Politics & Stuff

[Weckerz 3,781]

Where are all the women and children? Genuine question

All footage from Kabul I've seen show hordes of men

[Fernando 6,455]

1 hour ago, Atomiswave said:

Bound to happen is one thing, lacking foresight is another

Well what do you expect when people are desperate for Trump out they vote for a dud. 

[Vesper 28,795]

2 hours ago, Fernando said:

Well what do you expect when people are desperate for Trump out they vote for a dud. 

A Taliban Leader who Trump got released from prison in 2018 appears set to become the new President of Afghanistan under Taliban rule.

Trump also helped free 5,000 Taliban fighters, many of whom are likely now helping take over Kabul.

Trump TAKES CREDIT for withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan

 

The Republicans Agreed With Leaving Afghanistan on Their own Website

Q-MAGA white nationalists/neo nazis, Taliban stanning

 

 

 

 

Trump’s New Big Lie: Afghanistan

Biden has handled the withdrawal very badly. That doesn’t mean Trump would have done better.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/08/afghanistan-withdrawal-trump-biden.html

Former President Donald Trump is telling lies about how he would have handled the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, opening a new avenue for Trump-dazed Republicans to attack President Joe Biden.

Trump issued the following statement on Thursday, amid the collapse of the Afghan army in the wake of Biden’s pullout:

Had our 2020 Presidential election not been rigged and if I were now president, the world would find that our withdrawal from Afghanistan would be a conditions-based withdrawal. I personally had discussions with top Taliban leaders whereby they understood what they are doing now would not have been acceptable. It would have been a much different and much more successful withdrawal, and the Taliban understood that much better than anyone.

This is false—a series of unmitigated lies—on every level. His opening reference to the “rigged” election is, of course, the Big Lie, but the other lies are pretty monstrous as well.

First, the “peace accord” that Trump’s emissaries signed with the Taliban in February 2020, in Doha, imposed only a few conditions—and the Taliban are violating none of them at the moment. The Taliban merely agreed not to allow any “individuals or groups, including al-Qaida, to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.” The accord did not bar the Taliban from fighting Afghan government troops or from capturing Afghan provinces on its own.

Second, Trump’s claim that he had “discussions with top Taliban leaders” is overstated. A few days after the signing of the accord, on the phone, through an interpreter, he had a discussion with a leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who was the Taliban’s delegate to the Doha talks. Afterward, Trump said he had a “very good” relationship with Baradar, lauded the Taliban for “killing terrorists…some very bad people,” and said of the war, “They’re looking to get this ended and we’re looking to get this ended.” A statement released by the White House said that Trump “emphasized the need to continue the reduction in violence” and “urged the Taliban to participate in intra-Afghan negotiations.” The statement said nothing about Barader’s reply, if any.

In other words, there is no evidence that a withdrawal under Trump would have been “much more successful” than it’s going under Biden. Trump’s swift withdrawal of a small contingent of peacekeeping troops from Syria in Oct. 2019, leaving Kurdish allies open to Turkish slaughter, suggests that Trump would have been no more discerning about protecting Afghans. (The Kurds had been instrumental in helping U.S. troops crush ISIS in northern Syria.)

The falsehoods notwithstanding, Trump’s statement will no doubt be parroted by congressional Republicans and conservative pundits in the coming weeks and months. When Biden first announced his withdrawal in April, his critics were nonplussed. Trump, after all, had long called for a pullout; in fact, he initially supported Biden’s decision. Even as the Taliban began routing Afghan security forces and taking over whole provinces earlier this summer, critics remained unsure of how to respond, especially since polls showed a vast majority of Americans agreed with Biden’s move.

Now, however, the critics have received the word from their leader-in-exile: withdrawal isn’t a bad thing, but withdrawal under Trump would have been “conditions-based”; it would have been “much more successful.” When things worsen in Afghanistan, as they almost certainly will, this will be their mantra for attacking Biden’s foreign policy—and for absolving themselves of complicity.

None of this is to deny that Biden has handled the situation badly. The latest evidence came on Thursday, when the Pentagon announced it would send 8,000 troops back to Afghanistan to facilitate the evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Kabul—5,000 from bases in the Middle East, 3,000 (an entire combat brigade) from Ft. Hood, Texas. If the withdrawal had been more carefully planned, the evacuation—or at least a substantial drawdown of personnel—would have taken place earlier this summer, before the last few thousand U.S. troops in the country were withdrawn.

When the withdrawal got underway, U.S. officials were still saying the Afghan security forces could resist the Taliban for another six to 12 months—plenty of time to plan for an orderly transition. It would be interesting to know which intelligence agencies predicted that the Afghan army—and, with it, the government—could hold out for so long. Retired officers I spoke with at the time doubted the Afghan army could last for even a few months without U.S. and NATO close-air support, logistics, intelligence, repair and maintenance crews, medevac and surgical units, and helicopter transport—a view that the Biden administration now accepts.

The 20-year war in Afghanistan has been one misbegotten adventure after another, from nearly the beginning. The initial missions—rooting out al-Qaida, ousting the Taliban from power, and killing or capturing Osama bin Laden, in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept.
11—were justified. The add-ons—establishing a central government (in a very decentralized country run by warlords), building a civil society, and fostering something like a Western-style democracy—were a pipe dream all along. The vision had a glimmer of hope and possibility early on, in 2003-04, when the U.S. commander, a creative three-star general named David Barno, set up small-scale counterinsurgency projects—recruiting volunteers from corporations and non-profits to train Afghan officials in the rudiments of governance and management, starting programs in economic aid and justice reform to win the hearts and minds of the people. But President George W. Bush scaled back resources, turned his gaze toward Iraq, and by the time attention drifted back to Afghanistan, the effort became all too militarized and all too huge. As money flowed in, corruption soared; the Kabul government never won the trust of the people; the Taliban moved in to fill the vacuums.

Biden, to his credit, recognized this all along when he was Barack Obama’s vice president. In the National Security Council’s debates of 2009-10, Biden was almost alone in opposing a massive troop surge or a campaign of nation building, arguing instead for a slight troop-increase to train and equip the Afghan army. Obama sided with the surge faction but, 18 months later, saw that Biden had been right. He backpedaled on the surge, abandoned the nation building, scaled back the troop levels to 5,800, and limited their missions to training and supporting the Afghan military while also countering terrorists along the Pakistani border.

Ten years later, entering the White House as president, Biden understandably retained a certain allergy to all matters Afghan. Eager to deal with more urgent issues, domestic and foreign, he sought to get out of the place altogether and to downplay the whole region—again, understandably. There has long been a strong case for leaving Afghanistan. Had Biden kept a small number of troops there, and had the next three or four presidents done so as well, not much would ever have improved. But probably not much would have worsened either. Meanwhile, no American troops have been killed there since February 2020.

Was it necessary to get out so swiftly, so completely, and so thoughtlessly? Biden will likely be haunted by those questions for some time. And now that Trump has made it a partisan issue, however mendaciously, the Republicans will be pressing the questions as hard as they can.

Edited August 16, 2021 by Vesper

[Vesper 28,795]

Taliban in bumper cars

🤖

 

[Atomiswave 6,072]

9 hours ago, Fernando said:

Well what do you expect when people are desperate for Trump out they vote for a dud. 

No mate they are all cunts, they all eat from the same hand ( same masters )

And how wonderful that the arsenal were all left behind so that taliban could have some weaponry to play with......not planned at all.

[Fulham Broadway 16,838]

Protesters demand wealthy MP pays up for family’s slave trade past | Slavery | The Guardian

[Fernando 6,455]

Horrific hatchet attack at Manhattan bank ATM caught on surveillance video; suspect in custody as victim remains hospitalized after bloody assault

 

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-see-it-video-hatchet-attack-20210818-kqrnf3okrrcnhe553yamvec3cy-story.html#nt=pf-double chain~top-version-2021~flex feature~curated~hatchet10p~KQRNF3OKRRCNHE553YAMVEC3CY~1~1~1~7~art yes

 

 

[Vesper 28,795]

Edited August 24, 2021 by Vesper

[Vesper 28,795]

This good “Christian” threatens to kill school board members, cops etc. Jesus saves, huh?

 

 

[cosmicway 1,323]

In my college days the Afghani girls and the Persian girls were the most beautiful among coeds.
The beauty queen was an Indian girl however, who went on to marry the son of a minister of the Wilson government.
Those folks all wanted western democracy and were against the Shah.
Khomeinism was unknown and so was talibanism. There was a lot of anti-Israeli feeling among Arab students but Khomeinism and jihad were unknown things. 
There was a strange character who was a fanatical islamist -the others told me- but that was an exception.
Yet somehow fanatical Islam dominated in the end.
Somewhere there is a hidden connection between antisemitism and jihad, so jihad wins.
The same happened with Nasser in the fifties. Eisenhower was going to finance the Aswan dam project but pulled out soon as Nasser declared war on Israel.
Nasser went on to occupy the Suez canal and the Americans stopped Eden who was trying to retake it. But what the Americans wanted was to prevent the escalation, 
they did not renew their support for Nasser.
The (blind) antisemitism made the muslims pro-soviet in the fifties-sixties, it makes them pro-jihad now.
 

Edited September 2, 2021 by cosmicway

[Vesper 28,795]

New Texas state flag

 

[cosmicway 1,323]

21 hours ago, Vesper said:

This good “Christian” threatens to kill school board members, cops etc. Jesus saves, huh?

 

 

We have many such in Greece but also the communist party !
Last week they were staging a rally and we could n't sleep.
The reds have a peculiar monotonous rhythm when they shout their slogans.
Goes like:

Bergamo - was - the Parmenion manoeuvres

referring to the annual military manoeuvre Parmenion obviously.

[Fernando 6,455]

Don't know where to put this but I'm shock with the prices in the US when it comes to Houses and Cars. 

Cousin where he lives in New Jersey told me that a year ago the average prices where he lives for house was like 285. Now it's almost 100k up. 

100k in one year? insane!

And cars here in NYC, dealers are marking up the prices by 10k. Was looking at a Kia telluride and they are charging for an sx value at 48k msrp 58k. 

It's insane the prices here in the US with Housing and Cars. 

I think in partly because Covid has created a low of supply and Americans have money to spend after one year of quarantine on top of the stimulus money. 

Insane.....

[Vesper 28,795]

Maybe You Missed It, but the Internet ‘Died’ Five Years Ago

A conspiracy theory spreading online says the whole internet is now fake. It’s ridiculous, but possibly not that ridiculous?

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-internet-theory-wrong-but-feels-true/619937/

If you search the phrase i hate texting on Twitter and scroll down, you will start to notice a pattern. An account with the handle @pixyIuvr and a glowing heart as a profile picture tweets, “i hate texting i just want to hold your hand,” receiving 16,000 likes. An account with the handle @f41rygf and a pink orb as a profile picture tweets, “i hate texting just come live with me,” receiving nearly 33,000 likes. An account with the handle @itspureluv and a pink orb as a profile picture tweets, “i hate texting i just wanna kiss u,” receiving more than 48,000 likes.

There are slight changes to the verb choice and girlish username and color scheme, but the idea is the same each time: I’m a person with a crush in the age of smartphones, and isn’t that relatable? Yes, it sure is! But some people on Twitter have wondered whether these are really, truly, just people with crushes in the age of smartphones saying something relatable. They’ve pointed at them as possible evidence validating a wild idea called “dead-internet theory.”

Let me explain. Dead-internet theory suggests that the internet has been almost entirely taken over by artificial intelligence. Like lots of other online conspiracy theories, the audience for this one is growing because of discussion led by a mix of true believers, sarcastic trolls, and idly curious lovers of chitchat. One might, for example, point to @_capr1corn, a Twitter account with what looks like a blue orb with a pink spot in the middle as a profile picture. In the spring, the account tweeted “i hate texting come over and cuddle me,” and then “i hate texting i just wanna hug you,” and then “i hate texting just come live with me,” and then “i hate texting i just wanna kiss u,” which got 1,300 likes but didn’t perform as well as it did for @itspureluv. But unlike lots of other online conspiracy theories, this one has a morsel of truth to it. Person or bot: Does it really matter?

Read: The internet is mostly bots

Dead-internet theory. It’s terrifying, but I love it. I read about it on Agora Road’s Macintosh Cafe, an online forum with a pixelated-Margaritaville vibe and the self-awarded honor “Best Kept Secret of the Internet!” Right now, the background is a repeated image of palm trees, a hot-pink sunset, and some kind of liquor pouring into a rocks glass. The site is largely for discussing lo-fi hip-hop, which I don’t listen to, but it is also for discussing conspiracy theories, which I do.

In January, I stumbled across a new thread there titled “Dead Internet Theory: Most of the Internet is Fake,” shared by a user named IlluminatiPirate. Over the next few months, this would become the your-text for those interested in the theory. The post is very long, and some of it is too confusing to bother with; the author claims to have pieced together the theory from ideas shared by anonymous users of 4chan’s paranormal section and another forum called Wizardchan, an online community premised on earning wisdom and magic through celibacy. (In an email, IlluminatiPirate, who is an operations supervisor for a logistics company in California, told me that he “truly believes” in the theory. I agreed not to identify him by name because he said he fears harassment.)

Peppered with casually offensive language, the post suggests that the internet died in 2016 or early 2017, and that now it is “empty and devoid of people,” as well as “entirely sterile.” Much of the “supposedly human-produced content” you see online was actually created using AI, IlluminatiPirate claims, and was propagated by bots, possibly aided by a group of “influencers” on the payroll of various corporations that are in cahoots with the government. The conspiring group’s intention is, of course, to control our thoughts and get us to purchase stuff.

As evidence, IlluminatiPirate offers, “I’ve seen the same threads, the same pics, and the same replies reposted over and over across the years.” He argues that all modern entertainment is generated and recommended by an algorithm; gestures at the existence of deepfakes, which suggest that anything at all may be an illusion; and links to a New York story from 2018 titled “How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.” “I think it’s entirely obvious what I’m subtly suggesting here given this setup,” the post continues. “The U.S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population.” So far, the original post has been viewed more than 73,000 times.

Read: Artificial intelligence is misreading human emotion

Obviously, the internet is not a government psyop, even though the Department of Defense had a role in its invention. But if it were, the most compelling evidence to me is the dead-internet theory’s observation that the same news items about unusual moon-related events seem to repeat year after year. I swear I’ve been saying this for years. What is a super flower blood moon? What is a pink supermoon? A quick search of headlines from just this month brings up: “There’s Something Special About This Weekend’s Moon,” “Don’t Miss: Rare, Seasonal ‘Blue Moon’ Rises Tonight,” and “Why This Weekend’s Blue Moon Is Extra Rare.” I just don’t understand why everyone is so invested in making me look at the moon all the time? Leave me alone about the moon!

Dead-internet theory is a niche idea because it’s patently ridiculous, but it has been spreading. Caroline Busta, the Berlin-based founder of the media platform New Models, recently referenced it in her contribution to an online group show organized by the KW Institute for Contemporary Art. “Of course a lot of that post is paranoid fantasy,” she told me. But the “overarching idea” seems right to her. The theory has become fodder for dramatic YouTube explainers, including one that summarizes the original post in Spanish and has been viewed nearly 260,000 times. Speculation about the theory’s validity has started appearing in the widely read Hacker News forum and among fans of the massively popular YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips. In a Reddit forum about the paranormal, the theory is discussed as a possible explanation for why threads about UFOs seem to be “hijacked” by bots so often.

The theory’s spread hasn’t been entirely organic. IlluminatiPirate has posted a link to his manifesto in several Reddit forums that discuss conspiracy theories, including the Joe Rogan subreddit, which has 709,000 subscribers. In the r/JoeRogan comments, users argue sarcastically—or sincerely?—about who among them is a bot. “I’m absolutely the type of loser who would get swindled into living among bots and never realize it,” a member of the 4chan-adjacent Something Awful forum commented when the theory was shared there in February. “Seems like something a bot would post,” someone replied. Even the playful arguments about how everything is the same are the same.

Read: Why is Joe Rogan so popular?

That particular conversation continued down the bleakest path imaginable, to the point of this comment: “If I was real I’m pretty sure I’d be out there living each day to the fullest and experiencing everything I possibly could with every given moment of the relatively infinitesimal amount of time I’ll exist for instead of posting on the internet about nonsense.”

Anyway … dead-internet theory is pretty far out-there. But unlike the internet’s many other conspiracy theorists, who are boring or really gullible or motivated by odd politics, the dead-internet people kind of have a point. In the New York story that IlluminatiPirate invokes, the writer Max Read plays with paranoia. “Everything that once seemed definitively and unquestionably real now seems slightly fake,” he writes. But he makes a solid argument: He notes that a majority of web traffic probably comes from bots, and that YouTube, for a time, had such high bot traffic that some employees feared “the Inversion”—the point when its systems would start to see bots as authentic and humans as inauthentic. He also points out that even engagement metrics on sites as big and powerful as Facebook have been grossly inflated or easily gamed, and that human presence can be mimicked with click farms or cheap bots.

Some of this may be improving now, for better or for worse. Social-media companies have gotten a lot better at preventing the purchase of fake views and fake likes, while some bot farmers have, in response, become all the more sophisticated. Major platforms still play whack-a-mole with inauthentic activity, so the average internet user has no way of knowing how much of what they see is “real.”

But more than that, the theory feels true: Most weeks, Twitter is taken over by an argument about how best to practice personal hygiene, or which cities have the worst food and air quality, which somehow devolves into allegations of classism and accusations of murder, which for whatever reason is actually not as offensive as classism anymore. A celebrity is sorry. A music video has broken the internet. A meme has gotten popular and then boring. “Bennifer Might Be Back On, and No One’s More Excited Than Twitter.” At this point, you could even say that the point of the theory is so obvious, it’s cliché—people talk about longing for the days of weird web design and personal sites and listservs all the time. Even Facebook employees say they miss the “old” internet. The big platforms do encourage their users to make the same conversations and arcs of feeling and cycles of outrage happen over and over, so much so that people may find themselves acting like bots, responding on impulse in predictable ways to things that were created, in all likelihood, to elicit that very response.

Thankfully, if all of this starts to bother you, you don’t have to rely on a wacky conspiracy theory for mental comfort. You can just look for evidence of life: The best proof I have that the internet isn’t dead is that I wandered onto some weird website and found an absurd rant about how the internet is so, so dead.

[Vesper 28,795]

[Vesper 28,795]

 

 

A lot of people may be confused about Texas and why the women don’t just use birth control, so I’d like to talk about my personal experience in this state to give some insight; first of all, Texas teaches abstinence only sex education. Purity culture reigns supreme.

long thread, continued here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1434557502272724995.html

Rest of thread:

The idea is that if you have sex as a female you are unclean and lose your worth in the eyes of male suitors, and god. Your dad may even take you to purity balls where you promise him, in a room full of other dads, not to have sex with any man until you’re married.
You may be thinking that this sounds like a period piece, some movie set in the 1500’s depicting how women should behave, until they are sold into marriage by their father. Honestly, this is very much a holdover from that era. Our religious indoctrination will also enforce this.

The high school/ middle school Bible study classes will be divided by sex, this is the first time our classes aren’t coed. The female classes are heavily reliant on the ideals of being sexually chaste. How birth control is basically for dirty women. Good girls don’t have sex.

Our middle school will have actors come on stage during assembly meetings to rap (yes literally rap) about not having sex and waiting for marriage because of god. The girls who have sex are depicted as worthless.

From almost every angle, our sexuality is demonized, our education, our religion, and our parents… the only people not demonizing our sexuality is boys, and older male creeps. They pressure us relentlessly. They aren’t educated on birth control, and they aren’t ashamed.

The coercion, begging, pressure, and eventual sexual assault are part of a purity culture female’s right of passage. TW: rape. My first boyfriend begged to just be able to touch it, and after days of begging and fighting him off of me I finally allowed him to.

He escalated the situation, soon he inside me with me crying, begging him to stop, until he completed inside of me, and apologized. I ran to the bathroom, and punched myself in the stomach, scared I was pregnant, and everyone would know I was unclean. I was 13.
I knew it was all my fault, I tempted him, I allowed him to touch me, I should have left, I should have fought harder, I should have dressed more conservatively. Based on my education, I internalized my own sexual assault. I clung to him after that. You’d think I’d leave, but no.

See I was taught that because I had sex, no other man would want me. David had to be my husband, David had to stay with me no matter what. Even after he raped me, repeatedly. Even after he cheated on me. Even after he got addicted to drugs.
Even after I found stories about grooming and raping minors on his computer. I thought I could fix him, I thought I could save him. I told his parents expecting them to help me save him, but they denied he had ever done anything wrong, and accused me of corrupting him.

Eventually, I ended up attempting suicide. In the hospital one of my friends visited me and showed me David’s online journal, where he chronicled everything he had done to me, and more importantly how funny it was to him.

The last line was “I don’t know why I can’t just let her go, it’s not because I love her, I guess it’s just because she’s so stupid she always comes back.”

I finally left him after that. I decided I’d rather be alone forever than stay with him.

I was released from the hospital and the next day sold his game systems to game stop, where I met a nice guy, who was interested in me. I finally realized I had been lied to, and that men will find you attractive, even if you have had sex.

It wasn’t until I was in my 20’s that I realized how much trauma purity culture had put me through. I put all of the blame on David, and myself, for years. The truth is that the system was never designed to stop girls from having sex…

It was to shame them and punish them when they did. The goal wasn’t to stop teenage pregnancy, the goal was to control, subjugate, and demonize us. The goal was to make us internalize misogyny and loathe ourselves.

How many school classes teach boys not to rape, not to beg, not to cause damage? None. How many classes taught us how to use birth control, and gave it away for free? None. How many parents helped us to accept safe sex and an alternative? None.

All of the pressure is on young, impressionable female children. They are brainwashed. They are submerged in a culture that breaks them down. And now, they will be forced to carry shame pregnancies to term. They will be forced to raise babies when they are babies themselves.

Innocence lost forever…

[Vesper 28,795]

Daily Express front cover backfires spectacularly

Talk about a self own!

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/daily-express-front-cover-backfires-spectacularly-289551/

The Daily Express was caught in two minds this morning after publishing an anti-immigrant story next to news of a ‘history’ victory for British tennis player Emma Raducanu, who was born in Canada to a Romanian father and a Chinese mother.

Late last night news broke that Priti Patel has sanctioned new tactics to redirect migrant boats in the Channel back to France amid crunch talks over crossings – much to the delight of the right ring rag.

According to reports, the home secretary has ordered officials to rewrite maritime laws to allow Border Force to turn boats around, forcing them to be dealt with by French authorities.

It comes following a G7 interior minister’s meeting on Wednesday, during which Ms Patel told her French counterpart that the British public “expect to see results” from French efforts to prevent ongoing migrant crossings.

Several newspapers reported that members of Border Force are being given special training to handle migrant boats, but would only deploy the “pushback” tactics when deemed practical and safe to do so.

The story took pride of place on the front cover of the Daily Express, next to the jubilant Emma Raducanu, who made US Open history with stunning quarter-final victory last night.

 

[nyikolajevics 2,576]

Ouch..