If you feel the need for an additional deprecating term to support your non-argument, who am I to quibble?
I wonder then why you chose to respond to my post in which I stated I was dealing specifically with those making the chickenhawk argument. Did you not understand me when I said I was addressing the chickenhawk argument?
To me, it seems a pretty basic and stupid argument (the chickenhawk argument,) is it so complex to you that you are unable to form an opinion?
Again, I posted specifically to address those making the chickenhawk argument. You chose to respond and take issue with it, but now assert that you have nothing meaningful to say on the subject. I kind of knew that already
No, but it does depend on your ability to read his mind.
Ummm… not even close. He certainly used rhetoric outlining the importance of the conflict (since those supposedly genocide-hating pro-human rights Republicans were busy condemning and belittling it) but none of that rhetoric paints the conflict in anywhere the same direct urgency: a direct threat against a mortal enemy. Talking about how things in Europe can affect our security in some esoteric is not the same thing as the “we must fight the terrorists there so we don’t have to fight them there” and other very immediate, aggressive language.
You got all excited by the mention of WW2, but again, there’s nothing in there other than citing WW2 as one reason why the US has always found it important to engage in European policy throughout our history. But again, nowhere is there anything saying that Bosnia is some titanic struggle against having nuclear weapons detonated on American soil or a turning point in civilization vs the horde.
Clinton’s speech, in short, is perfectly consistent with a President arguing that a regional genocide and conflict are important priorities for the US to deal with. Clinton’s war wasn’t perfect, but there wasn’t anything approaching the same sense of a claimed titanic, world-teetering on the brink must win struggle.
Again, these are some very weak arguments for what is otherwise a pretty strong case against RTF’s claim.
Close enough certainly for the analogy that I made. The problem is that you are trying to make more of it than I did so that you’ll have something to rebut. In focusing on irrelevant differences between the two — no analogy is ever a perfect one-to-one correspondence; that’s the nature of analogics — you are also ignoring the other major points made: namely, (1) that there are many ways to respond to an urgent calling other than enlistment, and (2) that there are many reasons a person is not able to respond when otherwise he would.
What you said was: “I have a lot of trouble understanding the “chickenhawk” argument. The idea that you cannot endorse a particular course of action without personally engaging in it, seems to me to inherently fallacious.”
What I was responding to was the second sentence. If one substituted “hypocrisy” or “chartreuse” or “mxyzptlk” for “chickenhawk” in the first sentence, it would have changed things not a whit. The rest of your post consisted almost entirely of examples pertaining to endorsing courses of action without engaging in them. So I overlooked your use of “chickenhawk” and responded to what seemed to be the underlying point of your post, at least to the extent that it touched on my argument.
Seems that there’s been enough back-and-forth about it in this thread alone that I’m wise to avoid it unless I really feel liked getting dragged into a debate I care nothing about.
Your persistence implies that you feel I owe it to you to take a position on chickenhawkery. If that is indeed how you feel, then fuck you with a very recently used toilet-bowl scrubber.
If you regard the spectrum from bravery to cowardice as to be more or less identical with that from integrity to hypocrisy, then I don’t think we have much to talk about. We may use the same words, but in such vastly different ways as to preclude meaningful conversation.
What a marvelous word, a pity it already has a definition.
“The word is ‘analogic’ "
“Can you use it in a sentence, please?”
“The Presidents case is a perfect example of analogic.”
“Ah! 'analogic” B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T, 'analogic”."
No. For your analogy to hold any water, it needs to establish that there was widespread rhetoric that our civilization was on the line, as runs in many right-wing circles: that it was truly an urgent call in Bosnia the way it has been framed as being in Iraq. You’ve failed to meet that bar or even come close with the Bosnia example. Your points make sense, but like the MM case, this is a fairly lousy example.
Yes. The logic does hold if you substitute “hypocrite” for “chicken.” I’m glad you agree, because the argument is a fallacious one, either way.
I don’t see how substituting “hypocrite” for “chicken” alters the argument beyond an attempt to escape by weasel words. As you’ve agreed the logic is unaltered by the choice of modifier, it would seem reasonable for you to address it.
No offense taken. and no, you don’t owe me. I was just trying to see if you actually had a defensible proposition. It appears you don’t, as you need to substitute perjoratives for logic.
A strange viewpoint for you to have. In your first paragraph of the post you state the spectrum is unchanged by the use of modifier. You said: “If one substituted “hypocrisy” or “chartreuse” or “mxyzptlk” for “chickenhawk” in the first sentence, it would have changed things not a whit”
Frankly, I see your argument here as ill-considered and lacking in rationality. On the one hand you draw a false distinction and then admit that it’s unchanged (and then later again claim that there is a distinction.) You dodge direct questions with insults instead of addressing arguments.
No, it doesn’t. That’s what you want it to say so that you’ll have something to argue about. The OP said nothing about any “widespread rhetoric”. It cited a White House statement. I compared it to a statement from a different White House. If you have to make shit up, you’re losing the argument.
Maybe you should read your own post. It was about, and I quote, the “idea that you cannot endorse a particular course of action without personally engaging in it.”
I responded to your rebuttal of that idea. Insofar as that was all I did, the fact that you mentioned the word “chickenhawk” was irrelevant.
If you genuinely fail to grasp that simple concept, or if you are deliberately obtuse and fail to grasp that, then we really have nothing more to say to each other. Goodbye.
That isn’t the chickenhawk argument (okay, maybe it is for some). The name “chickenhawk” applies to those who are willing, even eager, to spend *other * people’s lives on a cause for which they would not be willing to spend their own life, or their own loved one’s lives. It does not require any physical action or inaction on anyone’s part, other than either facing or deliberately avoiding the sophistry (or perhaps simple narcissism) of thinking the lives of strangers are substantially less valuable than one’s own.
This war was started by such chickenhawks, and cheered on, including on this very board, by other such chickenhawks.
How do you know that a given chickenhawk would be unwilling to make the sacrifice if called upon, and how do you know that they value other lives less than their own?
Based upon what I wrote in that post, would I fit your definition?
Okay then, do you think the people who have gone there, with whatever degree of willingness, do not share those characteristics or some similar ones? Care to go through the list? Shall we?
Age: You’re how old now? There are men in their 40’s and 50’s regularly showing up on the casualties list. Not desk pounders, guys out riding the Humvees over the land mines. Can a proudly fit athlete like yourself do that? Did the dead guys think they were probably too old? Sure, probably many did. But they were there, and many more still are.
Not available due to your personal circumstances: Wow, dude. That means exactly nothing to the Reserves and Guardsmen who had to drop everything and go anyway, many now into their third tours over there. Every one of their lives was equally disrupted, many or most have left families behind, and many in dire financial straits from the loss of their former incomes. Many of those who will come back won’t be able to resume their former careers, too. But your personal circumstances are different, well, how?
Your contribution as a soldier: That phrase was simply incoherent, unless you’re going to claim that you really meant you’re contributing more to society as a financial fund manager, or whatever the hell your parasite job is, and part-time board poster, than actually fighting for the cause you believe in so sincerely. Maybe so. Or maybe you meant something else entirely. But all the 3000+ dead Americans and most of however many tens of thousands of dead Iraqis there are by now were contributing something as well, something that society is now bereft of. The many times that who’ve come home with missinglimbs and permanent brain injuries are past the point of weighing their contributions to society vs. their contributions as soldiers, too.
You’d go if they draft you: It’s nice that you’d go “willingly”, since you wouldn’t have a choice in the matter anyway. Why you emphasize that point is irrelevant. But you won’t go otherwise. The cause to you is worth cheering on the deaths of thousands of other people, but it obviously isn’t worth your *own * sweet pink ass. Right?
Yes, you fit the definition of “chickenhawk” perfectly, I’d say. The way you reached that position, and your reasons for maintaining it, are your own story, but probably not all that interesting a one.
When we were hit on 9/11, the drumbeats for war were pretty loud. I can’t recall a time when military action had such overwhelming support, and it had near unanimous support on these boards. The OP supported it as well.
Given such an overwhelming support for military action, you think people then would have been chastised for not enlisting, or not going to Kabul or Kandahar in the aftermath to help the Afghans. Yet this did not happen, from right or left, and it didn’t happen in the broader society either.
Which leads me to choose between two conclusions, sadly. One is that RTFirefly and his ilk are chickenhawks themselves, loudly advocating a war in Afghanistan that they’re not willing to lift a rifle to fight in, or volunteer to help in in other ways.
Or, that this is just a rhetorical nonentity to be employed against people and wars you don’t yourself favor.
I’ll lean toward the second argument for the time being. I don’t like questioning someone’s courage without good reason.
Or maybe - to state the bleedin’ obvious for those that apparently need it pointing out to them - the entire US military more or less wasn’t tied up in some stupid, half-ass quagmire of choice at that point and was more than up to the job. Unlike now.
