7 ms·

We are no longer a serious people

69 points by simonsarris 5y ago

echelon 5y ago
As a taxpayer and voter (but not a military person), it felt like we could have kept a 10k personnel presence on the cheap. Soldiers weren't dying. Now the women and children will be raped and unfree, ideologically and religiously different killed, and LGBT tortured. We shouldn't have been there, but this is a horrible outcome far worse than staying. I find the "but they won't defend themselves" argument abhorrent and totally unsympathetic. I can't imagine if I were in their shoes.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  So you were willing to stay there forever? Or at least with some sort with some sort of open-ended commitment. How would we ever know when it was time to leave? Lots of other places in the world where bad things are happening - should we send troops to those places as well? Where does it end?
  - TchoBeer 5y ago
    Ideally there should be a solution that's neither "stay there forever" nor "pull out and let the Taliban take complete control".
    - adventured 5y ago
      No. The US is so broke it's buying its own debt by the trillions of dollars via debasing its currency to keep the federal lights on (to keep social security and medicare solvent). We can't pay our bills properly. When as a nation your central bank has to buy your own debt because nobody else can afford to buy so much garbage paper, you clearly can't afford such irresponsible foreign adventurism. Enough is enough. Time to go home. Time to reduce military spending immediately. Time to stop playing at nation building. Time to stop pretending we can afford to be a globally deployed military superpower, as though WW3 is going on and we have to be at max defense spending. The US couldn't afford Afghanistan 15 years ago. It most certainly can't afford it now.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      There really isn't. The only practical alternative was to hand it over to some other great power to occupy, but no-one is stupid enough to willingly take that hot potato. And yes, it was occupation. One thing that the rapid collapse made clear, is that Taliban genuinely has plenty of popular support, and the US-backed government had very little. Keep in mind that ANA had three times as much manpower as the Taliban, and military equipment supplied by US - and yet it all just dissipated in less than two weeks, because, apparently, no-one was actually willing to fight.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - neolog 5y ago
    17 US troops died there in 2019. If that's what it takes to maintain a democracy, it may be worth that cost indefinitely.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      What makes you believe Afghanistan was a democracy under US control?
      - neolog 5y ago
        Afghanistan's democracy was weak but improving over time. https://freedomhouse.org/country/afghanistan/freedom-world/2021 https://freedomhouse.org/country/afghanistan/freedom-world/2...
        int_19h 5y ago
        IMO this assessment is overly optimistic, focusing too much on the outer trappings, and too little on the reality on the ground. They did have competitive politics, yes - but competition was really between various clans, and not for individual votes.
    - afutileattempt1 5y ago
      I mean people launch BLM over 15 or so unarmed black men killed in police encounters in a nation of 350million or so. They definitely don’t think it’s just the cost of a police force.
    - karakot 5y ago
      Yeah, "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make"
  - kasey_junk 5y ago
    Perhaps we just start with the places we invaded? The idea that we were in Afghanistan too long seems odd given our bases in Germany, Japan, Korea, the Philippines or Cuba.
  - blitz_skull 5y ago
    If my tax dollars paying American troops to maintain order prevented a single little girl from being violently raped at the hands of the Taliban—yeah, I'd say let's stay there forever. I mean seriously, this argument holds no weight whatsoever. No one ever intended to stay there forever. But maybe "stay there long enough to help the government be resistant to religious zealots willing to die to subdue non-believers"? That seems like a pretty damn low-bar.
- wwweston 5y ago
  Or as Colin Powell famously put it: “you break it, you bought it.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pottery_Barn_rule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pottery_Barn_rule
- adventured 5y ago
  > We shouldn't have been there, but this is a horrible outcome far worse than staying. You mean it's going to return to what it was before the US got involved. The US attempted to prop up the ~300,000 person Afghan national military. The majority of the people of Afghanistan clearly had no interest in defending anything or keeping anything. It folded instantly, with close to zero resistance, despite outnumbering the Taliban four to one, having control of the skies and superior weaponry. The US can't reasonably stay in Afghanistan forever to defend the 3% of the population that aligns ideologically with Western values. The next thing the US should do is to immediately proceed to close over half of its foreign military bases and start leaving other countries as well. > I find the "but they won't defend themselves" argument abhorrent and totally unsympathetic. They won't fight for Western values - which the US attempted to force on them - because they overwhelmingly don't agree with or believe in Western values. They don't have a fervor for those beliefs, whereas the Taliban do have a fervor for their beliefs. It is that simple, whether you find reality abhorrent or not. The best anyone can hope for is that as many as possible of the small minority of people in Afghanistan that do want those values, are able to flee the country.
  - echelon 5y ago
    > The next thing the US should do is to immediately proceed to close over half of its foreign military bases and start leaving other countries as well. That's an incredible geopolitical farce. Putin would love it. The United States cannot become isolationist, lest it risk its economy, dollar trade, and geopolitical edge. Adversarial nations would gladly step in to fill the void, and our allies would be at a loss. The "America is evil and incompetent" meme is atrocious.
  - tzs 5y ago
    Polls of Afghanis at the time the US went in showed around 80% support for the US toppling the Taliban government. The Taliban has never been popular among more than a small minority of Afghans.
- nradov 5y ago
  It was hardly cheap. The logistic train necessary to sustain troops in a landlocked country without secure transportation routes was horribly expensive. In some cases it cost $100 to deliver a gallon of fuel to an outpost after accounting for all the transportation and security costs. Tactical aircraft are wearing our from overuse and we can't afford replacements. Meanwhile the military-industrial complex wants to have those 10k personnel preparing for a future conflict with China.
woah 5y ago
Author of the piece has a lot of criticisms but no suggestions as to what anyone could have done better. Not a serious person.
- coldtea 5y ago
  Ah, the old "but doctor, you don't have anything better to propose replacing the tumor with" argument...
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    How about the opposite? A tacit understanding that the US pullout we desired so much results in this chaos? That the chaos is unavoidable, that the Taliban were going to take over the country one way or the other when we left. -------- Now we can wax poetic about the details: should the troops have stayed put? If so, how many? Clearly, the Taliban were ready to surge (and surge they did: they've overwhelmed the entirety of the Afghan forces in just a week). That means that boots on the ground fighting would have been left to American forces yet again, a proposition that no one wants either. Its not entirely wrong for us to state: well... at least Americans aren't getting attacked right now. --------- And as much as this blogpost wants to discuss "non-serious people", I tune into CSPAN and actually hear the people in power having the difficult discussions. Senators (even Republican ones) aren't blaming Biden for the collapse, they're mostly focused on the timing and the details of the pullout. Biden was wrong to pull out the troops a few months ago (his pullout was aimed at 9/11/2021). The current situation is: Biden evacuated a bunch of troops, and then suddenly had to send them back into Kabul to secure the airport. An understandable mistake at a high level (Biden underestimated the speed of the Afghan government's collapse)... but also absolutely fair for Republicans to criticize Biden over. I don't have any answers, but frankly, the political process is __working__. The Republicans are asking the right questions and levying the correct criticisms. Biden is responding in kind with his statements today. Politics continue, the debate continues, but of course no one cares about these details. ------- In contrast, this blogpost is about how we're not serious about the issue by mostly posting bad twitter arguments. Aka: the stuff that doesn't matter. Lets talk about the details. Lets prove that we're serious. 6000ish boots on the ground entering Kabul (as per Biden's plan). Is this too many troops? Too few troops? Will the 9/11/2021 pullout be done in time (less than a month remains). The Taliban has not yet started their expected bloodbath. Can we trust them to honor their side of the agreement? Will they let us leave in peace? There seems to be no honor or glory in killing a bunch of retreating civilians, but I admit that I'm relatively ignorant of this Taliban (sure, the Taliban from the 90s would have started a bloodbath by now. But that Taliban is mostly dead, we killed most of those former leaders in the nearly 20 year war. I'm sure today's Taliban have different ideas than back then, and it may be important to discuss the differences) Sure, I know they massacre and genocide people who live there (at least, back in the 90s). But surely its in _THEIR_ best interests to let all of these Afghani civilians (and US forces / NATO forces) leave in peace? The last thing they want is for US forces to "fight seriously" against them right now.
nostromo 5y ago
This is a side-effect of politicians as celebrities and influencers, not as serious people. I won't win any friends by saying this, but it didn’t start with Trump, who obviously fits the bill as a celebrity parlaying his popular image into a presidency. Obama was also more of a celebrity than a president - lapping up the fawning adoration of their “closest friends” at his 50th - who somehow didn’t include all the people that made him president, but instead Jay Z and Beyoncé. Even regular congresspeople now seem more worried about what’s happening on Twitter and hobnobbing at fancy parties than the job of lawmaking. Someone should tell them the vast majority of their supporters are not on Twitter at all.
- Overton-Window 5y ago
  It's the side-effect of politicians being chosen for legitimacy (identity), not competency. > The reason for this sudden silence is that in the year 2021, the cream of American society and the flower of its finest universities, can only understand the world as projections of the country’s own domestic neuroses. Our current elites, whether in media or politics, squint at the strange peoples and languages of whatever international conflict and only see who or what they can map to their internal gallery of heroes and villains: Who’s the PoC? Who’s the Nazi?
- version_five 5y ago
  Yeah I saw Trump basically as a product of the shift of politics to a celebrity reality show, not the reason for it. This has a clear lineage going back at least to OJ.
  - delecti 5y ago
    Bill Clinton's saxophone playing was a joke in a children's show in the 90s [0], and Reagan was a governor and president [1]. I think the lineage goes back a fair bit further than OJ. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA0TS9l_nJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA0TS9l_nJE [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38et6ecNRO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38et6ecNRO4
_Microft 5y ago
"you can just take some ‘me time’ and not tune into the disturbing images", seems very true. Don't get me wrong, this is an observation and I do not endorse it. I see the same happening with climate change topics that people just avoid as if that would help - we've got the phrase "Vogel-Strauß-Prinzip" for that in German (it literally translates to "ostrich-principle", meaning to hide the head in the sand, so that you cannot see). Let me see what a proper translation might be. Edit: "(ostrich) head-in-the-sand behavior", so literally the same Edit 2: the irony... submission is flagged now. I bet that'll make the problem go away
- quantified 5y ago
  That we can be triggered is triggering... omg
CPLX 5y ago
I’ll help translate, as I actually grew up inside the beltway in Washington DC. For a certain community of sociopathic individuals often referred to as the “foreign policy establishment” the word “serious” is a synonym for “willing to insist that other people’s children go kill people in foreign countries.” Perhaps you’re not into that idea. Perhaps you think people far away should decide things for themselves, or maybe you just think the idea of sending people from Medford or Tuscaloosa to shoot people in Kandahar is a fucking terrible idea that is certainly immoral and also has no practical chance of improving anyone’s life. Well in that case, as anyone can see, you’re not a serious person. QED
- mr-wendel 5y ago
  I think these are two different types of "serious" under discussion. I don't doubt your point for a moment, but I think the author is taking a more literal, traditional approach to the word. In either case, it's a useful distinction around how people align themselves (intentionally or otherwise) around these geopolitical issues.
coldtea 5y ago
>to impose (for imposing is what we’ll have to do) something vaguely resembling a liberal order in a country 20 years later and this guy still doesn't get it...
goldcountry 5y ago
One of the worst takes I've seen on what's happening in Afghanistan, and the internet is positively filled with bad takes right now
- dang 5y ago
  Ok, but please don't react to that by posting a shallow, information-free dismissal to HN. If you want to say something about what a 'good take' would be, that might be better. Otherwise it's fine not to post. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
CobrastanJorji 5y ago
> "As the situation in Afghanistan worsened, the charismatic new face of progressive politics was…enthusing about public libraries. Yay!" This is technically a true statement, but as of this writing the most recent tweets and retweets from AOC were entirely about Afghanistan: "We have a moral obligation to the Afghan people. The U.S. role in this crisis is indisputable. We must waste no time or expense in helping refugees safely & swiftly leave Afghanistan. We must immediately welcome them to the U.S. & provide real support as they rebuild their lives." Did you just expect that you'd provide a link to someone's Twitter and nobody would click on it to check out this "sudden silence?"
- Overton-Window 5y ago
  The article was published hours before those later Tweets.
  - CobrastanJorji 5y ago
    The article was published 3 hours ago. AOC was tweeting 6 hours ago and retweeting others 20 hours ago. More charitably, it's possible that the author wrote this article over a course of several days and didn't notice.
runawaybottle 5y ago
Why is this flagged? This is a well written article.
- blitz_skull 5y ago
  Yeah seriously. Someone got triggered by the truth, evidently.
- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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- version_five 5y ago
  > This is a well written article. Judging by some other comments, I think that's probably why. It mocks a number of current orthodoxies in a coherent and sensible way. It's not so easy to dismiss, better to try and hide it.
  - forgingahead 5y ago
    Sadly there is a large contingent of "fingers in the ears" downvoters here on HN who will move quickly to squash any coherent counter-point to the madness of current orthodoxy. Disappointing really - we would all benefit from more open discussion of pros and cons of different issues, without partisan blinkers on.
- dang 5y ago
  When you see [flagged] on a submission, it means that users flagged it (this is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case, I'd guess because it's a sensational opinion piece on a divisive and often-repeated topic. I'm not seeing significant new information here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
abvdasker 5y ago
What an absurd article. The only thing to learn from Afghanistan is that we never should have gone there to begin with. The author paints a quite ignorant narrative about the collapse of Afghanistan’s government being somehow the fault of modern day progressivism when the reality is that all of this was started by neocons 20 years ago who had 0 interest in helping the people there and were only in it to line the pockets of defense contractors and oil companies. The mistake was already made we are just now living through the consequences of our collective delusion called the War On Terror.
- drivingmenuts 5y ago
  The real goal in Afghanistan was achieved by a bunch of SEALs who executed Osama bin Laden. The rest of the armed forces pretty much were just wasted lives, wasted equipment and wasted money by politicians. I hope the lesson here will be to stop fucking around where we’re not wanted. But that’s pretty much our other national motto.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    We gave them cellphones and modern life. Their girls were allowed into schools thanks to our troops, and their women entered US-chartered universities with the hopes and dreams of becoming productive adults. This is all likely lost as the Taliban takes over again, but I don't think providing that dream was worthless (however fleeting it was for those people, I know we've changed their lives for the better).
    - abvdasker 5y ago
      Yeah I’m sure that the families of the tens of thousands of dead Afghan civilians are super grateful to America that they now have smartphones!
      - 5y ago
tolmasky 5y ago
In what universe was the Vietnam War “reckoned with”? Kennedy was most popular after The Bay of Pigs disaster. The entire Cold War fits the mold of what the author describes here — projecting our worldview on regional conflicts that could care less about our concerns at the time (Capitalism vs. Communism), complete with an inflated sense of trust in those we backed. Hell, in the war between Ethiopia and Somalia a bizarre series of events led to each side supporting the troops the other side had originally trained. Has nostalgia actually reached the point where we romanticize previously accepted embarrassing failures? If you want to give off an air of sophisticated Student of History, and go on about the “Before Times,” it doesn’t help to present such an idealized view of recent history. Perhaps your 5th grade history book gave you the false impression that things were more “serious” before, but I invite you to dig a little deeper.
pfisherman 5y ago
To me this article is the type of outrage porn typically amplified by social media / web, which is quite facile and ultimately contributes little to no value to the discourse surrounding recent events in Afghanistan. I see a lot of buzzwords relevant to theory recent iteration of the of the culture wars, but nothing about the neocon think tanks of the early aughts (ex. Project for a New American Century) that steered US foreign policy toward misguided adventures in “nation building”, nor any mention of the military leadership that successfully kept us engaged in Afghanistan for 20 years and four different administrations. The “sudden silence” is because there is broad agreement across the American populace that the war in Afghanistan had long passed its expiration date.

69 points by simonsarris 5y ago

As a taxpayer and voter (but not a military person), it felt like we could have kept a 10k personnel presence on the cheap. Soldiers weren't dying. Now the women and children will be raped and unfree, ideologically and religiously different killed, and LGBT tortured. We shouldn't have been there, but this is a horrible outcome far worse than staying. I find the "but they won't defend themselves" argument abhorrent and totally unsympathetic. I can't imagine if I were in their shoes.

UncleOxidant 5y ago
So you were willing to stay there forever? Or at least with some sort with some sort of open-ended commitment. How would we ever know when it was time to leave? Lots of other places in the world where bad things are happening - should we send troops to those places as well? Where does it end?
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  Ideally there should be a solution that's neither "stay there forever" nor "pull out and let the Taliban take complete control".
  - adventured 5y ago
    No. The US is so broke it's buying its own debt by the trillions of dollars via debasing its currency to keep the federal lights on (to keep social security and medicare solvent). We can't pay our bills properly. When as a nation your central bank has to buy your own debt because nobody else can afford to buy so much garbage paper, you clearly can't afford such irresponsible foreign adventurism. Enough is enough. Time to go home. Time to reduce military spending immediately. Time to stop playing at nation building. Time to stop pretending we can afford to be a globally deployed military superpower, as though WW3 is going on and we have to be at max defense spending. The US couldn't afford Afghanistan 15 years ago. It most certainly can't afford it now.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    There really isn't. The only practical alternative was to hand it over to some other great power to occupy, but no-one is stupid enough to willingly take that hot potato. And yes, it was occupation. One thing that the rapid collapse made clear, is that Taliban genuinely has plenty of popular support, and the US-backed government had very little. Keep in mind that ANA had three times as much manpower as the Taliban, and military equipment supplied by US - and yet it all just dissipated in less than two weeks, because, apparently, no-one was actually willing to fight.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- neolog 5y ago
  17 US troops died there in 2019. If that's what it takes to maintain a democracy, it may be worth that cost indefinitely.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    What makes you believe Afghanistan was a democracy under US control?
    - neolog 5y ago
      Afghanistan's democracy was weak but improving over time. https://freedomhouse.org/country/afghanistan/freedom-world/2021 https://freedomhouse.org/country/afghanistan/freedom-world/2...
      - int_19h 5y ago
        IMO this assessment is overly optimistic, focusing too much on the outer trappings, and too little on the reality on the ground. They did have competitive politics, yes - but competition was really between various clans, and not for individual votes.
  - afutileattempt1 5y ago
    I mean people launch BLM over 15 or so unarmed black men killed in police encounters in a nation of 350million or so. They definitely don’t think it’s just the cost of a police force.
  - karakot 5y ago
    Yeah, "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make"
- kasey_junk 5y ago
  Perhaps we just start with the places we invaded? The idea that we were in Afghanistan too long seems odd given our bases in Germany, Japan, Korea, the Philippines or Cuba.
- blitz_skull 5y ago
  If my tax dollars paying American troops to maintain order prevented a single little girl from being violently raped at the hands of the Taliban—yeah, I'd say let's stay there forever. I mean seriously, this argument holds no weight whatsoever. No one ever intended to stay there forever. But maybe "stay there long enough to help the government be resistant to religious zealots willing to die to subdue non-believers"? That seems like a pretty damn low-bar.
wwweston 5y ago
Or as Colin Powell famously put it: “you break it, you bought it.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pottery_Barn_rule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pottery_Barn_rule
adventured 5y ago
> We shouldn't have been there, but this is a horrible outcome far worse than staying. You mean it's going to return to what it was before the US got involved. The US attempted to prop up the ~300,000 person Afghan national military. The majority of the people of Afghanistan clearly had no interest in defending anything or keeping anything. It folded instantly, with close to zero resistance, despite outnumbering the Taliban four to one, having control of the skies and superior weaponry. The US can't reasonably stay in Afghanistan forever to defend the 3% of the population that aligns ideologically with Western values. The next thing the US should do is to immediately proceed to close over half of its foreign military bases and start leaving other countries as well. > I find the "but they won't defend themselves" argument abhorrent and totally unsympathetic. They won't fight for Western values - which the US attempted to force on them - because they overwhelmingly don't agree with or believe in Western values. They don't have a fervor for those beliefs, whereas the Taliban do have a fervor for their beliefs. It is that simple, whether you find reality abhorrent or not. The best anyone can hope for is that as many as possible of the small minority of people in Afghanistan that do want those values, are able to flee the country.
- echelon 5y ago
  > The next thing the US should do is to immediately proceed to close over half of its foreign military bases and start leaving other countries as well. That's an incredible geopolitical farce. Putin would love it. The United States cannot become isolationist, lest it risk its economy, dollar trade, and geopolitical edge. Adversarial nations would gladly step in to fill the void, and our allies would be at a loss. The "America is evil and incompetent" meme is atrocious.
- tzs 5y ago
  Polls of Afghanis at the time the US went in showed around 80% support for the US toppling the Taliban government. The Taliban has never been popular among more than a small minority of Afghans.
nradov 5y ago
It was hardly cheap. The logistic train necessary to sustain troops in a landlocked country without secure transportation routes was horribly expensive. In some cases it cost $100 to deliver a gallon of fuel to an outpost after accounting for all the transportation and security costs. Tactical aircraft are wearing our from overuse and we can't afford replacements. Meanwhile the military-industrial complex wants to have those 10k personnel preparing for a future conflict with China.

woah 5y ago

Author of the piece has a lot of criticisms but no suggestions as to what anyone could have done better. Not a serious person.

coldtea 5y ago
Ah, the old "but doctor, you don't have anything better to propose replacing the tumor with" argument...
- dragontamer 5y ago
  How about the opposite? A tacit understanding that the US pullout we desired so much results in this chaos? That the chaos is unavoidable, that the Taliban were going to take over the country one way or the other when we left. -------- Now we can wax poetic about the details: should the troops have stayed put? If so, how many? Clearly, the Taliban were ready to surge (and surge they did: they've overwhelmed the entirety of the Afghan forces in just a week). That means that boots on the ground fighting would have been left to American forces yet again, a proposition that no one wants either. Its not entirely wrong for us to state: well... at least Americans aren't getting attacked right now. --------- And as much as this blogpost wants to discuss "non-serious people", I tune into CSPAN and actually hear the people in power having the difficult discussions. Senators (even Republican ones) aren't blaming Biden for the collapse, they're mostly focused on the timing and the details of the pullout. Biden was wrong to pull out the troops a few months ago (his pullout was aimed at 9/11/2021). The current situation is: Biden evacuated a bunch of troops, and then suddenly had to send them back into Kabul to secure the airport. An understandable mistake at a high level (Biden underestimated the speed of the Afghan government's collapse)... but also absolutely fair for Republicans to criticize Biden over. I don't have any answers, but frankly, the political process is __working__. The Republicans are asking the right questions and levying the correct criticisms. Biden is responding in kind with his statements today. Politics continue, the debate continues, but of course no one cares about these details. ------- In contrast, this blogpost is about how we're not serious about the issue by mostly posting bad twitter arguments. Aka: the stuff that doesn't matter. Lets talk about the details. Lets prove that we're serious. 6000ish boots on the ground entering Kabul (as per Biden's plan). Is this too many troops? Too few troops? Will the 9/11/2021 pullout be done in time (less than a month remains). The Taliban has not yet started their expected bloodbath. Can we trust them to honor their side of the agreement? Will they let us leave in peace? There seems to be no honor or glory in killing a bunch of retreating civilians, but I admit that I'm relatively ignorant of this Taliban (sure, the Taliban from the 90s would have started a bloodbath by now. But that Taliban is mostly dead, we killed most of those former leaders in the nearly 20 year war. I'm sure today's Taliban have different ideas than back then, and it may be important to discuss the differences) Sure, I know they massacre and genocide people who live there (at least, back in the 90s). But surely its in _THEIR_ best interests to let all of these Afghani civilians (and US forces / NATO forces) leave in peace? The last thing they want is for US forces to "fight seriously" against them right now.

nostromo 5y ago

This is a side-effect of politicians as celebrities and influencers, not as serious people. I won't win any friends by saying this, but it didn’t start with Trump, who obviously fits the bill as a celebrity parlaying his popular image into a presidency. Obama was also more of a celebrity than a president - lapping up the fawning adoration of their “closest friends” at his 50th - who somehow didn’t include all the people that made him president, but instead Jay Z and Beyoncé. Even regular congresspeople now seem more worried about what’s happening on Twitter and hobnobbing at fancy parties than the job of lawmaking. Someone should tell them the vast majority of their supporters are not on Twitter at all.

Overton-Window 5y ago
It's the side-effect of politicians being chosen for legitimacy (identity), not competency. > The reason for this sudden silence is that in the year 2021, the cream of American society and the flower of its finest universities, can only understand the world as projections of the country’s own domestic neuroses. Our current elites, whether in media or politics, squint at the strange peoples and languages of whatever international conflict and only see who or what they can map to their internal gallery of heroes and villains: Who’s the PoC? Who’s the Nazi?
version_five 5y ago
Yeah I saw Trump basically as a product of the shift of politics to a celebrity reality show, not the reason for it. This has a clear lineage going back at least to OJ.
- delecti 5y ago
  Bill Clinton's saxophone playing was a joke in a children's show in the 90s [0], and Reagan was a governor and president [1]. I think the lineage goes back a fair bit further than OJ. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA0TS9l_nJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA0TS9l_nJE [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38et6ecNRO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38et6ecNRO4

_Microft 5y ago

"you can just take some ‘me time’ and not tune into the disturbing images", seems very true. Don't get me wrong, this is an observation and I do not endorse it. I see the same happening with climate change topics that people just avoid as if that would help - we've got the phrase "Vogel-Strauß-Prinzip" for that in German (it literally translates to "ostrich-principle", meaning to hide the head in the sand, so that you cannot see). Let me see what a proper translation might be. Edit: "(ostrich) head-in-the-sand behavior", so literally the same Edit 2: the irony... submission is flagged now. I bet that'll make the problem go away

quantified 5y ago
That we can be triggered is triggering... omg

CPLX 5y ago

I’ll help translate, as I actually grew up inside the beltway in Washington DC. For a certain community of sociopathic individuals often referred to as the “foreign policy establishment” the word “serious” is a synonym for “willing to insist that other people’s children go kill people in foreign countries.” Perhaps you’re not into that idea. Perhaps you think people far away should decide things for themselves, or maybe you just think the idea of sending people from Medford or Tuscaloosa to shoot people in Kandahar is a fucking terrible idea that is certainly immoral and also has no practical chance of improving anyone’s life. Well in that case, as anyone can see, you’re not a serious person. QED

mr-wendel 5y ago
I think these are two different types of "serious" under discussion. I don't doubt your point for a moment, but I think the author is taking a more literal, traditional approach to the word. In either case, it's a useful distinction around how people align themselves (intentionally or otherwise) around these geopolitical issues.

coldtea 5y ago

>to impose (for imposing is what we’ll have to do) something vaguely resembling a liberal order in a country 20 years later and this guy still doesn't get it...

goldcountry 5y ago

One of the worst takes I've seen on what's happening in Afghanistan, and the internet is positively filled with bad takes right now

dang 5y ago
Ok, but please don't react to that by posting a shallow, information-free dismissal to HN. If you want to say something about what a 'good take' would be, that might be better. Otherwise it's fine not to post. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

CobrastanJorji 5y ago

> "As the situation in Afghanistan worsened, the charismatic new face of progressive politics was…enthusing about public libraries. Yay!" This is technically a true statement, but as of this writing the most recent tweets and retweets from AOC were entirely about Afghanistan: "We have a moral obligation to the Afghan people. The U.S. role in this crisis is indisputable. We must waste no time or expense in helping refugees safely & swiftly leave Afghanistan. We must immediately welcome them to the U.S. & provide real support as they rebuild their lives." Did you just expect that you'd provide a link to someone's Twitter and nobody would click on it to check out this "sudden silence?"

Overton-Window 5y ago
The article was published hours before those later Tweets.
- CobrastanJorji 5y ago
  The article was published 3 hours ago. AOC was tweeting 6 hours ago and retweeting others 20 hours ago. More charitably, it's possible that the author wrote this article over a course of several days and didn't notice.

runawaybottle 5y ago

Why is this flagged? This is a well written article.

blitz_skull 5y ago
Yeah seriously. Someone got triggered by the truth, evidently.
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version_five 5y ago
> This is a well written article. Judging by some other comments, I think that's probably why. It mocks a number of current orthodoxies in a coherent and sensible way. It's not so easy to dismiss, better to try and hide it.
- forgingahead 5y ago
  Sadly there is a large contingent of "fingers in the ears" downvoters here on HN who will move quickly to squash any coherent counter-point to the madness of current orthodoxy. Disappointing really - we would all benefit from more open discussion of pros and cons of different issues, without partisan blinkers on.
dang 5y ago
When you see [flagged] on a submission, it means that users flagged it (this is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case, I'd guess because it's a sensational opinion piece on a divisive and often-repeated topic. I'm not seeing significant new information here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).

abvdasker 5y ago

What an absurd article. The only thing to learn from Afghanistan is that we never should have gone there to begin with. The author paints a quite ignorant narrative about the collapse of Afghanistan’s government being somehow the fault of modern day progressivism when the reality is that all of this was started by neocons 20 years ago who had 0 interest in helping the people there and were only in it to line the pockets of defense contractors and oil companies. The mistake was already made we are just now living through the consequences of our collective delusion called the War On Terror.

drivingmenuts 5y ago
The real goal in Afghanistan was achieved by a bunch of SEALs who executed Osama bin Laden. The rest of the armed forces pretty much were just wasted lives, wasted equipment and wasted money by politicians. I hope the lesson here will be to stop fucking around where we’re not wanted. But that’s pretty much our other national motto.
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- dragontamer 5y ago
  We gave them cellphones and modern life. Their girls were allowed into schools thanks to our troops, and their women entered US-chartered universities with the hopes and dreams of becoming productive adults. This is all likely lost as the Taliban takes over again, but I don't think providing that dream was worthless (however fleeting it was for those people, I know we've changed their lives for the better).
  - abvdasker 5y ago
    Yeah I’m sure that the families of the tens of thousands of dead Afghan civilians are super grateful to America that they now have smartphones!
    - 5y ago

tolmasky 5y ago

In what universe was the Vietnam War “reckoned with”? Kennedy was most popular after The Bay of Pigs disaster. The entire Cold War fits the mold of what the author describes here — projecting our worldview on regional conflicts that could care less about our concerns at the time (Capitalism vs. Communism), complete with an inflated sense of trust in those we backed. Hell, in the war between Ethiopia and Somalia a bizarre series of events led to each side supporting the troops the other side had originally trained. Has nostalgia actually reached the point where we romanticize previously accepted embarrassing failures? If you want to give off an air of sophisticated Student of History, and go on about the “Before Times,” it doesn’t help to present such an idealized view of recent history. Perhaps your 5th grade history book gave you the false impression that things were more “serious” before, but I invite you to dig a little deeper.

pfisherman 5y ago

To me this article is the type of outrage porn typically amplified by social media / web, which is quite facile and ultimately contributes little to no value to the discourse surrounding recent events in Afghanistan. I see a lot of buzzwords relevant to theory recent iteration of the of the culture wars, but nothing about the neocon think tanks of the early aughts (ex. Project for a New American Century) that steered US foreign policy toward misguided adventures in “nation building”, nor any mention of the military leadership that successfully kept us engaged in Afghanistan for 20 years and four different administrations. The “sudden silence” is because there is broad agreement across the American populace that the war in Afghanistan had long passed its expiration date.