Our Culture of Lying

[Draggingtree]

TAKI’S MAGAZINE

Our Culture of Lying

Steve Sailer  August 18, 2021

“There is a great deal of a ruin in a nation,” replied Adam Smith to a friend who lamented that General Burgoyne’s defeat by the American rebels at 1777’s Battle of Saratoga had ruined Great Britain.

And the United States in the 21st century has seemed exceptionally impervious (so far) to being ruined by its multitrillion-dollar mistakes such as the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration’s push for increased minority homeownership, the various Covid botches, and the racial reckoning.

On the other hand, a decisive military defeat galvanizes the attention in a way that more subtle fiascos do not, such as how it took fifteen years for social scientists to even notice that the turn-of-the-century promotion of synthetic opioids as the cure for what ails the working class was lowering their life expectancy.

So, what lessons should we have learned from the Afghanistan micro-debacle of recent days and the macro-debacle of the past nineteen years?    

Still, the Biden administration could have managed to not botch things up quite so badly. In any sensible pullout plan, you would leave the fortified Bagram airfield last, not first. You shouldn’t have to depend on the good graces of the Taliban to get your people out of the (soon-to-be-renamed) Hamid Karzai civilian airport.