The world will be a wonderful place when schools have all the funding they need and the Air Force must hold a bake sale to pay for new fighter jets.
The US spent $8,000,000,000,000 on the "war on terror" [1], while 21% of adults are illiterate [2]
[1] https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar
[2] https://www.crossrivertherapy.com/research/literacy-statisti...
Put another way, the reason some schools spend twice as much money but have worse outcomes is because the children in those schools are starting from much farther back. There isn’t a reasonable amount of money you could throw at the problem school to solve the issue.
If they paid teachers more, they'd have better teachers, though.
of course I write the above as if we can objectivly evaluate teachers. I'm not sure if we can. I had my share of what I thought were good and bad teachers: in the end I'm a successful engineer which matters far more than how I felt about any teacher. What we really know is overall they were good enough, but not how any individual played a part
The next time you’re in line at TSA, at a public event (sporting, concerts), at a major transportation hub, any large gathering of people, think about this position you’ve taken. There is a multiple victim shooting event almost every day in the US, and your argument is terrorist attacks can be defended against? We can’t even protect the country from ourselves. These outcomes are a choice.
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting?yea...
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/
> In a 2017 US study, researchers found that the average police response time was around 10 minutes. Department of Homeland Security research revealed that the average duration of an active shooter incident at a school is 12.5 minutes yet the average response time for law enforcement is 18 minutes.
https://criticalarc.com/cutting-your-teams-response-time-in-...
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/response...
https://jasher.substack.com/p/police-are-taking-longer-to-re...
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/17/1149455678/why-data-from-15-c...
The reason for shooting is related to civilian population carrying weapons. It's tragic but it is also a thing that would make attacking US super impractical.
Remember that Russia is super close to US geographically. It's not such a massive project to throw enough troops east and start with Alaska. So why not? Well, US (thanks its insane military budget that you so denounce) would see it coming years in advance and but even with zero warning every other house they encounter on the way will have well prepared people stoked with assault rifles.
Surely that's a constructive proof that this notion is mistaken?
Indeed. And the reason why such an attack happened is because the people who did the attack were the ruling government body of 2 million people for almost 2 decades, and were left to their own devices to build up a large scale attack, involving 1 thousand+ combatants.
And in a few months, those combatants and military infrastructure will be destroyed and not much of a threat.
It turns out that killing your enemies leaves them no longer able to attack you. And leaving them alone and in charge of a psuedo country, lets them built up the capacity to harm you.
Along with everything else, constituting a bigger crime than this is claimed to be an attempt to prevent.
https://twitter.com/muhammadshehad2/status/17317722618482647...
https://www.ipcinfo.org/ipcinfo-website/alerts-archive/issue...
https://twitter.com/jocelynhurndall/status/17330649265606495...
To be frank your comment has a really disturbing undertone of bloodlust. I don't know a nice way to say that. You should really reexamine what your attitudes are here and how you came to them, this is not an appropriate way to discuss the deaths of thousands of people.
After Israel voluntarily withdrew its military and displaced all Jews out of Gaza, Hamas painted it as "powerful Hamas won" to get elected and since then is in fact the ruling party in Gaza territory (even if not very popular among the citizens there anymore for obvious reasons). What are the alternative facts?
[1] Smotrich: "In the context of delegitimization, Hamas is an asset and the authority is a burden" -- https://twitter.com/pgosh_MTP/status/1741169302051402195
[2] https://twitter.com/Rachael_Swindon/status/17417897483670733...
But to answer your question, I have absolutely no idea. I follow a military news YouTuber named Ryan McBeth, and something he says that makes sense to me is that effective strategies present adversaries with dilemmas rather than problems, where each option is terrible but you have no choice but to pick one. The reason terrorism is effective, to the extent that it is effective, is that no one has discovered an effective means to counter it.
Murder is inexcusable. Terrorism is inexcusable. I don't see where I ever implied otherwise.
So two things how I hold this view.
First in all those years Hamas didn't manage to make a dent in Israel. Which makes me really think even Hamas leaders didn't expect this attack to go this far. But it so happened Israel was unprepared with its military all busy defending illegal Jewish settlements on the West bank. Maybe they got complacent. Or a conspiracist might say Netanyahu set it all up (but I doubt it). Whatever it was, Hamas did way more damage than anyone expected so things got out of hand
And second in all these years of throwing rockets, smuggling weapons and all the stuff they were getting away with they got no serious retaliation. Paradoxically because Israel's defenses were so good. So maybe Hamas also got a bit complacent and thought they are immune camping there under civilian hospitals and schools.
A radicalized population that has had their infrastructure and military destroyed isn't much of a threat.
Sucks for them, but the problem is still solved for other nations.
It can sound cheeky but perhaps the biggest thing you have to show for it is overall more free and less murdery world thanks to people wanting to prosper and stuff. Going to war is suddenly unappealing (unless you are very small and have nothing to lose, but then you do less damage comparatively).
Having a strong military and a willingness to fight, means you don't have to fight.
It would be similar if Mexico/Canada/Cuba together declared war at US and then Russia joined them. Because then sure Russia can have a decent chance of successfully invading US across a sea and then strong military could make a difference. But Mexico and Canada won't and countries who could are inconveniently far. This is why I say lack of attempted invasions may be more thanks to good geopolitical situation and civilian population equipped for defense than strong military.
And also, the same to the Aleutian Islands and Alaska?
It would be hard to argue that Afghanistan lost that much. Although I guess they "won" (if you call what happened winning. )
But the "war on terror" wasn't a "traditional war". It wasn't like some landing by foreign forces at Venice Beach. It was a manufactured political construct that served political purposes.
It handily created a jobs program called the TSA. Which is grossly over equipped to confiscate shampoo. All the world has airport security. Very few places have (or need) TSA levels of intrusion.
The "war on terror" was indeed lost. It was lost when the US became "terrified". In all of the troubles the IRA couldn't do that to the UK. Endless bombs just resulted in "carry on".
In the US the war continues all the time. The TSA bears witness to this.
But at this point it employs so many people, doing meaningless, unskilled work, that you may as well treat it as a jobs program.
It's a lot more readable to just write $8 trillion. Writing out all the zeros doesn't make your point any more convincing.
To be honest, I wrote it out longhand because I think it's important not to make it feel shorter or somehow less significant. It is an enormous sum of money that humans are not equipped to comprehend, so anything we can do to covey the scale more clearly is important.
A single trillion is an absurd amount. Now make eight of these: https://www.rogerebert.com/scanners/what-does-one-trillion-d...