Reddit r/PoliticalDiscussion supportive of Biden/Afghanistan

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Tross
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17 Aug 2021, 1:59 am

The way I see it, it was a bad situation all around, and having the US there was more of a bandaid than anything. Plus, the cost of US troops putting their lives on the line was just too high IMHO. If there's criticism to be had, it's not in removing the bandaid, but in ripping it off too quickly.



Brictoria
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17 Aug 2021, 2:15 am

Tross wrote:
The way I see it, it was a bad situation all around, and having the US there was more of a bandaid than anything. Plus, the cost of US troops putting their lives on the line was just too high IMHO. If there's criticism to be had, it's not in removing the bandaid, but in ripping it off too quickly.

And in how it was ripped off... Leaving so many civilains (both American and locals) there and decreasing their military protection, rather than removing civilians first, seems a major problem - That and giving up another airfield (Bagram) which could have also been used for evacuations (either departures from both, or helicopter from Kabul to Bagram and planes from there, given it has 2 runways, compared to only a single one at Kabul)...



Tross
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18 Aug 2021, 1:45 am

Brictoria wrote:
Tross wrote:
The way I see it, it was a bad situation all around, and having the US there was more of a bandaid than anything. Plus, the cost of US troops putting their lives on the line was just too high IMHO. If there's criticism to be had, it's not in removing the bandaid, but in ripping it off too quickly.

And in how it was ripped off... Leaving so many civilains (both American and locals) there and decreasing their military protection, rather than removing civilians first, seems a major problem - That and giving up another airfield (Bagram) which could have also been used for evacuations (either departures from both, or helicopter from Kabul to Bagram and planes from there, given it has 2 runways, compared to only a single one at Kabul)...
Yeah...the planning and execution leaves much to be desired. I agree in that regard. I am very much in support of the act of withdrawing though, as it's something I've been hoping for since...well, the early 2000s TBH. The US presence was definitely helping, but there would have come a day when even those troops wouldn't be enough to quell that raging storm. I just wish the withdrawal could have been handled better.



slam_thunderhide
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20 Aug 2021, 2:26 pm

VegetableMan wrote:
The_Walrus wrote:
VegetableMan wrote:
The_Walrus wrote:
VegetableMan wrote:
Dox47 wrote:
VegetableMan wrote:
I'll give Biden credit for a good decision. We should have been out of there over a decade ago.


I'll give him credit for actually going ahead with the pull out, but I'll blame the hell out of him for the shoddy execution.


No argument there. The bottom line is those in power don't care about the people in Afghanistan any more than the care about the people in Syria. But we do need to get out of these countries one way or another. In the longterm, the consequences will be far more catastrophic if we continue this pattern of perpetual war.

:lol:
What do you think could possibly be worse than what we’re seeing right now?

At some point this goes past ignorance and into outright evil, frankly. You certainly can’t claim that you care about Afghans or Syrians given how you cheer on their deaths and attack anyone who says we should protect them.


You have very little context about the past nearly seven decades of military escapades in the ME, nor do you understand the continued ramifications of the perpetuation of these policies. I understand these all too well because I have actually studied them for nearly 15 years. Getting out of these conflicts is paramount to U.S. survival. It's not a model that can be sustained for much longer.

I've tried to educate you, but to no avail. You have nothing to offer but the propaganda you've been fed and your apparent naivete and gullibility.

:lol:

You really want to try playing the “I know about things” card?

Someone like Viper could play the “I know about things” card with credibility because he actually worked in the field.

Someone who doesn’t know the difference between the Mujhadeen and the Taliban can’t play that card. Someone who thinks the occupation of Afghanistan was motivated by lithium can’t play that card. You’ve repeatedly admitted that you don’t even know the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, which is fundamental to the politics of your own country. When you struggle to comprehend the most basic parts of your own country’s politics, what makes you think you understand anything about other countries?

The simple fact is that I have never seen you demonstrate even a typical understanding of the Middle East, much less an expert level understanding. Almost everything meaningful you say is easily disproven. You bluster into these conversations with the false confidence of someone of someone at the painful end of the Dunning-Kruger effect. You say something that’s plainly and verifiably wrong, then when someone points out your mistake, you call them names and tell them to only listen to Glenn Greenwald :lol:


This coming from the guy who didn't even know we were arming terrorists in Syria, believes Joe Biden is a social Democrat and left wing. I've watched that Party swing right all my adult life and I've seen the damage it has done to this country. There is no longer and fundamental difference between the two major parties, which is evidenced by the complete continuity between Dem and Pub administrations. You've provided nothing to debunk that.

You walk lockstep with corporate propaganda all day long. You demonize a war veteran who served two tours of duty in Iraq as a medic and understands what these wars are really about, and now speaks out about them.

You're a joke!


A crude analogy I sometimes use when I think about party politics in the US or UK is to think of a hypothetical society where people are encouraged (or should I say coerced) into drinking only Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Most people, lacking the time to investigate further, obediently comply, switching between Coca-Cola and Pepsi every few years, while puzzling over the mysterious health complaints they keep suffering from.

You’d have a minority of people advocate that maybe once in a while people should drink water, or milk, or fruit juice, or tea, but the establishment dismisses them as extremists and looneys.

Then you’d have a load of professional pundits and their imitators writing long, pretentious articles about all the various ways in which Coca-Cola and Pepsi were different, usually because they’ve been trained not to even consider other alternatives. As time goes by, the Coca-Cola advocates and the Pepsi advocates start to become more hostile to each other, and this gets labelled "political polarization".

I’m usually reminded of the pundit in the above scenario when I see Walrus drone on about how politician A is a right-libertarian leaning centre-left Social Democrat and how this makes them so different from politician B who is a left-libertarian leaning right-centre Democratic Socialist (or something).



Last edited by slam_thunderhide on 20 Aug 2021, 3:00 pm, edited 2 times in total.

slam_thunderhide
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20 Aug 2021, 2:28 pm

The_Walrus wrote:

I actually have some sympathy for a priori isolationism. Dox might remember that I used to even advocate against the right to personal self-defence. I was a child of Iraq, and that made me a militant pacifist who thought the military and the police were inherently evil institutions. Then ISIS happened and that changed pretty quickly.

VM’s had the same “war is bad” realisation that most people have, and reached the same extreme conclusion that I did as a teenager. He just never had the “actually there are bad people who we can stop and save lives” realisation. He thinks of military action in purely deontological terms, without considering consequences. War is bad, therefore we should never ever do it. If someone invades Syria or Afghanistan or Poland and starts shooting people, well, we just have to let them do it.


It's not clear to me that VM is an “a priori isolationist” rather than someone who (rather like myself) distrusts the US establishment’s motivations/ability/competence to “make the world a better place” or even to serve the US national interest.

Anyway, if you yourself have become more hawkish since you were a teenager, then guess what – there are several people out there who move in the opposite direction as they get older. So such people could just as easily accuse you of holding positions that they “once held as teenagers”.

Also, if you would like to see ISIS’s influence in the world diminished, then you could start by supporting President Assad in Syria, but it seems you won’t do that either because most of your “respectable” media outlets tell you he’s a baddie.

By the way, here are some details about the sorts of people the US was allied with in Afghanistan:

Quote:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news ... -lee-smith
Assabiya Wins Every Time
LEE SMITH
AUGUST 19, 2021

The reality is that America lost its war in Afghanistan more than a decade ago, roughly around the time when CIA officers began bribing aging warlords with Viagra. The Americans knew all about the young boys the tribal leaders kept in their camps; because the sex drug helped Afghan elders rape more boys more often, they were beholden to America’s clandestine service. Losing Afghanistan then is the least of it. When you choose to adopt a foreign cohort’s cultural habits, customs for which the elders of your own tribe would ostracize and perhaps kill you, you have lost your civilization.



shlaifu
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20 Aug 2021, 9:28 pm

Dox47 wrote:
This stuff is really hard for me on a personal level, because I have a very strong instinct to fight evil where ever I see it (I was thrilled at the start of the Afghan war because I'd been reading about the Taliban for years and wanted to murder them), but bitter experience has taught me that we usually make things worse in the long run through these interventions. Same with Iraq, Saddam and his regime needed killing, but man did we f*ck up the nation building and occupation afterwards.

My current conundrum is China, every time I read about whatever their latest repressive measure against their own populace is, my instinct is "how could we annihilate the CCP without starting WWIII?", even though I know full well that's not really an option. My half joking sci-fi idea years ago was that if we ever got the whole space based missile defense lasers working, it shouldn't be too hard to aim them at the ground and vaporize troublesome world leaders without having to go through their armies, but I really wouldn't trust any government on earth with a weapon like that.


i found this one interesting.
how do you define evil? - the world doesn't seem to be star wars, and the people committing atrocities tend to not identify themselves as "on the dark side"

I mean... the US is an Empire that was built on slavery, and has in the last 60 years invadrd countries all over the world, killed elected politicians in south america, massacred villages in vietnam, threw the UN torture ban officially out of the window, has officially tortured 'the wrong guy' dozens of times, and recently has moved on to drone-striking 'the wrong guy' and his wedding ceremony.
there's footage of drone pilots calling children "fun-sized terrorists".
Europe is supporting the US in all of this like good provinces of any empire would, and because being part pf the empire also means protection - in this case, with nuclear missile silos over the whole continent, with which the US has held its enemies hostage, threatening to end life on earth.

China is torturing a religious minority which at any time could adopt the idiot religious fervour so destructive in its neighbouring countries - in other words, they are preemptively getting rid of a potential islamist threat.

and eventually, Islamists. Afghanistan has been a battleground for the world's major powers for 150 years, in a region thst was heavily exploited by colonialism. In the late 19th century, the idea of a pan-Islamic Kalifate was born, one that could stand up and hold its own against the colonialist Brits, or anyone else. The Taliban fighters today are illiterate goat farmers who are convinced to die for this idea, but in return, they get the freedom to rape, kill and torture - you know, like the colonial powers did. Like the US and the Europeans.

I can either see only evil and opportunist actors, and victims. And sometimes, both at once. But no Luke Skywalker on the horizon - or I can strip this all of star-wars morality and see it as ongoing global powerplays, in which actual humans are merely pawns.
my personal morality makes me want to help Afghan women and children, but it's all very far away from me, and it's not clear to me, on a rational level, if the best way would be to go in and kill the 'evil' guys.


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VegetableMan
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21 Aug 2021, 11:16 am

The_Walrus wrote:
VegetableMan wrote:
The_Walrus wrote:
VegetableMan wrote:
The_Walrus wrote:
VegetableMan wrote:
Dox47 wrote:
VegetableMan wrote:
I'll give Biden credit for a good decision. We should have been out of there over a decade ago.


I'll give him credit for actually going ahead with the pull out, but I'll blame the hell out of him for the shoddy execution.


No argument there. The bottom line is those in power don't care about the people in Afghanistan any more than the care about the people in Syria. But we do need to get out of these countries one way or another. In the longterm, the consequences will be far more catastrophic if we continue this pattern of perpetual war.

:lol:
What do you think could possibly be worse than what we’re seeing right now?

At some point this goes past ignorance and into outright evil, frankly. You certainly can’t claim that you care about Afghans or Syrians given how you cheer on their deaths and attack anyone who says we should protect them.


You have very little context about the past nearly seven decades of military escapades in the ME, nor do you understand the continued ramifications of the perpetuation of these policies. I understand these all too well because I have actually studied them for nearly 15 years. Getting out of these conflicts is paramount to U.S. survival. It's not a model that can be sustained for much longer.

I've tried to educate you, but to no avail. You have nothing to offer but the propaganda you've been fed and your apparent naivete and gullibility.

:lol:

You really want to try playing the “I know about things” card?

Someone like Viper could play the “I know about things” card with credibility because he actually worked in the field.

Someone who doesn’t know the difference between the Mujhadeen and the Taliban can’t play that card. Someone who thinks the occupation of Afghanistan was motivated by lithium can’t play that card. You’ve repeatedly admitted that you don’t even know the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, which is fundamental to the politics of your own country. When you struggle to comprehend the most basic parts of your own country’s politics, what makes you think you understand anything about other countries?

The simple fact is that I have never seen you demonstrate even a typical understanding of the Middle East, much less an expert level understanding. Almost everything meaningful you say is easily disproven. You bluster into these conversations with the false confidence of someone of someone at the painful end of the Dunning-Kruger effect. You say something that’s plainly and verifiably wrong, then when someone points out your mistake, you call them names and tell them to only listen to Glenn Greenwald :lol:


This coming from the guy who didn't even know we were arming terrorists in Syria,

You weren’t. You were arming moderates. The issue is that when you sell arms or give away arms, you can’t control what the other party ultimately does with them. Some rebels gave some equipment to al-Nusra in exchange for their safety. This was apparently in violation of their training. I don’t think that can be reasonably characterised as the US arming al-Nusra.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mide ... HO20150926

There are plenty of other stories of terrorists getting hold of American arms, but that doesn’t mean America has been arming them.

Quote:
believes Joe Biden is a social Democrat and left wing.

He is. I’ve evidenced this point to you in the past; Biden’s policies are in line with social democracies around the world and make him the most left-wing American president since FDR.

Quote:
There is no longer and fundamental difference between the two major parties,

Incorrect - there is a very sizeable gap between the two parties and it is growing all the time. Twenty years ago, there was considerable overlap between the two parties. The most right-wing elected Democrats were to the left of the most left-wing elected Republicans. Now, there’s a huge gap between, on one hand, Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema on the right wing of the Democratic Party, and Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins on the left of the Republican Party. The last time Congress was this polarised was during Reconstruction. Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2 ... ver-since/

Ideology is complex and hard to measure but we are definitely seeing a trend towards greater partisanship I.e Democrats and Republicans are becoming less likely to work together: https://paulrader-42650.medium.com/how- ... ab55a614f5

Quote:
is evidenced by the complete continuity between Dem and Pub administrations. You've provided nothing to debunk that.

Actually, I believe last time we had this conservation you admitted that I was right.

Your claim of “complete continuity between administrations” is again relatively easy to debunk. For example, this article sets out ways in which Biden has differed from Trump: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/28/poli ... index.html
- of course it’s worth noting that the achievements section glosses over some things (I don’t really put any stock on the jobs numbers because of the pandemic) but it still sets out where Biden has diverged from Trump in terms of policy.

Here is a similar rundown of Trump’s first 100 days - this is a bit more objective and is framed around whether Trump has kept promises, as opposed to what he has done: https://www.npr.org/2017/04/24/52015916 ... 9129130363

I had trouble finding high quality coverage of Obama’s first 100 days that was still available online, but eventually I did find this which sets out several major breaks with Bush (some of which ultimately fell through, but most of which didn’t): https://www.hindustantimes.com/world/ob ... PrVCL.html


Quote:
You walk lockstep with corporate propaganda all day long.

False. I’m a public sector employee.

Quote:
You demonize a war veteran who served two tours of duty in Iraq as a medic and understands what these wars are really about, and now speaks out about them.

I don’t glorify bad people just because they’re war veterans. If someone defends foreign dictators, has a long record of homophobia and transphobia, and attracts the support of all the worst Americans (David Duke, Billy Graham, Richard Spencer, and Steve Bannon, for example)… yeah, I’ll happily attack them. Tulsi Gabbard is a bad person and I’m glad she’s out of politics.

Quote:
You're a joke!

Bless your heart :lol:

So, I make that seven claims. Five of them demonstrably untrue. One is true, but frankly paints me in quite a flattering light. Another is an unverifiable opinion.

None of these things are deep mysteries. You don’t need to be a genius to identify the differences between the Democrats and the Republicans. They are made very clear and loudly advertised by both sides. I would suggest that anyone who cannot identify them, or thinks that they do not matter, has a below-average understanding of American politics. Probably in the bottom quarter of Americans, certainly the bottom third.

But hey, maybe I’m wrong. It’s up to you to prove it. I have made a lot of claims in this post, including those linked to in an NPR article about Trump’s first 100 days and a CNN article about Biden’s first 100 days. Debunk a claim I have made with reference to reliable sources, or debunk a claim made in one of those two articles, again with reference to reliable sources. As almost everything I have said has been in contradiction to something you have said, I am only asking you to substantiate your own beliefs.


We've been down this road too many times before. What you're talking about is merely poltical theater. You have to look at what they actually do, the actual legislation. Actually there is one difference: The Democrats get worse stuff done, because media gives them cover, and nobody really pays attention to what's happening in Congress, anyway.

Bill Clinton deregulated Wall Street, passed NAFTA, and gutted welfare.

Obama continued the Bush tax cuts, ramped up the wars in the ME, and was actually worse on the environment that his predecessor Bush. He heavily promoted fracking and opened up the Arctic for drilling twice. He didn't stand up for the indigenous people during the DAPL protests while they blasted them with water cannons as they tried to protect their water supply from a pipeline. Yes, he was worse than Bush. He built the cages for kids on the border and deported more Mexicans and Latinos in his first term than Trump did in four years.

Biden has already backed down on most of his key issues, like ending drilling on federal lands, the raising the minimum wage. He also has backed down on trying to reduce prescription drug prices. The Dems give lip service to progressive issues, but never do anything.

The Democrats never took Trump on at all. They funded his border wall and fast tracked his Supreme Court judges. They pretty much passed his entire legislation agenda.

Complete continuity. We have two right wing parties in the U.S. There is no fundamental differences between them, except on cultural issues. We will continue to circle the drain until the people wake up from their slumber, stop voting for these sh***y parties, and form massive movements to take back this country from the ruling class. We do have the power, but it's going to take massive educating of the American people of the mechanics of this system after being dumbed down for decades by MSM propaganda.


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