nnt's brane moving along the same channel (possibly in the opposite direction):
The gym of the Presidential Palace in Kabul.Not a single Taliban tried to deadlift. One of them pressed ~50 lbs. Tells you something about the strength of the other side. https://t.co/atIZVWBlMb— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) August 16, 2021
― mark s, Tuesday, 17 August 2021 11:10 (two years ago) link
like you need to be ripped and be able to bench 90 with your dick to fire an automatic weapon!
― calzino, Tuesday, 17 August 2021 11:20 (two years ago) link
I was watching Hearts and Minds the other night, lots of the conscripted US soldiers looked average build and not particularly ripped, it didn't prevent them from becoming genocidal killing machines.
― calzino, Tuesday, 17 August 2021 11:28 (two years ago) link
Interesting thread on Sharia law
A thread about the Taliban & sharia law. Everyone knows the Taliban run a brutal and oppressive legal system. But there are different ways a legal system can be bad and understanding how the Taliban's is bad, and how it isn't, is crucial for understanding their enduring appeal 1/— James E. Baldwin (@james_e_baldwin) August 16, 2021
― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 17 August 2021 11:46 (two years ago) link
Massively weird to lie about it.
đŚ[Notice anything about this picture of people escaping in a US plane? No women...odd...? https://t.co/VfgbSTHHKEđ¸â Polly Toynbee (@pollytoynbee) August 17, 2021đ¸]đŚ
― đ đđ˘đ¨ (caek), Tuesday, 17 August 2021 14:54 (two years ago) link
i think there's a fair chance the 2018 photo is the one she was was actually responding to and no one picked it up till too late (opinion writers aren't fact-checked particularly closely)
― mark s, Tuesday, 17 August 2021 15:10 (two years ago) link
Bidenâs speech was bad. Itâs not the Afghansâ fault that the occupation was a giant grift for military contractors. Itâs stupid to think we could help them build a competent administrative state while engaging in corrupt practices ourselves. Passing the blame unto them is not just hypocritical but evil.
Evil too is the impulse to demonize the refugees. The US needs to accept every Afghan who wants to come over. It is our fault that the Taliban is not only back in charge, but more powerful than ever.
― treeship., Tuesday, 17 August 2021 15:22 (two years ago) link
Worth reading: especially note Fairâs point that 80-90% of US investment in Afghanistan ended up back in US economy, siphoned by contractors https://t.co/vt8ulq3wTU— James Millward çąłčŻĺĽ (@JimMillward) August 17, 2021
― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 17 August 2021 16:27 (two years ago) link
gdi: https://www.reuters.com/article/afghanistan-tech-conflict/afghans-scramble-to-delete-digital-history-evade-biometrics-idUSL8N2PO1FH
― rob, Tuesday, 17 August 2021 17:02 (two years ago) link
â treeship., Tuesday, August 17, 2021 11:22 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink
US, Canada and Europe should welcome all refugees of course. But the Talibans are back because the Talibans are back, they had most of the country under their thumb before 9/11, they would be in power today if the US had never intervened, today they are hundreds of thousand of them, they regrouped, found weaponry and allies and have a much better understanding of Afghani culture than the Americans ever tried to have. It would be good to see some movements and their origins not as residual failures of American foreign policy but like as a real human active force that have their own reasons to oppose imperalism and impose their views of society and politics at home, they did pretty much the same to the Soviet Union.
― Van Horn Street, Tuesday, 17 August 2021 20:35 (two years ago) link
those pesky talibans
[
real human active force
this alone is proof you have no idea what you're talking about
― Linda and Jodie Rocco (map), Tuesday, 17 August 2021 20:47 (two years ago) link
Well explain why then.
― Van Horn Street, Tuesday, 17 August 2021 20:53 (two years ago) link
Heather Cox Richardson from today: "It strikes me that some of the same people currently expressing concern over the fate of Afghanistanâs women and girls work quite happily with Saudi Arabia, which has its own repressive government, and have voted against reauthorizing our own Violence Against Women Act. Some of the same people worrying about the slowness of our evacuation of our Afghan allies voted just last month against providing more visas for them, and others seemed to worry very little about our utter abandonment of our Kurdish allies when we withdrew from northern Syria in 2019. And those worrying about democracy in Afghanistan seem to be largely unconcerned about protecting voting rights here at home.Most notably to me, some of the same people who are now focusing on keeping troops in Afghanistan to protect Americans seem uninterested in stopping the spread of a disease that has already killed more than 620,000 of us and that is, once again, raging."
― sleeve, Tuesday, 17 August 2021 21:05 (two years ago) link
<distantly, from the top of a huge mountain of skulls> âWell, perhaps now you see that inaction has consequences too.'— Elvis BuĂąuelo (@Mr_Considerate) August 16, 2021
― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 17 August 2021 22:48 (two years ago) link
"real human active force"
Australian military in Afghanistan, 2007 pic.twitter.com/iUvhlOQvSV— . (@ImReadinHere) August 17, 2021
― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 17 August 2021 23:01 (two years ago) link
âNation buildingâ in afghanistan was not only a mistake but a farce. There was so much corruption on the US side that we cannot possibly say we made a good faith effort to leave them with a competent military and government.
Stillâthere is a weird pleasure some seem to be getting from americaâs humiliation that is grotesque to me. It is the afghans who suffered under the US occupation and it is the afghans who will now suffer under the taliban.
― treeship., Tuesday, 17 August 2021 23:02 (two years ago) link
My outrage overall though is with Bidenâs framing of the issue. âThe afghans werenât willing to fight.â Get the fuck out of here.
― treeship., Tuesday, 17 August 2021 23:03 (two years ago) link
"there is a weird pleasure some seem to be getting from americaâs humiliation that is grotesque to me"
it's called being the rest of the world, fule!
― calzino, Tuesday, 17 August 2021 23:05 (two years ago) link
America can shrug this off though. Afghans canât. Especially Afghan women and girls.
― treeship., Tuesday, 17 August 2021 23:07 (two years ago) link
typical lib, can't even be honest that what you really care about is the decline of your rotten empire.
― calzino, Tuesday, 17 August 2021 23:12 (two years ago) link
sorry, but why it is "grotesque" to you that people despise America?
― calzino, Tuesday, 17 August 2021 23:15 (two years ago) link
Youâre mixing me up with someone else.
― treeship., Tuesday, 17 August 2021 23:16 (two years ago) link
"Stillâthere is a weird pleasure some seem to be getting from americaâs humiliation that is grotesque to me."
I've not seen much knee jerk anti-US stuff around actually.
― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 17 August 2021 23:17 (two years ago) link
I listened to the most recent chapo and they seemed kinda giddy idk
― treeship., Tuesday, 17 August 2021 23:20 (two years ago) link
yes but it is still possible to feel happy that American power seems to have taken a hit (even though it is probably quite an illusionary hit they have been quite willing to take) without coming out for the Taliban or not giving a flying fuck about summary executions etc
― calzino, Tuesday, 17 August 2021 23:24 (two years ago) link
Sure.
Itâs more the Biden position I hate though. The idea that this is the failure of Afghanistan, despite the USâs best intentions.
― treeship., Tuesday, 17 August 2021 23:26 (two years ago) link
he's a near senile fuckwit, but what he said was quite clearly stated. It was addressed to his domestic audience more than the big world stage I think.
― calzino, Tuesday, 17 August 2021 23:45 (two years ago) link
I'd say explaining to a domestic audience afraid of nuance that, in his mind, our policy for 20 years is almost as much to blame as Afghan perfidy counts as maturity.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 17 August 2021 23:53 (two years ago) link
Blaming the Afghans + terrible domestic advice is an example of maturity, in other words, and the Beltway press doesn't give a shit anyway.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 17 August 2021 23:54 (two years ago) link
He didnât say that though
― treeship., Tuesday, 17 August 2021 23:54 (two years ago) link
He said something like âwe canât fight for a country that is unwilling to fight for itself.â
― treeship., Tuesday, 17 August 2021 23:55 (two years ago) link
"Afghan perfidy" covers his blinkered state of affairs.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 18 August 2021 00:00 (two years ago) link
I get the POTUS will never say 'we dropped the ball' and anyone who believes he would or even should is living in cloud cuckoo land. However, you can't occupy a nation already known for vast corruption, then enable even more corruption and blame the citizens or political leadership for being corrupted. Mentioning that he met the political leaders a month ago and asked them to clean up their mess is beyond the pale.
― Van Horn Street, Wednesday, 18 August 2021 00:46 (two years ago) link
Very crucial point: USA didn't waste trillions in Afghanistan on nation building. It wasted trillions on money that mostly enriched American contractors. https://t.co/D0z7tVqd4t— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) August 17, 2021
The US did not merely enable corruption. Our presence there was a pretense for massive profiteering on the part of defense contractors.
― treeship., Wednesday, 18 August 2021 00:54 (two years ago) link
We were not even seriously trying to set the Afghans up for success. It was a massive scam.
― treeship., Wednesday, 18 August 2021 00:55 (two years ago) link
i think you have the US mistaken for one of those nice countries like NZ or Canada
― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Wednesday, 18 August 2021 00:59 (two years ago) link
New: Afghan ambassador in Tajikistan says President Ashraf Ghani escaped with $169m worth of cash in bags before Kabul fell to the Taliban, BBC reports.— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) August 18, 2021
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 18 August 2021 13:39 (two years ago) link
how many bags do you think he'd need? enough to contain all the cash but not enough for people to notice
― nashwan, Wednesday, 18 August 2021 14:22 (two years ago) link
https://www.commoncentsmom.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/100-million.jpg
100-million.jpg
― peace, man, Wednesday, 18 August 2021 14:26 (two years ago) link
good morning!
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 18 August 2021 14:27 (two years ago) link
Four cars full and too much to fit in a helicopter, so they had to leave a couple of million on the tarmac at the airport, if you believe the reports.
xp
― Scampo di tutti i Scampi (ShariVari), Wednesday, 18 August 2021 14:29 (two years ago) link
"Anything to declare?""Just my two suitcases and these, uh, 40 bags of dry cat food. It's the only kind my cat will eat!"
― Jaime Pressly and America (f. hazel), Wednesday, 18 August 2021 14:33 (two years ago) link
Do we know for sure he wasn't just cosplaying as Mr. Monopoly?
― Halfway there but for you, Wednesday, 18 August 2021 14:40 (two years ago) link
Profiles in courage!
― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 18 August 2021 15:16 (two years ago) link
Grotesque spectacle of people mocking the democratic puppet ruler of Afghanistan
― Tumbledown Duck (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 18 August 2021 15:28 (two years ago) link
We should have stayed another 5 years in Afghanistan, given president moneybags some more time to build a coalition. Perhaps he was preparing to bring those bags around to the provinces to give them to the farmers
― Karl Malone, Wednesday, 18 August 2021 15:44 (two years ago) link
âWeâd make condolence payments of around $1,000 to $2,000... people thought, âOkay, this is fine, we paid them outâ â but you killed their fucking family. How could they not hate you forever?âI talked to Afghan War vets. Co-pub with @dailyposter https://t.co/cY41o1mlE6— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) August 17, 2021
âI had to talk guys out of just shooting farmers because they thought it would be fun,â Kirell told me. âThey literally didnât care by that point.â
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 18 August 2021 15:49 (two years ago) link
TIL that the largest dollarbill denom = $100 which scotches my own plan to run to the airport with $169m in notes >:(
― mark s, Wednesday, 18 August 2021 16:15 (two years ago) link
guess i cd spend some of it on like 200 stout portage-minions
i thought we invented crypto so we didnt have to suffer the inconvenience of actual bags of actual money when doing illegal stuff
― nobody like my rap (One Eye Open), Wednesday, 18 August 2021 16:23 (two years ago) link