A disgusting vat of filth that no self-respecting intelligent person would wade into.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
I said nine out of ten I think in the past seventy five years. I think I definitely showed that.

Then you confused me by pointing to the creation of Bulgaria as support, since that was longer ago.

You picked the country with the most border changes and most of them happening a long time ago, and Bulgaria ended up with 90% Bulgarians.

I picked the country I knew a little about. (Ever play Diplomacy? Bulgaria has an Aegean coast in that game.) You seem to have decided I was cherry-picking. Not so. BTW, Bulgaria's population appears to be 84% Bulgarian.

Nothing in Geopolitics is absolute. . . . You could go on all day with exceptions, but the question is how significant they are. A Frenchman living in Russia is an exception, but in no way significant. The borders all over Europe almost conform to ethnolinguistic borders. And most of the places where they don't: Belgium, Eastern Ukrain, Crimea, Kosovo the Basques, there are problems. Were the linguistic distinctions are minor the problems are still there: Scotland, Ireland, and Catalonia. So where the political borders are aligned with ethnolinguistic borders (most of the borders) there is no trouble, but in most of the places they are not aligned there is trouble. Seems like a pretty overwhelming force to me.

I agree with much of this. But perhaps we're interested in different parts of this. It's one thing to say that borders currently reflect linguistic and ethnic differences to a great degree. It's another to say that borders are going to keep changing to align with linguistic and ethnic differences. Borders moved a lot in Europe up through the end of World War II, and then haven't changed much since then, with a few exceptions. Bulgaria's borders kept changing in its first 60 years of independence, and then have stayed pretty much the same since then.

Now you could suggest that the shift to industrialization somehow caused borders to change a lot for a while. Or you could say that borders change all the time, but that the Cold War put a lid on things. Those two theories point in different directions for the future. And I'm sure there are other theories -- I just made those up now. My point: Distinguishing the exceptions from the trends is how you sort out between the theories.

Have you noticed that the current political map of europe conforms more closely to ethnolinguistic lines than the political map of europe fifty years ago.

Can you link to the maps?

2050 will most certianly be more aligned than 2000. In fact Montenegros split from Serbia has accomplished this. If you don't count that all it will take is Belgium breaking up, Scotland leaving, Ireland recombining, Catalan breaking off, crimea moving to Russia, Moldova and Romania combining etc.

If those things happen. But they haven't happened yet.

You know that no political lines will move to make themselves conform less to ethnolinguistic lines.

You're ignoring the EU, but in Europe you are probably correct. OTOH, I'm not sure about this outside Europe. The conversation started with a discussion of Afghanistan and Central Asia, and I'm still not understanding how you see this strong force translating into specific events that will change borders in those places.

[notcasesensitive]

Originally posted by Spanky
I said nine out of ten I think in the past seventy five years. I think I definitely showed that.

I'd check his math if I were you.

[Cletus Miller]

Originally posted by Spanky
Yes Spain and France have the basgues. Have these basques complained at all about not having their own country?

You're kidding, right? The Spanish government initially blamed ETA (the Basque separatist movement) for the Madrid train bombings. ETA's terrorism doesn't seem to have broad support, but their political goals (autonomy, at a minimum, which is the first step toward independence) are reasonably broadly supported.

[Replaced_Texan]

For a town that finally got on the map for it's replica of the Forbidden Gardens, you'd think that they'd be more excited about encouraging diversity. But, no.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Yglesias says:

• Workers getting pay raises, Federal Reserve contemplates slamming on the breaks. Same old, same old.
  
  It seems to me that this business almost invariably goes missing in mainstream discussions of inequality in America. Meanwhile, the most powerful economic policy institution in America has spent the past 25-30 years consistently viewing its mission as trying to prevent typical wage earners from seeing increases in pay. While hurting the interests of wage earners, this policy also manages to advance the interests of (relatively wealthy) net creditors over those of (relatively poor) net debtors. Meanwhile, during Alan Greenspan's long tour in office, he used his informal power to try and entrench the rule that larges budget deficits were okay when caused by tax cuts for wealthy people, but even small deficits are unacceptable when caused by progressive social outlay.
  
  Meanwhile, we're supposed to believe that the hegemonic run of such policy just so happens to have coincided with a period of "skill-biased technologic change" that is the real source of growing inequality in America.

Thoughts?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Heh.

• Some reports are issued and just gather dust. And truth of the matter is, a lot of reports in Washington are never read by anybody. To show you how important this one is, I read it.

-- President Bush, on the ISG Report.

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
Please, the problem is sunnis killing shias and visa versa.

That's certainly true today, but it wasn't inevitable that this Pseudo-Civil War would happen.

All of this is counter-factual speculation, but the availability of a significantly larger force to police post-War Iraq and maintain a more secure environment could and should have made a big difference in preventing the security situation and sectarian strife from developing as they did. Theoretically, it would certainly have been good to have as many of those foreign troops be Muslim as possible.

In reality, though, we were never going to get the sort of broad coalition, including a significant Muslim presence, that we did for Gulf War I -- or even the quiet acceptance/support that we got for the Afghanistan operation -- because the the very different circumstances behind the three conflicts.

i.e. In the other operations, almost everyone saw Saddam and alQaeda/Taliban as the respective bad guys. In Iraq II -- the widespread perception was that the U.S. started it, and we were going to invade no matter what.

S_A_M

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
Sorry for the tone. It was late last night and I was generally crabby.

Was that an apology? There are no apologies on this board. Take apologies to the FB board.

Seriously, I apreciate the apology, but I think I set the tone. In addition, I am just thankful people are still willing to respond to my posts.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by notcasesensitive
I'd check his math if I were you.

So who's better at math here: Hank or Spank? They each have such obvious deficiencies.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
"the situation in Iraq is not really debatable, the issue is to find a way forward." That is what they are trying to do.

So, I'm a bit surprised that you keep busting on the Report of the Iraq Study group (which neither of us have read in full) -- and I think it is for political reasons.

No one should have expected anything other than high-level summary reccommendations from what was/is a blue-ribbon bipartisan panel of non-subject matter experts aessentially asked to just think about it and report back.

S_A_M

I am busting on them because what I believe they said was to stay the course, and then slowly reduce troops. Of course they decorated it a lot but that was the bottom line. They didn't recommend anything that wasn't trivial, unrelated (Isreal peace process) or unrealistic (or the combination of the three).

Like I said the only significant policy change that I could see that could possibly have a significant effect on what we are doing is increase troop strength.

So the options are:

1) Give up (Pull out)
2) Stay the course
3) Increase troop strength.

Everyone is complaining because they are in denial about this reality. If you want to win the options are between 2 and 3. If you don't want to win the options are betwee one and two. What the panel recommended was between one and two.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by Spanky
I am busting on them because what I believe they said was to stay the course, and then slowly reduce troops. Of course they decorated it a lot but that was the bottom line. They didn't recommend anything that wasn't trivial, unrelated (Isreal peace process) or unrealistic (or the combination of the three).

Like I said the only significant policy change that I could see that could possibly have a significant effect on what we are doing is increase troop strength.

So the options are:

1) Give up (Pull out)
2) Stay the course
3) Increase troop strength.

Everyone is complaining because they are in denial about this reality. If you want to win the options are between 2 and 3. If you don't want to win the options are betwee one and two. What the panel recommended was between one and two.

If you go back a couple weeks (maybe search on "internationalization", as I think I used that word), you'll see I spelled out about a half-dozen alternative strategies. There are alternatives to staying the course. However, some of them involving eating crow in some way shape or form and some of them involve changes in objective (e.g., not worrying about keeping Iraq together).

Your three choices are a nice, simple little set of options. They are also bullshit.

[notcasesensitive]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
So who's better at math here: Hank or Spank? They each have such obvious deficiencies.

I figured Hank was good at math (he is an IP lawyer, no? don't they have to, like, know math and shit?). Actually when Spank accused me of skulking around waiting to prove him wrong at something yesterday*, I was going to reply that I would have preferred that the ".15% (which is 1/5/ of one percent)" thing had been posted by Hank because I've been trying to run up my PB arguments won tally against Hank. (I'm undefeated!)

Unfortunately I didn't think Hank would ever post that because (a) Hank is an IP lawyer (and therefore, I would assume, good at math) and (b) Hank lacks the hubris (condescension?) to include in a post to a board full of people with advanced degrees a parenthetical describing to them what a really really small number 0.15% is, much less to resort to an estimation to do so because, well, they might have a hard time wrapping their heads around 3/20ths.



*that was really, truly an excellent post. it makes me laugh just to think about it.

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Spanky
I am busting on them because what I believe they said was to stay the course, and then slowly reduce troops. Of course they decorated it a lot but that was the bottom line. They didn't recommend anything that wasn't trivial, unrelated (Isreal peace process) or unrealistic (or the combination of the three).

Like I said the only significant policy change that I could see that could possibly have a significant effect on what we are doing is increase troop strength.

So the options are:

1) Give up (Pull out)
2) Stay the course
3) Increase troop strength.

Everyone is complaining because they are in denial about this reality. If you want to win the options are between 2 and 3. If you don't want to win the options are betwee one and two. What the panel recommended was between one and two.

Ok. I disagree both with your assesment of the report (I think) and the options available. Partly that may be because we are using the term "stay the course" to mean different things.

I do agree that we may have no really good options at this point, so we may end up having to just try to limit the damage, choose the least worst, etc.

For example, the (more or less) cooperation of Iran could be very helpful in Iraq, but they have basically told us to turn around and drop trou if we want their help.

S_A_M

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
Your three choices are a nice, simple little set of options. They are also bullshit.

He is a skilled political operative.

if he were really funny, we could just start calling him Carville.

S_A_M

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by notcasesensitive

* * *

Nobody quote this post, just to see how long it is before Spanky clicks on it to check.

If you look at someone's posts a lot, you're not _really_ignoring them.

S_A_M