>There's a saying in Icelandic - þetta reddast - that means "everything will be alright", and, while many languages have a similar expression, this one is really embedded in Icelandic culture.
Ireland has a "It'll be Grand" culture as well for comparison. It's a trade off with pros and cons and works for some situations and inhibits progress in other situations, things often don't get acted on or resolved quickly but at the same time there is a huge reservoir of tolerance to draw on when things do get shit.
I would consider this the other end of the spectrum to countries like Japan or Germany in the way they respond to certain things. Lots of generalisations of course but that's often the impressions you get from travelling. It's very hard to be precise about big groups of people.
Give me German/Dutch "this is awful and it should be fixed" any day over "It'll be grand" (we have a similar attitude here just across the Irish sea)
It can be a bit annoying listen to them moan about small things constantly but my impression of the Netherlands is shit just works and things get fixed. They seem to have a very low tolerance for bs and excuses, which is refreshing
In my experience this is not how Germany works at all. "This is how we've always done it" is a lot closer to reality. Germans have an incredibly low standard for efficiency. At best they're just very thorough and methodical, but change aversion permeates every later of society.
Are you my parents? The things Obama still get blamed at is insane. I'm not a huge fan of Obama, Trump, or Biden. There are certainly things to blame them on, but every little thing like gas prices is just ridiculous. The office of the President wields a lot of power, but they're not in charge of everything.
I hear it more than anything about Biden. I personally think that it's an easy way to be racist without being pinned down on it because of the out that he was also a President.
"X is the real racism" is a talking point racists like to trot out. It is a pretty standard part of their playbook actually, to move the debate away from actual, obviously racist behavior.
Actual, obviously racist behavior like hiring people based on race? Or creating labels like “person of color” that imply being non-white is an important commonality between completely different groups?
I won’t go so far as to say “liberals are the real racists.” But I grew up as a brown kid in a 95% white Virginia town, where people were afraid to talk about or notice race. I never thought that 30 years later I’d be having attention drawn to my race in routine business settings in blue DC. I didn’t think Maryland liberals would be the reason my mixed kids see racial differences between me and my wife.
Urban liberals aren’t as bad as stormfront people, but they’re worse than “where are you really from” Iowa people. It’s not even close.
What? “They” aren’t a coordinated team with a playbook. Just because you find yourself disagreeing with many people over a contentious topic doesn’t mean the other side is part of some hate-fueled organized conspiracy.
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy for folks of a certain stripe to think the same debate tactic is clever. (And for the record - it is not)
ETA: if you find yourself wanting to argue further on this, I would recommend searching Stormfront for this phrase and then decide if you want to die on this hill.
I’m familiar with Stormfront, and I don’t intend to die on any ideological hill today. I’ll just say that I don’t think these things are as cut and dry as you’re making them out to be.
I expected someone to mention Brandenburg and VW in reply, to be honest. Seems like a bit of a straw-man though. If you tell me the country you think is perfect, I'm sure I could find some kind of scandal.
When it comes to disasters the phrases that come to my mind are "bana bir sey olmaz" (nothing will happen to me) and "teget gececek" (it'll be nothing), which are expressions of denial and minimization.
İyi şanslar, but also used regularly is kolay gelsin, which means let it come easy, or go easy, there is no direct translation. Then there is also hayırlısı, which means what will be will be, in my experience used sarcastically / raising you shoulders when everything is f*cked, as is common these days in Turkey.
Yup, I was thinking of kolay gelsin. I have heard and seen it everywhere- signing off group texts, saying bye to the neighborhood butcher, even as business names, like “Kolay Gelsin water delivery”.
New Zealand's "she'll be right" attitude is, I believe, why so much just doesn't work here. People tolerate breakage on a small and large scale, to a bigger extent than I've seen anywhere else. Anything from permanent shop signs with spelling mistakes, to letting people rent out unsanitary housing, to "ghost buses" which show up in their IT systems as planned, then as running, and then, when they are about to show up, simply disappear off of their systems as if it was never planned in the first place. People grumble, but it seems like they always assume somehow things will just magically fix themselves.
British English idioms are often contractions of MUCH longer phrases.
"Y'alrite?" is not, contrary to what you might assume, short for "Are you alright?"
It's short for "Are you alright if I come in and interrupt you? It's fine if you're not, I just wanted to check before barging in. It's really not too much trouble is it? I'll go away and come back later. Or never. Sorry. Sorry, sorry."
That's a bold statement to make. German souls need to be re-issued regularly by the BIE (Bundesamt für Immaterielle Essenzen), and it's quite easy to fall behind with how much paperwork this is every year.
I believe this completely. Folks who live under routine threat like volcanism can be the most calm and functional during crises.
I remember an interview with a Dutch Engineer during a storm surge that threatened an important dike (aren't they all important?). They had been working all day and continuing into the night.
"What will you do?"
"Well, we'll work like hell and see what happens come morning!"
Not really. Some dikes protect millions, some protect a vilage, and some protect only a handful of people. The Netherlands is currently experiencing minor flooding, and a dike failure in Maastricht led to a dozen house boats needing to be evacuated.
> see what happens come morning
There really isn't anything else you can do. Natural disasters are unpredictable, and the situation can drastically change from hour to hour. When your country is prone to this kind of threat, it'll have dozens of scenarios worked out, planned, and practiced. It's mostly a matter of grabbing the right playbook, working like hell, and hoping it doesn't get worse. If it does get worse, you simply grab the next playbook and carry on.
First two paragraphs resonated. I'm an American who grew up in Brazil, Japan, and Sweden. I'm tired of being asked "which was your favorite" because it's so reductive and ALWAYS what people ask me. Questions in this article are much better.
On the other hand, the description of roping up without proper training... yeesh. Sounds like bunch of gumbies putting each other's lives in danger. Not ok.
> Sounds like bunch of gumbies putting each other's lives in danger. Not ok.
One weird thing about Iceland (as of 2008) that might be related: They don't do warning signs.
- Superheated geyser pool 3 feet from the foot path? No warning sign 95% of the time. The other 5%? "Danger: Hot."
- A slippery tourist trail 5 feet from a rushing river that immediately goes over an 80 foot waterfall? No warning sign. Often no railing, either.
- A road to a tourist attraction that might rip your transmission out? No warning sign.
I could give more examples of unmarked deadly hazards at major tourist attractions.
Iceland appears to assume that deadly hazards are common, and that you'll use common sense. Or maybe you won't, and you'll stick your hand in a geyser.
I'm reluctant to draw any kind of philosophical point here, besides "When visiting Iceland, please use common sense and pay attention to your surroundings."
How about in future, when someone asks you "which was your favorite" you instead answer one of the questions in the article? It's highly unlikely people literally want to know which was your favourite. More likely they're open to hearing anything interesting about your experience you could share.
Yeah, totally-- I roll with it tactfully IRL, I'm usually like well Sweden had the most effective government, Brazil had unbelievable natural beauty, etc. I'm just using this opportunity to whine about a pet peeve :-)
"Sounds like bunch of gumbies putting each other's lives in danger" - that seemed pretty obvious from his story.
I have a couple good friends that work on the search and rescue team, and the increasing number of stories about people putting themselves in serious danger with no self awareness is really concerning. I've unwittingly been pulled into these situations myself with said gumbies, and I'm now at the stage where I have no tolerance of it.
It's really not cool to put a bunch of other folks in danger because you did something stupid, completely ignorant of any potential danger. It's totally ok to take measured risks, with proper training/knowledge and at least some kind of preparation for handling unexpected situations.
And sometimes it's me being the gumby, which probably still happens in small doses :)
I lived in Iceland for several years recently. One thing you have to keep in mind, is this philosophy is pretty much born out of necessity. Until the US Military built a base in Keflavík (which later became an international airport), the country was quite behind the times. As one friend put it to me "When you were landing on the moon we were getting running water installed"
Iceland was a very poor country for most people other than a few well off in the fishing industry. Today it's still relatively "medium" with few people very wealthy, but also almost no one in destitution. The attitude is that everyone should be able to live a good life, and while it's not truly socialist, it's pretty darn close.
Þetta reddast is used somewhat interchangeably with "I don't feel like dealing with this" and "Some how things will work out even though it doesn't look like it now" and "fuck it". To most people it's kind of an in joke you say when something really sucks.
We just spent some time in Iceland this past year. I hadn't really realized it but Iceland pretty much didn't even have a formal tourist industry until sometime in the early 2000s mostly due to volcanic eruptions disrupting transatlantic air traffic causing the country to end up on the news.
I came away with some interesting things:
- In one small town we visited they had turned the local town hall into a tourist greeting center. It had a theater that showed films from the 60s and 70s filmed near that town. One of them explained that there were no roads to the town until the modern period. However the town's main industry was sheep farming. How did they get the sheep to market in the larger towns? Simple, they flow in an aircraft, drove the sheep onboard, and flew them there! Before the airplane people either didn't live there or had to drive their sheep by foot or boat to market -- trips of many many days.
- Icelanders are incredibly comfortable being constantly very near volcanism. Most village centers have a local bathhouse fed by hot water from hot springs and they're very popular social centers, people live on the slopes of active volcanoes, the air often smells of volcanic gases in many places in the country, and so on.
- Much of the landscape is virtually impassable. It's the first time I've really ever seen such a vegetatively sparse landscape that was so inaccessible simply due to the terrain. In some areas, relatively "flat" landscapes were so rocky that I can't even imagine how one might traverse those.
Beautiful country, hearty people, expensive, surprisingly consistently good food.
> Much of the landscape is virtually impassable. It's the first time I've really ever seen such a vegetatively sparse landscape that was so inaccessible simply due to the terrain. In some areas, relatively "flat" landscapes were so rocky that I can't even imagine how one might traverse those.
There are certainly areas lacking in vegetation for natural reasons but much of the land is vegetatively sparse because the Vikings cut down all the trees:
> At the time of human settlement almost 1150 years ago, birch forest and woodland covered 25-40% of Iceland's land area
...but not old enough to have weathered down. Iceland is made of lava, as is Hawaii, but the Hawaiian islands are much older* which is why they are now a garden paradise.
*Except the big island which is young enough to still have active volcanoes like Iceland.
> It's the first time I've really ever seen such a vegetatively sparse landscape that was so inaccessible simply due to the terrain.
I haven't been to Iceland, but I got similar vibes the first time I hiked through the Kilauea East Rift zone (vegetatively sparse, nearly impassable), where it's perhaps even more stark since lush tropical forest is just a few miles away.
> It's the first time I've really ever seen such a vegetatively sparse landscape
The countryside of Iceland gave me the impression that instead of a "natural vegetated living world" there was two distinct things - an inorganic rock world, with a thin crust of life - lichen, moss and grass over it.
I mean, technically this is true everywhere; but in Iceland the vegetation was so thin and recent and patchy as to be noticeable in an unfamiliar way.
I truly felt in some areas, especially the South Coast, that we had accidentally driven off the continental shelf and ended up on the bottom of the sea.
When I made a 10-day car trip around a large part of Iceland some years ago, every single shower I used had that sulfur smell. I guess it's not impossible that the showers I used by sheer coincidence all used the same system. But isn't it also possible that even the water from the heat exchanger system contains some sulfur, in small enough amounts that locals get used to it and don't even smell it anymore, while foreigners still notice the smell.
Not only the showers have this smell: it's quite abundant all over the country. Every hot spring smells like that, and Iceland has quite a lot of those. I can easily imagine getting used to it after a few years living there, to the point that you simply don't smell small amounts anymore.
> ‘As one friend put it to me "When you were landing on the moon we were getting running water installed"’
This also applied to large parts of the United States in 1969, and was part of the reason why many leftists and Black activists saw the Apollo program as a symbol of misplaced priorities at the time.
Iceland wasn’t any poorer than Mississippi, for example. And at least Iceland had a program in place to build a Scandinavian-style welfare state so everyone really would get that running water pretty quickly, as well as healthcare and education and the rest. America is still struggling with that while again spending tens of billions on a microwaved-Apollo-cum-Artemis program that’s mostly pork distribution for senators.
It's extremely and utterly odd, to me, that so many people single out things like the Apollo Program as an 'extravagance' when this was also the era of the Vietnam War. The entire Apollo program cost $178 billion in 2022 dollars. The Vietnam War cost more than $1 trillion, and that's if you put a $0 price tag on the millions of people killed, to say nothing of decades more of people being maimed and killed by our cluster bomblets left all over the country.
The Vietnam War had absolutely 0 value. We hyped it up as some do-or-die necessity, we invaded, participated in the killing of millions of people, blew a trillion dollars, lost the war, went home, and there was no grand catastrophic change. We could have just skipped to the end by not getting involved in the first place. By contrast one can argue about the exact value of the Apollo Program but it's absolutely undeniable that there was value. We learned a bunch, showed what's possible with human ingenuity, and just plain old did something that would make one proud to be a human, let alone an American at the time. If we did more things like this, it's very likely that the relationship between the people and the government would be far better than it is today.
> say nothing of decades more of people being maimed and killed by our cluster bomblets left all over the country.
Not to mention the millions of people devastated by Agent Orange.
The fact that the specialists warned the US military of these effects and it didn't stop them from poisoning the population for generations is mind boggling. How did these people rationalize their actions?
Anyway - there's no possible price tag for that. Your point of comparison is correct; the space race as a whole was about the best- and cheapest-case scenario for a "war"
I agree, and.... One reason why Apollo might seem cheap is because a lot of the R&D dollars are counted against developing ICBM missiles to annihilate everyone on earth. The rockets themselves and the fundamental work was primarily motivated by the creation of weapons, space exploration second.
In the aftermath of the fall of South Vietnam, somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 refugees died at sea trying to flee the country. Cambodia also fell to communism, where the new regime murdered between 1.5 million and 2 million of its people. Actually winning the Vietnam War could have prevented these outcomes and left Southeast Asia in a much more stable and prosperous position today, similar to South Korea.
It was communist controlled Vietnam which got rid of the Khmer Rouge about 45 years ago ending the genocide in Cambodia, it's entirely unclear what your hypothetical "winning" South Vietnamese government would have done. The US government was still mad enough with Vietnam that it applied more sanctions on Vietnam after Vietnam invaded Cambodia and the other major player (China) supported the Khmer Rouge and invaded Vietnam in retaliation.
The United States and South Vietnam both opposed the Khmer Rouge during the Cambodian Civil War while the North Vietnamese supported them. The split between the Vietnamese communists and the Khmer Rouge only happened after the US allowed both South Vietnam and the previous Cambodian government to fall to communists.
> The genocide happened in the mid to late 70s, a couple of years after the US had already withdrawn from Vietnam.
That’s what I said—after the United States allowed both South Vietnam and Cambodia to fall to communists. I am arguing that if the United States consistently maintained military intervention against communism in both Vietnam and Cambodia the genocide would have been prevented.
> Why did the US decide to support the Khmer Rouge
It’s not actually clear that the US did support the Khmer Rouge. But if they did, that would have been wrong, just like abandoning South Vietnam and the pre-Khmer Rouge government of Cambodia was wrong. The US has wrongly supported many communist regimes, including those of China and the Soviet Union, and would have been better served with a consistent anticommunist foreign policy at almost any point in history.
It's not like the US or the UN were particularly bothered by mass massacres of civilians in South Korea, so it's doubtful that really was a significant concern. At the time, the non-communist regimes they were propping up in Korea or Vietnam were hardly any less brutal than their communist opponents as far as human rights are concerned (of course I'm not talking about the Khmer Rouge).
> It’s not actually clear that the US did support the Khmer Rouge
Well they together with China did support them in the UN at least. Which effectively was an endorsement of the genocide.
> intervention against communism in both Vietnam
Geopolitically it would have made perfect sense for the US to back the reunification of Vietnam under a socialist/moderately communist regime. The USSR had limited ability to project power in the region (unlike in Korea) and Vietnam would've certainly sided with the US instead instead of China despite the ideological differences.
Instead the US choose to back France in their desperate and and entirely pointless colonial war. After that.. well they had no choice.
> and would have been better served with a consistent anticommunist foreign policy at almost any point in history.
What do you think US could've done different in Vietnam (besides directly invading the north)? Not a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely curious because to me that was seemed pretty hopeless.
> At the time, the non-communist regimes they were propping up in Korea or Vietnam were hardly any less brutal than their communist opponents as far as human rights are concerned (of course I'm not talking about the Khmer Rouge).
Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled South Vietnam, or the massive crowds in Saigon begging the Americans to bring them or at least their children along as they evacuated the US embassy by helicopter.
> Geopolitically it would have made perfect sense for the US to back the reunification of Vietnam under a socialist/moderately communist regime. The USSR had limited ability to project power in the region (unlike in Korea) and Vietnam would've certainly sided with the US instead instead of China despite the ideological differences.
Vietnam sided with the USSR over China; their split with the Khmer Rouge was largely a proxy for the broader Sino-Soviet split. Nixon and Kissinger, along with their mistaken policy of pulling out of Vietnam, also adopted a mistaken policy of trying to cozy up with Communist China to try and widen and exploit this split. Our relatively good relations with Vietnam today are largely a consequence of the Soviets not being around anymore and China emerging as a major threat, both of which were largely unforeseen in the 1970’s.
The Carter administration actually adopted a policy very similar to what you recommend, of withholding support for authoritarian regimes otherwise friendly to the US who faced too much popular resistance. It didn’t work out well for reasons Jeane Kirkpatrick explained very clearly at the time: https://web.archive.org/web/20110228072902/http://www.commen...
> What do you think US could've done different in Vietnam (besides directly invading the north)? Not a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely curious because to me that was seemed pretty hopeless.
It might have seemed hopeless, but we were losing the propaganda war much more than we were losing the actual war on the ground. The Tet Offensive was a huge military disaster for the communists but got spun and misrepresented as a disaster for the US. This isn’t to say that there weren’t blunders on the part of the US—McNamara was one of the worst SecDefs we’ve ever had—but despite that, we were still winning.
Back in the Civil War, the South’s basic theory was that, while they could never beat the North in a straight up fight, maybe they could make the war so long and bloody and miserable that eventually the North would get tired of the war and lose its resolve. And to the South’s credit, the war was long and bloody and miserable. The Union made plenty of blunders. Some of the bloodiest days of American history were the days when rebel incursions into the North were repulsed at Antietam and Gettysburg. The reason Lincoln won where LBJ lost is because Lincoln was able to politically outmaneuver the rebels and their Copperhead allies in the North. Some of the methods Lincoln used to do that were admittedly extreme, but I’m not convinced Johnson would have had to go to the same extremes.
War is hard. Unless you win the entire war in a month or two, it’s always going to be easy to spin things and make it look as if the war is going badly. This problem gets worse as communication gets faster and attention spans get shorter. Vietnam seemed worse than it was because the government wasn’t prepared to fight a war in the age of color television. Britain had similar challenges fighting the Crimean War during the age of the telegraph, and the US struggled to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan during the eras of 24 hour cable news and social media. (Which is not a statement in defense of those wars, but rather a statement about the challenges of operating in a new media environment).
I'd challenge this argument in regards to Vietnam. I don't think the issue is that war is hard, but rather that we keep trying to attack motivated local populations. I'm sure you're aware of the old quote that, to my knowledge, originated during the Civil War about it being "a rich man's war, and a poor man's fight." And that was absolutely true. Without conscription (which the elites were of course able to sidestep), it would have been a far less brutal war. It was people who didn't want to be fighting, fighting against people who didn't want to be fighting.
In general when fighting an enemy does not want to be fighting but is being compelled to do so, I think that opens the door to a real and meaningful victory. But when you're fighting against groups of people, often with a very flat organizational structure, who blend seamlessly with the local population (in no small part because they are the local population), and who want to be fighting you? I think victory there is near to impossible.
This is how Afghanistan, a country with the GDP of a mid-sized town in a modern nation, has defeated not only the USA but also the USSR. In terms of results, they are the most powerful fighting force in the world. But the issue when fighting them is that you don't know who you're fighting. This makes ground operations near to impossible, and sends civilian casualties skyrocketing, which creates even more motivated fighters. You kill one Taliban and create 3 more.
And furthermore, these people aren't going anywhere because it's their home. For them, the conflict is a matter of their very existence. They'll fight you for decades until they die, then their children will fight you, and so on endlessly. By contrast, we're fighting with motivations like trying to avoid geopolitical embarrassment, literally. One of the leaks in the Pentagon Papers included a memo laying out our motivations. And the primary motivation, at 70%, was "To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor)." [1]
Even if you imagine America somehow was able to "win" in Vietnam, you end up with an Afghanistan issue. What now? You can't just maintain millions of soldiers there indefinitely. And if the people you support are only able to stay in power because of those millions of soldiers, then it may turn out that the "war" you just won was merely a battle in in the real "war."
> I don't think the issue is that war is hard, but rather that we keep trying to attack motivated local populations.
The local population of South Vietnam, for the most part, did not want to be conquered by the communists, did not rise up against the South Vietnamese government during the Tet Offensive as the communists expected them to, and were, in fact, brutally conquered and suppressed by the communist armies that invaded them from the north after the United States abandoned them. Why do you think so many of them became refugees? These people were our allies and we abandoned them.
You’re providing a perfect example of how the United States lost a propaganda war that had, at best, an extremely loose relationship with the reality on the ground.
And the exact same thing happened in Afghanistan. The level of American presence and support for the Afghan government was minimal and would have been easily sustainable, and it had been years since a single American casualty had been suffered. The withdrawal was a completely unforced error that left billions of dollars in weapons, thousands of Afghan translators, and the biometric data to identify them all in the hands of the Taliban. It was an absolute disgrace.
The 'Afghanistan Papers' are informative - with some obvious analogs to the Pentagon Papers, it was a publication of internal military assessments in Afghanistan. [1] We assessed victory as impossible to achieve, and an increasingly large percent of all money spent on Afghanistan (as in > 40%) was ending up lost to corruption, and often going straight to the Taliban. And of course the Taliban were well integrated into the forces we were training. See - e.g. the death of General Greene in Afghanistan.
And the Taliban were inflicting a higher casualty rate on "us" (including pro-US Afghan forces), than we were on them. And "we" (only American forces) suffered casualties each and every year, including during the final withdrawal. The number of our casualties was directly reflected by size of the force there - few people, few casualties, lots of people, lots of casualties. We were losing. The years of propaganda about making progress in the country was all fabricated and cynical lies, as usual.
Basically Vietnam and Afghanistan suffered the exact same issue, that you're sidestepping. Without massive foreign interference Afghanistan was going to be ruled by the Taliban, which it now is. And without massive foreign interference, Vietnam was going to be communist, which it now is. The cost is not only in lives, but also financial. Afghanistan cost upwards of $2 trillion. Well and I also think we shouldn't just count wounded as write-offs. We're much better at keeping people alive, but somebody coming back with no limbs, or PTSD so bad that they're destined to find themselves on the street, are also costs rivaling death.
Until the withdrawal, the United States went over a year—from March 2020 to July 2021–without anyone killed in action. The thirteen Marines killed in action in August 2021 were among the troops sent back into Afghanistan when the withdrawal took a turn for the worse. The level of troops and support for the Afghan government during 2020 and early 2021 was minimal yet still sufficient to stop the Taliban from overrunning the country.
> And without massive foreign interference, Vietnam was going to be communist, which it now is.
This is like saying without massive foreign interference, Ukraine would be part of Russia again already. Vietnam went communist as a direct result of massive foreign interference from the Soviet Union and China.
On the deaths, you're counting only KIA. We had 4 die in the time frame you mentioned, out of 2500, in ways outside of direct combat. Your assessment also is directly rejected by the military's own internal assessments. Afghan security forces were being killed at a rate deemed to be unsustainable. The US was literally running out of Afghans willing to fight for it. This is probably one of the main factors in deciding to vacate. And, again, it's also an endless money sink. We wasted trillions of dollars on Afghanistan and achieved less than nothing.
As for foreign interference, you clearly know Vietnam's history. Vietnam was a French colony that was occupied by Japan during WW2. Following the end of WW2, the Vietnamese themselves declared their independence, as a short-lived communist nation. However France was 'granted' the country, and this resulted in a war between France/UK vs Vietnam, which the Vietnamese ultimately lost leading to the divisions in the country and setting the stage for the Vietnam War. China and the USSR supported the Vietnamese forces, but those forces were already "naturally" aligned. By contrast the South Vietnamese government was just a an inorganic puppet government.
We can get into Ukraine if you fancy, but I think that's neither here nor there for now.
Because those are the most directly relevant to the conflict. Service members dying in accidents or by suicide still happens at home, sometimes at even higher rates than it happens on deployment.
> And, again, it's also an endless money sink. We wasted trillions of dollars on Afghanistan and achieved less than nothing.
As you’ve noticed, I’m not an advocate of losing wars, especially not by means of unilateral surrender. The Afghanistan withdrawal was not a military decision because the military does not have the authority to make that decision. It was a political decision.
> China and the USSR supported the Vietnamese forces, but those forces were already "naturally" aligned. By contrast the South Vietnamese government was just a an inorganic puppet government.
This explanation does not fit the facts. It is inconsistent with the failure of the Tet Offensive to inspire a large scale popular uprising in South Vietnam; it failed in this objective because the people of South Vietnam were not, for the most part, sympathetic to the communists. It also doesn’t explain the vast scale and utter desperation of Vietnamese refugees fleeing the communists as they overran the south of Vietnam. If the people of Vietnam wanted communist rule, why were they so desperate to escape it?
Looking at total deaths is only fair, because different situations are going to cause different attrition rates, including non-combat. Put another way, the non-combat death rate of those deployed in Afghanistan is going to be different than that for those on base at Pendleton. This is why, for instance, vaccine experiments compare all-cause mortality between the control and experiment groups.
Whether one is a fan of losing a war, or not, matters not - when you can't win. The Afghanistan Papers were the military's own assessment. We were losing, and running out of Afghans. If you wanted to keep the war going then soon enough you'd start needing large numbers of American soldiers maintaining ground ops, and that's basically not possible - we'd be getting picked off like fish in a barrel. The politicians certainly knew the Afghan security forces would collapse. The idea was probably to try to paint it as a failure of those security forces, instead of a failure of America - as would happen if we started mass deployment, and then ended up having to retreat anyhow - minimizing humiliation.
As for Vietnam, the number of initial refugees was quite low - hundreds of thousands in a country of tens of millions. And the earliest refugees were largely made up of collaborators who had every reasonable expectation of facing torture and death if they remained. It also says very little about ideology as China was one of the destinations for hundreds of thousands of the early refugees.
This fact is not disputed by anyone. You can read the US reports on the resettlement here [1]. Wiki being Wiki sites a YouTube video from the Navy, but concludes the same [2]:
---
"The Vietnam War ended on April 30, 1975, with the fall of Saigon to the People's Army of Vietnam and the subsequent evacuation of more than 130,000 Vietnamese closely associated with the United States or the former government of South Vietnam...
After the Saigon evacuation, the number of Vietnamese leaving their country remained relatively small until mid-1978. A number of factors contributed to the refugee crisis, including economic hardship and wars in Vietnam, China, and Cambodia. In addition, up to 300,000 people, especially those associated with the former government and military of South Vietnam, were sent to re-education camps, where many endured torture, starvation, and disease while being forced to perform hard labor."
> Cambodia also fell to communism, where the new regime murdered between 1.5 million and 2 million of its people
Right. What you're leaving out is that the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia was supported by the US and was overthrown by the communist Vietnam. I'm not trying to downplay the atrocities committed by the Viet Minh/etc. but this is an absolutely bizarre argument to bring up unless you didn't do it on purpose?
If we go back a few decades strategically the war was absolutely unnecessary. Geopolitically Vietnam and the US are natural allies (they hated/fear China far more than the US before the war and the same applies now), yet Truman and his successors literally forced North Vietnam to ally with China and the USSR because they had no other options. Of course not pissing off the French might have seemed like the better options at the time..
In the grand scheme of things, from a western PoV at the time at least two other factors loomed large in geopolitics:
* The French were the pipeline for very hi grade uranium yellowcake out of Africa which was a seething silent unspoken proxy war for Cold War resources. Appeasing the French in many small ways made sense for the US.
* All the European colonial powers were rapidly transitioning to being post WWII former colonial powers and the West was rife with fear that former countries that survived quite well on their own pre European colonisation would turn into anti-West proto communist countries.
Fleeting baby democracies | self governance movements in SE Asia and elsewhere were being crushed and strong man autocracies that paid lip service to being friendly to US hegemony got much support.
This is true but, in general, I don't think it should be. One can moralize endlessly about war. Even in this thread you can see somebody arguing that the Vietnam war couldn't have been that bad because it was against communism, which he thinks should always be opposed. And one cannot say he's wrong - it's an opinion.
By contrast a trillion dollars is a trillion dollars. And I think almost nobody could argue, in good faith, that near to any war is worth a trillion dollars. That's more than $7,500 per household in the US. That sort of money, for some sort of vague geopolitical ambition, is just beyond absurd. And the thing is, even when we initially claim that this war or that will "only" cost some billions of dollars, they all go this way.
Iraq "according to every analyst" was supposed to cost about $80 billion and last 2 years. 4 years later, the Congressional Budget Office estimated its cost to be about $2.4 trillion. That value is also not adjusted for inflation. These wars all around the world are just such an unbelievably tremendous waste of money. They have this magic trick that even Houdini couldn't hold a candle to - they can take trillions of dollars and just make it all disappear, with absolutely nothing to show for it. Nobody could ever rationalize this into being a good thing.
This always feels terribly myopic to me. There's a lot of state capacity and doing a sing;e time bound endeavor did not prevent civil rights legislation from passing or economic development in Mississippi. The moonshot caused NASA's funding to peak at ~4% of the federal budget for a single year in 1966, returning to less than 1% by '73.
But in 1969 it was not settled that the country should fix civil rights. Probably Apollo would have been received differently by many people if other, more humane areas had seen as enthusiastic spending. Not saying it was wrong to do Apollo, though! It was important, another great outcome was that it made the Soviet system crack faster.
It was also not clear from originally that Apollo would be single time limited project, in the beginning there was a lot of talk about moon bases and such.
There were a lot of enthusiastic spending programs and civil rights reforms in the 1960’s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965, Civil Rights Act of 1968 (which included the Fair Housing Act), the establishment of Medicare, Medicaid, federal funding for elementary and secondary schools, Job Corps, Head Start, expansion of Social Security benefits, the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio, the Department of Transportation (along with federal funding for mass transit and high speed rail), the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, and food stamps, just to name the highlights.
Try reading the comment I was responding to for context. I was responding to these claims in particular:
> But in 1969 it was not settled that the country should fix civil rights.
I responded to that by enumerating some of the civil rights laws that were passed during the 1960's.
> Probably Apollo would have been received differently by many people if other, more humane areas had seen as enthusiastic spending.
I agree that "enthusiastic spending" is an awkward phrase, but I was specifically calling back to actionfromafar's usage of it. And I responded by listing all of the humane spending programs that had been enacted in that period, ranging from Medicare and Medicaid to Social Security expansion to new funding programs for education, food stamps, transportation, and other such things.
In reality the administration of Lyndon Johnson was the second greatest expansion of the American federal welfare state in history (after the New Deal); it's simply not true to claim that the federal government during that period lacked "enthusiasm" for such things.
People use that kind of framing to say my highest priority isn't being addressed therefore anything else government does is wrong. I don't think this is logically sound, or a convincing argument.
I've never thought much of that narrative argument against the Apollo space program, since the Vietnam War cost at least 4X as much as the Apollo program, with much less to show for it and far more negative social effects (e.g. all the homeless Vietnam vets with unrecognized PTSD, etc.).
The true, multi-faceted cost of Vietnam sort of crept up slowly though, especially in the 70s. Weren't many armed gangs started by 'nam vets for instance? (Not even counting what it meant for south east asia.)
Except the war in Vietnam was fundamentally different to that in North Korea. It was a direct outcome of the French colonial war in the early 50s which the US decided to support for semi-absurd reasons ("domino theory").
Geopolitically China was always a much bigger threat to Vietnam than anyone else so had the US made the right choices in the 40s and 50s it would've been easy to turn it into a state which was friendly or at least neutral towards the US (like Yugoslavia for instance).
South Korea is a modern, developed country with a high tech manufacturing economy and a high standard of living. And it only exists today because many countries including the United States defended it from a communist invasion, just as the United States attempted to defend South Vietnam.
You asked how "killing people on the other side of the world could achieve anything," and clearly South Korea is an example of a successful contrast to North Korea given the same people. If you think North Korea is only where it is because the US bombed them, comrade...
Also, Germany, Japan, Serbian conflicts, etc. You'd have to never have seen a world map to think history never "achieve[d] anything [positive]" from interventions "on the other side of the world."
> If you think North Korea is only where it is because the US bombed them, comrade...
You called? I think it is very relevant, but somehow it never, ever gets brought up that the cartoonishly authoritarian regime was bombed to hell in that war. That Germany lost WWII is certainly relevant to its last 80 year history, for example.
> Also, Germany, Japan, Serbian conflicts, etc. You'd have to never have seen a world map to think history never "achieve[d] anything [positive]" from interventions "on the other side of the world."
You dropped “ideology”, liar.
In the case of WWII: I have never seen anything to make me believe that the allies fought the Nazis because they were anti-fascists (ideology).
> In the case of WWII: I have never seen anything to make me believe that the allies fought the Nazis because they were anti-fascists (ideology).
In the sense that “anti-fascist” is a dishonest euphemism for “communist”, of course not. But the Allies were ideologically opposed to fascism, Nazism, and Japanese imperialism.
Stop parroting commie talking points and I won’t assume you’re a communist.
> America thought Nazis were such an existential threat that they remained neutral until Pearl Harbor.
You’ve spent this entire thread criticizing the US for foreign military interventions and now you turn around and criticize the US for not intervening soon enough? I’m sorry they didn’t do more to bail out your beloved Soviet Union in the seven months between Operation Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor. (Not really)
That's almost an apples to oranges comparison. The situations in Korea and Vietnam were only similar on a very superficial level so it's a very disingenuous argument..
Also at the time the South Korean regime was about as brutal and oppressive as the Northern one. The situation barely improved in the 50s and 60s, after all South Korea only became a democracy in 1987 after all...
But South Korea was pursuing rational economic policies. Especially that Vietnam and China eventually turned to capitalism anyways, what was the point really of fighting a bloody civil war over communism and enduring decades of stagnation? If they had just worked with the US peacefully they could have achieved similar results way earlier.
It wasn't exactly that obvious at the time. IIRC North Korea outperformed the south in the 60s and didn't really fall significantly behind until decades after the war. After the war South Korea was both extremely poor and ruled by a very brutal and oppressive regime. Which if we're being fair was not that that different compared to the North (which actually had a stronger economy at the time due to Soviet support).
> If they had just worked with the US peacefully they could have achieved similar results way earlier.
It's not like they really had a choice? Truman ignored Ho Chi Minh in the 40s and later the US stayed neutral until deciding to back the French in their colonial war in Vietnam. Communist countries were willing to help the Vietnamese to fight for their indepence (well.. oversimplification but the French were pretty brutal and they South Vietnamese regime they put in place after the withdrawal was dominated by Catholics who were only ~10% of the population) so it was pretty much their only choice unless they wanted to remain a colony.
I'm not a historian, but my understanding is that Vietnam was a failure for the US because it wasn't executed properly. Eventually, US lost heart and fled the country. The goal itself (stopping comunism from spreading to another country), was in US' interest, at least as long as US wanted to be maintain its status as a global hegemon.
The US effectively lost the war before it even started. They decided to support the French during their colonial war due to the so-called 'domino theory,' which ignored the fact that the Vietnamese hated or feared China more than anyone else. After the French were gone, China would have been the biggest geopolitical threat to Vietnam.
If the right choices had been made in the 1940s and early 1950s, it wouldn't have been that hard to turn Vietnam into an East Asian equivalent of Yugoslavia, if not an actual US ally
My understanding from historians is that, whether or not the goal was right, it may have been an impossible situation.
Wars are politics and end only with a stable political settlement; without that, they can go on indefinitely - such as in Afghanistan recently.
Like Afghanistan, there was nobody in Vietnam that could run the country, politically, except the North Vietnamese. All the US could do was build someone else's capability, which wasn't working (in Vietname or Afghanistan) or fight indefinitely.
It's criminal that the US is spending money on SLS when it is so incredibly inefficient and will very likely be completely outclassed in cost and operational ability by Starship.
There are no plans to use SLS for national security missions. SpaceX, ULA, and Rocket Lab all do national security missions, and hopefully Blue Origin can join in as well in the next couple years.
In a sense, all the ostensible science missions are really about national prestige and are therefore national security missions in a round-about way. I saw a recent presentation given by Michael Griffin in which he makes this point; the HST wouldn't really be worth all the trouble if not for the "America flexing on the world" angle.
Sure, but who’s actually launching those science missions these days? It’s all commercial providers. Recycling 1970’s technology into SLS and making it even less reusable isn’t a flex on the world, it’s pork barrel politics.
I share your thoughts towards the lameness of SLS, but consider: would it even be happening if not for the threat of China going to the Moon? It seems to me that the whole point is to spoil China's fun.
Considering the CEO of the company making Starship has openly messed with his other companies in support of Russia (thinking about Ukraine decisions), there is zero chance the US should get into a situation where Elon Musk is the decider of whether or not Americans can go to space. Honestly, SpaceX with Musk at the helm is becoming a massive national security problem, and as a taxpayer, I'm okay spending more money to insulate ourselves from some globo-billionaire who doesn't give even a single F about my country.
I thought the end facts on that were that SpaceX had never turned it on there, to avoid stepping over a redline, and simply refused to change that policy when the Ukranians requested it for a USV attack.
It's my understanding that Starlink said something to the effect of:
> No, we're absolutely not supporting offensive military operations. However, Starshield _is_ in that business, so go file your request through that so as to run it by the appropriate people in the US government to get their approval.
And -AFAIK- the request was run through Starshield, and it did get approved.
You’re criticizing the “foreign policy” of a company that decided not to directly participate in a foreign war, quite possibly at the request of the US government or under threat of having those satellites shot down which would be a catastrophe for space travel.
If the US wanted to contract spacex for Ukrainian military comms, they would have.
There are plenty of reasons to criticize musk, but not participating directly in a war isn’t one of them
SLS isn't insulating us from him. If anything I'd say it has the opposite effect. By spending the money on an obsolete and inferior system we're playing ourselves and making it more likely we become dependent on such a person.
Now if we took some lessons from the design or changed the rules of the game around SpaceX that might be different. But we're not making moves that help us in that department.
I really liked this novel! A lot of what people say about Icelanders I assume comes from this caricature of an independent-minded (or uncompromisingly stupid) homesteader. There is sheep and starvation, bathetic death, ambitions ruined over and over while the 20th century grinds on around our hero. 600 pages. Did I say sheep? There's a lot of sheep. Pages of chasing them, eating them, buying them, driving them around. If that doesn't sell it to you I don't know what will.
Definitely, it's just about always used in a manner of like "Ah, don't worry about it", and while I tried to convey that as well in the post (like with the Snæfellsjökull story), I wanted to show that there might be more to the mentality behind the scenes.
The pipes in question were hot water pipes, used for district heating. I think most (probably every) house had had running cold water for decades at this point.
In contrast in the USA 7% of households were missing any plumbing in 1970.
Iceland was late industrializing and getting basic infrastructure. But so were other colonies. In 1918 Iceland stopped being a colony and by the 1950s it had pretty much caught on (with the major exceptions of road and rail networks).
So they got a freshwater connection to the mainland in 1968, and they do have some aquifers on the island (just really unreliable). I do know that they had problems with water prior to the main land connection, but I don’t know if most houses had plumbing connected to the unreliable aquifers prior to 1986.
> Iceland was a very poor country for most people other than a few well off in the fishing industry.
Very insightful. I had no clue this was the case.
Is there any published list somewhere that measures the relative richness between the countries? I am just curious to see which countries come out at the top and which ones at the bottom. Anyone knows any such list?
I don't know if it's technically stoicism or something, but you see this in places all over the world... the "it'll be alright until it isn't" kind of mantra. Living through these moments the best you can until you can no longer do so due to something beyond your control.
> "When you were landing on the moon we were getting running water installed"
Same for a number of folks in Fairfax Co VA (US ~wealthiest). My best friend's house was typical for the area. Cold running water arrived ~1970. Hot 1982. Outhouses stayed until about 2000.
> Today it's still relatively "medium" with few people very wealthy...
This doesn't appear to be true. Iceland is one of the wealthiest nations on the planet per capita.
Iceland also has the highest median wealth of any country at $413,193 compared to the US median of $107,739. Even in average wealth, Iceland ranks #5 globally only behind Switzerland, Luxembourg, United States, and Hong Kong. Keeping the average and median much closer than those other four does agree with your claim that they're good about making sure everyone has a good life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
Interesting thing I learned recently, is that Iceland has the highest rate of millionaires (in USD) of any country at 20% of the adult population. This more than double the 9% of US adult population millionaires. https://www.statista.com/statistics/262687/countries-with-th...
Some part of the reason for this is that pretty much anybody who is owns a single-family home in Iceland outright and is otherwise mostly debt-free would count as a millionaire (in USD) these days, because housing has appreciated by ridiculous amounts in the last 20 years or so.
One of the reasons there are a lot of house-millionaires is because some of the oldest generations, who bought their homes before 1980 or so, took normal loans with fixed interest rates, just before massive inflation in the 80s. The decrease in value per krona in ten years starting 1980 was something like 99.7%, so the loans went pretty quickly to something indistinguishable from zero. Inflation-indexed loans have been the only type of housing loan you could get for most of the time since about 1981, and are still the norm. The effect around that time of transition was that the younger generations (next waves of house buyers after them) were saddled with a lot of the burden.
That would be the infamous Icelandic verb of "nenna". It's used as such "Ég nenni þessu ekki", which translates roughly to "I don't feel like it" or "I don't want to".
But we have a word for both want and feel like, but they're different from "nenna". In some ways a better translation would be "I can't be bothered to".
The word is somewhat socially acceptable as an excuse not to do something.
"Þetta reddast" and "Ég nenni þessu ekki" are words many of us Icelanders live by.
This resonates with me on many levels. I worked at an Icelandic company for many years and some of my coworkers are like family - I never quite put my finger on why I got so well with Icelandic people, but maybe it's because of this "þetta reddast" attitude - I also have this attitude, though it was something I got in my mid-20s - I used to always think the sky was falling and at some point I realized that it consistently stayed up.
I'm past my prime, but would love to know your secret. I remember not wanting to return from Iceland, dreading the inevitable Anxiety Circus™ that was my life in the US. While in Iceland, I felt good about being alive. The way the people just get to the point and aren't afraid to say what they mean instead of this weird communication dance most Americans seem to do. The fact that yeah, danger looms in a variety of ways and the environment can be a bit hostile, but that's fine because we can deal with it together. It is difficult for me to call my experience there anything but refreshing...and yet I was not able to hang on to that.
A fault of my own, to be sure, but seeing as you adopted it in your early years, was there anything in particular that you did to make that happen?
Since you asked, but I dunno if this is applicable...
I had a lot of anxiety growing up - from "If I fail this test then everything is downhill" in school to "If I miss this payment then everything is downhill" in the scare quotes "real world". I remember listing out on paper every time I could remember that I thought there would be dire consequences if I failed and there wasn't actually dire consequences. Maybe it was a kind of retrospective cognitive behavioural therapy? I noticed a pattern (though I didn't have the understanding to call it a pattern back then).
But that was the moment that something switched and I had the confidence that even if shit hit the fan I would make it through. Probably it was the culmination of other realizations and not just this act by itself, but that was def the crystallization. And not that I'm always this way, but it's rare for me to fall back into the anxiety circus. It still takes some practice to maintain it in particularly tough situations.
Maybe you associate that state of mind with a place because you felt it most strongly there? But I think a state of mind is part of you and you can cultivate that anywhere.
In my head this becomes Risk perception in the US is severely broken. which it is.
We US-ians compulsively fear negligible risks (stranger kidnapping, terror attacks) while being unable to sense harm in play (elimination of child growth environments due to false risk perception and systemic destruction of free range area).
There is a phenomena that if you life under a consistent, visible threat to your life, like for example a huge damn upriver, you suppress that fear and become instead a "believer". And why wouldn't you, after all, if it goes wrong no survivors, so that story makes total sense, until it doesn't and even then.
> I managed to stop myself with an ice axe self-arrest, saved by having used my free time in the past to watch alpinism videos with self-arrest tutorials.
Wow. I took Sierra Club Basic Mountaineering class, and we learned self-arrest three ways: head down facing down, facing up, and head up facing up.
The class was cancelled later when someone stuck the ice ax into their stomach and sued, and insurance rates skyrocketed.
Hey! Author here. Felt this one in particular needed a reply.
I've since actually gotten a bit into alpinism and done a proper course. My instructor (a super experienced British guy in the Alps) refused to teach self-arrests to beginners because he said the risks were greater than the potential benefits. He said a lot of people get hurt practicing it (as you've noted) and so he preferred to really drill down on precautions and crevasse rescue techniques etc.
As for the story, I need to note the slope wasn't too steep, but being unable to brake would maybe have sent me down the crevasse (unclear how wide it was, we stepped over it on the way there and it seemed it may have been narrow). I also doubt my technique was perfect, but I just remembered to not just try to have the axe over my head somewhere but rather push my body/shoulder into it with the axe placed more diagonally.
I'm certain it was not beautiful nor perfect but at least enough in that situation.
My story, I was descending a mountain in early spring with 2 friends. I had an ice axe in my hand for balance, although I had never learned self arrest. As we're descending, my friends took the 'winter route', which was a rocky ridge going down. I took the summer route which was 100m away, just because it was smoother. It was wet grass and some patches of snow. I slipped, fell on my back and started sliding, had trouble turning because of my backpack. You really catch speed, I couldn't stop, I was approaching rocks. Somehow I turn on my belly, and instinctively I stick the axe in the ground. You're supposed to hold the top of the axe with one hand close to your chest, but I kept both hands on the handle, and I stoped, I was lucky
Part of my Icelandic search and rescue qualification program involved staying in a mountain cabin over a weekend with a few others, where we spent our days "throwing" ourselves down the icy steeps of the mountain and training ice axe self-arrests.
Of course there was no danger, but I get the sense other cultures would perhaps not go straight to that kind of hands on training.
According to OECD Health at a Glance 2023, Iceland is the highest per-capita consumer of tranquilizers. YMMV.
I did go there last year and I'm not sure I'd want to live there. Nice place to visit though and mostly nice people (apart from the large Ford truck driving psychopaths)
Reminds of Pakistan, specially when there was a lot of violence during 2008s. There would be _multiple_ bombs blasts on any given day and after a while, the news lost it's real world import for people. I was a tourist in Karachi then and recall appalling insensitivity when I heard of a blast on so and so road. The news just made me update the route I took that day.
Ireland has a "It'll be Grand" culture as well for comparison. It's a trade off with pros and cons and works for some situations and inhibits progress in other situations, things often don't get acted on or resolved quickly but at the same time there is a huge reservoir of tolerance to draw on when things do get shit.
I would consider this the other end of the spectrum to countries like Japan or Germany in the way they respond to certain things. Lots of generalisations of course but that's often the impressions you get from travelling. It's very hard to be precise about big groups of people.