American Politics Discussion Thread

[Mr. Cairo]

Basically the West put the cart before the horse, thinking that you start with liberal values which then create prosperity and stability, when it's actually the other way around. South Korea, Taiwan, Spain, Portugal, and Chile all went through a post-WW2 period of military rule that then led into a fairly bloodless transition to democracy, why not follow that precedent? I still can't get over the absurdity of disbanding the Iraqi Army.

What about even setting up monarchical rule in the countries post-invasion, sourced either from the oil states or from Afghanistan's old royal bloodline which is probably kicking around in Monaco? Would that have been a ridiculous LARP?

That's exactly what they should have done. For some reason people seem to forget that "Western Liberal Democracy" was something that was created through centuries of warfare and bloodshed. Peace in Europe is a pretty novel concept when one takes all of history into account.

But most importantly, the "Liberal" part of "Western Liberal Democracy" came before the "Democracy" part. People in Europe were fighting and dying to end feudalism and just generally improve their lot long before they were fighting for democracy. In fact, spend any time on reddit and you'll see pictures of Iran or Afghanistan in the middle of the 20th century that are far more liberal than now, and that was under hereditary, but liberalizing, monarchies. Rather than presuming we could just invade Afghanistan and create from scratch a western-style democracy, they should have tried to undo the damage caused by the Taliban and return to what Afghanistan was like before the Soviet invasion and go from there.

[Bobchillingworth]

Basically the West put the cart before the horse, thinking that you start with liberal values which then create prosperity and stability, when it's actually the other way around. South Korea, Taiwan, Spain, Portugal, and Chile all went through a post-WW2 period of military rule that then led into a fairly bloodless transition to democracy, why not follow that precedent? I still can't get over the absurdity of disbanding the Iraqi Army.

What about even setting up monarchical rule in the countries post-invasion, sourced either from the oil states or from Afghanistan's old royal bloodline which is probably kicking around in Monaco? Would that have been a ridiculous LARP?

Aside from being terrible optics (which is important, not just for domestic political calculations but also for maintaining international credibility and soft power capital), overthrowing a government and imposing military rule doesn't guarantee long-term stability or a healthy transition to democracy, as plenty of Central and South American nations could attest. It does make human rights abuses rather likely, which the U.S. is at least nominally concerned about.

As for a monarchy, descendants of Afghanistan's monarchy are indeed still around, but I doubt there was much popular support for hereditary rulers even after the absurdity of transitioning within the space of three decades from a monarchy to a single-party republic, to a Communist Soviet client state, to a theocracy. For some evidence, the former King of Afghanistan actually returned to the country shortly after the U.S. invasion, and though Wikipedia informs me he was greeted with honors, I don't recall there being a public outcry for his regime to be reinstated.

Of course you might think, "well, who really cares what the unwashed masses think, anyway?", to which I suppose the answer is "the people who are going to have to deal with the inevitable insurgencies that result".

[T-hawk]

Corporations are much more likely to readily abuse you than the government. But that doesn't align with your libertarian ideology, so you conveniently ignore all that. OR should the gov't prevent corporations from doing this? But isn't that a violation of corporate freedom (corporations are people after all )? (It's just all internal contradictions here man)

You're trying to play "gotcha" by labeling it a contradiction, but there is a significant point here. Do I want government to ban private businesses from imposing medical requirements? I'm actually not sure and I haven't argued it either way. I don't want private medical mandates, but the government having the power to forbid businesses from their choice of association might be the greater evil.

(This is the same point as before: Unlike the left, just because I want something doesn't mean I want to jump to forcible government coercion of it. The left doesn't even realize there's a distinction between those.)

What I want is private medical mandates to go away without government coercion, by competitive pressure from the free market. If the free market doesn't lead to that, I actually don't know which is worse, living with such mandates or invoking government force to ban them.

[BING_XI_LAO]

You're correct of course on several counts, about Afghanistan's externally-imposed borders, ethno-sectarian-linguistic makeup (though Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Turkmen are also all Turkic peoples, with Tajiks also having neighboring Tajikistan), and I would give better than even odds for the country to break up generally along those lines within a couple generations, barring some new international intervention. 

That stated, most countries are made up of conglomerations of different groups, even if you ignore Western nations founded as European colonies and populated by immigrants from an array of cultures.  Some are more stable than others, and ethnically-based insurgent groups obviously aren't uncommon, but no serious person would argue that, say, India isn't a "real" nation, even though it has borders largely defined by England, dozens of ethnic groups, 400+ languages, and less than half the population actually speaks Hindi.  Point being that the aforementioned factors in-and-of themselves don't mean Afghanistan is necessarily terminally deficient in its capacity to exist as a unified state.

So the contradiction between "imperialists caused chaos by drawing borders across ethnic boundaries" and "diversity is our strength" is being resolved now in favour of the latter?

What's so unserious about calling India not a nation? Perhaps it's better called a federation; I'd rather reserve the term "nation" for states with a supermajority of the same race, religion or at least language. India has some multiple secessionist tendencies, and the Western liberal values of its elite prevents the religious and linguistic plurality from asserting itself as a binding force. What requirements does a state have to meet to be a nation in your eyes?

[BING_XI_LAO]

Rather than presuming we could just invade Afghanistan and create from scratch a western-style democracy, they should have tried to undo the damage caused by the Taliban and return to what Afghanistan was like before the Soviet invasion and go from there.

Yeah, come to think of it the best vassal state option might've been to put all the Communist ideologues in charge, assuming they were still around. It would ironically have been the closest thing to modern Western values that had actual support in the country (unlike the corrupt playacting democracy).

[BING_XI_LAO]

Basically the West put the cart before the horse, thinking that you start with liberal values which then create prosperity and stability, when it's actually the other way around. South Korea, Taiwan, Spain, Portugal, and Chile all went through a post-WW2 period of military rule that then led into a fairly bloodless transition to democracy, why not follow that precedent? I still can't get over the absurdity of disbanding the Iraqi Army.

What about even setting up monarchical rule in the countries post-invasion, sourced either from the oil states or from Afghanistan's old royal bloodline which is probably kicking around in Monaco? Would that have been a ridiculous LARP?

Aside from being terrible optics (which is important, not just for domestic political calculations but also for maintaining international credibility and soft power capital), overthrowing a government and imposing military rule doesn't guarantee long-term stability or a healthy transition to democracy, as plenty of Central and South American nations could attest.  It does make human rights abuses rather likely, which the U.S. is at least nominally concerned about. 

As for a monarchy, descendants of Afghanistan's monarchy are indeed still around, but I doubt there was much popular support for hereditary rulers even after the absurdity of transitioning within the space of three decades from a monarchy to a single-party republic, to a Communist Soviet client state, to a theocracy.  For some evidence, the former King of Afghanistan actually returned to the country shortly after the U.S. invasion, and though Wikipedia informs me he was greeted with honors, I don't recall there being a public outcry for his regime to be reinstated. 

Of course you might think, "well, who really cares what the unwashed masses think, anyway?", to which I suppose the answer is "the people who are going to have to deal with the inevitable insurgencies that result".

Terrible optics for internal consumption - yeah that's absolutely true; but the internal American attitude towards such things has itself been created by neocon propaganda.
Transition to democracy - well imposing military rule doesn't guarantee a good outcome, but imposing a democracy doesn't work either. Realistically Afghanistan is going to have an autocratic government of some kind of the foreseeable future and democracy will happen when or if there's suitable socioeconomic conditions.
Human rights abuses - I really, really don't thinking having a hollow democracy that runs off foreign money reduces human rights abuses compared to a dictatorship that runs off foreign money. There's not going to be bottom-up civic participation in a poor and heterogenous country like this, you need a strong central authority and hope they're principled enough to crack down on most bad behaviour. Instead of the democratic palace rats that just ran off with some money at the end.
Reinstated monarch - well sure there was no clamour for his reinstatement, but clearly he wasn't hated either; so he may well have been more popular than an insubstantial and ethnically divided democracy. Especially if he'd been allowed to promote a lot of Islamist values to appease such sentiment, instead of having the US force feminist etc. policies on the democracy - though that's a bit of a different topic from government form itself.
Inevitable insurgencies - but the US had to face an insurgency anyway. Someone (maybe you) posted earlier that the Taliban are unpopular. I highly doubt that, I expect they are only unpopular in the urban population which is 25% of the total population.

[Mr. Cairo]

Rather than presuming we could just invade Afghanistan and create from scratch a western-style democracy, they should have tried to undo the damage caused by the Taliban and return to what Afghanistan was like before the Soviet invasion and go from there.

Yeah, come to think of it the best vassal state option might've been to put all the Communist ideologues in charge, assuming they were still around. It would ironically have been the closest thing to modern Western values that had actual support in the country (unlike the corrupt playacting democracy).

Yeah, not with you there, it was the communist coup that started Afghanistan down this path to begin with. Now maybe if there had been no soviet invasion and subsequent american involvement, said communist government might have turned out relatively "ok", but I have my doubts (and even without soviet involvement america would probably have supported islamists anyway).

Generally however, I would argue that of all the authoritarian forms of government, it is monarchy that is most likely to eventually transition to democracy, because there can always be a place for a monarch in a democracy. The same cannot be said (generally) for a military strongman or a communist dictator.

[BING_XI_LAO]

Wow, total acquittal? Thought it would be mistrial without prejudice. Bad day to be an arsonist terrorist in America.

I see you're trying hard to supplant Ipecac as RB's #1 cringe edgelord. 

Was just looking through his posts out of curiosity (seems to've not posted for a year). So he was actually Chinese? I'm not Chinese in the slightest, my username and pfp are just a meme that goes back to a clan of DotA2 griefers. Though I do like China and read their news in google translate. I have an incredibly spicy meme depiction of Derek Chauvin and George Floyd some Chinaman drew, probably shouldn't post it because it's too edgy. So anyway it will be an honour to pick up where ipecac left off if I'm up to his standards.

EDIT: still reading ipecac's posts, so he was Singaporean? Funny, I was just reading about some of LKY's attitudes the other day, such as his factual scientific statement that if career women have fewer kids it will have a negative selection effect on intelligence in the gene pool.

[T-hawk]

And on Long Covid, there's this: https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/long...volume-one

Up to 40% of people reported long-covid symptoms... people that the researchers knew from antibody testing never had Covid in the first place. Yes, it really is all in their head. There was no statistical correlation at all with actually having had Covid, but high correlation with thinking you did.

My take: These are the same people who think they're at the center of every trendy health fad. Like gluten intolerance was around eight years ago. They would believe they felt symptoms like gastric inflammation that were never physically present. Actually true for a tiny minority, but any such claim without a real medical diagnosis is overwhelmingly likely to be full of shit.

The human urge to follow the collective herd mind really is that strong, that the brain will invent a perception of symptoms that never existed.

[BING_XI_LAO]

It's just the idea that people who wind up as wealthy professionals are on average more intelligent, that intelligence is to an extent heritable, and that the wealthy these days have fewer children than the poor. Sort of line of thinking which natural selectino tends towards