Sometimes ya just gotta step back and ask... by AURaptor

Well, the argument about not letting the soviets have access to oil or gulf is also kinda less so certain. Not only is it land-bound, but it's got no oil to speak of either (all prospective, estimates of volume and composition suggest it's not worth the effort to extract). Soviets would have had to invade other nations to get near enough to either to make a difference. They might have taken the oil pipeline, or sabotaged it, but that's not the same thing as controlling the oil fields.

This was containment on our part, more than it was really all that strategic.

I don't disagree that they would have tried to oppress the hell out of the conquered territory, but on the other hand, LOOK at the people living in that area, or even look at the area itself. It's hell. It's sand dunes and caves and people subsistence farming here and there, it's difficult to track anyone unless you're friendly with the locals. I honestly don't think the Soviets could have controlled it.

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Tuesday, January 17, 2012 7:32 AM

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The locals were fighting with WW2 era equipment already, and older. We didn't MAKE them do anything!

You're misunderstanding me. When I say we threw them at the soviets, they wanted a little more substantial help, which, yes, we probably couldn't give to them. But we did fight a proxy war through them. So from their point of view, we were using them, we didn't give them near enough help, and so from their point of view we let them die like flies.

Quote:
out of MERCY, not as some devious , greedy plot to grab some oil pipeline deal.

Revisionist history?

AURaptor, by now you should know that I'm pretty well read. When I say something, I'm not pulling it out of my ass.

We don't go in to help people out of mercy. Soviets were a threat TO US. We fought a proxy war because we hated the soviets, not because we wanted to help Pakistanis or Afghans.

But, very well. Why do YOU think Afghans and some Pakistanis hate us?

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Tuesday, January 17, 2012 7:49 AM

America loves a winner!

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
Revisionist history?

AURaptor, by now you should know that I'm pretty well read. When I say something, I'm not pulling it out of my ass.

We don't go in to help people out of mercy. Soviets were a threat TO US. We fought a proxy war because we hated the soviets, not because we wanted to help Pakistanis or Afghans.

But, very well. Why do YOU think they hate us?

2 issues... our involvement in the war, after the Soviet invasion, and why do the radical Muslims hate us ?

As Sig states, why should Soviet take over of Afghanistan be a threat to us, hmmm? ( I know, but it's funny to see Sig so clueless on the matter )

But as for why they hate us ? It's the brand of radical Islam these ass backward goat herders cling to, primarily. They believe many of the lies told to them by enemies of the US, enemies of freedom, and us committing the greatest sin of all, NOT converted to Islam.

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

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Tuesday, January 17, 2012 7:55 AM

Quote:
As Sig states, why should Soviet take over of Afghanistan be a threat to us, hmmm? ( I know, but it's funny to see Sig so clueless on the matter )

Well, the military leadership thought that was a threat. I'm not so sure myself, because there's really very little about Afghanistan's resources that would be appealing to a foreign nation.

Quote:
But as for why they hate us ? It's the brand of radical Islam these ass backward goat herders cling to, primarily. They believe many of the lies told to them by enemies of the US, enemies of freedom, and us committing the greatest sin of all, NOT converted to Islam.

You just called them backwards goat herders. So, how exactly do they even know about America?

Could it be there might have been something we did that they noticed outside of their goatherding life? Something that their religious leaders could point to and said was done wrong to them and convince them we did it because we weren't Muslim?

If we never had any contact with them, sure, they might think we were heathens or whatever, but would they even care about us? Why do they give a crap?

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Tuesday, January 17, 2012 8:28 AM

America loves a winner!

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
Quote:
As Sig states, why should Soviet take over of Afghanistan be a threat to us, hmmm? ( I know, but it's funny to see Sig so clueless on the matter )

Well, the military leadership thought that was a threat. I'm not so sure myself, because there's really very little about Afghanistan's resources that would be appealing to a foreign nation.

Pretty much my view as well, but some folks just HAVE to concoct deep, dark, devious motives for anything the US does. And as for the claims that we were fighting to secure land for some pipe line, that seems a bit specious too. Why are we going to risk, as a nation, so much $, weapons ( then ) and human treasure ( now ), in a foreign land, 1/2 around the world ? When we have a President who won't even allow a pipe line to be built on our own soil ? And get paid for it ? Explain that one to me, please.

Quote:

Quote:
But as for why they hate us ? It's the brand of radical Islam these ass backward goat herders cling to, primarily. They believe many of the lies told to them by enemies of the US, enemies of freedom, and us committing the greatest sin of all, NOT converted to Islam.

You just called them backwards goat herders. So, how exactly do they even know about America?

Could it be there might have been something we did that they noticed outside of their goatherding life? Something that their religious leaders could point to and said was done wrong to them and convince them we did it because we weren't Muslim?

If we never had any contact with them, sure, they might think we were heathens or whatever, but would they even care about us? Why do they give a crap?

The population is fed lies, and believes it. Much as is the case in 'educated' Saudi Arabia, which , despite college educations, many believe the lies that Israel was behind 9/11, and that literally 5,000 Jews were absent from work that day in the WTC, because they all were told the attack was coming. ( PN chimes in in 3,2,1... )

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

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Tuesday, January 17, 2012 9:27 AM

Quote:
And as for the claims that we were fighting to secure land for some pipe line, that seems a bit specious too. Why are we going to risk, as a nation, so much $, weapons ( then ) and human treasure ( now ), in a foreign land, 1/2 around the world ?

Well, it's more about this is the ONLY oil resource consideration that I can see at the time in Afghanistan, because what little oil is in Afghanistan is not developed and won't ever be (not cost productive). We were concerned about Russia getting access to oil. Therefore, I can only conclude that's the oil we were worried about.

If they invaded Iran, that would be another thing entirely, and maybe that was what the Soviets were planning next. Back then, Iran was pro-US.

But Afghanistan was also in the grips of a communist revolution themselves, and the mujahideen appear to have been opponents of that who ran to US-friendly Pakistan and that's where they regrouped and received aid.

I suppose it's possible we wanted Afghanistan as a buffer state between US friendly nations and Soviet aggression.

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Much as is the case in 'educated' Saudi Arabia

Ah, but Saudi Arabia isn't Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia practices Salafism, the backwater parts of Afghanistan practice Sharia Law.

Neither is Afghanistan the same thing as Iran - the tribes in Afghanistan consider themselves Pashtun, with a few Kurds in the north, Iran considers itself Persian, they are separated by language. They are also separated by technology, there's places in the mountainous central and northern parts of Afghanistan that have never seen a television, let alone computers or other source of easy information access.

I would argue that it's less so much Gaza and the creation of Israel that is shaping the opinions Afghans, but rather the Afghan-Soviet war. Much of the rhetoric used by Afghan leaders refers to the Afghan-Soviet war, and there's some dislike at the CIA and Israeli trainers over their involvement.

However, our own puppet leader Karzai is inciting anti-Israeli sentiments over Gaza as he gets further off our leash, so that might be changing. But I would expect the really rural areas of Afghanistan don't really give a care about Israel versus Palestine. And they certainly know nothing about 9-11, let alone think that Israel had some hand in it.

http://afghanistan.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/13/in-rural-afghanistan-many-
don%E2%80%99t-know-911/

So I'm still digging around for why these rural goatherders, who are as backwards as you say (no disputing that) hate us. Or rather, specifically, why the mujahideen, descended from the rural goat herders, hates us. I suspect most of the rural goatherding population only vaguely knows who we are and who we're fighting, and switch sides based on who they think is going to kill them. So we're really talking about the mujahideen.

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Tuesday, January 17, 2012 10:20 AM

STORYMARK

I don't care about either. Kneel all ya want, folks.

"Goram it kid, let's frak this thing and go home! Engage!"

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Tuesday, January 17, 2012 10:55 AM

America loves a winner!

Quote:
Originally posted by Storymark:
I don't care about either. Kneel all ya want, folks.

"Goram it kid, let's frak this thing and go home! Engage!"

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

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Tuesday, January 17, 2012 11:18 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by AURaptor:

The population is fed lies, and believes it. Much as is the case in 'educated' Saudi Arabia, which , despite college educations, many believe the lies that Israel was behind 9/11, and that literally 5,000 Jews were absent from work that day in the WTC, because they all were told the attack was coming. ( PN chimes in in 3,2,1... )

A lot of educated americans seem to believe something similar, and don't start me on the evolution debate again. Which country is backasswards....?

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Tuesday, January 17, 2012 11:49 AM

Thanks Byte. I am appreciated the information, even if Rappy doesn't get that things are more complex than 'A-Rab Bad, America Good'.

Here is a little history of the Taliban

"There was no such thing as a Taliban until the Afghanistan’s civil war in the wake of Soviet troops’ withdrawal in 1989, after a decade-long occupation. But by the time their last troops withdrew in February 1989, they’d left a nation in social and economic shards, 1.5 million dead, millions of refugees and orphans in Iran and Pakistan, and gaping political vacuum that warlords attempted to fill. Afghan mujahideen warlords replaced their war with the Soviets with a civil war.

Thousands of Afghan orphans grew up never knowing Afghanistan or their parents, especially their mothers. They were schooled in Pakistan’s madrassas, religious schools which, in this case, were encouraged and financed by Pakistani and Saudi authorities to develop militantly inclined Islamists. Pakistan nurtured that corps of militants as proxy fighters in Pakistan’s ongoing conflict with over Muslim-dominated (and disputed) Kashmir. But Pakistan consciously intended to use the madrassas’ militants as leverage in its attempt to control Afghanistan as well.

As Jeri Laber of Human Rights Watch wrote in the New York Review of Books of the origins of the Taliban in refugee camps (recalling an article he’d written in 1986),

Hundreds of thousands of youths, who knew nothing of life but the bombings that destroyed their homes and drove them to seek refuge over the border, were being raised to hate and to fight, “in the spirit of Jihad,” a “holy war” that would restore Afghanistan to its people. “New kinds of Afghans are being born in the struggle,” I reported. “Caught in the midst of a grownups’ war, the young Afghans are under intense political pressure from one side or another, almost from birth." [...] The children that I interviewed and wrote about in 1986 are now young adults. Many are now with the Taliban."

http://middleeast.about.com/od/afghanistan/ss/me080914a_2.htm

Once again, seeing that extremism can often follow war and conflict and breeds where there is a society in disarray.

DOn't forget, as Signy rightly points out, that the US funded the pro Islamists in Afghanistan, because the secularism of communism was seen as a threat and Islam was not at that stage. Basically, the US 'grew' the Taliban and Al Queda.

There is plenty of evidence that, ironically, the US continued to fund military action against its own forces by giving military aid to Pakistan, which duplicitously supports, funds and trains Taliban fighters. It's a nutty war. I note that Obama was the President to withhold funding, as the Bush administration had its head up its own arse that it actually thought it was winning the war in Afghanistan.

So as you can see, Rappy, US involvement in these regions, as in Iraq and Iran has been less than consistent, giving aid to one day and warring against the next. USA seems to preserve its own world standing, and protect its resouces and it dresses it up in the name of 'goodness', which seems pretty transparent and downright hypocritical to most of the world.

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Tuesday, January 17, 2012 12:00 PM

And as for it being a dusty bunch of rocks with no economic value..

"Afghanistan, often dismissed in the West as an impoverished and failed state, is sitting on $1 trillion of untapped minerals, according to new calculations from surveys conducted jointly by the Pentagon and the US Geological Survey.

The sheer size of the deposits – including copper, gold, iron and cobalt as well as vast amounts of lithium, a key component in batteries of Western lifestyle staples such as laptops and BlackBerrys – holds out the possibility that Afghanistan, ravaged by decades of conflict, might become one of the most important and lucrative centres of mining in the world."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/afghanistans-resources-co
uld-make-it-the-richest-mining-region-on-earth-2000507.html

And a little info from wiki on opium production in the region.

"Soviet period (1979–1989)

As the Afghan government began to lose control of provinces during the Soviet invasion of 1979–80, warlords flourished and with it opium production as regional commanders searched for ways to generate money to purchase weapons, according to the UN.[7] (At this time the US was pursuing an "arms-length" supporting strategy of the Afghan freedom-fighters or Mujahideen, the main purpose being to cripple the USSR slowly into withdrawal through attrition rather than effect a quick and decisive overthrow.)

In 1995 the former CIA Director of this Afghan operation, Mr. Charles Cogan, admitted sacrificing the drug war to fight the Cold War. "Our main mission was to do as much damage to the Soviets. We didn't really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug trade," he told Australian television. "I don't think that we need to apologize for this. Every situation has its fallout. There was fallout in terms of drugs, yes, but the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan." [8] [9]

As explained by Zbigniew Brzezinski:

The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: 'We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.'[10][11]

It was alleged by the Soviets on multiple occasions that American CIA agents were helping smuggle opium out of Afghanistan, either into the West, in order to raise money for the Afghan resistance or into the Soviet Union in order to weaken it through drug addiction. According to Alfred McCoy, the CIA supported various Afghan drug lords, for instance Gulbuddin Hekmatyar[8][12] and others such as Haji Ayub Afridi.
[edit] Warlord period (1989–1994)

When the Soviet Army was forced to withdraw in 1989, a power vacuum was created. Various Mujahideen factions started fighting against each other for power. With the discontinuation of Western support, they resorted ever more to poppy cultivation to finance their military existence.
[edit] Rise of the Taliban (1994–2001)

During the Taliban rule, Afghanistan saw a bumper opium crop of 4,500 metric tons in 1999,.[13] However, in July 2000, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, collaborating with the United Nations to eradicate heroin production in Afghanistan, declared that growing poppies was un-Islamic, resulting in one of the world's most successful anti-drug campaigns. As a result of this ban, opium poppy cultivation was reduced by 91% from the previous year's estimate of 82,172 hectares. The ban was so effective that Helmand Province, which had accounted for more than half of this area, recorded no poppy cultivation during the 2001 season.[14]
[edit] Present War in Afghanistan
Opium production levels for 2005–2007

By November 2001, the collapse of the economy and the scarcity of other sources of revenue forced many of the country's farmers to resort back to growing opium for export.(1,300 km² in 2004 according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.)

In December 2001, a number of prominent Afghans met in Bonn, Germany, under United Nations (UN) auspices to develop a plan to reestablish the State of Afghanistan, including provisions for a new constitution and national elections. As part of that agreement, the United Kingdom (UK) was designated the lead country in addressing counter-narcotics issues in Afghanistan. Afghanistan subsequently implemented its new constitution and held national elections. On December 7, 2004, Hamid Karzai was formally sworn in as president of a democratic Afghanistan."[15]
Soldiers of the U.S. armed forces protecting their poppy field in 2005.
Regional security risks and levels of opium poppy cultivation in 2007–2008.

Two of the following three growing seasons saw record levels of opium poppy cultivation. Corrupt officials may have undermined the government's enforcement efforts. Afghan farmers suggested that "government officials take bribes for turning a blind eye to the drug trade while punishing poor opium growers".[16]

Another obstacle to getting rid of poppy cultivation in Afghanistan is the reluctant collaboration between US forces and Afghan warlords in hunting drug traffickers. In the absence of Taliban, the warlords largely control the opium trade but are also highly useful to the US forces in scouting, providing local intelligence, keeping their own territories clean from Al-Qaeda and Taliban insurgents, and even taking part in military operations."

Interesting that the Taliban was actually successful in reducing the cultivation of this crop, and now it has reached record proportions again.

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Tuesday, January 17, 2012 12:34 PM

I'd actually heard about the mineral resources, but I was leaving them out of the discussion for now, because there's nothing to indicate that either the soviets or the US knew about it at the time.

It could potentially explain things, but I think that's inconclusive.

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Tuesday, January 17, 2012 12:39 PM

I wasn't actually making that argument. I'm pretty certain it was about regional influence/power within the global cold war environment.

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Wednesday, January 18, 2012 7:47 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

Not bothering to catch up completely, it's obvious where this went...and stayed there. Just popping in because I caught the following:

Quote:
we did fight a proxy war through them. So from their point of view, we were using them, we didn't give them near enough help, and so from their point of view we let them die like flies.

We don't go in to help people out of mercy. Soviets were a threat TO US. We fought a proxy war because we hated the soviets, not because we wanted to help Pakistanis or Afghans.

First, and tiny, thank you for saying Pakistanis and Afghans...you're one of the few people I've heard get it right ("Afghans", not "Afghanis"). Small point, but to one who knows them and cares...

As I see it, we didn't "throw" them at the Soviets, but I'll cover that later.

But the big

for nailing it.

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suppose it's possible we wanted Afghanistan as a buffer state between US friendly nations and Soviet aggression.

Bang on. And kudos to Magons, who got it too:

Quote:
I'm pretty certain it was about regional influence/power within the global cold war environment.

Yes, the USSR was a threat to us...that was going on even when I was there. Russia wanted Afghanistan as a buffer against the West, and secondarily as a way to expand their interests. America feared Russia getting Afghanistan for just that reason, and because WE wanted a buffer against Russia. That was well known IN Afghanistan, BY Afghans and everyone there.

A "war" of sorts was going on then, which I've detailed before. We'd give them a school; the Russians would give them a grain siloh; we built them a hospital; the Russians built them a road (surprisingly, straight up to...gosh...RUSSIA!). And so forth. That's how I and my family GOT THERE; America "gave" Afghanistan an airline...Ariana, which is still flying today. Pan Am sold their old, antiquated DC-3s and others to the Afghan government, then built them an airport. We always knew the Russians hung over us like the Sword of Damoclese. I've explained why egineers like my dad were sent there to keep Ariana in the air; it wasn't working to let the Afghans do it for a couple of reasons. So we sent our own people.

The Afghan government played both of us off against one another, never being willing to ally with either side completely. Eventually the Russians got tired of playing the game, saw it wasn't going their way and invaded (with the use of that most excellent road they'd built "for the Afghans").

We definitely engaged in a proxy war, utilizing the various tribal leaders, everyone knows that. Russia learned the lesson so many have learned before. The reasons Afghanistan has never been conquered is that, more than anywhere else in the region, its population is spread around very difficult landscape AND because Afghans both know how to utilize that terrain (they've been through this many times) and are a very strong people who were "forged in the desert"...I've detailed the horrors of how they lived before, shouldn't have to again. They're very proud that they've never been completely conquered, and Afghan pride is something Americans probably can't understand. I can try, but I don't think anyone's interested. They would have worn down Russia in time, we just helped bring it about faster. Afghanistan is where armies go to die; machinery rots at an incredible rate, the climate goes from 6' snows in Winter to easily 120 in Summer, building roads doesn't work well because the desert swallows them up. It costs tons and tons to keep a war going in Afghanistan (as we've found out), so eventually it just isn't worth the money or loss of life (as we've also found out). Afghans perfected guerilla warfare long before we even knew it existed!

Why do they hate us? Because we've indiscriminately slaughtered their people, defiled their religion, treated them like barbarians (they aren't, and weren't when I was there, despite the conditions), TRY to force our ways on them (doesn't work too well) and there are atrocities. When I was there the Shah--the last one--was Western-thinking; he wanted to bring his country into the twentieth century. I think I've detailed how he was doing it before, like lifting the Chadri. He implemented reforms and modernized; you can't bring a country forward from essentially the time of Jesus to the twentieth century in a couple of years. He knew that, and was doing it at Afghan pace, and he knew, as every Shah did, that there could be no centralized authority, one had to work with the tribal leaders because of the isolation.

That's most of why, I believe, Russia invaded. The Shah was definitely facing our way, not theirs, and they were losing the "game". So they invaded. And got kicked out eventually. The WE invaded, as usual with absolutely no knowledge of the culture we were invading and with our typical American attitude of being the "saviors" to whom they should feel indebted. Our actions showed otherwise, as we've all been over many, many times. Of course they came to hate us.

The caveat being that we DID try to do good...we still are. But we do it wrong (don't we always?) and high-handedly. The Taliban knows how to do it better, and they share the culture.

When my family and I left, our bacha, Mehdi, begged to come with. Afghans were all convinced (most still are) that all Americans were rich...actually, the poorest among us has nothing on most Afghans; I've tried a couple of times, but it's pretty impossible for Americans to grasp how Afghans live. So our rich guys come in, run all over the country, our military treated them like shit, we don't know how to deal with the Taliban, we "bombed them back to the stone age" (they weren't far from it already, and were used to that) and kill civilians. And anyone (but Rap, who lives in his own world) can even wonder why they hate us??? Gimme a break.

They didn't hate us before. They didn't pay us much attention, as we were only in Kandahar and Kabul for the most part, and they found us, if nothing else, amusing in our inability to deal with the country, their customs, etc. They've stopped finding us silly. They NEVER found the Russians silly (partly because they kept to themselves, all lived in one big compund, whereas we rented homes of the rich, paid servants and some of us related directly to some of them).

Quote:
I'd actually heard about the mineral resources, but I was leaving them out of the discussion for now, because there's nothing to indicate that either the soviets or the US knew about it at the time.

Right on again. We knew about some, lapis lazuli and some other precious and semi-precious stones showed up in their jewelry and on the stocks of their famous guns (of which I own one)--the old English rifles they "personalized" and with most which they were fighting the Russians before we helped arm them. They are works of art; most have been bought or stolen by foreigners now--even back then. They made some gorgeous things, tables entirely out of marble mosaic with lapis and some beautiful brassware, but that's another subject. We knew some of it, but it had little interest to the Americans then and wasn't the reason we invaded.

And yes, we definitely go into countries on supposedly humanitarian grounds, but it's rarely, if ever, the only reason (or even one of the reasons). It's made us hated by many, many countries, we just don't hear about it from our MSM that much.

You got it on almost all points, Byte. As one who lived there and knew Afghans, and still has a few who've moved here, that's my take on the matter. I may be duplicating things others have said, I'm not about to read the back-and-forth idiocy lest I inadvertently read the bullshit Rap puts forward, which no doubt reflects the ignorance of far too many Americans, anti-Muslims, racists, nationalistic ignoramuses who would never bother to learn anything about anything, just spout what they believe. I bumped across too much of it after I read what Byte wrote as it is. By the way, not goat herders; sheep herders. They tended the sheep from which that tightly-curled "karakul" hide comes from, and "fat-tailed sheep" whose tails provided fat with which they cooked. Goats weren't all that common.

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Thursday, January 19, 2012 2:45 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
A lot of educated americans seem to believe something similar, and don't start me on the evolution debate again. Which country is backasswards....?

Oh indeed!

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Thursday, January 19, 2012 4:14 AM

America loves a winner!

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
Quote:
A lot of educated americans seem to believe something similar, and don't start me on the evolution debate again. Which country is backasswards....?
Oh indeed!

Critical thinking is rarely taught in the schools anymore, here in the US. However, the idea that a single event like 9/11 could be covered up, vs trying to comprehend the concept of evolution, and deep time. ( 10's of millions of years ) aren't exactly on par with each other, are they ?

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

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Thursday, January 19, 2012 5:10 AM

I actually read that the exact opposite way from what you intended.

I mean, a government covering up a single event is not exactly unprecedented. According to a lot of ex-Nazi soldiers, they were as shocked as we were when they found out about the concentration camps, and China has done such a good job of cover up with the June 4 1989 Tiananmen Square protest that the younger generations in China don't even know what it is.

Israel has only recently admitted that their warroom had the U.S.S. Liberty properly identified, their gun boats and airplanes should have known it and recognized it, and didn't.

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Saturday, January 21, 2012 3:23 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Rappy, A short course in critical thinking for you

Quote:
The goal of critical thinking is to arrive at the most reasonable beliefs and take the most reasonable actions. We have evolved, however, not to seek the truth, but to survive and reproduce. Critical thinking is an unnatural act. By nature, we're driven to confirm and defend our current beliefs, even to the point of irrationality. We are prone to reject evidence that conflicts with our beliefs and to attack those who offer such evidence.

opical index: critical thinking
A
ad hoc hypothesis
ad hominem
ad populum fallacy
affect bias
affirming the consequent
anchoring effect
apophenia
appeal to authority
appeal to tradition
argument to ignorance
autokinetic effect
availability error

There is more at
www.skepdic.com/ticriticalthinking.html

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Saturday, January 21, 2012 3:37 AM

America loves a winner!

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
I actually read that the exact opposite way from what you intended.

I mean, a government covering up a single event is not exactly unprecedented. According to a lot of ex-Nazi soldiers, they were as shocked as we were when they found out about the concentration camps, and China has done such a good job of cover up with the June 4 1989 Tiananmen Square protest that the younger generations in China don't even know what it is.

Israel has only recently admitted that their warroom had the U.S.S. Liberty properly identified, their gun boats and airplanes should have known it and recognized it, and didn't.

There may have been a lot of folks SAYING that about the death camps, but still, they had to know something really wrong was going on. And then of course there are those 1000's who were actually involved, directly, who went along and said nothing.

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

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Saturday, January 21, 2012 4:18 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
There may have been a lot of folks SAYING that about the death camps, but still, they had to know something really wrong was going on.

Why? There is a lot going on in the USA that is really wrong, and lot of people don't see it.

It's possible for an entire society to go down the wrong track and to be so blinded by its belief structure that it literally can't see what's present. An example not quite so close to home: the ancient Easter Islanders.

These people settled a forested island blessed with huge trees, the largest of which was the (now extinct) queen palm. It is a small island that one can walk across easily in less than a day, so its not like people couldn't "know" at any one time what was happening to their entire island. The islanders used the trees for many things, as a source of syrupy sap and nuts, to build homes and canoes to fish the open ocean (bringing in vitally necessary protein), and as rollers to transport giant stone faces from the island's central volcanic crater. The island was divided up into several tribes (families) and the moai were a symbol of wealth and divine blessing.

But

Quote:
Eventually Easter's growing population was cutting the forest more rapidly than the forest was regenerating.... Life became more uncomfortable-springs and streams dried up, and wood was no longer available for fires. People also found it harder to fill their stomachs, as ... timber for building seagoing canoes vanished, fish catches declined and porpoises disappeared from the table. Crop yields also declined, since deforestation allowed the soil to be eroded by rain and wind, dried by the sun, and its nutrients to be leeched from it. Intensified chicken production and cannibalism replaced only part of all those lost foods. Preserved statuettes with sunken cheeks and visible ribs suggest that people were starving. .. Surviving islanders described to early European visitors how local chaos replaced centralized government and a warrior class took over from the hereditary chiefs. The stone points of spears and daggers, made by the warriors during their heyday in the 1600s and 1700s, still litter the ground of Easter today. By around 1700, the population began to crash toward between one-quarter and one-tenth of its former number. People took to living in caves for protection against their enemies....
As we try to imagine the decline of Easter's civilization, we ask ourselves, "Why didn't they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?" ... In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation.

So Easter Island went from a thriving paradise to a barren windy rock littered with arrow points, gnawed human bones, and broken, desecrated moai.

That is one of the reasons why it is so necessary for people to keep their eyes on REALITY. Most of us walk around in a trance, believing in some kind of god or another, or that "we are the best", or that we need to feed the rich (build more moai). Some of us on this board, all of our GOP Presidential candidates, and our previous President have expressed their disdain for "reality". Anyone who dismisses reality so resoundingly is just like that Nazi solider who didn't see a thing.

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Saturday, January 21, 2012 4:34 AM

America loves a winner!

Sig.. really ? Easter Island?

I wasn't aware that the mystery of what ACTUALLY happened had been solved. I'm pretty sure there's more to the story, maybe we'll never know.

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

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Saturday, January 21, 2012 4:55 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

The death of the Easter Islanders IS pretty well-known. Unlike the Anasazi and the Mayans, the Easter Islanders collapsed relatively recently (1600s) so much of the evidence was still intact when Europeans arrived, even legends of the survivors and moai half-transported to site.

The REAL mystery is how a group pf people can so thoroughly commit collective suicide. As the question goes: What was the man thinking as he cut down the last palm tree? But I could just as easily point to Nazi Germany... an entire nation in the grip of a mass delusion about German superiority and anti-Jewish hysteria; where even the nearby greasy black smoke is blotted from acknowledgment.

So as I said before, it is possible for a whole people to go entirely off the rails. Maybe it would be useful to understand HOW that happens and apply it to our own society so that we don't follow likewise.

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Saturday, January 21, 2012 7:28 AM

Quote:

There may have been a lot of folks SAYING that about the death camps, but still, they had to know something really wrong was going on. And then of course there are those 1000's who were actually involved, directly, who went along and said nothing.

This is where hindsight is 20/20. We can say that they SHOULD have known that there was something going on, but the thing is, an unfortunate aspect of attitudes towards Jews before the concentration camps were discovered is that for various reasons Germans wouldn't really have associated with Jews or gone into the living areas Jews were restricted to. So most Germans really wouldn't have noticed that they were disappearing, and the war was a distraction that kept them from noticing.

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Sunday, January 22, 2012 7:21 PM

RIONAEIRE

Beir bua agus beannacht

I find the Easter Island story extremely interesting, something that we could learn a lot from were we to know exactly what transpired, seems like something straight out of certain types of post apocolyptic scifi, worthy of the best writers thereof, the end of hunanity in a baron waste land of their own making.

"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya

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Monday, January 23, 2012 4:48 AM

I've always been unsure of Easter Island myself. The oral traditions and pollen records suggest that it was brought on by the settlers themselves, but on the other hand, there's also evidence that the rats they brought with them (and then hunted to extinction) were a destructive invasive species that played a role in destroying all the trees as well.

Really, I think both were an issue, and it was not all one or the other, but a perfect storm of a culture incompatible with the eco-system niche and the invasive species problem. In other places where the tree species are faster growing and faster reproducing, polynesians (and their rats) have managed to maintain ecological balance fairly well, and the Rapa Nui demonstrate some fairly typical polynesian belief structures and traditions.

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Monday, January 23, 2012 6:56 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Well, there are a few things about the Easter Island story which make it somewhat unique in Polynesian history:

1) It is EXTREMELY small. A triangle shape roughly eight miles across at its widest point. No room for error, literally.

2) It is EXTREMELY isolated... 2000 miles away from either Chile and Tahiti. No place to run.

The Easter Islanders had to live with the consequences of their actions immediately. They had no time to learn from their mistakes. On other islands, even though the Polynesians hunted some large animals to extinction, over time they learned to live within their resources. On many islands, when the population got too large, the young males would paddle off in canoes, never to be seen again.

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Monday, January 23, 2012 7:31 AM

Well, quickly being relative. They started fighting each other, toppled their old ancestral idols, and reinvented their religious beliefs about 600 years after they first settled, which is about when I'd describe the situation as "complete societal collapse."

There's other islands around there it's not completely isolated, but as they ran out of trees to make boats with it definitely became so. Arguably they did wreck the place, I just happen to think that there were other factors besides the choices and traditions of the people that made it worse. Rats are surprisingly destructive under the right conditions, and I think the rats may have been a bigger factor than people give credit for.

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Monday, January 23, 2012 7:46 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Also, it wasn't an coral atoll. All of their fishing had to be of the deep-sea variety, and as they cut down the palms they destroyed their source of materials for outriggers, which meant they had no ocean-based food source (or escape), and had to depend on the island exclusively. Since they denuded the island they had to depend on farming. The other problem with cutting down the palms was that the palms literally trapped rain. Without palms the clouds passed by, rain didn't fall and the place became arid and unfarmable.

As I recall, the place wasn't entirely uninhabited when the Europeans arrived. There were scattered groups of people that told of famine, raids on other humans and cannibalism.

They really did a thorough and complete number on themselves.

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Monday, January 23, 2012 7:58 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

One of the worst epithets that you could supposedly hiss at an enemy was "Your mother's flesh is stuck in my teeth"

Anyway, BYTE, the point being that if the islanders had a firm grasp that the trees were their life.... and apparently they DIDN'T, poor sods... they would have done EVERYTHING to save them, including hunting rats. Tree-planting would have been a sacrament, and rat-hunting a holy contest. Instead, they apparently just kept cutting them down willy-nilly and foused on erecting moai.

[snark] GOOD CHOICE! [/snark]

So the islanders DID have a choice. They COULD have saved themselves, but failed to grasp the reality of their situation in time. There is a parallel to the current situation with global climate shift. There isn't a forest we won't cut down, nor a fuel we won't burn, in order to support our current lifestyle. Instead, we focus on profits and the military and religion. GOOD CHOICE! Just saying.

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Monday, January 23, 2012 8:09 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

So, this is going back to 'how is it people don't see what's going on'? as in Nazis and Jews.

Well, for the longest time no one spoke about 'the disappeared' in Argentina (Brazil, Peru, Chile et al). It wasn't in the news and it wasn't a topic of conversation. But people knew, and knew enough to keep quiet and pretend the lie was normal. And it seems to me to be far easier to hide the disappearance of a few ten thousand people than of millions. Still, they knew.

But what of other outrages 'disappeared' in recent times here in the US?

Katrina for example. The thousands displaced have for the most part not come back. The properties have not been rebuilt, instead sold at rock bottom prices to large-money interests. But we are all certainly more comfortable thinking life is back to normal and everything is OK. And nobody is agitating for either news (we demand the TRUTH!) or for redress for the victims.

Or Fukushima. There is a dribble of news that comes out from whistle-blowers, but the official pronouncements are that the reactors are at cold-shutdown, and everything is under control. Just a matter of slow-cleanup folks, nothing to see for the next 30 years, move on. Are we clamoring for the truth? For action? Well, no.

That's how extermination happens. It's not me. It's not in my control. It's too hard to speak up. I prefer my comforts.

All you have to do is make sure people have enough reason to close their eyes, ears and mouths. And voila! You can make the elephant in the room disappear.

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Monday, January 23, 2012 8:27 AM

Quote:
Anyway, BYTE, the point being that if the islanders had a firm grasp that the trees were their life.... and apparently they DIDN'T, poor sods...

I don't know. I just heard that the trees in question were an indigenous species to that island, not really found anywhere else, with a very slow growth and reproduction time. It could be that their society and traditions could have survived anywhere else BUT on that island, because they misunderstood how the trees worked and that the trees couldn't grow or be harvested at the rate they could other places that the culture was familiar with/ drawing from.

I will agree, however, that instead of acknowledging the problem (or not doing something about the rats until well after the rats had destroyed THEIR only food source on the island, that is the seeds of those trees), the leadership chose to deny it, and cover it up, until the situation was irreversible.

I also agree that the industrial military complex as we know it now is unsustainable.

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Monday, January 23, 2012 8:37 AM

Here's a little something about rats being destructive.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/03/photogalleries/bamboo-
rat-plague-missions/index.html

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Monday, January 23, 2012 8:41 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

While it may be understandable and even pitiable that the islanders didn't grasp their situation quickly enough, couldn't reverse their thinking in time to respond to their peril, it was also fatal, not just for them but for the ecology of the island.

We are very much in the same straits. As my hubby likes to point out, our existence is tenuous, we live in a hostile world at the mercy of energies beyond our control and in some cases beyond even our imagination. One good coronal mass ejection and our electrical supply goes POOF! One good earthquake, and our nuclear plants go POOF! Our highly technological and interdependent economy, which supports our very massive population, has many critical, single points of failure. We can't afford to go daydreaming our way through existence, telling ourselves stories and repeating our prayers while our world crumbles around us. Altho I think that is exactly what we will do.

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Monday, January 23, 2012 8:46 AM

Maybe.

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Monday, January 23, 2012 9:26 AM