I think much of the problem is Islam + Central Asia/Mongols/steppe conquests, and I think either is bad enough on its own.
And if you'd please not post in the flamewar style generally, we'd appreciate it.
Protip: none of them
I'm being sarcastic. It terrifies me, but now I need to hear it.
Though to be honest, I expect it will be run-of-the-mill cultural chauvinism and I'll be disappointed.
I’ll refrain from judging your viewpoint, but I don’t think it’s controversial to interpret this as trying to judge cultures objectively, no? That inherently includes a lot of trust in one’s viewpoint and knowledge to judge off of. Just the snippet you posted here does not inspire a lot of confidence.
Being unable to discern between the product of a society and the situation after an exogenous power funded and armed the outer most fringe of deplorable religious extremism, under the delusion they would be fighting the commies and noone else, is not the good look you think it is.
But hey, I’m sure you regard your own opinion as something valuable and positive, it’s your own after all ;)
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilisation_in_...
How much time should pass before it's no longer seen as America's fault ? Assuming you're referring to the arming of the mujaheddin.
Instead of talking about what ifs, why don’t you have a look at what has been. Pre-Soviet Afghanistan is truely worlds apart from anything you’d now connect with living in Afghanistan. If you so desperately want the afghans to be at fault for their demise, how did that happen?
Close relatives of mine try to reform and expand Kandahar university clinic and med school, they all have built a comfortable living abroad, they owe that to no one. Of course, there are more than enough elements in Afghanistan that have contributed to their collective fate, profited and now hinder progress. I’m not here to defend them, i despise them. But that’s nothing different to any other country, they just have wayyy more destruction and suffering to foster and grow. Germany just needed a few decades of, in comparison laughable, economic mismanagement, for new politicians talking about gas chambers[0] to emerge. Let’s not act like that’s a uniquely afghan reaction to misery of any sort. Still horrible from all perspectives, no denying that.
[0] https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article206589067/AfD...
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
First you responded to a friendly comment with a swipe and then you added more downthread to make sure you turned it into a slur. I feel ashamed of HN when I see people treating others this way.
If that's not what you intended, please make more effort to disambiguate your intent in the future. That's every commenter's responsibility here.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I wholly agree, as an American citizen
The United Kingdom went from a country with enormously outsized global influence to just another European nation. The downward spiral has been stark. The economy stagnates, more and more people live in poverty, and voters decided to inflict further self-harm by cutting themselves off from economic treaties with neighbors based on an illusion of self-importance.
If America ends up in the same place, its collapse will be harder and more dangerous.
In my experience, UK is a country that has managed to combine the worst of America with the worst of Europe with very few redeeming benefits except for the richest 0.1%, who are indeed very well taken care of in England.
Are you assuming nobody here has lived or visited the EU or UK?
There are tons of homeless in London, Berlin, and Paris. It is equivalent to the worst American cities.
London is definitely a better city for the super rich though. It is essentially a butler economy - most residents are involved in the industries that cater to super rich foreigners.
Spending two minutes to look on Wikipedia shows that, for example, comparing UK to USA: the UK is technically worse in "homeless per capita" (where homeless includes people forced to sleep in the houses of friends or family) - at 56.1 per 100k for UK, and 19.5 per 100k for USA. However when it comes to "unsheltered", i.e. what people generally think of "homeless" as meaning, and what's visible on streets, the US is far worse at 12 per 100k compared to UK's 0.9 per 100k. (France at 4.5 per 100k, Germany doesn't have a comparable number listed and I'm too lazy to look for one.)
I have lived in two of the European cities you mentioned, visited many others as well as a number of major US cities, and I agree that in all of them it is possible to see extremely depressing scenes with far too many people forces to live on the streets. But it's ridiculous to think you could compare any two city's homeless/unsheltered problems based on visiting or even living in those cities without actually studying the situation / looking at statistics.
Perhaps you read parent comment as implying there are literally zero homeless people in Europe, which obviously isn't true, and technically US and European unsheltered numbers are indeed "comparable" as I've just proven by comparing them - but I feel if the difference is the US having 12x as many people in that position it's misleading, to the point of being effectively wrong, to call that a comparable situation.
What are we calling 'unsheltered' versus 'homeless'?
America is full of oddballs who live #vanlife or couch surf or bounce between motels. Is that what we are calling 'unsheltered'?
> Every time I've seen statistics comparing, they disagree with your anecdote.
We both know the Churchill saying. Hard to parse the statistics you provided but what I am talking about is bona-fide homeless on the street that you walk past in the city. Not some Barista who is technically not on a lease but lives at her boyfriends house.
The stats in it differentiate between those two types of homelessness, and says that US is actually better than UK when counting "some Barista who is technically not on a lease but lives at her boyfriends house", however drastically worse for "bona-fide homeless on the street" (the official term for which is "unsheltered").
You should read the book Treasure Islands by Nick Shaxson.
The UK may not be the global military/political power it once was (and that's probably a good thing), but it is still very much in the middle of the global economy (and not in a good way).
This isn't to refute any of your points, but it was an eye-opening read.
Seems to be not only inevitable, but currently in progress.
If the only way to sustain that was to starve people in india… perhaps it is good to learn how to survive on one's own means instead?
I don't want to infinitely limit US influence, and want something more like no one country being able to dictate anything to others, an increased capacity for all countries to be free from both overt and covert influence of all sorts, etc., perhaps with the exception of some particularly horrible countries.
I'm not going to defend US autrocities, but why exactly is Sweeden and the EU allowing this stuff to happen on their soil?
Yet the calls from Swedes for the US to provide more Ukraine aid are deafening at this point. Swedes want the US to intervene when it benefits them, regardless of their chest-beating.
Where is the criticism from Swedes when Russia murders its own journalists or China restricts freedom of speech?
Please, if you are so anti-american, impress upon your countrymen to stay away from NATO. You people are clearly not interested in allying with the US.
We even warned the Soviet Union of Operation Barbarossa, using information we obtained from cracked Nazi codes. When one of my grandparents fled Norway due to the Nazis they were given asylum. During WWII Sweden was led by a political coalition consisting of the peasant's party and the social democrats, and in Germany, social democrat leadership got put into concentration camps as they were seen as communist-adjacent.
>Yet the calls from Swedes for the US to provide more Ukraine aid are deafening at this point
The Russians have probably threatened us behind the scenes and have probably been saying things that are quite extreme. Otherwise the social democrats wouldn't have flipped and had us join NATO. Furthermore, it's not like the US didn't want Ukraine to join the western block, so why shouldn't they help, now its attempt to do so is being met with an invasion?
I don't hate America. There's much good about it, but the US should rule the US, the Swedes Sweden, and the Ukrainians Ukraine. Just as we help Ukraine, it is reasonable that the Americans do too, since it's near us, and since we're kind of in this together.
>Where is the criticism from Swedes when Russia murders its own journalists or China restricts freedom of speech?
Literally all the time? When has Swedish media stopped caring about people Politovskaya, etc
>Please, if you are so anti-american, impress upon your countrymen to stay away from NATO. You people are clearly not interested in allying with the US.
I am kind of personally opposed to our membership, but I don't hate America, nor am I necessarily anti-American as such. But I don't want US power in Europe, we should rule our lands, and the Americans theirs.
If the Americans have influence here, then that is influence we ourselves do not have. Consequently, it can't be permitted. But this doesn't mean that we can't be friends. It means that the US can't have the keys to our house, or put cameras in it, or hang around the windows with binoculars, or decide what we buy, etcetera.
I understand the US wanting to get at the maniacs after 9/11. 9/11 was much worse than is immediately apparent and there are details that anger me even now, that make me want to reach across the world and dash a whole bunch of people against walls and furniture, so I understand the desire to do something, even the extraordinary rendition stuff, to some degree, but you can't do this kind of thing. You weren't willing to actually go after the Saudis, which you probably should have, instead of the aggression against less relevant countries.
Justice for individuals is important and soverignty is as well and even justified lashing out, when it is at odds with justice for an individual or soverignty of some foreign country, then it's not easy to go along with the lashing out of a country that is justified.
He means like letting their troops cross sweden, sell iron to them, ask them to specially mark the documents of jews. Perhaps he's seen the photos that nazi and swedish soldiers were taking together at the time, on the border with occupied norway.
> Otherwise the social democrats wouldn't have flipped and had us join NATO
Or… hear me out… they're corrupt and got something from the owners of weapons factories?
They had been waiting for a literal casus belli for several years.
Sweden was officially neutral, so the Germans were permitted to buy iron in return mostly for coal, which we needed not to die during winter.
Once Germany had occupied Norway they argued that it was permitted to transit troops. Some transits were indeed permitted, but at the same time Sweden accepted many Norwegians in and many of them were trained militarily to later retake Norway.
With regard to the marked passports, that is not in any way support for the Nazis. We wanted to be able to control our immigration and to know who was attempting to enter. Policy w.r.t. to Jewish immigration was also reversed as the attacks on Jews in Germany crossed the line.
>Or… hear me out… they're corrupt and got something from the owners of weapons factories?
We won't get more weapons factories because of NATO. Much of our weapons industry is successful because we've been one of the few highly industrialised third world countries.
We'll spend more in weapons. I never said it must be a swedish factory owner to be doing the corrupting.
Well well well… the request to join NATO was done just a few months BEFORE the election, after several changes of government since the previous elections.
People in power specifically didn't want the people's opinion about that one.
But just to be on the safe side, they also did a lot of mediatic fear mongering about russia invading sweden very soon™, which is ludicrous if you look at a map and see that there's a sea in between.
Anyway in sweden the ruling class had wanted to join NATO for at least 10 years, if not more. But the people would have not liked severe welfare cuts to buy expensive bombs. However the invasion of ukraine provided the perfect excuse.
Perhaps you need a better map. Gotland is a prime target for Russians. Establishing air defense batteries on Gotland, along with capturing the Suwalki gap between Poland and Lithuania, are two key steps of invading the Baltics. Suwalki cuts the land supply route and Gotland the air and sea routes.
To prevent liberation of Gotland and keep Swedish armed forces busy, they would then terrorize the remaining parts of Sweden with drones and missile attacks on cities the same way they do in Ukraine. Even Sweden isn't rich enough to buy enough air defense systems for that, hence the need for NATO to get access to pooled resources.
It's a simple calculus.
It's wrong. But it's certainly very simple :)
You forgot about how an invasion force is supposed to swim across the baltic.
After all, Russia can't move a huge fleet in there, because access is between sweden and denmark. So they'd have to use whatever they already have in there.
And sea invasions are more complicated than land invasions.
The only wrong thing here is the idea that the invasion of Gotland would have to look like Normandy landings.
He's actually agreed to confess to something which the US should have no legal authority over.
We must remember that the US are torturers who tortured people here in Sweden, right at Bromma airport, even after specifically agreeing not to torture them. It is not a country which should have any influence whatsoever outside its borders; and this is someone who exposed very severe crimes and who had no duty whatsoever to keep any US defence information secret.