Is there anyone incapable at this point of seeing what the United States has become? – Glenn Greenwald
Another week, another crop of links. Our top contributor, as so often happens, was Radley Balko, who provided everything down to the first video: Peter Sellers reading the lyrics to the Beatles’ “She Loves You” in a Doctor Strangelove voice. If you enjoy or (or else just can’t resist), you might also want to watch him reading them as a Cockney, and Irishman and an upper-class twit (thanks to Szusa, who also provided “letter to Hitler”). The second video is propaganda from 1954 which tried to convince Americans that one’s house stands a better chance of surviving a nuclear attack if it’s clean and painted; nine other hilarious propaganda films from all over the world can be found here. The links between the two videos were provided by Mistress Matisse (“honor”), Jesse Walker (“road stealing”), Mike Siegel (“lard”), Penn Jillette (“nothing so dumb”), Joyce Arthur (“exact change”), Michael Whiteacre (“murder charges”), Popehat (“DEA”), and Laura Lee (“Satanists”).
- Austin cops want the murders they commit to be hidden from the public.
- The FBI authorizes 15 crimes a day because “It’s not done randomly”.
- Man steals front-end loader to hide his nudity.
- 4% of all Americans were arrested in 2011.
- Cops murder a teenager for graffiti.
- Honor among thieves.
- Gandhi’s letter to Hitler.
- Man charged with stealing road.
- London sewer clogged by 15-ton mass of lard.
- There’s nothing so dumb that some people won’t fall for it.
- Woman fined $219 for not paying bus fare with exact change.
- Prosecutors refuse to drop murder charges against dead man.
- DEA directs NSA info to cops, instructs them to lie about source.
- Mississippi police want to arrest Satanists who turn dead people gay.
From the Archives
- Obviously nude pictures are far more dangerous to “children’s” lives than spending 20 years in prison.
- The effects of defining everything as “violence against women” or “human trafficking”.
- Never on Sunday, New Orleans, Pretty Baby and Taste the Blood of Dracula.
- Fanatics complain “authorities” don’t invent enough “trafficking victims”.
- “He was so desperate for money he actually opened a legal business!”
- Dear prudish twit actresses: leave sex worker parts to grown women.
- Politicians wasting other people’s money to fight a legal sex business.
- Cats, cops, apes, TSA, free speech, prohibition, guitars and fascism.
- Norwegian study says that Swedish Model causes “sex trafficking”.
- “The House of the Rising Sun”, “Farewell to Storyville” and “Jacky”.
- Swedish Model proponents are NOT “sex industry lobby groups”.
- It’s time for humanity to grow up and set aside childish beliefs.
- What it looks like when individuals behave as “authorities” do.
- “Trafficking” means whatever its proponents want it to mean.
- Man argues it wasn’t a crime because he only raped a whore.
- The weird situations that arise from sex work legalization.
- I wonder how this would have turned out in America?
- An extended example of New Orleans’ “Yat” dialect.
- “Authorities” who use their power to rape whores.
- Prohibitionists will say whatever they need to say.
- The bittersweet experience of leaving sex work.
- A historical version of “50 clients a night” idiocy.
- Behold the lawhead psychosis in action.
- The truth about “safe harbor” laws.
- The new Victorianism.
Err, true actually. Especially if you paint it completely flat white, including the windows. The shock wave will blast them out, but by then the flash will have passed so hopefully the whole place won’t burst into flame.
Of course you’re likely to see your property value drop substantially anyway on account of all potential buyers being dead or dying. But you won’t be in any position to worry about that. At least the roaches will still have somewhere nice to live.
Reminds me of a Mythbusters where they disproved the myth that you can paint your house with explosives. Of course that was conventional explosives, not an A-bomb.
Not for the first time, I wished the myth was true.
Back in those days – there was a lot of insanity and crazy thoughts about nuclear weapons. It was gone by the time I got on submarines, but the U.S. used to have a MK-45 Nuclear Tipped Torpedo. It was WIRE GUIDED (meaning it had to stay attached to the sub via a very thin wire until it reached it’s target) – and it had a range of 5 to 8 miles (the nuclear blast radius was GREATER than this range). It’s warhead had a yield of around 11-12 KT’s … “Little Boy”, dropped on Hiroshima was around 16 KT’s.
Firing a MK-45, certainly meant DEATH for the submarine and crew that fired it. Also – one of the biggest malfunctions wire-guided torpedoes suffer (to this day) are wires that just fucking “break” while the fish is on the way to the target. At that point, on a MK-45 you had a runaway nuclear weapon speeding through the ocean to god-only-knows where. No it wouldn’t detonate, but it would run out of power and sink somewhere leaving a nice warhead for someone to come along and find eventually.
The weapon was so retarded we used to play games trying to figure out how it could be used effectively without killing the crew that shot it. Along with some “nukes” (good at math) on my first sub – we devised that we could launch one straight into San Diego harbor and then haul-ass the sub around the south-west tip of Point Loma. If the wire could be maintained … we could blow the shit out of the Coronado Bay Bridge and the Point Loma peninsula would shield us from the blast. Yeah – we sat around figuring this out for fun!
Surely the MK-45 was just maintaining a fine old tradition among American submariners.
Remember the Hunley?
Hang on a minute.
How the f*** are you supposed to steer a wire-guided torpedo from a submarine?
Couldn’t have been optically tracked.
And if it’s sonar tracked both the target and the torp must be pingable, right?
If the torp can be pinged anyway, why not give it active sonar and let it do it’s own guidance?
OK krulac, I’ve looked it up and thought really hard and I still don’t get it.
The MK-48 (for example) has active and passive sonar guidance and a wire.
But if the target dudes can’t jam your sonar why do you need the wire?
And if they can, how the heck can you guide it even with a wire?
About the only use I can think of would be if you wanted to reassign the target when the fish is already running. But how often would that happen?
Maybe if you fired all the tubes and wanted to redirect to secondaries if your first shot took out the primary?
But if your blast radius exceeds your torpedo range any potential secondaries are gone already.
I just don’t get it.
The 48 is a conventional weapon and it does have a wire. You can think of a wire as an “eraser” on a multiple-choice test. Usually, your first answer is the right one – you go back and start erasing and changing answers and you usually fuck yourself. That’s the 48 “wire” in a nutshell – it allows Officers to second-guess their original target solutions – which were probably correct to begin with.
With the 48 – all us Enlisted guys always PRAYED the wire would break – then we wouldn’t have to calculate complicated “steers” for the officers to input into the running fish. The 48 then defaults to it’s active / passive sonar track and lock and attempts to kill the target independent of the officers (which is a good thing imo! LOL).
On one 48 shot – I heard a Fire Control Officer in Control yell out … “Recommend PORT 120 degree steer!”. Fuck me – if you have to spin a fish 120 degrees to hit a target you certainly did miscalculate it’s course and speed when you fired on it!
And yes – you can “re-assign” targets if the steers you have to input aren’t too radical. If you fire a three salvo shot – and two fish kill the target – you can take the third and put it on another target and kill it.
The MK-45 did not have a default guidance system in the nuclear mode when the wire broke. There was a conventional “anti-shipping” mode that it could be configured with – without a nuke warhead – and in that configuration it DID have alternate guidance. But it didn’t have alternate guidance in the nuke configuration.
My guess is – no one wanted to trust a computer on board a torpedo that had a nuke warhead … so allowing it to run out of juice and fall to the bottom was the better option to it acquiring some target that you didn’t want to hit and nuking it … like a hospital ship or something … bad PR all around!!
Thanks for that krulac.
Makes sense now.
You just drew a solid line under the difference between theoretical understanding and practical experience.
Technically – that wire is there so you can correct the course of the torpedo in the case of a target “zig” … meaning the target changed course and / or speed after you shot. But even then – there’s a lot of leeway since a ship can’t outrun a torpedo and terminal homing on the 48 relied on active sonar returns anyway – and it had a wide “cone” of detection – so even if initial solution was off a bit – and the target did “zig” you still stood an excellent chance of a hit.
But seriously – back then it was pretty funny – because in a 688 control room there’d be at least two – and sometimes three different target solutions plotted and calculated by different teams. One team would recommend a “steer” be input – and then the others would yell out … “DO NOT CONCUR!!” and then a debate would ensue about who was right – all while the fish is speeding down the track. It was hilarious. We shot a torpedo one time and steered it all over the Pacific Ocean for 37 minutes before the wire broke – and we missed the target.
Quote from my CO during that “event’ … “Goddamn it boys … put a steer into that fish or shut the damn thing down before the torpedo goes on LIBERTY in KUAI !!!”
I would think that the Virginia Class fire control system is a lot more “automated” and probably uses some artificial intelligence to determine what the target is doing more accurately – so I doubt they have the fire control “teams” we had … arguing back and forth. Virginia is a marked improvement and embraces “automation” all around. The Sub Navy of Rickover hated “automation”, quote from Rickover … “I want to be able to track every action taken back to an officer or an enlisted Sailor that I can HANG!!”
Gandhi’s Letter … EL OH EL!! The only remedy for tough, bad men with advanced weaponry is other men with advanced weaponry who are just as goddamn tough. Too bad MOST in the U.S. and the Western world in general have forgotten this.
Matters not though – a few generations in chains will remind us all once again.
Except that Gandhi sort of disproved that.
Or maybe not.
I guess the British Empire c1946 wasn’t as tough or well armed as an emaciated old vegetarian with a walking stick.
I think it’s a myth that Gandhi had a really significant impact. He was a public relations stunt, maybe he gave the “push” over the proverbial “cliff”. He had a unifying effect on the Indian people for sure but beyond that …
There was no way a tiny island like Britain could hold on to a vast expansive territory like India was back then, certainly not with the technology they had then. Don’t forget, the Indian territory under Britain’s control included East / West Pakistan and Burma at the time. I’m not sure where India ranked population-wise back then but today, India alone, is the second most populous nation on the planet – so it’s safe to say there was a metric shit-ton of people living there then also.
Britain did not have the physical presence there that it needed to hold on to India and the people they sent to administer it committed some pretty serious cultural offenses against the Indians which pissed them off – a lot.
The Brits certainly had plenty of tough bad men with advanced weaponry (think Dyer with his machine guns at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919) and they’d managed to hold onto India and Burma for centuries despite the population differences and the 1857 rebellion (triggered by cultural offences).
Something had changed by the 1940s.
I think you could make a good case that they’d lost their moral legitimacy – the same thing that got your advanced weaponised bad arses kicked out of Vietnam and will soon get them kicked out of Afghanistan. And it was Gandhi more than anyone else that took that away from them.
Any half decent tactician can tell you that smaller numbers with poorer weapons but significantly better morale have a damned good chance of winning. Look at the 1940 Winter War in Finland. Heck, look at France 1940.
I think you are right there and that is why I mentioned that the Brits made many cultural “SNAFUs” in India and this kind of eroded their moral legitimacy. But these were “unforced errors” on the part of the British Empire – they didn’t need Gandhi to prompt these errors, they made them even before he came along.
Since India was a “possession” of Britain and Vietnam and Afghanistan have never been “possessions” of the American Empire – I don’t think you can compare the latter two with the former. There was no moral legitimacy lost in Vietnam – not to any thinking observer anyway. Of course – the Americans made mistakes there … but saying that a Marxist dictator (and mass murderer) in NORTH Vietnam like Ho Chi Minh had more “moral legitimacy” in South Vietnam than the quasi-elected government there is plain rubbish to anyone with a brain.
Ask the millions of people executed in Southeast Asia after we left them to the Communists if they think we had the moral legitimacy to stay. You’d get a different answer – from the people who paid the price.
The same in Afghanistan. The war has been botched from the beginning and the government there is absolutely insane right now … so let’s go back to executing women at half-time during soccer games under … Taliban leadership? I think not. There were clear binary choices in Vietnam and Afghanistan and the answer should have been clear to a second grader which choice was the more “moral”.
Not so in India – where the choice was essentially the same choice as the American Revolution – rule by the crown or self-determination. In India, self-determination seems to have worked – fairly well. To the North, with the beheaders – well let’s just say they are always the fly in the ointment … EVERYWHERE aren’t they?
Gotta disagree with you on that one krulac.
As I mentioned earlier, the Brits were making horrendous cultural snafus in India right from the get-go, but up until the 1930s they could always count on divisions among the Indians to keep them in power (it was when the Marathis and Mughals turned on each other that the 1857 rebellion collapsed for example).
Even up until the1930s the Indian liberation movement was more interested in fighting each other than the Brits and while I wouldn’t want to downplay the roles of Nehru or Shahid Bhagat Singh in uniting it I reckon a shriveled up little dude who picked up a bit of salt from a beach did most of the heavy lifting. By the time Subash Chandra Bose was calling on Indians to join the Axis against the Brits he had very few takers because they already had their acts together and knew they were on a winner. Of course as soon as they won the Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs went back at each other’s throats – hence Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The US had pretty much bankrupted itself fighting the VC (who were among the majority of South Vietnamese who wanted the US out, even though most initially didn’t support Ho), that’s why your mob had to abandon the gold standard – which sabotaged Bretton-Woods and turned the US into a debtor nation. But it was the loss of legitimacy both at home and abroad that ten years of napalming little girls to save them brought about that forced your politicians to back down. I know quite a few Vietnamese refugees from communism who settled in Australia and even they wanted the yanks out in the end. When I was in Vietnam in the early 1990s lots of locals told me they hated the communists but most still hated the Americans more (even though they were selling them stuff again).
Ditto in Afghanistan, where even the US installed puppet, Hamid Karzai, has pretty much turned on you for blowing up so many weddings. Karzai’s arse is grass when the Talibs take over again (just like Najibullah before him when the Soviets turned tail) but he knows he’s a dead man today if he doesn’t stand up against the sort of people who pose for happy snaps with SS flags and the body parts of unarmed Afghanis they’ve killed and tossed off an entrenching tool onto so as to claim they were planting IEDs (the tactic in Vietnam was to plant a mine or grenade on the corpse but they were fooling no-one then and they’re fooling no-one now).
If more than a fraction of the locals supported the invaders the Talibs wouldn’t be able to pull off so many successful IED ambushes and the guys you’re trying to train wouldn’t keep saying ‘thank you’ then emptying a magazine into your guts.
I don’t understand why so many Americans seem to think you can kill people’s sons and daughters and they’ll keep loving you as long as you say you’re there to save them from their countrymen and not just following your own strategic interests.
The Viet Cong recruited people by force – not by winning hearts and minds so you have the history in Vietnam completely wrong. There was a binary choice there – and WE were the better choice. Ask the millions who were slaughtered by the Marxists when we left.
Karzai, in Afghanistan, IS NOT a puppet of the U.S. He frustrates us on a daily basis. He rigged the elections – we didn’t. Who cares? He’s 12 orders of magnitude better than any goddam Taliban that would lead that nation and that is NOT debatable in any universe where physical laws exist.
That is the problem with the “nay-sayers” you guys act as if there is no “down-side” … I have been INSIDE Afghanistan (Khost Province) and I have seen what the Taliban DO. I have seen the eyes of AsKars (Afghan Army) who were DETERMINED to liberate their nation from these beheaders. The problem is … WE DO NOT HAVE THE NATIONAL RESOLVE. The good Afghans cannot depend on us because they know the “naysayers” will always pull us out of the fight – and leave them dangling – just like we left the South Vietnamese dangling.
This is one of the reasons a lot of Vietnamese went to the VC – because they knew America didn’t have the guts to stick it out so hey … better make your peace with the guys who will eventually rule right?
Let me tell you – if we were a nation that stood up and said we’ll fight the Taliban until there are no more corpses for Marines to urinate on – even if it takes a thousand years – we’d have no problems with retaining Afghan support. If we’re losing support – it is because they know we’re chicken-shit.
Bottom line straight up hong kong no shitter there brother. Life is about choices – and sometimes you don’t have an “excellent” choice – just a couple of shitty ones to choose from. So you can have the Taliban – cutting the noses off of little Afghan girls who simply want an education – but aren’t allowed one under “Islamic Law” … or you can have a clown like Karzai in there with the hope that one day you’ll get something better.
That’s the choice – MAKE THE CHOICE! And know who, and WHAT you stand for.
My Choice? BURY THESE IDIOTS.
Again …
1. Choose who you want to rule Afghanistan …
a. A Clown named Karzai
b. The Taliban Beheaders.
There IS NO answer C. That’s your choices. “Leaving Afghanistan” is the same as choosing answer B – so have the balls to say …
“I’LL TAKE ANSWER B PLEASE … I will take ANSWER B and the senseless bloodbath of millions of innocent people that will come with it.”
But see – that’s the problem – people “pretend” that answer B doesn’t exist. To this day – we can’t get the liberal goddamn news media to own up to the fact that their actions in propagandizing against the Vietnam war resulted in the DEATHS OF MILLIONS of people when the Marxists took control. And – it was completely predictable because every Marxist government that ever existed used mass murder to gain and retain control. “Mass Murder” is a inherent, organic flaw in Marxist ideology and the “all-knowing” press should have known this.
higharka,
I never intimated that the genocide was acceptable. What I was disagreeing with was your assertion that it was western aggression within krulac’s memory that was the historical cause of the violence in Afghanistan. It is not. Tribal wars in Afghanistan pre-date Western involvement by at least 800 years.
In addition, I do not endorse the method of “nation-building” that we have indulged in since the aftermath of WWII. We should not be invading other countries “for their own good.” We should only invade them when they are the aggressors against US – as Japan and Germany were – and we should defeat them utterly. If you want to add nation building on top of that action – as we did AFTER WWII, then I have less of a problem with that. But to attempt to do it while you’re still fighting the enemy is an absurdity.
There was no reason for our involvement in Vietnam. Korea is more problematical as we had occupation troops there in the aftermath of WWII – because the Japanese had previously occupied the peninsula. But Truman’s half-assed response to the NK and Chinese aggression set the stage for further aggression by similarly dictatorial minded states.
No reason for Persian Gulf one and no reason for the Persian Gulf two – Iraqi theatre. Afghanistan? You betcha. We were attacked, the Afghan government was sheltering those responsible and would not surrender them; that has been a casus belli for 600 years. But I would not have tried the nation building. I’d have used the hellfire missiles on the retreating gov’t forces which some JAG twit in Southern Command disallowed, I’d have driven them back to the tribal areas, bombed the bridges out of existence and forced them back to the 7th century life style they’d like to impose on the rest of us, then I’d have packed up and gone home.
Our governing philosophy in America, both domestically and abroad, has been corrupted. We should not employ force against others “For their own good.” We should employ force in a retaliatory manner or as pre-emption; the rape victim shouldn’t be required to wait for penetration before blowing the perp’s head off. The purpose of gov’t is to protect individual rights. Full Stop. The corruption of that mission with all of these ancillary missions is what has led to the absurdity of “burning a village to save it,” which, although a Vietnam era meme, describes exactly what Clinton and Reno did to the Branch Davidians in Waco. Ditto the incarceration of prostitutes and non-violent drug offenders and underage “victims” and … I’m sure you get the picture.
Now in regard to the mass shooting point that you raise; surely you are aware that the vast majority of those took place in government enforced “gun free zones?” Once again, gov’t extending their reach beyond the protection of rights actually facilitating the abrogation of those same rights.
And, once again, I’m not offering to protect those exotic Arabian women, although that particular description is NOT apt for Afghanistan. It may be that the byproduct of regime change would protect those women not in the tribal areas. But I don’t think that that is any of America’s concern. Any more than I think that defeating the Arab Muslims in the Sudanese North who were murdering the Southern black Animists and Christians in job lots were our concern. Or that it was our job to stop the Rwandan genocide. But, if we (the West or the US as a country) are not going to engage on that level, we have to accept that these things will occur. That’s the point of krulac’s A or B choice. Because it wasn’t western troops, that shot the Pakistani teenaged education activist in the head, it was Taliban. And it’s not US troops raping unaccompanied women and then stoning them or beheading them or pouring acid on them in honor killings, or poisoning the water supply of girls’ schools, it’s the local muslim men. If you don’t want the West doing nation building, then accept that this is what will happen – because it is their culture, it is their religion, and nothing short of utter defeat will stop them from doing it. Krulac is aware of this and it pains him to see it happen when we could stop it. But personally, I think that we lack the mind-set and the will to do so and I take the decline of the British Empire as an historical warning to those who would undertake such a task. Socialism at home and a quasi-benevolent colonialism abroad.
Because for foreign policy, we have two broad choices. We can take up Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” and expend our blood and treasure abroad “civilizing” the natives, and possibly do some good. After all, the Royal Navy destroyed the slave trade for the first time in history and put a period to the practice of Sati in India. I consider both accomplishments an unqualified good.
But I think that a Pax Americana is a bad idea; I don’t want to pay for it and I am perfectly willing to let these folks go to hell in their own way.
Which leads us to the 2nd alternative; projecting US force abroad only when we’ve been attacked or to preempt the same. As, for instance, we did against the muslim Barbary pirates 2 centuries ago. This is the foreign policy I think that we should adopt. And if we do, we’re going to have to accept that Sudanese and Rwandan Genocides are going to happen and we’re not going to step in to stop them. Which will lead to no end of bleating on the American Left about our indifference and how immoral it is. It might be instructive to the Left to ponder the fact that Somalia started as a humanitarian mission.
So, I’m curious higharka. Are you willing to let the various 3rd world genocides run to completion without Western interference? Because if you are not so willing, then you’re right back in Krulac’s A/B alternative world.
I don’t know what comic book you’re getting your history lessons from krulac but the idea than any guerrilla army can operate successfully without the consent of much of the populace is just as ridiculous as the suggestion that the VC who overran the US embassy during Tet were doing so at gunpoint from Hanoi.
It was the US who were forcibly conscripting cannon fodder, not the VC. And it was the US strategic hamlet program and its ‘hearts and minds’ campaign in places like My Lai that drove the VC recruitment campaign and inspired Buddhist monks to Zippo themselves, long before it became clear that the American people didn’t have the stomach for the continued slaughter of US conscripts and Vietnamese villagers.
I assume the by the ‘millions who were slaughtered by the Marxists’ you mean the victims of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, a country the US were never invited in to defend by anyone (though they sent special forces in illegally and illegally bombed the crap out of the mountain villages, so enraging the residents that the survivors provided the psychopathic backbone to Pol Pot’s mob of mass murderers) and not the thousands of Vietnamese who were ‘re-educated’ after 1975, a few hundred of whom were ‘re-educated’ to death.
Karzai frustrates the US now for the reasons I detailed in my previous comment. When the ‘Mayor of Kabul’ (as he is more accurately known) pulled his first electoral swifty in 2002 it was Dick Cheney who was at his inauguration patting him on the back and congratulating him. No other world leaders recognised the election that the UN had condemned as rigged.
And the idea that the US empire can win in a country that defeated Alexander, Genghis Khan, the British Empire (twice) and the Soviets – just to list the best known examples – is … well … Do you know what hubris means?
The fact that so many Americans don’t seem to get is that it is not my choice, your choice or POTUS’s choice that matters. It’s the choice of the Afghan people. A lot of them hate the Talibs and I’m sure that left alone for long enough they will start making sensible choices themselves – just like they were doing in the 1960s and 70s before the T-72s rolled in to ‘liberate’ them. But as long as there is an even more despised foreign enemy on their soil a lot of them are going to support the ‘beheaders’ because, sometimes at least, it’s the invaders’ heads they’re blowing off.
What confuses me even more than wire-guided torpedoes is that US libertarians seem to have no trouble seeing what the US government stands for on US soil, yet they seem to imagine it stands for the exact opposite overseas.
Whatever gave you that idea? Most US libertarians are firmly opposed to US military adventurism, and often talk about how the country earned its horrible reputation overseas. In fact, libertarians have been the most consistent opponents of drone murders and other US abominations for years, while both Republicans and Democrats either cheer them or remain silent.
Fair cop Maggie.
Actually I did know better even as I typed it, but knowing that krulac sees himself as a libertarian I decided to ignore the rest of my potential audience and let it ride.
Bertrand Russell initiated a debate in the New Statesman in 1957 about nuclear disarmament. One of the replies was from John Foster Dulles (the US Secretary of State), who said, inter alia:
“I do not think that it is possible to find in the history of the United States any occasion when an effort has been made to spread its creed by force of arms.”
I am a Libertarian.
But I’m not an idiot.
In no universe is a man allowed to ignore the consequences of his decisions (or to pretend there are no consequences).
If we pull out of Afghanistan – millions will die – period.
If we pull out of Afghanistan – the Taliban will once again take control.
If we pull out of Afghanistan – it will become (again) a training ground for terror.
Or we can stay … with a firm determination to slog it out with these freaks – and bury them. We can HOPE to make the situation better – but pulling out offers no such hope. The consequences of this I am well aware of. It means more Americans will die there. It means more money will be spent on the war there. It means more “collateral” damage and casualties.
It is a DAMN SIGHT better than the alternative.
In this … I have announced what decision I would make … I have announced the consequences and my willingness to deal with them. I note that cowards will simply say … “We should leave” … or drool out some blather such as “We have no moral authority (humph!)” … but, like cowards – they will never announce that they are aware of the dreadful consequences – and that they’re fine with them.
Now – on to Libertarians with whacko ideas of passivism overseas …
It’s these opinions which have marginalized Libertarians and made them irrelevant to American political discussion. I loved Ron Paul on domestic and economic issues – but like so many other Americans – I found his foreign policy to be quite infantile.
Now – does this mean I am a “hawkish” – “let’s get involved everywhere” kind of guy? Nope – because, for the life of me I don’t understand why the hell we were in Libya or why we give a shit why two sets of Islamofascists are bashing their brains out in Syria. Let em do it!
I like Rand Paul’s foreign policy ideas – he seems to be a bit more moderated than his Dad was on those issues – or at least he realizes that MOST Americans will not follow his Dad’s ideology on that.
But ya know … I ain’t much for snobby “clubs”. And if Libertarians want to huff and puff and say I’m not a libertarian because I believe in staying in Afghanistan (even though I’m against drone murders of U.S. citizens) … then, heh … fine. It will break my heart for five milliseconds until I realize again … why Libertarians are so irrelevant to today’s political discussion.
I’ve never read comic books – I can’t even get into Japanese Hentai porn.
Oh yes – the Vietnamese LOVED the Marxists – it had nothing to do with the fact that the VC often killed entire families in gruesome ways just to keep their mouths shut and to keep them feeding their sons to them.
Denial. We “conscripted” via a lottery – not at the point of a gun with threats to kill your Mom if you didn’t pick up an SKS and fight for Uncle Ho.
No – not just them … read up on your history about the atrocities committed by the North Vietnamese government.
Again – all you’re doing is making excuses … there’s no “answer c”. You can rationalize all you want but at the end of the day you’re advocating for Taliban control of Afghanistan and all that comes with it.
And – to top it off … I can’t understand why. No one has asked YOU to sacrifice anything but a few tax dollars to the effort. There are MEN, real warriors (yes we still produce a few) in this nation who will do the heavy lifting inside Afghanistan to correct the situation if the parasites in the U.S. will just leave them to their business.
There is no answer “c”.
Nope – you can complain about us being there – but we are there, brother. Someone puked right in the doorway of the bar and we can either leave it there and tell the customers to track through it or we can clean it up.
Reality – that’s what I deal with.
Please expound on your position that the Taliban are BETTER for Afghanistan than Karzai is …
Because THAT’s your position (though you will never admit it).
You advocate for U.S. withdrawal – you advocate for Taliban control and the deaths of millions. Millions of people you don’t give a damn about.
Now who has the moral high ground really?
krulac, if one begins history with “as far back as krulac can remember,” everything you’re saying is true. However, if one considers that men like you have been raping Afghanistan for centuries–each time claiming they were doing it for her own good to save her from the results of the last invasion–one can realize that your attitude is the reason why people keep dying there.
All of the scary, spooky Islamaniacs that you’re quivering in fear of are only so violent because they’ve seen dozens of generations of their people killed by your predecessors.
Higharka,
Muslim conquests of surrounding tribes and cities begin in 632 – 22 years after Mohammed began receiving his Koranic Revelations. They continued until the 1800’s. The idea of Islam as a Religion of conquest is not a comic-book scheme, nor is it the product of krulac’s fevered imaginings.
And when they are not uniting against various outsiders, the various tribes are perfectly willing to kill each other. That’s been going on for at least a thousand years. It’s not a recent phenomenon; various tribes have been played off against each other by players in “The Great Game” since the mid 19th century. These were power players and none of them were doing for the Afghan’s own good, but to forestall either Turkey, Russia, or Britain from making incursions out Afghanistan into areas of respective interest to those great powers.
The violence in Afghanistan is cultural – it predated Western powers by 1200 years and, with the conquest by muslim forces in 642 CE, gave this violence a religious raison d’ etre.
The only sustained era of peace was subsequent to the invasion of Alexander the Great; he required his officers to marry local women and the Hellenistic period that followed was Afghanistan’s most peaceful.
Krulac is right; this is a binary solution set. Either we destroy the notion of state Islam in the same fashion that we destroyed state Shinto in Japan, or the devout muslims will institute the same theocratic state, complete with non-schooling of women, half-time executions of women at soccer games, and all the horrors that follow from a Sharia law state.
Now maybe the best foreign policy decision to be made is withdrawal, particularly given the feckless nature of our State department and present military command structure. But I doubt that that will rebound to the interest of the women in Afghanistan nor will it rebound to our interest. And unless one thinks that an oppressive theocratic gov’t is in the interest of those subjugated under it, it won’t be all that cheery for Afghanis at large either.
c andrew,
The aboriginal American tribes regularly battled and raided one another for many years before Columbus landed; do you feel that this excused the resulting genocide?
Americans now have regular mass shootings, and wipe out some 30K yearly of each other in sleepy/drunk/lazy/stupid car crashes.
…and every other place in the world has some history of violence. Do you feel that previous violence in a location, or associated with a genetic group, justifies killing members of that group? Western Europeans and Western-European-derived Americans have the highest, most consistent rate, over centuries, of invading other lands and killing their people, so if you do support “an eye for an eye,” the next eye to go is the Anglo-American eye. The violence in western Europe is cultural–it predated everything except the arrival of humans to western Europe.
Whenever you hurt someone, you always do it for their own good. You beat your wife because you need to teach her; you rape the hooker because she was asking for it; you kill thousands of Iraqi children to protect them from Saddam Hussein; you burn the village to spare it.
There is nothing new in your perspective; it’s how murderers have always rationalized (1) leaving home, (2) going to someone else’s home, (3) killing a bunch of people there, and (4) taking their stuff.
It’s kind of you to so selflessly think about killing another few generations’ worth of people in Afghanistan in order to offer those exotic Arabian women protection. For the past thousand years, though, those women have been getting raped and slaughtered by people who said they were only there to protect them from dangerous Muslims. That’s why they don’t like you and want you to go away.
Since we’re on Maggie’s site, consider the ways that police forces use the rhetoric of “offering protection” from boogeymen pimps and traffickers in order to lock up and brutalize women and children. What they are doing is mimicking, domestically, the same rapists’ logic that has been used geopolitically for centuries.
The difference was that he could shame the British into agreeing with him. The Nazis had no such shame. Their genocide was open.
Pretty much agree with you Hal.
Maybe not all the Nazis but Hitler sure didn’t.
That was still kinda privileged information in 1939 though.
Nearly every world leader still thought he could be reasoned with until he crossed the Polish frontier.
It should have been obvious where a massive military build-up combined with unsustainable deficit spending would lead.
At least Hitler didn’t have nukes.
Someone else with a massive military build-up combined with unsustainable deficit spending does.
Just curious, but who is going to own those chains? Russia? China? The ‘beheaders’? Or perhaps the NSA/DEA/FBI/CIA/etc.?
Because we have nukes … we’ll never be taken down by a foreign “constrained” entity like Russia or China. So the choice is between the last two and I’d ask … between the beheaders and a domestic tyranny – which would you choose?
The bad choice between the “Taliban beheaders” and Unocal (“Karzai”) was created by the bankers who now offer the choice. The Taliban got their funding, weapons, training, and legitimacy from the U.S.
Manly, sturdy
creaturespolitical realists are great for bankers, because they’re so frightened by the thought of Arabiacs seducing their wives that they’ll wet their pants and immediately start gunning down villagers somewhere far away to keep it from happening. Once they get a little older, they have the wisdom to pronounce that, instead of doing our dirty work ourselves, we should be equipping and training insane Islamic armies to resist the communist armies–or alternately, equipping and training insane Islamic armies to resist the other insane Islamic armies.Poor little hammer–so very, very strong, you’re not even sure what you’re pounding or why you’re pounding it, but you’re damn well going to keep pounding until the end of time. Pounding makes you feel you have a purpose, and people much smarter than you are more than happy to exploit that in exchange for a little pension and some shiny medals.
We really must learn to channel this kind of strength into building useful things, instead of killing off foreign populations on a rotating cycle.
higharka wrote;
The Taliban got their funding, weapons, training, and legitimacy from the U.S.
Not true. The Economist was reporting on the Taliban in the early 1990’s when they began to form out of the madrassas on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Taliban translates as “Student,” a label assumed by these self-same devout inhabitants of the Islamic schools. They were supported by Pakistani internal intelligence and the Pakistani military who hoped to use them for their own ends.
You may be confusing the Taliban with Osama bin Laden who did get his military support from the United States in the 1980’s in his fight against the Russians. But that support moved through the same Pakistani intelligence and military channels so that, with the exception of the upper echelons of OBL’s organization, the mujahedeen thought the support was coming from fellow muslims in Pakistan.
After Bank One Corporation was taken over by JP Morgan Chase in 2004, Bank One ceased to exist, and new employees of the organization were called employees of Chase Bank. However, even though Bank One “ceased to exist,” and different signs went up at your local branch, it was still pretty much the same operation. The same people, the same purpose, the same carpeting, the same cheap button-up shirts, and almost the same placards on the walls encouraging you to consolidate your credit card debt.
Similarly, the people in Afghanistan who have been accepting cash and weapons from foreign powers for decades to fight proxy wars have called themselves many different things at many different times. “Taliban” was one of them, and it became an infamous western term when some of the locals got a little too uppity and decided they might rather cut pipeline deals with China or Russia instead of the U.S. All of a sudden, America became keenly interested in the sexual freedom of Afghan women.
It’s certainly possible that many Afghan fighters, living in metaphorical caves, are not as aware of world politics as are you. However, whenever mysterious cash payments and western-made weapons showed up in their hands, do you really think they didn’t know Uncle Sam was behind it? Their mistake, like Saddam’s, was to threaten native control of, and euro-based trading for, natural resources.
True of Saddam and Gaddafi (threatening to break the US dollar lock on oil trading that is) but I think the reasons for what we’re seeing in Afghanistan are :-
1. Trying to secure the route for the TAPI pipeline.
2. Trying to threaten the viability of the Iran-Pakistan-(potentially)India pipeline
3. Trying to establish a permanent military presence in an energy strategic geographical chokepoint
Recent developments in US domestic fossil fuel extraction probably won’t change much. Its more about controlling the energy supplies of potential economic rivals than securing their own. That plus ensuring that everyone who wants to buy oil has to maintain US dollar reserves – when that changes it’s all over red rover for the US economy. Since they kicked the gold bricks away the yankee dollar has floated exclusively on oil.
cabrogal wrote;
when that changes it’s all over red rover for the US economy.
Yup. And justifiably so. The only reason we’ve lasted as long as we have as the global reserve currency despite our stupid and destructive fiscal and monetary policies is that, as stupid as we are, other countries are even stupider. If any country with a major currency gets their “poop in a group” and establishes a safe currency without the major de-facto devaluations that QE#### brings, then the US dollar is done as a reserve currency. And all that inflation we’ve been exporting all those years will come back home to us. You’d think that Bernanke would be smart enough to pull his head out of his ass long enough to take a breath of fresh air and take a look at what happened to US currency under Volcker in the late 70’s and early 80’s.
Volcker raised the interest rates to around 18% to choke the money supply. It didn’t work because all of those expatriate US Dollars came flooding back to take advantage of the 18% rate – an incredible rate of return you couldn’t match the world over. If the US Dollar is displaced as a global reserve currency, those expatriate dollars will come flooding back, not to take advantage of higher than average interest rates, but to avoid the crash in value that will follow.
higharka,
The genesis of the Taliban was well documented by The Economist 4 years before they burst onto the international scene. They weren’t a continuation of a previous organization, they were like a newly evolved pathogen, very virulent in their ideology and without any diluting factors to slow things up. As one would expect from youth freshly removed from the schoolroom; look at the role that students played in the runup to the fascist takeover of Italy and the Nazi takeover of Germany. The Taliban were offering pure quill Islam, straight from the imam’s mouth and enacted with all the ruthless idealism that young men can bring to bear. That’s why you had soccer half-time entertainment consisting of executing women and why women were banned from all professions and schooling, etc.
It was not a derivative movement. So your banking metaphor does not apply.
Now it would not surprise me if our State dept were playing, along with the Pentagon, the stupid ROE games as an attempt to win hearts and minds and secure some kind of pipeline deal for politically connected corporations. But that was an “after the fact” development, if it is in fact there, and does not address the original casus belli offered by the Taliban protecting the architect of the 9-11 attacks.
As far as the political awareness of the lower echelons of the mujahedeen, it’s pretty well documented that they were not aware of US involvement with OBL. That was the whole point of the Pakistani’s insisting that they take credit for the supplies; they wanted an “in” with the tribal areas and this was their ticket toward that end.
The Economist, a UK publication, is far better than any American weekly newsmagazine in both depth and breadth of reporting and has been for decades. I’ve been reading them since the mid-80’s but had to stop about 10 years ago as I lacked the time to continue reading their publication. But their correspondents in various areas of the world are usually folks that have been in place for significant periods of time and provide coverage and insight that American publications approach only in their most fevered and fantastical dreams.
If you feel that imperial fiscal policy releases are sources of accurate information about the world’s poor and desperate, the problem exists at a more fundamental level than one of merely being aware of history.
As to history, though, the Anglo-American empires have been constantly finding native resistance “new” and “sudden” whenever it is convenient to. If you poison someone’s mother, kill his brother, rape his sister, and blow up half his friends, and five years later he hits teenagehood and begins to fight you, his resistance is not a brand new social movement with complex global implications. Wealthy white people strain furiously to imagine that it is a brand new social movement with complex global implications each time it happens, which is why it often takes them decades of critical analysis of the produce of various media outlets staffed by people with extensive educations in order to better get a handle on the effects of agramalfied stromingent intrasocial renooberation in Afghanistan.
In what we might pejoratively call “the real world,” though, your evangelical confession of partial western greed does not make your crass dehumanization of swarthy people trying to protect their families any more appealing–or accurate. The Talibans sins do not exonerate you yours, and any fresh faces in the Taliban boardroom do not relieve you of responsibility for the past: specifically, responsibility for the hundreds of years of rape and murder that made it impossible for a stable government to form.
Accurate to an extent. But taken to an extreme it devolves into mass cowardess (see USA).
When the population feels they need to spend 10x in defense than their largest enemy, that is cowardess.
When a man feels the need to buy guns to “keep his family safe”. That is cowardess.
When a nation needs to militarize their police against brown people and whores, that is cowardess.
Show me a solid pro gun patriot, and I’ll be looking at a scared little pussy.
Ghandi, the kid in front of the Chinese tank, the guy that pushes an officer off a tear gas victim: those guys are brave.
But somehow we in the US have double thought ourselves into reversing the definition of brave and coward. Holding onto our guns like our mamas skirts.
Wow. The police are claiming the officer drew his weapon to subdue a struggling suspect (how? by pistol-whipping him? Then he lost his balance and “a round” accidentally went off (note passive voice; also rounds don’t just go off — they’re fired) and, what a coincidence, hit the suspect right in the neck, killing him.
Boy, it’s sure strange how accurate these weapons during falls, stumbles, spills and struggles with people who won’t “stop resisting”.
Re: the Satanists and Fred Phelps’ mom. I’m partially on the cops’ side here. That was a pretty nasty and petty thing to do. I’ll grant you there should be other priorities in Meridian, but two wrongs don’t make a right and going after the grave of the mother of someone you don’t like is pretty low.
Maybe the Meridian police could indict these guys next. It’d make almost as much sense.
OK krulac, I’ve just made a huge leap across into the Fox News alternative universe where this incredible load of ahistorical bollocks you have come up with is actually true.
The commies and beheaders really are what you say and really do what you say they do or have done.
People like me really want them to slaughter masses of utter strangers to no profit to ourselves whatsoever because we’re just plain evil.
And its only people like me who made the US look like such a bunch of murderous morons in Vietnam and Afghanistan when really they were there to save the day for those poor little children the Marxists made them napalm.
But hey krulac, the all-powerful evil demons like me defeated the US in Vietnam. And we’re about to do it again in Afghanistan.
So tell me, what exactly is the point of all this expenditure of blood and treasure, all of the ‘collateral damage’, all of the people worldwide who are hypnotised by us evil demons into hating the Americans for only wanting to be nice to villagers down the barrel of a GAU-12?
I mean we’re just going to make sure the beheaders and commies puke in the doorway again, no matter how many times you clean it up.
So why do you do it?
That’s what I’d like to know. Individuals have the right to control their own bodies, up to and including the right to self-mutilation and suicide. Societies have the same right. If a society chooses self-annihilation we don’t have to deal with it; we can help those who don’t want to live there by accepting refugees and even (in extreme cases) by planting agents who will help those who want to escape. But going into a foreign country in a blatantly-foolish attempt to nanny other free adults is a waste of time which only succeeds in creating enemies; even outright conquest makes more moral sense.
I’ve never thought of it terms of the suicide metaphor before – and I sure agree with you about the right to self-mutilation and suicide.
I’m going to have to think this over a bit, but on the face of it your framing of the issue sure works for me.
Maggie wrote;
even outright conquest makes more moral sense.
Yup. Just like we did with Japan and Germany.
I think that the problems we have had in the last 60 years is because our foreign policy makers are operating under the delusion that we can have “a short, victorious war.”
What we end up with instead is a half-assed, long, and unsuccessful war. After the third go-round, you’d think we’d learn something.
If we’re not willing to go all-in and defeat the acolytes of aggressive ideologies, I’m thinking that we should stay the hell out.
What exactly was half-arsed about the US invasion of Vietnam?
Casualties inflicted and received?
Ordnance dropped and fired?
Rice paddies cratered and poisoned?
Buildings leveled?
Money spent?
And the results?
A million Vietnamese and 60,000 US and non-VN allies dead.
A generation of maimed and head-fucked veterans on the streets of US and Vietnamese cities.
Hueys pulling embassy staff off the roof as T-55s smash down the front gates.
South Vietnamese collaborators scattered as refugees across the face of the planet.
The permanent crippling of the US economy while the Vietnamese economy is now the strongest (and most free) it has ever been.
A united Vietnam and a divided US populace.
Except for the body count America couldn’t have lost more thoroughly if Ho had paddled his canoe across the Pacific and over-run California.
Maybe JFK should have been briefed on Vietnamese anti-colonialist history.
Took them a millenia to drive out the Chinese.
A century to get rid of the French.
A decade to kick the US arse into the South China Sea.
Practice makes perfect.
And what the hell was the whole thing for anyway?
They don’t eat babies there you know.
“Maybe JFK should have been briefed on Vietnamese anti-colonialist history.”
I read one of those “what if” articles the other day; this one speculated on what might have happened if JFK hadn’t been shot.
It seems that Kennedy’s generals were often making the case for wars (it’s their job, of course), but JFK didn’t agree and over-ruled them. LBJ, however, agreed to escalate US activity in Vietnam.
The suggestion was that, if Kennedy had lived, continuing US participation in Vietnam would have been minimal.
What was half-assed about the Vietnam war was that no American interests were at stake and we did not prosecute that war to win it. On either count, we should not have been engaged there.
We were dealing with the same insane ROE issues that we are now facing in the Afghanistan conflict.
One of my older cousins was lost in Vietnam; he was a pilot. He wrote home that before they would be sent against a target, they would drop leaflets 3 days in advance. If the North Vietnamese couldn’t move the target, they’d set up a SAM site to protect it. That’s half assed.
My bookkeeper’s brother was brought up on charges because he was in a perimeter position and defended himself against encroaching hostiles before getting a fire order from Battalion.
When I was doing work for the Forest Service, our Contracting Officer who flew helicopters in ‘Nam and was on his 3rd tour, said that they could not engage anti-aircraft and SAM sites even when he was losing birds to their attacks. He go “lost” one night and took out the AA that was taking out his men; they couldn’t pin it on him as insubordination but they cut his tour short and sent him home.
We did not attack the Ho Chi Minh trail – the caches along its length or the storage depots in North Vietnam. That’s half-assed.
In short, no actual reason to be there, and once there, no intention of fighting the war to win it. That’s half-assed.
And the points you raise only make the half-assery more blatant.
I’ve been thinking about your metaphor and while it works well as rhetoric (not a bad word in my dictionary) it’s probably not as useful as I thought at first sight.
A lot of people who support military adventurism don’t really support those rights over your own body.
Attempted suicide is theoretically legal in Aus but if you land in A&E following an unsuccessful attempt or some over-enthusiastic self-harm you’ll probably be forcibly medicated and locked in a psyche ward with fewer rights than if they caught you with a freezer full of missing people.
Public opinion is probably moving towards even further reduction of the rights of those some ‘expert’ says may ‘harm themselves or others’. From what I’ve heard about the NRA trying to blame mental illness for every shooting that makes the media and the push to roll out ‘Kendras Law’ type legislation across the country, things are at least as bad in the US.
But more relevantly, is there really anyone here (with the possible exception of krulac) who thinks countries ever get invaded to protect the people or societies there?
It’s all about strategic interests.
Or in the US case, the interests of a handful of multinational companies, mostly in the energy sector.
Links. I’ll come back to it.