The Trump administration has, as one of it's projects, a sort of narrowing of morality and also in a way judgement just broadly considered.
I was thinking about this. The George W. Bush regime tended to justify torture by saying, essentially, yes this is a drastic step, but in a high stakes world it may be, regrettably, necessary.
Trump is currently threatening to kill as many Iranian civilians as he can if the government that was mowing them down in the streets a few weeks back doesn't do what he says, and... how can I put this?
This is presented not as a regrettable but necessary trade-off, but as not a trade-off at all.
It is wrong for a US President to care what happens to Iranian children and the question of how many babies we kill should not even be put in the "Con" catsgory when we put together the Pros and Cons of the war.
"A lot of Iranian civilians will die if we do this" is not a con, it's just... off the board. It doesn't belong as part of our thought process. It's not a con which is balanced out by some other pro, it's an irrelevance, not to be weighed at all.
You can find clips of JD Vance and Elon Musk very openly saying that their project is to narrow down the moral concerns of the nation, that the biggest threat we face is giving too much moral weight to certain people.
But I was also thinking about Venezuela.
Now, we absolutely are not allowed to question whether it is moral for us to demand that Venezuela use their oil reserves how we want them to under threat of violence.
But honestly you're kind of not even supposed to ask, "What benefit do I, the American tax payer, get from this?"
Whatever future savings from increased oil supply is being cancelled out by the pile of expenses Trump is throwing on us, but also... like... I don't get paid by Chevron? Various oil barons get to sell me somebody else's oil.
But the only metric you're supposed to use is "Did they get away with it?"
They wanted to kidnap Maduro and intimidate the Venezuelan government and they didn't suffer many bad consequences, therefore the operation was successful.
What it specifically was successful at doing is an irrelevant question.
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