The US “won” the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan rather quickly and handily, but they lost the subsequent peace. Turns out that’s the hard part.
Has anyone here read any persuasive articles or books explaining why Japan and Germany accepted and flourished under US occupation but Iraq and Afghanistan did not?
Haha, good point. I stand corrected. :)
A new UH-60L is around $10-$20 million depending on avionics and weapons, and I am under the impression that even an old 1990s A-variant would still cost upwards of $2 million.
One example: https://www.hangar67.com/aircraft-for-sale/turbine-helicopters/sikorsky/uh60a-black-hawk
What are you even talking about?
That’s really inappropriate.
According to NOAA, the ocean was originally not very salty but became saltier over time as rivers eroded the land and delivered the dissolved minerals to the ocean. At the same time, salts crystallize out of the water and are deposited on the ocean floor. This input and output are now more or less balanced so the ocean is not getting saltier. Apparently, this salt cycle involves about 4 billion tons of new dissolved salts being added to the ocean each year and about the same amount being deposited from the water to the ocean bottom.
So, why aren’t rivers salty? Apparently, it is because rivers carry only a small amount of salt and are kept fresh by constant rainfall, whereas the ocean has been accumulating salt for the last 4 billion years.
Lakes that don’t drain to the ocean, like the Dead Sea, can get salty over time, just like the ocean.
That’s true, but my point was that the commenter was implying that Twitch was making some kind of political statement about Israel vs. Palestine, which it probably wasn’t.
You know there is no country called Palestine, right? Twitch means that they blocked new accounts from the country of Israel, which includes the territories that may some day be called Palestine.
People downvoting you didn’t get the joke.
Haha, you have just discovered the strong anti-Western, anti-Israel streak in Lemmy politics. I had to unsubcribe from the news forums because of it. Lemmy politics is pretty much the opposite of Reddit politics, and consciously so.
I agree. Canada doesn’t need to be embarrassed because we provide arms to an ally that is under coordinated attack by Iran and its many proxies. Yes, some criticism of their operation in Gaza and failing to resolve the Palestinian situation over the last 40 years is warranted. However, the attacks by Hezbollah and Iran show what the situation is really about, and we should proudly be helping Israel protect itself against the medieval theocracy in Tehran, and the Hezbollah death cult that has also pretty much destroyed Lebanon.
Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea. Plus their terrorist proxies. That’s the “resistance” to the West. Whatever you think about the terrible situation with Israel and the Palestinians, there is little room of moral equivalence here.
Solid like a turd
What is your “take” then?
Most Canadians do not have a guilty conscience about indigenous people because no one is responsible for the actions of their personal or racial ancestors. Each of us starts with the hand we are dealt, some better some worse. Sure, the political class mouths platitudes about the historic suffering of indigenous people, but I’m sure you know that politicians don’t really care about anything but themselves. Similarly, the chattering classes and the professional classes look and sound stricken by the plight of some indigenous people, but they are paid to care. There are a few saints out there, but vast majority of people will not willingly give up any substantial amount of their personal wealth to any poor person, whether indigenous or otherwise.
Unless someone swung an actual tire iron at your actual personal kneecaps, most people don’t really care for the colorful analogies. And if you’ve been hearing the same “condescending” logic all your life, maybe there is a lesson there. That lesson isn’t that you are wrong, but rather that people have limited fucks to give and don’t want to be burdened with other people’s problems. Everybody wants to claim victim status these days, even conservatives and billionaires like Trump, so I think it is a spent strategy.
No one can just “take over” resource extraction. It is a massively capital-intensive business and most First Nations don’t have that kind of capital. Instead, First Nations communities are essentially rent-seeking from companies, which is not a bad idea as a way to fund impoverished communities, but it makes the business endeavour less profitable and, therefore, less likely to happen at all.
As for your other hand, begging for hand-outs to make indigenous communities functional is just going to keep you at subsistence poverty levels forever. Being “taken care of” is what we do for children. You’ll never get ahead that way in the modern world. You can call it “treaty rights” or welfare, but it amounts to the same thing, practically speaking. It is infantalizing. Maybe in the 1800s, in the face of the total collapse of indigenous societies, all your ancestors wanted was a reliable source of food and medicine, but I’m sure that isn’t the limit of your ambition in the modern world. Fighting over old treaties of pointless. Colonization happened. Native peoples all over the globe were defeated by more powerful nations, either militarily or through deception or one-sided treaties. It’s sad, but it is done. Every square inch of habitable land on Earth is claimed, and virtually the whole globe is converging on a semi-common culture because of mass media and the internet. So, there is no going back. And indigenous people don’t want to go back to hunting and fishing and subsistence farming for survival anyway.
Given this reality, how can indigenous people in Canada escape the poverty trap?
Well, first it must be said that many indigenous groups have done a good job with education. Even in just the last 25 years, I have noticed a huge difference in how sophisticated the leading edge of indigenous advocacy and governance have become. It is very, very impressive. That’s just the first step, though. Indigenous people, as a whole, still experience more poverty and hopelessness than other racial groups.
Step 2, in my opinion, is to abandon the remote reserves. It doesn’t matter whether you are white or brown or purple, it is hard to have a thriving modern community in the middle of the muskeg with no road access. It just isn’t viable. That land is effectively worthless for First Nations that don’t have the capital and expertise to run a modern remote resource extraction industry. Not only that, but reserve land isn’t privately owned so you can’t use it as collateral. And what are your treaty rights worth in real terms? Not much, right? So, make a deal to sell off those remote reserves and treaty rights to the federal government in exchange for something that will give people on those reserves a good start in a more populated area. Whatever you do, though, don’t accept individual cash payments. That’s like winning the lottery and most people will just blow it.
Okay, so what about all of the indigenous people not on remote reserves? Well, some reserves close to populated areas are doing fine, if they’ve invested in viable businesses. For the urban indigenous that are poor, they share in the wider problem of poverty for all races. This is not easily solved for lots of reasons: racism, mental illness and addiction caused by intergenerational trauma, etc. So, unfortunately, it has to be solved one person and one family at a time. I definitely don’t have all the answers for that.
Self-governance can help, and you are wrong to say that you “aren’t allowed to govern” yourselves. There is plenty of indigenous self-government in Canada, from individual reserve governance to larger tribal councils collectively taking on health and welfare programming, policing and education. These are the parts of government that make an actual difference in people’s day to day lives and their chances of success. But, ultimately, indigenous people still have to (and probably want to) live in the wider Canadian society, so these systems of self-governance have to interleaf and interact with other Canadian institutions so there is some semblance of continuity between reserve and non-reserve life. It is happening, but it takes time to build institutions.
I went to indigenous cultural safety training a couple of years ago and the trainer said something that stuck with me. She said that broader Canadian society actually shouldn’t try to “fix” the problems of indigenous people. She said it will take a couple of generations for indigenous people themselves to re-construct an identity for themselves in the modern world, but that work is well underway. Some of that work will draw on romanticized ideas of the past, but most of it will be new. She said that Canada should be passively supportive and give indigenous people space to heal and to recreate themselves. At the end of the day, indigenous success will look a lot like every other kind of success.
There is no doubt that indigenous people in Canada and around the world were fucked over, and they continue to live with the resulting disadvantages. But you are exactly right when you say that non-indigenous people don’t really care. Sure, people will wear an orange shirt from time to time and perhaps even shed a tear for MMIW, and they’ll support things like free education and welfare, but no one is going to hand over their personal income or their own home to solve indigenous poverty, or any other kind of poverty. This lack of care is only going to worsen because new citizens are coming from non-European countries that feel zero sense of responsibility for centuries-old European colonization. Heck, many of the ancestors of these new Canadians were also victims of European colonization and worked their asses off to save money to move here, so they are not likely to support special rights or hand-outs for Canadian indigenous people. So, I say that indigenous people should take advantage of the current climate of white guilt to get a free education and whatever else they can toward long-term individual success while they still can. Is that harsh? Maybe, yes, but the world isn’t exactly fair. You’ve got to figure out how to be successful. Lots of people, including many, many indigenous people are doing it.
Gotcha. Fair enough.
It’s getting harder and harder to constantly blame Israel while they are under coordinated attack by Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. I feel sorry for ordinary Gazans, and ordinary Lebanese too, but I know that the blame for their situation rests with Iran and its proxies.
Better stop buying anything made in China then, what with the slavery and human rights abuses. And you should stop using oil and gas products as well because climate change kills. Good luck with that.
Afghanistan: the graveyard of empires
A great power can usually defeat it in the conventional military sense and take the cities, but no one can rule it long term. And many have tried. In that sense, Afghanistan is possibly the greatest blow to American exceptionalism ever.
The Chinese could probably do it using the totalitarian tactics they’re using on the Uighers, including gradual replacement of the population with ethnic Han Chinese. But…yuck, hopefully that’ll never happen.