as god is my witness i will never click on a bare link again, i would rather step on a lego

 Beagles' forebears may have come in ships but to the anti immigration folk of the day they were swarming in like locusts.  Of course there were no immigration laws back then, but fifty years later they would not have allowed those ships of human vermin to dock on our shores at all, and there would not have been a Beagles at all.  As to his worries about the country being overpopulated, I have to ask when is the last time he left the swamp to take a look at the USA?

That link led nowhere, but it doesn't matter, because I have already read about it in my regular news feed.  Apparently Beagles thinks that things that are common knowledge are hidden truths that he has uncovered through internet sleuthing.  And he can't be bothered to insert the link into the proper form so that it can be clicked on instead of copying and pasting it into that whatchamacallit, only to find out, by the way, that it doesn't work.  And then he doesn't do as I do, accompanying all my links with an explanation and what my opinion of it is, but just shoves it in like a finger going into the reader's nose.  And DeSantis, this is the guy who has willingly let tens of thousands of the people of his state die in the (futile) hope that Trump will allow him to run for president.

But Beagles is dead on with this one.

The only reason some of them helped the Americans was the Americans were paying better than whoever was in second place at the moment.  

This has been the problem with all our experiments in nation building since Vietnam.  We go in there because there is some popular movement we want to stop, and at first we think we'll just kill the leaders of the popular movement and that will put a stop to that, but then it turns out that the people really like the movement, so then we decide that we should win their hearts and minds, but we never put much effort into that.  It's much easier to just pay some warlord who says he is on our side.  

We think we can win their hearts and minds by paying them money and standing over them with guns, and that works well enough but we just don't have enough people to stand over everyone.

And then there is the issue of the women.  As Americans of the current day we abhor the way they treat them.  They really should be able to get an education and go outside without a burka.  And we pointed out that we made some moves in that direction, but just in the cities, not in the countryside, where the woman probably would like to go to school and go outside without being in a burlap sack, but that is never going to happen, and unpleasant as the Taliban are, at least there isn't that everyday violence.