Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Adder

An important lesson in clearly defining the mission from the start and how easy it is for interests that benefit from mission creep to make it happen.

Did anyone honestly believe we could fix Afghanistan when we went in? If so, those people should be anywhere near decisions.

But you see how it happens in the press coverage of how the current situation might be bad for Biden and the Dems. We are finally engaged with reality and making hard choices. You might even call that leadership (and yes, the former guy was there, sorta, too).

I do not recall anyone here saying we should not have gone in, and to me that is still a no-brainer. But in retrospect we supported guerrillas, not really people bound to govern. Still I think early on there was a sense that they could defend themselves eventually. And the hell the women experienced there then, and are again, is a hard thing not to try to change.

[LessinSF]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

I do not recall anyone here saying we should not have gone in, and to me that is still a no-brainer. But in retrospect we supported guerrillas, not really people bound to govern. Still I think early on there was a sense that they could defend themselves eventually. And the hell the women experienced there then, and are again, is a hard thing not to try to change.

I did. Repeatedly. (If we only had a search function.)

[Adder]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

I do not recall anyone here saying we should not have gone in, and to me that is still a no-brainer. But in retrospect we supported guerrillas, not really people bound to govern. Still I think early on there was a sense that they could defend themselves eventually. And the hell the women experienced there then, and are again, is a hard thing not to try to change.

I thought and think that we needed to go in to get Al Qaeda. We should have limited ourselves to that.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Adder

I thought and think that we needed to go in to get Al Qaeda. We should have limited ourselves to that.

That's like eating just one potato chip. It's theoretically possible, but have you ever done it?

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

That's like eating just one potato chip. It's theoretically possible, but have you ever done it?

So just let the women be fucked? We can’t try to improve anything anywhere?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

So just let the women be fucked? We can’t try to improve anything anywhere?

It's like you haven't even seen that episode of Madame Secretary.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

So just let the women be fucked? We can’t try to improve anything anywhere?

We can’t kill our way to improving the world. See the last 20 years.

[Adder]

My nieces’ grandma and her husband aren’t vaccinated. They had Covid already, so they probably have some immunity, but I cannot tell you how angry I am that they won’t either stay the fuck away or get the jab form the granddaughters who aren’t old enough.

It was the older one’s 5th birthday and my brother’s um.... I would have told them not to come. Apparently others in the family are less of an asshole. I should have said something to them. They are inside with my nieces right now.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Adder

We can’t kill our way to improving the world. See the last 20 years.

Exactly. But this is controversial, it being counterintuitive to modeling and that shows that if you take over a country at gunpoint with thousands of soldiers and then install a puppet government to run it, all the while bulldozing the established social/political/commercial systems of the country which have been established over hundreds of years, the locals will greet you with open arms.

This also runs counter to the eminently researched white papers of men like Wolfowitz, Perle, and Kristol, who've seen "nation building" up close, feet on the ground. It runs smack in the face of their assessment, shared by the executive suite of Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Halliburton, that what really dogged us in Vietnam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan was a simple lack of will. That Horatio Alger ethos, and that belief in Manifest Destiny of democracy worldwide (the Bush Doctrine) simply eludes us. It is our lack of backbone, our fatigued spirit and amnesia for the Gipper's never-say-die attitude, that racks up the Ls instead of the Ws.

(Nevermind, of course, that the Gipper, like Bush II, used surgical strikes in response to the attack on Marines in Lebanon, and in response to Gaddafi, and never once considered "nation building" in either location, realizing it was hopeless.)

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

So just let the women be fucked? We can’t try to improve anything anywhere?

In retrospect, one of our greatest failings was the CivOps operation. We convinced few and alienated many.

If your goal is social change, I suspect $4T could have been spent more productively, and the death toll could have been kept below a quarter million.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

In retrospect, one of our greatest failings was the CivOps operation. We convinced few and alienated many.

If your goal is social change, I suspect $4T could have been spent more productively, and the death toll could have been kept below a quarter million.

I think there are many people in Afghanistan who would prefer something else to the Taliban, but that doesn't mean they can create a legitimate, durable government.

[Replaced_Texan]

I'd like to extend a hearty "Fuck you" to anyone who ever said, "don't worry about Roe, they'll never touch it. It'd be suicide and the end of their cash cow."

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

I do not recall anyone here saying we should not have gone in, and to me that is still a no-brainer. But in retrospect we supported guerrillas, not really people bound to govern. Still I think early on there was a sense that they could defend themselves eventually. And the hell the women experienced there then, and are again, is a hard thing not to try to change.

I can verify Less was anti-going in from the beginning. I was not, and I was wrong.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

I do not recall anyone here saying we should not have gone in, and to me that is still a no-brainer. But in retrospect we supported guerrillas, not really people bound to govern. Still I think early on there was a sense that they could defend themselves eventually. And the hell the women experienced there then, and are again, is a hard thing not to try to change.

Can't find it now, but I read an article yesterday saying that the big mistake was the Taliban wanted to surrender early on, and we wouldn't negotiate with them. Unclear that anyone in the government in the last twenty years has had a realistic idea of how to get out.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

I do not recall anyone here saying we should not have gone in, and to me that is still a no-brainer. But in retrospect we supported guerrillas, not really people bound to govern. Still I think early on there was a sense that they could defend themselves eventually. And the hell the women experienced there then, and are again, is a hard thing not to try to change.

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/t...s-what-happens

The movie cited in the article contains several great lines. One of the best, paraphrased as accurately as I can recall is, "You can't create peace within a country by invading it."

Bush I understood this in Iraq. Probably because he was not a McKinsey sort. He didn't run models. He didn't apply metrics from afar as would an MBA. Because he'd actually been to war and accumulated decades of experience in foreign affairs on the ground - working directly with other nations - he was humble enough and shrewd enough to view Hussein as a lamentable but necessary garbage pail lid that kept a festering pile of shit from leaking around the greater middle east.

His son, OTOH, w/no experience, and Dick Cheney, the very worst form of Beltway know-it-all consultant-think operative, had nothing but hubris. "They'll greet us as liberators." And of course, once you've broken all the china, put a guy like Bremmer, a half-wit middle manager, in charge of the whole thing.

There are many lousy reasons Americans distrust people calling themselves experts. There are just as many quite valid ones. Colin Powell might've on to something far more than he knew when he said people who haven't gone to war aren't the right people to make decisions about going to war.

Maybe add to that, policy wonks and MBAs who don't have any direct experience with the culture they're liberating are the last people who should be guiding any of our foreign policy, let alone military interventions.

We can't force democracy on the rest of the world for two reasons. First, many cultures simply don't want it. Second, the alleged best and the brightest who task themselves with doing so are just as often incompetents as they are experts.