Our public servants are not good or evil. They are merely people responding to the incentives that they are faced with.
This means that they are incentivised to behave by fear of losing their jobs, by financial contributions and kickbacks, by legacy, by moral sentiment, by haste and convenience, by duty. There are very few to no public servants who feel that what they are doing is wrong - and you might agree with some of their actions even when it blurs lines (assassinating Osama Bin Laden without due process of law).
What's happening now is that America's post WWII order is fracturing and weakening. There are new players on the stage. The theater of global politics and finance is shifting from Europe to the Asian Pacific. The borders fixed to prevent another great European war had also been fixed to provide energy security from the Middle East - but this freezing has prevented those people living there from having a great or fully modern society of their own. The technology backing nuclear weapons has exceeded the defense capabilities of all nations at a time non-proliferation treaties expired (the Bush administration did not renew them). Russia and China are rushing to create a Eurasia that can compete with Europe and Europe is trying to create a United States of Europe to ween away from NATO and to achieve a regional hegemony that provides it security and an opportunity to be a global player. Frought with both politicization, financial warfare, general gamifiedness, and brittleness global finance has brought financial redistribution, bubbles and busts to both hemispheres.
In response the US is building oil pipelines across the Americas, coup'ing Venezuela to open up its oil to US investment, settling new bases and rigs into the now contested (for geostrategic military reasons) the artic north.
The internet through all of this was supposed to allow a marketplace of ideas to exist across the world - but instead has been used by nations to propagandize, spy and sabotage one another.
In this turbulant time of America losing its grips, huge changes and bets will be made and American leadership will kill, torture, surveil and censor to ensure its own survival. That is to say we can't think of this as good versus evil but dog eat dog. The world has never been about good and evil, though men are compelled by it before they stand in trenches and need to survive.
The sad part is that during a time on Earth where there is more of everything for more of everyone that changes and fluxuations and opportunity mean the prospect of violence.
To be clear you, not me nor the parent, but you introduced good and evil into the conversation. We were discussing fine, as in decent or humane.
But if the words good and evil are to mean anything then the torture and murder of innocents must qualify as evil. Spare me your grad school real-politics analysis, none of which justifies torture because it categorically cannot be justified.
Thank you. Yes I introduced it as terminology because I felt it was present in content without the terminology before I spoke my piece.
You misunderstand me. I am neither justifying nor trying to justify torture. I am trying to show why nations convince themselves that torture is justifiable. The calculus of nations - their realpolitik - exists in a world where an analysis of torture makes it seem sensible (entirely tangential to its being reprehensible).
To add more here: what I'm saying is that if every modern nation actively participates in these behaviors we must go beyond good and evil to understand the behavior - there only appears to be relative good rather than an exaggerated excluded middle. A realist, realpolitik analysis affords us a way of understanding the points of contention and the contradictions that incentivize those nations and their representatives to participate in reprehensible activity.
Wherein comes 'constructive realism': if it is incentives and power conflict that incentivize reprehensible acts then we can fix the acts not by voting for new representatives but by changing the conditions that lead to contentions. The realpolitik analysis is not a cynical analysis or one that is doomed to justify behavior: it is instead one that places the responsibility on conditions and context as much as specific actors.
This means that they are incentivised to behave by fear of losing their jobs, by financial contributions and kickbacks, by legacy, by moral sentiment, by haste and convenience, by duty. There are very few to no public servants who feel that what they are doing is wrong - and you might agree with some of their actions even when it blurs lines (assassinating Osama Bin Laden without due process of law).
What's happening now is that America's post WWII order is fracturing and weakening. There are new players on the stage. The theater of global politics and finance is shifting from Europe to the Asian Pacific. The borders fixed to prevent another great European war had also been fixed to provide energy security from the Middle East - but this freezing has prevented those people living there from having a great or fully modern society of their own. The technology backing nuclear weapons has exceeded the defense capabilities of all nations at a time non-proliferation treaties expired (the Bush administration did not renew them). Russia and China are rushing to create a Eurasia that can compete with Europe and Europe is trying to create a United States of Europe to ween away from NATO and to achieve a regional hegemony that provides it security and an opportunity to be a global player. Frought with both politicization, financial warfare, general gamifiedness, and brittleness global finance has brought financial redistribution, bubbles and busts to both hemispheres.
In response the US is building oil pipelines across the Americas, coup'ing Venezuela to open up its oil to US investment, settling new bases and rigs into the now contested (for geostrategic military reasons) the artic north.
The internet through all of this was supposed to allow a marketplace of ideas to exist across the world - but instead has been used by nations to propagandize, spy and sabotage one another.
In this turbulant time of America losing its grips, huge changes and bets will be made and American leadership will kill, torture, surveil and censor to ensure its own survival. That is to say we can't think of this as good versus evil but dog eat dog. The world has never been about good and evil, though men are compelled by it before they stand in trenches and need to survive.
The sad part is that during a time on Earth where there is more of everything for more of everyone that changes and fluxuations and opportunity mean the prospect of violence.