HSBC: Too big to jail?

[Straha]

While I personally don't like the Iranian government either, anyone opposed to the US throwing its weight around should not take this stuff at face value.

It's one thing to dislike Iran for legitimate reasons and another thing to introduce an economic blockade "cause they bad". Or, more to the point, blocking drug cartels would not be even remotely similar to the economic blockade of Iran, Cuba, etc. Mexico's economy won't collapse due to that. In fact, these drug cartels mostly operate serving the more, uh, wealthy (if we can speak of them as wealthy) drug addicts in the industrialized North than in SA proper, right?

In a "poor downtrodden thirdworlder" paradigm, which I gladly embrace here, stopping the cartels would mean (1) less violence in Mexico (2) more decriminalized occupations for citizens of Mexico (3) less drugs for American junkies.

Now pardon me if I put American junkies very low on my sympathy list.

Or more to the point:
Afghanistan in the 1960s before both superpowers had a "me soldiers trample this with their boots" moment:
>snip images<
As for culture, just Google "Afghanistan women". I won't show the pictures but we all know what's there.

Narco-states are bad. That's proven by practice.

“Look, Afghanistan, I’m sorry to tell you, I’m old enough to remember, forty years ago, Afghanistan was arguably the most tolerant Middle East Muslim country, with a pro-Western technocratic king, with a very strong local communist party and so on. And then, we know what happened. Communist party tried to took power. They did. When they started to fail, Soviet Union intervened. Then Americans backed the Muslim fundamentalists. In other words, always bear in mind this: Afghanistan is not an old fundamentalist country that we should enlighten. Afghanistan was quite a nice, tolerant country. Its fundamentalization is precisely the result of being caught in the global politics. We, the global liberal system, generate fundamentalisms.” - Slavoj Zizek

[ryacko]

I thought rural Afghanistan was always centuries behind the times, but it was the cities that were liberal.

Also, based on Zizek's wikipedia article, it doesn't appear as if Zizek is an authority on Afghan history, sociology, or culture.

[Straha]

That second sentence needs to be memorialized for all time so that future generations can come and gaze at it in wonder and awe while children whisper to parents to ask how such a thought could come into being.