Negatory

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-covid-19-vaccine Hopefully this means something to skeptics.

This is the sad part. I agree with you 100%. It’s just a question of how much money, time, and national effort is it worth it to stop it? Where is it on the priority list? It’s easy to argue that it hasn’t been worth the opportunity cost. I bet America will be attacked again in the next decade. Probably smaller scale attacks within the next year or two even. But we need to keep our wits about us and not have overly emotional responses. That, from a grand strategy perspective, is how we manage this. Easier said than done, especially when 90% of America has been relatively unaware of and uninvested in what we have been doing in the Middle East. They have been conditioned to think that we can throw only a few resources - almost imperceptible to them - at the problem and make it go away. But we can no longer make these problems just “out of sight out of mind” for the average American by just spending our treasure. Time for America to do some soul searching and figure out what they want - and they is not just the Joint Chiefs, the Combatant Commanders, the SecDEF - it’s the average American taxpayer. No one wants to pay more taxes. No one wants to reduce domestic freedoms. No one wants terrorist attacks in America. No one wants to go to war. No one wants soldiers to die. Until we actually embrace the options as a nation and come to a common sight picture, we aren’t accomplishing anything other than option 1: 1) A gradual decline internationally, but one in which the average person doesn’t think about terrorism very much as we ignore the Russia/China competition (what we have been doing the last 20 years) 2) A situation where we as Americans basically double the military budget and manpower so we can stay in the Middle East while still fighting China/Russia (which actually isn’t as unrealistic as some people may initially think - our military spending to GDP ratio is actually pretty low compared to history, e.g. a third of what it was in Korea), at the cost of significantly increase taxes and reduced standard of living 3) One where we prioritize grand strategic competition at the cost of increased domestic terror attacks. Taxes don’t increase much, but explosions on and nearby America probably do. This or #2 are my vote. 4) Some combination, potentially including reduction of domestic freedoms to deal with the inability to increase spending - this is the least likely in my opinion The average American has to be invested in this or it has to stop, is the blunt truth. My pragmatic worldview is that the mil and Civ sectors have been so disjointed that we have made bad policy with no one really at the wheel to check whether we are giving the nation what it actually wants. I would offer that we are not, especially in regards to China/Russia. This is a step towards righting that. If we really want, we can go take Kabul again next year. But we really have to want it among all of our priorities. I’m telling you one thing. I don’t want to go back ever again and hear an O-6, O-8, or O-9 tell me “We aren’t sure what victory looks like, just keep doing what you’re doing.” I heard that half a dozen times at the CAOC, and it’s sickening.

History is something. I guess I’d describe it as eerie. Chaplain G. H. Gleig, British Army, 1843 after returning from fighting in Afghanistan for the previous 3 years, had this to say: “A war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, was acquired with this war.” A mere 30 years later, Britain thought about going back. One of the army soldiers who had been taken hostage during hostilities wrote an article to the British papers urging caution: “A new generation has arisen which, instead of profiting from the solemn lessons of the past, is willing and eager to embroil us in the affairs of that turbulent and unhappy country ... The disaster of Retreat from Kabul should stand forever a warning to the Statesmen of the future not to repeat the policies that bore such bitter fruit in 1839-42.”

Yes, don’t burn leave this month just to burn it. https://www.af.mil/Portals/1/documents/2021SAF/07_July/DAF Guidance on SLA for FY21.pdf?ver=oCfPgPI-qRj-iHEzmpSxPg%3d%3d

The 2312 number is contentious. It doesn't include contractors or combat related suicides (which are almost 10 times the number of casualties), but for the sake of argument we'll go with 2312. I could be convinced that those numbers of casualties are worth it, if that was it. But in addition to those deaths, do you also think it was worth the $2,260,000,000,000 dollars and twenty lost years of military modernization in reference to actual peer power competitors i.e. China/Russia? https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/military/killed https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/oct/27/donald-trump/did-us-spend-6-trillion-middle-east-wars/ The PLA alone has already caught up, in unclassified reports, in Ships, Missiles, and Air Defenses, among more. In many Rand studies, we have lost significant ground in dozens of areas that we had a significant advantage in only 20 years ago. https://www.rand.org/paf/projects/us-china-scorecard.html https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/RB9800/RB9858z1/RAND_RB9858z1.pdf For reference, with $2.26T, we could have bought an entire new additional fighter platform fleet analogous to the F-35 from cradle to grave, lasting until 2070 (including development/test/operations/sustainment). https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2021-06-01/The-F-35-Joint-Strike-Fighter-the-costliest-weapon-system-in-US-military-history-now-faces-pushback-in-Congress-1618847.html You could have bought over 17 entire carrier battle groups + air wings + personnel and operated them literally every day for 50 years. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA575866.pdf You could have modernized to actually fight against the IADS, the J-20, chinese satellites, the cyber threats, anti-ship missiles, etc. We could have technologies that are relevant to peer competition. We could have replaced the E-3, the A-10, the B-52, the F-16, the EC-130, the RC-135, the AC-130, the MQ-9, the B-1, etc. The army could have upgraded the patriot. The marines and army could have developed modernized fires systems. You could have modernized our outdated nuclear triad. We could have developed hypersonics on parity with our competitors. https://jamestown.org/program/chinas-hypersonic-missiles-methods-and-motives/ But instead we decided to try to wipe out an ideology that killed 3000 American civilians. And it didn't just stop with Afghanistan - it brought us to Iraq and Syria. I have to admit, some of those sorties seemed deeply satisfying to me, at first. It felt like I was making a difference. But every year that I was there, I realized more and more that we were getting nothing done. One poignant example was fencing in to fight a faction that, only a few years ago, I was defending. That wasn't just a single event, either. If that's not an operational/strategic miscalculation, I don't know what is. I can agree with some folks on here that want to point out that we were successful tactically and operationally. Some really smart tacticians/operations commanders did a good job of fighting a conventional war against an unconventional combatant. But to say we had any clear strategic or grand strategy victories in the middle east is a huge stretch. FFS, we let Russia invade Crimea, and we pretended like it didn't happen. In the end in the middle east, we didn't just give away the 7000+ uniformed deaths, the 8000+ contractor deaths, and the 30000+ military suicides after coming back home. We gave away an unfathomable amount of money, our advantage in the future fight, and a huge portion of our strategic influence. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/military/killed

Fair enough, I’m conflating the whole Middle East to Afghanistan. My bad. You’re right that Trump supported the withdrawal from Afghanistan more than Obama. I guess I didn’t see it as pertinent to my original argument that the DFP goes back to Bush/Cheney giving Obama and Trump a no win situation either way. I don’t think that, on the whole, Trump significantly more stabilized the Middle East as a whole compared to Obama/Bush, especially when it comes to things like conflict with Iran. I agree with your premise that Obama and Bush fucked it. I just also think Trump did nothing helpful. I currently think Biden is doing, more or less, the right thing by giving up. Backing it up, the right move was to fiercely crush the taliban cities, with pretty liberal ROE, then gtfo. When there is inevitably another terrorist attack in the next couple years, Biden better be ready to slay some people cheaply and send a message, all while avoiding war. I doubt he will be, but that’s where I’m at.

I get the sentiment, but not ever asking questions just because I am deployed to Afghanistan and you shouldn’t be disrespectful to me isn’t productive for the nation. See why it was seen as unpatriotic to even question the Iraq war in 2003.

Address your point if you have one. Your response which only added Obama to my Bush opinion and conveniently not bringing up anything about Trump shows your bias. I also will contend that Republican leaning bias is worse in this specific issue, as numerous polls have shown that republicans who opposed action in the Middle East under Obama actually supported it under Trump. Democrats - relatively unchanged. I have dozens of these polls if you’d really like to go down this route. Go with bias.

I’m comfortable with my worldview. Obama actually withdrew from Iraq, even with almost unilateral republican opposition in case you don’t remember. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/21/obama-us-troops-withdrawal-iraq https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/gop-presidential-field-unified-in-opposition-to-iraq-withdrawal/2011/10/21/gIQAp03o4L_story.html I don’t actually fault him as much as you do, either, when it comes to the troop buildup. Especially when the whole military and Congress said the only option we had to end things was one more plus up or offensive. Edit: this is why I largely don’t blame Trump at all, either, for how the Middle East went during his presidency.

Primary blame goes to the Bush admin for fighting a war whatsoever. Turns out having an emotional response to a terrrorist attack isn’t a good grand strategy. Going to Iraq on top of that was inane. If you don’t have goals and a realistic exit strategy, you don’t get to go to war. The other thing that we have to realize is that we, as a nation, can’t just “fix” the world to be pro-US. But over 70 years of propaganda in US education during the Cold War teaching American Exceptionalism and 30 years of being the only superpower - something that is extremely rare in all of human civilization - is going to be hard to come to terms with. The future is not one of American unquestioned superiority. We’re going to have to find our place in a world that equalizes, and it’s gonna suck. Because I can tell you very few people on any political side have really embraced that reality. And let’s be real, both Obama and Trump were handed a hot bag of shit. Obama tried to just leave and ISIS happened. Trump was faced with largely the same problems and it’s a lose-lose. Now imagine that China invades Taiwan in 1-5 years. Do we go? Why? It sure as hell shouldn’t be because it feels right. Add Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Crimea onto Vietnam as big L’s for the US. We need to do some serious soul searching in the coming years. We need a better strategy than going by feel - it’s not working so good.

This opens a legitimate avenue for discussion. Should facebook, twitter, google, etc. be able to point out, when people link any "news" from that website, that the articles are "misinformation" or "fake news?"

Facepalm.

The more I approach this forum as a real time sociology exhibit, the more I feel at peace. I don’t know how you guys function believing everything is a conspiracy, from vaccines to immigrants to cabals. But I’ll join - Down with the Illuminati! Down with Gates! Down with Antifa who are personally driving drug cartels into America!

Kinda funny, arrests of illegal immigrants (by government employees, mind you) are at a high - you choose to interpret it as the gov doing nothing.

You’re right, that was a mistype. I meant to say a large fraction, not a majority - significantly larger than any actual adverse vaccine effects, as Pawnman has already cited.

There’s little point in having a rational discussion here fellas. As the anti-vax crowd on this forum has pointed out (weird to be called that, huh), they need literally no justification other than spite. Which is about all the justification they have. Any sort of appeal to emotion or point about helping mankind will be lost. This issue has been politicized to where they think of themselves as William Wallace fighting the British Vaccination squad, when in reality it’s nothing more than folks that are, ironically, doing what they’re told by misinformation and false news. To the “objective” “statistical” data that was presented above, it’s all hogwash. VAERS actually presents a significantly higher chance of adverse reactions if you want to actually look at data (contained below for all COVID shots). It’s actually closer to 100% than 0% that you’ll have an adverse reaction if you want to read these statistics. For the record, VAERS records things like “headaches,” “myalgia,” “pyrexia,” or “chills” as an adverse reaction. Mind you, this is with literally everyone knowing that if you get the shot, you get sick for 1-2 days - I.e. have an adverse reaction. The 0.27% number, I wouldn’t be surprised at this point, if it was entirely made up. Or they are misrepresenting a category of reactions titled “vaccination complication,” the 215th most prevalent adverse reaction. https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D8;jsessionid=D93E73A304E0219C83B64E8FE404?stage=results&action=sort&direction=MEASURE_DESCEND&measure=D8.M2 The actual truth, when you stop distorting the facts, is that the vast majority of people with COVID suffer complications as well. And there are mounds of data that show that getting COVID when vaccinated is significantly less severe than the alternative. But that’s not part of the calculus because of “spite” disguised as “liberty.” I’m glad we got to that in the last couple of days, because that’s the root cause. It’s not any sort of scientific or measurable reason. It’s to “own the metaphorical libs,” and that’s it.

See the 2014 annexation of Crimea. I promise we militarily had all the ability in the world to combat Russia conventionally. But that’s not how it’s going to happen.

Wow, what the hell 🤯

I understand you don’t like the point I brought up because it’s hard to refute. If you read it, you’ll also note that it wasn’t “progressive,” it tied in everybody! What specifically are you mad I haven’t responded to? EDIT: Also, I don’t spend that much time on this forum. I check it about once a week, say my piece, and leave. I don’t have an emotional attachment to my arguments, and I won’t change that. If you want my actual thoughts on a specific issue (I doubt you do), message me and I’ll make sure to give em to you (sts).

This is called resting on your laurels. We had significant government propaganda and government persecution of socialists/communists/Nazis/black rights (MLK??) for the whole time period that actually made us a superpower (essentially the whole 20th century). Literally, free citizens were regularly jailed, fired, fined, or alienated for ideas. This was a government backed campaign. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism Lets not pretend that government controlling the information narrative isn’t a real facet of our recent history and rise to power.

You guys are all smart people. Many of you even have security clearances and access to more detailed reports on weaponized misinformation and it’s effects on the U-S-of-A. You know that there are concerted attacks on the Information sector of America designed to cause turmoil, polarize folks, or get people elected who are in the best interests of our adversaries. From that standpoint, I’d hope you wouldn’t take such a black and white view on how to combat this adversarial disinformation, because it’s not helpful in making our nation strong or unified. From a grand strategy DIME perspective, many will even argue that the I (information) is becoming the most impactful way to fight the US for many adversaries. This is because many in the US will, ironically, fight to freely allow and maintain misinformation under the guise of liberty. It’s a tough problem, because it really is a Liberty vs security discussion. Maybe we should bring back the feel good official government propaganda machine that made people in the fifties to 2000 hate things like the concept of socialism so much? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Information_Agency You think it’s a coincidence that the US disbanded its official information propaganda around the same time that those ideals started picking up more (1998)? The pragmatic truth is that you can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you embrace free information - regardless of veracity - you open up a giant attack vector. And for almost no benefit other than the dumbing of society. People just don’t have the time or effort to trudge through misinformation, so we’re left with it having a profound impact on us at a national scale. This includes those from every spectrum: those that blindly call things socialism, q-anon folks, people who think it’s racist to require a voter ID just cause they’ve heard it is, people who think that Trump won the election, folks that think there is significant evidence of surface transmission of COVID, people who think that COVID isn’t real, people who think it is extremely deadly, etc. Disinformation is bad in our society and for our nations national security. If something is patently, provably false, why should that message not be stopped? The concern, of course, is who in government determines “the truth.” You can take two stances here: be a fatalist, accept misinformation, and say you could never trust the gov to do it. Or fight to make the government make bounded, reasonable, bipartisan stops against it.

This illustrates my point even more. If middle class people won’t do it, why would people who actually have no money? In my experience, unless you’re getting significantly better quality for the higher cost, people dgaf where things are produced. They’ll bitch and moan about China, but it is definitely not in the vast majority of American’s minds or capabilities to actually give a damn.

I agree with everything you said except for this. Americans don’t actually have the excess money to make market choices based on ethics or feelings - they overwhelmingly must go with the cheapest option no matter what if they want a chance at “the American dream.” You can’t blame people that don’t have excess resources for not spending them.

If you can’t address the content of the argument, you’re not really contributing.

This assumes that everyone agrees taxes are inherently fair, and that once money is taxed it is 100% fair and yours. The fact that things like the top marginal tax rate have gone from percents in the 90s to the 20s just since WWII, along with the amount of crying on both sides when taxes change in either direction really makes it hard to believe that anyone really agrees with your premise that the amount of post-tax money you have is inherently fair, just, or ethical. And if people dont agree with that, then they won’t agree with your point that $1B was necessarily obtained in an acceptable way just because it was obtained. To highlight this, if you make $500 an hour working 80 hours a week with no breaks, it will only take you… 481 years to make $1B. Oh also, this assumes no inflation, because in reality 480 years of inflation would mean you would have only been making $1 an hour to start out. I don’t care if you like it or not, but this is why people can easily question the morality of what, basically, amounts to taking other people’s labor because it’s nigh impossible to make $1B without exploitation and stealing of labor value. Finally, would you ever enter a poker competition where you get a $10 chip and have to play against the guy with $50k to get to the second round? Because that’s what it’s like for a baby born on the streets who’s trying to get the same opportunities as your Nantucket example.