Tainari88 wrote:Maybe you love the lack of diversity? I don't think you do in real life. You are a lover of various meals not just the same old thing every day, aren't you?
Of course. I make a mean pad grapraw gai.
Tainari88 wrote:Why do humans like variety in many things? It is more engaging.
It is part of the explore/exploit dynamic. You go out exploring for the berry bush; then, you exploit the bush by picking the berries. It's hard wired into people.
Tainari88 wrote:You have argued about people being better off segregated and separated from each other for a more peaceful and orderly life.
Strictly speaking, I'm not a segregationist. However, in studying business, psychology, sociology, organizational behavior, theories of motivation, etc. were all required topics. There are a lot of interesting things in those topics. People with low IQ and also older people tend to be less resilient to change or diversity.
You chastise me for not speaking other languages. Do you know why I switched from working on mass storage to 5G edge cloud computing a few years ago? I started teaching myself German and machine translating a storage architecture paper I had written from English into German, and showed it to my boss. That was a big red flag to management that I was getting bored and that I was a retention risk. So they looked for a new challenge for me. Someone like me doesn't require much management at all, but I do require challenging subject matter or I get bored. So I'm teaching myself a different language--Golang or Go, because Kubernetes, Docker, Podman and a lot of Operators are all written in Go. They never seem to have any problem with me learning new machine languages.
Tainari88 wrote:No, what must prevail is knowing what peace requires. It requires advanced humane policies, will, and resources being put to good use and not wasted on violence and destruction.
Again, I think it is too simple a statement. If you read "The Last Outpost" by Jake Tapper (CNN dude), it illustrates a combat outpost that was put in a militarily precarious situation, because senior command (nowhere near a battlefield) were trying to "win hearts and minds." Their theory was that building roads and bridges and so forth would do that. So they put US soldier's lives in great peril to that end. Did it work? No. The Taliban pretty much overran their position and only B1s, F-16s and Apaches saved them. Yet, many people died while the US was trying to win hearts and minds.
Read "Hammerhead Six: How Green Berets Waged an Unconventional War Against the Taliban to Win in Afghanistan's Deadly Pech Valley". Again, you've got a really detached high command looking to catch some high ranking Taliban guys, and they get pissed off because the army special forces guys end up winning hearts and minds, but not getting the Taliban people they were hunting for. The author was a special forces captain, and was basically told to run the Pech valley with 50 troops--it's about the size of Connecticut! It's an interesting story, but the first thing he ends up doing is rebuilding a damaged mosque to build trust among the elders. He wears a beard. He's a mormon, so he doesn't drink alcohol and the people in the valley figure he's a muslim. He ends up asking elders to send able bodied young males to participate in patrolling the valley, and that they would be paid. At one point, he asks people to "go get" two suspected militants for questioning. They interpret the order to go and kill them, which they did. They come back and want to be reimbursed for the bullets they used, and learning that they misunderstood the order. The guys are crying and stroking the captain's beard. He's puzzled by it, but he understands that they misunderstood the order. Later, the captain gets attacked by a wild dog, and so he shoots the dog. The bullet goes right through the dog killing it, but ricochets off the rocks and hits a villager in the head, killing him. Total freak accident. The father is furious and wants revenge, death. So the captain goes to meet the father, and sees the anger in his eyes. They dispassionately explain what happened, and the father is still furious. So the captain gets down on his knees, and strokes the father's beard expresses his regret and asks for forgiveness, which totally changes the father's disposition. It goes from extreme Islam requiring a life for a life to him having to give him a hundred pounds of rice and a bunch of goats. Later, he confronts some Afghani police who are about to execute what they think is a Taliban propagandist. He has his interpreter look at the flyers. They are US propaganda. Why were the police ready to execute the guy? They can't read. So that the police save face, the captain yells at the propagandist and tells him that if he wants to do that, he must consult the captain and the police first, or he may face execution. The story goes on, but the nub of it is that he wins the hearts and minds of the Pech Valley. Yet, high command doesn't get the scalp they were looking for, so the special forces are pulled out and replaced with more kinetic combatants. In the end, morale falls apart among the people in the valley.
Watch (or read) 13 Hours about the Benghazi special mission getting overrun. The CIA people are "the best" people educated at Harvard and Yale. It's not just no corazon. They aren't street smart. They're book smart, and way too detached.
You have a point with "corazon," but it goes a lot deeper than that. The special forces guys knew how to get it done, but they had too few resources, and the high command could have thought about augmenting that mission with a secondary force to go hunting for the Taliban leader they wanted. Yet, people who expect 50 men to hold the Pech Valley are clearly thinking in abstractions and not in real world scenarios.
Tainari88 wrote:How does one define being a truly kind, good, intelligent, sharp and wonderful human being that everyone from many cultures goes out and points to as an example to follow? Universal human qualities BJ.
I'm not making an argument against kindness, you understand? I'm just saying the Beatles "All you need is love" is a very nice song written by people whose basic physical needs are already met. Our establishment is far different from what it used to be. FDR's four freedoms were Freedom of Speech (today's Democrats prefer censorship), Freedom of Religion (close the churches, but keep the casinos open), Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear (constant negative propaganda about racism, discrimination and end-of-world climate change scenarios). We are ruled by assholes, who have much better manners than Donald Trump.
Tainari88 wrote:That is what is required.
How different are those cultures. Do they let women vote and drive cars? Are they really that different? Or do they just look a little different, speak different languages, spice their foods in different ways but otherwise have similar standards of living? Do you think the Taliban would surrender to your charms? Or would they kill you because you are an infidel woman?
"We have put together the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics."
-- Joe Biden