Rov_Scam
21hr ago
The average age of enlisted personnel is 27. If you assume their parents had them at age 30 on average, that would mean that their grandparents were born around 1938, which is probably a little early. 1938 was 73 years after the Civil War ended. Their grandparents would have grown up around people who remembered the Civil War in the same sense that someone born in 1991 grew up around people who remember World War I; I was born earlier than that and I don't recall a single instance of anyone talking about memories of WWI. The oldest people in my life, who were well into their 80s by the time someone born in 1991 would have been old enough to remember anything about world events, were themselves not old enough to have any meaningful memories of WWI. The last Civil War veterans reunion in 1938 at Gettysburg attracted 2,000 people. The average age was 94. Coincidentally, my own grandmother and great aunt's grandfather was a Civil War veteran, and I only know this because of genealogical research I did when I was in my 30s. Keep in mind that they were born in 1913 and 1911, respectively, and he died in 1920 at age 80, so that gives you an arbitrary example of when a fairly typical Civil War veteran would have passed, and how old one would have to be to have any memory of them being alive.
Anyway, I can't find good numbers on this, but a report from Brown University on the state of origin of people serving in post-9/11 wars at least points in the right direction. Assuming their work is representative, while the fact that the South provides a disproportionate number of soldiers is true, your thesis doesn't hold when you look at things at a more granular level. Most of this is driven by three states—Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina—that have vastly disproportionate numbers. But Florida gets an asterisk since its population didn't start taking off until well after the Civil War and relatively few of its present-day residents are culturally Southern, with only 43% born in the former Confederacy. Alabama is in the top-ten per capita, but Mississippi isn't; it's close to the national average, as are Arkansas and Louisiana, which has the highest native-born population of any Southern state at 78% born in-state.
Even if the effect does exist to the extent, it doesn't seem to have much of an effect when applied to the military as a whole. The top four states in terms of total enlistees mirror the top four states in population: California, Texas, Florida, and New York, in that order. Nine of the top ten are the same; Pennsylvania takes the biggest drop, from 5 to 9. Michigan, tenth in total population, is replaced by Virginia which is twelfth in total population. South Carolina, Alaska, and Hawaii punch above their weight when it come to producing enlistees, but their populations are small enough that it doesn't move them much on the list. South Carolina moves from 23 to 17. Alaska moves from 49 to 44. Hawaii moves from 41 to 39. The correlation between population and number of enlisted is 0.98. You can criticize the numbers because they are only a snapshot of a certain subset of enlisted men taken at a certain time and not representative of say, everyone who has served in the past 20 years, but I would expect variation due to sample size to smooth out with better data, not go in the opposite direction.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
The Civil War was 160 years ago. The South's period as a cultural and economic backwater was largely over by the time most of the current enlistees were born. Are you seriously trying to make the argument that "generational trauma" or whatever is a thing? I guess that would also explain why blacks have disproportionately high enlistment rates.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Cardinal directions refer to the surface of the earth, not some abstract fixed plane.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Not necessarily true. I live not 50 meters from one but within walking distance, and I recently made a specific point of going there because I wanted to clean my car before I lent it to someone and didn't have any other errands to run.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
I agree that there are bad attorneys out there, I'm just skeptical that self-help remedies offer any improvement. I did consumer-side law for a few years and the amount of "preparation" a client does in a legal sense (and not just having the right documents together) is usually inversely proportional to how easy it was for me to handle their case. At best these people would read about worst case scenarios and freak themselves out; these were the easy cases because these people tended to be very trusting and did an emotional 180 at the end of the consult. The worst were the people who were convinced they knew how I should handle the case and second-guessed my every decision. No, I am not going to try that One Weird Trick that's not going to work and might get me sanctioned. Yes, after much cajoling, I may be willing to put together a bunch of exotic entities that you heard about, but only after trying to talk you out of them, and only because if I lose you as a client you'll go to someone else who will charge you more and won't do the job right.
I did a lot of bankruptcy and estate administration and the problem with those isn't so much that clients have a ton of questions but that there's a flurry of activity right at the beginning followed by a lot of waiting, and they get worried if they haven't heard from you in a while and all you can tell them is that it's a waiting game. I'm not going to get into the workflow and how the consults are usually constructed, but in these kinds of cases the client is meeting with the attorney enough in the early stages that there's plenty of opportunity to ask questions. Like I said, LLMs weren't a thing quite yet, but there was a lot of Google, plus people like Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey, and I specifically instructed my clients to avoid the internet and pop financial gurus and if they wanted general information I recommended good publications that were easily available in libraries. But I can't imagine that telling them to direct their questions to an LLM would inspire much confidence.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
The Eisenhower Dollar flopped because it was too large and cumbersome to be convenient to use. So they replaced it with the Susan B. Anthony Dollar, which flopped because it was too similar to a quarter. They then replaced it with the Sacajawea Dollar, which was similar in size, but which the Mint thought would be distinguishable because of its gold color. Unfortunately, while it was visually distinct it wasn't so much when people are reaching in their pockets for change, so it flopped. Then they started the president series, which they thought would work because of the public interest in the 50 state quarter series. But it didn't have the desired effect, probably because it's easier to get people to collect an existing coin than to rely on collector demand to force the coins into circulation. Since Trump was able to effectively end the penny by simply telling the mint to stop producing them, maybe he could do something similar whereby he tells the Bureau of Printing and Engraving to stop producing dollar bills and print more 2 dollar bills, and has the mint ramp up dollar coin production. But people had been calling for the end of the penny for years, while the dollar bill remains popular, so I don't know that it would fly.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
perfume and cologne is generally supposed to be personal-space-percieved only.
Which is fine, provided the personal space is limited to someone who is kissing you. It does not extend to the entire elevator.
When a woman passes me with an enticing perfume I think something very much along those lines. Perhaps with a bit more eroticism.
In other words, you can put it with cars and athletic ability in the category of things men think impress women because they impress other men. I have never once heard a woman compliment a man for his cologne or tell me they liked the smell of a guy's cologne. I have heard a lot of women complaining about guys who wear too much cologne.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
Yeah, I don't think non-professionals realize that for most issues there's a lot of leeway with particular questions and the answers are unlikely to be resolved on appeal since most judges encourage the parties to settle and the parties are going to settle unless either things go completely off the rails or they really want a favorable appellate ruling and are willing to risk a multimillion dollar verdict (or long prison sentence) to get the answer. I'd also add opposing counsel to the list of relevant people that LLMs will never be able to understand. The bulk of my job consists of analyzing facts so I can figure out how much the case is worth from a settlement standpoint. Unless you've settled a few cases you aren't going to have any idea how much yours is worth. And I'd assume that most pro se litigants would insist that their case is worth either full value or nothing, depending on what side they're on. You may think you have a good argument, but chances are that a professional wouldn't take it to trial unless they absolutely had to.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
I agree that there are plenty of bad attorneys out there, but the situation you describe is malpractice.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
People have called me old-fashioned for this, but I still think that legal digests are the best way to conduct research since you can browse cases broadly by category and read thumbnail descriptions rather than have to dive into the case itself. Unfortunately I don't have a law library at work, so I have to make do with Lexis. Luckily I don't have to do research very often.
With LLMs, I think there's a general problem whereby people who aren't in a field and don't know what people in the field actually do all day confidently assert that some piece of technology will make them obsolete. Lexis or Westlaw could develop a perfect research tool that gave me all the relevant material on the first try every time, and it might save me a few hours per year. And even at that, a lot of legal argument involves a kind of inferential knowledge that you aren't going to find explicitly stated in caselaw. Just for fun, I constructed a simple scenario loosely based on an argument that took place last week:
George filed a lawsuit in Ohio in 1998 alleging that he developed asbestosis as a result of work he performed at a steel mill in the 1970s. Several defendants were named in the suit, and he settled with some of them. The suit was dismissed in 2007. In 2021, he filed another lawsuit in Pennsylvania alleging that he contracted asbestosis from the same work as the 1998 suit. He sued some defendants from the 1998 suit from whom he did not receive settlements. The remaining defendants were not named in the 1998 suit. Is the 2021 suit barred by the statute of limitations?
In the real case there were additional factors at play that complicated the situation, but this distills a basic question. I won't reproduce the overlong answer here, but ChatGTP confidently stated that the action was almost certainly barred by the SoL and went on to list all of the factors and applied the facts to them, just as one would do in a law school exam. The only problem is that the answer is wrong, and it's not wrong in the sense that it's an obvious hallucination but in the sense that there's a lot more going on that a Chatbot, at least at this stage, isn't going to consider.
The PA courts ruled in 1993 that asbestosis suits required actual impairment. The Ohio courts were silent on the issue until after tort reform in 2004 barred suits with no impairment. To be clear, no court explicitly allowed suits without impairment, but they hadn't been barred, and plenty of defendants settled these suits. The upshot is that if he had no impairment in 1998 then he had no valid case in PA, and the SoL would begin running not from date of diagnosis but from date of actual impairment.
Or at least that's what I think is going to happen, because we haven't gotten a ruling yet. But my point is that the model seems to be straightforward: It recognizes it as a SoL question, pulls the relevant SoL rules, and applies the rules to the facts I gave it. What it didn't do was consider that there may be other law out there not directly related to the SoL that's relevant to whether a claim even exists, and, by extension, whether there are any relevant facts that weren't mentioned that would go into the analysis. Even if the LLM know about the whole impairment issue, it wouldn't be able to give an answer without knowing whether the 1998 complaint alleged any impairment. And the analysis doesn't even stop there, because then we get to the issue of whether an averment in a complaint counts as a judicial admission.
To illustrate the point further, I asked the LLM whether a defendant who didn't settle the 1998 suit would be able to make an argument that the claim was barred by res judicata. It didn't do quite as bad here; rather than being incorrect, the answer was merely misleading. It said yes, provided that the dismissal was on the merits, etc. and listed the res judicata stuff. The problem for the average person is that they're going to see the yes and not worry too much about anything else, because in the actual case the dismissal was administrative. A sufficiently eagle-eyed LLM would be hip to the reality that administrative dismissals aren't exactly rare.
The bigger problem is that a sufficiently eagle-eyed LLM doesn't exist. Maybe it can exist, but it would still be useless. In the real case that this is based on, the Plaintiff was deposed for three days. There were three days worth of questions, the answers of which were all potentially relevant, and even that didn't cover all of the information needed to accurately evaluate this argument.
It's pretty obvious from the context here that this guy wasn't just trying to get background information or looking up the definition of "included offense"; if that were the case it's unlikely his attorney would even contest handing over the documents. He was probably laying out what he did in detail and trying to see if the LLM's advice corresponded to what his attorney was telling him, or doing something else that required him to disclose incriminating information.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
I'm not sure what the point of this would be. If you're represented by a lawyer, why are you asking an LLM questions about your case. That's the point of having a lawyer! If the lawyer can't explain things sufficiently, then you simply don't have a good lawyer. In any event, this wouldn't work because you would still be disclosing the information to a third party. The email question is complicated, but it ultimately isn't comparable. For starters, we have to be very careful with our email communications in general because there is a lot of confidential information (including information that would be shared with the opposing party anyway) that could get leaked—social security numbers, financial information, medical information, proprietary business information, etc. Any law firm is going to use a secure email server run by their IT company. Any email sent from the attorney's account is going to be encrypted, and they should ensure that any email the client sends will be encrypted as well.
If for some reasons these precautions aren't taken, there's not gotcha that I'm aware of that says because something hidden in Google's TOS that says they can read your emails would make communications from an unsophisticated party to an attorney unprotected because they were shared with a third party. When it comes to attorney communications, most judges would probably say that the sender had a reasonable expectation of privacy in email communications and didn't expect that the server host would have access, especially a large host like Google that deals with millions of emails an hour. The situation with LLMs is different because you're deliberately giving the third party company the information with the expectation that they will provide an output, not just using them as a messenger or having them store it for you.
When I was doing consumer-side stuff, LLMs weren't really a thing yet, but Google definitely was. I told clients that if they had questions for me to write them down and call me after enough time had passed that they didn't anticipate having any more (usually a couple weeks). I expressly warned them not to start Googling for answers. The reason for this isn't because I was protecting billable hours (I was charging flat fees and it was theoretically costing me money to take their calls), but because I didn't want them scaring the shit out of themselves. There's a lot of bad or inapplicable legal information online, and it's easy for someone to get worked up based on information that's irrelevant. If they really wanted more information I'd tell them to check a NOLO guide out of the library because at least I could vouch for the accuracy of the information, but told them to keep in mind that I paid hundreds of dollars a year for practice manuals that go into much more technical detail than anything they're going to find and am also familiar with local practice. In other words, if they get concerned that I didn't take some factor into consideration then rest assured that if they're reading about it on the internet than I did. There were, of course, a few people who felt the need to argue with me and any time I'd set them straight they'd go back to Google to prove me wrong, but they were just assholes.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
I think it's more that they're the kind of sports that the average person can stomach watching for a few hours once every four years. I'm watching luge right now, but I wouldn't want to watch it every week.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
Trying to convince you that at least some country music is worth listening to requires knowledge of what kind of music you already prefer. That being said, as the resident music maven I feel obliged to give my opinion as someone who agrees that the TPUSA halftime country was garbage:
Emmylou Harris - Boulder to Birmingham
Rov_Scam
9d ago
Here's the way I look at the whole dueling halftime show thing: Some people wanted a country music halftime show, and some wanted a Hispanic halftime show. They could have just gotten whatever version of the Texas Tornados is still touring and called it a day, and everyone would have agreed that it was the best halftime show ever. There could have even been a surprise appearance by Linda Ronstadt. And of course they would have performed their cover of Ely's "She Never Spoke Spanish to Me", which seems like a fitting commentary on the current situation, though I'm not sure exactly why.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
How do you get boomer conservatives to do something about this? Why do they just lay down and take it?
The kneeling scandal showed that people generally prefer watching and complaining to not watching. I know two people who have given up on the NFL for political reasons, but I get the impression that they weren't particularly big football fans before all of that. For most people, the personal enjoyment they get out of following a team and watching them every week is greater than whatever disgust they have for the infrequent intrusions of politics into the game, and until that changes, the NFL won't change.
This kind of attrition will only happen when the on-field product is affected, and that hasn't happened thus far. Bad Bunny's performance was 15 minutes when both teams were in the locker room. The kneeling happened before the games, and would have gone unnoticed had no one reported on it (even Kaepernick only talked about it after he was asked by a reporter). For instance, I used to watch NASCAR. I used to defend NASCAR to all the unsophisticated meatheads who told me that it wasn't a real sport and that it was less entertaining than watching paint dry. I was incredibly happy when it was gaining momentum in the mid-2000s. It went from being on TNN and ESPN to getting major network coverage, and while it was never going to come close to football, rivaling the popularity of baseball seemed a distinct possibility.
Then they decided to tinker with the format. The introduction of the Chase wasn't bad, but they kept tinkering with the format tho ensure maximum drama at the end of the season. Then they tinkered with the cars. Then drivers started getting into pro wrestling-style feuds. Then they decided to run the races in stages, and eliminate finishes under caution, and by this point my interest had eroded to the point that I had no idea what was going on. My father still watches religiously and defends almost every decision NASCAR makes. Yet when I go over there on Sundays and watch the end of a race with him I comment that the leader is too far ahead to allow the race to finish, so mum better be prepared to delay dinner for the inevitable caution, to which my father responds that that won't happen, only for there to inevitable be a crash and a green-white-checker finish. Every fucking time.
But I digress. Conservatives actively hating the NFL isn't going to do anything to change the NFL, because hating the NFL requires one to actually care about the NFL. And the NFL still makes money. For conservative ire to actually hurt the NFL it would have to be so pervasive that conservatives not only give up on it, but don't even care if it comes back. What we have now is akin to performatively breaking up with your girlfriend over some minor disagreement, but still taking her calls even though nothing has changed. I watched the Super Bowl with a lot of people who complained about the Bad Bunny performance and acted like they were owed another halftime show. But if they really cared that much they would have just stayed home and watched something else.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
No, I'm reducing American citizenship to the terms outlined in the Constitution and US law, which is the only definition that matters. What you're trying to do is introduce additional criteria that doesn't come from anywhere accept your own imagination to define American as that which conforms to your own biases of what Americans are supposed to be. Well, two can play at that game; for that matter, 200 million can play at that game, and you don't have any authority to make that determination over them. The only authority that matters in this case is that of the US government, and that is who I'll defer to on definitions of who counts as an American. You can't just invent your own definitions for things that are already well-defined because the implications make you uncomfortable.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
I understand your point, but I don't know how you can conclude that Roman Polanski is American. He only lived in the US for about five years.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
Sorry, he is. From the State Department website:
Puerto Rico comes within the definition of "United States" given in section 101(a)(38) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). A person born in Puerto Rico acquires U.S. citizenship in the same way as one born in any of the 50 States.
Puerto Ricans weren't granted citizenship by treaty but through the Jones Act in 1917. You can make the argument that gaining citizenship by statute isn't the same as being entitled to citizenship under the Constitution, but by that logic you'd have to concede that John McCain and Ted Cruz aren't Americans either. McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, which was under US jurisdiction at the time but not an incorporated territory, and Cruz was born in Canada, a foreign country. Both rely on statutes outlining the circumstances under which children of US citizens born abroad can claim US citizenship.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
UTree is entertaining, but as someone who watches a lot of his videos, it's clear that he knows very little about football. He's basically a go-to if you want to hear a distilled version of three hours of sports talk callers.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
I thought about speculating about what may have happened but I didn't because it would be just that, speculation. I don't know what happened, and the Beacon doesn't either, and can only point to lack of evidence, but the Oxford thing isn't something that's a matter of public record. The ministry thing is, but the article admits that the records only note the transfer and not the reason for it, and it could be that all the church knew was that he requested a transfer and was granted one. If the family was indeed receiving death threats it's certainly plausible that they didn't tell anybody and quietly requested a transfer. But I don't know, and unless one can find contemporaneous accounts that directly contradict the story, or find a relative who insists that Wes was never told that, it's not the kind of thing we can know. Even if it's false and the story was embellished through the generations, "Guy repeats family story without doing intensive historical research" isn't the kind of scandal that's going to sink a campaign.
Moore himself is one of young moderates who is seen as a rising star in the party. He's a YIMBY who is concerned about budget deficits and has a distinguished military record. He's somewhat pro Israel. George Clooney thinks he should run for president and he often gets named in the conversation, but he hasn't done anything to indicate he'd even be interested. Progressives don't like him because they live in a bubble where they think every Democrat is super far left, even though his views are more or less representative of the party as a whole. He's more or less the anti-Harris in the sense that he's a good speaker and has been pretty consistent throughout his career and doesn't sound like his positions are based on what some advisor told him played well in a focus group. As a Democrat I'd have no issue voting for him if he were the nominee, but I honestly don't know enough about him to say that I'd prefer him in a primary to a guy like Shapiro, though I'm biased in that regard.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
It would be easier for me to take your claim seriously if you hadn't said it like this:
The Washington Free Beacon has done two reports on Moore in recent months that are probably best considered bombshells and exclusionary.
His academic credentials appear to have been heavily fabricated.
A widely told anecdote about his ancestor fleeing from the KKK appears entirely fictious.
As for the first claim, the story says that he made some statements about his time at Oxford that the Beacon couldn't verify, other than that he completed a Masters program there but never received the actual diploma. And there's something about the dates not lining up with what we know about his life. There's probably some weird administrative explanation for this, but I'm not going to speculate. The article has a lot of weasely statements like
The problems start with confusion—which neither Moore's staff nor Oxford's registrars were willing or able to clear up—about when Moore completed his studies, when he received his degree, whether he submitted his thesis, and what the title of the work was.
I'd emphasize the "willing" part: They had questions. Moore's people didn't think a story in a right-wing publication was worth wasting the governor's time clearing up, so they took the path of least resistance and sent over written confirmation that he studied at Oxford. Oxford probably told them that they weren't in the business of disclosing student records to anyone who called. I don't know what the truth is here, but calling his academic credentials "heavily fabricated" is quite a stretch based on what we actually know.
The second item can be dismissed even more quickly, as it's the kind of family lore that most people aren't going to perform any serious research to confirm. But even still, the Beacon's reporting didn't actually reveal the story as fictitious, they just couldn't confirm it. And I don't know how they would be able to confirm it. The contents of sermons from black preachers in the South over 100 years ago weren't exactly comprehensively cataloged. Whether or not some random black guy got death threats in 1924 isn't the kind of thing that normally makes the public record. I don't know that political candidates at the state level are in the habit of performing independent research on stories their parents told them, but even if they are, there's nothing here that directly contradicts anything Moore said. The reporting certainly muddies the waters and casts doubt on the story, but again, that's a far cry from "entirely fictitious".
At this point, I know that you're going to argue that the specifics don't matter and that there's enough here to suggest that Moore has a problem of at least not being entirely truthful, and that this is in itself newsworthy. And I agree. The problem I have is that you claim
Our big media outlets just aren’t investigating (unless of course, it’s the Right).
While this is true with respect to the specific stories you mentioned, this isn't true with regard to the overall theme that Wes Moore may have engaged in some degree of fabulism. CNN ran a story questioning claims that he "grew up in" Baltimore. And if that seems too small potatoes for you, the New York Times ran a story about his incorrectly claiming that he was awarded a Bronze Star, and they had mentioned a number of such controversies in a piece on the 2022 primary. In other words, the mainstream media reported on Wes Moore's questionable relationship with the truth during a time when it actually mattered. Moore is running for reelection this year, but as an incumbent Democrat in a state with a heavy Democratic advantage, it's unlikely that a minor scandal like this is going to spark his downfall. The people with the most to gain here are his primary challengers; if this were that big a deal they'd certainly be trying to make some hay out of it.
But you don't seem to concerned about his reelection, because who actually cares about the Governor of Maryland anyway? No, your framing is in terms of the 2028 presidential election:
Those who have been following the upcoming election cycle may have noted that Wes Moore (current governor of Maryland) has quietly been dropped from top ten lists and is starting to be listed as someone who might not run.
We're at least a year out from when the first candidates will start declaring. Who were the top ten Democratic prospects at the beginning of 2018? I've looked, and I can't find anything. The few polls on the subject that were being conducted at the time were asking about far fewer than ten people, and those included Oprah Winfrey and The Rock. The earliest poll in which I can find ten candidates (February 2019) has the 9 and 10 positions occupied by Michael Bloomberg and Sherrod Brown, who both clock in behind Someone Else at 8 (the poll named 20 actual candidates). Only 11 candidates actually made it to the primaries, and that includes people like Tom Steyer and Deval Patrick. My point is that saying someone is in a top ten list doesn't mean much, and them dropping off a top ten list only means that they went from a fringe candidate to a non-candidate.
Finally, even if it turns out that Wes Moore fabricated this stuff, why does the right actually care? They are currently in thrall of one of the biggest pathological liars the office has ever known, and as far as I'm concerned they've forfeited the right to get on their high horse about whether it's really plausible that Wes Moore's great-grandfather got death threats from the Klan. Trump lied about his father being born in Germany and his grandfather being born in Sweden. He keeps insisting that his first inauguration parade was bigger than Obama's when it clearly wasn't, and he doubled down on the whole hurricane hitting Alabama thing. Almost as soon as he entered politics in 2015 he would say something on the campaign trail and when it became an issue he would deny that he said it, even though it was only a day or two before and was recorded on tape. Hell, just a couple weeks ago he had his press secretary denying that he said Iceland when he meant Greenland. I don't get how a publication like the Beacon can support Trump through the endless parade of bullshit, yet when Wes Moore says something it's a huge scandal because he didn't hire a genealogist to dig into 100 year old church records so he can verify something his parents told him.
I don't know that Gaza is the example you want to bring up here. I'm not even going to get into why it isn't comparable because it's not exactly a rousing success, even when compared to Afghanistan. The US was able to defeat the Taliban militarily in a matter of weeks, and their resurgence was slow and geographically limited. The problem was political not in the sense that the US was too squeamish about inflicting or taking casualties, but that the administration had no idea what to do when it got there and got distracted with attempts to gin up a war in Iraq. Bush wasn't much of a military guy and relied on Cheney and Rumsfeld for his strategy, which unfortunately meant that they were both overly aggressive when it came to starting wars and overly cautious when it came to executing them. Rumsfeld, in particular, wanted to do things as nimbly as possible. This makes sense when you consider that he was never a high ranking military officer and that most of his early experience in dealing with high level military affairs came on on the political side during the Vietnam and post-Vietnam eras, when public opposition to simply throwing troops at the problem developed. Meanwhile, more recent military operations in the 80s and 90s showed that public support would remain high with quick operations with minimal personnel and few casualties.
What he failed to realize is that 9/11 basically gave him a blank check. Political support was nearly unanimous (and Barbara Lee said she would have voted for the resolution had it been limited to Afghanistan), nation-building wasn't yet a dirty word, and he could have sent a half million troops in to garrison the place and nobody would have cared. Then they compounded the error by excluding the Taliban from participation in any future government and by neglecting to rebuild the Afghan military, similar to what they would do in Iraq. While it seems stupid to give defeated terrorists a seat at the table, the political reality is that they ruled the country for years and had some level of popular support. If they were truly popular enough to control the Afghan government, you'd find that out quickly and be able to act accordingly. If there support was low but they were operating on strength and fear, you could rest assured that the legitimate government could keep them under control. If they had just enough support to be a factor in government then they would have an escape valve. By blackballing them entirely, they ensured that the level of support would never be known and that the only way their supporters could influence government would be through armed rebellion, setting up the perfect conditions for an insurgency that they couldn't control.
And they'd still have had a chance at success if they had simply sent enough troops to patrol the countryside and stop Taliban reformation before it started, largely by just having enough of a presence to form relationships with the locals. Instead, they sat on their bases while everyone's attention turned to Iraq and the Taliban slowly gained traction in large parts of the country. When they figured this out they tried to stamp it out, but at this point they were being reactive rather than proactive, and they were slowly increasing troop counts Vietnam-style. By the time Obama took office Iraq had become so unpopular that Afghanistan had become the Good War and he increased troop counts to 100,000, but by this time the situation was out of control.
I'm not saying any of this would have necessarily worked, just that it had a better chance of working than your proposal that they just needed to kill more people and take more casualties. People seem to forget that things were relatively quiet in Afghanistan for a few years after the initial invasion, and it looked like a stable government might form. All the while, though, the Taliban was reforming under the Coalition's noses, because they simply didn't have the necessary coverage. Whether this kind of coverage was even possible is an open question. This is like trying to patrol Texas if the biggest city is Houston minus a couple million people and the second-biggest city is El Paso, and everyone from Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio, plus the 2 million taken from Houston, are scattered across the rural parts of the state. And the groups I described comprise half the population. If they're truly determined to resist your rule, then there's nothing you can do to stop them. I don't even know what kinds of numbers would be involved for this. I remembered Rumsfeld nearly having a heart attack after one of the generals told congress it would take over 400,000 troops to occupy Iraq, but Iraq is significantly more urbanized than Afghanistan, so I'd expect it to take quite a few more than that.
There seems to be a theme among conservatives here—and I'm not accusing you of this personally, since I can't tell if you're actually advocating for the options you proposed—of calling out the alleged "squeamishness" of the American public in terms of inflicting casualties on foreigners, taking casualties ourselves, and engaging in behavior that would generally be classified as atrocities. The upshot of this is that they blame American military and foreign policy failures on such a squeamishness. But there's another kind of political squeamishness that they don't talk about, which is when the policies required to win would be ones they themselves oppose on principle. Were we too squeamish about allowing Islamic terrorists a seat at the table, even if doing so may have served as a litmus test of their popular support and offered a relief valve for their political aims? Were we too squeamish in our reluctance to spend money? If Bush had said at the outset that he expected a minimum of 500,000 troops would be stationed across Afghanistan for the next 20 years minimum and would be slowly drawn down over the following 30, that all troops serving in Afghanistan would be expected to learn the local language of the area where they were serving, and that we would send hundreds of billions of dollars in economic development funds annually with absolutely no expectation of there being any kind of payoff, because this afforded Afghanistan the best chance of stability, what do you think the raction would have been? Even in the wake of 9/11, this would have been too much. But would it have meant we were too squeamish to want to win?
I'll never understand why people think monarchical restorations are a good idea. I can't think of any examples of this ever working, and it gets worse the closer you get in history. The Stuart Restoration is probably the most successful, but it only lasted 28 years, and they had only been out of power for about a decade. The Bourbon Restoration lasted 15 years. And honestly those are the only two examples I can think of because the rest aren't true restorations of exiled kings returning. I don't see how a guy who was nearly 90 and hadn't set foot in the country in 30 years was going to be the man of the hour to save Afghanistan from the Taliban. Yes, he was well-liked among all ethnic groups. This is what happens when half the population can't remember your being in power and the other half is looking through nostalgia-tinted glasses. That kind of goodwill is burned quickly when you're actually in power and have to make real decisions, and you haven't done anything remotely resembling statecraft in decades. It also would have seriously pissed off Pakistan to the point that it would have jeopardized the US's ability to use the land corridor, which would have made matters significantly worse than having Karzai, who was also popular at the time of his election.
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