The quote doctors

Just to be clear, this isn’t my only objection to Farley’s post. But it’s sufficient for me to treat the whole thing as an exercise in bad faith.

I don’t think that’s fair at all, John. You were shown, repeatedly, to be quite wrong on this, and though you’ve partly accepted it, you should just full accept that you’ve made a mess of it. Even in this quote, it is, at least, pretty unclear what you mean, especially as you elsewhere show that you didn’t know or understand the roles of the US navy in lots of conflicts. Pretty much everyone here agrees with you that too much is spent on navies, in particular in the US. But pretty much everything else you’ve said has been, at least, a very significant stretch, if not shown to be ought-right wrong. Rob is a good and honest guy who, unlike you, happens to be an expert on navel power. (I don’t think that of everyone there- there is one person on that blog is who is a self-aggrandizing fool, but it’s not Rob.) It’s time to just step back and note that you’ve botched up an attempt to make a good point in a pretty serious way, in part by getting into something that you had, at the very best, a wikipedia level knowledge of.

even if the full quote was unclear (which I deny) there’s no justification for editing in a way that gives it a totally different meaning to the one I intended, and repeatedly stated in comments.

Given what you said elsewhere in the original post, John, I think that the interpretation people put on it was perfectly reasonable. You stated that the US navy had done “hardly any fighting”. That was shown to be pretty clearly wrong- it’s only true in the same sense that any branch of the US military had done “hardly any fighting”. given that, I don’t think it changed your meaning at all to leave it out. Really, you were just completely wrong on all the details here, and you should accept it. The idea that Farley was “acting in bad faith” here is silly.

Because the omitted passage had no bearing on the point he was making in that particular part of the main piece. It’s a bit strong to call someone “dishonest” because they won’t change an essay when some commenters stray from the specific arguements it is making, particularly when those comments aren’t that far from the spirit of your original post. it’s one thing to accuse readers of “A Modest Proposal” of missing hyperbole in the interest of intentional provocation, it’s another to accuse them of lying because they misquote the recipie.

Beg pardon, but the comparison to “you didn’t build that” is quite a distance over the top, in degree and kind. At any rate there was a direct link to the original, something that the really malicious Internet quote doctors don’t provide.

John, please just stop. You are not doing yourself any favors.

You are continuing a blog fight on a Friday night. Think about what this means for just a second. Then you must chill. Step away from the computer. Chill. There is alcohol, food, other video devices. See those things? Now chill.

“John, please just stop. You are not doing yourself any favors.”

How typical that supporters of the U.S. military are claiming a victory that they didn’t win.

Mission Accomplished boys!

Matt @1 “Rob is a good and honest guy who, unlike you, happens to be an expert on navel power”

It’s been several hours since Matt posted this and still no snark on “navel power” ! I just can’t take the suspense …

I find this post to be a rather poor admission of “I have made some wild and hilariously wrong assertions well outside my area of expertise.”

Amends can be made, of course, but they might have to begin with something like:

“I acknowledge the fact that military theory is in fact an academic discipline, with a history that extends a bit beyond my own induction into the professoriat, and which has, like every other area of academic inquiry into social matters, assimilated quite a lot of problematic post-structural criticism.”

“Also, for assuming that there are no serious people who both study war and understand fancy university ideas less than 60 year old, I deserve and pledge to wear a hat made out of arse until such time as people everywhere believe I have honestly and shamefacedly rejected my very, very stupid blabberings about things that quite a lot of rather well-trained academics have been studying for the better part of their lives.”

John, I want to thank you for taking the post down. The LGM/CT blogfight of the past few weeks was making me want to quit reading both blogs. I appreciate you doing your part to lower the level of tension.

The point is that even the Navy’s Army’s Air Force used planes rather than ships to move its materiel to the theater. The U.S. is quite capable of projecting force even without a navy.

STOP IT. This is becoming like a thread of vaccine deniers arguing about the doctors who are pooh-poohing them.

The US does not have planes large enough or in sufficient quantity to move its military forces around the work quickly and fully. During the 1991 Gulf War, the 82nd Airborne was taken out to Saudi Arabia by plane and it was to serve as “speed bump” for Iraqi forces until the American heavies could get there, by sea. Moving and supplying ground forces by air is expensive, slow, and hard to sustain.

I admire you and Steve Keen a lot. You are probably my favorite economists, long with Peter Dorman and Robert Waldman. However, you both seem to take criticism and challenges to your argument in a real personal way that is not productive. Instead of challenging Bob Farley’s good faith, you could have said “Bob, I think you missed my point. None of the alleged fighting that the U.S. Navy has done since WWII has been for the actual defense of the United States, but for its imperial adventures, and therefore was, and is, a colossal waste of blood and treasure.” Now, I might still have a nuanced disagreement with some of that statement, but there is certainly a huge amount of truth in it.

the costs of interblog war typically outweigh the benefits.

I think this is false, but only because most interblog wars consist of posters trying to outdo one another in the sport of posting increasingly excruciating campy Youtube videos.

I’ll just say this. It seems pretty clear to me that you were raising a legitimate point (hey, do we need to spend so much on navies) and maybe indulged a little hyperbole in framing it. He jumped on the hyperbole and steadily ignored the substantive point because CT and LGM had a pretty heated disagreement earlier. Underneath the pose of intellectual objectivity, Scott and Rob are quite sectarian and tribal in their passions, and not immune to pulling douche moves to underline whatever rhetorical points they’re trying to make. The completely OTT reaction to what seemed to me a pretty vanilla post about naval spending tells me that this isn’t about the post, and Rob himself admitted that he’ s still steamed about what he perceives to be your earlier stupidity (ie he disagreed with you). If you didn’t know that LGM isn’t about the search for truth but is about party lines and score settling, this kerfuffle should have clarified things for everyone wonderfully.

Why do you think the acronym is L(G)M?

The “G” is for Gramsci.

I’ll just say this. It seems pretty clear to me that you were raising a legitimate point (hey, do we need to spend so much on navies) and maybe indulged a little hyperbole in framing it.

If by a “little hyperbole” you mean “got pretty much everything wrong,” then sure.

Since neither blog, afaics, has a party line

Though as scott says @34, they may have a little bit more of a party line. And frankly, the way the LGM folks reacted to Henry’s original post and Henry’s and dsquared’s follow ups about the lesser evil was pretty categorically different than how things played out at CT. (Just e.g.: I’m pretty sure that JQ more or less went with the lesser evil position in the comments, and with little trouble; nothing quite comparable at LGM[1])

And it’s fairly well impossible to deny that Farley’s first response was way unnecessarily belligerent.

fn. 1: I did really like djw’s post about the whole voting shit, but I don’t think it really established the conclusion he was going for. Still, good stuff.

Though as scott says @34, they may have a little bit more of a party line. And frankly, the way the LGM folks reacted to Henry’s original post and Henry’s and dsquared’s follow ups about the lesser evil was pretty categorically different than how things played out at CT.

It’s that Noon character what really fries my biscuits.

The point wasn’t that airlift was adequate, but that not having a navy wouldn’t keep the US out of making trouble wherever it wished.

“The point wasn’t that airlift was adequate, but that not having a navy wouldn’t keep the US out of making trouble wherever it wished.”

In the sense of deploying large land forces, yes.

Very difficult to become an instant expert on the relative merits of different configurations of military hardware and personnel, even with the aid of Wikipedia.

Even those who have devoted their lives to the study and assessment of relative merits of different mixes, must, given the immense and detailed differences possible, find the task non-trivial. Data from actual conflicts, I imagine, can only form part of an overall assessment because in any conflict there are always elements of luck, good and bad, decisions, good and bad, and political directives, occasionally good.

The value of something ‘floating with guns on it’ is probably highly dependent of all the other assets around it. And the adventure in the Falklands might not have been undertaken with optimal configurations on either side. But then, assessment is doubly difficult — politics was strongly involved on both sides.

I can’t help but think that there is some element of “separated by a common language” here. I read Quiggin’s original post as a provocation, to stimulate discussion on spending. LGM folk jumped on specifics. And jumped again. I’m beginning to think Matt’s “navel power” was unintentionally revealing. Omphaloskepsis, bitchez!

The only way the United States can exercise military power over Australia is…through the US Navy. I think Quiggin’s true geopolitical agenda in these posts is clear. If socialism in one country is ever to take root and flourish in Australia, the US Navy must be neutralized!