thebestaquaman

If you make any edits that contradict the physical evidence, you've outed yourself.

We're talking about people that contradict both themselves and physical reality on a daily basis without their supporters batting an eye.

Export to jpeg. Compress.

Can decent edits still be reliably detected?

Great, it seems like we agree on the major points here! I'm not denying any of the major issues of the Afghan war, nor any of the glaring problems with how the whole "nation building" attempt went about. I'm very well aware of the history of the Afghan war, and have seen several of the documentaries you refer to that point out that it was largely known that the Afghan army would likely desert once the coalition left.

I'm not saying we don't care.

That is quite literally what you said in your first comment, and is literally the only thing I've disagreed with you on so far ("the world simply doesn't care"). If you didn't mean that, then I don't see anything I disagree with you on.

Many individual people did earnestly care, and tried their best.

This is literally the point I've been trying to make, but it seems like you keep misinterpreting me as saying the whole invasion was a misunderstood humanitarian operation. I'm not saying that.

It differs per community.

Good point, I'll moderate myself and just state that I've never experienced it being a hard requirement in my field.

No it's not. I have both published in a variety of scientific journals, reviewed for a couple journals, and turned down reviews for a couple journals.

No journal checks your "review history" before allowing you to publish. However, if you consistently turn down reviews from a journal, the editor is likely going to get annoyed and you will probably have a harder time publishing in that journal in the future.

Yep. At that point, why even bother taking the review? You're not forced to do reviews. Never taking any is likely to negatively impact your career, but still... just decline the review if you're going to use a LLM for it anyway. Have some dignity.

I don't really understand what you're trying to say here?

My point is that, while flimsy and flawed, there was in fact an education system and a humanitarian system in place that was propped up by coalition forces. This system did fall apart, leaving no system at all when the forces left. And yes, a bunch of Afghanis have every right to feel betrayed. I never said otherwise.

It's not like Afghanistan is the only place where schools, hospitals and infrastructure has been financed by western countries. By and large, we spend a lot of money on these things because a significant portion of the population sees it as the right thing to do. Because we care, and want to help people.

What became very clear in Afghanistan was that you can't force a population to be a liberal democracy. They have to be willing to fight for it themselves. The Afghan army (on paper) had several hundred thousand men, loads of heavy equipment, and several years to train and prepare for coalition forces leaving. There was a government structure in place. These things instantly folded when the coalition left because, clearly, enough people preferred Taliban to what the outsiders had forced upon them.

I guess I'm saying it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. If you stay, you're an oppressive occupier. If you leave, you're a traitor that permits a humanitarian crisis to occur.

The OP here asked "why doesn't anybody do anything about NK", and my answer is that we (seem to) have learned that you can't force democracy and human rights on a country. Chalking it up to "we don't care" is reductionist.

It didn't go to shit when we left, it was shit from the beginning.

It seems like you didn't observe the thousands of people swarming the airport in Kabul trying to get out with the last planes. It also seems like you haven't picked up on the people crying about how people are being brutally punished for getting an education or listening to music now.

I'm not denying that shit was really bad while coalition forces were there, but acting like it didn't get worse for a lot of people when the left is just closing your eyes.

Regardless, it's ludicrous to claim that western countries "aren't doing anything because they don't care". It's not like we've spent truckloads of money and thousands of lives over 20 years of trying to get a functioning system in place while preventing a humanitarian crisis because we "didn't care". People saw it as immoral to just turn our backs on Afghanistan and let them solve their own problems. The result was largely that we learned that you can't force democracy and human rights onto someone else, as proven by the almost complete absence of people willing to fight for just that once the coalition left.

"The west" isn't really a cohesive unit regarding Israel/Iran. You have some western countries supporting a genocide and committing blatant violations of international law, while others condemn them for it and try to pressure them to stop.

Sadly, one rogue state can cause a lot of damage, and countries typically have a very high bar for using military force against their closest allies in defence of a third party.

It's not that people "don't care". We've tried intervening with force in e.g. Afghanistan, where the oppressive regime was forcibly removed, and military power was used to ensure that elections were held and the results were respected.

We have observed, several times, that everything goes to shit when we leave. Not only that, but people generally don't seem like it when outsiders take over and tell them how to run their country, who should be allowed an education, and that cannot be oppressed. So a side effect of the armed intervention is that a lot more people hate you now.

Western countries "aren't doing anything" because we've both learned from experience that military intervention doesn't really work, and been repeatedly told by the rest of the world to mind our own business.

I always assumed this was a parody account because of this post. Recent developments suggest otherwise. Is this guy, in fact, not a parody?

He had the important (and, admittedly unrealistic) important capability of recognising that someone was smarter than himself.

I honestly think this is the major plot hole in Idiocracy: The first thing to go would be peoples ability to recognise expertise. Thus, nobody would be willing or able to recognise that a stranger knew how to solve a problem they had no clue how to deal with. This is the real-world Idiocracy we're seeing today.