It's been obvious for weeks that all of Afghanistan including Kabul is going to fall now that American troops are leaving, but there continues to be no urgency about evacuating Afghans marked for death to US territory in the rapidly deteriorating situation theguardian.com/world/2021/jul…
This is a replay of what happened in Vietnam in 1975. All the same pieces are there—lies about how long the government could hold out without government support, indifference to the fate of people who took our promises at face value, abhorrence at the idea of opening our borders
Even if you don't care about the moral case for letting a large number of Afghans evacuate to the US, do you think that foreigners are stupid and don't see the same pattern repeat from war to war? And then we have the audacity to complain we're not greeted as liberators anymore.
America would be immeasurably stronger with a couple hundred thousand new citizens of Afghan extraction. Every time the country took in refugees from an American war, it was to our benefit. But it would require both moral courage and quick action in the face of imminent collapse
Every year I grow more ashamed of my country, and my other country.
The message couldn't be clearer: we're too afraid to invite a bunch of Muslims who fought side by side with our armies for twenty years into our prosperous, pluralistic, multi-ethnic society of 350 million that never stops boasting about its diversity and immigrant origins.
New US motto: trillions for war, not a penny for consequences
For those interested in seeing more of the Afghanistan we're leaving behind, I can't recommend this YouTube travelogue from a pair of Polish travelers highly enough. I believe there are eight episodes so far, all subtitled in English

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More from @Pinboard

9 Jul
Poll finds public remains unaware of the Biden administration's achievements, possibly because there are none. Only the Covid relief handout at the start of the administration made it through Congress, everything else is just sweet, sweet promises. politico.com/news/2021/07/0…
A few weeks ago in Maine I asked an appliance store guy whether people were spending their "Biden bonus" buying stuff, since I saw a lot of "sold" tags. He got furious and told me "that's OUR money. Biden's just giving some of it back." Trump was better at taking credit for this
By my count, it's now Infrastructure Week #25 of the new administration. Just 19 Infrastructure Weeks to go if Biden wants to stick to his campaign promise.
Read 7 tweets
6 Jul
Every single takedown of the lab origins of covid seems to use this photo, which shows a level-four facility with full precautions in force. But a far more likely lab escape scenario is the non-bunny-suit area where live bats were kept. newrepublic.com/article/162689…
Bats being bats is a perfectly plausible explanation for where we got covid, but were they first brought to a Wuhan lab, or did they expose someone elsewhere who just happened to come to the one city in Asia with a world-class coronavirus laboratory?
The endless confusion over "natural origin" vs. "lab origin" is a false dichotomy, since all the sane scenarios involving the latter also imply the former. We really need more details and not more J-school probabilistic reasoning to get closer to an answer here.
Read 5 tweets
6 Jul
I'm looking forward to the rise of centrally administered anti-ransomware software, which corporations will install on every vulnerable client.
There's a nice long history here that information security people who know more than me can expand on. Software to prevent sensitive data being sent outside of the organization, for example, is one of the favorite targets of people trying to get such data.
The best computer security advice never goes out of date theonion.com/after-checking…
Read 4 tweets
6 Jul
Provoking China to waste enormous resources on a space station and giant military is a fantastic way to get them to burn money they might otherwise use to embarrass us with a green economy or higher standard of living. globaltimes.cn/page/202107/12…
I know that the giant military is supposed to be used to scare Taiwan, but the idea that after a 40 year hiatus the PLA is going to go from getting its ass kicked by Vietnam to pulling off Normandy II strikes me as a stretch.
(In fairness I also believe that the US Army would fail in an amphibious invasion of Taiwan)
Read 4 tweets
5 Jul
It's going to be fun when ransomware strikes a cryptocurrency. Some of the software this grift is built on is not at NASA avionics level of correctness, and there sure is a lot of money for the taking.
So-called "stablecoins" in particular (since they're backed with non-pretend assets) are just a progressive lottery for whoever can hack a cryptocurrency exchange or mining client fast enough.
The logical endpoint is to have smart ransomware contracts that live on yet another blockchain, to make it more difficult for authorities to shut down these attacks. And then metaransomware can attack that, recursively, until we reach full employment.
Read 5 tweets
2 Jul
"The U.S. has asked Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to take in about 9,000 Afghans who assisted with the American occupation." There are over 18,000 of these applicants, over 50,000 family members, and they deserve US green cards, not this weak shit. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Creating a large refugee group of the people who helped us most in Afghanistan, rather than simply welcoming them to America to our mutual benefit, shows the ineradicable xenophobia at the heart of all US policy in the Islamic world.
We know what happens when you let Syrians, Palestinians, Afghans, Yemenis, Somalis etc. become Americans. They build a new life, work their asses off, and help family back home like anyone else. Treating them like dangerous bacilli who must not enter US borders is disgraceful
Read 11 tweets

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