Everything will be alright in Iceland
memoirsandrambles.substack.com
memoirsandrambles.substack.com
Ireland has a "It'll be Grand" culture as well for comparison. It's a trade off with pros and cons and works for some situations and inhibits progress in other situations, things often don't get acted on or resolved quickly but at the same time there is a huge reservoir of tolerance to draw on when things do get shit.
I would consider this the other end of the spectrum to countries like Japan or Germany in the way they respond to certain things. Lots of generalisations of course but that's often the impressions you get from travelling. It's very hard to be precise about big groups of people.
It can be a bit annoying listen to them moan about small things constantly but my impression of the Netherlands is shit just works and things get fixed. They seem to have a very low tolerance for bs and excuses, which is refreshing
But it does get at how some folks here deal with adversity.
ETA: In lieu of acceptance and determination.
I won’t go so far as to say “liberals are the real racists.” But I grew up as a brown kid in a 95% white Virginia town, where people were afraid to talk about or notice race. I never thought that 30 years later I’d be having attention drawn to my race in routine business settings in blue DC. I didn’t think Maryland liberals would be the reason my mixed kids see racial differences between me and my wife.
Urban liberals aren’t as bad as stormfront people, but they’re worse than “where are you really from” Iowa people. It’s not even close.
ETA: if you find yourself wanting to argue further on this, I would recommend searching Stormfront for this phrase and then decide if you want to die on this hill.
If you are repeating talking points or rhetoric common on Stormfront...
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You might say it to a clerk instead of “have a nice day”.
Much less conviction about everything being alright, but hopeful anyway.
[knocks]
[door opens]
"Y'alrite?"
"Y'alrite?" is not, contrary to what you might assume, short for "Are you alright?"
It's short for "Are you alright if I come in and interrupt you? It's fine if you're not, I just wanted to check before barging in. It's really not too much trouble is it? I'll go away and come back later. Or never. Sorry. Sorry, sorry."
Literally impossible, by the nature of it.
I remember an interview with a Dutch Engineer during a storm surge that threatened an important dike (aren't they all important?). They had been working all day and continuing into the night.
"What will you do?"
"Well, we'll work like hell and see what happens come morning!"
Not really. Some dikes protect millions, some protect a vilage, and some protect only a handful of people. The Netherlands is currently experiencing minor flooding, and a dike failure in Maastricht led to a dozen house boats needing to be evacuated.
> see what happens come morning
There really isn't anything else you can do. Natural disasters are unpredictable, and the situation can drastically change from hour to hour. When your country is prone to this kind of threat, it'll have dozens of scenarios worked out, planned, and practiced. It's mostly a matter of grabbing the right playbook, working like hell, and hoping it doesn't get worse. If it does get worse, you simply grab the next playbook and carry on.
Mind the (tectonic) gap.
On the other hand, the description of roping up without proper training... yeesh. Sounds like bunch of gumbies putting each other's lives in danger. Not ok.
One weird thing about Iceland (as of 2008) that might be related: They don't do warning signs.
- Superheated geyser pool 3 feet from the foot path? No warning sign 95% of the time. The other 5%? "Danger: Hot."
- A slippery tourist trail 5 feet from a rushing river that immediately goes over an 80 foot waterfall? No warning sign. Often no railing, either.
- A road to a tourist attraction that might rip your transmission out? No warning sign.
I could give more examples of unmarked deadly hazards at major tourist attractions.
Iceland appears to assume that deadly hazards are common, and that you'll use common sense. Or maybe you won't, and you'll stick your hand in a geyser.
I'm reluctant to draw any kind of philosophical point here, besides "When visiting Iceland, please use common sense and pay attention to your surroundings."
I have a couple good friends that work on the search and rescue team, and the increasing number of stories about people putting themselves in serious danger with no self awareness is really concerning. I've unwittingly been pulled into these situations myself with said gumbies, and I'm now at the stage where I have no tolerance of it.
It's really not cool to put a bunch of other folks in danger because you did something stupid, completely ignorant of any potential danger. It's totally ok to take measured risks, with proper training/knowledge and at least some kind of preparation for handling unexpected situations.
And sometimes it's me being the gumby, which probably still happens in small doses :)
Iceland was a very poor country for most people other than a few well off in the fishing industry. Today it's still relatively "medium" with few people very wealthy, but also almost no one in destitution. The attitude is that everyone should be able to live a good life, and while it's not truly socialist, it's pretty darn close.
Þetta reddast is used somewhat interchangeably with "I don't feel like dealing with this" and "Some how things will work out even though it doesn't look like it now" and "fuck it". To most people it's kind of an in joke you say when something really sucks.
I came away with some interesting things:
- In one small town we visited they had turned the local town hall into a tourist greeting center. It had a theater that showed films from the 60s and 70s filmed near that town. One of them explained that there were no roads to the town until the modern period. However the town's main industry was sheep farming. How did they get the sheep to market in the larger towns? Simple, they flow in an aircraft, drove the sheep onboard, and flew them there! Before the airplane people either didn't live there or had to drive their sheep by foot or boat to market -- trips of many many days.
- Icelanders are incredibly comfortable being constantly very near volcanism. Most village centers have a local bathhouse fed by hot water from hot springs and they're very popular social centers, people live on the slopes of active volcanoes, the air often smells of volcanic gases in many places in the country, and so on.
- Much of the landscape is virtually impassable. It's the first time I've really ever seen such a vegetatively sparse landscape that was so inaccessible simply due to the terrain. In some areas, relatively "flat" landscapes were so rocky that I can't even imagine how one might traverse those.
Beautiful country, hearty people, expensive, surprisingly consistently good food.
There are certainly areas lacking in vegetation for natural reasons but much of the land is vegetatively sparse because the Vikings cut down all the trees:
> At the time of human settlement almost 1150 years ago, birch forest and woodland covered 25-40% of Iceland's land area
From: https://www.skogur.is/en/forestry/forestry-in-a-treeless-lan...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/20/climate/icela...
A lot of the roughness in the terrain is because there are lots of old lava fields
*Except the big island which is young enough to still have active volcanoes like Iceland.
https://www.scienceabc.com/nature/why-is-volcanic-soil-so-fe...
That is why the alaskan lupin was introduced to Iceland, as it can grow in nitrogen poor volcanic soil to halt the erosion and do nitrogen fixation.
I haven't been to Iceland, but I got similar vibes the first time I hiked through the Kilauea East Rift zone (vegetatively sparse, nearly impassable), where it's perhaps even more stark since lush tropical forest is just a few miles away.
The countryside of Iceland gave me the impression that instead of a "natural vegetated living world" there was two distinct things - an inorganic rock world, with a thin crust of life - lichen, moss and grass over it.
I mean, technically this is true everywhere; but in Iceland the vegetation was so thin and recent and patchy as to be noticeable in an unfamiliar way.
Not only the showers have this smell: it's quite abundant all over the country. Every hot spring smells like that, and Iceland has quite a lot of those. I can easily imagine getting used to it after a few years living there, to the point that you simply don't smell small amounts anymore.
This also applied to large parts of the United States in 1969, and was part of the reason why many leftists and Black activists saw the Apollo program as a symbol of misplaced priorities at the time.
Iceland wasn’t any poorer than Mississippi, for example. And at least Iceland had a program in place to build a Scandinavian-style welfare state so everyone really would get that running water pretty quickly, as well as healthcare and education and the rest. America is still struggling with that while again spending tens of billions on a microwaved-Apollo-cum-Artemis program that’s mostly pork distribution for senators.
The Vietnam War had absolutely 0 value. We hyped it up as some do-or-die necessity, we invaded, participated in the killing of millions of people, blew a trillion dollars, lost the war, went home, and there was no grand catastrophic change. We could have just skipped to the end by not getting involved in the first place. By contrast one can argue about the exact value of the Apollo Program but it's absolutely undeniable that there was value. We learned a bunch, showed what's possible with human ingenuity, and just plain old did something that would make one proud to be a human, let alone an American at the time. If we did more things like this, it's very likely that the relationship between the people and the government would be far better than it is today.
Not to mention the millions of people devastated by Agent Orange.
The fact that the specialists warned the US military of these effects and it didn't stop them from poisoning the population for generations is mind boggling. How did these people rationalize their actions?
Anyway - there's no possible price tag for that. Your point of comparison is correct; the space race as a whole was about the best- and cheapest-case scenario for a "war"
Why did the US decide to support the Khmer Rouge only after they have significantly intensified their campaign of mass murder?
That’s what I said—after the United States allowed both South Vietnam and Cambodia to fall to communists. I am arguing that if the United States consistently maintained military intervention against communism in both Vietnam and Cambodia the genocide would have been prevented.
> Why did the US decide to support the Khmer Rouge
It’s not actually clear that the US did support the Khmer Rouge. But if they did, that would have been wrong, just like abandoning South Vietnam and the pre-Khmer Rouge government of Cambodia was wrong. The US has wrongly supported many communist regimes, including those of China and the Soviet Union, and would have been better served with a consistent anticommunist foreign policy at almost any point in history.
It's not like the US or the UN were particularly bothered by mass massacres of civilians in South Korea, so it's doubtful that really was a significant concern. At the time, the non-communist regimes they were propping up in Korea or Vietnam were hardly any less brutal than their communist opponents as far as human rights are concerned (of course I'm not talking about the Khmer Rouge).
> It’s not actually clear that the US did support the Khmer Rouge
Well they together with China did support them in the UN at least. Which effectively was an endorsement of the genocide.
> intervention against communism in both Vietnam
Geopolitically it would have made perfect sense for the US to back the reunification of Vietnam under a socialist/moderately communist regime. The USSR had limited ability to project power in the region (unlike in Korea) and Vietnam would've certainly sided with the US instead instead of China despite the ideological differences.
Instead the US choose to back France in their desperate and and entirely pointless colonial war. After that.. well they had no choice.
> and would have been better served with a consistent anticommunist foreign policy at almost any point in history.
What do you think US could've done different in Vietnam (besides directly invading the north)? Not a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely curious because to me that was seemed pretty hopeless.
Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled South Vietnam, or the massive crowds in Saigon begging the Americans to bring them or at least their children along as they evacuated the US embassy by helicopter.
> Geopolitically it would have made perfect sense for the US to back the reunification of Vietnam under a socialist/moderately communist regime. The USSR had limited ability to project power in the region (unlike in Korea) and Vietnam would've certainly sided with the US instead instead of China despite the ideological differences.
Vietnam sided with the USSR over China; their split with the Khmer Rouge was largely a proxy for the broader Sino-Soviet split. Nixon and Kissinger, along with their mistaken policy of pulling out of Vietnam, also adopted a mistaken policy of trying to cozy up with Communist China to try and widen and exploit this split. Our relatively good relations with Vietnam today are largely a consequence of the Soviets not being around anymore and China emerging as a major threat, both of which were largely unforeseen in the 1970’s.
The Carter administration actually adopted a policy very similar to what you recommend, of withholding support for authoritarian regimes otherwise friendly to the US who faced too much popular resistance. It didn’t work out well for reasons Jeane Kirkpatrick explained very clearly at the time: https://web.archive.org/web/20110228072902/http://www.commen...
> What do you think US could've done different in Vietnam (besides directly invading the north)? Not a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely curious because to me that was seemed pretty hopeless.
It might have seemed hopeless, but we were losing the propaganda war much more than we were losing the actual war on the ground. The Tet Offensive was a huge military disaster for the communists but got spun and misrepresented as a disaster for the US. This isn’t to say that there weren’t blunders on the part of the US—McNamara was one of the worst SecDefs we’ve ever had—but despite that, we were still winning.
Back in the Civil War, the South’s basic theory was that, while they could never beat the North in a straight up fight, maybe they could make the war so long and bloody and miserable that eventually the North would get tired of the war and lose its resolve. And to the South’s credit, the war was long and bloody and miserable. The Union made plenty of blunders. Some of the bloodiest days of American history were the days when rebel incursions into the North were repulsed at Antietam and Gettysburg. The reason Lincoln won where LBJ lost is because Lincoln was able to politically outmaneuver the rebels and their Copperhead allies in the North. Some of the methods Lincoln used to do that were admittedly extreme, but I’m not convinced Johnson would have had to go to the same extremes.
War is hard. Unless you win the entire war in a month or two, it’s always going to be easy to spin things and make it look as if the war is going badly. This problem gets worse as communication gets faster and attention spans get shorter. Vietnam seemed worse than it was because the government wasn’t prepared to fight a war in the age of color television. Britain had similar challenges fighting the Crimean War during the age of the telegraph, and the US struggled to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan during the eras of 24 hour cable news and social media. (Which is not a statement in defense of those wars, but rather a statement about the challenges of operating in a new media environment).
In general when fighting an enemy does not want to be fighting but is being compelled to do so, I think that opens the door to a real and meaningful victory. But when you're fighting against groups of people, often with a very flat organizational structure, who blend seamlessly with the local population (in no small part because they are the local population), and who want to be fighting you? I think victory there is near to impossible.
This is how Afghanistan, a country with the GDP of a mid-sized town in a modern nation, has defeated not only the USA but also the USSR. In terms of results, they are the most powerful fighting force in the world. But the issue when fighting them is that you don't know who you're fighting. This makes ground operations near to impossible, and sends civilian casualties skyrocketing, which creates even more motivated fighters. You kill one Taliban and create 3 more.
And furthermore, these people aren't going anywhere because it's their home. For them, the conflict is a matter of their very existence. They'll fight you for decades until they die, then their children will fight you, and so on endlessly. By contrast, we're fighting with motivations like trying to avoid geopolitical embarrassment, literally. One of the leaks in the Pentagon Papers included a memo laying out our motivations. And the primary motivation, at 70%, was "To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor)." [1]
Even if you imagine America somehow was able to "win" in Vietnam, you end up with an Afghanistan issue. What now? You can't just maintain millions of soldiers there indefinitely. And if the people you support are only able to stay in power because of those millions of soldiers, then it may turn out that the "war" you just won was merely a battle in in the real "war."
The local population of South Vietnam, for the most part, did not want to be conquered by the communists, did not rise up against the South Vietnamese government during the Tet Offensive as the communists expected them to, and were, in fact, brutally conquered and suppressed by the communist armies that invaded them from the north after the United States abandoned them. Why do you think so many of them became refugees? These people were our allies and we abandoned them.
You’re providing a perfect example of how the United States lost a propaganda war that had, at best, an extremely loose relationship with the reality on the ground.
And the exact same thing happened in Afghanistan. The level of American presence and support for the Afghan government was minimal and would have been easily sustainable, and it had been years since a single American casualty had been suffered. The withdrawal was a completely unforced error that left billions of dollars in weapons, thousands of Afghan translators, and the biometric data to identify them all in the hands of the Taliban. It was an absolute disgrace.
And the Taliban were inflicting a higher casualty rate on "us" (including pro-US Afghan forces), than we were on them. And "we" (only American forces) suffered casualties each and every year, including during the final withdrawal. The number of our casualties was directly reflected by size of the force there - few people, few casualties, lots of people, lots of casualties. We were losing. The years of propaganda about making progress in the country was all fabricated and cynical lies, as usual.
Basically Vietnam and Afghanistan suffered the exact same issue, that you're sidestepping. Without massive foreign interference Afghanistan was going to be ruled by the Taliban, which it now is. And without massive foreign interference, Vietnam was going to be communist, which it now is. The cost is not only in lives, but also financial. Afghanistan cost upwards of $2 trillion. Well and I also think we shouldn't just count wounded as write-offs. We're much better at keeping people alive, but somebody coming back with no limbs, or PTSD so bad that they're destined to find themselves on the street, are also costs rivaling death.
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...
> And without massive foreign interference, Vietnam was going to be communist, which it now is.
This is like saying without massive foreign interference, Ukraine would be part of Russia again already. Vietnam went communist as a direct result of massive foreign interference from the Soviet Union and China.
As for foreign interference, you clearly know Vietnam's history. Vietnam was a French colony that was occupied by Japan during WW2. Following the end of WW2, the Vietnamese themselves declared their independence, as a short-lived communist nation. However France was 'granted' the country, and this resulted in a war between France/UK vs Vietnam, which the Vietnamese ultimately lost leading to the divisions in the country and setting the stage for the Vietnam War. China and the USSR supported the Vietnamese forces, but those forces were already "naturally" aligned. By contrast the South Vietnamese government was just a an inorganic puppet government.
We can get into Ukraine if you fancy, but I think that's neither here nor there for now.
Because those are the most directly relevant to the conflict. Service members dying in accidents or by suicide still happens at home, sometimes at even higher rates than it happens on deployment.
> And, again, it's also an endless money sink. We wasted trillions of dollars on Afghanistan and achieved less than nothing.
As you’ve noticed, I’m not an advocate of losing wars, especially not by means of unilateral surrender. The Afghanistan withdrawal was not a military decision because the military does not have the authority to make that decision. It was a political decision.
> China and the USSR supported the Vietnamese forces, but those forces were already "naturally" aligned. By contrast the South Vietnamese government was just a an inorganic puppet government.
This explanation does not fit the facts. It is inconsistent with the failure of the Tet Offensive to inspire a large scale popular uprising in South Vietnam; it failed in this objective because the people of South Vietnam were not, for the most part, sympathetic to the communists. It also doesn’t explain the vast scale and utter desperation of Vietnamese refugees fleeing the communists as they overran the south of Vietnam. If the people of Vietnam wanted communist rule, why were they so desperate to escape it?
Whether one is a fan of losing a war, or not, matters not - when you can't win. The Afghanistan Papers were the military's own assessment. We were losing, and running out of Afghans. If you wanted to keep the war going then soon enough you'd start needing large numbers of American soldiers maintaining ground ops, and that's basically not possible - we'd be getting picked off like fish in a barrel. The politicians certainly knew the Afghan security forces would collapse. The idea was probably to try to paint it as a failure of those security forces, instead of a failure of America - as would happen if we started mass deployment, and then ended up having to retreat anyhow - minimizing humiliation.
As for Vietnam, the number of initial refugees was quite low - hundreds of thousands in a country of tens of millions. And the earliest refugees were largely made up of collaborators who had every reasonable expectation of facing torture and death if they remained. It also says very little about ideology as China was one of the destinations for hundreds of thousands of the early refugees.
You’re just taking literal communist propaganda at face value with takes like that. I can’t believe I thought you were arguing in good faith.
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"The Vietnam War ended on April 30, 1975, with the fall of Saigon to the People's Army of Vietnam and the subsequent evacuation of more than 130,000 Vietnamese closely associated with the United States or the former government of South Vietnam...
After the Saigon evacuation, the number of Vietnamese leaving their country remained relatively small until mid-1978. A number of factors contributed to the refugee crisis, including economic hardship and wars in Vietnam, China, and Cambodia. In addition, up to 300,000 people, especially those associated with the former government and military of South Vietnam, were sent to re-education camps, where many endured torture, starvation, and disease while being forced to perform hard labor."
---
[1] - https://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p4013coll...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_boat_people#Backgro...
Right. What you're leaving out is that the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia was supported by the US and was overthrown by the communist Vietnam. I'm not trying to downplay the atrocities committed by the Viet Minh/etc. but this is an absolutely bizarre argument to bring up unless you didn't do it on purpose?
If we go back a few decades strategically the war was absolutely unnecessary. Geopolitically Vietnam and the US are natural allies (they hated/fear China far more than the US before the war and the same applies now), yet Truman and his successors literally forced North Vietnam to ally with China and the USSR because they had no other options. Of course not pissing off the French might have seemed like the better options at the time..
In the grand scheme of things, from a western PoV at the time at least two other factors loomed large in geopolitics:
* The French were the pipeline for very hi grade uranium yellowcake out of Africa which was a seething silent unspoken proxy war for Cold War resources. Appeasing the French in many small ways made sense for the US.
* All the European colonial powers were rapidly transitioning to being post WWII former colonial powers and the West was rife with fear that former countries that survived quite well on their own pre European colonisation would turn into anti-West proto communist countries.
Fleeting baby democracies | self governance movements in SE Asia and elsewhere were being crushed and strong man autocracies that paid lip service to being friendly to US hegemony got much support.
The arguments were far less about the monetary value in that case, though.
By contrast a trillion dollars is a trillion dollars. And I think almost nobody could argue, in good faith, that near to any war is worth a trillion dollars. That's more than $7,500 per household in the US. That sort of money, for some sort of vague geopolitical ambition, is just beyond absurd. And the thing is, even when we initially claim that this war or that will "only" cost some billions of dollars, they all go this way.
Iraq "according to every analyst" was supposed to cost about $80 billion and last 2 years. 4 years later, the Congressional Budget Office estimated its cost to be about $2.4 trillion. That value is also not adjusted for inflation. These wars all around the world are just such an unbelievably tremendous waste of money. They have this magic trick that even Houdini couldn't hold a candle to - they can take trillions of dollars and just make it all disappear, with absolutely nothing to show for it. Nobody could ever rationalize this into being a good thing.
By 1970, 93% of the homes in the US had "complete plumbing facilities", which means not just running water but hot and cold water, a shower or bath, and a flush toilet. See https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/coh-plumb....
1940 54.7%
1950 64.5%
1960 83.2%
1970 93.1%
1980 97.3%
1990 98.9%
In the 1950's and 1960's, the United States was able to do more than one thing at a time.
This always feels terribly myopic to me. There's a lot of state capacity and doing a sing;e time bound endeavor did not prevent civil rights legislation from passing or economic development in Mississippi. The moonshot caused NASA's funding to peak at ~4% of the federal budget for a single year in 1966, returning to less than 1% by '73.
It was also not clear from originally that Apollo would be single time limited project, in the beginning there was a lot of talk about moon bases and such.
> enthusiastic spending programs
... what does "enthusiastic" mean here? Enthusiastic support? There was plenty of opposition.
> But in 1969 it was not settled that the country should fix civil rights.
I responded to that by enumerating some of the civil rights laws that were passed during the 1960's.
> Probably Apollo would have been received differently by many people if other, more humane areas had seen as enthusiastic spending.
I agree that "enthusiastic spending" is an awkward phrase, but I was specifically calling back to actionfromafar's usage of it. And I responded by listing all of the humane spending programs that had been enacted in that period, ranging from Medicare and Medicaid to Social Security expansion to new funding programs for education, food stamps, transportation, and other such things.
In reality the administration of Lyndon Johnson was the second greatest expansion of the American federal welfare state in history (after the New Deal); it's simply not true to claim that the federal government during that period lacked "enthusiasm" for such things.
Geopolitically China was always a much bigger threat to Vietnam than anyone else so had the US made the right choices in the 40s and 50s it would've been easy to turn it into a state which was friendly or at least neutral towards the US (like Yugoslavia for instance).
Bombed North Korea to the Stone Age?
Also, Germany, Japan, Serbian conflicts, etc. You'd have to never have seen a world map to think history never "achieve[d] anything [positive]" from interventions "on the other side of the world."
You called? I think it is very relevant, but somehow it never, ever gets brought up that the cartoonishly authoritarian regime was bombed to hell in that war. That Germany lost WWII is certainly relevant to its last 80 year history, for example.
> Also, Germany, Japan, Serbian conflicts, etc. You'd have to never have seen a world map to think history never "achieve[d] anything [positive]" from interventions "on the other side of the world."
You dropped “ideology”, liar.
In the case of WWII: I have never seen anything to make me believe that the allies fought the Nazis because they were anti-fascists (ideology).
In the sense that “anti-fascist” is a dishonest euphemism for “communist”, of course not. But the Allies were ideologically opposed to fascism, Nazism, and Japanese imperialism.
Give me a fucking break. I meant as in: they fought the war because they had to, not because of being anti-fascist.
America thought Nazis were such an existential threat that they remained neutral until Pearl Harbor.
Stop parroting commie talking points and I won’t assume you’re a communist.
> America thought Nazis were such an existential threat that they remained neutral until Pearl Harbor.
You’ve spent this entire thread criticizing the US for foreign military interventions and now you turn around and criticize the US for not intervening soon enough? I’m sorry they didn’t do more to bail out your beloved Soviet Union in the seven months between Operation Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor. (Not really)
Also at the time the South Korean regime was about as brutal and oppressive as the Northern one. The situation barely improved in the 50s and 60s, after all South Korea only became a democracy in 1987 after all...
> If they had just worked with the US peacefully they could have achieved similar results way earlier.
It's not like they really had a choice? Truman ignored Ho Chi Minh in the 40s and later the US stayed neutral until deciding to back the French in their colonial war in Vietnam. Communist countries were willing to help the Vietnamese to fight for their indepence (well.. oversimplification but the French were pretty brutal and they South Vietnamese regime they put in place after the withdrawal was dominated by Catholics who were only ~10% of the population) so it was pretty much their only choice unless they wanted to remain a colony.
The non-communist regime in South Korea was about as brutal as the Northern one during and after the war.
If the right choices had been made in the 1940s and early 1950s, it wouldn't have been that hard to turn Vietnam into an East Asian equivalent of Yugoslavia, if not an actual US ally
Wars are politics and end only with a stable political settlement; without that, they can go on indefinitely - such as in Afghanistan recently.
Like Afghanistan, there was nobody in Vietnam that could run the country, politically, except the North Vietnamese. All the US could do was build someone else's capability, which wasn't working (in Vietname or Afghanistan) or fight indefinitely.
Even if it's really inefficient and bad.
I thought the end facts on that were that SpaceX had never turned it on there, to avoid stepping over a redline, and simply refused to change that policy when the Ukranians requested it for a USV attack.
> No, we're absolutely not supporting offensive military operations. However, Starshield _is_ in that business, so go file your request through that so as to run it by the appropriate people in the US government to get their approval.
And -AFAIK- the request was run through Starshield, and it did get approved.
If the US wanted to contract spacex for Ukrainian military comms, they would have.
There are plenty of reasons to criticize musk, but not participating directly in a war isn’t one of them
Now if we took some lessons from the design or changed the rules of the game around SpaceX that might be different. But we're not making moves that help us in that department.
In contrast in the USA 7% of households were missing any plumbing in 1970.
Iceland was late industrializing and getting basic infrastructure. But so were other colonies. In 1918 Iceland stopped being a colony and by the 1950s it had pretty much caught on (with the major exceptions of road and rail networks).
So they got a freshwater connection to the mainland in 1968, and they do have some aquifers on the island (just really unreliable). I do know that they had problems with water prior to the main land connection, but I don’t know if most houses had plumbing connected to the unreliable aquifers prior to 1986.
Very insightful. I had no clue this was the case.
Is there any published list somewhere that measures the relative richness between the countries? I am just curious to see which countries come out at the top and which ones at the bottom. Anyone knows any such list?
It's not wealthy in an absolute sense, but it's incredibly wealthy per capita.
Same for a number of folks in Fairfax Co VA (US ~wealthiest). My best friend's house was typical for the area. Cold running water arrived ~1970. Hot 1982. Outhouses stayed until about 2000.
This doesn't appear to be true. Iceland is one of the wealthiest nations on the planet per capita.
Iceland also has the highest median wealth of any country at $413,193 compared to the US median of $107,739. Even in average wealth, Iceland ranks #5 globally only behind Switzerland, Luxembourg, United States, and Hong Kong. Keeping the average and median much closer than those other four does agree with your claim that they're good about making sure everyone has a good life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
Interesting thing I learned recently, is that Iceland has the highest rate of millionaires (in USD) of any country at 20% of the adult population. This more than double the 9% of US adult population millionaires. https://www.statista.com/statistics/262687/countries-with-th...
One of the reasons there are a lot of house-millionaires is because some of the oldest generations, who bought their homes before 1980 or so, took normal loans with fixed interest rates, just before massive inflation in the 80s. The decrease in value per krona in ten years starting 1980 was something like 99.7%, so the loans went pretty quickly to something indistinguishable from zero. Inflation-indexed loans have been the only type of housing loan you could get for most of the time since about 1981, and are still the norm. The effect around that time of transition was that the younger generations (next waves of house buyers after them) were saddled with a lot of the burden.
Source: I'm Icelandic.
But we have a word for both want and feel like, but they're different from "nenna". In some ways a better translation would be "I can't be bothered to".
The word is somewhat socially acceptable as an excuse not to do something.
"Þetta reddast" and "Ég nenni þessu ekki" are words many of us Icelanders live by.
I'm past my prime, but would love to know your secret. I remember not wanting to return from Iceland, dreading the inevitable Anxiety Circus™ that was my life in the US. While in Iceland, I felt good about being alive. The way the people just get to the point and aren't afraid to say what they mean instead of this weird communication dance most Americans seem to do. The fact that yeah, danger looms in a variety of ways and the environment can be a bit hostile, but that's fine because we can deal with it together. It is difficult for me to call my experience there anything but refreshing...and yet I was not able to hang on to that.
A fault of my own, to be sure, but seeing as you adopted it in your early years, was there anything in particular that you did to make that happen?
I had a lot of anxiety growing up - from "If I fail this test then everything is downhill" in school to "If I miss this payment then everything is downhill" in the scare quotes "real world". I remember listing out on paper every time I could remember that I thought there would be dire consequences if I failed and there wasn't actually dire consequences. Maybe it was a kind of retrospective cognitive behavioural therapy? I noticed a pattern (though I didn't have the understanding to call it a pattern back then).
But that was the moment that something switched and I had the confidence that even if shit hit the fan I would make it through. Probably it was the culmination of other realizations and not just this act by itself, but that was def the crystallization. And not that I'm always this way, but it's rare for me to fall back into the anxiety circus. It still takes some practice to maintain it in particularly tough situations.
Maybe you associate that state of mind with a place because you felt it most strongly there? But I think a state of mind is part of you and you can cultivate that anywhere.
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
-- ts eliot, following julian of norwich
We US-ians compulsively fear negligible risks (stranger kidnapping, terror attacks) while being unable to sense harm in play (elimination of child growth environments due to false risk perception and systemic destruction of free range area).
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/v870vf/m...
There is a phenomena that if you life under a consistent, visible threat to your life, like for example a huge damn upriver, you suppress that fear and become instead a "believer". And why wouldn't you, after all, if it goes wrong no survivors, so that story makes total sense, until it doesn't and even then.
Wow. I took Sierra Club Basic Mountaineering class, and we learned self-arrest three ways: head down facing down, facing up, and head up facing up.
The class was cancelled later when someone stuck the ice ax into their stomach and sued, and insurance rates skyrocketed.
And this guy learned it by watching a video.
I've since actually gotten a bit into alpinism and done a proper course. My instructor (a super experienced British guy in the Alps) refused to teach self-arrests to beginners because he said the risks were greater than the potential benefits. He said a lot of people get hurt practicing it (as you've noted) and so he preferred to really drill down on precautions and crevasse rescue techniques etc.
As for the story, I need to note the slope wasn't too steep, but being unable to brake would maybe have sent me down the crevasse (unclear how wide it was, we stepped over it on the way there and it seemed it may have been narrow). I also doubt my technique was perfect, but I just remembered to not just try to have the axe over my head somewhere but rather push my body/shoulder into it with the axe placed more diagonally.
I'm certain it was not beautiful nor perfect but at least enough in that situation.
Was it safe? Obviously not. But 1000's of people did it before anyone got badly hurt.
Of course there was no danger, but I get the sense other cultures would perhaps not go straight to that kind of hands on training.
I did go there last year and I'm not sure I'd want to live there. Nice place to visit though and mostly nice people (apart from the large Ford truck driving psychopaths)
In comparison, the USA ? Don't make me laugh.