Afghanistan Is Your Fault

It annoys me that there is such staunch criticism of Americans for wanting this. Universally Democrats opposed these wars for most of the past 20 years, but now they're getting upset that we're leaving?

300k Afghan Defense force members wouldn't have up and walked away if they actually cared about the Taliban taking over. It's almost as if they wanted this. Afghanistan mind you, is also a third world country which indentured slavery universally recognized. You can watch videos even of people who are basically so in debted to their landlords, that they sell organs to help pay off the debt.

Any American at least decrying this event should be ashamed of themselves. Not only were we there too long, we shouldn't have been there in the first place. But now is the time to virtue signal how the US didn't do something perfectly...again. What did they want the US to do? Stay and save everybody while simultaneously leaving? We can only do so much. Not to mention, had we never been there, the society would've been the exact same as when we left it.

The other ironic thing is people criticizing the US for allowing the Taliban to impose harsh restrictions on women. That isn't the US's fault, that is radical Islam. But not a single person in the US is going to mention this because it's only okay to criticize Christianity in the US. Seeing as critics of Islam are somehow equated to bigotry when there are very much justifiable reason to criticize the theology like any other religion.

This is such a stereotypical Tom Nichols think-piece write-up. A reasonable veneer of good earnest frank asssessment, wrapping a core of angry blow-hard snobbery. To say that we "wanted" this is off the mark & repulsive. There's no possible other alternatives Tom presents, no strategems or ideas for how a democratic system might better align itself to long term goals, to better assess it's progress & face hard truths: no, the convenient truth presented & packaged is that Americas are shitty people & that we hate having democracy & truth & that all we want is to go shopping. 100% typical completely expectable write up from Tom Nichols.

He is a master at writing incendiary posts that get easily lit people fired up at everyone else, thinking they're much better, angry at the everyman. It's sabotage, a way to sow dissent and strife & earn hella clicks for it, and it presents little of substantial value. There's enough not wrong about it, enough appealing, seductive even, to make it enjoyable, but it argues only for the dark side, for distrusting each other, for ineffectuality, for making you feel better, for agreeing with his thick fisted bloviation.

I wrote about a very different but equally dangerous sort of self-regard a day or two ago, when someone was warning about how software engineers adore complexity, and how they alone are a platinum guardian of the codebase, uniquely suited, to which someone else was ever too ready to worship. Just because you're a fine critic doesn't make you a worthwhile contributor[1]. We need positive basis to operate from too.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28194395

It's generally rare to see blaming the voters vs blaming the politicians they elected. Maybe this is because this risks offending part of the audience. If so, it seems a bad bias that leads to the master constantly changing their mind and then blaming the servants for executing the previous policy.