LOLed

Here's the pic (for users that don't click links)

The leftist calculus on the afghan pullout and aftermath has been quite stunning. all at once it was great, and also the women trapped there who were fighting islamic norms are heroes, and also women under the thumb of islamic norms are consenting to it so it's ok, and the taliban is only so bad because of US imperialism, and also the taliban are oppressive rapists. its situations like this that cognitive dissonance was invented for.

It shows the world to be every bit as complex and multifaceted as we pretended it wasn't in the aftermath of 9/11. A lot of women were being oppressed by the Taliban, others took conservative values to heart. The Taliban were fractious goatherders with little centralization, but they did have some shared islamist laws they imposed nationwide. We played world police to avenge a terrorist attack, then retroactively tried to define our purpose as liberating women, then abandoned them and left them worse off than we started. That's a parallel to conflicts like Ukraine. We could hold legitimate well intentioned ideals beyond just imperalism or power grabs, but we should be able to predict the self-defeating nature of our intervention both to our geopolitical self-interest as well as the interests of the people we're getting killed. Its not about 'saving the women of afghanistan', its about the cynical calculation of 'can you save the women of afghanistan, and do you want to'

i'd bet we could have taken a secret census of all afghan women and airlifted all 127 of them that wanted out of conservative islamic culture then just bounced. from all ive read the resistance to that particular brand of sharia is so niche it borders on non-existent. no shocker, besides smoking opium it's about the only glue holding the entire fractious nation together. and if you're raised from birth in that culture with almost zero outside influence you wouldnt even apply right/wrong to it any more than we apply right/wrong to the existence of tap water. but hey soldiers guarding opium fields while the islamists burn their way through the villages, nothing to see here.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing (nor agreeing) with the rest of your post, but how exactly are women in Afghanistan worse off today than they were from 96 through 01?

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jul 3 2024 03:34pm

Sorry, I don't accept. I guess I'm lucky that I didn't read it before the debate. (Handcuffs you can send half his donation to me, tyvm)

My 1:1 odds no longer make sense, as if Biden is the nominee he's almost guaranteed to lose.

can't blame you there

Well the ones that didn't get killed during the war probably aren't too much worse off I guess. Though afghanistan got hobbled compared to the rest of the world's development in the same span, I mean Cambodia went from being a country of child slave labor to 7.2% growth, massive reduction in poverty and phnom penh becoming a true metropolis.



My challenge is still on the table, 1000 on the brain worm dog-eater

Maybe Trump should take advantage, too.

He can ask AI to write what he talks about, instead of goingon and on about EV boats, sharks, and washing machines, lol.