Only if cocks and slapping are involved…

People like Phinn learned a few words in high school for the SATs, and now they think they are all smart-like.

I really can’t tell what Phinn’s point is. S/He doesn’t seem to address anything anyone is saying here, and then ends with

I see no real moral difference between supporting a proposition and advocating it. I realize that the mongers may attract more attention than the supporters (until election night, that is). But I’m really more interested in the schema people use to arrive at conclusions of right and wrong, the decisional criteria and methodology. Whether that decision-making process plays out silently in your head, or on the editorial page of a newspaper or website, the propriety of the decision-making process and the validity of the conclusions reached therewith are the same.

WTF? Is this Jeff Goldstein?

What I’ve gleaned: Phinn is an irritable underachiever whose sole mission in life is to keep talking until everyone else dies. Righteous Bubba and lemonheads (among others) remain my heroes for giving the Phinns of the world the benefit of the doubt by taking his (her? its?) arguments more seriously than they deserve.

I see no real moral difference between supporting a proposition and advocating it.

I have to know what you mean by “supporting” for this to make any sense. Also you seem to be putting under the heading of “the proposition” a wide range of military activities from what was basically a peacekeeping action in Somalia, to a special forces and airpower war in Afghanistan, to a full-on war of imperial aggression in Iraq, and I’m sorry, those are not equivalent situations.

But I’m really more interested in the schema people use to arrive at conclusions of right and wrong, the decisional criteria and methodology. Whether that decision-making process plays out silently in your head, or on the editorial page of a newspaper or website, the propriety of the decision-making process and the validity of the conclusions reached therewith are the same.

Again, this shit has no meaning to me. Maybe it would fly at Crooked Timber?

I see no real moral difference between supporting a proposition and advocating it. I realize that the mongers may attract more attention than the supporters (until election night, that is). But I’m really more interested in the schema people use to arrive at conclusions of right and wrong, the decisional criteria and methodology. Whether that decision-making process plays out silently in your head, or on the editorial page of a newspaper or website, the propriety of the decision-making process and the validity of the conclusions reached therewith are the same.

A. It’s not a giant leap — it’s central to one of my points (which you failed to address) is that the Democrat crusade against the Iraq invasion IS NOT GENUINELY MOTIVATED by concern over armor and planning.

You speak (write) as though the two are mutually exclusive. I beg to differ; I think a giant leap is central to one of your points.

Cool. (Except the Republicans are not my party.)

How did I see that coming a mile away?

But a minute ago, Shygetz said that I had to quit living in the past, that the 60s were over, etc … so which is it? That I’m too old, or that I’m too young?

No, too young and too gullible. You’ve been trying to dress up your gullibility as age and experience.

Tell that to the guy who wrote Catwoman. And to Gavin, who links Mr. Catwoman’s armor-and-planning post so gleefully. (x3)

Armor-and-planning is not totally unrelated to “chickenhawk” rhetoric, but it is rather tangential. At most, one might say that if one isn’t going to sign up and put his own ass on the line, a war supporter should at least be willing to sacrifice (there’s that word!) the costs of giving the troops the armour to protect them. Especially since unlike the classic wars of maneuver and such, with well-defined front lines, in Iraq, everybody’s a target, even those who in the past would have been considered behind the lines (or REMFs). And it’s certainly less risky to oneself to pay for somebody else’s body armour than to enlist oneself, so it would seem to be the least one could do.

The war in the Balkans is a prime example of setting up a bogeyman to justify an unnecessary foreign war — we dropped a few thousand tons of explosives to depose a dictator half a world away who posed no security threat to the US, on the basis of intelligence that later proved to be exaggerated or false.

Were you still in high school when that one was going on? Junior High?

I was getting shipped overseas, twice. You? Oh, I know, you didn’t support that one, though.

Via this formulation Kosovo and Somalia….

Of course you’d think this. You will apparently say ANYTHING to distinguish between these two misadventures….

Just to clarify, do you mean distinguishing between Kosovo and Somalia, or between those and Iraq, which somehow equals two in your world?

Besides, where were you when your fellow travelers were slinging around the ‘chickenhawk’ label a few days/weeks/months ago, during this supposed Invalid-Chickenhawk Period?

I was right here. Go ahead, search for “chickenhawk”. Or even “chicken” or “hawk”. I dare you. I double dog dare you.

Just a movie fan with a functioning sense of smell. Jesus H, did you people not see either one of these piles of flaming dog crap? Good Lord!

Hell no, I didn’t. I’ve got more taste than that, but also enough sense not to go too heavy on criticism of moview I haven’t seen. Which do you lack, taste or sense?

You’re really missing the boat here trying to get hard and fast rules for this. There are obvious examples like Jonah Goldberg but it depends on how slippery your slope is. It will always raise the hackles of whichever warmonger you’re trying to shame, and that has a lot of utility. Precision is excellent in satire, but the collateral damage has value too.

So: feel free to nitpick at the selection of targets – so and so can’t serve because he has to clean grandma’s catheter every day and no one in the trailer park will help! – but it should be pretty goddamned obvious that there are reasonable targets out there. Ace is fond of Mencken, for instance, so when he gets squirmy he might try “Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.”

it’s awfully hypocritical for the accusers to even use it, considering that they, too, have the habit of supporting wars in which they do not fight

It looks like you’re using a different definition of chickenhawk than everyone else. I’ve only seen it applied to actual war mongers, not to people who were just “supporters” (whatever that means). This has been pointed out to you more than once. You should address it. Why is your definition right and everyone else’s wrong?

January 11, 2007 at 23:54

Nuance? Sure. Whatever. I happen to think that when you decide to ask (or, even worse, tell) thousands of people to risk their lives and kill thousands of others, you’d better be crystal fucking clear on whether you think it’s the right thing to do, or not.

But that’s me.”

You have no concept of irony. If you did, that statement alone would change you 180.
Sadly, you don’t have that self awareness.

That’s because you haven’t said anything substantive.

Nuance? Sure. Whatever. I happen to think that when you decide to ask (or, even worse, tell) thousands of people to risk their lives and kill thousands of others, you’d better be crystal fucking clear on whether you think it’s the right thing to do, or not.

But that’s me.

Besides, that’s not what we’re really talking about here. We’re talking about whether the whole ‘chickenhawk’ accusation is valid and meaningful, or if it’s awfully hypocritical for the accusers to even use it, considering that they, too, have the habit of supporting wars in which they do not fight (as long as a Democrat is preznit at the time).

Debased and deranged as he may be, Phinin does have a point. The difference between Dubya and Clinton is not that one is an imperialist and the other isn’t. The differences are (a) Clinton is from the economic hegemonist wing of the imperialist camp, and (b) Clinton was competent. Even in the 1990s, the press was fully on board the imperialist agenda. It is only Bush’s rank incompetence that have allowed the American people to begin to realize what is realy going on.

The highlighted portion is obviously the critical element in your formulation. After all, every war means that someone’s life is going to be risked, and these wars are always supported by many others who do not fight themselves, including many Democrats, recently. (I seem to remember a vote on that … ). They can’t all be chickenhawks, can they, just for supporting a war in which they will not be personally fighting? Not unless to qualify as a non-chickenhawk, one can only support wars in which no one will risk death, I guess, as though we live in World of Warcraft, or something.

But what if the person in question, when faced with the evidence that a war he supported now requires more personnel (and money) than he initially believed? What if, in light of this new evidence, he supports the proposition that the solution to this practical, logistical, economic problem is that our forces should increase their manpower (and materiel, etc.). For this he supports more money to be devoted to the war effort. New budgeting, higher taxes, change in allocation of resources, and all that.

Is this not the same behavior — the same moral and political position — that this person had before the war started? That he would work to pay for it and others would fight? Those characteristics alone are not enough to make him a chickenhawk, as you say. So, how could it make him a chickenhawk when he supports solving this lack of sufficient resources by providing more resources?

I’m not saying that you have to agree with the particular decisions about men, dollars, and resource-allocation in every case, but as a moral and ethical principle, is supporting an increase in resources to deal with an increased risk not enough to keep from being a chickenhawk, in your estimation? If not, why?

There are just causes, and pursuits of conquest and ego and world perception. This list sums up the difference.
Next?
We have a winner!!!

It’s real simple. Black or white. Up or down”

And thus the box you have put yourself in has been your rhetorical mistake.
Nothing is black or white, up or down.
This is one of the fundamental mistakes of the right: that everything can be argued or solved with polar decisions.
Life’s a lot more f’in complicated than that, and that type of simplistic thinking has caused a lot of problems, conflicts, wars, etc.
Oh no, am I grasping at the gray? Am I referencing “nuanced”?
Damn right I am. That’s life, and to think otherwise is intellectually lazy.

In my opinion, it was invalid before we invaded Iraq the second time. We had sufficient force to carry out the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, but not the invasion and occupation of Iraq (and those who thought otherwise have since been proven wrong). However, chickenhawk is a subjective term describing hypocritical behavior (I know, Objectivists have a hard time with subjectivism, but you’ll have to get over it). One becomes a chickenhawk when one believes that a war is essential to national well-being, supports that war, believes that we do not have sufficient manpower to fight that war, and still refuses to volunteer. In doing so, he has stated that HIS life is too valuable to risk for the well-being of the nation, while continuing to insist that OTHERS go and fight in his stead.

As I stated before, in no other war in my lifetime have we had a critical shortage of manpower in our volunteer army (including others that I disagreed with, such as Grenada). Therefore, in my opinion, chickenhawk has not been previously applicable.

Point A of your breakdown is irrelevant–we do not have conscription now, so it is beside the point.

Point C is wrong–not every war that is supported is thought to be essential to our national well-being. Some are proposed for entirely altruistic motives (e.g. Darfur). Which wars I supported are irrelevant, both for reasons stated above and because the question is not whether I think I am a chickenhawk.

Point D shows a naive misunderstanding of the nature of the military. You want to shuffle people from other bases? Then who mans those bases? Think N. Korea is going to give us a time-out while we get Iraq sorted out? In true libertarian style, you underestimate the complexity of the real world in your fantasy scenarios. There is a reason why there has never been a successful libertarian government, why Heinlein was a science-fiction writer instead of a political operative, and why most philosophy departments ignore Objectivism.

Point E is an incorrect conclusion based on invalid premises. Never before in the post-conscription era have we fought a war where we could not field an army of sufficient size to win the war. Now, that has come to pass. Get with the times.

Point B suggests that, in your twisted way, you DO understand what we are talking about. Patriotism–that “intangible benefit”–is worth next to nothing to the chickenhawk patriots. Even though they think that we need more soldiers to win this vital war, it should be someone else, and not them. Their patriotism, which they trumpet so loudly, is worth a fart in the wind.