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Afghanistan

Started by Fambo Number Mive, July 08, 2021, 02:26:53 PM

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Shoulders?-Stomach!

Given Bitter Lake is largely unnarrated and Drizzle hasn't given an example of what they mean, there isn't much to go on.


Quote from: Shoulders?-Stomach! on September 08, 2021, 04:54:20 PM
Given Bitter Lake is largely unnarrated and Drizzle hasn't given an example of what they mean, there isn't much to go on.

At one point he described the US going into Afganistan as a nation building exersise.  Coinsidently, Earlier last week I watched David Petraeus being interviewd on Channel 4 news saying the opposite, in that it was never about nation building when the coaltion first went in. I think alot of the neo cons around Bush just wanted to "kick some ass" after 9/11. 

You could argue it either way of course, but the point im attempting to make is that history is often more nuanced then the kind of binary logic Curtis presents us with, there is no room for an alternative view point in his world. 

Another thing that gets on my tits is his tendancy to generalise and lump demograhics together when he talks about "those in power" "politicians" and "bankers" without any qualiifcation or exlplanation about who these bogeymen are.

Buelligan

Is that the same David Petraeus who is Senior Vice President of the Royal United Services Institute?  You know, the place where The War Criminal, Blair, gave a big speech about how fine it all is two days ago?


This is a bogeyman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_United_Services_Institute

And take a fucking look at the man's résumé whilst you're at it, fuck me, it's another bogeyman!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Petraeus

Quote from: Buelligan on September 08, 2021, 08:15:41 PM
Is that the same David Petraeus who is Senior Vice President of the Royal United Services Institute? 
Probably, unless there are two David Petraeuses?

sardines

Quote from: Mrs Wogans lemon drizzle on September 08, 2021, 04:16:10 PM
Yeah that's a decent analogy.  It just winds me up how he presents everything, no matter how tenuously connected, as a fact.

Isn't he doing exactly the opposite of this?
A lot of his programs start literally with him stating 'I'm going to tell you a story...' .
He has repeatedly talked about wanting to show people that what popular news presents is often a single narrative and that could easily be formed into many other narratives.
I'd hope/think he would consider anyone who took his programs as gospel as at least slightly missing the point.

MikeP

Quote from: king_tubby on September 06, 2021, 08:18:32 AM
So, torture doesn't work? Unlucky for David Miliband and Lee Hurst!

Full-on torture never works. People are inclined to admit to anything and everything to get it to stop. But there may always be some gold dust hidden in the outpourings, so interrogators have something to do sorting through it all.
Worst case scenario is the subject dies before they really get going.

AllisonSays

Quote from: Mrs Wogans lemon drizzle on September 08, 2021, 06:55:17 PM

Another thing that gets on my tits is his tendancy to generalise and lump demograhics together when he talks about "those in power" "politicians" and "bankers" without any qualiifcation or exlplanation about who these bogeymen are.

It's interesting that you say that, because I watched Bitter Lake earlier in the week and had (essentially) the opposite problem with it; he presents financialisation as 'the politicians' handing over power to the 'banks'. I share your sense that these are slightly imprecise blocs but I think that's fair enough for the purposes of narrative polemic. What I found more annoying was the imprecision in how the dynamic was presented - financialisation wasn't a handover of power from politicians to finance, whatever that would even mean in practice, but just a reorganisation of how power was expressed. When you have people like Rees Mogg running Somerset Capital Management and sitting in the HoC it seems to be burying the lede to think of power as passing from one discrete group to the other, in my opinion; finance and politics have never been discrete operations.

There's some great footage, though, and I love the way he sort of lingers on moments immediately after the camera's been rolling - the shots of people turning off the BBC idents or of reporters right after they've done a piece to camera. Something very compelling about seeing behind the production of the spectacle like that. Also, the video of the art historian showing the Afghani women the Duchamp urinal is wonderfully silly and really seemed to capture something about the emptiness of the rhetoric of 'Western values' without him having to be too didactic about it.

Buelligan

Quote from: Mrs Wogans lemon drizzle on September 08, 2021, 10:27:23 PM
Probably, unless there are two David Petraeuses?

Right, so why would anyone hold up the opinions of Petraeus, an ex four star general in the US Army, venture capitalist and ex Director of the Fucking CIA, who is clearly not a straight arrow, a dangerous spook, if you like, as a guide to any kind of insight or truth whatsoever relating to anything at all?  The man's an obvious and fully out bogeyman.

chveik

Quote from: Mrs Wogans lemon drizzle on September 08, 2021, 04:10:28 PM
I see that the Taliban have banned woman's sport.  Can't say I blame them.

cunt

Quote from: Buelligan on September 09, 2021, 10:53:24 AM
Right, so why would anyone hold up the opinions of Petraeus, an ex four star general in the US Army, venture capitalist and ex Director of the Fucking CIA, who is clearly not a straight arrow, a dangerous spook, if you like, as a guide to any kind of insight or truth whatsoever relating to anything at all?  The man's an obvious and fully out bogeyman.

I don't think anyone's holding up the opinions of Petraeus, it was just that coincidentally i'd seen him on the telly shortly before I watched the Doc, and it struck me how thier are usually mutiple view points, and more nuanced reasons why history unfolds in a certain way, as opposed to X happend, which then led to Y happening.

Quote from: AllisonSays on September 09, 2021, 09:08:53 AM
It's interesting that you say that, because I watched Bitter Lake earlier in the week and had (essentially) the opposite problem with it; he presents financialisation as 'the politicians' handing over power to the 'banks'. I share your sense that these are slightly imprecise blocs but I think that's fair enough for the purposes of narrative polemic. What I found more annoying was the imprecision in how the dynamic was presented - financialisation wasn't a handover of power from politicians to finance, whatever that would even mean in practice, but just a reorganisation of how power was expressed. When you have people like Rees Mogg running Somerset Capital Management and sitting in the HoC it seems to be burying the lede to think of power as passing from one discrete group to the other, in my opinion; finance and politics have never been discrete operations.


Intresting, I was just a bit confused by that section on finacialisation, so maybe I misunderstood what Curtis was getting at.  It's a facianting topic in itself though, and I wish he'd of expanded on it a bit more.

Buelligan

Quote from: Mrs Wogans lemon drizzle on September 09, 2021, 04:16:14 PM
I don't think anyone's holding up the opinions of Petraeus, it was just that coincidentally i'd seen him on the telly shortly before I watched the Doc, and it struck me how thier are usually mutiple view points, and more nuanced reasons why history unfolds in a certain way, as opposed to X happend, which then led to Y happening.

Are you saying that Curtis dominates all discussion on this topic (and others) and we need to make space for suppressed voices like that of the ex-Director of the CIA?

Quote from: Buelligan on September 09, 2021, 05:15:34 PM
Are you saying that Curtis dominates all discussion on this topic (and others) and we need to make space for suppressed voices like that of the ex-Director of the CIA?

No, not quite. What i was trying (and seemginly failing) to get at, was that history tends to be a bit more nuanced then one persons (ie Curtis's) own view of events.

Buelligan

So what does that mean?  We need to listen to other people too?  Be conscious of the danger that Curtis might drown out the CIA?

Kankurette

Quote from: Mrs Wogans lemon drizzle on September 08, 2021, 04:10:28 PM
I see that the Taliban have banned woman's sport.  Can't say I blame them.
Hilarious. They didn't ban it because they think women's football is slower than the men's game, put it this way.

Quote from: Buelligan on September 09, 2021, 05:55:46 PM
So what does that mean?  We need to listen to other people too?  Be conscious of the danger that Curtis might drown out the CIA?

No, nothing to do with the CIA. Just that when watching a Curtis doc, I feel he has a tendancy to pronounce his take on events as some kind of ultimate truth, with no room for duel perspectives. 

Buelligan

Heheh, yeah, you're right, whilst people like Blair or the CIA tend to be more nuanced, more open to the ideas of others. 

Buelligan

And now this - a new film from DoubleDown News by another Curtis, Mark Curtis this time, pretty sure he's not a bogeyman, goes into a fair bit of detail on exactly who are and the roles they've played in Afghanistan, twelve minutes well spent.  The One Thing NEVER Mentioned When Talking About Islamist Terrorism going to pop it on to the 9/11 thread too, it needs seeing.

WhoMe

Strong case presented here that the recent US drone strike that killed civilians, including children, mistakenly targeted a local aid worker who the US had convinced themselves was preparing an airport attack/car bomb.

https://twitter.com/evanhill/status/1436422176425578496

Mr Farenheit

Sky News report from the abandoned prison area at Bagram air-base. I haven't seen this reported on elsewhere, if the Taliban were more savvy they would organise a huge press conference and walk through there.

It's shocking stuff, equipment and rooms for sensory deprivation, cells with cage roofs so you're always watched like French colonial prisons in Guiana or Vietnam. Sounds like people in there were held without any charges, I guess you shouldn't be surprised by that but how you can keep a straight face going on about nation-building and education etc. while running places like this.... bloody hell

buttgammon

The scale of it is frightening. I have no illusions about the crimes that were committed in the course of that conflict but the almost industrial nature of the place makes it clear that it was designed to facilitate torture.

Fambo Number Mive

All female government employees in Kabul have been told by the new mayor to stay home unless their jobs cannot be done by a man (the example he gave was women were still needed to clean the women's toilets).

They said this would happen until the situation is "normalised" whatever that involves.

poo

Schools are open again. Not if you're a girl though.

MikeP

Quote from: Buelligan on September 10, 2021, 11:24:20 AM
The One Thing NEVER Mentioned When Talking About Islamist Terrorism going to pop it on to the 9/11 thread too, it needs seeing.

Nothing not already in the public domain.
Not saying people shouldn't watch it, they should, but it's not actually new stuff.

Fambo Number Mive

Reading the SA American newspaper cartoons thread, it's fascinating to see the number of cartoonists who one week publish a cartoon attacking Biden for the handling of the Afghanistan pullout and what it means for those Afghanistan citizens left in the country, and another week publish a hateful racist cartoon about Afghanistan refugees entering the US.

These cartoonists, like BG, are in my view terrible people. I don't disagree that Biden could have handled the pullout a lot better but it's clear they don't care about Afghanistan citizens, in fact they want to incite Americans to actively hate them.


chveik

they left in a panic because they were losing, badly.  what they couldn't handle is a clear military defeat so it had to happen when they technically weren't there anymore. their intelligence should've known the talibans' grip was getting tighter, they didn't 'win' the country in a fortnight. it's a fucking joke of a damage control, but the media bought it.

they don't lose wars, they rage quit them, which makes them look even more incompetent.

Buelligan

One does wonder what the ratio is

  • protecting human rights
  • uniting the proles using fear and hatred
  • weapons sales opportunity
  • excuse to clamp down domestically on individual freedoms
  • opportunity to extend power and undermine the power of others.

Fambo Number Mive

The government have given up pretending to care about civilians in Afghanistan

QuoteDeporting asylum seekers back to Afghanistan presents "no real risk of harm", according to new Home Office guidance that could pave the way for some to be sent back to the Taliban-controlled country.

Updated guidance states that, in order to be granted protection in the UK, Afghan asylum seekers must be able to show that there are "specific reasons over and above simply being a civilian for being affected by the indiscriminate violence"...

Campaigners said it was "perverse and immoral" that the government was leaving scope for people seeking protection to be sent back to Afghanistan, warning that the guidance failed to "reflect the situation on the ground" and "ignored many threats to basic human rights".

A Home Office spokesperson told The Independent that it was not enforcing returns to Afghanistan for those who have been refused asylum – though lawyers said this "contrasted" with the new guidance which indicates that it may be safe to return people...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/afghan-asylum-deportation-guidance-afghanistan-home-office-b1933921.html#

50 people were killed and 100 injured in the city of Kunduz in a bombing today, with several people also killed in a bombing in Kabul a few days ago. But according to the Home Office there is "no real risk of harm"