Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
Okay, here's an o/t question.
I am not an historian (tm). Recently I listened to the excellent Revolutions Podcast on the French Revolution, and read/listened to other stuff on it (including the less-excellent Napoleon Podcast). Being British, my pre-existing viewpoint was that Napoleon was a sh*t. After all this listening/reading/?learning?, my viewpoint is still that he was a sh*t.
So: am I right, despite my rather biased British upbringing? Taken in totality, was he a hero or villain?
This is a massive gap for me too. I basically know about this stuff through reading the Sharpe books. I keep meaning to learn more about Napoleon but I never get round to it.
I would recommend listening to both of the above. The former seems very even-handed, whilst the latter is hosted by two Napoleon fanboys who are very keen to excuse his excesses. But it is still good.
I *wish* the latter had had people who different in the views about Napoleon on it - a polite discussion would have been brilliant.
Good morning from LNER. Pingdemic still creating staffing issues. Happily the rules do not apply to Liar so we can all benefit from his ministrations.
Get a life
Bless. I think I have a pretty good life thanks. Unlike you sheep who bleat away that anyone who isn't cheering on good old Boris are unpatriotic or whatever.
I would say sheep have a pretty good life. Eat, sleep, shag, and kick Jeremy Clarkson in the balls every so often. None of this existential angst bullshit we all go through.
Every so often sheep roll over onto their backs and get stuck. One of the jobs of a shepherd is to put them back on their feet, otherwise they would die in that position.
Sheep may well be the stupidest mammals.
Came across one on that position a few months ago. Dont know how they manage it, not sure why they would attempt to roll about even if frolicking.
The sheep around here have learnt to roll over on their backs. This allows them to cross the cattle grids between moorland and local villages. You often see them nibbling residents plants.
Amazed by this. Our vaccine advisory group is out of line with current evidence on this, and CDC, AAP, + US, Canada, most European countries. We've done a quantitative assessment of this, and the benefits vs risks are v. clear. How do they justify this?
I saw a post on one of these twitter accounts that admitted it’s fair to disagree. I really think is a finely balanced decision, and while we may not agree with it, it is being made in good faith, based on how these scientists see the data at the time.
I agree. The science is finely balanced. The benefits to the community are clear, to the individual teens, much less so. What I don't respect are the absolutists like Gurdasani who are 100% certain they are 100% right when they have so often been wrong in the past, yet rarely if ever admit it.
That’s fine, but with a proviso: we’re happy to recommend vaccines to children where there is no benefit, because of high uptake of vaccines.
I.e., the HPV vaccine. There are side effects. But the benefits to society of eliminating a form of cancer are enormous. Every individual would (or should) choose not to take it, but society as a whole benefits enormously from high uptake.
Why are we thinking about the benefits to society of high uptake of the COVID vaccine differently?
The problem may be that it is of limited benefit to the young and the current vaccines are clearly less effective at preventing transmission than they are at preventing serious illness. Is is therefore clear that the game is worth the candle? In the USA for example, they're only just up to 50% fully vaxed and perhaps should be more focused at this point in vaccinating the vulnerable of whatever age.
You could, from that point of view, go back to World War I, and the Arab Revolt against the Sultan, or the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, as the starting point
But I was thinking of its current incarnation, and that very much does link to the situation in Afghanistan in the mid-1970s that culminated in the Soviet invasion. The CIA sowed a wind by supporting the mujahadeen as enemies of the Soviets. Sadly they have reaped a whirlwind.
The key year is 1979 - the year of the Iranian revolution.
In the same way that the Catholic church reacted to the Reformation with the Inquisition, the Saudis reacted to the Iranian Revolution by going hardline Wahabi. They closed the cinemas, clamped down on all sorts of things that were thought to be "haram" and basically tried to match Shia extremism with Sunni extremism.
The other event of 1979 was the invasion of Afghanistan.
As others have pointed out, Saudis reacted to that by funding mujahideen. They also flooded the market with oil, forcing the price below $10 by 1986 in an economic attack against the Soviets. This hurt Gorbachev's perestroika efforts because he ran out of money and the Soviet Union collapsed.
Which means that if the Soviets hadn't invaded Afghanistan, they wouldn't have triggered the Saudi response that bankrupted them and eastern europe would still be under the Soviet yoke.
That wasn't the only reason why the Saudis drove the oil price down: they wanted to send a very clear message to the big international oil companies that controlling the oil market was at least as important to them as actual profits. Specifically, they wanted to discourage investment in new, more expensive forms of oil.
And to a certain extent that worked: in the 90s, investment by the big oil companies collapsed. But - as Margaret Thatcher once said - "you can't buck the market", and world underinvestment in the 90s led to the monumental oil boom in the 2000s, and which (in turn) led to the development of unconventional oil reserves that probably destroyed Saudi hegemony forever.
I see we now have six medals in track and field. Disappointing to not get a gold, but I think it’s a decent return.
Sounds absolute crap to me.
I think that you are being harsh. Laura Muir's medal in particular was a really excellent effort.
It would have been gold if Scotland was independent.
It would have been fuck all outside of Team GB/BOA funding tbh. It's what's turned the UK into a sporting powerhouse compared to years gone.
It will be interesting to see if there is an effect from Scots so clearly proud to wear a team GB strip and doing really well in these games. According to Sky News Scotland has more medal winners than any other part of the UK per head of population but they all seem very proud to wave the Union Jack.
Not allowed to do anything else. Remember the London Olympics and what happened with the Cornish flag.
Oh sure. But as @MaxPB points out our athletes have an incredible amount of funding an opportunities from the Union.
There would be nothing stopping Scotland replicating it, of course, I just don't see it as very likely and bigger teams scale better wrt funding as coaches, physios, medical teams and such can be shared across sports. The fixed costs would eat up a huge proportion of what would be considered a proportional bit of elite sport funding (though that's not how it works in practice).
Ultimately it's a choice of what money should be spent on, the government has decided that winning elite sports events is a worthwhile use of money, but other countries think public funds should be used elsewhere. I'd probably imagine after a few cycles an SNP government would rather save the money.
Doesn’t a lot of funding for athletics come from the National Lottery?
That funding would certainly go.
And even if Scotland set up a lottery of its own, it would be on a much smaller scale and have less money to go round.
We would send less duffers and makeweights and so given it would be a much smaller select team why would it hav eless money to go round. Would be very interesting to see where the money is spent just now, how many sports facilities etc funded outside England , etc. My educated guess is that Scottish athletes have to go to England for most of the facilities but will be pleasantly amazed if not correct. Must be a frother with all the data to hand surely.
Amazed by this. Our vaccine advisory group is out of line with current evidence on this, and CDC, AAP, + US, Canada, most European countries. We've done a quantitative assessment of this, and the benefits vs risks are v. clear. How do they justify this?
I saw a post on one of these twitter accounts that admitted it’s fair to disagree. I really think is a finely balanced decision, and while we may not agree with it, it is being made in good faith, based on how these scientists see the data at the time.
I agree. The science is finely balanced. The benefits to the community are clear, to the individual teens, much less so. What I don't respect are the absolutists like Gurdasani who are 100% certain they are 100% right when they have so often been wrong in the past, yet rarely if ever admit it.
That’s fine, but with a proviso: we’re happy to recommend vaccines to children where there is no benefit, because of high uptake of vaccines.
I.e., the HPV vaccine. There are side effects. But the benefits to society of eliminating a form of cancer are enormous. Every individual would (or should) choose not to take it, but society as a whole benefits enormously from high uptake.
Why are we thinking about the benefits to society of high uptake of the COVID vaccine differently?
The problem may be that it is of limited benefit to the young and the current vaccines are clearly less effective at preventing transmission than they are at preventing serious illness. Is is therefore clear that the game is worth the candle? In the USA for example, they're only just up to 50% fully vaxed and perhaps should be more focused at this point in vaccinating the vulnerable of whatever age.
That's a fair point: if you have lower levels of vaccination in adults, then having children vaccinated makes more sense.
But you only have to look at pediatric hospital admissions in Florida, to see that when Delta is rampant, then there is a lot more benefit to vaccinating teenagers, than when the plague is in remission. Simply: assumptions about background levels of the disease matter, and if there are lots of only mildly symptomatic adults spreading viral matter around, your chance of your child getting Delta are massively higher.
All that being said, why not leave it up to parents? Our 13 year old daughter is Pfizered, and when the vaccines are approved for 9-11 year olds (September), we will be getting our son jabbed too. The balance of risks is very different now than it was three months ago, and the fact that so many vaccinated people can carry and spread Delta means that that is likely to continue for some time.
I see we now have six medals in track and field. Disappointing to not get a gold, but I think it’s a decent return.
Sounds absolute crap to me.
I think that you are being harsh. Laura Muir's medal in particular was a really excellent effort.
It would have been gold if Scotland was independent.
It would have been fuck all outside of Team GB/BOA funding tbh. It's what's turned the UK into a sporting powerhouse compared to years gone.
It will be interesting to see if there is an effect from Scots so clearly proud to wear a team GB strip and doing really well in these games. According to Sky News Scotland has more medal winners than any other part of the UK per head of population but they all seem very proud to wave the Union Jack.
Amazed by this. Our vaccine advisory group is out of line with current evidence on this, and CDC, AAP, + US, Canada, most European countries. We've done a quantitative assessment of this, and the benefits vs risks are v. clear. How do they justify this?
I saw a post on one of these twitter accounts that admitted it’s fair to disagree. I really think is a finely balanced decision, and while we may not agree with it, it is being made in good faith, based on how these scientists see the data at the time.
I agree. The science is finely balanced. The benefits to the community are clear, to the individual teens, much less so. What I don't respect are the absolutists like Gurdasani who are 100% certain they are 100% right when they have so often been wrong in the past, yet rarely if ever admit it.
That’s fine, but with a proviso: we’re happy to recommend vaccines to children where there is no benefit, because of high uptake of vaccines.
I.e., the HPV vaccine. There are side effects. But the benefits to society of eliminating a form of cancer are enormous. Every individual would (or should) choose not to take it, but society as a whole benefits enormously from high uptake.
Why are we thinking about the benefits to society of high uptake of the COVID vaccine differently?
The problem may be that it is of limited benefit to the young and the current vaccines are clearly less effective at preventing transmission than they are at preventing serious illness. Is is therefore clear that the game is worth the candle? In the USA for example, they're only just up to 50% fully vaxed and perhaps should be more focused at this point in vaccinating the vulnerable of whatever age.
That's a fair point: if you have lower levels of vaccination in adults, then having children vaccinated makes more sense.
But you only have to look at pediatric hospital admissions in Florida, to see that when Delta is rampant, then there is a lot more benefit to vaccinating teenagers, than when the plague is in remission. Simply: assumptions about background levels of the disease matter, and if there are lots of only mildly symptomatic adults spreading viral matter around, your chance of your child getting Delta are massively higher.
All that being said, why not leave it up to parents? Our 13 year old daughter is Pfizered, and when the vaccines are approved for 9-11 year olds (September), we will be getting our son jabbed too. The balance of risks is very different now than it was three months ago, and the fact that so many vaccinated people can carry and spread Delta means that that is likely to continue for some time.
I think the failure in the US to get beyond 50% is shockingly bad. Unless they can remedy that situation soon they're in for a rough ride not to mention the continual danger of new variants. It just seems that the issue of children being the focus after this degree of failure with the oldies is frankly odd. This is the richest country in the world ffs.
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
Okay, here's an o/t question.
I am not an historian (tm). Recently I listened to the excellent Revolutions Podcast on the French Revolution, and read/listened to other stuff on it (including the less-excellent Napoleon Podcast). Being British, my pre-existing viewpoint was that Napoleon was a sh*t. After all this listening/reading/?learning?, my viewpoint is still that he was a sh*t.
So: am I right, despite my rather biased British upbringing? Taken in totality, was he a hero or villain?
This is a massive gap for me too. I basically know about this stuff through reading the Sharpe books. I keep meaning to learn more about Napoleon but I never get round to it.
I would recommend listening to both of the above. The former seems very even-handed, whilst the latter is hosted by two Napoleon fanboys who are very keen to excuse his excesses. But it is still good.
I *wish* the latter had had people who different in the views about Napoleon on it - a polite discussion would have been brilliant.
Will do, cheers 😀
I was rather put out when Margaret Thatcher accepted Mitterand's invitation to Paris to celebrate the bicentenary of the Bastille gaol-break. It was a heaven-sent opportunity to remind johnny foreigner that we do things differently over here. I'm sure Boris would rise to the bait, but it is, perhaps, a trifle optimistic to expect him to be there (or not there, if you catch my drift) for the 250th.
The CoE has come out against the 'Rogers' of this parish! Archbishop of york has finally WOKEn up!
‘The most senior leader in the Church of England.’
Has something happened to Justin Welby without my noticing?
Currently taking a sabbatical. So describing Stevey-baby (as we used to call him in the pews of Chelmsford Diocese) as the most senior leader in the C of E is more justified than many things in the Daily Mail.
Worth noting that he comes out in favour of English Regions, so something to annoy everyone there.
Cottrell is a state school and central London polytechnic educated Archbishop of York, so would be a significantly less elite choice for the top job than Welby who is Eton and Trinity College Cambridge educated.
Cottrell also is clearly trying to move the C of E away from the FBPE crowd and recognising that most of England voted for Brexit. He is also sensibly suggesting England deserves the same level of devolution as Scotland and Wales have.
Note too there are some theological differences between Cottrell and Welby too. Welby is more on the evangelical wing of the Anglican church, Cottrell is closer to the high church, Anglo Catholic wing (although sensibly accepts women priests and is not anti gay either, reflecting the England of the 21st century)
Perhaps if Stevie baby rescinded from sitting unelected in a big hoose in that London with his frocked mates from the Church of Engerland overseeing laws for the whole of the UK, he might not come over as a mouthy opportunist.
Why should he not? The whole House of Lords is unelected and as long as it continues to be unelected there is no problem with having 26 bishops as peers out of 792 Lords in total ie less than 5%. Most Bishops have experience in their communities, have been parish clergy too at some some point and have a lot to offer. The Lords can only delay legislation anyway not block it outright.
I would have a few more Catholic bishops (although the Vatican currently is opposed) and rabbis too and add some imams as well.
Remember before the Reformation most members of the House of Lords were Bishops and Abbotts, so the number of Bishops in the Lords is now only a fraction of what it once was
Who do you think should represent the non-believers?
Not to mention the Wrong Kind of Believer. I find it utterly astounding that HYUFD could omit the truly Reformed Churches and maintain the current massive bias in favour of the Church of England. What is a Methodist, or a Congregationalist, or a Presbyterian, to think of this disgraceful partisanship?
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
No, the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the Glorious Revolution. The second was the American Revolution.
Can you justify those statements? Because I have to say I do not agree with you.
Both were based on the concepts of natural liberties, implicit social contracts between ruler and ruled, and the concept of constitutionality. All were Enlightenment concepts, developed by Algernon Sidney, John Locke and others.
Not really. Be careful about retrospective attempts to shoehorn them into Whiggish ideals.
The Orange Revolution was ultimately caused by King James VII and II having a nosebleed. Nothing else. It takes on a far greater significance with hindsight, especially in light of Locke and later Burke’s writings, than it ever had at the time.
Similarly, the American Revolution was ultimately a tax dispute that got a bit out of hand. Had Townshend acted a week sooner than he did, it wouldn’t have happened. I agree, to an extent, that the subsequent federal state had enlightenment ideals under it - those of Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin, to take the most obvious examples - but many of them really came into play only some years later under Jefferson and Madison.
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
Okay, here's an o/t question.
I am not an historian (tm). Recently I listened to the excellent Revolutions Podcast on the French Revolution, and read/listened to other stuff on it (including the less-excellent Napoleon Podcast). Being British, my pre-existing viewpoint was that Napoleon was a sh*t. After all this listening/reading/?learning?, my viewpoint is still that he was a sh*t.
So: am I right, despite my rather biased British upbringing? Taken in totality, was he a hero or villain?
‘Talented thug’ is an analysis I read on here and that sums him up quite nicely for me.
He was one of the first truly totalitarian non-monarchical dictators. Comparisons with Lenin and Trotsky are valid, although he was far more self-aggrandising than either of those.
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
Okay, here's an o/t question.
I am not an historian (tm). Recently I listened to the excellent Revolutions Podcast on the French Revolution, and read/listened to other stuff on it (including the less-excellent Napoleon Podcast). Being British, my pre-existing viewpoint was that Napoleon was a sh*t. After all this listening/reading/?learning?, my viewpoint is still that he was a sh*t.
So: am I right, despite my rather biased British upbringing? Taken in totality, was he a hero or villain?
‘Talented thug’ is an analysis I read on here and that sums him up quite nicely for me.
He was one of the first truly totalitarian non-monarchical dictators. Comparisons with Lenin and Trotsky are valid, although he was far more self-aggrandising than either of those.
He was an artillery officer. At least in the British Army, it portended having rather more brains than the average junior officer of infentry or cavalry.
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
No, the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the Glorious Revolution. The second was the American Revolution.
Can you justify those statements? Because I have to say I do not agree with you.
Both were based on the concepts of natural liberties, implicit social contracts between ruler and ruled, and the concept of constitutionality. All were Enlightenment concepts, developed by Algernon Sidney, John Locke and others.
Not really. Be careful about retrospective attempts to shoehorn them into Whiggish ideals.
The Orange Revolution was ultimately caused by King James VII and II having a nosebleed. Nothing else. It takes on a far greater significance with hindsight, especially in light of Locke and later Burke’s writings, than it ever had at the time.
Similarly, the American Revolution was ultimately a tax dispute that got a bit out of hand. Had Townshend acted a week sooner than he did, it wouldn’t have happened. I agree, to an extent, that the subsequent federal state had enlightenment ideals under it - those of Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin, to take the most obvious examples - but many of them really came into play only some years later under Jefferson and Madison.
Be wary about confusing cause and effect.
Presumably both are nice examples of Whig historiography?
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
No, the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the Glorious Revolution. The second was the American Revolution.
Can you justify those statements? Because I have to say I do not agree with you.
Both were based on the concepts of natural liberties, implicit social contracts between ruler and ruled, and the concept of constitutionality. All were Enlightenment concepts, developed by Algernon Sidney, John Locke and others.
Not really. Be careful about retrospective attempts to shoehorn them into Whiggish ideals.
The Orange Revolution was ultimately caused by King James VII and II having a nosebleed. Nothing else. It takes on a far greater significance with hindsight, especially in light of Locke and later Burke’s writings, than it ever had at the time.
Similarly, the American Revolution was ultimately a tax dispute that got a bit out of hand. Had Townshend acted a week sooner than he did, it wouldn’t have happened. I agree, to an extent, that the subsequent federal state had enlightenment ideals under it - those of Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin, to take the most obvious examples - but many of them really came into play only some years later under Jefferson and Madison.
Be wary about confusing cause and effect.
Presumably both are nice examples of Whig historiography?
Cause and effect, or attempts to reform the government?
Edit - of course, it could be argued that the French Revolution was caused not by enlightenment ideals, but by Louis XVI’s bankruptcy and a poor harvest. But the reforms demanded to rescue the monarchy from its financial collapse were certainly based on Enlightenment ideals.
Amazed by this. Our vaccine advisory group is out of line with current evidence on this, and CDC, AAP, + US, Canada, most European countries. We've done a quantitative assessment of this, and the benefits vs risks are v. clear. How do they justify this?
I saw a post on one of these twitter accounts that admitted it’s fair to disagree. I really think is a finely balanced decision, and while we may not agree with it, it is being made in good faith, based on how these scientists see the data at the time.
I agree. The science is finely balanced. The benefits to the community are clear, to the individual teens, much less so. What I don't respect are the absolutists like Gurdasani who are 100% certain they are 100% right when they have so often been wrong in the past, yet rarely if ever admit it.
That’s fine, but with a proviso: we’re happy to recommend vaccines to children where there is no benefit, because of high uptake of vaccines.
I.e., the HPV vaccine. There are side effects. But the benefits to society of eliminating a form of cancer are enormous. Every individual would (or should) choose not to take it, but society as a whole benefits enormously from high uptake.
Why are we thinking about the benefits to society of high uptake of the COVID vaccine differently?
The problem may be that it is of limited benefit to the young and the current vaccines are clearly less effective at preventing transmission than they are at preventing serious illness. Is is therefore clear that the game is worth the candle? In the USA for example, they're only just up to 50% fully vaxed and perhaps should be more focused at this point in vaccinating the vulnerable of whatever age.
That's a fair point: if you have lower levels of vaccination in adults, then having children vaccinated makes more sense.
But you only have to look at pediatric hospital admissions in Florida, to see that when Delta is rampant, then there is a lot more benefit to vaccinating teenagers, than when the plague is in remission. Simply: assumptions about background levels of the disease matter, and if there are lots of only mildly symptomatic adults spreading viral matter around, your chance of your child getting Delta are massively higher.
All that being said, why not leave it up to parents? Our 13 year old daughter is Pfizered, and when the vaccines are approved for 9-11 year olds (September), we will be getting our son jabbed too. The balance of risks is very different now than it was three months ago, and the fact that so many vaccinated people can carry and spread Delta means that that is likely to continue for some time.
I think the failure in the US to get beyond 50% is shockingly bad. Unless they can remedy that situation soon they're in for a rough ride not to mention the continual danger of new variants. It just seems that the issue of children being the focus after this degree of failure with the oldies is frankly odd. This is the richest country in the world ffs.
The focus on vaccinations for children looks like displacement activity.
If we assume everyone is going to come into contact with Delta, or maybe a worse variant, at some point then you can pretty much calculate the number of hospitalisations and deaths among the anti-vaxxers now.
It then becomes a question of managing the spread of hospitalisations so that they remain within an acceptable level.
Fail to do that and health systems become overloaded and the death rate rises.
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
No, the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the Glorious Revolution. The second was the American Revolution.
Can you justify those statements? Because I have to say I do not agree with you.
Both were based on the concepts of natural liberties, implicit social contracts between ruler and ruled, and the concept of constitutionality. All were Enlightenment concepts, developed by Algernon Sidney, John Locke and others.
Not really. Be careful about retrospective attempts to shoehorn them into Whiggish ideals.
The Orange Revolution was ultimately caused by King James VII and II having a nosebleed. Nothing else. It takes on a far greater significance with hindsight, especially in light of Locke and later Burke’s writings, than it ever had at the time.
Similarly, the American Revolution was ultimately a tax dispute that got a bit out of hand. Had Townshend acted a week sooner than he did, it wouldn’t have happened. I agree, to an extent, that the subsequent federal state had enlightenment ideals under it - those of Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin, to take the most obvious examples - but many of them really came into play only some years later under Jefferson and Madison.
Be wary about confusing cause and effect.
Presumably both are nice examples of Whig historiography?
Cause and effect, or attempts to reform the government?
Edit - of course, it could be argued that the French Revolution was caused not by enlightenment ideals, but by Louis XVI’s bankruptcy and a poor harvest. But the reforms demanded to rescue the monarchy from its financial collapse were certainly based on Enlightenment ideals.
I meant, later interpretation of the events made to fit in one nice long story of progress under the beneficient elective dictatorship of Westminster, [edit] or Washington DC as approptiate. But maybe Locke and Burke antedated that.
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
Okay, here's an o/t question.
I am not an historian (tm). Recently I listened to the excellent Revolutions Podcast on the French Revolution, and read/listened to other stuff on it (including the less-excellent Napoleon Podcast). Being British, my pre-existing viewpoint was that Napoleon was a sh*t. After all this listening/reading/?learning?, my viewpoint is still that he was a sh*t.
So: am I right, despite my rather biased British upbringing? Taken in totality, was he a hero or villain?
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
No, the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the Glorious Revolution. The second was the American Revolution.
Can you justify those statements? Because I have to say I do not agree with you.
Both were based on the concepts of natural liberties, implicit social contracts between ruler and ruled, and the concept of constitutionality. All were Enlightenment concepts, developed by Algernon Sidney, John Locke and others.
Not really. Be careful about retrospective attempts to shoehorn them into Whiggish ideals.
The Orange Revolution was ultimately caused by King James VII and II having a nosebleed. Nothing else. It takes on a far greater significance with hindsight, especially in light of Locke and later Burke’s writings, than it ever had at the time.
Similarly, the American Revolution was ultimately a tax dispute that got a bit out of hand. Had Townshend acted a week sooner than he did, it wouldn’t have happened. I agree, to an extent, that the subsequent federal state had enlightenment ideals under it - those of Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin, to take the most obvious examples - but many of them really came into play only some years later under Jefferson and Madison.
Be wary about confusing cause and effect.
Presumably both are nice examples of Whig historiography?
Cause and effect, or attempts to reform the government?
Edit - of course, it could be argued that the French Revolution was caused not by enlightenment ideals, but by Louis XVI’s bankruptcy and a poor harvest. But the reforms demanded to rescue the monarchy from its financial collapse were certainly based on Enlightenment ideals.
I meant, later interpretation of the events made to fit in one nice long story of progress under the beneficient elective dictatorship of Westminster, [edit] or Washington DC as approptiate. But maybe Locke and Burke antedated that.
No. Arguably they created it.
Not that Whigs are the only guilty ones. Marxist historiography, oh my goodness.
You could, from that point of view, go back to World War I, and the Arab Revolt against the Sultan, or the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, as the starting point
But I was thinking of its current incarnation, and that very much does link to the situation in Afghanistan in the mid-1970s that culminated in the Soviet invasion. The CIA sowed a wind by supporting the mujahadeen as enemies of the Soviets. Sadly they have reaped a whirlwind.
The key year is 1979 - the year of the Iranian revolution.
In the same way that the Catholic church reacted to the Reformation with the Inquisition, the Saudis reacted to the Iranian Revolution by going hardline Wahabi. They closed the cinemas, clamped down on all sorts of things that were thought to be "haram" and basically tried to match Shia extremism with Sunni extremism.
The other event of 1979 was the invasion of Afghanistan.
As others have pointed out, Saudis reacted to that by funding mujahideen. They also flooded the market with oil, forcing the price below $10 by 1986 in an economic attack against the Soviets. This hurt Gorbachev's perestroika efforts because he ran out of money and the Soviet Union collapsed.
Which means that if the Soviets hadn't invaded Afghanistan, they wouldn't have triggered the Saudi response that bankrupted them and eastern europe would still be under the Soviet yoke.
That wasn't the only reason why the Saudis drove the oil price down: they wanted to send a very clear message to the big international oil companies that controlling the oil market was at least as important to them as actual profits. Specifically, they wanted to discourage investment in new, more expensive forms of oil.
And to a certain extent that worked: in the 90s, investment by the big oil companies collapsed. But - as Margaret Thatcher once said - "you can't buck the market", and world underinvestment in the 90s led to the monumental oil boom in the 2000s, and which (in turn) led to the development of unconventional oil reserves that probably destroyed Saudi hegemony forever.
On the subject of oil:
“American oil refiners have never before bought so much crude oil from Russia. The Cold War adversary is now the number two supplier to the U.S.”
So Germany's 2020 games will mainly be remembered for casual racism, and punching a horse?
Can you imagine the column inches that would have been written if those two individuals had been British Olympic coaches?
A lot of preconceived notions would have been reinforced, for sure.
Indeed. International condemnation etc... just like for the racist abuse towards our football players despite the majority of the abusers being based overseas.
Amazed by this. Our vaccine advisory group is out of line with current evidence on this, and CDC, AAP, + US, Canada, most European countries. We've done a quantitative assessment of this, and the benefits vs risks are v. clear. How do they justify this?
I saw a post on one of these twitter accounts that admitted it’s fair to disagree. I really think is a finely balanced decision, and while we may not agree with it, it is being made in good faith, based on how these scientists see the data at the time.
I agree. The science is finely balanced. The benefits to the community are clear, to the individual teens, much less so. What I don't respect are the absolutists like Gurdasani who are 100% certain they are 100% right when they have so often been wrong in the past, yet rarely if ever admit it.
That’s fine, but with a proviso: we’re happy to recommend vaccines to children where there is no benefit, because of high uptake of vaccines.
I.e., the HPV vaccine. There are side effects. But the benefits to society of eliminating a form of cancer are enormous. Every individual would (or should) choose not to take it, but society as a whole benefits enormously from high uptake.
Why are we thinking about the benefits to society of high uptake of the COVID vaccine differently?
The problem may be that it is of limited benefit to the young and the current vaccines are clearly less effective at preventing transmission than they are at preventing serious illness. Is is therefore clear that the game is worth the candle? In the USA for example, they're only just up to 50% fully vaxed and perhaps should be more focused at this point in vaccinating the vulnerable of whatever age.
That's a fair point: if you have lower levels of vaccination in adults, then having children vaccinated makes more sense.
But you only have to look at pediatric hospital admissions in Florida, to see that when Delta is rampant, then there is a lot more benefit to vaccinating teenagers, than when the plague is in remission. Simply: assumptions about background levels of the disease matter, and if there are lots of only mildly symptomatic adults spreading viral matter around, your chance of your child getting Delta are massively higher.
All that being said, why not leave it up to parents? Our 13 year old daughter is Pfizered, and when the vaccines are approved for 9-11 year olds (September), we will be getting our son jabbed too. The balance of risks is very different now than it was three months ago, and the fact that so many vaccinated people can carry and spread Delta means that that is likely to continue for some time.
I think the failure in the US to get beyond 50% is shockingly bad. Unless they can remedy that situation soon they're in for a rough ride not to mention the continual danger of new variants. It just seems that the issue of children being the focus after this degree of failure with the oldies is frankly odd. This is the richest country in the world ffs.
The focus on vaccinations for children looks like displacement activity.
If we assume everyone is going to come into contact with Delta, or maybe a worse variant, at some point then you can pretty much calculate the number of hospitalisations and deaths among the anti-vaxxers now.
It then becomes a question of managing the spread of hospitalisations so that they remain within an acceptable level.
Fail to do that and health systems become overloaded and the death rate rises.
You put my point far more clearly. In truth I'd continue to follow a hierarchy of priority with age and vulnerability at the top and work down from there. I think the UK and some European countries have made a good stab at this simple approach - all the AZT shenanigans notwithstanding - the US looks more like the cat's dinner!
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
No, the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the Glorious Revolution. The second was the American Revolution.
Can you justify those statements? Because I have to say I do not agree with you.
Both were based on the concepts of natural liberties, implicit social contracts between ruler and ruled, and the concept of constitutionality. All were Enlightenment concepts, developed by Algernon Sidney, John Locke and others.
Not really. Be careful about retrospective attempts to shoehorn them into Whiggish ideals.
The Orange Revolution was ultimately caused by King James VII and II having a nosebleed. Nothing else. It takes on a far greater significance with hindsight, especially in light of Locke and later Burke’s writings, than it ever had at the time.
Similarly, the American Revolution was ultimately a tax dispute that got a bit out of hand. Had Townshend acted a week sooner than he did, it wouldn’t have happened. I agree, to an extent, that the subsequent federal state had enlightenment ideals under it - those of Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin, to take the most obvious examples - but many of them really came into play only some years later under Jefferson and Madison.
Be wary about confusing cause and effect.
Presumably both are nice examples of Whig historiography?
Cause and effect, or attempts to reform the government?
Edit - of course, it could be argued that the French Revolution was caused not by enlightenment ideals, but by Louis XVI’s bankruptcy and a poor harvest. But the reforms demanded to rescue the monarchy from its financial collapse were certainly based on Enlightenment ideals.
I meant, later interpretation of the events made to fit in one nice long story of progress under the beneficient elective dictatorship of Westminster, [edit] or Washington DC as approptiate. But maybe Locke and Burke antedated that.
No. Arguably they created it.
Not that Whigs are the only guilty ones. Marxist historiography, oh my goodness.
And history of science too, at least until more recently (it has had a big shakeup).
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
Okay, here's an o/t question.
I am not an historian (tm). Recently I listened to the excellent Revolutions Podcast on the French Revolution, and read/listened to other stuff on it (including the less-excellent Napoleon Podcast). Being British, my pre-existing viewpoint was that Napoleon was a sh*t. After all this listening/reading/?learning?, my viewpoint is still that he was a sh*t.
So: am I right, despite my rather biased British upbringing? Taken in totality, was he a hero or villain?
A lot of figures can achieve a lot and be great and also be shits.
I didn't pose it well, but I think my question is more: is the world better for him having got power, than it would have been if he had not? Some people (and I'm looking at the presenters of one of the podcasts above), seem to excuse all his bad points with things like 'metricisation'! 'stable government'! 'Modern law system'!
Whereas I wonder if, once the monarchy had been dispatched, the same could have been achieved without the constant warfare he felt necessary. What if he had looked a little more at what his international competitors wanted, and the Treaty of Amiens had not failed? (and yes, I know that wasn't totally in his hands.)
It just seems that he caused an awful lot of deaths and hardship, to leave a politically unstable France and millions of deaths.
I didn't pose it well, but I think my question is more: is the world better for him having got power, than it would have been if he had not? Some people (and I'm looking at the presenters of one of the podcasts above), seem to excuse all his bad points with things like 'metricisation'! 'stable government'! 'Modern law system'!
Whereas I wonder if, once the monarchy had been dispatched, the same could have been achieved without the constant warfare he felt necessary. What if he had looked a little more at what his international competitors wanted, and the Treaty of Amiens had not failed? (and yes, I know that wasn't totally in his hands.)
It just seems that he caused an awful lot of deaths and hardship, to leave a politically unstable France and millions of deaths.
Didn't he fund a huge amount of science and invention? I think I remember a podcast by Stephen Fry which discussed it..
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
Okay, here's an o/t question.
I am not an historian (tm). Recently I listened to the excellent Revolutions Podcast on the French Revolution, and read/listened to other stuff on it (including the less-excellent Napoleon Podcast). Being British, my pre-existing viewpoint was that Napoleon was a sh*t. After all this listening/reading/?learning?, my viewpoint is still that he was a sh*t.
So: am I right, despite my rather biased British upbringing? Taken in totality, was he a hero or villain?
A lot of figures can achieve a lot and be great and also be shits.
I didn't pose it well, but I think my question is more: is the world better for him having got power, than it would have been if he had not? Some people (and I'm looking at the presenters of one of the podcasts above), seem to excuse all his bad points with things like 'metricisation'! 'stable government'! 'Modern law system'!
Whereas I wonder if, once the monarchy had been dispatched, the same could have been achieved without the constant warfare he felt necessary. What if he had looked a little more at what his international competitors wanted, and the Treaty of Amiens had not failed? (and yes, I know that wasn't totally in his hands.)
It just seems that he caused an awful lot of deaths and hardship, to leave a politically unstable France and millions of deaths.
Attitudes to deaths were so very different in those times.
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
Okay, here's an o/t question.
I am not an historian (tm). Recently I listened to the excellent Revolutions Podcast on the French Revolution, and read/listened to other stuff on it (including the less-excellent Napoleon Podcast). Being British, my pre-existing viewpoint was that Napoleon was a sh*t. After all this listening/reading/?learning?, my viewpoint is still that he was a sh*t.
So: am I right, despite my rather biased British upbringing? Taken in totality, was he a hero or villain?
This is a massive gap for me too. I basically know about this stuff through reading the Sharpe books. I keep meaning to learn more about Napoleon but I never get round to it.
I've just finished Adam Zamoyski's "Napoleon, the Man behind the Myth" which treads a careful path between (often French) hagiography and (frequently British) demonisation.....as ever "its a bit more complicated than that....."
He was clearly a brilliant and aggressive leader of soldiers, but a (much) less successful leader of France.
I didn't pose it well, but I think my question is more: is the world better for him having got power, than it would have been if he had not? Some people (and I'm looking at the presenters of one of the podcasts above), seem to excuse all his bad points with things like 'metricisation'! 'stable government'! 'Modern law system'!
Whereas I wonder if, once the monarchy had been dispatched, the same could have been achieved without the constant warfare he felt necessary. What if he had looked a little more at what his international competitors wanted, and the Treaty of Amiens had not failed? (and yes, I know that wasn't totally in his hands.)
It just seems that he caused an awful lot of deaths and hardship, to leave a politically unstable France and millions of deaths.
Didn't he fund a huge amount of science and invention? I think I remember a podcast by Stephen Fry which discussed it..
Technology and archaeology too, IIRC - for instance the multidisciplinary team sent to Egypt as part of the invasion force.
Possibly also the infrastructure: the learned societies, and the Jardin du Roi, which were evolving into the botanic gardens and Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle of today, though I'm not sure how much of that was down to Nap rather than his royal and republican predecessors.
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
Okay, here's an o/t question.
I am not an historian (tm). Recently I listened to the excellent Revolutions Podcast on the French Revolution, and read/listened to other stuff on it (including the less-excellent Napoleon Podcast). Being British, my pre-existing viewpoint was that Napoleon was a sh*t. After all this listening/reading/?learning?, my viewpoint is still that he was a sh*t.
So: am I right, despite my rather biased British upbringing? Taken in totality, was he a hero or villain?
A lot of figures can achieve a lot and be great and also be shits.
I didn't pose it well, but I think my question is more: is the world better for him having got power, than it would have been if he had not? Some people (and I'm looking at the presenters of one of the podcasts above), seem to excuse all his bad points with things like 'metricisation'! 'stable government'! 'Modern law system'!
Whereas I wonder if, once the monarchy had been dispatched, the same could have been achieved without the constant warfare he felt necessary. What if he had looked a little more at what his international competitors wanted, and the Treaty of Amiens had not failed? (and yes, I know that wasn't totally in his hands.)
It just seems that he caused an awful lot of deaths and hardship, to leave a politically unstable France and millions of deaths.
The problem France had was (1) it had been attacked - a fair enough excuse for going to war but (2) that it needed money, urgently, to fight those wars - the financial collapse of the monarchy hadn’t gone away - and the only way it could get it was plundering neighbouring states.
If Napoleon hadn’t seized power, then the French state would have collapsed. But it’s hard to argue that would have been much better. What would the Coalition Powers have done with it?
It was Napoleon’s talent that kept a smaller army more or less undefeated fighting on every front for a decade, and his madness in needlessly attacking Sweden and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall.
Equally, when he finally came up against a brace of generals who were his equal in Wellington and Blucher, he lost. Badly.
Would it have been better had he never been? Hard to say. Many changes happened because of him, as his defenders note and you list, that might have happened at heavy cost anyway. And he can hardly be blamed for France’s century of turbulence, which was much more due to Charles X’s misguided attempt at personal rule.
Love him, loathe him or be ambivalent about him though, he was undoubtedly important. Maybe Stalin is a fair comparison?
You could, from that point of view, go back to World War I, and the Arab Revolt against the Sultan, or the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, as the starting point
But I was thinking of its current incarnation, and that very much does link to the situation in Afghanistan in the mid-1970s that culminated in the Soviet invasion. The CIA sowed a wind by supporting the mujahadeen as enemies of the Soviets. Sadly they have reaped a whirlwind.
The key year is 1979 - the year of the Iranian revolution.
In the same way that the Catholic church reacted to the Reformation with the Inquisition, the Saudis reacted to the Iranian Revolution by going hardline Wahabi. They closed the cinemas, clamped down on all sorts of things that were thought to be "haram" and basically tried to match Shia extremism with Sunni extremism.
The other event of 1979 was the invasion of Afghanistan.
As others have pointed out, Saudis reacted to that by funding mujahideen. They also flooded the market with oil, forcing the price below $10 by 1986 in an economic attack against the Soviets. This hurt Gorbachev's perestroika efforts because he ran out of money and the Soviet Union collapsed.
Which means that if the Soviets hadn't invaded Afghanistan, they wouldn't have triggered the Saudi response that bankrupted them and eastern europe would still be under the Soviet yoke.
That wasn't the only reason why the Saudis drove the oil price down: they wanted to send a very clear message to the big international oil companies that controlling the oil market was at least as important to them as actual profits. Specifically, they wanted to discourage investment in new, more expensive forms of oil.
And to a certain extent that worked: in the 90s, investment by the big oil companies collapsed. But - as Margaret Thatcher once said - "you can't buck the market", and world underinvestment in the 90s led to the monumental oil boom in the 2000s, and which (in turn) led to the development of unconventional oil reserves that probably destroyed Saudi hegemony forever.
On the subject of oil:
“American oil refiners have never before bought so much crude oil from Russia. The Cold War adversary is now the number two supplier to the U.S.”
Patrick Chovanec @prchovanec · 1h 30 US states had over 1,000 new cases yesterday. Florida led the pack with over 22,000 new cases, followed by Texas with over 15,000 and California with over 14,000. Louisiana and Georgia had over 6,000 each.
Patrick Chovanec @prchovanec · 1h 30 US states had over 1,000 new cases yesterday. Florida led the pack with over 22,000 new cases, followed by Texas with over 15,000 and California with over 14,000. Louisiana and Georgia had over 6,000 each.
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
Okay, here's an o/t question.
I am not an historian (tm). Recently I listened to the excellent Revolutions Podcast on the French Revolution, and read/listened to other stuff on it (including the less-excellent Napoleon Podcast). Being British, my pre-existing viewpoint was that Napoleon was a sh*t. After all this listening/reading/?learning?, my viewpoint is still that he was a sh*t.
So: am I right, despite my rather biased British upbringing? Taken in totality, was he a hero or villain?
A lot of figures can achieve a lot and be great and also be shits.
I didn't pose it well, but I think my question is more: is the world better for him having got power, than it would have been if he had not? Some people (and I'm looking at the presenters of one of the podcasts above), seem to excuse all his bad points with things like 'metricisation'! 'stable government'! 'Modern law system'!
Whereas I wonder if, once the monarchy had been dispatched, the same could have been achieved without the constant warfare he felt necessary. What if he had looked a little more at what his international competitors wanted, and the Treaty of Amiens had not failed? (and yes, I know that wasn't totally in his hands.)
It just seems that he caused an awful lot of deaths and hardship, to leave a politically unstable France and millions of deaths.
I'm no historian, but I'd probably fall on that side. Those achievements don't necessitate all the negative things that he caused. One of those 'Die a hero, or live long enough to become a villain' situations perhaps? It#s not like the chaos and death was all down to him, but his personality and choices seem to have a big impact on the path taken.
We are pretty darn good at these multi sport events. Triathlon. Pentathlon.
Can I suggest the "Mick's Cafe Race" as an Olympic tetrathlon event. I don't know if it still held, but was a rag week regular in my student days:
Starting at the student union, drink a bottle of Newcastle Brown, run to Mick's Cafe, eat a 'Mick's Grill', run back to the union, drink another bottle of Brown. First one to bring it all up into the fountain is the winner.
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
Okay, here's an o/t question.
I am not an historian (tm). Recently I listened to the excellent Revolutions Podcast on the French Revolution, and read/listened to other stuff on it (including the less-excellent Napoleon Podcast). Being British, my pre-existing viewpoint was that Napoleon was a sh*t. After all this listening/reading/?learning?, my viewpoint is still that he was a sh*t.
So: am I right, despite my rather biased British upbringing? Taken in totality, was he a hero or villain?
A lot of figures can achieve a lot and be great and also be shits.
I didn't pose it well, but I think my question is more: is the world better for him having got power, than it would have been if he had not? Some people (and I'm looking at the presenters of one of the podcasts above), seem to excuse all his bad points with things like 'metricisation'! 'stable government'! 'Modern law system'!
Whereas I wonder if, once the monarchy had been dispatched, the same could have been achieved without the constant warfare he felt necessary. What if he had looked a little more at what his international competitors wanted, and the Treaty of Amiens had not failed? (and yes, I know that wasn't totally in his hands.)
It just seems that he caused an awful lot of deaths and hardship, to leave a politically unstable France and millions of deaths.
The problem France had was (1) it had been attacked - a fair enough excuse for going to war but (2) that it needed money, urgently, to fight those wars - the financial collapse of the monarchy hadn’t gone away - and the only way it could get it was plundering neighbouring states.
If Napoleon hadn’t seized power, then the French state would have collapsed. But it’s hard to argue that would have been much better. What would the Coalition Powers have done with it?
It was Napoleon’s talent that kept a smaller army more or less undefeated fighting on every front for a decade, and his madness in needlessly attacking Sweden and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall.
Equally, when he finally came up against a brace of generals who were his equal in Wellington and Blucher, he lost. Badly.
Would it have been better had he never been? Hard to say. Many changes happened because of him, as his defenders note and you list, that might have happened at heavy cost anyway. And he can hardly be blamed for France’s century of turbulence, which was much more due to Charles X’s misguided attempt at personal rule.
Love him, loathe him or be ambivalent about him though, he was undoubtedly important. Maybe Stalin is a fair comparison?
I doubt the French would like that comparison. Presumably why the Stalin pig in Animal Farm was renamed.
I tend to talk in terms of 'great' figures anad really should stop, as I always then need to clarify I don't necessarily mean good, but impactful.
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
Okay, here's an o/t question.
I am not an historian (tm). Recently I listened to the excellent Revolutions Podcast on the French Revolution, and read/listened to other stuff on it (including the less-excellent Napoleon Podcast). Being British, my pre-existing viewpoint was that Napoleon was a sh*t. After all this listening/reading/?learning?, my viewpoint is still that he was a sh*t.
So: am I right, despite my rather biased British upbringing? Taken in totality, was he a hero or villain?
A lot of figures can achieve a lot and be great and also be shits.
I didn't pose it well, but I think my question is more: is the world better for him having got power, than it would have been if he had not? Some people (and I'm looking at the presenters of one of the podcasts above), seem to excuse all his bad points with things like 'metricisation'! 'stable government'! 'Modern law system'!
Whereas I wonder if, once the monarchy had been dispatched, the same could have been achieved without the constant warfare he felt necessary. What if he had looked a little more at what his international competitors wanted, and the Treaty of Amiens had not failed? (and yes, I know that wasn't totally in his hands.)
It just seems that he caused an awful lot of deaths and hardship, to leave a politically unstable France and millions of deaths.
The problem France had was (1) it had been attacked - a fair enough excuse for going to war but (2) that it needed money, urgently, to fight those wars - the financial collapse of the monarchy hadn’t gone away - and the only way it could get it was plundering neighbouring states.
If Napoleon hadn’t seized power, then the French state would have collapsed. But it’s hard to argue that would have been much better. What would the Coalition Powers have done with it?
It was Napoleon’s talent that kept a smaller army more or less undefeated fighting on every front for a decade, and his madness in needlessly attacking Sweden and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall.
Equally, when he finally came up against a brace of generals who were his equal in Wellington and Blucher, he lost. Badly.
Would it have been better had he never been? Hard to say. Many changes happened because of him, as his defenders note and you list, that might have happened at heavy cost anyway. And he can hardly be blamed for France’s century of turbulence, which was much more due to Charles X’s misguided attempt at personal rule.
Love him, loathe him or be ambivalent about him though, he was undoubtedly important. Maybe Stalin is a fair comparison?
I doubt the French would like that comparison. Presumably why the Stalin pig in Animal Farm was renamed.
I tend to talk in terms of 'great' figures anad really should stop, as I always then need to clarify I don't necessarily mean good, but impactful.
Yes.
Cesar, of course, was a very unsubtle pun on ‘Tsar’ - the Russian for Emperor.
You have stated that a “non-trivial” number of long-Covid cases are psychosomatic. We know that infections such as Covid lead to post-viral syndromes. At the risk of being insensitive, I would be surprised if there wasn’t a link between disease severity and the severity of follow-up symptoms. Like tuberculosis or influenza, people who have a severe case should expect to take a long time to recover fully. And sometimes recovery is never complete.
I would like to stress: if you have a serious infection, do not necessarily expect to be back to full fitness in three months. The situation is more complicated with a mild infection. Post-viral symptoms can happen but it seems relatively implausible to me that this would happen very frequently. In all likelihood, some cases are psychosomatic – though this doesn’t make the suffering less real for those affected or reduce the cost to society. All disease is real, irrespective of its root cause.
There is a mental component to health and disease. Just the fear of something bad happening to us can make us feel unwell. A remarkable example of this process can be seen in the way over 30% of the people who were enrolled in the control arm of the Pfizer vaccine trial reported headaches and fatigue, despite not being injected with a vaccine.
You could, from that point of view, go back to World War I, and the Arab Revolt against the Sultan, or the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, as the starting point
But I was thinking of its current incarnation, and that very much does link to the situation in Afghanistan in the mid-1970s that culminated in the Soviet invasion. The CIA sowed a wind by supporting the mujahadeen as enemies of the Soviets. Sadly they have reaped a whirlwind.
The key year is 1979 - the year of the Iranian revolution.
In the same way that the Catholic church reacted to the Reformation with the Inquisition, the Saudis reacted to the Iranian Revolution by going hardline Wahabi. They closed the cinemas, clamped down on all sorts of things that were thought to be "haram" and basically tried to match Shia extremism with Sunni extremism.
The other event of 1979 was the invasion of Afghanistan.
As others have pointed out, Saudis reacted to that by funding mujahideen. They also flooded the market with oil, forcing the price below $10 by 1986 in an economic attack against the Soviets. This hurt Gorbachev's perestroika efforts because he ran out of money and the Soviet Union collapsed.
Which means that if the Soviets hadn't invaded Afghanistan, they wouldn't have triggered the Saudi response that bankrupted them and eastern europe would still be under the Soviet yoke.
That wasn't the only reason why the Saudis drove the oil price down: they wanted to send a very clear message to the big international oil companies that controlling the oil market was at least as important to them as actual profits. Specifically, they wanted to discourage investment in new, more expensive forms of oil.
And to a certain extent that worked: in the 90s, investment by the big oil companies collapsed. But - as Margaret Thatcher once said - "you can't buck the market", and world underinvestment in the 90s led to the monumental oil boom in the 2000s, and which (in turn) led to the development of unconventional oil reserves that probably destroyed Saudi hegemony forever.
On the subject of oil:
“American oil refiners have never before bought so much crude oil from Russia. The Cold War adversary is now the number two supplier to the U.S.”
Devastating for the poor athlete of course, though perhaps due to my vestigial lower middle class roots I find it hard to feel too bad for anyone in a silly jacket and hat on top of a horse.
You have stated that a “non-trivial” number of long-Covid cases are psychosomatic. We know that infections such as Covid lead to post-viral syndromes. At the risk of being insensitive, I would be surprised if there wasn’t a link between disease severity and the severity of follow-up symptoms. Like tuberculosis or influenza, people who have a severe case should expect to take a long time to recover fully. And sometimes recovery is never complete.
I would like to stress: if you have a serious infection, do not necessarily expect to be back to full fitness in three months. The situation is more complicated with a mild infection. Post-viral symptoms can happen but it seems relatively implausible to me that this would happen very frequently. In all likelihood, some cases are psychosomatic – though this doesn’t make the suffering less real for those affected or reduce the cost to society. All disease is real, irrespective of its root cause.
There is a mental component to health and disease. Just the fear of something bad happening to us can make us feel unwell. A remarkable example of this process can be seen in the way over 30% of the people who were enrolled in the control arm of the Pfizer vaccine trial reported headaches and fatigue, despite not being injected with a vaccine.
I mentioned on here that I passed out at 3am, 12 hours after my 1st AZ, whilst walking to the kitchen to get some paracetamol. I am pretty sure the fact I lost conciousness, and the fear of it happening again, caused anxiety which prolonged the "side effects" of the vaccine. My girlfriend certainly thought so, she was having none of it!
You have stated that a “non-trivial” number of long-Covid cases are psychosomatic. We know that infections such as Covid lead to post-viral syndromes. At the risk of being insensitive, I would be surprised if there wasn’t a link between disease severity and the severity of follow-up symptoms. Like tuberculosis or influenza, people who have a severe case should expect to take a long time to recover fully. And sometimes recovery is never complete.
I would like to stress: if you have a serious infection, do not necessarily expect to be back to full fitness in three months. The situation is more complicated with a mild infection. Post-viral symptoms can happen but it seems relatively implausible to me that this would happen very frequently. In all likelihood, some cases are psychosomatic – though this doesn’t make the suffering less real for those affected or reduce the cost to society. All disease is real, irrespective of its root cause.
There is a mental component to health and disease. Just the fear of something bad happening to us can make us feel unwell. A remarkable example of this process can be seen in the way over 30% of the people who were enrolled in the control arm of the Pfizer vaccine trial reported headaches and fatigue, despite not being injected with a vaccine.
The most expensive tickets for tomorrow at Trent Bridge are £20. Ridiculously good value.
Cricket is generally great value (assuming you like cricket). I often pop to Lords for a fiver.
They give out free fivers?
*Checks trains to Marylebone*
Almost as good as that. Whole day Middx CCC vs ??? for £5. Basically just me and the bacon and egg brigade. Sadly that very fact - the tiny crowd - indicates a dying game. Will red ball cricket exist in 50 years? 25 even? Not sure.
It was Napoleon’s talent that kept a smaller army more or less undefeated fighting on every front for a decade, and his madness in needlessly attacking Sweden and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall.
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
No, the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the Glorious Revolution. The second was the American Revolution.
Can you justify those statements? Because I have to say I do not agree with you.
Both were based on the concepts of natural liberties, implicit social contracts between ruler and ruled, and the concept of constitutionality. All were Enlightenment concepts, developed by Algernon Sidney, John Locke and others.
Not really. Be careful about retrospective attempts to shoehorn them into Whiggish ideals.
The Orange Revolution was ultimately caused by King James VII and II having a nosebleed. Nothing else. It takes on a far greater significance with hindsight, especially in light of Locke and later Burke’s writings, than it ever had at the time.
Similarly, the American Revolution was ultimately a tax dispute that got a bit out of hand. Had Townshend acted a week sooner than he did, it wouldn’t have happened. I agree, to an extent, that the subsequent federal state had enlightenment ideals under it - those of Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin, to take the most obvious examples - but many of them really came into play only some years later under Jefferson and Madison.
Be wary about confusing cause and effect.
Presumably both are nice examples of Whig historiography?
This is all nonsense. It's like saying the French Revolution wasn't an Enlightenment revolution because it was just a fiscal crisis that got out of hand. The Founding Fathers of the United States explicitly used language from John Locke in the Declaration of Independence for goodness sake.
We are pretty darn good at these multi sport events. Triathlon. Pentathlon.
Can I suggest the "Mick's Cafe Race" as an Olympic tetrathlon event. I don't know if it still held, but was a rag week regular in my student days:
Starting at the student union, drink a bottle of Newcastle Brown, run to Mick's Cafe, eat a 'Mick's Grill', run back to the union, drink another bottle of Brown. First one to bring it all up into the fountain is the winner.
Drinking Running Eating Vomiting
I'm confident that Team GB would excel.
The US have an advantage as the Nathan Hot Dog contests on 4th July already cover the last two disciplines.
We are pretty darn good at these multi sport events. Triathlon. Pentathlon.
Can I suggest the "Mick's Cafe Race" as an Olympic tetrathlon event. I don't know if it still held, but was a rag week regular in my student days:
Starting at the student union, drink a bottle of Newcastle Brown, run to Mick's Cafe, eat a 'Mick's Grill', run back to the union, drink another bottle of Brown. First one to bring it all up into the fountain is the winner.
Drinking Running Eating Vomiting
I'm confident that Team GB would excel.
Add in pissing against someone's door and then being chased by an angry bloke with a big dog.
I see we now have six medals in track and field. Disappointing to not get a gold, but I think it’s a decent return.
Sounds absolute crap to me.
I think that you are being harsh. Laura Muir's medal in particular was a really excellent effort.
It would have been gold if Scotland was independent.
It would have been fuck all outside of Team GB/BOA funding tbh. It's what's turned the UK into a sporting powerhouse compared to years gone.
It will be interesting to see if there is an effect from Scots so clearly proud to wear a team GB strip and doing really well in these games. According to Sky News Scotland has more medal winners than any other part of the UK per head of population but they all seem very proud to wave the Union Jack.
It was Napoleon’s talent that kept a smaller army more or less undefeated fighting on every front for a decade, and his madness in needlessly attacking Sweden and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall.
Spain and Russia, surely?
No, Sweden. He invaded Pomerania in 1812 and turned it from an uneasy ally into an active enemy.
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
Okay, here's an o/t question.
I am not an historian (tm). Recently I listened to the excellent Revolutions Podcast on the French Revolution, and read/listened to other stuff on it (including the less-excellent Napoleon Podcast). Being British, my pre-existing viewpoint was that Napoleon was a sh*t. After all this listening/reading/?learning?, my viewpoint is still that he was a sh*t.
So: am I right, despite my rather biased British upbringing? Taken in totality, was he a hero or villain?
A lot of figures can achieve a lot and be great and also be shits.
I didn't pose it well, but I think my question is more: is the world better for him having got power, than it would have been if he had not? Some people (and I'm looking at the presenters of one of the podcasts above), seem to excuse all his bad points with things like 'metricisation'! 'stable government'! 'Modern law system'!
Whereas I wonder if, once the monarchy had been dispatched, the same could have been achieved without the constant warfare he felt necessary. What if he had looked a little more at what his international competitors wanted, and the Treaty of Amiens had not failed? (and yes, I know that wasn't totally in his hands.)
It just seems that he caused an awful lot of deaths and hardship, to leave a politically unstable France and millions of deaths.
The problem France had was (1) it had been attacked - a fair enough excuse for going to war but (2) that it needed money, urgently, to fight those wars - the financial collapse of the monarchy hadn’t gone away - and the only way it could get it was plundering neighbouring states.
If Napoleon hadn’t seized power, then the French state would have collapsed. But it’s hard to argue that would have been much better. What would the Coalition Powers have done with it?
It was Napoleon’s talent that kept a smaller army more or less undefeated fighting on every front for a decade, and his madness in needlessly attacking Sweden and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall.
Equally, when he finally came up against a brace of generals who were his equal in Wellington and Blucher, he lost. Badly.
Would it have been better had he never been? Hard to say. Many changes happened because of him, as his defenders note and you list, that might have happened at heavy cost anyway. And he can hardly be blamed for France’s century of turbulence, which was much more due to Charles X’s misguided attempt at personal rule.
Love him, loathe him or be ambivalent about him though, he was undoubtedly important. Maybe Stalin is a fair comparison?
My *impression* (and it is just that; I'm not an expert) is that whilst he was a brilliant martial expert, he was unskilled in other areas. He had two tools in his toolkit: war, or putting family members or friends on the various European thrones. Neither appear very forward-looking or long-term (although Charles XIV John did well).
Instead of trying diplomacy, time and time again he chose war. In particular, the hundred days and Waterloo seem incredibly pointless.
As for France's century of turbulence: given the changes he did achieve, it would have been easy to go a step further and modernise the political system. Instead he made himself Emperor.
You have stated that a “non-trivial” number of long-Covid cases are psychosomatic. We know that infections such as Covid lead to post-viral syndromes. At the risk of being insensitive, I would be surprised if there wasn’t a link between disease severity and the severity of follow-up symptoms. Like tuberculosis or influenza, people who have a severe case should expect to take a long time to recover fully. And sometimes recovery is never complete.
I would like to stress: if you have a serious infection, do not necessarily expect to be back to full fitness in three months. The situation is more complicated with a mild infection. Post-viral symptoms can happen but it seems relatively implausible to me that this would happen very frequently. In all likelihood, some cases are psychosomatic – though this doesn’t make the suffering less real for those affected or reduce the cost to society. All disease is real, irrespective of its root cause.
There is a mental component to health and disease. Just the fear of something bad happening to us can make us feel unwell. A remarkable example of this process can be seen in the way over 30% of the people who were enrolled in the control arm of the Pfizer vaccine trial reported headaches and fatigue, despite not being injected with a vaccine.
I mentioned on here that I passed out at 3am, 12 hours after my 1st AZ, whilst walking to the kitchen to get some paracetamol. I am pretty sure the fact I lost conciousness, and the fear of it happening again, caused anxiety which prolonged the "side effects" of the vaccine. My girlfriend certainly thought so, she was having none of it!
I was a bit unsteady after my second AZ jab, in a similar manner (at the cost of a broken mug).
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
Okay, here's an o/t question.
I am not an historian (tm). Recently I listened to the excellent Revolutions Podcast on the French Revolution, and read/listened to other stuff on it (including the less-excellent Napoleon Podcast). Being British, my pre-existing viewpoint was that Napoleon was a sh*t. After all this listening/reading/?learning?, my viewpoint is still that he was a sh*t.
So: am I right, despite my rather biased British upbringing? Taken in totality, was he a hero or villain?
A lot of figures can achieve a lot and be great and also be shits.
I didn't pose it well, but I think my question is more: is the world better for him having got power, than it would have been if he had not? Some people (and I'm looking at the presenters of one of the podcasts above), seem to excuse all his bad points with things like 'metricisation'! 'stable government'! 'Modern law system'!
Whereas I wonder if, once the monarchy had been dispatched, the same could have been achieved without the constant warfare he felt necessary. What if he had looked a little more at what his international competitors wanted, and the Treaty of Amiens had not failed? (and yes, I know that wasn't totally in his hands.)
It just seems that he caused an awful lot of deaths and hardship, to leave a politically unstable France and millions of deaths.
The problem France had was (1) it had been attacked - a fair enough excuse for going to war but (2) that it needed money, urgently, to fight those wars - the financial collapse of the monarchy hadn’t gone away - and the only way it could get it was plundering neighbouring states.
If Napoleon hadn’t seized power, then the French state would have collapsed. But it’s hard to argue that would have been much better. What would the Coalition Powers have done with it?
It was Napoleon’s talent that kept a smaller army more or less undefeated fighting on every front for a decade, and his madness in needlessly attacking Sweden and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall.
Equally, when he finally came up against a brace of generals who were his equal in Wellington and Blucher, he lost. Badly.
Would it have been better had he never been? Hard to say. Many changes happened because of him, as his defenders note and you list, that might have happened at heavy cost anyway. And he can hardly be blamed for France’s century of turbulence, which was much more due to Charles X’s misguided attempt at personal rule.
Love him, loathe him or be ambivalent about him though, he was undoubtedly important. Maybe Stalin is a fair comparison?
My *impression* (and it is just that; I'm not an expert) is that whilst he was a brilliant martial expert, he was unskilled in other areas. He had two tools in his toolkit: war, or putting family members or friends on the various European thrones. Neither appear very forward-looking or long-term (although Charles XIV John did well).
Instead of trying diplomacy, time and time again he chose war. In particular, the hundred days and Waterloo seem incredibly pointless.
As for France's century of turbulence: given the changes he did achieve, it would have been easy to go a step further and modernise the political system. Instead he made himself Emperor.
(Forgive me if I've got details wrong; IANAE...)
He did try diplomacy on a number of occasions. The peace with Sweden in I think 1808 and the Peace of Amiens in 1802.
He just wasn’t very good at it. He tended to humiliate people while leaving their power bases untouched.
Then he would force them to do things they didn’t want to do - e.g. invade Russia - and they turned on him.
I don't think this is mentioned enough in the debate over vaxxing the kids in well-off countries. Seems odd that 'right-on' iSAGE doesn't factor this in, despite iirc the inventor of AZ/Ox saying the same thing:
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
Okay, here's an o/t question.
I am not an historian (tm). Recently I listened to the excellent Revolutions Podcast on the French Revolution, and read/listened to other stuff on it (including the less-excellent Napoleon Podcast). Being British, my pre-existing viewpoint was that Napoleon was a sh*t. After all this listening/reading/?learning?, my viewpoint is still that he was a sh*t.
So: am I right, despite my rather biased British upbringing? Taken in totality, was he a hero or villain?
A lot of figures can achieve a lot and be great and also be shits.
I didn't pose it well, but I think my question is more: is the world better for him having got power, than it would have been if he had not? Some people (and I'm looking at the presenters of one of the podcasts above), seem to excuse all his bad points with things like 'metricisation'! 'stable government'! 'Modern law system'!
Whereas I wonder if, once the monarchy had been dispatched, the same could have been achieved without the constant warfare he felt necessary. What if he had looked a little more at what his international competitors wanted, and the Treaty of Amiens had not failed? (and yes, I know that wasn't totally in his hands.)
It just seems that he caused an awful lot of deaths and hardship, to leave a politically unstable France and millions of deaths.
The problem France had was (1) it had been attacked - a fair enough excuse for going to war but (2) that it needed money, urgently, to fight those wars - the financial collapse of the monarchy hadn’t gone away - and the only way it could get it was plundering neighbouring states.
If Napoleon hadn’t seized power, then the French state would have collapsed. But it’s hard to argue that would have been much better. What would the Coalition Powers have done with it?
It was Napoleon’s talent that kept a smaller army more or less undefeated fighting on every front for a decade, and his madness in needlessly attacking Sweden and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall.
Equally, when he finally came up against a brace of generals who were his equal in Wellington and Blucher, he lost. Badly.
Would it have been better had he never been? Hard to say. Many changes happened because of him, as his defenders note and you list, that might have happened at heavy cost anyway. And he can hardly be blamed for France’s century of turbulence, which was much more due to Charles X’s misguided attempt at personal rule.
Love him, loathe him or be ambivalent about him though, he was undoubtedly important. Maybe Stalin is a fair comparison?
My *impression* (and it is just that; I'm not an expert) is that whilst he was a brilliant martial expert, he was unskilled in other areas. He had two tools in his toolkit: war, or putting family members or friends on the various European thrones. Neither appear very forward-looking or long-term (although Charles XIV John did well).
Instead of trying diplomacy, time and time again he chose war. In particular, the hundred days and Waterloo seem incredibly pointless.
As for France's century of turbulence: given the changes he did achieve, it would have been easy to go a step further and modernise the political system. Instead he made himself Emperor.
I didn't pose it well, but I think my question is more: is the world better for him having got power, than it would have been if he had not? Some people (and I'm looking at the presenters of one of the podcasts above), seem to excuse all his bad points with things like 'metricisation'! 'stable government'! 'Modern law system'!
He changed things, but whether you consider the changes good or bad very much depends on who you are.
For example the Dutch guilder was still the primary reserve currency at the end of the 18th century. What did for them was Napoleon invading and closing all their ports to trade with Britain. The Dutch economy collapsed and so did their reserve currency status. The losers were the Dutch and everyone who held guilders (pretty much all the countries in Europe, plus some others outside Europe who held guilders to facilitate trade with European countries). The winner was the UK as the pound sterling replaced the guilder as the primary reserve currency.
Then there are the effects of Napoleon's invasion of the German principalities. It triggered a movement seeking to unify the German-speaking peoples for their own safety - this finally came to fruition in 1871 when Germany unified under Bismark. But that hurt France, which started to get invaded in return - Franco-German war, WW1, WW2.
I'd argue Napoleon destabalised France too. They are locked into a cycle where each generation tries to enact it's own revolution, and some strong man fancies himself as Napoleon in regaining control from the mob - and then the mob rebels against this and the cycle starts over again. See all those revolutions in the 19th century which get interrupted with restorations of the monarchy or Napoleon III. See also De Gaulle, Sarkozy, Macron, all with a Napoleon complex.
It was Napoleon’s talent that kept a smaller army more or less undefeated fighting on every front for a decade, and his madness in needlessly attacking Sweden and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall.
Spain and Russia, surely?
No, Sweden. He invaded Pomerania in 1812 and turned it from an uneasy ally into an active enemy.
But surely Napoleon's occupation of Spain was more costly to him, along with the 1812 (mis)adventure to Moscow.
Napoleon did not invade Pomerania in 1812. It was in in 1807. Pomerania was given back to Sweden in 1810.
It was Napoleon’s talent that kept a smaller army more or less undefeated fighting on every front for a decade, and his madness in needlessly attacking Sweden and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall.
It was Napoleon’s talent that kept a smaller army more or less undefeated fighting on every front for a decade, and his madness in needlessly attacking Sweden and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall.
Spain and Russia, surely?
No, Sweden. He invaded Pomerania in 1812 and turned it from an uneasy ally into an active enemy.
Sweden was neutral wasn't it rather than an "uneasy ally"?
Trying to control Afghanistan from outside has been a damnfool idea from day 1. If I'm not mistaken Alexander the Great came a bit of a cropper there, and no-one else has come closer.
We did not invade to colonise Afghanistan, the Taliban took control of it in 1996 and we left them in power for 5 years.
We only invaded in 2001 because 9\11 was launched by Bin Laden from Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to hand him over.
Bin Laden is now dead but we will have to do a deal with the Taliban to give them some of rural Afghanistan in return for not allowing Al Qaeda back in
It was still a damnfool idea. The US would have done far better to offer money for him. Somebody would have bitten. That's how Afghanistan seems to work.
If you think 'we'...... the US will have to 'give' the Taliban 'some of rural Afghanistan' you'd better think again. Afghanistan will soon all be under Taliban control and, seriously, our best hope is to ignore the US and concentrate on encouraging their very capable cricket team.
If the US had not invaded Bin Laden would still be alive and Al Qaeda still in the country.
If the Taliban retake the whole country (which is unlikely given US air support still for the elected government and warlords who will resist them) and invite Al Qaeda back we would have no choice but to re invade or face future 9/11s and terrorist attacks launched on New York, London and Paris from cells trained in Afghanistan
AQ is still in the country, and across the world. It might not be called AQ, there’ll be many names for the many groups, but they’ll all share the same broad Islamist ideology. It’s a franchise model.
One of Bin Laden’s main objectives for 9/11 broadly succeeded. We were deliberately sucked into an unwinnable war. We have been stung, and we will no longer commit ourselves to large scale combat operations in Muslim countries. Western populations won’t accept it.
The Islamists will regain full control of Afghanistan. Call them AQ, call them Talibs, call them what you like. A rose by any other name, and all that.
The Islamists will carry out their struggle for years to come and apart from firing missiles from drones and a few Special Forces on the ground we will probably do very little, unless there’s another big terrorist spectacular in the West. And why would they do that? Let sleeping dogs lie.
If I may continue from the post above, in light of subsequent discussion about Brexit and how it could/will weaken the UK/EU.
9/11 was designed to weaken the West, to suck us into inwinnable wars, to split us, weaken our alliances, to allow Islamists a free hand in Muslim lands, to ultimately establish a Caliphate. That struggle will go on for decades, maybe centuries, that is the timescale they are thinking in.
I’m sure many will disagree but I think it can be argued that one of the effects, aftershocks, of 9/11 was Brexit.
If we hadn’t had 9/11 we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq and Afghan. Therefore we wouldn’t have had a wave a domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, radicalised by Al Qaeda, and it’s offshoots’, propaganda.
If we hadn’t had that experience of Islamist terrorism and the dog whistle that Muslims = terrorists, and being in the EU will allow more Muslims in (Turkey will join, refugees flooding in from the Middle East) - cheers Nige - then perhaps Leave wouldn’t have scraped home.
Because I think many people voted Leave, at least ooop North, because they simply don’t like Muslims. Or they don’t like the image of Muslims they have in their head.
So if you accept that view, and you think that Brexit will weaken the UK and the EU, and our and the EU’s security alliances, then Brexit is fuelled, to a degree, by the fallout from 9/11.
I’m sure many of you will disagree…
Unsurprisingly I 100% disagree.
For one thing 9/11 didn't begat Islamic terrorism, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism preceded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9/11 was the second time the World Trade Centre was attacked by Islamists not the first. There were plane bombings, embassy bombings and much more through the seventies, eighties, nineties all before 9/11.
In the UK we tended to pay less attention then because we had our own Troubles but it's entirely plausible we would have seen the 7/7 bombing, and attacks like Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks etc even without 9/11.
Islamist terrorism is occuring because radical Islam is an extremely violent, medieval and disturbing religion that hasn't undergone a Reformation. And is being state sponsored not least by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not because of wars in the Middle East that came after terrorism was well set.
Of course 9/11 didn’t cause Islamist terrorism. But the success of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was to build a narrative that the West, from the Crusades onwards, through colonialism, had interfered in and damaged Muslim culture in Muslim lands. Another key plank of their argument was the obscenity of US troops stationed in Saudi, the home of Islam’s holiest sites.
You don’t have to find that persuasive, you’re not the intended audience. Many do, to a greater or lesser extent. And from that pool radicals will emerge, have emerged.
When we went into Iraq and Afghan it reinforced Bin Laden’s propaganda again. So radicalised Muslims carried out terrorist attacks here.
That tarnished Muslims, which led, in part, to a successful Leave vote.
You argue Islamist is evil, and backwards, and didn’t have a Reformation. There is much truth in there but it is also simplistic, you fail to understand the enemy. A counter argument is that Islamism is a reaction to colonialism, to the impact European countries had carving up the Middle East between themselves, to the Sykes-Picot agreement, to arbitrary lines drawn across maps by European administrators, to a thousand other slights real or imagined.
The genius of Bin Laden’s propaganda is that it is built on a kernel of truth.
Islam absolutely had a reformation. It is called salafism and its various types reject the religious establishment, want to return to literalist scripture and are generally all round intolerant of anyone that disagrees, just as early Protestantism was.
The problem with Islam is that (a) Mohammed was less pleasant in his original message than Jesus of Nazareth so there's more support for the extremist position and (b) it didn't have an Enlightenment, which is what really made the West into a good place to live.
Hmmmm...the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution.
I’m not sure those who were massacred in the Terror, murdered in the Vendee or killed in Napoleon’s interminable wars would altogether agree with you.
No, the first major political fruit of the Enlightenment was the Glorious Revolution. The second was the American Revolution.
Can you justify those statements? Because I have to say I do not agree with you.
Both were based on the concepts of natural liberties, implicit social contracts between ruler and ruled, and the concept of constitutionality. All were Enlightenment concepts, developed by Algernon Sidney, John Locke and others.
Not really. Be careful about retrospective attempts to shoehorn them into Whiggish ideals.
The Orange Revolution was ultimately caused by King James VII and II having a nosebleed. Nothing else. It takes on a far greater significance with hindsight, especially in light of Locke and later Burke’s writings, than it ever had at the time.
Similarly, the American Revolution was ultimately a tax dispute that got a bit out of hand. Had Townshend acted a week sooner than he did, it wouldn’t have happened. I agree, to an extent, that the subsequent federal state had enlightenment ideals under it - those of Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin, to take the most obvious examples - but many of them really came into play only some years later under Jefferson and Madison.
Be wary about confusing cause and effect.
Presumably both are nice examples of Whig historiography?
This is all nonsense. It's like saying the French Revolution wasn't an Enlightenment revolution because it was just a fiscal crisis that got out of hand. The Founding Fathers of the United States explicitly used language from John Locke in the Declaration of Independence for goodness sake.
Even if I accepted your statements on the American Revolution - which I still don’t, by the by, as it seems to me you are confusing the causes of the rebellion with the way it subsequently developed - but it doesn’t seem worth arguing about it - your argument was that the Enlightenment made the West a pleasant place to live.
Do you still stand by that argument in light of the counter example I have offered of Revolutionary France?
You have stated that a “non-trivial” number of long-Covid cases are psychosomatic. We know that infections such as Covid lead to post-viral syndromes. At the risk of being insensitive, I would be surprised if there wasn’t a link between disease severity and the severity of follow-up symptoms. Like tuberculosis or influenza, people who have a severe case should expect to take a long time to recover fully. And sometimes recovery is never complete.
I would like to stress: if you have a serious infection, do not necessarily expect to be back to full fitness in three months. The situation is more complicated with a mild infection. Post-viral symptoms can happen but it seems relatively implausible to me that this would happen very frequently. In all likelihood, some cases are psychosomatic – though this doesn’t make the suffering less real for those affected or reduce the cost to society. All disease is real, irrespective of its root cause.
There is a mental component to health and disease. Just the fear of something bad happening to us can make us feel unwell. A remarkable example of this process can be seen in the way over 30% of the people who were enrolled in the control arm of the Pfizer vaccine trial reported headaches and fatigue, despite not being injected with a vaccine.
I mentioned on here that I passed out at 3am, 12 hours after my 1st AZ, whilst walking to the kitchen to get some paracetamol. I am pretty sure the fact I lost conciousness, and the fear of it happening again, caused anxiety which prolonged the "side effects" of the vaccine. My girlfriend certainly thought so, she was having none of it!
I was a bit unsteady after my second AZ jab, in a similar manner (at the cost of a broken mug).
I had probably 3 hours of feeling the worst I ever have, with fever, and then just lack of energy and a headache for maybe 6 days. I took my first headache tablet since 2004, followed by about 50 more over the week! Second jab was no problem, I just had a week off the nightcap... dont fancy it every year for the rest of my life mind you
It was Napoleon’s talent that kept a smaller army more or less undefeated fighting on every front for a decade, and his madness in needlessly attacking Sweden and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall.
Spain and Russia, surely?
No, Sweden. He invaded Pomerania in 1812 and turned it from an uneasy ally into an active enemy.
But surely Napoleon's occupation of Spain was more costly to him, along with the 1812 (mis)adventure to Moscow.
Napoleon did not invade Pomerania in 1812. It was in in 1807. Pomerania was given back to Sweden in 1810.
It was Napoleon’s talent that kept a smaller army more or less undefeated fighting on every front for a decade, and his madness in needlessly attacking Sweden and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall.
Spain and Russia, surely?
No, Sweden. He invaded Pomerania in 1812 and turned it from an uneasy ally into an active enemy.
Sweden was neutral wasn't it rather than an "uneasy ally"?
It was technically an ally and in a phony war with Britain (having told the British it wouldn’t fight as long as it was left alone).
In 1812, following the invasion of Pomerania, it allied itself with Russia and declared itself neutral unless Russia was attacked.
It was Napoleon’s talent that kept a smaller army more or less undefeated fighting on every front for a decade, and his madness in needlessly attacking Sweden and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall.
Spain and Russia, surely?
No, Sweden. He invaded Pomerania in 1812 and turned it from an uneasy ally into an active enemy.
But surely Napoleon's occupation of Spain was more costly to him, along with the 1812 (mis)adventure to Moscow.
Napoleon did not invade Pomerania in 1812. It was in in 1807. Pomerania was given back to Sweden in 1810.
And, if you check, he invaded it again in 1812.
And how was that attack a disaster?
It was his follies in Spain and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall, NOT Sweden and Russia.
Interesting read from @andywightman on the bruising background to his resignation from @scotgp and a brutally personal insight into a party that @theSNP is in talks with to be part of our government.
It was Napoleon’s talent that kept a smaller army more or less undefeated fighting on every front for a decade, and his madness in needlessly attacking Sweden and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall.
Spain and Russia, surely?
No, Sweden. He invaded Pomerania in 1812 and turned it from an uneasy ally into an active enemy.
But surely Napoleon's occupation of Spain was more costly to him, along with the 1812 (mis)adventure to Moscow.
Napoleon did not invade Pomerania in 1812. It was in in 1807. Pomerania was given back to Sweden in 1810.
And, if you check, he invaded it again in 1812.
And how was that attack a disaster?
It was his follies in Spain and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall, NOT Sweden and Russia.
Are you unaware of the importance of the Swedish army in the war of the Sixth Coalition? Not to mention Bernadotte’s personal generalship?
If so I’m surprised given how knowledgable you usually are about military history.
Edit - that’s not to underestimate the significance of the Peninsular War in draining France’s strength, but ultimately it wasn’t that that cost him his Empire. Had he left the East quiet and marched his whole army against Wellington, sorely undermanned and with only Spanish and Portuguese help, could Wellington have withstood him? He was a damn good general - better than Napoleon, I would say - but you have to say it’s unlikely.
It was Napoleon’s talent that kept a smaller army more or less undefeated fighting on every front for a decade, and his madness in needlessly attacking Sweden and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall.
Spain and Russia, surely?
No, Sweden. He invaded Pomerania in 1812 and turned it from an uneasy ally into an active enemy.
But surely Napoleon's occupation of Spain was more costly to him, along with the 1812 (mis)adventure to Moscow.
Napoleon did not invade Pomerania in 1812. It was in in 1807. Pomerania was given back to Sweden in 1810.
And, if you check, he invaded it again in 1812.
And how was that attack a disaster?
It was his follies in Spain and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall, NOT Sweden and Russia.
Are you unaware of the importance of the Swedish army in the war of the Sixth Coalition? Not to mention Bernadotte’s personal generalship?
If so I’m surprised given how knowledgable you usually are about military history.
You mean like at Leipzig?
Out of a Coalition Army of 365,000 troops, only 25,000 were Swedes.
It was Napoleon’s talent that kept a smaller army more or less undefeated fighting on every front for a decade, and his madness in needlessly attacking Sweden and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall.
Spain and Russia, surely?
No, Sweden. He invaded Pomerania in 1812 and turned it from an uneasy ally into an active enemy.
But surely Napoleon's occupation of Spain was more costly to him, along with the 1812 (mis)adventure to Moscow.
Napoleon did not invade Pomerania in 1812. It was in in 1807. Pomerania was given back to Sweden in 1810.
And, if you check, he invaded it again in 1812.
And how was that attack a disaster?
It was his follies in Spain and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall, NOT Sweden and Russia.
Are you unaware of the importance of the Swedish army in the war of the Sixth Coalition? Not to mention Bernadotte’s personal generalship?
If so I’m surprised given how knowledgable you usually are about military history.
You mean like at Leipzig?
Out of a Coalition Army of 365,000 troops, only 25,000 were Swedes.
Sweden was neutral wasn't it rather than an "uneasy ally"?
One of Napoleon's Generals, Jean Bernadotte, got invited to become heir to the King of Sweden and Norway in 1810, and he succeeded to the throne in 1818 as Charles XIV John. While he was still Prince Charles John, he was instrumental in allying Sweden with Russia and Britain, against France. Which must have surprised Napoleon.
Fun fact: the current Swedish royal family are direct descendants of Bernadotte.
I don't think this is mentioned enough in the debate over vaxxing the kids in well-off countries. Seems odd that 'right-on' iSAGE doesn't factor this in, despite iirc the inventor of AZ/Ox saying the same thing:
Rich countries vaccinating million of 12-15 year olds
Whilst millions of over 60s and health workers waiting for 1st dose
When I suggested back in April or May we should be providing vaccination doses to poorer countries, I was roundly condemned on the basis "we should vaccinate our own first, then we can help others".
Now, it seems we are considering vaccinating older children - then it seems we are all to get a "booster" vaccination even though AZ are claiming the efficacy of their vaccine is such it will get us through the winter and we don't need booster vaccinations.
At what point are we going to consider the vaccination of the poorest in the rest of the world? What is the current rate of vaccination in Burundi, Bhutan or Bolivia? Do they have access to enough vaccine or the means to distribute them?
Are we genuinely going to undertake a round of further booster vaccinations if the scientific evidence is growing they aren't necessary?
Interesting read from @andywightman on the bruising background to his resignation from @scotgp and a brutally personal insight into a party that @theSNP is in talks with to be part of our government.
Comments
And to a certain extent that worked: in the 90s, investment by the big oil companies collapsed. But - as Margaret Thatcher once said - "you can't buck the market", and world underinvestment in the 90s led to the monumental oil boom in the 2000s, and which (in turn) led to the development of unconventional oil reserves that probably destroyed Saudi hegemony forever.
Must be a frother with all the data to hand surely.
But you only have to look at pediatric hospital admissions in Florida, to see that when Delta is rampant, then there is a lot more benefit to vaccinating teenagers, than when the plague is in remission. Simply: assumptions about background levels of the disease matter, and if there are lots of only mildly symptomatic adults spreading viral matter around, your chance of your child getting Delta are massively higher.
All that being said, why not leave it up to parents? Our 13 year old daughter is Pfizered, and when the vaccines are approved for 9-11 year olds (September), we will be getting our son jabbed too. The balance of risks is very different now than it was three months ago, and the fact that so many vaccinated people can carry and spread Delta means that that is likely to continue for some time.
The Orange Revolution was ultimately caused by King James VII and II having a nosebleed. Nothing else. It takes on a far greater significance with hindsight, especially in light of Locke and later Burke’s writings, than it ever had at the time.
Similarly, the American Revolution was ultimately a tax dispute that got a bit out of hand. Had Townshend acted a week sooner than he did, it wouldn’t have happened. I agree, to an extent, that the subsequent federal state had enlightenment ideals under it - those of Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin, to take the most obvious examples - but many of them really came into play only some years later under Jefferson and Madison.
Be wary about confusing cause and effect.
He was one of the first truly totalitarian non-monarchical dictators. Comparisons with Lenin and Trotsky are valid, although he was far more self-aggrandising than either of those.
At least Bairstow played a shot.
Edit - of course, it could be argued that the French Revolution was caused not by enlightenment ideals, but by Louis XVI’s bankruptcy and a poor harvest. But the reforms demanded to rescue the monarchy from its financial collapse were certainly based on Enlightenment ideals.
If we assume everyone is going to come into contact with Delta, or maybe a worse variant, at some point then you can pretty much calculate the number of hospitalisations and deaths among the anti-vaxxers now.
It then becomes a question of managing the spread of hospitalisations so that they remain within an acceptable level.
Fail to do that and health systems become overloaded and the death rate rises.
A lot of preconceived notions would have been reinforced, for sure.
Not that Whigs are the only guilty ones. Marxist historiography, oh my goodness.
“American oil refiners have never before bought so much crude oil from Russia. The Cold War adversary is now the number two supplier to the U.S.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-04/russia-captures-no-2-rank-among-foreign-oil-suppliers-to-u-s
Lol
Whereas I wonder if, once the monarchy had been dispatched, the same could have been achieved without the constant warfare he felt necessary. What if he had looked a little more at what his international competitors wanted, and the Treaty of Amiens had not failed? (and yes, I know that wasn't totally in his hands.)
It just seems that he caused an awful lot of deaths and hardship, to leave a politically unstable France and millions of deaths.
A double vaxxed friend of mine has got it, and says he has never felt worse in his life. In his fifties, but runs marathons, so a fit fellow
He was clearly a brilliant and aggressive leader of soldiers, but a (much) less successful leader of France.
Possibly also the infrastructure: the learned societies, and the Jardin du Roi, which were evolving into the botanic gardens and Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle of today, though I'm not sure how much of that was down to Nap rather than his royal and republican predecessors.
Edit: also schools and specialist colleges?
If Napoleon hadn’t seized power, then the French state would have collapsed. But it’s hard to argue that would have been much better. What would the Coalition Powers have done with it?
It was Napoleon’s talent that kept a smaller army more or less undefeated fighting on every front for a decade, and his madness in needlessly attacking Sweden and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall.
Equally, when he finally came up against a brace of generals who were his equal in Wellington and Blucher, he lost. Badly.
Would it have been better had he never been? Hard to say. Many changes happened because of him, as his defenders note and you list, that might have happened at heavy cost anyway. And he can hardly be blamed for France’s century of turbulence, which was much more due to Charles X’s misguided attempt at personal rule.
Love him, loathe him or be ambivalent about him though, he was undoubtedly important. Maybe Stalin is a fair comparison?
But I hadn’t realized that there was so much heavy Russian crude available for the Gulf coast refineries.
@prchovanec
·
1h
30 US states had over 1,000 new cases yesterday. Florida led the pack with over 22,000 new cases, followed by Texas with over 15,000 and California with over 14,000. Louisiana and Georgia had over 6,000 each.
Can I suggest the "Mick's Cafe Race" as an Olympic tetrathlon event. I don't know if it still held, but was a rag week regular in my student days:
Starting at the student union, drink a bottle of Newcastle Brown, run to Mick's Cafe, eat a 'Mick's Grill', run back to the union, drink another bottle of Brown. First one to bring it all up into the fountain is the winner.
Drinking
Running
Eating
Vomiting
I'm confident that Team GB would excel.
*Checks trains to Marylebone*
I tend to talk in terms of 'great' figures anad really should stop, as I always then need to clarify I don't necessarily mean good, but impactful.
Cesar, of course, was a very unsubtle pun on ‘Tsar’ - the Russian for Emperor.
Prof Francois Balloux
You have stated that a “non-trivial” number of long-Covid cases are psychosomatic.
We know that infections such as Covid lead to post-viral syndromes. At the risk of being insensitive, I would be surprised if there wasn’t a link between disease severity and the severity of follow-up symptoms. Like tuberculosis or influenza, people who have a severe case should expect to take a long time to recover fully. And sometimes recovery is never complete.
I would like to stress: if you have a serious infection, do not necessarily expect to be back to full fitness in three months. The situation is more complicated with a mild infection. Post-viral symptoms can happen but it seems relatively implausible to me that this would happen very frequently. In all likelihood, some cases are psychosomatic – though this doesn’t make the suffering less real for those affected or reduce the cost to society. All disease is real, irrespective of its root cause.
There is a mental component to health and disease. Just the fear of something bad happening to us can make us feel unwell. A remarkable example of this process can be seen in the way over 30% of the people who were enrolled in the control arm of the Pfizer vaccine trial reported headaches and fatigue, despite not being injected with a vaccine.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/07/prof-francois-balloux-the-pandemic-has-created-a-market-for-gloom-and-doom
But then I remember that I was bone idle already
Instead of trying diplomacy, time and time again he chose war. In particular, the hundred days and Waterloo seem incredibly pointless.
As for France's century of turbulence: given the changes he did achieve, it would have been easy to go a step further and modernise the political system. Instead he made himself Emperor.
(Forgive me if I've got details wrong; IANAE...)
He just wasn’t very good at it. He tended to humiliate people while leaving their power bases untouched.
Then he would force them to do things they didn’t want to do - e.g. invade Russia - and they turned on him.
Michael Absoud
@MAbsoud
·
9h
A morale failure
Rich countries vaccinating million of 12-15 year olds
Whilst millions of over 60s and health workers waiting for 1st dose
For example the Dutch guilder was still the primary reserve currency at the end of the 18th century. What did for them was Napoleon invading and closing all their ports to trade with Britain. The Dutch economy collapsed and so did their reserve currency status. The losers were the Dutch and everyone who held guilders (pretty much all the countries in Europe, plus some others outside Europe who held guilders to facilitate trade with European countries). The winner was the UK as the pound sterling replaced the guilder as the primary reserve currency.
Then there are the effects of Napoleon's invasion of the German principalities. It triggered a movement seeking to unify the German-speaking peoples for their own safety - this finally came to fruition in 1871 when Germany unified under Bismark. But that hurt France, which started to get invaded in return - Franco-German war, WW1, WW2.
I'd argue Napoleon destabalised France too. They are locked into a cycle where each generation tries to enact it's own revolution, and some strong man fancies himself as Napoleon in regaining control from the mob - and then the mob rebels against this and the cycle starts over again. See all those revolutions in the 19th century which get interrupted with restorations of the monarchy or Napoleon III. See also De Gaulle, Sarkozy, Macron, all with a Napoleon complex.
Napoleon did not invade Pomerania in 1812. It was in in 1807. Pomerania was given back to Sweden in 1810.
NO: 47%
YES: 44%
Undecideds Excluded:
NO: 52%
YES: 48%
Via @RedfieldWilton
https://twitter.com/electpoliticsuk/status/1424012469073321991?s=20
Napoleon did not invade Pomerania in 1812. It was in in 1807. Pomerania was given back to Sweden in 1810.
Do you still stand by that argument in light of the counter example I have offered of Revolutionary France?
In 1812, following the invasion of Pomerania, it allied itself with Russia and declared itself neutral unless Russia was attacked.
Spot the caveat...
It was his follies in Spain and Russia that brought his ultimate downfall, NOT Sweden and Russia.
https://twitter.com/holyroodmandy/status/1424002527255748608?s=20
If so I’m surprised given how knowledgable you usually are about military history.
Edit - that’s not to underestimate the significance of the Peninsular War in draining France’s strength, but ultimately it wasn’t that that cost him his Empire. Had he left the East quiet and marched his whole army against Wellington, sorely undermanned and with only Spanish and Portuguese help, could Wellington have withstood him? He was a damn good general - better than Napoleon, I would say - but you have to say it’s unlikely.
The zeal of a new convert to a cause is a remarkable thing.
Out of a Coalition Army of 365,000 troops, only 25,000 were Swedes.
Fun fact: the current Swedish royal family are direct descendants of Bernadotte.
Now, it seems we are considering vaccinating older children - then it seems we are all to get a "booster" vaccination even though AZ are claiming the efficacy of their vaccine is such it will get us through the winter and we don't need booster vaccinations.
At what point are we going to consider the vaccination of the poorest in the rest of the world? What is the current rate of vaccination in Burundi, Bhutan or Bolivia? Do they have access to enough vaccine or the means to distribute them?
Are we genuinely going to undertake a round of further booster vaccinations if the scientific evidence is growing they aren't necessary?