Support for sharia ≠ support for the Taliban! The *Islamic* Republic of Afghanistan had sharia, for that matter.
Patterns in pro-Taliban sentiment & "conservative"/Islamist sentiments, from high to low:
Regions: SW >> old Northern Alliance > Kabul > center
Ethnic: Pashtuns >> Uzbeks > Tajiks >> Hazara
Sex: Men > women
Age: ~equal
Income: High income > low income (but likely inflects at top)
Only the income patterns are a surprise, but congruent with @RichardHanania's observation that many Taliban are well educated.
ANA has been much maligned, and I'm sure much of it was well deserved. That said, at least as of 2019, only 11% of Afghans said they felt "a lot of fear" in encounters with ANA, versus 73% for the Taliban. (Not much lower than 83% for ISIS).
Perhaps Afghans are afraid to answer truthfully? Impossible to disprove, but I think there are many reasons to think it's not a big factor.
So why was Afghanistan overrun so quick?
Discussed. But in general, there are many cases of small highly committed groups imposing their will on unenthusiastic majorities. This is more of a risk in highly dysfunctional and less developed polities.
Why is it never a White man and a Black woman? 🤔 (rhetorical question) rt.com/russia/533560-…
Sushi chain Tanuki's Instagram team has been pushing Western Woke/LGBT and now #BLM subliminal messaging into Russia for a year now. unz.com/akarlin/woke-c…
Things become more powerful. Russian feminist points out Tanuki owner Alexander Orlov is a shitlord who says he doesn't hire fat people & makes sexist jokes ("Do I have to kneel because I'm black?" "No, because you're a woman").
Debates about white genocide miss the point. In reality, it will be a white counter-elite versus the existing one. It's not excluded that they could get very violent, at least in short-term. But over long-term, history suggests white supremacism will win.
In the geopolitical sphere, this could translate into a white neocon SJW like WASBAPPIN taking over the US and unleashing atomic genocide against "white supremacist" Russians. Since Russians are POC, this would ironically constitute a great victory for white world-supremacy.
Basically, both @clairlemon, @ConceptualJames, @a_centrism are all barking up the wrong true. It doesn't even matter what happens. Long-term, short of China simply sidelining it altogether, White Supremacism wins (SJWism, CRT, etc. being just a costly means of signaling it).
The long awaited five year update to the index of Comprehensive Military Power (CMP), my attempt to quantify military power in a way that's comparable across time and space, is here. unz.com/akarlin/cmp-20…
You can read the original 8,300 word post, complete with detailed methodology, here. unz.com/akarlin/top-10…
Basic observation then was that China & Russia each at ~1/3 of US military power, while second-tier Great Powers were, in turn, at about a third of China & Russia.
Since then, China has continued forging ahead, and now accounts for 57% of US CMP. Hypothetical Sino-Russian bloc is close to parity.
Interesting to ponder potential market cap of @urbit address spaces.
Facebook, world's dominant social network, is $800B. $800B/65,000 stars = $12M per star.
Currently $4k per star. Potential 3 OOM growth?
But some bold assumptions:
(1) Decentralization wins out in social media. (Plausible, if team can keep making it user friendly at rapid clip. Successful so far).
(2) urbit retains a lead *within* this space. (Plausible, thanks to first mover advantage & network effects).
(3) More importantly - most of Facebook's value is derived from advertising. This is antithetical to urbit, whose entire point is that it's decentralized, so people go to where there's less advertising & censorship.
Musk - SpaceX is trillionaire making company if it goes public. Amazon's potential seems maxed out - but who knows? BTC needs to rise just 4x for Satoshi to converge with Musk & Bezos now, I think it'll rise 10x+ by 2030. But could be some currently little known Chinese techie.
Main argument against Chinese trillionaire is that CPC really doesn't want to see emergence of such wealth concentrations & has aggressively pruned oligarchs that got too big for their breeches. Richest current Chinese billionaire is a bottled water tycoon... Says it all.
This year will see epochal #DeFi boom: BTC $100k, ETH $10k - ending in a bust (dotcom bubble).
Then a long winter, when hardy survivors can be picked up at fire sale prices.
And then, come the 2030s - just like software 20 years ago - crypto will "eat the world." #prediction
This is extremely specific and unlikely to happen in quite this way, but I do think that generally, this is what will actually happen. Crypto is replicating all the institutions and infrastructure of the modern economy. But this boom came just a bit too early to actualize rn.
Last major digital asset to "moon" will be "land". Don't know if urbit will dominate, but does have "first mover" advantage. Stars currently worth ~$5,000, might increase 100x within the decade. Window of opportunity for competitors is narrowing fast (Metcalfe's Law).