Clown Car VI: Hello, Goodbye. On to 2024.

[Farm Boy]

There are so many things that go into a nice house(much less a nice home) in the first place, and its maintenance, there is so much infrastructure to attack. This is an early 21st century military, the air cavalry can get there in under 3 hours if they want to get there. It could in Vietnam. You sort of have to be able to be everywhere there is infrastructure, or supply chain, or civilians, or destructible resources, all at the same time all the time. No?

 

[FriendlyFire]

wrong, Wrong, Obama didn't get congressional authorization for Libya and Syria.

lol next you will tell me Obama spying / data collection was done without congresional authorization as well.
Because connecting the dots here would be bad.

 

[Sommerswerd]

What is clearly true is that actually "fixing" Afghanistan would have been several orders of magnitude more expensive than just rolling in, killing a lot of people and blowing stuff up, and then leaving.

And it would have required sustained military presence, which in turn is provocative, and exposes those forces to attack, feeds anti-US propaganda, and so on. The whole idea of fixing Afghanistan is a flawed idea from top to bottom.

I don't think it is that simple. The more you spend on building, the more people are motivated to defend it themselves because they want to keep it. Someone in a nice house usually does not want to give it up for a cave in the hills. And especially building infrastructure makes defense easier. If you can reach a remote place in 3 hours rather than in 3 days, you don't need as many forces to defend everything.

Its not simple at all. That's the point.

As far as giving people a nice place motivating them to take care of it goes... I'm a landlord. That idea is hit-or-miss. Some people take care of the nice place, some people don't.

 

[uppi]

This is an early 21st century military, the air cavalry can get there in under 3 hours if they want to get there. It could in Vietnam. You sort of have to be able to be everywhere there is infrastructure, or supply chain, or civilians, or destructible resources, all at the same time all the time. No?

Sure, the air cavalry can get there, but it is also much more expensive than a truck and cannot carry as much. Even a 21st century military is much more effective with roads.

And no, you don't have to be everywhere. You just need the locals to be able and willing to call you and be there in time.

 

[Farm Boy]

I would have figured it would take several million in-country US Army personnel 60 years to do the job right. Which is why I didn't like the idea when we did it. I knew we were going to hump it up, which we have.

Or, you know, you could just kill a lot a lot more aggressively. But. Ew.

 

[Sommerswerd]

The "solution" is, was, and has always been... at least on our end, to get off oil. We (the US) stop using oil, or at least stop using oil to the extent that we produce many times what we need domestically, and we are done with the Middle East.

I also like to think that if oil usage waned globally, to the point where oil was nearly worthless, that the resource-extraction-economy, that for some reason, is always linked to a country experiencing higher relative levels of political/social violence, strife, and instability... would gradually be transitioned into something that produced more stability, democracy, etc. At least that's what I hope would happen.

 

[Farm Boy]

We export oil. Falling crude prices are sort of good for me(it's more complicated, but eh, I can't sort it all out), but now bad for us.

Resource extraction economies are unstable because when people look at you, it's not about what you make, it's what they can take. The common nation tamps it down, but it's domestically true every bit as much as internationally. Water reservoirs and big cities are a great microcosm that plays out relatively fast instead of slow. Building dams destroys an awful lot of uniqueness and biovalue. But, water and cities, and electricity, and agriculture.

 

[Sommerswerd]

We export oil.

We do. But we also import it. Like you say, its complicated. But the point is we use too much oil, the world at large uses too much oil and that's part of the reason we are always finding excuses to have a large military footprint in the Middle East.

 

[Farm Boy]

You'll note that we don't want it there anymore, though, and now we'd just rather import some of the men and women we've made dependent on us over the past 20. That's a shift in values. Well, some of them. Somehow it's always the plight of the girls and we need to take them in, particularly the young ones. That's nothing new under the sun, though it has certainly seen crueler iterations.

 

[Lexicus]

The "solution" is, was, and has always been... at least on our end, to get off oil. We (the US) stop using oil, or at least stop using oil to the extent that we produce many times what we need domestically, and we are done with the Middle East.

I also like to think that if oil usage waned globally, to the point where oil was nearly worthless, that the resource-extraction-economy, that for some reason, is always linked to a country experiencing higher relative levels of political/social violence, strife, and instability... would gradually be transitioned into something that produced more stability, democracy, etc. At least that's what I hope would happen.

Sadly, it's unlikely to happen. Even if we stop burning oil for energy we'll still need it for plastics.

 

[Ferocitus]

Bolton: U.S. didn’t lose war in Afghanistan
“We weren’t defeated,” Bolton told CNN in an interview. “You have to be defeated to lose a war.
We’ve given up because we’ve lost patience. That’s a sad commentary about the current administration,
but it’s not a defeat for the United States.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/16/john-bolton-war-afghanistan-withdrawal-499815

 

[Sommerswerd]

Sadly, it's unlikely to happen. Even if we stop burning oil for energy we'll still need it for plastics.

I'm still holding out hope for a real, rather than fake/for-show, process being developed for recycling plastics on a large scale. In my dream scenario, we would mostly abandon single-use plastic, replace most single-use type uses of plastic with recycled paper/cardboard and/or glass products, develop a process of recycling nearly all of the plastic we use to be refabricated into new plastic products, then we could actually start mining plastic from landfills to be refabricated.

No process currently exists for any of this obviously, ot at least if it does we aren't putting it to great use, but as you point out, we use oil to make new plastic, so until we decide to get off of oil, there is little incentive to really re-use/refab/recycle all of our plastics. I don't know if oil is used in the recycling of plastic as well, but surely its less oil than making new plastic from scratch. In any case, a commitment to phasing out oil is the first essential step. Unfortunately, we can't just wait until the oil just runs out. Humanity very well might be extinct before that happens.

 

[Berzerker]

lol next you will tell me Obama spying / data collection was done without congresional authorization as well.
Because connecting the dots here would be bad.

Congress passed the Patriot Act under Bush, they did not vote on Syria.

 

[Samson]

Bolton: U.S. didn’t lose war in Afghanistan
“We weren’t defeated,” Bolton told CNN in an interview. “You have to be defeated to lose a war.
We’ve given up because we’ve lost patience. That’s a sad commentary about the current administration,
but it’s not a defeat for the United States.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/16/john-bolton-war-afghanistan-withdrawal-499815

Methinks he has not heard of King Pyrrhus of Epirus. Though of course he has, and he is just trying to defend his warmongering from two decades ago.

 

[Takhisis]

Ah, yes, the conflicting definitions of ‘oversight’.

 

[FriendlyFire]

Congress passed the Patriot Act under Bush, they did not vote on Syria.

Congress passed the AUMF under Bush, they then allowed Bush to use it to invade 2 countries, drone strikes, rendition, military actions etc.
The ship already left the port for a long, LONG time.

 

[FriendlyFire]

How soon before the MAGAs hijack a plane and fly it into a building ?

Two charged in terror plot to avenge Trump's election loss: “I want to blow up a democrat building"
Two California men disgruntled by Donald Trump's election loss have been charged by the Justice Department for attempting to blow up the California Democratic Party's headquarters in Sacramento.
This week, the FBI also arrested Copeland, who attempted to scrub his text exchanges following his friend's arrest. Prosecutors noted that Copeland had joined the military back in 2013, but was twice arrested for desertion. Following his "other than honorable" discharge from service, Copeland joined the Three Percenters, a far-right, anti-government militia

https://www.salon.com/2021/07/16/tw...n-loss-i-want-to-blow-up-a-democrat-building/

 

[Berzerker]

Congress passed the AUMF under Bush, they then allowed Bush to use it to invade 2 countries, drone strikes, rendition, military actions etc.
The ship already left the port for a long, LONG time.

Afghanistan and Iraq were separate votes, there were no votes on Libya and Syria.

 

[Lexicus]

I'm still holding out hope for a real, rather than fake/for-show, process being developed for recycling plastics on a large scale. In my dream scenario, we would mostly abandon single-use plastic, replace most single-use type uses of plastic with recycled paper/cardboard and/or glass products, develop a process of recycling nearly all of the plastic we use to be refabricated into new plastic products, then we could actually start mining plastic from landfills to be refabricated.

No process currently exists for any of this obviously, ot at least if it does we aren't putting it to great use, but as you point out, we use oil to make new plastic, so until we decide to get off of oil, there is little incentive to really re-use/refab/recycle all of our plastics. I don't know if oil is used in the recycling of plastic as well, but surely its less oil than making new plastic from scratch. In any case, a commitment to phasing out oil is the first essential step. Unfortunately, we can't just wait until the oil just runs out. Humanity very well might be extinct before that happens.

I think we can probably shift to biodegradeable materials for some applications that currently use plastic. I agree that really recycling plastic would be good, too. I don't know a whole lot about plastics though.

 

[Farm Boy]

We can break them down now, but the byproducts are worse than the plastic was. Find a way to capture and use the byproducts and that's the gold. Easy to say.