I got nothin [NOT 16/8/21]

Hi, friends.

I don’t know about you all, but I’m just a mess today. I’m just worried and depressed and so upset for what people in Afghanistan are going through because we all fucking knew this would happen.

Anyways, this is a venting post. In the comments, vent/rage/cry/yell/etc about whatever you want.

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25 Comments

  1. I have seen some commentary regarding Afghanistan on here and have seen and heard a lot via several media outlets and even more on discussion boards and  I have a lot of opinions about it myself but with all due respect I believe it is in everyone’s best interest – including mine – if I sit this one out.

    What I am willing to say is that my heart goes out fully to the women and children of Afghanistan.

    One thing that has had me completely baffled my entire life is the amount of pride Americans feel for their country because it is “the best” country when they are so far behind in EVERYTHING that they are not even remotely close to being the best at anything…except glorifying hate, intolerance, and ignorance…granted,those are things at which they are the very best.

    • Do I think the US should never have invaded Afghanistan? YEP. Do I think the US should never have funding the Taliban back during the Cold War to “fight” against the USSR? OF COURSE.

      But here we are and a lot fuckton of people in Afghanistan are about to be in really bad shape due to horrible US decisions (again). And fuck me I am upset about what’s going to happen to them. 

      • You’re making this “bite your lip on this one, myo” decision of mine harder than it is…

        Let’s offer a modicum of grace to the argument(s) that there was justification in the US entering Afghanistan for the sake of argument (definitely not one I’d be making but I am trying to “butt-out” of this discussion entirely). There was a point in which it was ultimately decided to stick around, form a government in (our) likeness and give weapons and strategic advice to a military created in (our) likeness that is in no way deserving of being offered the same amount of grace for the sake of arguing. Especially as it pertains to a country who dubs itself “the greatest experiment” during a time in which the experiment is failing on a catastophic level. But I digress…

        I won’t even get started…forgive me.

        That said, the speed at which the Taliban have completely taken over Afghanistan with little to no resistance isn’t in any way “shocking” (as most pundits have described it) to someone like me who is obsessed with US politics and follows it religiously from a country who obtained its independence by, basically, asking for it politely?

        • See, here is an example of American exceptionalism.

          You follow American politics obsessively. Do you do this for any other country? I try to keep up with Canadian politics, out of interest and family ties, and British politics, because of friends and it’s interesting, and German politics, because I once lived in the Bundesrepublik and it’s interesting to see what has changed and what has not, but none of them obsessively.

          I read French and Italian media but that’s mostly an exercise in trying to keep up languages I really have no occasion to hear or use, and when I stumble upon political reporting my eyes glaze over and I move on to something that’s already been covered extensively in America, so I can basically follow along and fill in the blanks. 

          There’s really no point to this comment and with this I think I’ll sign off. It will interest you all to know that I made egg salad sandwiches with a side of potato chips for us for dinner, since Better Half was on some interminable conference call (not Zoomed, thankfully.) While he was nattering away with strangers on the other side of the globe and discreetly tucking into this modest repast I was quietly dining here in my home office and “sharing insights”/badgering the DeadSplitertariat.

          • When there is a street in the middle of nowhere, for this analogy to work, with only three houses on it that is in within view of several other little houses in the area, it is common for one of those houses to have front and back yards littered with junk (old rusted out and beaten down cars the owners long ago lost interest in getting to work to the point they wouldn’t even know how to restore them today even if they wanted to, for JUST one example), and the structure of the house was selfishly allowed to become a dilapidated sorry excuse for what it once was, or at least intended to be.

            It’s safe to say that the other two houses on the street have a right to genuinely share their concerns with the owner of said house…and even safer to say that they obsessively pay attention. Disgraces such as this typically get dealt with swifty BUT the issue in this case is that the shithole, yard full of shit with asshole deplorable owners is THE BIGGEST HOUSE ON THE STREET…and the ONLY house to ever drop  nuclear bombs on other houses.

            Canada follows the US political news the same way we keep an eye on our  neighbour we suspect to have a self-made meth lab.

            To answer your question, specifically, I religiously follow local news from various countries around the world.

            • That is an excellent analogy. I should have put “American exceptionalism” in quotes. Or a disclaimer. Whenever you hear me use that phrase assume sarcasm or irony. I shouldn’t be so unpatriotic, and I really wasn’t until Trump came along, and I started thinking, “My God, if we’re capable of this, to what further depths of depravity will we sink?”

            • Myo my friend, ^that^ is pretty much the *perfect* summation of the situation💖
               
              I just have one or two *very* minor quibbles with this part😉;
              “the shithole, yard full of shit with asshole deplorable owners is THE BIGGEST HOUSE ON THE STREET…and the ONLY house to ever drop  nuclear bombs on other houses.
              Quibble 1 being that you didn’t quite go far enough–the asshole with that huge house also somehow manages to control/(rent?) MOST of the land around, and has also claimed many of the mineral & water rights in the surrounding territory… poisoning MUCH of it, and hogging most of…. well… EVERYTHING.
               
              AND (quibble #2), it’s not even the owner the neighbors are having to deal with–it’s his asshole kid/scion who grew up in luxury, (thinking he was a genius whose “OWN Smarts!” got him that wealth🙄🙄🙄), who fucked it all up & drove it into the ground… never having had to do a damn thing for *himself,* because that kid has allllllways had access to Daddy’s Credit Card, and has always been able to simply obtain anything he desired by saying, “Do you KNOW who my dad is?!?!???” … knowing that Daddy *did* always come along after Spawn made a mess and smooth things over/clear it up…
              And for a very long time, because so many of the folks that brat encountered *did* know “who his dad was,” gave the kid the benefit of the doubt–because they are good, kind people, who wouldn’t EVER think to be *that* kind of an asshat to *their* neighbors.
               
              (Not that that acknowledgement of parentage or former respect for that parent by the neighbors was in ANY way a fault!!!
              The neighbors are simply exceedingly kind & understanding people, who assumed that absentee dad would have acted like *they* would’ve–responsibly & with decorum & speed, when it was pointed out that the spawn was being an utter twat! 😉💖)
               
              TL/DR;
              I couldn’t agree more with you, and I can only imagine the frustration, as y’all watch us & our leadership fuck shit up, left & right, for decades, while we don’t even *bother* cleaning up our own damn mess–or, hell, even *acknowledging* it,  right here at home…
              💖

        • Yup. Like the way the Afghan govt basically rapidly collapsed is not surprising to pretty much everyone I think except the people in charge. 

          If your option is surrender quickly to the Taliban or fight them and incur lots of death and injuries and then still surrender to the Taliban, what option are you going to do? Quite frankly cost-benefits analysis is that you just surrender without resorted to fighting. 

          Quite frankly, I think this was Trump’s plan all along because that douchebag expected to have a second term and he seemed to really want to play with nukes. I could see Cheeto Mussolini deciding that the only way to ensure “freedom” was to deploy nukes and kill millions. 

    • And yet you’d be surprised.

      For some reason Better Half and I found ourselves going to Europe quite often during the Iraq War (the second one, the one that kicked off in 2003.) I expected widespread hostility among the locals, we are VERY obviously American, by word, deed, and dress, but nary a discouraging word was ever said to us. The only time anyone said anything over the course of maybe five visits in the course of two years was:

      A group of us, Americans and Brits, were walking toward a restaurant somewhere in London and a very drunken guy heard our (those of us American) accents and started ranting about how America had dragged Britain into a senseless war in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of Better Half’s British friends, a big bruiser of a guy, said, “We have our own government. Did you vote Labour? That’s what gave us Tony Blair, and he’s the one who gave us Iraq. I hope you’ll consider voting Conservative next time.” 

      This only enraged him further but he staggered off. The Bruiser’s girlfriend said, “Well done. Another convert to our side. Oh look, here’s the restaurant!”

      • …I don’t have a lot of nice things to say about tony blair…but with all due respect to the friend in question the idea that a conservative government wouldn’t have done the same when it came to going into iraq beside the US is pretty much laughable…unless I’m very much mistaken they were in charge back in the 90s when pretty much the same thing came up & they didn’t exactly spurn the idea

        • I’m not sure The Bruiser or the girlfriend voted Con. I think he was really “taking the piss” out of the drunken Londoner. Better Half knew The Bruiser through the financial industry world, so I doubt he’d be a Corbynite, but Blair was about as left-wing as his good friend Bill Clinton, who was a Rockefeller Republican on his best days…

          • …I wouldn’t call it a hard & fast rule…but by & large the people I’ve known who work(ed) in “the city” tended pretty heavily towards the point of view that basically the tories were the only party to get how business worked & voting for anyone else was fiscally irresponsible…there’s sort of a cliché that whenever labour is in power they fuck up the books & the tories have to fix things…or to the opposing point of view that the conservatives cut public spending until shit stops working & then labour have to fix that

            …it’s why “the tories want to privatize the NHS” is an evergreen campaign tactic against the conservative party…who never really got over the fact it was a labour government who got it off the ground in the first place…but that’s another story, as the saying goes

    • We went through the same thing with Iraq. We have cities that are emptying out and could use immigrants, but as soon as the war went ugly in 2003, there was no plan to help Iraqis move their families to places like Detroit or St. Louis and build housing and schools to accommodate people who put their lives on the line for Cheney’s fantasy.
       
      People like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle flat out lied about how the Iraq War wasn’t going to cost the US a penny because it would all be funded by the Iraqis, and the press decided it wasn’t their job to challenge the most obviously stupid things. And now they’re all clutching pearls together because none of them wanted to spend a dime except on bombs. Find me a single reporter pounding the drumbeat about the political implications of a border “crisis” in March who raised a single finger about allowing immigrants from Afghanistan.
       
      20 years. We fought WWII and rebuilt Europe and Japan and went from Tommy Dorsey to the Beach Boys in the time it took for the US to finally take off the rose colored glasses in Afghanistan. Paul Wolfowitz can still get an op ed in the NY Times, John Bolton can get air time on NPR — we can’t even get to the point of honest debate because the worst people are still given a seat at the table, and the press acts like it’s a crime to even mention that Donald Rumsfeld was the worst Defense Secretary in a generation, possibly two.
       
      They all fell down on the job, and now they want to pretend that it’s everybody outside the circle who failed. And they’ll do everything in their power to make sure nobody inside the circle takes the blame. They’re the real victims here, sure.

      • My friends and I are contacting our local politicians about taking refugees. St. Louis did it before with Bosnian Genocide refugees, and we have space and capacity to do it with Afghan refugees. I don’t have any optimism, but at least we’re trying. 

      • We fought WWII and rebuilt Europe and Japan and went from Tommy Dorsey to the Beach Boys in the time it took for the US to finally take off the rose colored glasses in Afghanistan.

      • We ARE  a fucking Kakistocracy, ^THOSE^ folks proved it, and more recently, Dolt-45 (and the team running him) simply ran the tables to the extent they could, trying to pull versions the same damn grifts.🤬🤬🤬

  2. …I would vent…pretty sure I could use a little of that, even…I just don’t really know where to start

    …so I think your title for tonight kind of says it all for me…for now at least?

  3. I have a friend who I think has gotten deep into some kind of spirituality. A good thing, usually. But she used to be a very funny and sharp observer of the foibles of others and the wrongs perpetrated against her. Now it’s all “I think I understand where they’re coming from” and “I just feel so blessed [you can almost hear the hashtag in her voice] that…”

    To my mind, God in His Infinite Wisdom put us on this Earth to complain and vent. We humans have endless ways to irritate and enrage each other. We must “lean in” and embrace this, muttering expletives the entire time.

    • Ohh that would be annoying, Cousin Matthew.

      I’ve been an atheist for a few decades. I said agnostic for most of my 20s but then I was like what the fuck is that about, keeping my options open just in case?

      It really is the only answer to “wow humans are shit and treat each other like shit” if there’s no magical sky daddy or other powerful beings looking out for us. 

    • wait…. im supposed to mutter the expletives?
      i..uhh… missed that part of the teachings
      probably got distracted by the asshole that kept asking questions….every fucking meeting has one….makes shit drag on forever

  4. I too have nothing, I lack the words to express my level of heartache and disgust. Robert Burns said it best:

    Many and sharp the numerous ills
    Inwoven with our frame;
    More pointed still, we make ourselves
    Regret, remorse and shame;
    And man, whose heaven-erected face
    The smiles of love adorn,
    Man’s inhumanity to man,
    Makes countless thousands mourn.

     

  5. I guess the one glimmer I’ve got is that because the US was there, every other power in the region — Russia, China, Pakistan, Iran — could sit back in denial and let us fester. There is an incentive for them to start negotiations and take a share in containment, which hopefully they realize is the only realistic option.
     
    If they figure things out, it will be a really bumpy road, but it was never going to be hashed out at all while we were there. Not good odds, but a little bit better.

  6. not a lot to vent about here….everyone above has said what i might have had to say about afghanistan..
    decided to go on another sober bender (as my drinking every night thing cant be good for me)…figured if i wait for everything to stop going to shit for a minute i might as well switch to liquer now and really do some damage…
    sooo yeah..thats why ive been logging off earlier these last couple days (well..that and exploding glasses..now fixed) some marginally better decision making here for the time being

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