Comments by "MarcosElMalo2" (@MarcosElMalo2) on "Anders Puck Nielsen"
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Your teacher was talking about martial arts, which is a sport, and (probably) personal defense. He wasn’t talking about war. There are similarities between competitive sports and war. Both involve adversaries in contention, each trying to win. And each adversary will (hopefully) leverage its strengths (size, endurance, skill, physical strength) to win.
But the differences are too large to apply your teacher’s lesson to war. Maybe it applies to the tactical level, but it falls short as you move up to higher levels.
And the main difference is this: in competitive sport, you and your adversary are fighting for the same goal, to win a game. If you don’t achieve a better score (or pin or knock out your opponent), you lose. There are other differences (rules, time limits, agreed upon dimensions of the area), but this is the main one.
In war, the two adversaries often are fighting for different goals. I’ll go so far as to say they almost always are fighting for different goals. If one side fails to understand this and fails to understand their adversary’s goals (including the reasons for those goals), they will misapply their advantages and/or their advantages don’t really apply. Size or firepower don’t win the war if you fail to understand your adversary and his goals and motivations.
What about self defense? Isn’t that a much closer analogy? It is, but it still falls short. You and your adversary have different goals, but the goals are quite easy to understand. Your adversary wants to harm you or rob you. You want to prevent him from harming or robbing you. Strength, size, and/or superior firepower are paramount in self defense.
Your teacher was motivating you to develop your skills, to put in the work required to perfect them, to practice, and to improve your physical body. He was training you in a sport that also has self defense applications, up to a point. But if he was only training you for self defense and nothing more, he’d be a firearms instructor. 😂
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@jesan733 I don’t think I’ve seen that put better anywhere else. You demolished runethorsen’s bad faith argument. Or let us say you “runed” his arguments.
I’m past sick and tired of soft-brained leftists and pro-dictator trolls using emotionally charged rhetoric, like “American Empire”. Is the U.S. a hegemonic power? Does it try to impose Western Democracy and values on other parts of the world? I think that is more or less true. But does it act like a traditional empire? No. If we want to see imperial ambitions, we need only look at China, Russia, and Iran.
I’m not saying the U.S. is perfect. If it is the world’s policeman, there are times when it acts like an abusive cop. U.S foreign policy and defense policy has made big mistakes with tragic consequences for others. This is all true. But it is also true that the U.S. checked the Soviet’s expansionism and has helped weaker nations maintain their independence against stronger belligerent nations. And it has not done this alone. It forms coalitions and alliances. Hell, the U.S. was the motivating force behind the U.N., making its two chief rivals permanent members of the Security Council.
Despite the mistakes, despite the sometimes mixed intentions of the U.S., the Pax Americana has been a net benefit for world. The conditions created by American “imperialism” has allowed hundreds of thousands, if not billions, of humans to pull themselves and their nations out of poverty.
American is not above criticism. It might not always listen to it, even when it comes from close friends. But it doesn’t prevent those friends or anyone else from voicing criticism and disapproval. It doesn’t persecute internal dissent. Not like China and Russia or various other smaller dictatorships do.
About the left: I only condemn the knee jerk anti-American left, its intellectually dishonest grifters, and its cud chewing followers. Once upon a time they were far on the fringe and/or limited to minor fields of academia. I don’t lump the liberal or progressive left with them. Once upon a time the childish revolutionaries were a trivial annoyance.
It troubles me that they seem to be gaining influence. It’s not as troubling as what’s happening on the right side of the political spectrum, but the lefty loons are becoming a threat—they sap our ability to fight the proto-fascist right, for one thing.
Anyway, I’m getting off topic. But the point is, if the U.S. is a hegemon, it’s a soft hegemon, the softest the world has ever seen. It ceased using violence to expand its borders in the 19th Century. People like runethorsen are either dumdums or wicked power worshipping nihilists, trying to “colonize” our minds with dishonest rhetoric.
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