from Hacker News

We are no longer a serious people

by Overton-Window on 8/17/21, 1:13 AM with 18 comments

  • by dataflow on 8/17/21, 1:33 AM

    Hard to take this post seriously when it completely dismisses the substance of Blinken's responses as "a deer-in-the-headlights stare and canned remarks" without spending 2 seconds explaining what they even were. Blinken explained their rationales very calmly and clearly in that video, whether we like with them or not. That deserves consideration, and, if the rationale is wrong, a substantive rebuttal. Not a backhanded dismissal like this.

  • by eucryphia on 8/17/21, 2:07 AM

    This comment:

    The insane thing here: the _financial_ cost of the war in afghanistan, which lasted deacdes and involved hundreds of thousands of people, and logistical operations spanning the globe, is less than the amount of money we printed in 2020.

    https://www.newsweek.com/how-much-did-war-afghanistan-cost-1...

    Talk about 'reality being optional' - in the financial markets, it still very much is optional

    https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/we-are-no-longer-a-serious-...

  • by droptablemain on 8/17/21, 1:30 AM

    Death toll of the formerly perpetual occupation of Afghanistan:

    American military members: 2,448 U.S. contractors: 3,846 Afghan military/police: 66,000 Other allied troops: 1,144 Afghan civilians: 47,245 Taliban/opposition fighters: 51,191 Aid workers: 444 Journalists: 72

    src: https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2021-08-14/cos...

  • by gnabgib on 8/17/21, 1:28 AM

  • by MR4D on 8/17/21, 1:54 AM

    There are 26 days before the 20th anniversary of 9/11. I expect the volume of frustration and anger with us politics on this war to increase substantially over that time.

  • by kokken on 8/17/21, 2:15 AM

    I thought the most interesting part of the text was unrelated to the war: "American society(...) can only understand the world as projections of the country’s own domestic neuroses. (...) Who is the PoC? Who is the Nazi?"

    I've recently realized how much of the discourse around the word HAS to be trapped within terms the Americans can understand. Every experience that is not translated to Americana is 'confusing' or 'irrelevant'. Much like the Author himself points, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party has no idea what to say about a victory of an extremist group against the American Military-Industrial complex to the loss of minorities who themselves hate or dislike American progressivism.

  • by vlovich123 on 8/17/21, 1:29 AM

    Can someone explain to me the partisan tilt this coverage has had? Both parties seem to have wanted to get out of Afghanistan and this past few weeks is (at least per my understanding) the culmination of the plan the Trump administration had put into motion (signing the peace treaty with the Taliban, releasing their prisoners, etc). Is there something specific the Biden administration bungled? What would a better plausible outcome have looked like?

    And yes, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and on “terror” have clearly been mismanaged from the start in exactly the ways that critics predicted, but I don’t see meaningful differences in the way all administrations have bungled these things.