Share this page!

Ser Jeff Garzik Profile picture
Twitter logo
15 Aug, 73 tweets, 22 min read
America's (and Biden's) Saigon moment. 😣
🤔
To clarify, "Biden's" refers to the lack of course correction.
Previous administrations certainly contributed to the current situation, and my tweet was not ignoring those earlier factors.
🔥
#thread
Sharing despite skepticism.
Like Afghanistan itself, the various incentives at play in Pakistan are complex. TB+Pak, TB v Pak, Pak & US, Pak v India, India v China, India+US, the list goes on...
Partisan blame-shifting narrative machine is warming up. 😉
Trial balloon for GOP midterms.

Reminder: The US Congress balance of power sits on a razor-thin margin. Washington pols will see and react to all issues through this re-election lens.
All recent US administrations and political parties own this, as my 17-tweet-and-counting #thread has been capturing.
Indeed.
🔥
Short myth-busting #thread
23/
24/ distraction versus reality.
25/
26/
27/ history thread.

Taliban are not the same as the 1980s mujahideen.
28/ why was the collapse so rapid? Well, for the past 18 months...
29/ excellent #thread on the US effort to curtail opium production.
30/ Did the fall of Saigon hurt President Ford politically?
31/ Are US citizens calling their representatives about Afghanistan?
32/ "opposing view" is an exaggeration; nevertheless, include some useful data points.
33/ "What evacuation plan?"
34/ What role did WhatsApp play? prestonbyrne.com/2021/08/15/did…
35/ #thread of ways to support refugees through #charity.
36/ Fate of government monetary reserves (Afghanistan treasury)?
37/ Chinese state propaganda is using Afghanistan to lay the groundwork for Taiwan.
38/ Afghanistan's Central Bank governor tells his story.
39/ The growing consensus: claims of sticking to the agreement negotiated under Trump was blameshifting by team Biden. Boot argues that the Taliban had already broken the agreement.
(And even if not, humanitarianism would have argued for breaking it)
40/ another defense strategy analysis #thread on the Afghan withdrawal, blunders and likely outcomes.
41/ "We all lost Afghanistan" by a former US ambassador.
42/ Taibbi postmortem, on lack of US self-reflection.
43/ via @bariweiss, @Jacob__Siegel, HR McMaster and others on the "tragic but unavoidable" fall of Afghanistan.
43/ @tylercowen argues a hawkish approach would not have worked, either.
44/ Straight talk from Ian.
45/ New interim president of Taliban dominated government. Seems like a thankless position that both sides will make impossible demands of, at first blush.
46/ Walter R Mead examines the strategic fallout for the United States and the Biden administration in geopolitics.
47/ Ground security deteriorating predictably.
48/ @ggreenwald chronicles the rosy expectations communicated from the top over the years.
49/ #thread from former senior NATO official.
50/ #thread some of the conditions leading up to yesterday.
51/ Bremmer quick take: The most consequential foreign policy crisis for the US since the 1979 failed Iranian rescue under President Carter.
52/ Why not more women and children on that flight? Zeynep has a thought:
53/ A #thread cataloging the Biden administration's Afg assessments and predictions, contrasted with reality.
54/ Even Toyota seemed to know that the Taliban were about to take Kabul.
55/ Given the razor thin margin in Congress and upcoming midterms, I am surprised that Democrats are opening hearings. Good for them, standing on principle.
56/ The US military spent years gathering biometric data (iris scans, fingerprints) on Afghans. That’s now been seized by the Taliban.
57/ Argues that reverting to pre-9/11 terror training camp status is unlikely.
58/ A #thread on analogies between Afghanistan and Vietnam.

[Although my own thread begins with a Saigon reference, Iran 1979 is perhaps a better match.]

59/ "CIA’s Former Counterterrorism Chief for the Region: Afghanistan, Not An Intelligence Failure — Something Much Worse"
60/ massive #Afganistan #OSINT #thread 🧵
Just keep scrolling. Appears to be continually updated.
61/ Argued: The very idea of #Afganistan as a nation-state was utopian.

(Rejoinder: It is possible that the Taliban may succeed where the US failed.)

62/ #thread on the state of the #Afganistan Central Bank (DAB), by the DAB governor.
63/ IMF says "no" also.
64/ 🔥
65/ mujahideen va Taliban. An op-ed aimed at Western readers. Will events come full circle, with Western-friendly proxies funding and arming the mujahideen?
66/ US is preventing private evacuations?
67/ "What I learned eavesdropping on the Taliban"
68/ WSJ editorial board: "How Biden broke NATO"
69/ This is a major reason why the Afghan army melted away and the government fled. The US sent a clear signal, kicking the legs out from under the stool:
70/ "The fall of an American empire" Making the rounds.

Worth reading. The familiar counter thesis: America is shedding inefficiency and freeing up resources.
71/ in re over-confidence of the chattering class labelling "this is Biden's legacy"
72/ "By prioritizing security over anti-corruption, the United States got neither."

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Ser Jeff Garzik

Ser Jeff Garzik Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @jgarzik

Ser Jeff Garzik Profile picture
9 May
1/ Snowden notices part of what's wrong with #Bitcoin governance and development.
2/ As I've observed over a decade of #Linux development and another decade in #blockchain, crypto and infosec folks often hyper focus on security to the point where people are turned off from the product, or simply stop waiting for a promised future and move on.
3/ #Bitcoin's lodestone is that it's difficult to build on, and it's developers are focusing on features unlikely to have a visible impact on most existing or future holders. Fancy, well engineered plumbing which does not really change user outcomes.
Read 8 tweets
Ser Jeff Garzik Profile picture
18 Dec 20
1/ Excited - Soon to be opening the doors to the @VesperFi beta launch #DeFi #cryptocurrency #permissionless #ethereum #blockchain #PaymentFreedom #SaveTheDate medium.com/vesperfinance/…
2/ Beta testers will be able to test our first product - ETH, WBTC and USDC "Holding Pools"

Holding Pools are yield aggregating vaults, similar to other projects, with a focus on longevity, and a professional, simple, clean experience.

This is a familiar DeFi primitive.
3/ Holding Pools at Vesper are scored with liquidity quality scores internally, resulting in a "conservative" or "aggressive" summary label. Conservative yield sources, such as @compoundfinance, @AaveAave and @MakerDAO are "seasoned", with time-in-market, real-money tested.
Read 10 tweets
Ser Jeff Garzik Profile picture
8 Oct 20
1/ Yesterday: My L1 chain has better, faster tech than #Bitcoin or #Ethereum. It is not compatible with existing software or tooling, but will nevertheless overcome network effect and momentum to become the next Ethereum. Invest in my Ethereum killer.
2/ Today: My L2 rollup chain has better, faster tech than #Bitcoin or #Ethereum. It is not compatible with existing software or tooling, but will nevertheless overcome network effect and momentum to become... Invest in my...
3/ Investors routinely underestimate the value of iterative evolution - trial-and-error over time - sunk into software, tooling, auditing software libraries & the 1,000 other elements of a software ecosystem.

Smart competitors build on top of that, rather than starting from zero
Read 5 tweets
Ser Jeff Garzik Profile picture
6 Oct 20
1/ Supportive of this innovation and effort, and encourage people to participate.
2/ #Ethereum bot ecosystems often unintentionally evolve to single-bot-wins situations, where it is pointless & costly to run a bot that consistently comes in "2nd place"
3/ Bot 1 consistently wins liquidation auctions. It becomes unprofitable for others to play the game, resulting in a single player game. If the player (Bot 1) leaves or malfunctions, no other bots step up and take its place, due to incentives & deteriorated ecosystem.
Read 4 tweets
Ser Jeff Garzik Profile picture
21 Feb 19
Finally spent some time studying #Ethereum Merkle Patricia Tree github.com/ethereum/wiki/…
1. It is an elegant data structure for Eth, creating a cryptographically stable merkle root, no matter the data insertion order.
2. Oh boy, it really punishes your hard drive storage.
In my past life at Red Hat, I wrote the ATA (aka IDE) drivers for Linux, so I know a bit about data storage and hard drives.
Here is why Eth is so punishing on data storage, and why SSDs/NVMe are a field requirement for Eth:
Like Bitcoin, Eth has poor cache locality:
* Huge db, which means each Next Page is less likely to be in page/disk cache.
* Keys are hashes, which means each Next Query Key is uniformly random, and therefore equally unlikely to be “close” to any recent past query.
Read 6 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Like this author's thread?

Get emails when @jgarzik has new unrolls!

Check out other threads from @jgarzik!

Read all threads by @jgarzik

:(