"War on terror" is just a ugly concept and not one that seem to work.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/911-civili...

Oh and something that does not get too much attention, either:

the taliban back then only refused to hand over Bin Laden without evidence presented, that he indeed was responsible, which at that time was not at all clear. And even till date, there never was a proper criminal investigation and court ruling about it all. Probably because of the Saudi connections.

Most of them killed by the same people the US targeted. Funny how all responsibility is always given to the West even when the people doing the killing are their enemies.

>the taliban back then only refused to hand over Bin Laden without evidence presented

Also after he publicly confessed, not to mention his previous crimes. Their refusal had nothing to do with 'evidence'.

It's barely ever given to the west, and never in major media. And when someone in an anonymous internet comment dares suggest we might be morally accountable for vast amounts of innocent deaths - a trifle of a blip of a nothing in the discourse - we can count on certain people getting their feewings hurt and becoming overly defensive. "I'm always being accused!" cried Tony Soprano.

> No one knows with certainty how many people have been killed and wounded in Iraq since the 2003 United States invasion. However, we know that between 184,382 and 207,156 civilians have died from direct war related violence caused by the U.S., its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces from the time of the invasion through October 2019. [1]

[1] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/ir...

It was a 24/7 talking point by everyone on the left politically from the day the US invaded Iraq until the day Bush left office. Across all forums, anywhere a comment could be posted.

Google: "nytimes iraq death count" or "nytimes bush iraq civilian deaths"; or any number of dozens of variations on that same premise.

You must have missed the endless media parade about the Bush death count, and deaths from drone strikes. The headlines and discussion were everywhere across social media, mainstream media, on blogs.

You must be kidding, or never ever read any major Western media.

> And when someone in an anonymous internet comment dares

Oh no. Someone disagreed with you on the internet. It's horrible even thinking about this. Nobody should ever be victimized like this.

War introduces a lot of entropy into nations. It is the ultimate dice roll in terms of outcomes. You are taking a gamble. And history would suggest that civilians suffer hugely whatever the political outcome. If we know that then how can we shut our eyes to that effect?

That just sounds crazy given that our first retaliation for 9/11 was Iraq. Which had nothing to do with 9/11, and further...no "WMDs".

The first retaliation for 9/11 was not Iraq. That's a really bizarrely inaccurate claim.

The US invaded Afghanistan and removed the Taliban from control of the country by the end of 2001. Operation Enduring Freedom launched in October 2001.

The Iraq invasion was 2003.

The US initially sent its special forces into Afghanistan shortly after 9/11 to work with the Northern Alliance to route the Taliban and pursue bin Laden, and then invaded.

Source?

Bin Laden initially declined responsibility, saying his hosts the taliban, would not allow such a operation.

(surely not out of being nice, but because of wanting to keep the power)

And later (after he confessed) the US was on full war with the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden not with them anymore.

I'm referring to that, not to his preinasvion evasion.

The Taliban didn't even cut relations with him or his associates after he confessed, and they were not without influence in AfPak.

Surely the Taliban should have been very upset with their 'guests' for getting them involved in Al-Qaeda's war, right? Unless the Taliban knew from the start... Obviously they did, since this wasn't Al-Qaeda's first attack against America.

As I wrote, there's little reason to give any credence to their not knowing, and even if we did, there were plenty of other things they should have given up Bin Laden for.

I am pretty sure, they were upset and maybe there were actual heads rolling behind the scenes. But on the outside, they had the US as common enemy. An enemy that hit them both as hard as he could, without making any difference.

So of course at that time, talking about extradiction was over.

But the Taliban while at power did made the civic offer to extradict Bin Laden, if presented with evidence.

So of course, it is not sure, if they actually would have done it. Maybe they would have ended in a civic war by themself over it.

But we never knew, because the US choose to go the brutal way. No evidence. No extradiction. Just war.

Now 20 years later with the Taliban back in power and stronger than ever, I can just say, awesome outcome with this approach.

No evidence of it, and I find this entire debate odd.

Again, the Taliban hosted a terrorist group which had publicly declared war against America, and launched known attacks - all this well known before 9-11. What did anyone expect this public antagonist group to do? Play volleyball?

If someone hosted a group called "Death to X" and the group predictably attacked X, that someone shouldn't get to claim innocence. Especially not after the nth attack!

>Now 20 years later with the Taliban back in power and stronger than ever

A completely predictable result of the ideological way the retreat was done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Shah_Massoud#Assassinati...

A different way to think about it: what if individuals independently taking small steps in only sufficient to maintain the status quo? What if the true state of reality is that something larger is needed, and is possible, but will never come to be because we never even tried to find it?

In times of crisis, it's the local network that will support you, not the federal government. As much as we've been told to embrace individualism over the past century, we're still a cooperative species and will default to cooperation when things turn bad.

If you want to see how well top-down nation building works out, ask the Afghans. The reason the new government never took hold was that there was no political will to address corruption so the old system still endured in local bonds and power structures. You can't have structural reforms without addressing root causes.

Only for a given subset of implementations (ones that require billions of dollars). Also: there are many billions of dollars looking for a place to be deployed, so it's not even a hard stop either, only a major difficulty.

I suspect there are other barriers in the mix that are a bit harder to see though (for some, at least), and may also have very powerful active defence measures that are maintained and improved on an ongoing basis.

> In times of crisis, it's the local network that will support you, not the federal government. As much as we've been told to embrace individualism over the past century, we're still a cooperative species and will default to cooperation when things turn bad.

I very much agree, and this is only one of many ~base-capabilities that ship as defaults from the factory. Perhaps one could make use of these services if one could reverse engineer their behavior, and discover the various API's that must be called.

> If you want to see how well top-down nation building works out, ask the Afghans.

This is but one example (therefore, not scientific thinking - the best kind of thinking...or so "they" say).

> The reason the new government never took hold was that there was no political will to address corruption so the old system still endured in local bonds and power structures. You can't have structural reforms without addressing root causes.

110% agree. So if one was to dig down into the infinitely complex causality, deeper and deeper, what plausibly most important root cause(s) might one find at the very lowest levels?

Please. This is just going to create more toxic conversation and politics. Can we just focus on 9/11 victims and mourne peacefully? Rest of the top level comments here are sharing stories about their personal experience. I know you mean well but its the wrong place to bring this up.

Instead all we got was 60 words in 2001 followed by that lousy PATRIOT Act, two decades of drone strikes, several case studies in failed nation building, and then for Covid a president pushing ineffective treatments and ridiculing medical experts.

Yes, it's insulting. But not because it's untrue but because it's hurtful.

How can you help the people who dont want vaccines? Are you going to force them to have it?

If it were for me super markets should be mask only anyway. I hate old people and kids running around coughing at everything I maybe would have wanted to eat. Even before covid

Wait, so have you been wearing masks before Covid to protect other people who cannot be vaccinated for flu and other respiratory diseases?

If not then you are a hypocrite.

But yeah since I catched a bad case of regional flu in the Airport of Kuala Lumpur about 8 years ago I do wear masks in some situations. Especially when I feel sick but have to go out.

So you dont follow your own advice by not wearing a mask when you are not sick and yet you expect others to do what you say. What is that saying "do as i say not as i do"

No, they inflict massive negative externalities on society through healthcare.

> while being a bit more careful with covid will potentially prevent sickness in a lot of people.

Classic Safety-ism. Even today, 20 years after 9/11 and we are still paying a ludicrous price for this logic.

> The ludicrous and horrible price - of wearing masks?

Of shutting down schools? of closing borders and separating families, which since you want to trivialize things I didn't bring up, a 3 year old in my family was separated from her mother for a year and a half.

I didn't specify wearing masks.. but no one knows what the effect will be of kids wearing masks all day. They are at a time of critical development & learning to read faces, non verbally communicate etc. It may turn out to have a terrible price.

Social distancing, closing schools, etc. were proven methods that showed the difference between cities with horrible losses and much better outcomes for the Spanish Flu. (Edit: Washington had his troops in the revolutionary war quarantined, separated, and inoculated when small pox became a problem. ) We knew all that.

This weekend, we are mourning the tragical losses of a terror attack that cost the lives of 3000 innocent people. Because of people like you, who call proven measures against COVID ‘safety-isms’ we lose that many people every other day.

If anything, we clearly didn’t do enough ‘safety-isms’.

That is baseless speculation.

> Social distancing, closing schools, etc. were proven methods that showed the difference between cities with horrible losses and much better outcomes for the Spanish Flu.

Where is the source? And that was a completely different disease, which had the worst outcomes for young people, so maybe taking pre-cautions for them made sense.

> Because of people like you, who call proven measures against COVID ‘safety-isms’ we lose that many people every other day.

You should take your dogmatism & personal attacks to another forum, where it is welcome.

> we lose that many people every other day.

Tragic, but they are elderly, chronically sick and had a life expectancy of less than 5 years. Also tragically under accepted normal & non idealogical circumstances, we loose around 8,000 people a day in the US.

Even if the U.S. had managed to simply reach the average of the world of 0.058% mortality, i.e. competing against such beacons of healthcare and wealth as the Congo, the U.S. outcome would have been a mere 190k, i.e. 470k souls saved.

Unless you're suggesting that U.S. Americans are somehow inherently inferior to people in other countries, or that the health care system is the world's worst, one would think that the differences will lie in policy and different measures would have changed the outcome.

I'll leave it as an exercise to you to draw a fairer comparison, maybe by comparing to OECD countries rather than all of them.

Astounding, how generous you are with other people's lives. Dogmatism is overlooking the data and holding on to your misbelief. You will know more about that than I do, I am afraid.

> competing against such beacons of healthcare and wealth as the Congo

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has had 1.23 deaths per 100k population from Covid [1]. Why do you think the US has 200x deaths per population than the DRC ?

> Unless you're suggesting that U.S. Americans are somehow inherently inferior to people in other countries

Yes people are not all the same, and those different factors effect outcomes. The US has a large populations that are elderly, chronically sick, urban, highly mobile etc, were tested for covid, etc.

Saying hundreds of thousands of people could have been saved in the US is highly speculative.

1. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

Many people, including little children, are expected to wear these masks 8 hours a day.

You have no idea what damage you are causing for the lower classes, the less fortunate, and American public school children.

Nor do you understand the effect this has had on the campaign for mass vaccination.

I can assure you this is significant. Minority enclaves in my city (Chicago), largely regard masks as "white people bullshit". I work in these communities.

It's not a stretch to see why they apply that same logic to vaccine mandates (even if the vaccines would be beneficial for most of their community).

Many people, such as doctors, nurses, certain manufacturing jobs wear masks for much longer stretches of time, for many decades already. They are fine, it works really well.

But you are right, I do not understand the effect of mask wearing on vaccination. Care to elaborate?

I still fail to see the extraordinary “burden” “hardship”, “sacrifice” of - wearing a mask as a proven way to save lives?

Would you feel better if there was some medal attached, maybe “Great Hero of the Fight against COVID”?

Quite amusing to me that you jump to that. It speaks volumes about what motivates you.

Are you ready to finally admit you were mistaken about covid vs influenza mortality in children? And to retract your slanderous statements that I was "lying", "spreading propaganda"?

I know it's much easier to snipe at me with snide comments like the one above. If that's all that you're interested in, rather than a substantive discussion, well, that wouldn't surprise me given the totality of our interaction over the past few days.

Good thing the US doesn't have socialized healthcare and private insurers generally exclude preexisting conditions.

> Classic Safety-ism. Even today, 20 years after 9/11 and we are still paying a ludicrous price for this logic.

Funny how the "safety-ism" after 9/11 was pushed by the Republicans and now the Republicans are complaining about Democrats pushing safety measures against Covid.

Except y'know most of these measures actually drastically reduce transmission (tho I agree some are ill-conceived, like I'm not sure curfews do anything but encourage people to meet indoors where transmission risk is significantly higher). Banning shampoo bottles was mostly theatrics.

Bonus:

> no one knows what the effect will be of kids wearing masks all day

I'm going to avoid the bait to reference mask wearing in Asian countries, but sure: that sounds like an important reason to crack down on Covid hard and fast rather than go back an forth on half-assed policies and artificially expand the duration of the crisis and risk a perpetual cycle of masks and vaccinations as poorer communities keep generating resistant mutations.

So I take it you support the mass production of vaccinations and free distribution to developing countries to bring down infection numbers world-wide and protect the US from foreign mutants? If perpetuating this pandemic could traumatize an entire generation of children, maybe this should be considered a national defense emergency and the US should invest a few more billions and rally its allies to do the same. Open up the patents to also get the countries on board that are distrustful of US-supplied vaccines.

Or are you trying to argue that Covid isn't that bad or that it's better if we let children catch it because they have a lower mortality?

So your answer is to go sophist ad-hominem, by putting me in a group you find unfavorable rather than addressing the content of what I said. Am I letting the terrorist win or am I killing grandmas ? therefore you can justify x.

> Except y'know most of these measures actually drastically reduce transmission

This is very un-specific, but aside from vaccinations & living in a country with island like borders, very little has been definitely shown to reduce spread.

> maybe this should be considered a national defense emergency and the US should invest a few more billions

I'm not especially against that, even though I do think that unfortunately in practice these things risk end up just being vehicles for cronyism rather than tackling the core issue.

Try nearly zero. Much lower than other common pathogens like flu and RSV. Which is why the UK is not recommending mass vaccination of teenagers aged 12-15, or any children younger.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58438669

This is why many argue that the focus on covid in children is largely about the irrational fears of parents and educators who have not seriously looked at the data.

Stop spreading lies like the lower COVID mortality compared to flu. It’s disgusting.

Stop lying about what the article says, it’s not about the national recommendation of a country (that famously botched their response).

“Nearly zero” means nothing for societal outcome, certainly for mortality. What is the number of people infected, “nearly zero” of which die? Then these numbers become meaningful.

More children have been shot in Chicago in the past year than have died from covid in the entire country.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9979619/More-childr...

I'm finished communicating with you. You're not participating in this discussion in good faith.

I assume you're embarrassed that you're so confused about the data.

For your second point, after you torture what the article actually says into a alleged national policy of the UK, I suggest you read up on exponential growth. It reminds me of the discussions in this country in March 2020, when everything was written on the wall, but people looked at absolute numbers and proclaimed that it’s not going to be a problem.

See, if you were simply lying about how expensive your car is, I couldn’t care less. But it’s propaganda pieces like yours that kill people, currently at a rate of half a 9/11 per day, all of it completely avoidable.

Go ahead. I'll wait.

https://freopp.org/comparing-the-risk-of-death-from-covid-19...

"Based on that analysis, what is striking is that those under the age of 15 are at significantly lower risk of death from COVID-19 than of the flu. Under our assumptions, for example, children under the age of 15 have a 1 in 155,535 chance of dying of influenza, but a 1 in 1.2 million chance of dying of COVID-19."

"For toddlers, the relative risk is even more pronounced. We estimate that Americans between ages 1–4 are 3.4 times more likely to die of influenza than of COVID-19."

In an attempt to head off your inevitable criticism that I'm citing "conservative propaganda", here's an article from New York Magazine making similar arguments:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/the-kids-were-safe-f...

"according to the CDC, among children the mortality risk from COVID-19 is actually lower than from the flu. The risk of severe disease or hospitalization is about the same."

"the infection fatality rate for those aged 5 to 9 is less than 0.001 percent"

Note that these same sources also espouse that children are safe because of their lower infection risk but then go and compare the mortality rate to the entire population to come up with grandiose claims. When looking at the actual official UK numbers (i.e. comparing deaths after a confirmed infection to confirmed infections) child mortality is indeed significantly lower but only by a factor of 10 compared to adults. This paints a far grimmer picture than all this talk about there being a multiple orders of magnitude difference.

It's also worth pointing out that the vaccine supply is limited, so the question of whether children should be vaccinated is one of prioritization. If children already have a low likelihood of infection and have better outcomes than the average adult, it makes more sense to use that vaccine on an adult than a child.

German media also suggests the decision for the German vaccination authority to not recommend a third round of vaccinations at the moment is similarly driven by the idea that it's more important to make sure everyone has some level of immunization than that some people have a very high level of immunization: the goal is to control spread, not to protect individuals. Note that the German authority has greenlit vaccinations for 12+ year olds, so their risk evaluation seems to consider the likelihood of children spreading the virus or potentially developing chronic conditions in the future to be significant enough. Of course you can't compare these risks directly due to differences e.g. in the school systems and pandemic-related accommodations.

And? They still kill people and clog the healthcare systems around the world. Worse a lot of those are aggravated by obesity and smoking, all of which not only are voluntary actions but also generate profits. Also obesity is contagious: http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1646997,0...

Also average Covid death age is only 4 years lower than the pre-pandemic life expectancy in the US. And what is the biggest aggravating factors for Covid-19? Obesity and smoking.

You pass on your way of life to your children. Your friends and family reinforce each other's decisions every time you make a meal, make plans, etc.

This stuff is all vitally important. And in fact, we would have lower rates of covid fatality if a larger percentage of our population took this seriously.

Luckily getting a shot is really really easy, so we do have a lot of influence over deaths from COVID.

Arguably, retrofitting every important building in the country to be well ventilated is a challenge on a similar scale to changing our deeply ingrained unhealthy cultural habits.

I was getting take out a couple of weeks ago and a woman brought her coughing child to the restaurant, which doesn't seem great, so I have noticed people being less alert now that a significant portion of people has been vaccinated here.

>Arguably, retrofitting every important building in the country to be well ventilated is a challenge on a similar scale to changing our deeply ingrained unhealthy cultural habits.

Yeah, I hadn't looked at it that way, but that's indeed a big task.

But to respond to your point(?) covid patients that get sick enough to go to the ICU are there for a long time, while heart patients get better (or die) significantly faster, I recently heard an ICU doctor say on TV here (the Netherlands) that a covid ICU bed could help up to 8 heart patients, which makes it extra important to reduce the amount of covid cases.

That wasn't what I was trying to do at all, and I can't really see how you could get that from my initial reply, so I don't think we are going to agree on anything here, have a nice day.

Firstly, Ok: I take full responsibility for advocating for a temporary reduction of rights to stop the spread of a novel virus with the aim of reducing strain on the healthcare system. I also think that we made the right choice, waiting for EMA approval before starting vaccinating.

Right now here about 77% of the people (17,4 million) has been fully vaccinated and everything except nightclubs and big festivals has been reopened. I went to see The Green Knight a couple of weeks ago, didn't need a mask, or proof of vaccination/negative test. People haven't died en-masse from the vaccines, so things are pretty good right now.

There is still a big backlog in delayed care right now, so if the seasonal aspect of covid means we gotta partially shut down some things the next winter, so be it.

OTOH, a pandemic with high peaks of demand is hard to plan for. And having excess capacity on hand for such an occasion is hard when everyone is always upset about how expensive healthcare is.

If we assume that the biggest cause of heart disease is obesity and poor general health-keeping, the solution there is to completely change your lifestyle: new diet, new exercise regimen, etc. While I think people who are at risk should probably do that, that's a much heavier lift than getting a COVID vaccine.

But given that we mostly don't know how to avoid all forms of cancer (aside from things like "don't smoke and you probably won't get lung cancer"), I don't see what point you're trying to make there. I mean, ok, yes, we should all get vaccinated against COVID in order to make it vanishingly unlikely we'll have to take an ICU bed away from a cancer patient (who got cancer through no fault of their own) who might need it.

(Hint: it would be more dangerous to get a shot if you’ve already had it than to not, but it won’t make Fauxi & friends any money if you don’t. Gee, I wonder why they don’t advertise that.)

Get off your high horse and do your fucking part. People are dying of Covid19, and a lot of people who survive end up with permanent disabilites, while you engage in mental gymnastics with your hypotheticals!

It's not mental gymnastics to point out the information overload on one side of this issue, which makes absolutely no medical or scientific sense, yet makes a ton of profit "cents".

Given the fact that you've made an absolutist statement about immunity that doesn't track with the studies I've read, I suspect it's sadly the latter.

(Natural immunity may give rise to more mature memory B-cells, which could be better than the memory B-cells you get with vaccination, but the vaccines do provoke your immune system to produce many more antibodies than found in the aftermath of natural infection. So the jury is kinda still out on this.)

The state of the world is obvious from the activity on this forum. If these are supposed to be "intelligent hackers" here, god help the human race.

The pandemic is first and foremost a health issue, not a resource issue.

If you receive care and have nocomorbid conditions, Covid for most won’t be dangerous, certainly not as dangerous as the 1918 pandemic, which killed young people.

Covid 19 results in mild symptoms for most young people. In comparison, the 1918 pandemic was most deadly if you were young, or old.

There is a qualitative difference between the diseases.

Actually there has been a lot of research showing obesity as a social virus is contagious.

In contrast, heart disease and cancer are much more expensive to mitigate. Regular exercise reduces the incidence of some heart diseases for the average person by about ~50% (estimating from the graph) [2]. We have no cheap way of reducing cancer incidence (besides vaccines for some viruses that cause cancer) — for example, intervening in cases of substance addiction is expensive.

So even if your comparison was correct (it's not), how is it relevant? Are you trying to argue that the government should compel people to completely alter their lifestyles before they should mandate masks or vaccines? That makes no sense, because 1) preventing cancer requires mandating vaccines and 2) the interventions are orders of magnitude more expensive.

Or, are you trying to suggest that the deaths of 650,000 people (in the US) are insignificant because there are some aggregate diseases that kill more? And therefore, because we can't stop all death, it's pointless to try to even mitigate some death?

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

[2] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/01.CIR.00000488...