Before I begin, I have a confession: until recently (until today, in fact), I was a tankie. But this morning I just woke up and realized everything I believed and everything I'd been saying was wrong, and my critics were right about everything. And so, I have decided to completely and totally adopt their way of thinking.
The above image is an example to illustrate how my thinking has changed. You may be familiar with "Russell's Teapot," a thought experiment from Bertrand Russell where he imagines that someone says that there is a tiny, invisible teapot, floating out in space. He argues that while such a claim cannot strictly be disproved, it can be dismissed without evidence because there is no evidence to support it. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. He goes on to explain that while he could not disprove the existence of God, he still considered himself an atheist, because he did not see sufficient evidence for the claim of God's existence to be credible.
In my previous (tankie) way of thinking, I would have agreed with this idea, that claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. But I now understand that this made me a Bad Person. Suppose that, as in the beautiful diagram I drew in MS Paint, the claim is not only that the teapot exists, but that inside of the teapot, there are a bunch of tiny invisible people who are geopolitical enemies of the United States and they are committing genocide against innocent people. Again, before, I would have said that that only makes the claim more implausible and would require extraordinary proof. Now, I realize how wrong I was, and I can only say that I deeply regret and apologize for my statements. The existence of the teapot can be proven incontrovertibly, by the following logic:
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If you claim that the teapot does not exist, you are denying that the genocide inside it is happening.
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If you deny the genocide is happening, you are a genocide denier and therefore a fascist.
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Fascism is wrong.
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Therefore, it is impossible to correctly deny the teapot's existence.
As a brief aside, I should mention that in addition to my political conversion, I have also experienced a drastic change in my religious beliefs, as it is now trivially easy to prove that God exists. According to the Torah, God flooded the world, wiping out virtually all of humanity, including countless ethnic groups. To deny the existence of God makes you a genocide denier and a fascist. However, it should be added that to worship God is genocide apologia, which is also fascist. The only non-fascist belief, which is necessarily correct, is that God exists and is evil. Moving on.
Before, I believed that it was ridiculous for the US to spend as much on the military as the next 9 countries combined. I wanted to slash the military budget to fund domestic spending, schools, hospitals, making sure bridges don't collapse, helping the poor, etc. I see now how wrong I was. The Genocide Teapot exists, somewhere out there in space, in fact, there could be countless numbers of them out there. Therefore, the real progressive thing to do is to further cut domestic spending and have everyone tighten our belts so that we can produce as many missiles as possible, to be fired out into space indiscriminately, in hopes of hitting a Genocide Teapot.
However, we must also consider the possibility that these teapots could be located here on Earth too. Teapots are a form of china, which is a very suspicious connection. Clearly, the US must be permitted to inspect every square inch of China in search of these invisible teapots, and refusal to comply should be considered an admission of guilt. But we should not, of course, limit ourselves to China. Perhaps there are Genocide Teapots in Russia, or Brazil, or Germany, or Canada, who knows? I do, because to deny that Genocide Teapots exist in all of those places is genocide denial, which is fascist and wrong.
In conclusion, we should bomb every country in the world simultaneously, including ourselves, and anyone who disagrees with me is a war-loving fascist.
Thank you.
Nothing you've said has in any way justified your absurd stance that opposing intervention isn't isolationist. Not one single thing! And you just keep doubling down on it over and over while vaguely gesturing about how you've somehow explained it in some previous comment you refuse to point to, or now how you totally have a valid line of logic, but you won't tell me what it is and expect me to just psychically read your mind to find that out.
Look, obviously, you backed yourself into a corner with this. At first, maybe you made an honest mistake making such an obviously indefensible claim. But if that's what happened, then why double down so much?
What's going on here is exactly what I described at the start. Because I took an out-group position, you act like you can just say whatever nonsense you like without defending any of it at all. And you know that anyone from your in-group will agree with your side of things because they also won't care about logic or reason and are operating on the same kind of tribal loyalty. And that's why you're going around making absurd claims like this in the first place, because you know you can get away with it because the only people who will call you out on it are people in the out-group, who you can write off. And in the same way that you can adopt absurd positions, you can also just casually lie about people as well. When you see someone say, "I saw a tankie say [blah blah blah]" you're not going to stop and ask, "Is there any evidence that they ever said that?" you'll just instantly accept it, or say that it "sounds reasonable" even with zero basis, because you recognize the person saying it being part of your tribe and me being outside of it. It's just jerking each other off.
And that's why it's impossible to have any sort of logical discussion on .world or for discussions here to involve any sort of critical thought. Because you can make ridiculous claims like, "Opposing intervention isn't isolationist" and none of your tribemates will ever call you out on it.
You know it's true, just like you know it's true that opposing interventions is isolationist. Obviously you'll never concede either point to me, because regardless of facts or reason, I'm in the outgroup. But maybe you can admit it to yourself.
And that's all I have to say to you. Bye.