[racketcon2089]

A more sophisticated thinker would ask questions like "from which people's perspective?" and "at what point in time?"

These questions would give you access to critical insights, one of them is that it's never persuasive to take a rough estimate of hypothetical aggregate good and bad and then attempt to weigh it using one's personal intuitions at present to derive a universal claim.

Peoples who were ethnically cleansed at scale to facilitate settler or US commercial expansion or currently suffer under US-backed dictatorships will tend to have a negative view of the US as an empire.

People whose countries need the US as an ally to protect them from an aggressive regional power and/or currently experience economic prosperity and political stability within a democratic government because of the US will tend to have a positive view of the US as an empire.

Telling a Guatemalan whose entire family was massacred by US-trained death squads in the Guatemalan civil war that you've done the math from a god's eye view and the US is the best possible hegemon in aggregate is unpersuasive, bordering on absurd.

It would be like arguing to a Polish person whose entire family was executed in stalinist trials of the 1940s that the Soviet Union was in aggregate benign because of all the aid they gave out to peoples fighting wars of liberation from european colonial dictatorships, which in aggregate killed far more people than Stalin did.

If you can't understand that the second example and the first are equally absurd, you are wearing ideological blinkers that make it hard for people outside the US to take you seriously.

Attributing malice to other empires but "good intentions gone awry" to your own is a fundamental attribution error, and one you should be wary of to avoid unpleasant surprises in foreign policy outcomes.

[AYBABTME]

I think being alive is awesome in aggregate even though there are people whose existence is miserable and for whom it's absurd to suggest that life might be awesome.

You might think Descartes was an awesome human, but what about the broken hearts he left behind? His past lovers might think your aggregate perspective is absurd.

Your focus on picking particular contradictory perspectives doesn't seem relevant to me. I don't think it's particularly sophisticated. It comes to me as being more interested in cynicism than pragmatism for aesthetic reasons.

[Aeolun]

> Peoples who were ethnically cleansed at scale to facilitate settler or US commercial expansion or currently suffer under US-backed dictatorships will tend to have a negative view of the US as an empire.

Obviously. But would they have been happier if it was a different country doing it?

I can think of a few countries that would probably have been better, but none of them are in a position to actually do so. I can think of many countries that would have been worse, some of which could have, but didn’t do so.

> It would be like arguing to a Polish person whose entire family was executed in stalinist trials of the 1940s that the Soviet Union was in aggregate benign because of all the aid they gave out to peoples fighting wars of liberation from european colonial dictatorships, which in aggregate killed far more people than Stalin did.

While it would be a boneheaded thing to do if you had any social grace, would it make it any less true (assuming it were true)?

On the whole I’m just less likely to trust the good intentions of a (near) dictatorship than that of a democracy.

That may be because I grew up in one, but I can’t exactly change that.