Societies often go to great lengths to separate war from peace. Wars are declared, sometimes with elaborate ritual. Soldiers wear uniforms and are part of specialized hierarchical organizations. Battlefields are often delineated. Maintaining this distinction is important because what is permissible in wartime is often prohibited in peacetime. Preventing the rules of war from infecting views of moral conduct in times of peace is essential for preserving civilization.
.. Captured combatants in wars between countries can be detained without charge or trial until the end of the armed conflict. In peacetime, by contrast, law enforcement rules allow the use of lethal force only as a last resort to stop an imminent lethal threat, and detentions generally can be sustained only after charges have been filed and a trial has taken place.
.. US soldiers now undertake public health programs, agricultural reform efforts, small business development projects, and training in the rule of law. This expanding mandate, as Brooks shows, has enabled the Pentagon to dramatically increase its budget
.. The militarization of these efforts has contributed to the “shrinking of humanitarian space” in which aid workers give assistance; they are increasingly endangered because they are perceived as military assets.
.. Other governments are developing or purchasing this technology as well. Even ISIS reportedly has attacked with simple drones.
.. if targeted killing is permitted under an expansive rationale for the “war against terrorism,” there may be no need for drones at all. Assassinations, poisoning, car bombs, “accidents”—there are plenty of ways to kill an “enemy combatant” once that characterization is accepted.
.. she suggests “recognizing that war and peace are not binary opposites, but lie along a continuum.” The task then, she concludes, is to ask not what the law requires, since the law’s answer depends on the difficult-to-resolve dispute over the definition of war or peace. What matters instead is what is right, based on our values.
.. The opponents of stronger limits on governmental powers to kill or detain are now likely to come from both the White House and the Kremlin. Even Theresa May, the new British prime minister, vowed at the most recent Conservative Party conference “never again” to “let those activist, left-wing human rights lawyers harangue and harass the bravest of the brave—the men and women of [Britain’s] armed forces.”
.. with countries as diverse as Russia, Turkey, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates today all involved in active efforts against armed or terrorist groups outside their territories, any weakening of the rules would give those countries greater latitude too—a frightening thought.
The Simple Psychological Trick to Political Persuasion
Conservatives are more likely to support issues like immigration and Obamacare if the message is “morally reframed” to suit their values.
.. Rather than emphasizing concern over the harm that might come to refugees, says Matt Feinberg, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, to truly persuade Trump supporters on the matter it would have been be better to go with something like this:
“These refugees and immigrants are just like our family members who came to America in years past to seek a better life. All our ancestors wanted was to live the American dream, and that’s why today’s immigrants and refugees have chosen to come to America, so they too can live that same American dream that brought our families here. That dream is what our nation was founded on, it is what brought our grandparents and great-grandparents to this great land, and it is the great success story that these immigrants want to be a part of.”
It’s a message high on patriotism and loyalty—two “moral frames” that research shows are more important to conservatives than are traditionally more liberal values, like reciprocity and caring.
.. One reason this is so hard to do, they explain, is that people tend to present their arguments in a way that appeals to the ethical code of their own side, rather than that of their opponents.
.. just 8 percent of the liberals in Willer and Feinberg’s study were able to craft an argument that would appeal to conservatives’ value of loyalty toward your own kind. (So something like, “Our fellow citizens of the United States of America deserve to stand alongside us … We should lift our fellow citizens up, not bring them down.”) What’s worse, some of them picked an argument that directly contradicted what many conservatives value, with arguments like, “your religion should play no part in the laws of the United States.”
..Previously, they had found that conservatives were more likely to endorse environmental protections when researchers activated their concerns about purity, rather than the more liberal concern about “harm”: A picture of a forest covered in rotting garbage, in other words, performed better with Republicans than a forest of tree stumps..researchers tested four different hot-button political issues, each time trying to reframe it in terms of the values that the Moral Foundations Theory tells us are more important for the opposite political side. Again, for liberals that’s “harm and fairness (e.g. benevolence, nurturance, equality, social justice),” and for conservatives, “group loyalty, authority, and purity (e.g., patriotism, traditionalism, strictness, religious sanctity).”
Left Pretends Trump Inheriting Strong Obama Economy
But Donald Trump won by campaigning on making the election a referendum on President Obama’s failed economic policies.
.. Middle class voters, especially in “flyover country,” came to believe on November 8 that the Obama administration’s economic recovery was the worst since the Great Depression in the 1930s, according to Peter J. Ferrara of the Heartland Institute.
.. But more than half of that supposed decline during the Obama Administration was due to the equivalent of about 7.5 million Americans giving up looking for a job or dropping out of labor force. Furthermore, the current level of part-time employment, at 18.3 percent(about 27.8 million), is a higher percentage than at any time since the Great Depression.
.. Friedman observes: “Liberals are concerned with inequality. People in the lower-middle class are simply concerned with making enough money to live a decent life. They are two very different things.”
.. Friedman credits Trump for also understanding that “these people had lost the culture wars that had been waged for the past generation.” Their churches and parents raised and taught them “gut values.” The pride that comes to the lower- and middle-class from working hard and making a good living for their families was lost had been displaced. In order to be politically correct, the “values they were taught as children could no longer be expressed in public.”
http://www.breitbart.com/live/2016-election-day-live-updates/first-exit-poll-twice-many-voters-2016-want-strong-leader-president/
More than one-third (36 percent) of 2016 voters said being a strong leader was the most important quality when picking a president, compared with 18 percent of voters who said the same during 2012 election. It’s an opinion held regardless of partisan leanings: 35 percent of Democrats, 34 percent of independents and 39 percent of Republicans said that was most important.
After being a strong leader, voters said having a vision for the future, at 29 percent, was most important. Sixteen percent picked having a candidate share their values and care about people like them, respectively.
Democrats were more likely than Republicans to place more value in whether the candidate cares about them (20 percent to 12 percent), while GOP voters said it was more important that the candidate shares their values (19 percent to 14 percent).