“the collapse of Kabul sends a clear message: liberal values lack the dramatic emotional appeal of faith-based cruelty. Liberalism is weak tea when up against men with rifles who operate on divine guidance. Liberalism is basically neighborliness and it lacks the satisfactions of ferocity.”
Category Archives: Quotable & Notes
Mass Murder Movement
Author Tim Wise explains why COVID anti-vaxxers aren’t a MAGA death cult… it’s a mass murder movement.
When you would tell them repeatedly that wearing a mask was less for the wearer than for others, they shrugged. If other folks are at risk, they should stay home and let the rest of us get back to the gym, the hairdresser, concerts, movies, and tailgate parties before the big game. […] Their freedom to do as they pleased was more important than other people’s lives.
Suicidal people don’t act or think that way. Homicidal people do.
If you refuse a vaccine when you have no valid health reason to do so (as almost no one does), thereby keeping the virus alive longer by increasing the risk of mutations, you are saying that other people’s lives don’t matter to you.
I cannot weep for someone who thought the “blood of Jesus” was all the vaccine they needed.
On a personal level, treating deniers like pariahs means banishing them, metaphorically, to the cornfield. It means cutting them out of our lives entirely: no invitations to the cocktail party or backyard barbecue, no seat for them at the holiday table, and no invitation to the grandkid’s graduation, Little League game, or dance recital. Refuse to speak to them, break bread with them or communicate with them in any way until they get their shit together and learn to play by the rules of public health by which rational, decent people agree to play.
Till then, they have made their ICU beds. Now they can lie in them, and sadly, die in them — completely and utterly, alone.
“Afghanistan Meant Nothing”
That’s the conclusion of Laura Jedeed, a freelance journalist who deployed to Afghanistan twice — once in 2008, and again in 2009-2010.
I remember Afghanistan as a dusty beige nightmare of a place full of proud, brave people who did not fucking want us there. We called them Hajjis and worse and they were better than we were, braver and stronger and smarter. […] It was already obvious that the Taliban would sweep through the very instant we left.
And now, finally, we are leaving and the predictable thing is happening. The Taliban is surging in and taking it all back. They were always going to do this, because they have a thing you cannot buy or train, they have patience and a bloody-mindedness that warrants more respect than we ever gave them.
I am Team Get The Fuck Out Of Afghanistan which, as a friend pointed out to me today, has always been Team Taliban. It’s Team Taliban or Team Stay Forever. There is no third team.
Rambo III: Freedom Speech
We knew how Afghanistan was going to end way back in 2008. In this scene from Rambo III Richard Crenna warns the Russian commander how stupid it is to start a holy war in the middle east in the name of freedom.
And this from 2009. Matthew Hoh, a former marine saying Afghanistan is not worth U.S. lives.
“I feel that our strategies in Afghanistan are not pursing goals that are worthy of sacrificing our young men and women or spending the billions we’re doing there,” Hoh said. “I believe that the people we are fighting there are fighting us because we are occupying them — not for any ideological reasons, not because of any links to al Qaeda, not because of any fundamental hatred toward the West. The only reason they’re fighting us is because we are occupying them.”
“I’m sorry, but…”
“How should I mourn friends who threw away their lives because irrational politics overrode rational thoughts of self-preservation? What should I say to the grieving spouse you leave behind? “Well, at least they died doing what they loved to do” becomes even more ludicrous when what they loved to do was LIVE! I probably won’t go to your funeral at all. It’s your fault that I have to make that choice. I don’t want to be your pallbearer.”