Tainari88 wrote:I know you are not low IQ, so why are you so resistent to demographic change in the USA and diversity?
I am not resistant to demographic change, as such. I'm opposed to non-assimilation. I think a civic national culture is important for the functioning of the society. So creating a society where poor people speak Spanish or AAVE and middle and upper classes speak English is a bad idea.
Tainari88 wrote:I think taxes have more to do with it.
My desire to leave California is entirely financially driven, and the fact that they do not enforce non-violent crimes anymore. I see no reason to pay taxes for that sort of thing. It's just the state stealing from me.
Tainari88 wrote:You implied that the Little Rock nine were doing things that were ultimately a failure and there was no real change.
I didn't imply anything. I posted Minnejean Brown's observation on her return to Little Rock Central High School 50 years later. She noted that the class room was segregated. All the kids, regardless of race, said they just sat with who they felt comfortable with. The segregation was not enforced at all. It was the preferred arrangement of everyone there according to their own statements. It was not about overt or covert animus.
Tainari88 wrote:The issue with social mobility BJ in the USA are people born in certain zip codes restricting them to their parents social and economic circles. We are living in segregationist neighborhoods by default. Nothing has really changed. You want to make it more acute? What do you think should happen to kids who are black and so on and test high in the IQ exams?
Charter schools and vouchers. Basically, until we break the teachers unions and the Democrat political machine, nothing will change.
Tainari88 wrote:People really are not separate. In any group. Even when it was illegal and dangerous to mix. It still did not really work BJ.
Who mixed? And in what context? From kindergarten through the second grade, my best friends were black. Context? Sports and sense of humor. When I moved to the suburbs, it was mostly white.
Tainari88 wrote:You might stop thinking you have the right to judge other cultures once you realize that they have a deep love for their own thing and speaking English is not what they see as being the endall of existence in this world.
You do realize that on my own team, fully half of the team is not American, right? They all speak English. They do not all speak English as a first language. I don't need to speak another language fluently to arrive at that conclusion.
So what do you think of societies where women don't get to vote? Do you decline to judge them, or conclude that they don't have "corazon"?
Tainari88 wrote:Neither is it being some pureblood Irish/English/German
The Irish and English are not pureblood. They have faced many invasions, and have long fights. That's why I have pointed out that if someone asks me my first name in Ireland, they peg me as Catholic, and then they ask me my surname and they peg me as English with a bit of coolness. In England, they peg me as Cambro-Norman. White people didn't exist in Europe until very recently.
Genetically, the interesting invasion is the Viking/Danelaw invasions that more or less saw the Y chromosomes of the Celts more or less disappear from England while the female X chromosomes remained.
Tainari88 wrote:Have you ever realized how the Taliban think about American enemy invasive force soldiers in their eyes? You are in their nation and not the other way around at all.
Maybe they need to work on their "corazon"?
Tainari88 wrote:The Taliban was one faction in a nation of warring tribes and diversity of conflicts of interest. There is an internal power struggle. Afghanistan was invaded by the French, and others like the English too, the Russians, and the reality is that nations invaded massively with long protracted wars have adapted to war-like conditions.
Or, perhaps because it is a nation in name only. Do you think the problem is that the Taliban need to stop limiting themselves to Pashto and learn Dari and Uzbek? The French, English, Russians and Americans did not create places speaking Pashto, Dari, Uzbek and so forth. That predates anything Western powers did.
Tainari88 wrote:I read a great book called Three Cups of Tea or something. An American who wanted to establish a school there. His entire cultural process of trying to gain trust in Afghanistani society. It is eye opening. I bet you don't read that. Because the ENEMY is complex and not a cardboard cartoon characterization that you tend to paint the baddies as.
Where have I said they are the baddies? I note what they do. For example, women being distinctly second class. I note the culture shock of American soldiers from the accounts I read from them. Why do I read those books? It's the only way to get a real picture of what's going on, because the news media is so terrible in the US.
Read "Left of Boom". A CIA guy learned how to speak Pashto, wore traditional Afghan clothing, wore a beard, attended loya jirgas, etc. I'm familiar with it, I just don't read the books of the do-gooders as I'm trying to understand what my government is doing there knowing that most of what I hear in American media is a lie.
Tainari88 wrote:Yes, societies in these places can be intolerant, sexist, racist, haters, they can be lovers, warm, nurturing, communal and respectful and full of good decent people too. That is the classic complexity of living a human life BJ. I hope one day you understand that.
What makes you think I don't? You try to focus on "corazon," which I take to mean emotional connections, which I take to mean the social aspect of the human brain--the limbic system, which is also where intense feelings of hatred come from.
Tainari88 wrote:But if you can't get Puerto Ricans need for certain things? I doubt you are going to do well with other cultures.
I'm sure that the Taliban are not thinking about the needs and wants of Puerto Ricans either. My comment on apathy was about scope. Most people are preoccupied with their immediate surroundings, not the needs and wants of people thousands of miles away.
Tainari88 wrote:It is war BJ. And war and the conditions of war are not normal conditions at all.
You are missing the point. They actually did win hearts and minds, but they had to adapt to the local culture. They also had to integrate the locals into their own force and pay them. They wore beards--regular army regulations would preclude that. They went to the loya jirgas and worked with the elders, etc. They ended up calling the captain "Commandon", not unlike the 1975 film "The Man who would be King" with Michael Caine and Sean Connery; or as they likely called Alexander the Great's men something similar.
Tainari88 wrote:lands that don't belong to them and committ to integration and love of a productive life serving other humans as their equals
How do you commit to integration if you don't belong? Politics has to go beyond mere sentimentality. Why do you get along so well in Mexico? The most important part of it is that you understand the official language and share some of its cultural heritage. I could get along just as well in England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or South Africa. I would probably struggle in Turkmenistan, and I think you would to.
Tainari88 wrote:No, I believe their error is underestimating what it takes to conquer old warrior battered cultures.
Libya isn't an old warrior battered culture like Afghanistan. It was relatively stable until Obama deposed Qaddafi. You have to read Zero Footprint to get another aspect of that story--that the Obama administration was trying to create a force in Syria to overthrow Assad, but leave zero American footprint--that is, using non-US weapons to make it look like it was a home grown rebellion. So they were looking for non-US weapons--first in the Balkans--and then in Libya. So the official cover as told in the movie 13 Hours is that they were trying to buy the rockets and excess guns of the militias to stabilize the situation. They were actually feeding that weapons supply to Syrians.
You will not get the truth from the media or the government. You have to read extensively to figure out what they're really doing. Even 13 Hours hides the truth from the American audience.
Tainari88 wrote:Commitment to nation building.
Germany was largely rebuilt by 1960 after almost total devastation. There is a reason it's different in Afghanistan after 20 years, and it's not a lack of commitment.
Tainari88 wrote:They went to the Templo Mayor and they destroyed it. And then they stayed and married and cut their ties to Spain. Their blood coursed through the veins of the new race.
Sounds like the Normans. However, 1000 years after the Norman Conquest, people can still pick my surname out as Norman straight away.
Tainari88 wrote:Unless the Americans want to become the new Afghanistanis and live there forevermore with their Afghan wives and children they will be forever strangers in a strange land.
It didn't work out that way in Germany or Japan. There are some real differences, and it isn't just "corazon."
Tainari88 wrote:But there are no shortcuts to nation building. The Americans are not understanding how hard it is. They never did understand it.
Japan, Germany, South Korea, China, Taiwan, etc. are all examples of US nation building. You can look at the flip side of that reading Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins. When it's China doing the same thing, you speak of it in more glowing terms. The reality is that China was a backwater until the US opened up trading relationships with them.
Tainari88 wrote:For me BJ most wars in human history are about fantasies made up by men who don't have to do the dirty and hard task of fighting and conquest. It is a terrible lack of intelligence about human nature.
Really? It's just fantasies? Only men have these fantasies? Catherine the Great? Margaret Thatcher? Queen Elizabeth I? What I'm describing in the Afghanistan case is the detachment of the senior command, or the CIA, as juxtaposed from people with boots on the ground and danger close to battle. Politicians even have a hard time keeping political support for wars, because they haven't asked Congress for a declaration of war since 1941. So war legally speaking doesn't exist, but the reality is that it does. You can abolish it by treaty, legal documents, etc. That's why there have been so few genocides since WWII.
It's illegal. Or... we call it "ethnic cleansing" when we do not want to invoke treaties that require us to do something about it. The Rwanda genocide was a classic case of that. Nobody wants to fight a land war in China, which is why we'll not do anything militarily about Xinjiang.
Tainari88 wrote:So the pressure needs to come from outside those structures.
That's what Donald Trump was. In some respects, I think it's fine that we have a president with Lewy body dementia, because it shows people the country functions with a president who is totally out to lunch, because the technocratic neoliberal/neoconservative types have been de facto running things for quite some time.
Pants-of-dog wrote:I see that there is no intelligent support for the idea that ethnic diversity matters when it comes to mass shootings like this.
"Mass shooting" is just a definition that three or more people have been shot. What we have in the Colorado case is a paranoid schizophrenic, and these instances get used by the media to push gun control narratives. In fact, there is regular gun violence across ethnic groups. For example, in San Francisco's Bay View/Hunter's Point area, the blacks and the Samoans have been fighting each other since WWII when they both were paid to work in the shipyards during the war. Part of the reason that violence is declining is because those population groups are declining due to "gentrification."
"We have put together the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics."
-- Joe Biden