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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27522 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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The ground invasion is what Hamas wanted from the start, it's a trap. It's sad to me that so many people are so brain poisoned from watching too many Hollywood action films that they see a trap and say "Well a real hero goes in anyway and figures out a way."

Al Qaeda thought they were setting a trap for the West with 9/11. Now, Bin Laden and his contemporary lieutenants are dead and Al Qaeda is scattered and broken, fighting over scraps in sub-Saharan Africa, and the West is mostly annoyed that it had to spend the time and money to do that to them.

Sometimes, it really does work out that the 'hero' goes in anyway and figures things out just fine. Provided the Biden administration doesn't knuckle under to its Left flank and start applying real pressure to get Israel to stop, Hamas is going to be crushed in the ground invasion and Israel will re-occupy the Gaza Strip, probably eventually handing over (Non-democratic) control to the PA.

https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-taliban-takeover-anniversary-explainer-10711b53a73638f46f2eb534b15b1a63

And yet...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_terrorism_in_Europe

This list seems to have entries running all the way up to 2021.

Did you know that Osama Bin Laden, no bullshit, was a big Asimov fan? And that one way to translate "The Foundation" into Arabic is "Al-Qaeda?"

Al Qaeda lost, but the idiotic heroism here also lost. Aside from the economic and human costs, we spent two decades with our energies focused on fighting illiterate goat herders and incels instead of countering the actual threats to a US-led world order.

A tiny portion of our energies, maybe. It's not like these things are mutually exclusive.

Of course, a huge part of that was that the American people didn't really care, at the end of the day, once Bin Laden was dead. Israelis will care about what happens in the Gaza Strip.

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