In the end, the American Empire has been about the looting of the American taxpayer in the name of spreading democracy by killing third world residents. It's a farce that serves the interests of DC in the most cynical way possible.
In the end, the American Empire has been about the looting of the American taxpayer in the name of spreading democracy by killing third world residents. It's a farce that serves the interests of DC in the most cynical way possible.
The heirs to Woodrow Wilson must make the world safe for democracy! Viet Nam was hardly the first unjustifiable war in our history. And we have that era and the pompous Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr to thank for the immortal "can't shout fire in a theater" 1st Amdt case that was really about protesting the war, and Holmes was defending the suppression of dissent.
Fair point. I will say in his defense about the often quoted ""shouting fire in a crowded theater" that gave us the 1919 Schenck v. United States case you accurately refer to as a travesty, OWH did spend the rest of his career walking that bad case law back, ultimately giving us the high point of US protected speech with Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, which remained the standard until the 1st amendment once again began it's decline with the internet.
OWH was deeply flawed for many reasons, but wanted to give the devil his due.
Had he been more concerned with real principle rather than his glib word-smithing, he might not have committed the error (for which he did partially repent) in the first place. And in fairness, unlike so many other progressives, he did learn from his error - at least in the matter of the free speech.
Well, we helped hatch a batch there - the Mujahedeen - to fight the Soviets. Led by the scion of a fine family loyal to our great friends the House of Saud!
I saw him on a late-night show with some other politicians and he actually said "Maybe we'd have less problems with them if we didn't mess with them all the time." IN PUBLIC!
I thought "Great morals, awful political strategy." Sadly, honest politicians are the ones who don't get elected above a certain level.
Bingo, the MIC/bankster cabal could care less about people. All they care about is more power and how to keep the shadows on the wall the center of attention for us peasants.
But big balled, limp dicked, incel Skutch and incel Scottie, they be big balled he men that wonтАЩt tolerate no child bride raping afore they get themselves one too.
I think Islam is the smallest part of why it's an awful place. I'm remembering something P.J. O'Rourke said about Yugoslavia - all of history's barbarians sent their most objectionable people around a corner while they sneaked off or somesuch, leaving behind today's population. Afghanistan is no different.
I think O'Rourke is ignoring the fact that prior to the overthrow of the Afghan Shah in 1973, the predominant form of Islam in Afghanistan was Sufism- a sect that's liberal to the point of being considered heretic by many more orthodox Muslims. Also, there was very little opium in the region until it was transformed into a cash crop to fund the anti-Soviet resistance by the Western coalition. It must have seemed like a neat idea to corrupt old fossils like Count Marenches and Bill Casey, in the Reagan era; the Carter administration had already looked the other way on hashish smuggling, but there's no real money in that, compared to the heroin trade. And then of course the Saudis had to get involved, for the juice of it, and along with all of the money they sluiced into Pakistan, they also exported Wah'habi fundie Islam to the feral orphans and refugees of the resettlement camps, who grew up getting their only schooling in Wah'habi madrassas, drilled with verses of the Koran in the original Arabic, a language they neither spoke or understood. So they literally had to take the word of their matinent arch-Salafist Arab tutors about what Allah meant. Right and wrong. Right or wrong.
I don't view a foreign troop presence as helping that situation. I wish something could. I find it conceivable that even the Taliban are sick and tired of it. But as long as foreign invaders are on their soil, they probably feel entirely justified in devoting their lives to war. One terrible thing about PTSD is that if there is actually a war on, the stress has a way of making some of the afflicted people feel like the condition is normal, and adaptive.
There are millions of adult women who have had their genitals mutilated from another continent, child brides, forced marriages, etc that convince me otherwise.
Islam is, as Maher has observed, the mother lode of bad ideas.
You know, I have to observe that if there were millions of boy children grown to manhood whose dick was sliced off at the root... the big balled genius opining Russel Brand like cowards on this board might have a problem with Islam.
As it is, we have Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a lonely voice in the wilderness and a bunch of cowards bloviating like men.
For what it's worth, I've heard similar opinions voiced about the American state of Georgia, which was first settled by parolees from debtor's prison. Great Britain was grappling with over-incarceration as early as the late 17th century; eventually, they settled on overseas exile as a solution for many of the petty criminals. (British laws in that era were HARSH. For, like, nothing. A little-known legacy that probably deserves more scrutiny, as a way of explaining what happened to Patrick Garner and George Floyd. Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence may have had a lot of rights the accused this and due process that, which is a worthy legacy. But up until about the mid-19th century, the British would also flog the muscles right off of your back for stealing a watch, or send you to a dungeon for being a runaway girl. And we're talking all whiteys here.) That's how Australia got founded (read The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes, which is also where I got most of the information imparted above.) But before the era of the Australian Transportation, the British Crown sent a lot of their miscreant and lumpenproletariat class to the American and Caribbean Colonies, as indentured servants. And they dealt with others by impressing them into His Majesty's Royal Navy, as "able seamen."
Very few of our ancestors were ladies and gentlemen; few of them could afford to be, and even most of the ones who could behaved terribly. Which is why I'm constantly on people to read history. To learn how horrible everything used to be, everywhere. Which, by corollary, can provide an inkling of how good we have it nowadays.
I mean, we don't want to blow this scene up. People need to put a check on their sense of entitlement over every little imagined slight. And have patience. You finish reading a book like The Fatal Shore and you look around and realize: everything is amazing, and what up? People are complaining and threatening insurrection, because they had to do 12 months easy time wearing a face mask?
The Australians refer to George Washington as the father of their country for just that reason. He won the revolution that resulted in many of the criminals that once came to America being redirected to Australia.
I agree we should read history, but I'm not sure the conclusion is things have improved, rather than history is a circle without end.
We have certainly changed the names. We now call slavery and indentured servitude incarceration. We have replaced lepers with the sex offender registry. The kind of criminals you cite who built this country would be unforgivable pariah's in today's America confined to the lowest wage jobs in America that do not do background checks and unable get access housing because they did something wrong 40 years ago. They died earlier, but had nothing like we understand as the surveillance state. Where you see progress I see trade-offs and old institutions given more acceptable names.
I have no problem wearing a mask, but if you think that is the the motivation behind those who threatening insurrection I would look again.
I will never, never accede to the "cyclical theory of history." No matter how popular it is- and I fully realize that it's commonly provided legitimacy in academia, to the extent that it arguably prevails over what's commonly derided as "the myth of progress."
Notice how the cyclical framing is granted the status of Theory, whereas the idea of human progress is dismissed as a Myth.
I don't believe in the unending forward march of Progress advancing through Time, the way the notion is most commonly caricatured by those who dismiss it. I'm not a naif.
But the Cyclical Theory is so despairing that it writes off all of human advance as illusory, and hence all effort as futile. Of all the fucked-out, elite, lazy, cowardly, capitulationist paradigms...only an ivory tower stance of entitlement imagines that it can afford to think that way. And it's been poisoning the minds of the youth for decades, like some unholy amalgam of Oswald Spengler and Jean Paul Sartre. If that's the best a social philosophy of history can do, it's no wonder guys like Julius Evola retain an appeal for young people in the West, trying to resolve the alienation they've been prompted to cultivate.
I'm realistic. I know that there's a risk of things going bad. That's a long way from the stance that things HAVE to go bad,. A stance held in common by both the effete faux liberal adherents of the Cyclical Theory, and the adherents to more militantly apocalyptic visions- ideological, theological, or even both- that theorize that the conditions have to degenerate to the point of utter chaos, decadence,and destitution before the Final Transformation. If we can't do better than that, then why care about any of it? But that's what some elements are angling for; maximizing the number of people who sink into uncaring cynicism.
"The kind of criminals you cite who built this country would be unforgivable pariah's in today's America confined to the lowest wage jobs in America that do not do background checks and unable get access housing because they did something wrong 40 years ago."
We got rid of flagellation. We can take the albatross off of the necks of the people you speak of, too. We still have dungeons- but not as many as in that bad old days. we know damn well we can do better. Our problems are solvable. A disproportionate amount of them consist of long-term collateral damage from orienting our domestic priorities to make room for the War on Drugs, the dry rot of public policy solutions. A public policy so bad that it enabled the rise of a parallel economy to replace the one that was being hollowed out by the abandonment of even elementary regard for keeping the wages of working people above poverty level, and their economic prospects at a level more secure than precarity.
That isn't about the inevitability of some Cycle of History, it's about bad policies that can be reversed. But the first step is to admit the sources of the problem. Including the fact that you can't make an exception for passively accepting the status quo of the War on Drugs; it's the single feature that's made so many of the other attempts to use public policy in a pro-social way ineffective.
Beyond that: one of the unexamined premises of the Cyclical Theory is that the glass never gets to be more than half full. I think it's important to read history from the standpoint of an honest appraisal, of appreciating just how full our glass really is, at present. I can easily fill as many column inches with a recounting of the ills of the present day as I could be compiling a list from the 14th century (I'm currently reading Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, for the first time.) But for me to simply conclude that I live in a slightly more comfortable respite that's only a surface condition, and that underneath it all, things are as bad as they've ever been- that's just plain entitled ingratitude. Not warranted by the facts.
You are far more familiar with modern theory on cyclical history than I am. Correct me if I am wrong, but I sense you think of a cyclical view of history as trendy modern take that deviates from a more traditional linear view?
The first time I read about cyclical history was Ecclesiastes, but I've since learned the concept goes back further to the Mesopotamian conception of the Universe. You see it in Buddhism and Hinduism as well as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche who re-popularized the idea in the West. I have no idea how their arguments for circular history relate to what you call the "effete faux liberal adherents of the Cyclical Theory." I never really considered the political position of Buddhism on cyclical history.
For me it's an ought/is argument. I'm not interested in the political implications so much as the accuracy of the model. I could be wrong, but I see far more proof of a cyclical pattern where we rebranding older ideas and call it progress.
Did we get rid of flagellation? Have you read Kendi or DiAngelo?
Not only do we still have dungeons, but we actually have far more of them capable of an exquisite science driven torture our ancestors with their iron maidens could have only dreamed of, but certainly would have implemented if they had known. The type of CIA inspired and directed torture used at Abu Ghraib (worth reading McCoy's "A question of Torture" if you have not) is not what I consider progress. As for the enormous Gulag type imprisonment we currently run in the US? There isn't enough space here for me to document its sadistic practices.
Our problems may be solvable, but our human nature is not. In the early 1900's we launched a moral panic driven war against "White Slavery" along with a series of deeply xenophobic laws due to fear over Asian workers that specifically targeting Asian sex workers and black men who had sex with white women. Since then we have had a war on alcohol, a war on gambling, a war on drugs and recently we have returned to the deeply xenophobic war on sex work again literally using the same racists tropes against the exact same Asian women and interacial couples we targeted over 110 years ago when we passed the White Slavery Mann Act of 1910.
The biggest difference is that a conviction for a black man having sex with a white sex worker in the 1910's got you a max of 10 years as black world champion boxer Johnson showed us at the time. Now it will get 40-50 years and is largely aimed at the same ethnic groups for the same reasons under different branding. It that the progress you are referring too?
The war on drugs is a symptom of the human condition, not the cause. Humans are incapable of not weaponizing laws against marginalized communities who behave in ways we don't approve of. That weaponization has only increased over time. The urge to censor and punish are stronger even than our urge to procreate and we are only getting better at it.
Entitled gratitude is a bad thing and we should all avoid it, but I don't think a religious belief in linear progress is needed to avoid that pitfall. In the end entitlement is about how we respond to life, not whether history is cyclical or not.
Yes, IтАЩm a Virginia native and we were taught all the regular stuff about the VA colony. Once I got to college I learned the only women they could get to colonize were brought from the prions or whorehouses. No genteel woman was going to leave her comfortable home. Our first governors were blue bloods but disgraced family members, exiled to a savage country. Americans are mostly clueless about and think theyтАЩre special.
Understand exactly what you mean. My battle buddy (Mark) in Iraq spent a couple years being a FSR fixing satellite kits with two Sikh bodyguards in Afghanistan (yes, they did carry daggers), and said he loved it. I liked Iraqis too, which is not a sentiment I get a lot from others who have been there. Never did Yugoslavia and it's probably not the same now, but Mark was part of the Kosovo deployment and had a broadly similar view.
All I'd need to do is drop by some Catholic Church in the US if I wanted that, but probably would need to visit some Basque sheep herders in Northern California for the animal variety.
From the person concerned about Afghan women. You're just a bigot using women as an excuse to advance your hate. Let someone talk long enough, and they expose their real self.
No one from Afghanistan had anything to do with 9-11(same with Iraq, Syria, Yemen Libya etc.) Of course, SA is the home of the religious beliefs that spur the terrorists and has funded them, but they also prop up the dollar and buy lots of weapons from us.
Of course, if we want to nuke places that help the terrorists, we'd have to nuke ourselves, since we armed AQ affiliates in Syria, and first, under Obama, and later Trump, we gave logistical support to the Saudis bombing campaign against the Houthis, who were fighting AQ in Yemen.
It's amazing how after 19 years of utter futility, there are still people in this country who think all problems are solved with military force, just what you'd expect from a country where so few have served, much less been in combat, but where video combat games are very popular.
One reform idea: Taxpayers are allowed to determined themselves (to some extend) in which budget category their tax will be spend. That would give voters at least some control over foreign policy.
In the end, the American Empire has been about the looting of the American taxpayer in the name of spreading democracy by killing third world residents. It's a farce that serves the interests of DC in the most cynical way possible.
The heirs to Woodrow Wilson must make the world safe for democracy! Viet Nam was hardly the first unjustifiable war in our history. And we have that era and the pompous Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr to thank for the immortal "can't shout fire in a theater" 1st Amdt case that was really about protesting the war, and Holmes was defending the suppression of dissent.
War is the health of the state!
Fair point. I will say in his defense about the often quoted ""shouting fire in a crowded theater" that gave us the 1919 Schenck v. United States case you accurately refer to as a travesty, OWH did spend the rest of his career walking that bad case law back, ultimately giving us the high point of US protected speech with Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, which remained the standard until the 1st amendment once again began it's decline with the internet.
OWH was deeply flawed for many reasons, but wanted to give the devil his due.
Had he been more concerned with real principle rather than his glib word-smithing, he might not have committed the error (for which he did partially repent) in the first place. And in fairness, unlike so many other progressives, he did learn from his error - at least in the matter of the free speech.
And Afghanistan is a shithole that breeds terrorists.... with or without US troops....
Well, we helped hatch a batch there - the Mujahedeen - to fight the Soviets. Led by the scion of a fine family loyal to our great friends the House of Saud!
Much less defensible to my view
The term is blow-back. Ron Paul used it and set himself apart as a pariah to all good-thinkers.
I saw him on a late-night show with some other politicians and he actually said "Maybe we'd have less problems with them if we didn't mess with them all the time." IN PUBLIC!
I thought "Great morals, awful political strategy." Sadly, honest politicians are the ones who don't get elected above a certain level.
LOL Sure.. but not until the major players all lined up to go in and reap the benefits of all of that heroin.
The UK, Russia... The US. It's been made into an anti imperial shithole from 800 years of imperialists coming in to rape and pillage freely.
So where does it go now? Probably back to the stone age again haha
The rub here is that the media lied about it and repeated the lies of the state to continue funneling money into war industry pockets.
It's a sham, whether or not the Afghanis are "good" or "evil".
Doesn't matter.
Bingo, the MIC/bankster cabal could care less about people. All they care about is more power and how to keep the shadows on the wall the center of attention for us peasants.
But big balled, limp dicked, incel Skutch and incel Scottie, they be big balled he men that wonтАЩt tolerate no child bride raping afore they get themselves one too.
No. ItтАЩs an Islamic shithole with or with imperial YT, despite a whole lot of attention and money... they refuse to evolve
I think Islam is the smallest part of why it's an awful place. I'm remembering something P.J. O'Rourke said about Yugoslavia - all of history's barbarians sent their most objectionable people around a corner while they sneaked off or somesuch, leaving behind today's population. Afghanistan is no different.
I think O'Rourke is ignoring the fact that prior to the overthrow of the Afghan Shah in 1973, the predominant form of Islam in Afghanistan was Sufism- a sect that's liberal to the point of being considered heretic by many more orthodox Muslims. Also, there was very little opium in the region until it was transformed into a cash crop to fund the anti-Soviet resistance by the Western coalition. It must have seemed like a neat idea to corrupt old fossils like Count Marenches and Bill Casey, in the Reagan era; the Carter administration had already looked the other way on hashish smuggling, but there's no real money in that, compared to the heroin trade. And then of course the Saudis had to get involved, for the juice of it, and along with all of the money they sluiced into Pakistan, they also exported Wah'habi fundie Islam to the feral orphans and refugees of the resettlement camps, who grew up getting their only schooling in Wah'habi madrassas, drilled with verses of the Koran in the original Arabic, a language they neither spoke or understood. So they literally had to take the word of their matinent arch-Salafist Arab tutors about what Allah meant. Right and wrong. Right or wrong.
Also: by now, a half-century of mass PTSD in the Afghan population. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15292083/
I don't view a foreign troop presence as helping that situation. I wish something could. I find it conceivable that even the Taliban are sick and tired of it. But as long as foreign invaders are on their soil, they probably feel entirely justified in devoting their lives to war. One terrible thing about PTSD is that if there is actually a war on, the stress has a way of making some of the afflicted people feel like the condition is normal, and adaptive.
There are millions of adult women who have had their genitals mutilated from another continent, child brides, forced marriages, etc that convince me otherwise.
Islam is, as Maher has observed, the mother lode of bad ideas.
You know, I have to observe that if there were millions of boy children grown to manhood whose dick was sliced off at the root... the big balled genius opining Russel Brand like cowards on this board might have a problem with Islam.
As it is, we have Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a lonely voice in the wilderness and a bunch of cowards bloviating like men.
For what it's worth, I've heard similar opinions voiced about the American state of Georgia, which was first settled by parolees from debtor's prison. Great Britain was grappling with over-incarceration as early as the late 17th century; eventually, they settled on overseas exile as a solution for many of the petty criminals. (British laws in that era were HARSH. For, like, nothing. A little-known legacy that probably deserves more scrutiny, as a way of explaining what happened to Patrick Garner and George Floyd. Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence may have had a lot of rights the accused this and due process that, which is a worthy legacy. But up until about the mid-19th century, the British would also flog the muscles right off of your back for stealing a watch, or send you to a dungeon for being a runaway girl. And we're talking all whiteys here.) That's how Australia got founded (read The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes, which is also where I got most of the information imparted above.) But before the era of the Australian Transportation, the British Crown sent a lot of their miscreant and lumpenproletariat class to the American and Caribbean Colonies, as indentured servants. And they dealt with others by impressing them into His Majesty's Royal Navy, as "able seamen."
Very few of our ancestors were ladies and gentlemen; few of them could afford to be, and even most of the ones who could behaved terribly. Which is why I'm constantly on people to read history. To learn how horrible everything used to be, everywhere. Which, by corollary, can provide an inkling of how good we have it nowadays.
I mean, we don't want to blow this scene up. People need to put a check on their sense of entitlement over every little imagined slight. And have patience. You finish reading a book like The Fatal Shore and you look around and realize: everything is amazing, and what up? People are complaining and threatening insurrection, because they had to do 12 months easy time wearing a face mask?
The Australians refer to George Washington as the father of their country for just that reason. He won the revolution that resulted in many of the criminals that once came to America being redirected to Australia.
I agree we should read history, but I'm not sure the conclusion is things have improved, rather than history is a circle without end.
We have certainly changed the names. We now call slavery and indentured servitude incarceration. We have replaced lepers with the sex offender registry. The kind of criminals you cite who built this country would be unforgivable pariah's in today's America confined to the lowest wage jobs in America that do not do background checks and unable get access housing because they did something wrong 40 years ago. They died earlier, but had nothing like we understand as the surveillance state. Where you see progress I see trade-offs and old institutions given more acceptable names.
I have no problem wearing a mask, but if you think that is the the motivation behind those who threatening insurrection I would look again.
I will never, never accede to the "cyclical theory of history." No matter how popular it is- and I fully realize that it's commonly provided legitimacy in academia, to the extent that it arguably prevails over what's commonly derided as "the myth of progress."
Notice how the cyclical framing is granted the status of Theory, whereas the idea of human progress is dismissed as a Myth.
I don't believe in the unending forward march of Progress advancing through Time, the way the notion is most commonly caricatured by those who dismiss it. I'm not a naif.
But the Cyclical Theory is so despairing that it writes off all of human advance as illusory, and hence all effort as futile. Of all the fucked-out, elite, lazy, cowardly, capitulationist paradigms...only an ivory tower stance of entitlement imagines that it can afford to think that way. And it's been poisoning the minds of the youth for decades, like some unholy amalgam of Oswald Spengler and Jean Paul Sartre. If that's the best a social philosophy of history can do, it's no wonder guys like Julius Evola retain an appeal for young people in the West, trying to resolve the alienation they've been prompted to cultivate.
I'm realistic. I know that there's a risk of things going bad. That's a long way from the stance that things HAVE to go bad,. A stance held in common by both the effete faux liberal adherents of the Cyclical Theory, and the adherents to more militantly apocalyptic visions- ideological, theological, or even both- that theorize that the conditions have to degenerate to the point of utter chaos, decadence,and destitution before the Final Transformation. If we can't do better than that, then why care about any of it? But that's what some elements are angling for; maximizing the number of people who sink into uncaring cynicism.
"The kind of criminals you cite who built this country would be unforgivable pariah's in today's America confined to the lowest wage jobs in America that do not do background checks and unable get access housing because they did something wrong 40 years ago."
We got rid of flagellation. We can take the albatross off of the necks of the people you speak of, too. We still have dungeons- but not as many as in that bad old days. we know damn well we can do better. Our problems are solvable. A disproportionate amount of them consist of long-term collateral damage from orienting our domestic priorities to make room for the War on Drugs, the dry rot of public policy solutions. A public policy so bad that it enabled the rise of a parallel economy to replace the one that was being hollowed out by the abandonment of even elementary regard for keeping the wages of working people above poverty level, and their economic prospects at a level more secure than precarity.
That isn't about the inevitability of some Cycle of History, it's about bad policies that can be reversed. But the first step is to admit the sources of the problem. Including the fact that you can't make an exception for passively accepting the status quo of the War on Drugs; it's the single feature that's made so many of the other attempts to use public policy in a pro-social way ineffective.
Beyond that: one of the unexamined premises of the Cyclical Theory is that the glass never gets to be more than half full. I think it's important to read history from the standpoint of an honest appraisal, of appreciating just how full our glass really is, at present. I can easily fill as many column inches with a recounting of the ills of the present day as I could be compiling a list from the 14th century (I'm currently reading Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, for the first time.) But for me to simply conclude that I live in a slightly more comfortable respite that's only a surface condition, and that underneath it all, things are as bad as they've ever been- that's just plain entitled ingratitude. Not warranted by the facts.
That's an interesting and thoughtful take.
You are far more familiar with modern theory on cyclical history than I am. Correct me if I am wrong, but I sense you think of a cyclical view of history as trendy modern take that deviates from a more traditional linear view?
The first time I read about cyclical history was Ecclesiastes, but I've since learned the concept goes back further to the Mesopotamian conception of the Universe. You see it in Buddhism and Hinduism as well as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche who re-popularized the idea in the West. I have no idea how their arguments for circular history relate to what you call the "effete faux liberal adherents of the Cyclical Theory." I never really considered the political position of Buddhism on cyclical history.
For me it's an ought/is argument. I'm not interested in the political implications so much as the accuracy of the model. I could be wrong, but I see far more proof of a cyclical pattern where we rebranding older ideas and call it progress.
Did we get rid of flagellation? Have you read Kendi or DiAngelo?
Not only do we still have dungeons, but we actually have far more of them capable of an exquisite science driven torture our ancestors with their iron maidens could have only dreamed of, but certainly would have implemented if they had known. The type of CIA inspired and directed torture used at Abu Ghraib (worth reading McCoy's "A question of Torture" if you have not) is not what I consider progress. As for the enormous Gulag type imprisonment we currently run in the US? There isn't enough space here for me to document its sadistic practices.
Our problems may be solvable, but our human nature is not. In the early 1900's we launched a moral panic driven war against "White Slavery" along with a series of deeply xenophobic laws due to fear over Asian workers that specifically targeting Asian sex workers and black men who had sex with white women. Since then we have had a war on alcohol, a war on gambling, a war on drugs and recently we have returned to the deeply xenophobic war on sex work again literally using the same racists tropes against the exact same Asian women and interacial couples we targeted over 110 years ago when we passed the White Slavery Mann Act of 1910.
The biggest difference is that a conviction for a black man having sex with a white sex worker in the 1910's got you a max of 10 years as black world champion boxer Johnson showed us at the time. Now it will get 40-50 years and is largely aimed at the same ethnic groups for the same reasons under different branding. It that the progress you are referring too?
The war on drugs is a symptom of the human condition, not the cause. Humans are incapable of not weaponizing laws against marginalized communities who behave in ways we don't approve of. That weaponization has only increased over time. The urge to censor and punish are stronger even than our urge to procreate and we are only getting better at it.
Entitled gratitude is a bad thing and we should all avoid it, but I don't think a religious belief in linear progress is needed to avoid that pitfall. In the end entitlement is about how we respond to life, not whether history is cyclical or not.
Yes, IтАЩm a Virginia native and we were taught all the regular stuff about the VA colony. Once I got to college I learned the only women they could get to colonize were brought from the prions or whorehouses. No genteel woman was going to leave her comfortable home. Our first governors were blue bloods but disgraced family members, exiled to a savage country. Americans are mostly clueless about and think theyтАЩre special.
Alexander the Great thought the same thing about Afghanistan before Islam or Christianity were invented.....
It's a real opinion, not a bunch of mealy-mouthed horseshit devoid of meaning.
I kind of enjoyed The Artist Formerly Known as Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. They're like the biker bars of countries. Not for everybody.
Understand exactly what you mean. My battle buddy (Mark) in Iraq spent a couple years being a FSR fixing satellite kits with two Sikh bodyguards in Afghanistan (yes, they did carry daggers), and said he loved it. I liked Iraqis too, which is not a sentiment I get a lot from others who have been there. Never did Yugoslavia and it's probably not the same now, but Mark was part of the Kosovo deployment and had a broadly similar view.
[puts on Will Rogers hat]
Never met an Afghan I didn't like, to include the Talibans.
Fucking with a Sikh is a bad idea.
It breeds far fewer terrorists than the US empire and its allies.
Yeah because itтАЩs a shithole....
The pedophilia and goat raping over there are not jokes, but real, common cultural/sexual practices
You donтАЩt say. Michael T is a aspiring to join the enlightened ones... maybe he could get some one he could force to suck his dick
All I'd need to do is drop by some Catholic Church in the US if I wanted that, but probably would need to visit some Basque sheep herders in Northern California for the animal variety.
Dress up like a girl and parachute yerself in big balls....
They could fucking nuke the entire Gawd foresaken shithole and the planet would suffer less misery
From the person concerned about Afghan women. You're just a bigot using women as an excuse to advance your hate. Let someone talk long enough, and they expose their real self.
Limp dick ... limp dick... whatcha gonna do ifn they ainтАЩt got no 9 year old fer you
That was precisely my position in 2001. We lacked the balls.
No one from Afghanistan had anything to do with 9-11(same with Iraq, Syria, Yemen Libya etc.) Of course, SA is the home of the religious beliefs that spur the terrorists and has funded them, but they also prop up the dollar and buy lots of weapons from us.
Of course, if we want to nuke places that help the terrorists, we'd have to nuke ourselves, since we armed AQ affiliates in Syria, and first, under Obama, and later Trump, we gave logistical support to the Saudis bombing campaign against the Houthis, who were fighting AQ in Yemen.
It's amazing how after 19 years of utter futility, there are still people in this country who think all problems are solved with military force, just what you'd expect from a country where so few have served, much less been in combat, but where video combat games are very popular.
Of course ...
Limp dick... limp dick... whatcha gonna do ifn they ainтАЩt got no 9 year old fer you
I wonder if the Spanish Flu may have been, partially at least, a way for young men to avoid the WWI draft and disappear.
These have been sold as spreading democracy in the press to get public support. The real motivations depend on the region.
One reform idea: Taxpayers are allowed to determined themselves (to some extend) in which budget category their tax will be spend. That would give voters at least some control over foreign policy.