes attract the very last person you'd want to hand an assault rifle. I've read stories of several US service members who shame their brothers and sisters in uniform by essentially just wanting to shoot people, not seeking to serve their country or help create a better world or even just get money for college. Obama didn't give anyone a weapon. The military does have psychiatric evaluations and policies intended to prevent truly mentally unstable individuals from serving in the military.The unfortunate side effect is that some people who are mentally unstable will seek to hide that fact so that they can serve...and neither the Obama administration nor the military recruiters are magically able to see through such deception in every case. You don't have to be mentally unstable in the first place to become mentally unstable in a war zone. I'm fairly well-adjusted, but if you send me to Kabul and I have to live for 6 months wondering which of the apparent civilians actually has an automatic rifle or a bomb and wants to kill me, I might start to lose it.Even a rational, reasonable person is going to develop a pretty strong "us vs. them" mentality when occupying a foreign nation where a significant portion of the populace is openly hostile and unexpected bombings and shootings are commonplace. It's a damned strong feedback loop.How is the Obama administration responsible for any of that? The military has specific policies created to prevent the sort of tragedy we're talking about - the only thing Obama could do better in that case would be to immediately pull out of Afghanistan, which may or may not be a better ethically utilitarian solution. And what if the failure isn't the administration, but the individuals in the military who ignore policy and fail to report their squadmate for fear of reprisal or out of a sense of loyalty? After all, in the military you don't really fight for your country, not after you've already reached the warzone. You fight to protect your friends, and your friends are the guys who watch your back in turn. It's an inevitable result of combat, and there is no policy any administration can put into place to overcome it short of simply not having any more warzones ever. I'd like that as much as you, but I'm fairly certain that's just fantasy. The President is not an omnipotent King. An administration can ensure that policies and reporting structures are in place, they can institute penalties and incentives for following those policies, but at the end of the day the squadmate and/or superior officer has to actually do the reporting, and in a warzone you will have a greater sense of loyalty to your comrades in arms than some suit sitting safe in Washington.A reasonable person can very easily fall into the trap of excusing suspicious behavior because "I know John, he's just going through a rough time, god knows it's hell on Earth here and it's hard for all of us. But he's not crazy. Even if he's acting a little weird from the stress, he wouldn't snap. The training said to report stuff like this, but I won;t risk John's career over something so small. After all, he saved my life at least twice in the past month, I owe him. And the other guys would kick the shit out of me if I betrayed him." After all, 9 times out of 10 he might be right. It's just that last one that causes problems.Is that the fault of the administration? Or is it simply an inevitable result of warfare? I can see exactly where the incentives lie - those who need mental health care will not request it and will actively try to hide it so that they can remain on duty to help their buddies and to preserve their career. Their buddies will not report suspicious activity because they don't want to betray the guy who saved their life. The commanders feel the same way. The military in general has always had an attitude of taking care of its own and covering up embarrassment. What do we expect to happen? And sometimes the policies are in place, and Joe Poverty doesn't use any of the programs they set up because he's mentally ill.Unless someone can point to a specific failing of the Obama administration detailing a policy, lack of a policy, or an ignored systemic pattern that leads to atrocities such as the recent Afhanistan massacre, I don't see how the administration can be morally culpable.

Take a Humvee for a drive. Make an arrest. If you know the location for a missile launch, you know the location for an arrest.Since when is "it's a long drive" or "we might have to take a helicopter" sufficient cause to just say "fuck it, we'll just blow up the suspect?"

We're not at war.We are not engaged in hostilities with a foreign nation-state or a uniformed military.We're scared to death, to the point of ignoring human rights, of a bunch of criminals. Plane hijackers and bomb makers. Not soldiers.In war, you don't need to work to identify the enemy - they wear a uniform that clearly identifies that they're on the other side. Your governments have engaged in legally declared open hostilities until such time as one of them surrenders. Their personnel and infrastructure are identifiably distinct from innocent neutral parties.The Afghanistan invasion started as a war, with the coalition military fighting the Taliban, formerly the official government of Afghanistan.We won that war. It's over.This isn't war. We're pretending it is, to justify sending over a bunch of soldiers and Hellfire missiles and drones.But we're fighting criminals.And our heavy-handed approach creates more of the enemy every time we cause "collateral damage."For some reason people have bought into the whole "war on x" meme and actually started to think that just because we call something a "war on x" means that it's actual war and justifies deployment of the military.It doesn't. For the same reason that we don't use drone attacks and cruise missiles to combat narcotics dealers in New York City for the "war on drugs," and we don't send in Navy SEAL teams to kill the homeless in the "war on poverty."The "war on terror" is a misnomer, just like those. If we can arrest Timothy McVeigh, we can arrest other terrorists. If we can give Ted Kaczynski a trial, we can give other terrorists trials. If we send the FBI to arrest a heavily-armed David Koresh (even if that turned out poorly), then we don't need to use the Marines to murder another alleged terrorist.

I said "a great many." I didn;t say "all." And my opening sentence in my initial reply to you was a general agreement that I, too still feel significant disappointment and often moral outrage at the activities of the Obama administration.My only point was to suggest that, while the Obama administration certainly bears responsibility for many of the evils that cause you and I to feel outraged, not every outrageous event that occurs on "Obama's watch" is the actual moral responsibility of the Obama administration. Your recent posting history has come across as, forgive me, hyperventilating "Obama is teh devil" ranting to a degree that would better fit a birther/Muslim-conspiracy nutcase in tone (though thankfully your actual basis and reasoning are on far more rational and ethical grounds). I simply think that you've identified Obama as "an enemy," and that now you've become too eager to blame that enemy for any event involving the US government or military forces, as if one man bore the entire weight of responsibility for every policy and decision and budget in the country.There's a lot wrong, and precious little right, but not all of it is Obama's fault specifically.

It's not?Why not?Is there some reason that it's impossible to arrest a terrorist in Afghanistan or Pakistan? We have several accused terrorists in Guantanamo that came from those nations (their continued detention being another topic entirely), so clearly sometimes we're able to capture alleged terrorists.What's the threshold of difficulty involved in making an arrest before summary execution via drone attack is justified? What specific conditions need to be met? I won;t argue with that sentiment in general. I will argue that since we're not fighting a uniformed military, perhaps our ow uniformed military is not the best tool to combat the problem. We fight violent individuals destructive to society who want to remain hidden within the general population all the time. Why do we seem to forget that when a foreign nation is considered?More importantly - do you believe that human beings have inalienable rights? Do those rights include the right to face their accuser in a court of law? To be free from unreasonable search and seizure? To be immune from cruel or unusual punishment, or unreasonable bail? To be presumed innocent of a crime until proven guilty in a court of law?If those rights are truly inalienable, then you must agree that an accused terrorist has the right to face that charge in a court of law, that the state is burdened with the requirement to present sufficient proof to convince a jury that the charges are true beyond a reasonable doubt, and that if the state fails to meet those requirements the accused must be set free.Are those rights really inalienable? Or do we lose them the moment the state considers them inconvenient? Between Bush and Obama, it certainly seems like the convenience of the state is winning out. We are?It seems to me there are already policies in place. I'm not aware of any work being done to adjust those policies or "develop a paradigm." I'm aware of the Attorney General of the United States saying that "due process" does not mean "judicial process," and that the President has the ability to summarily execute American citizens (and obviously anyone else) on the bare accusation that they are "terrorists." I can see no reason to expect any of those policies to change in the near future in the current political climate. Yet curiously neither our government nor theirs are firing Hellfire missiles from remote drones at accused cartel members. Afghanistan, not Iran. Yet, anyway. Let's hope our leaders don;t turn out to be that stupid. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times...I'm not really being fooled, I obviously want it to happen. Are US casualties more meaningful to you than Afghani casualties? Your phrasing seems to suggest as much. How many Afghani deaths are equivalent to one dead US service member? One dead US civilian? It's interesting that your reaction to identifying that the current "paradigm" is a complete failure is simply to "stay the course" until we can get out.How many innocent Afghani deaths are justified in possibly preventing a maybe terrorist from carrying out an unknown plot that may or may not exist? Is it acceptable to kill 50 innocents to get one actual terrorist? 30? 10? 100? How many, jar?You acknowledge that we aren't winning hearts and minds as we are - so why are we maintaining the same course of action if we know that it's counterproductive? So why do you support continued drone attacks? If you think we should get out now, we might as well just stop with the drones now too, right? Or do you actually think that we should pull out our human presence and just keep flying drones from safe airbases?

I would say somewhere between 7 and 8, calibrating 10 as being on the level of the Nazi genocide. But I'd identify the emotion more as "moral outrage" than "sadness." I didn't know those people, I don't feel a sense of loss, I can't process the emotion the same way the relatives of the victims do, but my ethical system requires that every human mind be considered equally valuable and that the unjustified destruction of such a mind is anathema. I don't particularly care whether they're "women and children" excepting that children logically must be innocent of any crime and women are statistically less likely to actually be terrorists than men, but the actual problem is any innocent person being punished for a crime they did not commit, an inevitability of summary executions without evidence or trial.My problem with your "rantings" is that your tone is one of hysterics rather than constructive discussion. To be perfectly blunt, you're not going to convince anyone who doesn't already agree with you, and you're leaving yourself extremely open to committing erroneous attributions of guilt, which will only serve as ammunition for an opponent who debates you. It's counterproductive. It's okay to feel outraged, but the more of that outrage you put into your posts, the less well-reasoned and sane they'll come across to everyone else. Again, the issue isn't at all what justifies a "rant." It's that ranting is not particularly effective at convincing others to join your cause unless they already agree with you, and that the attitude that spawns ranting tends toward an overabundance of eagerness to place guilt even when it's not deserved. Your arguments necessarily become tunnel-blind - you focus so hard on "the Obama administration" that you eagerly blame new travesties on the existing enemy, and miss out on correctly assessing the problem.After all - if Obama loses the 2012 election, do you really expect a significant change in the policies that so anger us both? I don;t think it particularly matters who wins in terms of improvement, all I can hope for is for things to not get significantly worse. If the problem extends beyond the Obama administration (as it must if changing administrations would cause no real improvement), perhaps the real problem is the attitude of the average voting American, who apparently honestly sees brown Muslims in a foreign country as less morally significant than any lower-middle-class-or-higher American, and who is perfectly happy killing several hundred thousand innocent Iraqi citizens because a few non-Iraquis who weren't tied to Iraq at all killed around 6000 Americans back in 2001. Or perhaps the problem is the 2-party winner-takes-all political engine of the United States, preventing easy alternatives to teh Democrats or Republicans on any but the most local scale election (and rarely then). Or perhaps the issue is one of a dozen other serious deficiencies in America that have nothing whatsoever to do with the specific administration that happens to have won the most recent election cycle.I'd rather put my efforts toward the real problem. I rather think the Obama administration is a symptom, not the disease. And I'd rather try to do something more effective than an "I hate Obama, look at these horrible pictures" rant that will gain no converts to my cause and will serve only to further alienate those who disagreed. I stopped paying significant attention to American news outlets other than NPR largely for that exact reason. The sensationalism and ratings-driven so-called "news" services are yet another symptom of the disease: Americans do not really care about non-Americans, except that some are willing to pay 50 cents per day to supposedly save some anonymous African child. They care about who is a "slut," who is a "douchebag," what new stuff they can buy, and anything that makes them laugh instead of feeling bad. And, to paraphrase the Dethklok song, we'd rather those foreigners be dead than contemplate not opening a restaurant. That's fine, except that it has to not only be something that Obama supports, but that he had control over. After all, jar may support the drone strikes, but he has no ability to control whether they actually happen or not, and so he's not morally culpable.

Why the "near term?" Can you explain why it would be okay now but not later? I know that you claim that. I asked why you believe that to be the case. Repeating an assertion, after all, doesn't help me understand your reason for making it. And why do you think we have not? Do you think we should? Do you think it would be a good idea? Why or why not? Obviously rights are human constructs and don't exist in an absolute, natural sense.But are you saying that you don't believe that there are rights that should be universally granted? Should my right to a speedy and fair trial be subject to a whim? If the police "know the guy did it," can we just bypass the trial entirely? ...well, that's rather monstrous. Why exactly does an American life carry more moral weight to you than an Afghani life? How many Afhani lives are equivalent to a single American life? From where do you think the value of a human life comes? What's the standard you apply to determine relative moral weight in human lives? is there some sort of human-life exchange rate you can clue me in to? How does the life of a British person compare to an Afghani? I'm fairly certain that we could just start flying troops home tomorrow and be out within a few months if we really wanted to, agreements or no.But I'll note that you're only obliquely responding to me, dodging most of what I say. Why is that, exactly? Well, there's finally something we agree on. At least you agree that Afhani lives have value, even if for some reason you think that value is somehow less than that of an American. It's curious to me that you believe that the location of one's birth has such strong bearing on the moral weight of a person. I was born in Indiana; tell me, does that make my life more or less important than someone born in Texas? I agree. But there are police, we are there to help them be police, not just death squads, and there are courts and laws for prosecuting the accused legally. It seems rather odd to me that our form of helping the Afghanis put together the infrastructure and police forces they need actually bears closer resemblance to training soldiers to kill an enemy as opposed to enforcing the law. Why is that, I wonder?

I think this single sentence answers most of what I would want to know.The only remaining question I would have then is "why doesn't morality figure highly into your position?" If moral considerations lack the power to move you, then what does move you? If your desire to protect American lives (as opposed to exclusively your own) is not based on moral considerations, what then is it based on?

This may surprise you, but that response was not particularly illuminating. Could you perhaps elaborate?

I'm still not understanding, jar. I'm not seeing a motivating factor or general outlook that results in valuing American life outside of moral concerns.You seem to be trying to tell me that I'm an idealist and you're just pragmatic. But that's obvious (at least that you believe so) and isn't at all what I'm asking you. I'm asking, if moral considerations do not move you, what considerations do move you? What gives a human life value to you if not moral considerations?I understand that the most ethical solution is often not practical due to political or other realities. But you have a position you've taken considering that. What drives that position?

You're typing words, which means you're certainly trying to convey some meaning. It just seems like we're having different conversations. Do you mean that you value individuals you've had direct experience with, and don;t value perfect strangers you'll never meet? Do your aggregate life experiences grant you a sense of empathy for other human beings who feel the same things you've felt and so you value them all equally, counter to what you've stated in recent replies? Or does that sentence mean something else? My main question in the last few posts has essencially been how you determine the "right thing." If the "right thing" is not determined by what is moral, than how is the "right thing" determined for jar?

But Im not asking about your morality. Youve explicitly stated that moral considerations lack the power to move you, that you are instead moved by "reality." You've explicitly stated that the "right thing" is sometimes not the "moral thing." If the "right thing" is not determined by morality, then what determines the "right thing?" ...which wasn't actually what I asked at all, of course. It wasn't even a "yes or no" question - I gave three mutually exclusive options, one of which was "if not those, then what did you mean?"If you don;t want to answer, you don;t have to respond at all. Well, that's...good...I guess? It doesn't address any of my questions, but it's good that you can have empathy. Is perhaps empathy what defines the "right thing" for jar? That would confuse me further as I tie empathy very closely to morality and you've said that morality does not determine the "right thing," but perhaps you and I think differently in that regard as well. It has to do with understanding your argument in favor of supporting drone attacks as carried out by the Obama administration. You believe the drone attacks are simultaneously the "right thing" yet not the moral thing. You value American lives more strongly than Afghani lives (though you still have not given the ratio of their value), and your only clarification to that thus far has been the word "reality" and the sentence "I am American."My argument against the drone attacks rests solely on moral considerations, but you've said those do not move you. So, in order to try to understand your position, I've been trying to determine how you determine the "right thing" when it's not the "moral thing."I thought the line of conversation was fairly clear - perhaps you'd like me to clarify something?

..."Reality" is not a set of guidelines. Reality denotes the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and allows for a set of potential actions that carry varying outcomes.What I'm asking, jar, is given reality, in any give circumstance, what guidelines do you use to determine "the right thing," since you've already stated that it's not morality?In fact, let's add some specificity - given the reality of the situation in Afghanistan, what is your reasoning for believing that drone attacks constitute the "right thing?"If I were jar, and I were presented with a few different versions of reality, how would I determine which versions of reality resulted in drone attacks being the "right thing" and which did not?As an example, I use moral considerations to determine whether an action is acceptable. Moral considerations, to me, include a consolidation of expected outcomes and their relative success and failure in achieving the general goal of reducing human suffering, promoting justice being one of the means by which net suffering can be lowered. So to me, if I want to determine the "right thing," I weight the options from the perspective of how many lives can be saved or lost, how much suffering can be prevented or relieved, and the probability of each outcome given each action or inaction. Through these considerations I think that the drone attacks result in a net loss of human life and an increase in human suffering as compared to attempting even difficult arrests or, indeed, even doing nothing at all and attacking the problem of terrorism as it arrives on our shores in later planning and preparation stages through standard police action, in the same way that we caught the "shoe bomber," and the recent individual who wanted to blow up the Capitol building.My determination of the most moral action (and therefore the "right thing") includes probable results in reality, meaning that I'm highly unlikely to suggest that everyone just buy a Care Bear and sing songs as a solution to the problem of terrorism, but will instead suggest taking courses of action that actually reduce the threat of terrorism without correspondingly higher costs in human suffering or lives elsewhere (or stopping actions that have a net increase in suffering or lives lost when compared to the activities they intend to reduce). For instance, I would suggest stopping the policy of extraordinary rendition, stopping the use of torture even including stress positions, sleep deprivation, and of course waterboarding...and stopping drone attacks, just to name a few.Given my explanation of how I determine the "right thing," could you share how you determine the "right thing?"

So if Afghanistan or Pakistan were to revoke any and all permission that may have been granted for the United States to use their airspace for the purpose of drone attacks, their withdrawal of consent is functionally irrelevant if the United States still wants to use drones?What exactly does sovereignty mean crash? Does it mean you have the exclusive right to control your own territory including whether other nations are permitted to utilize your airspace, or is it a matter of simple mutual recognition, void if one party chooses to ignore the other party's demands?If you're having consensual intercourse with a woman, and after a time she withdraws consent but you want to keep going, are you permitted to continue, or has the withdrawal of consent now made further acts of coitus into rape?I think, if we consider sovereignty to be at all relevant (including considering our own ability to control our own territory such as denying the use of our national airspace to a foreign military), that if Afghanistan or Pakistan withdraw consent to allow drone attacks within their airspace, we would be obligated to stop, else be considered a rogue nation committing an act of war by the international community.Do you think differently? Why, or why not?

No, frog.My issue is not with war itself.My issue is that this is not a war.There is no enemy nation-state. There is no uniformed enemy military.We keep calling it a "war," but it's only a war in the same sense that the "War on drugs" is also a war, or the "War on poverty."We are not at war with Afghanistan, who are supposed to be our allies. We are not at war with Pakistan, who are supposed to be our allies. If we were at war, then of course to hell with concepts of sovereignty, but we are not at all at war with those nations.I wonder at your position if the Unites States were the militarily weaker nation containing a loose coalition of independent militias hostile to a more militarily powerful external nation presumably allied to the US. Would you think it would be okay for the "allied" nation to dispatch military assets inside of your own borders even after you told them to stop? Wouldn't that rather harm the presumed alliance? If the foreign "allied" nation was killing your citizens on suspicion of being part of those militias with scant (or no) evidence, and your citizens were frightened and angry at the seemingly indiscriminate killings of innocent people (along with some possible number of guilty individuals, but we'll never know the actual ratio), would you consider the "allied" nation to be acting in an ethical manner? Would you want to remain "allied" with them?Why should other nations trust the United States to respect their own rights to national sovereignty if we show that we're just going to do whatever we want because the other guy doesn't have enough guns to stop us?Again - if you were having consensual sex with a woman, and partway through she tells you to stop, what happens? Do you have the right to just keep going because you want to, and her rights to her own body don't matter?If continuing would constitute rape...then how is it ethical to continue to use the airspace of a nation you are not at war with after that nation revokes permission to do so?