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The_Jaded_One comments on [Link] A rational response to the Paris attacks and ISIS - Less Wrong Discussion
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Maybe, though I strongly suspect that lack of "buildings" is not the main constraint on Afghanistan - more like lack of civil culture. To fix Afghanistan, you would have to replace the culture, which is not really a feasible option.
Yup, I was using "rebuilding" in the broader sense of socioeconomic/cultural infrastructure.
Yeah, very tough. Britain in roughly the year 600 AD is probably socioculturally comparable to Afghanistan today. It took us 1400 years of civil wars and bloodshed to get to where we are now.
Probably magical brain-altering nanobots for 90% of the population would be the only way to get there quickly - suddenly everyone wakes up one morning feeling that they are atheists or moderate Muslims and their primary loyalty is to their country and to humanity as a whole, rather than to the local warlord/sect, that they love freedom and democracy, etc. Maybe I'm being pessimistic.
On that time scale WW2 was yesterday. So tell me, where did it take you 1400 years to get to?
It took me a minute or two to figure out what you were trying to say. For anyone else who didn't get it first-read, I believe Lumifer's saying something like:
"World War II was 60 years ago. On a 1,400 year timescale, that's not getting somewhere, that's just a random blip of time where no gigantic wars happened; those blips have happened before. What do you mean 'to get to where we are now'?"
Now, to answer that, I think he means "to get to a society where fear of being killed or kidnapped (then killed) isn't a normal part of every day life, and women can wear whatever they want."
More specifically, if you are operating on the time scale of a millenium and a half and setting up the contemporary Western society as the one to emulate, that contemporary Western society includes, say, the entire XX century. So you're going to emulate attempts at genocide, concentration camps, massive slaughter of civilians through nukes and firebombings, etc.?
That's you normal hunter-gatherer tribe, Pharaonic Egypt, Ancient Rome -- pretty much any successful society.
Of course if you're treating "women can wear whatever they want" literally, it's not true for contemporary West as well. See the public obscenity laws.