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youngblood wrote:A quick refutation, things are not near as bad as they were during the Great Depression for a number of reasons. The recession is over. The stock market has recovered (which is the leading indicator in these things), jobs just have to recover (which is the trailing factor in all this).

I understand what you are saying, but being isolationist will not speed our recovery. I'm not a big fan of prolonged military action as I think its just makes the general populace weary. At the same time, America is clearly looked up to as "Big Brother".

So you think the recession is over?

Frazzled wrote:

youngblood wrote:A quick refutation, things are not near as bad as they were during the Great Depression for a number of reasons. The recession is over. The stock market has recovered (which is the leading indicator in these things), jobs just have to recover (which is the trailing factor in all this).

I understand what you are saying, but being isolationist will not speed our recovery. I'm not a big fan of prolonged military action as I think its just makes the general populace weary. At the same time, America is clearly looked up to as "Big Brother".

So you think the recession is over?

At least the decline from an economic standpoint. Houses will still be foreclosed on, jobs will still be lost, but our economy is no longer shrinking.

youngblood wrote:

Frazzled wrote:

youngblood wrote:A quick refutation, things are not near as bad as they were during the Great Depression for a number of reasons. The recession is over. The stock market has recovered (which is the leading indicator in these things), jobs just have to recover (which is the trailing factor in all this).

I understand what you are saying, but being isolationist will not speed our recovery. I'm not a big fan of prolonged military action as I think its just makes the general populace weary. At the same time, America is clearly looked up to as "Big Brother".

So you think the recession is over?

At least the decline from an economic standpoint. Houses will still be foreclosed on, jobs will still be lost, but our economy is no longer shrinking.

Three words for you
Double
Dip
Recession

Frazzled wrote:

youngblood wrote:

Frazzled wrote:

youngblood wrote:A quick refutation, things are not near as bad as they were during the Great Depression for a number of reasons. The recession is over. The stock market has recovered (which is the leading indicator in these things), jobs just have to recover (which is the trailing factor in all this).

I understand what you are saying, but being isolationist will not speed our recovery. I'm not a big fan of prolonged military action as I think its just makes the general populace weary. At the same time, America is clearly looked up to as "Big Brother".

So you think the recession is over?

At least the decline from an economic standpoint. Houses will still be foreclosed on, jobs will still be lost, but our economy is no longer shrinking.

Three words for you
Double
Dip
Recession

Is that when the president dips the economy in salsa, takes a bite, and then dips again?

No, thats me

Ahtman wrote:

Redbeard wrote:

Ahtman wrote:A possible strategy isn't a logical fallacy. Still waiting.

The logical fallacy is that it is impossible to claim that something is vital, yet establish a hard timeline for abandoning it.

Setting a time line for assessment isn't abandoning anything, nor is it a logical fallacy. As stated several times before, nothing is being abandoned so that is a factual error, but it to is not a logical fallacy.

No one ever claimed there was a fallacy here. I said there's a hole, not a fallacy. There is. If you can't see it, I can't make it any more obvious.

The speech I heard didn't say anything about assessment. It said that they would start withdrawing troops in eighteen months. Obama said, "After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home. These are the resources that we need to seize the initiative, while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan."

There's no assessment, no evaluation, simply a statement that the troops will start to come home. Once, he mentioned something about 'conditions on the ground', but went on to say that we're not going to fight an open-ended war. Claiming that revising deadlines isn't the same as being open-ended, well, that's a fallacy. If you set a deadline and continually push it back, that is open-ended.

(As a side-note, I agree with Youngblood - there's no way the Afghans will be able to control the Taliban themselves in eighteen months, or even eighteen years, regardless of whether we send an extra 30,000 (which is, by the way, less than a quarter of the number of men who fought at Austerlitz, today-in-history) or an extra 300,000. No one in history has ever been able to control Afghanistan. The Russians failed, and had far more people over there than we do now, and that was only 20-30 years ago. As someone said, "Afghanistan, where Empires go to die."

I have to agree with Frazzled plus you may think we are no were near where we were with the great depression, but a lot of that has to do with the checks and balances system as much as the FDIC. Statistically if you pick up a wall street journel you will read that we are at and have even been below the level were our people were in the 1920's. This difference is the population increases and the insurances our gov't has set in place to help ease the burden. Our currency is at the weakest it has been in a while(well almost last year canada's was higher then our ), and the unemployment rates are still through the roof.

Hell I was thinking of even becoming a recruiter being as the national gaurd and reserves had to stop recruiting from april to june because they excedded quota for the first time since the war began back in 2002. This is due to the lack of work out their. I can understand why you would "think" the recession is over, but if you do that just means you either are too young to have to worry about taking care of a family, or you have a nice cushy job that you think you can't get fired from. I dropped out of college to go full time military again in my life, and moved across country just to insure I had a job to take care of my family.

Empchild wrote:I have to agree with Frazzled plus you may think we are no were near where we were with the great depression, but a lot of that has to do with the checks and balances system as much as the FDIC. Statistically if you pick up a wall street journel you will read that we are at and have even been below the level were our people were in the 1920's. This difference is the population increases and the insurances our gov't has set in place to help ease the burden. Our currency is at the weakest it has been in a while(well almost last year canada's was higher then our ), and the unemployment rates are still through the roof.

Agreed, which is precisely why this isn't like the Great Depression. Unemployment is still half what it was in 1932 (19-23%), in terms of absolute numbers, we hit the high in October with 15.7 million americans unemployed (10.2%). Anyway, this has become way off-topic.

So ya... go pres.

As someone who really cares about statistics, you will find that we have suffered less casualties the entire time our military has been deployed in iraq and afghanistan than in the first 2 days of Operation Overlord, and yet people have been describing this as a meatgrinder. I find that ridiculous in the extreme. More people die in the U.S. in one day than our death count during the entire Iraq War.

Also, the only reasons the Soviet Union (not Russia, there is a difference) lost that war is because:

1. We provided the Afghans with weapons and training.
2. The Soviet Union had a horrible economy that was going down the gutter and could not support the war.
3.The Soviet troops had poor training and morale.

And don't say we have a horrible economy now, the problems with the U.S. economy are nothing compared to the problems the Soviet Union had.

youngblood wrote:

Empchild wrote:I have to agree with Frazzled plus you may think we are no were near where we were with the great depression, but a lot of that has to do with the checks and balances system as much as the FDIC. Statistically if you pick up a wall street journel you will read that we are at and have even been below the level were our people were in the 1920's. This difference is the population increases and the insurances our gov't has set in place to help ease the burden. Our currency is at the weakest it has been in a while(well almost last year canada's was higher then our ), and the unemployment rates are still through the roof.

Agreed, which is precisely why this isn't like the Great Depression. Unemployment is still half what it was in 1932 (19-23%), in terms of absolute numbers, we hit the high in October with 15.7 million americans unemployed (10.2%). Anyway, this has become way off-topic.

So ya... go pres.

Again, why do you think we hit the high yet?

Frazzled wrote:

youngblood wrote:

Empchild wrote:I have to agree with Frazzled plus you may think we are no were near where we were with the great depression, but a lot of that has to do with the checks and balances system as much as the FDIC. Statistically if you pick up a wall street journel you will read that we are at and have even been below the level were our people were in the 1920's. This difference is the population increases and the insurances our gov't has set in place to help ease the burden. Our currency is at the weakest it has been in a while(well almost last year canada's was higher then our ), and the unemployment rates are still through the roof.

Agreed, which is precisely why this isn't like the Great Depression. Unemployment is still half what it was in 1932 (19-23%), in terms of absolute numbers, we hit the high in October with 15.7 million americans unemployed (10.2%). Anyway, this has become way off-topic.

So ya... go pres.

Again, why do you think we hit the high yet?

I don't. What I said was that unemployment is not the leading indicator of economic decline. Typical (as in, with every recession/depression America has had) the markets are the leading indicators as to where the economy is headed. The markets tend to be 9 months (give a take a few) ahead of the rest of the economy. I'm not saying that this is gospel gold, just that this is what has happened in the past.

double post, ignore this comment


Automatically Appended Next Post:
where it says depression, it should say recession.

youngblood wrote:

Frazzled wrote:

youngblood wrote:

Empchild wrote:I have to agree with Frazzled plus you may think we are no were near where we were with the great depression, but a lot of that has to do with the checks and balances system as much as the FDIC. Statistically if you pick up a wall street journel you will read that we are at and have even been below the level were our people were in the 1920's. This difference is the population increases and the insurances our gov't has set in place to help ease the burden. Our currency is at the weakest it has been in a while(well almost last year canada's was higher then our ), and the unemployment rates are still through the roof.

Agreed, which is precisely why this isn't like the Great Depression. Unemployment is still half what it was in 1932 (19-23%), in terms of absolute numbers, we hit the high in October with 15.7 million americans unemployed (10.2%). Anyway, this has become way off-topic.

So ya... go pres.

Again, why do you think we hit the high yet?

I don't. What I said was that unemployment is not the leading indicator of economic decline. Typical (as in, with every recession/depression America has had) the markets are the leading indicators as to where the economy is headed. The markets tend to be 9 months (give a take a few) ahead of the rest of the economy. I'm not saying that this is gospel gold, just that this is what has happened in the past.

I'll restate this to be clear. Your assumption is that the recession is over.

The market is only one indicator. As a reminder the Depression stiock markets went up as well and largely missed the 2nd and much deeper dip.
I am hopeful there is no second dip. However while its safe to assume the Panic of 2008 (old use of the term meaning a financial panic) is passing, most indicators are all over the place for whether or not the recession has passed and if so, whether there will be a second dip.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

GundamMerc wrote:double post, ignore this comment


Automatically Appended Next Post:
where it says depression, it should say recession.

There are so many things wrong with this statements that its staggering.

Redbeard wrote:

Ahtman wrote:

Redbeard wrote:

Ahtman wrote:A possible strategy isn't a logical fallacy. Still waiting.

The logical fallacy is that it is impossible to claim that something is vital, yet establish a hard timeline for abandoning it.

Setting a time line for assessment isn't abandoning anything, nor is it a logical fallacy. As stated several times before, nothing is being abandoned so that is a factual error, but it to is not a logical fallacy.

(As a side-note, I agree with Youngblood - there's no way the Afghans will be able to control the Taliban themselves in eighteen months, or even eighteen years, regardless of whether we send an extra 30,000 (which is, by the way, less than a quarter of the number of men who fought at Austerlitz, today-in-history) or an extra 300,000. No one in history has ever been able to control Afghanistan. The Russians failed, and had far more people over there than we do now, and that was only 20-30 years ago. As someone said, "Afghanistan, where Empires go to die."

No one in history was able to defeat Japan either; until of the course the US of A and her allies became involved after Pearl Harbor. Largely thanks to Bush's crusade against Iraq we haven't been able to devote as much resources or troops into the Afghanistan conflict. However one would be somewhat correct in that winning in Afghanistan will not be a conventional win and instead we have to take a modern and non-Cold War/conventional approach to it. Infiltrate their politics and society and spread reform that way while at the same time putting bullets in the heads of terrorists. Another poster already brought up significant differences in how the Soviets handled Afghanistan and the status quo; imo the modern American military is much more suited towards modern combat than the Soviets and even Cold War America.

As for troop withdrawal imo whats going to happen is just more tours except different military personnel will be substituted. So those troops being sent now will be coming home in 18 months but there will likely be more ready to go and like the case of Iraq; unfortunately many will likely be serving repeated tours. As for projecting large troop withdrawals thats obviously dependent on a ton of factors and uncertainty - just like when past American presidents claimed to have wars won by X-Mas; great idea and something most Americans would want but like what they say in the IT field: "It depends".

Redbeard wrote:I watched the President's speech tonight, and was left with the following logical gap.

Premise: Afghanistan is vital to national and international security.
Plan: Help the Afghans prepare to handle their own security and leave in eighteen months.
Flaw: What if they're not ready in eighteen months???

This translates as Vietnam 1971.

The OpFor need only say, hold for eighteen months, the end is near. Obama has no stomach for the fight, I have some sympathy for that we should never have gone in to begin with but Bush wanted his pound of flesh and Blair followed him yapping.
This was the wrong thing to say, now only the enemy can see the light at the end of the tunnel. How typical of a self serving politician, he wants to cover his own face and leaves the troops on the ground to swing, things will be much tougher now and morale will deterioriate rapidly.

Orlanth wrote:

I have some sympathy for that we should never have gone in to begin with but Bush wanted his pound of flesh and Blair followed him yapping.
This was the wrong thing to say, now only the enemy can see the light at the end of the tunnel. How typical of a self serving politician, he wants to cover his own face and leaves the troops on the ground to swing, things will be much tougher now and morale will deterioriate rapidly.

I disagree. We had no choice. This isn't Iraq. We were attacked and thousand of Americans and hundreds of Brits were killed in that attack.
We've smashed Al Qaeda and the Taliban who were protecting them. Some would say Afghanistan. They started. We kicked their teeth in. Time to go. This whole nationbuilding thing in a place that has never been a nation is misplaced. If Alqaeda re-appears, nuke them, otherwise let Afghanistan rule itself in whatever form the Afghanis choose to. If they permit they psycho taliban to regain power then they deserve what they get.

Translation: We didn't go there to be cops and social workers. We went there to kill a whole lot of people. Now that we've done that time to get out of that bad neighborhood.
But again, thats one opinion. There are many.

Cane wrote:
No one in history was able to defeat Japan either

No one?

Don't forget the Chinese stopped them in Korea back in the hack n slash sword days.

GundamMerc wrote:As someone who really cares about statistics, you will find that we have suffered less casualties the entire time our military has been deployed in iraq and afghanistan than in the first 2 days of Operation Overlord, and yet people have been describing this as a meatgrinder. I find that ridiculous in the extreme. More people die in the U.S. in one day than our death count during the entire Iraq War.

Also, the only reasons the Soviet Union (not Russia, there is a difference) lost that war is because:

1. We provided the Afghans with weapons and training.
2. The Soviet Union had a horrible economy that was going down the gutter and could not support the war.
3.The Soviet troops had poor training and morale.

And don't say we have a horrible economy now, the problems with the U.S. economy are nothing compared to the problems the Soviet Union had.

Ok you are right in the basics of your statement, but so incredably ignorant to the overall. First off yes the overall KIA figures are much less this is due A: to the advanced body armor and tanks, and B: to the advancements in medical treatment. The U.S has in a sense adopted Napoleans belief that if you can remove a wounded soldier from the battlefield within 30 minutes of the action then the soldiers chances of survival increase exponentially. The Use of Helocopters has also played a mainstream role in our wars of current as well.

You are by no accounts counting in the civilian "contracters" kia's with that number either. This number last reported(don't ask me where because I can't remember which paper I read it in) was almost 3 times the numbers of our combat troops. Also remember the wars of the past are just that the past. Unless we have another world war casualty figures like that will hopefully never be seen again.

Finally go because for you to even think of soldiers like that shows how utterly distasteful you are and how lazy you are as well. For you to think like that shows me and many others that you are probably the type of person who I like to call an armchair general. The Presidents plan though very ummm difficult to say the least is highly understandable. Yes it is by no means a way to end this war, but I feel it is better then most atm. Their is no winner in a guerilla war as both side decimate each other pretty heavily. Supplies is the strongest factor for the winner and until the American population cuts the bonds holding our soldiers back we can not win any war thrown at us. Our own citizens hold us back and call for peace, but they forget that we were attacked, and we as a junk yard dog have to be unleashed otherwise that thief will just come back and hit your house. Their is no such thing as an innocent on the battlefield sad to say.

sorry for that wierd post by me earlier about ignoring the post, the internet was going on the fritz

Redbeard wrote:

Cane wrote:
No one in history was able to defeat Japan either

No one?

OOO DEAR GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Modquisition on. Gentlemen politeness is required. This is a public warning to everyone to tone down personal attacks. Further posts of that nature will lead to disciplinary actions.

I think what people may be overlooking is that the deadline is about Karzai. It's well-known this administration doesn't trust him and doesn't think he's up to the job. So they're likely putting him on notice that his police, army and corruption situations need to improve in 18 months, or we're cutting our losses and getting out.

That would mean A-Q and the Taliban would move right back in like the past 9 years never happened. And that's bad for us. So yes, the deadline is likely a bluff, but one that Karzai may not be willing to test, given that he'll end up powerless and beheaded if he's wrong.

Regarding this recession and the Great Depression, there's absolutely no comparison. And anyone suggesting this needs a history lesson and a better grasp of economic data. It's tremendously insulting to those who lived through the Great Depression to even suggest such a thing. It's also disturbing to me that anyone would even seem to be rooting for more bad times for American families simply because it "hurts" the current administration.

Who on earth is rooting for more bad times Gorgon?

Redbeard wrote:

Cane wrote:
No one in history was able to defeat Japan either

No one?

Whoops meant in the war sense. Battles =/= war. If we're talking about battles than America and even the Soviet Union won a few of those against Afghan terrorists.

That battle was part of an undeclared war resulting in a neutrality pact where both empires respected specific territories and borders.

Frazzled wrote:

Orlanth wrote:

I have some sympathy for that we should never have gone in to begin with but Bush wanted his pound of flesh and Blair followed him yapping.
This was the wrong thing to say, now only the enemy can see the light at the end of the tunnel. How typical of a self serving politician, he wants to cover his own face and leaves the troops on the ground to swing, things will be much tougher now and morale will deterioriate rapidly.

I disagree. We had no choice. This isn't Iraq. We were attacked and thousand of Americans and hundreds of Brits were killed in that attack.
We've smashed Al Qaeda and the Taliban who were protecting them. Some would say Afghanistan. They started. We kicked their teeth in. Time to go. This whole nationbuilding thing in a place that has never been a nation is misplaced. If Alqaeda re-appears, nuke them, otherwise let Afghanistan rule itself in whatever form the Afghanis choose to. If they permit they psycho taliban to regain power then they deserve what they get.

Translation: We didn't go there to be cops and social workers. We went there to kill a whole lot of people. Now that we've done that time to get out of that bad neighborhood.
But again, thats one opinion. There are many.

We more or less agree actually. Goin in in 2001 to beat up the Taliban was acceptalble, its trying to stay that doesnt work. Afghanistan swallowed up the Soviet army, something alot closer larger and meaner than anything we have got simply because when the Kremlin pulls their gloves off they really do come off. they still lost. You cant win a war against a religion, you can only skew the body count while staying in combat. its a vast game of whack-a-mole the arms will get tired long before the critters stop emerging.
Though nukes are not the answer.

Cane wrote:

Redbeard wrote:

Cane wrote:
No one in history was able to defeat Japan either

No one?

Whoops meant in the war sense. Battles =/= war. If we're talking about battles than America and even the Soviet Union won a few of those against Afghan terrorists.

That battle was part of an undeclared war resulting in a neutrality pact where both empires respected specific territories and borders.

Vietnam was an undeclared war. I guess it stays that way so that the US can keep claiming they've never lost a war. Japan invaded mainland Russia with an army. The Russians destroyed that army. Then they negotiated a peace. Just because the initial invasion was undeclared doesn't mean that the Japanese were any less soundly defeated, or that the invasion of a sovereign nation's territory with an army is anything less than a war. It may not have been on the same scale as some other wars, but it's still an invasion.

gorgon wrote:
Regarding this recession and the Great Depression, there's absolutely no comparison. And anyone suggesting this needs a history lesson and a better grasp of economic data. It's tremendously insulting to those who lived through the Great Depression to even suggest such a thing.

First of all, there have been significant changes in how data is counted, especially in regard to unemployment. I've read several reports that say that if we counted the unemployed using the same method that they used during 1930's, we'd have higher unemployment than we did then. The new unemployment figures throw out claims over a certain age, as they assume (wrongly, in most cases) that the people aren't looking for work anymore. While stocks may not have fallen as far and fewer banks may have failed (due to better safeguards on both), the impact on many families is greater in today's recession than it was during the great depression. The number of families living beneath the poverty line is comparable, and there are tent cities springing up among the newly-homeless that are similar to the 'Hoovervilles' of the Great Depression.

Secondly, if you can find me someone who lived through the Great Depression who is posting on Dakka, I'll be happy to apologize to them. Otherwise, I don't think anyone here is offended or insulted at the comparison. Feigning insult on behalf of people who aren't present is stupid. Maybe it's not as bad, but to say there is no comparison is ignorant and tremendously insulting to the very real people who are jobless and homeless currently (some of whom are on dakka, and can read this). There are clearly similarities between the two, comparison is possible.

Being in the military and having fought in Iraq twice I know for a fact the 30k troop numbers is an outright lie. When talking about troop numbers and strength they only include the infantry based units. This makes it more palatable to the people. They conviently forget the cooks, bakers and candle stick makers because for every one infantrymen it takes roughly (service dependant) 5 support personnel to make him combat effective. These support personnel range from aircraft mechanics, truck drivers, APC crews ect ect. These personnel will fill combat roles. Some of the trainers they speak of come from support units (in the Marines any ways) because they have the personal to give up without taking away from their combat effectiveness. It will not be 30k it will be more alone the lines of 150k and no one will notice until we are kicking the crap out of anything dumb enough to shoot at us. Same thing happened in Iraq and all the commentators scratched their heads trying to figure out have an additional 100k troops were sent over. Congress didn’t even figure it out until late 2006 in Iraq. It is a bait and switch that has worked for the past 8 years and will continue.

Redbeard wrote:
No one ever claimed there was a fallacy here. I said there's a hole, not a fallacy. There is. If you can't see it, I can't make it any more obvious.

They're the same thing. If you can't see that, either your understanding of the word logic, or the word fallacy is incomplete.

Redbeard wrote:
Claiming that revising deadlines isn't the same as being open-ended, well, that's a fallacy. If you set a deadline and continually push it back, that is open-ended.

And if you set a deadline, and then adhere to it, then its not. Open-ended is a phrase which means "without end". Technically, nothing is open-ended as all things eventually end. So it doesn't make any sense to use the phrase in future context. Otherwise I could tell you that you're completely wrong because Afghanistan has to end, even if it takes the destruction of the United States in order to bring that eventuality about.

No, the phrase open-ended in the context of a statement with respect to planning is meant to reference the lack of a desire to bring any given thing to a close. In this context the 'thing' can be considered to be either the 'war' or the deployment of large numbers of soldiers to Afghanistan. Obama did not state he would bring all soldiers home, he stated the process would begin. This, in concert with the claim of vitality, implies that our soldiers will remain in some capacity indefinitely.

From a strategic point of view its a decision designed to gauge the relative level of violence we might expect during a continued garrison, which thereby helps to determine the feasibility of such a garrison.