Octopus Overlords

Rip wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 6:26 pm TeeHee, you guys are a riot. One says we are retreating to isolationism while the other says Bolton wants to blow everyone up. Which is it, you can't both be right?

Rip wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 6:26 pm TeeHee, you guys are a riot. One says we are retreating to isolationism while the other says Bolton wants to blow everyone up. Which is it, you can't both be right?

Rip wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 6:26 pm TeeHee, you guys are a riot. One says we are retreating to isolationism while the other says Bolton wants to blow everyone up. Which is it, you can't both be right?

Rip wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 6:26 pm TeeHee, you guys are a riot. One says we are retreating to isolationism while the other says Bolton wants to blow everyone up. Which is it, you can't both be right?

Holman wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 6:32 pm

Rip wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 6:26 pm TeeHee, you guys are a riot. One says we are retreating to isolationism while the other says Bolton wants to blow everyone up. Which is it, you can't both be right?

Modern isolationism doesn't mean closing the doors on the world like 18th-century Japan.

It means rejecting international diplomacy and agreements in favor of lashing out with force and threats like a tiny-handed bone-spurred moron and hoping that'll #MAGA.

Rip wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 8:32 pm

Holman wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 6:32 pm

Rip wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 6:26 pm TeeHee, you guys are a riot. One says we are retreating to isolationism while the other says Bolton wants to blow everyone up. Which is it, you can't both be right?

Modern isolationism doesn't mean closing the doors on the world like 18th-century Japan.

It means rejecting international diplomacy and agreements in favor of lashing out with force and threats like a tiny-handed bone-spurred moron and hoping that'll #MAGA.

Now you are just making shit up.

Isgrimnur wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 9:29 pm How the fuck did these people even live to old age?

Holman wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 9:45 pm

Isgrimnur wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 9:29 pm How the fuck did these people even live to old age?

Amyl nitrite, or so I hear.

Freyland wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 9:25 pm

Rip wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 8:32 pm

Holman wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 6:32 pm

Rip wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 6:26 pm TeeHee, you guys are a riot. One says we are retreating to isolationism while the other says Bolton wants to blow everyone up. Which is it, you can't both be right?

Modern isolationism doesn't mean closing the doors on the world like 18th-century Japan.

It means rejecting international diplomacy and agreements in favor of lashing out with force and threats like a tiny-handed bone-spurred moron and hoping that'll #MAGA.

Now you are just making shit up.

I agree (ugh) that paragraph two is awfully...specific. But paragraph one is closer to the truth, except acknowledging that other countries exist, but to interact with us you have to kow-tow to diplomacy that places us in a superior position no matter the cost. It may sound good on paper, but it ain't gonna happen that way and we're going to suffer for it since we are incapable of just flipping a switch to self-sufficiency.

Isolationism is strong in the Tea Party, where mistrust of executive power is profound and where being able to see Russia from your front yard counts as mastery of international affairs. But sophisticated readers of The New York Times are not immune, or so it seems from the comments that arrive when I write in defense of a more assertive foreign policy. (In recent columns I’ve advocated calibrated intervention to shift the balance in Syria’s civil war and using foreign aid to encourage democracy in Egypt.) Not our problems, many readers tell me.

Isolationism is not just an aversion to war, which is an altogether healthy instinct. It is a broader reluctance to engage, to assert responsibility, to commit. Isolationism tends to be pessimistic (we will get it wrong, we will make it worse) and amoral (it is none of our business unless it threatens us directly) and inward-looking (foreign aid is a waste of money better spent at home).

“We are not the world’s policeman, nor its judge and jury,” proclaimed Representative Alan Grayson, a progressive Florida Democrat, reciting favorite isolationist excuses for doing nothing. “Our own needs in America are great, and they come first.”

Rip wrote: Sat Apr 07, 2018 1:10 am You can mind twist it all you want. It is a common and well defined term. Words have meaning.

Rip wrote: Sat Apr 07, 2018 1:10 am

Freyland wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 9:25 pm

Rip wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 8:32 pm

Holman wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 6:32 pm

Rip wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 6:26 pm TeeHee, you guys are a riot. One says we are retreating to isolationism while the other says Bolton wants to blow everyone up. Which is it, you can't both be right?

Modern isolationism doesn't mean closing the doors on the world like 18th-century Japan.

It means rejecting international diplomacy and agreements in favor of lashing out with force and threats like a tiny-handed bone-spurred moron and hoping that'll #MAGA.

Now you are just making shit up.

I agree (ugh) that paragraph two is awfully...specific. But paragraph one is closer to the truth, except acknowledging that other countries exist, but to interact with us you have to kow-tow to diplomacy that places us in a superior position no matter the cost. It may sound good on paper, but it ain't gonna happen that way and we're going to suffer for it since we are incapable of just flipping a switch to self-sufficiency.

You can mind twist it all you want. It is a common and well defined term. Words have meaning. I find no empirical reference to the phrase "modern isolationism".

Freyland wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 9:25 pm it ain't gonna happen that way and we're going to suffer for it since we are incapable of just flipping a switch to self-sufficiency.

em2nought wrote: Sat Apr 07, 2018 5:02 pm

Freyland wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 9:25 pm it ain't gonna happen that way and we're going to suffer for it since we are incapable of just flipping a switch to self-sufficiency.

We've been pretty much self sufficient in the past. Seems like a pretty good thing to aim for. I think we'd suffer more if there weren't any jobs left here at all.

Fitzy wrote: Sat Apr 07, 2018 5:52 pm

em2nought wrote: Sat Apr 07, 2018 5:02 pm

Freyland wrote: Fri Apr 06, 2018 9:25 pm it ain't gonna happen that way and we're going to suffer for it since we are incapable of just flipping a switch to self-sufficiency.

We've been pretty much self sufficient in the past. Seems like a pretty good thing to aim for. I think we'd suffer more if there weren't any jobs left here at all.

Myth.

Without foreign aid we wouldn't have won our Independence. We've relied on imports to accelerate wealth since Jamestown and Plymouth. We imported labor (often forced) to build and tend to the infrastructure and to grow and mine raw materials.

There are many great moments in our history for which we can be proud. However, we should acknowledge that our country is built on the backs and blood of people who were considered less than human by the people and government of this nation.

We are not now and have never been self sufficient as a nation.

Rip wrote: Sat Apr 07, 2018 12:37 pm That literally isn't isolationism.

GreenGoo wrote: Sat Apr 07, 2018 8:19 pm

Rip wrote: Sat Apr 07, 2018 12:37 pm That literally isn't isolationism.

You can tell your grandkids that you were there the moment isolationism's meaning changed slightly to focus more on economic and geopolitical isolation.

If you can't get over that hump, just substitute economic and geopolitical isolation everywhere you see isolationism in this thread.

If that's too much to ask, then feel free to find something more productive to do.

What the accused "isolationists" in the GOP and the Democratic Party are really describing would be far more accurately defined as foreign policy realism. The notion that the U.S. should be more restrained in where it chooses to engage militarily, for example, is rooted in the assumption not that the United States should never intervene but that perhaps it should do so more selectively. The "isolationist" argument that vital national interests should take precedence over notions of humanitarianism or global leadership, such as those that led the United States into Libya, is really about modifying the nature of America's dominant positions in the world, not about ending it.

To be sure, hurling the "isolationism" epithet is something of an old game in American politics. In the 1940s, President Franklin Roosevelt went after his GOP opponents (and not unreasonably) for opposing rearmament and active support for European Allies in the face of rising German aggression. That position did great damage to the Republican Party brand at the time. Only when Dwight Eisenhower defeated the isolationist wing of the party at the 1952 Republican convention did the GOP finally begin to wipe away the isolationist stain. Since then, the charge has remained a dirty word in American politics, even as it's frequently misaimed.

In 1972, when George McGovern (also quite reasonably) called on the country to "come home" from foreign entanglements after the disaster of Vietnam he, and the Democratic Party, were branded as too weak and too defeatist to safely manage global affairs. In the 1990s, when I served in the Clinton Administration as a foreign policy speechwriter, my colleagues and I regularly trotted out the claim that Republicans, by questioning the President's foreign policy positions, were returning to the isolationist spirit of the 1920s, '30s and '40s. It wasn't, but the sobriquet was an effective one that brought with it connotations of appeasement and weakness in the face of foreign threats.

Its return today, as well as the ease and frequency with which it is made, are a reminder that a step away from foreign policy orthodoxy and toward a position of urging restraint -- no matter how tepid -- can make one susceptible to the isolationist charge. It's only from the perspective of that orthodoxy would the recent warnings of American overstretch could be considered a retreat from the global stage.

GreenGoo wrote: Sun Apr 08, 2018 10:14 am Yawn.

"Economic and geopolitical isolationism".

You can do it.

I am not arguing which is the more persuasive view. There is, perhaps, even a third option. But to label as isolationist a view that argues for a shift in prior US policy is in error. The isolationists in the past may have been wrong, but they weren’t really isolationists.

The US can’t be isolated from the world, as George Washington made clear. That being the case, the question is what should the United States’ involvement be? Washington did not have an expansive view of US involvement. He had a realistic view, seeing that the US had minimal resources at the time. His doctrine was to limit American involvement to what was necessary. Necessity shifts with circumstance, but Washington’s doctrine is self-evidently correct.

Rip wrote: Sat Apr 07, 2018 1:10 amYou can mind twist it all you want. It is a common and well defined term. Words have meaning. I find no empirical reference to the phrase "modern isolationism".