Afghanistan Wars: The Taliban Strikes Back.

It’d stop at Brabara Lee. She seemed to have gotten it right. I’ll certainly grant you that.

Oh shit. That was supposed to be directed at miccrobet.

Apologies

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Damn it. Forgot to divide by $100/bill.

For posterity, Google says a single $100 bill weighs 1g, in agreement with what I measure on my +/- 0.1 g scale for a $5 bill (too poor for 100s). So

$169e6(1 g/$100)(1 kg/1000 g)(2.2 lb/kg)=3718 lb, or 21 Americans at 181 lb apiece.

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lol at “for now”, why exactly is that in the headline?

I’ve been kind of surprised, honestly, at how universal the media backlash has been.

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So did Donald Trump (groundbreaking direct negotiations with the Taliban with the aim of ending the war) and Joe Biden (actually ended the fucken war). Give all three the Nobel Peace Prize, each did more than Barack Hussein Obama, who actually won the dumb thing but didn’t do a fucking thing to end the actual wars his country was fighting.

I was just saying that blaming the Afghanis for anything is nuts. They’re not even a real country, they’ve just been getting serially invaded for forty fucken years.

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lol I was all I’m not sure what the hell we’re talking about but Ima gonna fire up the Rapid Response Team here!

It’s less bad than that for Asraf Ghani. He didn’t have to keep that much personally, but he’d probably have been dead already if he weren’t grifting.

Wars are good for the media. Think of all the incredibly easy stories they get out of it.

https://twitter.com/david_j_roth/status/1428843573437419524?s=21

It’s not just Facebook-addicted MAGA losers tuning out the media. Everyone is tuning out the media.

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Ehhh, I don’t know that I buy any of these pat justifications about incentives, and more specifically I don’t think Afghanistan was acting as a source of stories. Nobody cared. The WaPo ran a bombshell investigative report and got crickets. I think it’s more that the same ideological Overton window that means that you get Douthat and Stephens in the NYT rather than writers actually representative of the GOP also results in a universal bias to support of American empire.

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Remember the surge? Lol Obama, that guy’s presidency is looking worse by the day. Biden is easily outperforming him.

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Right but it’s a microcosm for the whole occupation. It wasn’t a real police force, it wasn’t a real army, it wasn’t a real bureaucracy, it was just dudes being paid off exorbitantly the whole time. Once the spigot is turned off the whole thing falls apart. At least in Afghanistan the grifters have the chance of being summarily executed, here in America the much richer grifters are all looking at what second and third boats they want to buy.

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For sure, but Afghanistan passed being a good story a long time ago. Pulling out is a bit of a story. There’s some giant megacorp being pro-MIC here, but mostly it’s just that this is the Acela Corridor “Liberal” take.

Indeed, but that’s kind of the point. The media gets easy layup coverage by cheerleading forever wars. There’s no shortage of people for them to find where they can just transcribe pro war rhetoric and call it a story.

I think it’s as simple as all their “sources” being former generals getting paid all the money by defense contractors. I’ve been saying it forever, they are, above all extremely and astonishingly lazy.

Raytheon is a publicly traded company. You’re the grifter.

Plus, every foreign policy “expert” brought on the news for the last 2 decades has spent their time justifying these wars. I wouldn’t be surprised if that brainwashed the media figures themselves.

We’re gonna see periodic articles about Afghan human right violations to try to convince Americans that pulling out was a bad idea for a long time.

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It’s just as easy to stroll over to Columbia and get some professor of International Affairs. If it were just laziness they could do that. Be dangerous though, they might get some commies on live TV.

Forty years ago journalists’ parents were plumbers who reflexively hated politicians and the establishment, now they all went to ivy league schools and want to obsequiously suck up to their establishment peers.

I totally agree, but this invites the question of why this is the case, and I’m not sure I have a good answer to that.