Yeah, I'm sure China will be as damaged by their 'collapse' as we have been by ours.
China is a powerhouse whether you like it or not. China has been the cultural, political, and economic epicenter of the largest continent on earth for the better part of five thousand years. Almost every society near China is directly derivative of Chinese society. China contains nearly 20% of the world's entire population. They will be second only to the US in GDP very shortly. China is second only to the US in military expenditures, and has nearly 1 million more active duty military personnel than the US (sobering considering that the US could not defeat China in any of the proxy wars it has fought in Asia). Ask the Germans or the French how well technological superiority works against vast numbers and huge territory in a conventional war. And while I'm not one of the nutjobs who think war with China is around the corner, if their economic growth falters and it destabilizes their society, they may change their approach to a more aggressive one regionally to rally nationalism, perhaps even to the point of provoking a war with India over Arunchal Pradesh or trying to absorb Taiwan.
China is a police state, even a nightmare, but if you think China is a joke you might find that the punchline is not so funny.
Google made a move everybody else was afraid to make, and they're too big to be ignored. This is going to have a geopolitical domino effect, that's why everybody is now concerned. It is rare that a corporation should make such a bold statement that preempts what I'm sure are a lot of well laid foreign policy plans both public and private. They're forcing action on the issue, and now each nation is going to have to grandstand. We'll see how much real substance is addressed, but if other corporations start coming forward like a bunch of women coming out of hiding in a serial rape case, then you can be sure that for any number of constituency reasons (contributions included) there will be so much pressure on Congress that it could topple the foreign policy direction of the executive branch.
Deny everything and change nothing? I daresay you don't know China. When China denies everything, it denies everything including the changes it makes. This is big, really damn big, and changes will be made but China will not lose face talking about those changes. They will be made quietly, and if everything goes right nobody will notice until it's just normal business as usual.
(I'm not saying these changes will benefit any interests other than China's, but it may result at least in scaling back.)
I will admit that Strauss and Howe's ideas suffer from a selection bias that is inextricable from the model. However I think that if there are patterns in history (like those additionally posited by Dr. J. S. Lee to which I wish I could provide a link, but despite being listed frequently as source material I can't find the original of 'The Periodic Recurrence of Internecine Wars in China' online) may be necessary to look outside of conventional restrictions on modelling to begin to understand them. As long as one remains conscious of changes to normal parameters of inquiry, there may be valuable ideas that can later be refined back into parameters. Straight-jacketed methodology can be detrimental to the leaps of analysis that have been key to major advancements.
You're quite vague about 'comparable things'... name one.
Yes, yes, you're fully correct about context adjusting probabilities, but that sword cuts both ways, in that outside of places where intellect is concentrated the probability decreases.
And actually my boasting days are largely behind me. The only reason we're having this conversation is that you came in saying essentially that no teenage philosopher kings existed, to which I could not help but differ. Ironically, you undermine your own argument throughout your responses by frequently talking about how we aren't the only ones who at 10 years old were reading thousand page non-fiction of the humanities. So which is it really?
I get nervous about saying too much about my occupation (clearances get revoked), suffice to say I work as a contractor for the US government in a security support role. For what it's worth, it manages to support a wife and kid and a mortgage on a suburban house. That's enough for me at 26. Bigger question is will I manage to get a PhD before I'm 40...
At no time did I say or imply that Imperial Russia was a better place than Soviet Russia. I was simply disagreeing with Reservoir Penguin that famines didn't occur and didn't kill anybody in Soviet Russia. Quite frankly Russia hasn't been a comfortable place to live for most of its people for the entirety of its history, regardless of the regime.
Is it just me, or are all the replies to the GP missing the point? We already deliberately consume things such as booze and cooking oil that are bad for our livers. So what? People can do that all their lives (in moderation) and be perfectly normal. If some GM corn is a bit rough, is that the end of the world any more than olive oil or whiskey?
Tell that to Strauss and Howe. I'm sure that their decades of scholarship will quickly wither under your unstudied personal opinion.
I would further say that you presume much to say how plentiful kids of the caliber I was are supposed to be. In the first place, I have an IQ of 144, which, depending on whose categorizations and standard deviations you use, puts me in the top 0.2%. Of course based on current US population, that still leaves ~617k people who are as intelligent or moreso than I am, but put in personal terms, I think it's meaningful that for every five hundred people I meet, statistically only one is likely to be as intelligent as I am.
Speaking anecdotally again, if you can find another person who at the age of 10 read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or any comparable non-fiction of the humanities ~1200 pages or more I will buy you lunch.
People, however, did look on me and despair, because I was (and by the standards of most people, still am) an arrogant bastard. When I was a teenager I was an intellectual bully, and it took years for me to develop socially enough not to rip everybody to rhetorical shreds with encyclopedic knowledge and synthetic understanding in public conversation.
However, this isn't about me and how you think you can generalize about me without knowing me, but rather society as a whole. I don't suggest that a genius can be chiseled out of every tot, though I wish it were so easy, but rather than teenagers and children as a whole are not held to a high enough standard. Especially children. Too often they are dismissed and dissuaded by adults who say 'you're too young to understand' or something to that effect before even trying to teach them. Only a few driven individuals have the wherewithal to say 'screw you guys I'm learning it anyway.' Rather in most cases the desire to learn is crushed out of them, and they gravitate toward whatever is easy, often for the rest of their lives. That is the crux of the problem, children are actively dissuaded, teenagers are ignored, and this produces lackluster, underachieving, vacuous adults.
Ah, I see I have already been modded 'Troll' for committing the mortal sin of being rationally proud of my actual knowledge and how I accrued it. Of course I should flay and deprecate myself in false modesty lest somebody who has been raised in the BS 'self-esteem for its own sake' culture take offense and feel inferior as though it's my fault for who they are and what they do.
You rang? Although categorically Gen Y (aka Net Gen) I was reading Aristotle's Metaphysics at 16, right after I finished a collection of Cicero's orations, letters, and commentaries. In fact I read usually over 100 books a year, albeit many of them fictional, and when I went to undergrad everything felt like a review.
There is nothing inherently limiting about age. Nobody asked me to read what I read. People are too keen to give teenagers a pass, and it dilutes the development of the whole society. Each person can choose, regardless of their age, to spend their time enriching themselves and becoming informed or to spend their time watching the latest 'reality' TV shows or IMing all their idiot peers about what idiot peer A said to idiot peer B during class yesterday. Who needs history and culture when you have idle gossip?
Trying to use the capacity of technology as an excuse for personal laziness doesn't work. Yeah, I can look up nearly any important data in human experience, but if I don't at least understand the framework, I won't even know what question to ask, let alone how to answer it. More than anything else, 'kids these days' don't ask meaningful questions. It is said there are no such things as stupid questions, but I beg to differ. Understanding is a reduction. You start with what you know, think about what is most important in that knowledge, and ask questions about the origins of those conditions, and when you get that information, you ask questions about the new data, until you have a satisfactory foundation you can do real work from. If all you have as a baseline is TV and gossip, you'll never have anything meaningful to reduce, no pathway to follow to real insights, real applications of ideas that enrich and improve. It is as has been said elsewhere in comments on this topic, GIGO.
Speaking as somebody who nonetheless wears seatbelts, it's still something of a Russian Roulette. You're betting that because the seatbelt is more likely to prevent injuries than cause them that you won't be the unlucky guy that hits things just right such that the seatbelt decapitates you. Some people are uncomfortable with the tradeoff, and for adults the decision, regardless of how rational it may or may not be, should not be enforced by law.
I am sure the millions of people who died of starvation in the USSR would be rather wryly amused by your personal anecdote. Anecdotes and personal experience do not by themselves make for a good historical record.
Hey I know right? Just like that Jules Verne guy... he can't seem to get with the times and keeps writing about reaching the moon via a giant cannon as though there had never been any Apollo Program. I mean what's wrong with these science fiction writers allowing themselves to be so influenced by the times they lived in and shit. Pfff.
This.
You might as well say that a movie version of 2001: A Space Odyssey would be just fine so long as it had a monolith in it. Really? Are your standards so low that having just one element of similarity between the book and the movie is its vindication? (This is not a strawman, I consider my example directly equivalent to 'at least [...] the three laws' as a singular justification.)
If you're too lazy to come up with your own material, you damn well better get the structure of the original right, or nobody will like it. The original is popular and loved for what is, not what some hack director or producer wants it to be. Of course a book has to be adapted to the medium, but any changes beyond the most necessary will be seen usually as detractions, stark flaws sourced in the hubris of somebody too deficient to create anything but a derivative work but too conceited to leave somebody else's work unadulterated.
To be pedantic, the difference between humans and animals is usually called reason, but in fact it's probably more specific if less poetic to call it 'problem solving'. Animals don't 'live in equilibrium' per se because that implies that they know what they're doing, as though they're thinking 'oh... I'll eat exactly this much and no more because that will mess things up!' Pfff I'll bet somewhere there's some green whackjobs who think that's exactly the romantic notion going through the brains of animals. (In fact, there are predators that kill even after they are full, just to kill. I remember watching a documentary about sea turtles and watching them hatch and try to make their way to the sea, and predatory birds were attacking them, first to eat them, but even after that they just kept killing and leaving the dead baby turtles there to rot.) Anyway, I'm rambling, point is, animals expand as far as they can. They consume as much as they can, whenever and where-ever they can, and reproduce as often as possible. What determines their numbers ultimately are things like the rate at which their consumed resources replenish and the rate at which they otherwise die from predation/disease/accidents/age, not some kind of instinctive population control.
So the contrast is, an animal, insofar as it thinks, thinks 'I will eat x' and then when x is scarce it thinks 'oh shit there isn't enough x!' Then depending on luck, it dies. Whereas humans think 'I like to eat x' and when x becomes scarce humans think 'well, this sucks, there isn't enough x anymore. Maybe I can eat something else? How about this? Ew. No, not that. How about this other thing? Meh, it's ok. Maybe I can cook it? What things could I do, or do in concert with others, that might restore the natural abundancy of x and/or allow x to be produced in an environment I control?' Yeah. That's why human population keeps growing, moving, adapting, and animals just have to suck it up. They can't solve resource problems creatively.
(Viruses aren't creative either, they and other micro-organisms just have such fast life cycles that it allows them to find mutations that positively affect their survival at a higher rate. In other words they adapt quickly by chance, humans adapt quickly by decisions.
US forces occupied only very small parts of Canada for very short periods of time. Consequently I didn't feel it met the criteria established by the original scope of the argument as outlined by the GP. Further the question was whether or not a nation was positively or negatively impacted by occupation overall. I doubt greatly that anybody can point to any systemic, lasting negative effects caused by occupation. Yes, some buildings (on both sides) were burned, that's war, but Canada as a whole I don't think was made better or worse off by the process.
I was not trying to do any detailed analysis, but rather just rendering an opinion as to whether in each case the result of direct US military involvement made the situation in the region better or worse overall. My knowledge of that conflict is limited, so I'm going to ask general ethical questions: is stopping one of two genocides/expulsions better than stopping neither? Is it possible to link increased criminal activity in Kosovo to US involvement in a way that excludes the possibility that it would have happened anyway?
While I'm not going to defend the persecution of 'heretics' by Christians as that of course was reprehensible, but that is a different matter as I can demonstrate. Even given the faultiness of the ethical premise of believing that 'subversion of Christian values' was a crime deserving torture and/or death, the idea that crime deserves punishment, even capital punishment, is cross-cultural, rational, human social norm. So Christians were getting the definition of crime wrong, a thing that has happened in virtually every culture/civilization at some time, but at least they were trying to work within a crime/punishment model, albeit a distorted and subverted one.
However, this does not make Christianity a death cult because while over-zealotry about the religion did cause some to kill, the religion itself does not command its followers to kill (even if there are a lot of vagueries about bad things happening to infidels). Whereas the Aztec religion did require without reservation or equivocation the constant and unceasing slaughter of whomever was convenient to appease the gods or else. Period, full stop. I'm sorry, but they just are not on the same ethical level.
You're being disingenuous to the scope of the argument. The GP specifically said 'when Uncle Sam [...] "liberates" a country' and 'invasions' i.e. he defined the scope of the argument as those times when the US has used direct military force. So don't act like I'm 'conveniently omitting' anything, I didn't define the scope.
Besides which, throughout the Cold War both sides did whatever they could to foment rebellions in the 3rd world against whatever government was in power that didn't support their views. It was a systemic problem, so don't act like the US was 'the bad guy' for toppling governments while the USSR was doing the exact same thing.
I'm really not sure what you're talking about with regard to Vietnam... the only thing 30 years before the war was a rather unsuccessful nationalist uprising, fully six years after Woodrow Wilson left office (or do you mean some other Wilson? I can't find any major figures relating to US SE Asia policy named Wilson during the 1930s, not to mention that was the height of US isolationism and no political move for military support of a uprising in SE Asia would be tolerated by the American public). Or are you referring to the deal made more than a dozen years later by Roosevelt/Truman to return Vietnam to the French? Ironically, US unilateral support (if such a thing were possible) of Ho Chi Minh after the August Revolution would not only have been the political doom of whomever suggested it so soon after WWII (with support for the 'downtrodden' French and their interests at a ludicrous high) but might have even increased tensions with the Russians since at that time they were on-board with the other powers of Europe to support the French. So... I really, really have no idea what you're trying to say about Vietnam.
I'm not one usually to reference YTNMD on/., but this is appropriate.
However, if you look at the whole issue from a broader perspective, you begin to wonder if this sort of thing isn't deliberate, by which I mean people must understand the Streisand Effect by now and maybe people are trying to exploit it. The first thought of a lot of people on the internet when they hear 'x is being banned/censored/removed' is 'wow, I need to both satisfy my curiosity AND stick it to The Man!' Maybe some companies are pulling things like this not in a pure bid just to get them removed (since that doesn't work), but really to make them the center of a controversy such that their (albeit hijacked) IP reaches a broader audience that otherwise wouldn't hear about it without free press from places like/. getting upset about stuff being removed.
Or maybe I'm getting paranoid and seeing conspiracies...
Statistically I'd say that US involvement is more likely to be positive than negative. Enumerated:
Mexican-American War: Substantially positive effects on acquired territory.
Spanish-American War: Substantially positive effects for Puerto Rico and Guam, less so but still positive for the Philippines... Cuba not so much, the degree of which depending on whether you want to blame the revolution on the US.
World War II: Positive effects for numerous occupied territories, Japan, Germany, former Japanese Pacific island mandates too numerous/small to list...
Korean War: Substantially positive effects on South Korea
Vietnam War: Negative effects, but to be fair, what happened in post-war Vietnam is what the Vietnamese did to themselves, we lost the war and had no further direct impact on Vietnam's development. (And if we hadn't been involved at all, the South just would have lost more quickly and the same things/conditions would have happened faster.)
Grenada: Positive effects
Panama: Probably barely net positive, but hard to say considering how little Panama has advanced and how much collateral damage was done.
Kuwait: Substantially positive effects
Somalia: The place was so messed up when we started there I don't think it was substantially more messed up when we left, and just like Vietnam the Somalis themselves must shoulder the responsibility for their condition after our withdrawal.
Balkans: Net positive effects
Afghanistan: Net positive effects, primarily because the country was practically starting from zero.
Iraq: Substantially positive effects in the north, substantially negative effects in the south. It's too bad Turkey is such a bitch about Kurds, otherwise it would make a lot of sense to just split Iraq and salvage what's working.
So there you are, even if we assume that what countries do to themselves after we leave is our fault, that's still round about an 80% rate of positive effects to places we have occupied.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I'm sure China will be as damaged by their 'collapse' as we have been by ours.
China is a powerhouse whether you like it or not. China has been the cultural, political, and economic epicenter of the largest continent on earth for the better part of five thousand years. Almost every society near China is directly derivative of Chinese society. China contains nearly 20% of the world's entire population. They will be second only to the US in GDP very shortly. China is second only to the US in military expenditures, and has nearly 1 million more active duty military personnel than the US (sobering considering that the US could not defeat China in any of the proxy wars it has fought in Asia). Ask the Germans or the French how well technological superiority works against vast numbers and huge territory in a conventional war. And while I'm not one of the nutjobs who think war with China is around the corner, if their economic growth falters and it destabilizes their society, they may change their approach to a more aggressive one regionally to rally nationalism, perhaps even to the point of provoking a war with India over Arunchal Pradesh or trying to absorb Taiwan.
China is a police state, even a nightmare, but if you think China is a joke you might find that the punchline is not so funny.
Yeah the 19th century just called and wanted to give you a little update called the Monroe Doctrine. Not new.
Neither, technically, is that of large companies altering the course of diplomacy. British East India Company comes to mind fastest.
Google made a move everybody else was afraid to make, and they're too big to be ignored. This is going to have a geopolitical domino effect, that's why everybody is now concerned. It is rare that a corporation should make such a bold statement that preempts what I'm sure are a lot of well laid foreign policy plans both public and private. They're forcing action on the issue, and now each nation is going to have to grandstand. We'll see how much real substance is addressed, but if other corporations start coming forward like a bunch of women coming out of hiding in a serial rape case, then you can be sure that for any number of constituency reasons (contributions included) there will be so much pressure on Congress that it could topple the foreign policy direction of the executive branch.
Deny everything and change nothing? I daresay you don't know China. When China denies everything, it denies everything including the changes it makes. This is big, really damn big, and changes will be made but China will not lose face talking about those changes. They will be made quietly, and if everything goes right nobody will notice until it's just normal business as usual.
(I'm not saying these changes will benefit any interests other than China's, but it may result at least in scaling back.)
Uh, being married to the guy counts as 'involved' to most people. Just because she wasn't in the room does not negate that.
I will admit that Strauss and Howe's ideas suffer from a selection bias that is inextricable from the model. However I think that if there are patterns in history (like those additionally posited by Dr. J. S. Lee to which I wish I could provide a link, but despite being listed frequently as source material I can't find the original of 'The Periodic Recurrence of Internecine Wars in China' online) may be necessary to look outside of conventional restrictions on modelling to begin to understand them. As long as one remains conscious of changes to normal parameters of inquiry, there may be valuable ideas that can later be refined back into parameters. Straight-jacketed methodology can be detrimental to the leaps of analysis that have been key to major advancements.
... name one.
You're quite vague about 'comparable things'
Yes, yes, you're fully correct about context adjusting probabilities, but that sword cuts both ways, in that outside of places where intellect is concentrated the probability decreases.
And actually my boasting days are largely behind me. The only reason we're having this conversation is that you came in saying essentially that no teenage philosopher kings existed, to which I could not help but differ. Ironically, you undermine your own argument throughout your responses by frequently talking about how we aren't the only ones who at 10 years old were reading thousand page non-fiction of the humanities. So which is it really?
I get nervous about saying too much about my occupation (clearances get revoked), suffice to say I work as a contractor for the US government in a security support role. For what it's worth, it manages to support a wife and kid and a mortgage on a suburban house. That's enough for me at 26. Bigger question is will I manage to get a PhD before I'm 40...
Aw man... why did you have to go ruining the guy's witty sarcasm with that reality shit?
At no time did I say or imply that Imperial Russia was a better place than Soviet Russia. I was simply disagreeing with Reservoir Penguin that famines didn't occur and didn't kill anybody in Soviet Russia. Quite frankly Russia hasn't been a comfortable place to live for most of its people for the entirety of its history, regardless of the regime.
Is it just me, or are all the replies to the GP missing the point? We already deliberately consume things such as booze and cooking oil that are bad for our livers. So what? People can do that all their lives (in moderation) and be perfectly normal. If some GM corn is a bit rough, is that the end of the world any more than olive oil or whiskey?
Tell that to Strauss and Howe. I'm sure that their decades of scholarship will quickly wither under your unstudied personal opinion.
I would further say that you presume much to say how plentiful kids of the caliber I was are supposed to be. In the first place, I have an IQ of 144, which, depending on whose categorizations and standard deviations you use, puts me in the top 0.2%. Of course based on current US population, that still leaves ~617k people who are as intelligent or moreso than I am, but put in personal terms, I think it's meaningful that for every five hundred people I meet, statistically only one is likely to be as intelligent as I am.
Speaking anecdotally again, if you can find another person who at the age of 10 read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or any comparable non-fiction of the humanities ~1200 pages or more I will buy you lunch.
People, however, did look on me and despair, because I was (and by the standards of most people, still am) an arrogant bastard. When I was a teenager I was an intellectual bully, and it took years for me to develop socially enough not to rip everybody to rhetorical shreds with encyclopedic knowledge and synthetic understanding in public conversation.
However, this isn't about me and how you think you can generalize about me without knowing me, but rather society as a whole. I don't suggest that a genius can be chiseled out of every tot, though I wish it were so easy, but rather than teenagers and children as a whole are not held to a high enough standard. Especially children. Too often they are dismissed and dissuaded by adults who say 'you're too young to understand' or something to that effect before even trying to teach them. Only a few driven individuals have the wherewithal to say 'screw you guys I'm learning it anyway.' Rather in most cases the desire to learn is crushed out of them, and they gravitate toward whatever is easy, often for the rest of their lives. That is the crux of the problem, children are actively dissuaded, teenagers are ignored, and this produces lackluster, underachieving, vacuous adults.
Ah, I see I have already been modded 'Troll' for committing the mortal sin of being rationally proud of my actual knowledge and how I accrued it. Of course I should flay and deprecate myself in false modesty lest somebody who has been raised in the BS 'self-esteem for its own sake' culture take offense and feel inferior as though it's my fault for who they are and what they do.
You rang? Although categorically Gen Y (aka Net Gen) I was reading Aristotle's Metaphysics at 16, right after I finished a collection of Cicero's orations, letters, and commentaries. In fact I read usually over 100 books a year, albeit many of them fictional, and when I went to undergrad everything felt like a review.
There is nothing inherently limiting about age. Nobody asked me to read what I read. People are too keen to give teenagers a pass, and it dilutes the development of the whole society. Each person can choose, regardless of their age, to spend their time enriching themselves and becoming informed or to spend their time watching the latest 'reality' TV shows or IMing all their idiot peers about what idiot peer A said to idiot peer B during class yesterday. Who needs history and culture when you have idle gossip?
Trying to use the capacity of technology as an excuse for personal laziness doesn't work. Yeah, I can look up nearly any important data in human experience, but if I don't at least understand the framework, I won't even know what question to ask, let alone how to answer it. More than anything else, 'kids these days' don't ask meaningful questions. It is said there are no such things as stupid questions, but I beg to differ. Understanding is a reduction. You start with what you know, think about what is most important in that knowledge, and ask questions about the origins of those conditions, and when you get that information, you ask questions about the new data, until you have a satisfactory foundation you can do real work from. If all you have as a baseline is TV and gossip, you'll never have anything meaningful to reduce, no pathway to follow to real insights, real applications of ideas that enrich and improve. It is as has been said elsewhere in comments on this topic, GIGO.
Speaking as somebody who nonetheless wears seatbelts, it's still something of a Russian Roulette. You're betting that because the seatbelt is more likely to prevent injuries than cause them that you won't be the unlucky guy that hits things just right such that the seatbelt decapitates you. Some people are uncomfortable with the tradeoff, and for adults the decision, regardless of how rational it may or may not be, should not be enforced by law.
I am sure the millions of people who died of starvation in the USSR would be rather wryly amused by your personal anecdote. Anecdotes and personal experience do not by themselves make for a good historical record.
Hey I know right? Just like that Jules Verne guy... he can't seem to get with the times and keeps writing about reaching the moon via a giant cannon as though there had never been any Apollo Program. I mean what's wrong with these science fiction writers allowing themselves to be so influenced by the times they lived in and shit. Pfff.
This. You might as well say that a movie version of 2001: A Space Odyssey would be just fine so long as it had a monolith in it. Really? Are your standards so low that having just one element of similarity between the book and the movie is its vindication? (This is not a strawman, I consider my example directly equivalent to 'at least [...] the three laws' as a singular justification.)
If you're too lazy to come up with your own material, you damn well better get the structure of the original right, or nobody will like it. The original is popular and loved for what is, not what some hack director or producer wants it to be. Of course a book has to be adapted to the medium, but any changes beyond the most necessary will be seen usually as detractions, stark flaws sourced in the hubris of somebody too deficient to create anything but a derivative work but too conceited to leave somebody else's work unadulterated.
That's Vancouver, BC, thank you very much.
To be pedantic, the difference between humans and animals is usually called reason, but in fact it's probably more specific if less poetic to call it 'problem solving'. Animals don't 'live in equilibrium' per se because that implies that they know what they're doing, as though they're thinking 'oh... I'll eat exactly this much and no more because that will mess things up!' Pfff I'll bet somewhere there's some green whackjobs who think that's exactly the romantic notion going through the brains of animals. (In fact, there are predators that kill even after they are full, just to kill. I remember watching a documentary about sea turtles and watching them hatch and try to make their way to the sea, and predatory birds were attacking them, first to eat them, but even after that they just kept killing and leaving the dead baby turtles there to rot.) Anyway, I'm rambling, point is, animals expand as far as they can. They consume as much as they can, whenever and where-ever they can, and reproduce as often as possible. What determines their numbers ultimately are things like the rate at which their consumed resources replenish and the rate at which they otherwise die from predation/disease/accidents/age, not some kind of instinctive population control.
So the contrast is, an animal, insofar as it thinks, thinks 'I will eat x' and then when x is scarce it thinks 'oh shit there isn't enough x!' Then depending on luck, it dies. Whereas humans think 'I like to eat x' and when x becomes scarce humans think 'well, this sucks, there isn't enough x anymore. Maybe I can eat something else? How about this? Ew. No, not that. How about this other thing? Meh, it's ok. Maybe I can cook it? What things could I do, or do in concert with others, that might restore the natural abundancy of x and/or allow x to be produced in an environment I control?' Yeah. That's why human population keeps growing, moving, adapting, and animals just have to suck it up. They can't solve resource problems creatively.
(Viruses aren't creative either, they and other micro-organisms just have such fast life cycles that it allows them to find mutations that positively affect their survival at a higher rate. In other words they adapt quickly by chance, humans adapt quickly by decisions.
My kingdom for some mod points!
US forces occupied only very small parts of Canada for very short periods of time. Consequently I didn't feel it met the criteria established by the original scope of the argument as outlined by the GP. Further the question was whether or not a nation was positively or negatively impacted by occupation overall. I doubt greatly that anybody can point to any systemic, lasting negative effects caused by occupation. Yes, some buildings (on both sides) were burned, that's war, but Canada as a whole I don't think was made better or worse off by the process.
I was not trying to do any detailed analysis, but rather just rendering an opinion as to whether in each case the result of direct US military involvement made the situation in the region better or worse overall. My knowledge of that conflict is limited, so I'm going to ask general ethical questions: is stopping one of two genocides/expulsions better than stopping neither? Is it possible to link increased criminal activity in Kosovo to US involvement in a way that excludes the possibility that it would have happened anyway?
While I'm not going to defend the persecution of 'heretics' by Christians as that of course was reprehensible, but that is a different matter as I can demonstrate. Even given the faultiness of the ethical premise of believing that 'subversion of Christian values' was a crime deserving torture and/or death, the idea that crime deserves punishment, even capital punishment, is cross-cultural, rational, human social norm. So Christians were getting the definition of crime wrong, a thing that has happened in virtually every culture/civilization at some time, but at least they were trying to work within a crime/punishment model, albeit a distorted and subverted one.
However, this does not make Christianity a death cult because while over-zealotry about the religion did cause some to kill, the religion itself does not command its followers to kill (even if there are a lot of vagueries about bad things happening to infidels). Whereas the Aztec religion did require without reservation or equivocation the constant and unceasing slaughter of whomever was convenient to appease the gods or else. Period, full stop. I'm sorry, but they just are not on the same ethical level.
You're being disingenuous to the scope of the argument. The GP specifically said 'when Uncle Sam [...] "liberates" a country' and 'invasions' i.e. he defined the scope of the argument as those times when the US has used direct military force. So don't act like I'm 'conveniently omitting' anything, I didn't define the scope.
Besides which, throughout the Cold War both sides did whatever they could to foment rebellions in the 3rd world against whatever government was in power that didn't support their views. It was a systemic problem, so don't act like the US was 'the bad guy' for toppling governments while the USSR was doing the exact same thing.
I'm really not sure what you're talking about with regard to Vietnam... the only thing 30 years before the war was a rather unsuccessful nationalist uprising, fully six years after Woodrow Wilson left office (or do you mean some other Wilson? I can't find any major figures relating to US SE Asia policy named Wilson during the 1930s, not to mention that was the height of US isolationism and no political move for military support of a uprising in SE Asia would be tolerated by the American public). Or are you referring to the deal made more than a dozen years later by Roosevelt/Truman to return Vietnam to the French? Ironically, US unilateral support (if such a thing were possible) of Ho Chi Minh after the August Revolution would not only have been the political doom of whomever suggested it so soon after WWII (with support for the 'downtrodden' French and their interests at a ludicrous high) but might have even increased tensions with the Russians since at that time they were on-board with the other powers of Europe to support the French. So... I really, really have no idea what you're trying to say about Vietnam.
I'm not one usually to reference YTNMD on /., but this is appropriate.
/. getting upset about stuff being removed.
However, if you look at the whole issue from a broader perspective, you begin to wonder if this sort of thing isn't deliberate, by which I mean people must understand the Streisand Effect by now and maybe people are trying to exploit it. The first thought of a lot of people on the internet when they hear 'x is being banned/censored/removed' is 'wow, I need to both satisfy my curiosity AND stick it to The Man!' Maybe some companies are pulling things like this not in a pure bid just to get them removed (since that doesn't work), but really to make them the center of a controversy such that their (albeit hijacked) IP reaches a broader audience that otherwise wouldn't hear about it without free press from places like
Or maybe I'm getting paranoid and seeing conspiracies...
Statistically I'd say that US involvement is more likely to be positive than negative. Enumerated:
Mexican-American War: Substantially positive effects on acquired territory.
Spanish-American War: Substantially positive effects for Puerto Rico and Guam, less so but still positive for the Philippines... Cuba not so much, the degree of which depending on whether you want to blame the revolution on the US.
World War II: Positive effects for numerous occupied territories, Japan, Germany, former Japanese Pacific island mandates too numerous/small to list...
Korean War: Substantially positive effects on South Korea
Vietnam War: Negative effects, but to be fair, what happened in post-war Vietnam is what the Vietnamese did to themselves, we lost the war and had no further direct impact on Vietnam's development. (And if we hadn't been involved at all, the South just would have lost more quickly and the same things/conditions would have happened faster.)
Grenada: Positive effects
Panama: Probably barely net positive, but hard to say considering how little Panama has advanced and how much collateral damage was done.
Kuwait: Substantially positive effects
Somalia: The place was so messed up when we started there I don't think it was substantially more messed up when we left, and just like Vietnam the Somalis themselves must shoulder the responsibility for their condition after our withdrawal.
Balkans: Net positive effects
Afghanistan: Net positive effects, primarily because the country was practically starting from zero.
Iraq: Substantially positive effects in the north, substantially negative effects in the south. It's too bad Turkey is such a bitch about Kurds, otherwise it would make a lot of sense to just split Iraq and salvage what's working.
So there you are, even if we assume that what countries do to themselves after we leave is our fault, that's still round about an 80% rate of positive effects to places we have occupied.