Delvin Benet
8/25/2012 7:46:00 PM
On 8/25/2012 11:30 AM, raven1 wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Aug 2012 08:43:19 -0700, Delvin Benet <DB@nbc.n?t> wrote:
>
>> On 8/23/2012 5:41 AM, Mitchell Holman wrote:
>>> Delvin Benet <DB@nbc.n?t> wrote in
>>> news:k4Cdnacmp4J9BajNnZ2dnUVZ5vadnZ2d@giganews.com:
>>>
>>>> On 8/21/2012 12:45 AM, William December Starr wrote:
>>>>> In article <tJmdnQmCCZ3bNbPNnZ2dnUVZ5oidnZ2d@giganews.com>,
>>>>> Delvin Benet <DB@nbc.n?t> said:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Conservatives give a higher percentage of their income to secular
>>>>>> charities than liberals give, even though liberals have higher
>>>>>> incomes. Talk about regressive "taxation"!
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Liberals are just more selfish, that's all.
>>>>>
>>>>> Loosely speaking -- which is the only way to talk about groupings
>>>>> that include tens of millions of people -- liberals believe that
>>>>> people shouldn't have the _option_ of being selfish, while
>>>>> conservatives do.
>>>>
>>>> The conservatives are correct, and the liberals are wrong. To say that
>>>> people shouldn't have the option of choosing how much to donate to
>>>> charity is to be totalitarian. Leftists are totalitarian.
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> If conservatives should not be forced to contribute
>>> to charities then liberals should not be forced to
>>> finance wars.
>>
>> But conservatives *aren't* forced to contribute to charities - they do
>> that entirely voluntarily. National defense, including the possibility
>> of waging war, is one of the few truly "public" goods. When the US went
>> to war in Afghanistan - a good war, without doubt - the illiberal
>> "liberals" in the US benefited from the destruction of the safe haven
>> for Al Qaeda right along with the conservatives and centrists.
>
> Two questions:
>
> 1) Leaving aside whether or not the war was justified, what's your
> proposed exit strategy for Afghanistan that doesn't make the whole
> exercise a complete waste of lives and trillions of dollars? I can
> think of exactly zero scenarios under which Afghanistan doesn't revert
> right back to a safe haven for al Qaeda once the US pulls out.
I can't think of one, either. We probably reached the point of
diminishing returns to our involvement a few years ago.
We should withdraw, and if the Taliban look like they're going to
reassert control, we warn them not to let Al Qaeda or any other global
terror organization back in, or else we'll come back again. If all they
do is inflict terror and misery on their own people, like North Korea
and the Castro Bros. in Cuba and Chavez in Venezuela, we can live with that.
> 2) It's unclear to me how we liberals benefited from the war in Iraq;
> in fact, it seems that the biggest single beneficiary was Iran, whose
> main regional rival we conveniently removed. Was that also a "good"
> war, worth the lives of US troops, the lives of tens of thousands of
> Iraqis who were no threat to us, and the trillions of dollars
> squandered under false premises?
I didn't support the war in Iraq. That's why I only mentioned
Afghanistan in my introductory comments.