Proceedings of the Castle Aching Parish Council, 1905

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

I read an item in the latest Washington Post which reports that the new Afghan gov't has formally asked the US to retain it's diplomatic presence in Kabul.

 

I also note that the US has announced that they took out a IS-K commander with a drone strike. That seems to back up President Biden's remarks at the press conference. 

[Annie]

3 hours ago, Malcolm 0-6-0 said:

 

I also note that the US has announced that they took out a IS-K commander with a drone strike. That seems to back up President Biden's remarks at the press conference. 

My only concern with American drone strikes is that they may have taken out half a neighbourhood as well in the process.  But that was Ok because all the people killed didn't look like white Americans and they dressed funny so they must've been IS-K as well.

[Edwardian]

To adopt a demotic American expression, whatever gloss the US, or HMG for that matter, tries to put on this, it's a sh1t show.

 

It's a defeat that is coming uncomfortably close to a fighting withdrawal, and is an unmitigated disaster in every respect for the West and the Afghans in the short, medium and long terms. 

 

With the west ultimately thrown out to the Taliban's timetable, abandoning thousands of Afghans who bought into the US-back regime because they trusted the US promise of support and who are now utterly f-cked, there is no Rorke's Drift or Dunkirk moment of redemptive consolation for humiliating defeat. Anyone in the US administration - like Biden with his ISIS revenge speech - who tries such spin, should shrivel up and expire of shame.

 

Now we are reliant on the Taliban granting 'safe passage'. The Taliban has claimed that they will not hunt out those who helped the western powers, they will let people out, they will let women work and girls be educated, all of which have already shown to be lies. No promise of safe conduct can be relied upon. Elphinstone's army, and their families, withdrew from Kabul under a promise of safe conduct in 1842.  There was only a single survivor.

 

Honestly, I'm not one for catastrophising, I hope, but the Afghan debacle could hardly be worse.  

[Northroader]

Not so, the Chinese will fly in, offer plenteous food relief, grease palms, and dig large holes in the ground. We’ll continue to get cheap batteries and electronics. Win win....... ?

[Edwardian]

1 hour ago, Northroader said:

Not so, the Chinese will fly in, offer plenteous food relief, grease palms, and dig large holes in the ground. We’ll continue to get cheap batteries and electronics. Win win....... ?

 

Yep, and while we're at it, we can pretty much wrap up democracy and human rights as failed experiments and concentrate on what we're really bothered about, the rush to kill the planet in order to acquire yet more cheap and plentiful consumer goods while ensuring that the way competitive football is played is not interfered with.  Tom Tugendhat can be sent to a Chinese labour camp for re-education in the benefits of a one-party authoritarian capitalist system (assuming Boris Johnson and Priti Patel have failed to convince him).

 

We can then stop worrying, because literally everything will be out of our hands.  It'll be such a relief when it comes. 

[webbcompound]

I think the Chinese (when you look at their policy of mass indoctrination camps applied to the Uighurs in the Tarim Basin) are just as likely to be concerned about a radical moslem state on their borders as the Russians, which is why they are currently carrying out joint military exercises with them in Central Asia. Their pragmatic state capitalism only extends so far. Afghanistan isn't on the New Silk Road, won't be a viable market for the forseeable future, but does have mineral resources. What are the chances they will be the next "Great Power" to have a go at ruling Afghanistan..

Edited August 28, 2021 by webbcompound

[rocor]

44 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 

Yep, and while we're at it, we can pretty much wrap up democracy and human rights as failed experiments and concentrate on what we're really bothered about, the rush to kill the planet in order to acquire yet more cheap and plentiful consumer goods while ensuring that the way competitive football is played is not interfered with.  Tom Tugendhat can be sent to a Chinese labour camp for re-education in the benefits of a one-party authoritarian capitalist system (assuming Boris Johnson and Priti Patel have failed to convince him).

 

We can then stop worrying, because literally everything will be out of our hands.  It'll be such a relief when it comes. 

 

One of the elements that seems to contribute to the present crisis of representative democracy, is that there is very little quality control, in regard to those representatives that are being selected.

[Edwardian]

33 minutes ago, rocor said:

 

One of the elements that seems to contribute to the present crisis of representative democracy, is that there is very little quality control, in regard to those representatives that are being selected.

 

Not much quality to control

[alastairq]

As the US has just [apparently] demonstrated, to combat whoever they take a fancy to, they no longer need 'boots on the ground'.....they can strike with relative impunity, wherever and whenever they like.

 

So endeth the concept of losing many military lives to maintain a presence...one simply has a competent system of drones..unmanned, therefore expendable.

Talking of Chinese [economic] takeovers... [as per East Africa?] what about Somerset?????

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

One of things which is often raised by critics of China is this bogus claim of their dominance of lithium deposits. Well just a heads up - Australia has a lot of the stuff as well. It's just that it has taken second place to our iron ore deposits. 

 

As for the manner of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, it was something that everyone wanted. It's a done deal. I am reminded of the British withdrawal from India - in the end it was exactly the same in what happened, however the human casualties were higher, much higher. The accounts of that period are harrowing. 

 

The end of military campaigns and colonial occupations are always such - I suggest people read up on the the number of casualties incurred as Europe sorted itself out after May 8, 1945. There wasn't a sudden outbreak of peace and magical days with no violence - it was the opposite, the killing and dying went on for several years, the difference was that there was no declared war. So to moralise is easy, but we must recognise the brutal truth that moralising like thoughts and prayers offer no solutions - they just relief our personal feelings.  

 

 

Edited August 29, 2021 by Malcolm 0-6-0

[rocor]

22 hours ago, alastairq said:

As the US has just [apparently] demonstrated, to combat whoever they take a fancy to, they no longer need 'boots on the ground'.....they can strike with relative impunity, wherever and whenever they like.

 

So endeth the concept of losing many military lives to maintain a presence...one simply has a competent system of drones..unmanned, therefore expendable.

Talking of Chinese [economic] takeovers... [as per East Africa?] what about Somerset?????

 

The ultimate weapon, the perfect assassin. If it was possible to kill a named individual wherever they may be hiding in the world. Then the charismatic jihadist would be brown bread before they had hardy got their movements underway. Terrorist commanders would be dropping like flies, one after the other, until their groups were left with no one with any organizational abilities. Dictators would rapidly leave office just as rapidly as they would leave this world.

 

What possibly could go wrong?

 

 

[webbcompound]

3 hours ago, rocor said:

What possibly could go wrong?

please note that none of the systems in this video are "future". It is just their full integration in a single swarm that is new. Also if you get to the end (at 7.08) you will see that this is produced by a bona-fide academic expert in the field a professor of computer science at Berkeley.

 

Edited August 29, 2021 by webbcompound

[Regularity]

3 hours ago, rocor said:

What possibly could go wrong?

There’s the inherent contradiction in trying to establish the importance of the rule of law whilst simultaneously ignoring it.

The rule of law and the payment of debts are the two pillars of (western) democracy, without which our societies cannot function. The primacy of the rule of law above all else was first recorded in England in 1215. It is well established in our way of thinking(although it was refuted and reinstated soon afterwards!), but those laws and their interpretation have changed over time: universal suffrage at age 18 is a relatively new thing in the UK, for example, and homosexuality between men was made illegal for a few decades, whereas discrimination and the ability to buy influence were perfectly acceptable.

 

We may not like a different viewpoint and may wish to fight to protect our own people and our interests, but it is arrogant of use to presume that our viewpoint on “human rights” is the only one or the correct one, even if we believe it to be the best viewpoint.

 

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

8 hours ago, Regularity said:

There’s the inherent contradiction in trying to establish the importance of the rule of law whilst simultaneously ignoring it.

 

 

 

Indeed, but long recognised. It's called cognitive dissonance. We are capable of holding two mutually exclusive views at the same time and we seem to do it with apparent ease. It's probably what stops us from succumbing to the age old phenomenon of "paralysis though analysis" i.e. overthinking outcomes at the real risk of preventing any possible necessary remedial action from being carried out. 

 

We like to pretend that we act for the best carefully weighing options - what we actually do is follow the natural imperative which is act to preserve ourselves first. The video of a future world with pre-programmed drones carrying out search and destroy missions is little different to the world we have now where for reasons either political or religious people kill without compunction. Essentially there is no difference between a Nazi concentration camp official sorting newly arrived inmates into those of work value and those for immediate death because of age or infirmity, and a modern jihadist suicide bomber walking into a crowd and detonating an explosive vest. The one small thing in the favour of the AI drone is that it can be more precisely targeted. 

 

But then all three, the concentration camp official, the jihadist and the drone are through either training, indoctrination or programming responding to outside decisions based on the ethical ideas of their employers. Their employers are us humans and that's where cognitive dissonance comes in. How we handle that is down to how much we are prepared to honestly assess what it is to be human, and I'm not terribly convinced that we can overcome the strength of our innate genetic imperative to achieve that wisdom. 

[monkeysarefun]

30 minutes ago, Malcolm 0-6-0 said:

The one small thing in the favour of the AI drone is that it can be more precisely targeted.

 

Drones pffff.  Mate, if theres one country that has the mad skills to beat them  its Australia with our years of experience of much scarier  attacks every September.

 

Ya just need a bike helmet with eyes drawn on the back and twigs sticking out the top  - no worries, problem solved. 

 

 

 

Edited August 29, 2021 by monkeysarefun

[Regularity]

10 hours ago, Malcolm 0-6-0 said:

Their employers are us humans and that's where cognitive dissonance comes in. How we handle that is down to how much we are prepared to honestly assess what it is to be human, and I'm not terribly convinced that we can overcome the strength of our innate genetic imperative to achieve that wisdom.

As the Milgram experiment suggests, it’s very easy to get other humans to obey orders and do nasty things, especially if they are told it is for the benefit of society. The cognitive dissonance resolves into “I was only doing what I was told to do”. This has been determined (during the aftermath of WW2) as ethically unacceptable, which creates further dissonance, this time at a societal level, where empirical science tells us one thing about human behaviour, but philosophy and ethics expects a “higher standard”.

 

The original conception of a “holy war” or jihad was to say, “Only God can decide if war is justifiable. You are not God, therefore you cannot go to war.” Unfortunately, take the easiest route to division (them and us ) via the simplest mob manipulation (the false dichotomy of “you are either with us or against us”) and add to that the fervour of religious zeal from prophecy (“God gave me a vision, and we must crush the infidels”) and well, here we are in the modern world.

 

There is an ethical strand within the three major Abrahamic religions which put simply shows some evolution of sensitivity over the centuries:

Old Testament: retaliation is limited to no more than was done to you.

New Testament: do not react to violence.

The Q’ran: invite your enemy into your house. 

[Nearholmer]

25 minutes ago, Regularity said:

Only God can decide if war is justifiable. You are not God, therefore you cannot go to war.”

Actually, it was more like: “Only God can decide if war is justifiable. You are not God, therefore you have to get The Pope to ask him for permission on your behalf. If he says ‘yes’, then it’s OK to do the most appalling things to whoever you are at war with, because you have been granted absolution in advance.”

 

Therein, I think lies a clue to human nature, in that we are capable of doing appalling things, but because we also have a conscience (well, most people to some degree, psychopaths possibly not), so are forever looking for higher powers to get our own consciences off our backs, and will accept any higher power to do that for us, the boss, the sergeant, God, the woman next door, a mate who said it was alright.

We are also phenomenally good at silencing our consciences in the absence of peer observation of our actions, so tend to do bad stuff in secret, if we think we can get away with it (anonymity on social media ….. trouble all the way!).

 

We seem to be hard-wired to need a parent-figure both to give formal permission to do appalling things, and to threaten punishment if we do them without permission. God the Father, historically.

 

I wonder (without much hope) whether we will ever transcend that condition, and be able to exercise genuinely enlightened  self-control.

 

 

Edited August 30, 2021 by Nearholmer

[Regularity]

30 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

You are not God, therefore you have to get The Pope to ask him for permission on your behalf.

Other religious “leaders” are also available.

[wagonman]

The problem with sanctifying the 'Rule of Law' is that laws are written by fallible people. There have been many times in the past – Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa are just two that come to mind – when the Law was clearly wrong and had to be opposed in the name of humanity.

 

 

[Regularity]

35 minutes ago, wagonman said:

The problem with sanctifying the 'Rule of Law' is that laws are written by fallible people. There have been many times in the past – Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa are just two that come to mind – when the Law was clearly wrong and had to be opposed in the name of humanity.

So, what do you suggest?

[Nearholmer]

1 hour ago, wagonman said:

when the Law was clearly wrong

…… when viewed from within the framework of our belief-system.
 

The adherents of the belief systems that threw-up these repugnant laws clearly didn’t think they were wrongful laws at all.

 

So, the clashes that occur are really between belief systems, rather than between codes of laws, which are secondary emanations of belief systems.

 

It is almost as if a Darwinian struggle is continually going-on between belief systems, very, very slowly tending towards the most workable/sustainable belief system eventually becoming so dominant as to be practically universal

 

If you stand back far enough, become a Martian or something, it becomes clear that none of the belief systems in play anywhere right now is ‘perfect’ enough to become universal. They all have flaws that will lead to them being superseded: western liberal democracy, for all its many positives, fails a lot of people who live under it, and inevitably gets tangled-up with unsustainable models of resource consumption; most quasi-communistic, and certainly almost every God-bothering belief system tends to crush or oppress some minority, or ride rough-shod over anyone that thinks differently, which isn’t sustainable, people eventually buck against it; populist right-wing systems are real rubbish, usually imploding after the life of one demagogue; etc.

 

Upshot? A very long time to go in the Darwinian struggle of belief systems yet, with existence punctuated by periodic flare-ups as the systems clash.

 

Oh, and to add cheeriness, the tribes of belief-system adherents fight not only over beliefs, but over resources. Even if nobody believed anything, we were all simple animals incapable of troubling ourselves with mental models of how the world ought to be, we’d have to form tribes to fight over resources, so it’s quite handy that we can use belief systems as rallying flags, and don’t have to invent other ones. 

[alastairq]

2 hours ago, wagonman said:

when the Law was clearly wrong and had to be opposed in the name of humanity.

 I can think of many occasions when situations which we , now, find intolerable, were in fact, considered by all & sundry to be for the very best of reasons.

 

For example, the Canadian Government's policy of 'civilising' children of First NAtions Families' by enforced removal from said families, and incarceration in Government run [or, more likely, outsourced] ''Schools'' , with parents denied recourse, appeal, or even, visitation rights!

Said schools being run often by religious groups of both sides of the coin.....the whole misguided scheme being conducted for what were seen by the 'elders' of the State , the very best of reasons!

 Still happening right up until just over 20 years ago......[think, Tony Blair's Prime ministership, Gulf War 1, turn of this century, to put things into a proper time perspective?]

 

Except now they are finding the mass graves of children who died in ''State'' care, far too many deaths of which went unrecorded!  Many children dying of abuse & neglect by the very religious groups who pontificate about the woes of the world!

 

Not very well publicized as it is too embarrassing for certain quarters to  contemplate, even today.....

 

In my lifetime, the US Army practiced a rigid colour bar.....not in the slightest bit acceptable in my eyes....

 

Let us not forget, how close, time-wise, to this day, are those things we now abhor, but did little about  at a high enough level, as I said, even in my lifetime!!

[Regularity]

5 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

so it’s quite handy that we can use belief systems as rallying flags, and don’t have to invent other ones

I think it is as much a case of people who value power and influence (for themselves) using anything populist in terms of the largest group pitted against a much smaller (but large enough to be a supposed threat) group. Belief systems tend to fall into that. Divide and rule…

 

Most Presidents of the USA realise and accept that they are the president of all US citizens, not just those who voted for them (which given the usual turnout, would be a fairly small part of the electorate). The narcissist who was recently voted out shows the dangers that can arise with a president who thinks that because he got in - despite losing the popular vote - then everyone must agree with what he says. Populists behave like dictators, as long as they feel they can get away with it (qv, the UK Premier).

 

Inevitably we return to quoting a drunkard who proposed eugenics at one point in his life: [liberal] democracy is the worst form of government. Apart from all the others that have been tried.

[wagonman]

On 30/08/2021 at 13:22, Regularity said:

So, what do you suggest?

 

That's where it gets difficult of course. What I do not propose is the use of military force to impose 'liberal democracy' on third parties. It's hard enough preserving it in our own country when this government is constantly trying to subvert it.

[Nearholmer]

Which, for some reason just made me think of gardening. 
 

It’s never good to go bash-crashing over into your neighbour’s garden, chopping down his plants, clearing the ground, and, in this case, forgetting to plant and water the sort you like, while at the same time leaving your own lawn to run rampant, weeds to flourish in the flowerbeds, and tender plants to die of frost and drought, thereby over stretching yourself and yielding two messed-up gardens. Unless…..

 

The reason you really want into his garden was to secure monopoly access to the well just beyond, and all the talk about his tasteless geraniums, and the bindweed crawling under the fence from his side, was just a pretext.

 

Next week, Bob Flowerdew will be with us at Little Fumbling Parish Hall, to talk about the best time to cut-back your wisteria, and force-projection in a post 9/11 world.