The more he runs away from this the more likely that nobody will believe whatever explanation he lands on to dismiss it. Even if there really isn’t a list, and he really isn’t on it, and they present some evidence that proves it conclusively, there’s zero shot anyone will believe it.

The conspiracy vibes are so strong that even reality couldn’t kill them.

“Biden 2020 Voters Who Did Not Vote For Harris”

Which could mean a bunch of things, including the thing right next to it that I highlighted: “who cast a ballot for someone besides harris”

I’m sorry, is there some secret cabal of “Harris/the DNC did nothing wrong” poster

This is some next-level denial.

It literally fucking does, at the top, in big fucking letters.

This is what I see:

No one fucking here on Lemmy is questioning whether the Dem party is at fault

To use one of your own phrases, “fucking what”

That poll says nothing about non-voters

But also:

The Democratic Party needs to come to terms with the real reasons it lost the presidency in November, including that after over a year of unprecedented protests and calls for Biden to stop sending weapons to Israel, party leadership failed to listen to its own voters who overwhelmingly want their government to end its complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Oh boy, is the midterm bullshit already starting?

My point is that this is the same argument you’re leveling about ‘origins’ with the Taliban.

Lol, no it isn’t bud. I’m not saying the US ‘created’ the Taliban, just that their support of islamic fundamentalism lead to the proliferation of islamic fundamentalist groups. If ‘supporting socialism’ involved arming and funding fascist militants, then sure - that involvement could be said to have lead to the growth of fascism. Similarly, if ‘opposing socialism’ involved funding and arming fascist militants (or islamic fundamentalists…), then that involvement could be said to have lead to the growth of fascism (or islamic fundamentalism…). But ‘socialism leads to fascism’ would be an exceedingly dumb thing to say.

The Mujahidin still retained large stocks of US weapons, even if the flow had stopped.

Right… And once the soviets had left, all the weapons and funding the US had dumped into the country helped fuel factional conflicts between competing fundamentalist groups.

The mujahidin were a diverse group united against the Soviet invasion.

I mean, maybe at the time? Once the war ended they certainly weren’t united anymore. The only other thing they had in common other than their religion (and the only thing that mattered to the US) was their opposition to the Soviets. The US preferred this group over the secular militias because, in their view, they were less likely to install another communist or socialist government after the soviets were defeated.

Again, what is your position here? “The US supporting people against being massacred is Bad and the Afghan people deserve Blowback™ for accepting aid”?

Not at all. My position is that the US knowingly armed and funded religious fundamentalists in order to undermine Soviet influence, and that funding ended up fueling religious extremist movements that threw the entire region into chaos for decades after. Does that mean I support the Soviet invasion? Fuck no. But I sure as fuck don’t deny the US’s role in the formation of the Taliban and other militant groups that terrorized the country once the soviets were gone.

Child abuse is a sadly long-standing tradition in Afghanistan society, not something that Mujahidin ‘extremists’ just ‘starting doing’ after the Soviet-Afghan War.

Ok, so they were religious extremists before the US was supplying them with weapons, too? That doesn’t exculpate the US from empowering them just because they were dead-set on stopping the spread of communism at any cost, and acknowledging that cost doesn’t somehow legitimize communism, either.

If Pakistan had decided that reviving the Communist throwbacks was in their national interests, would you be decrying the US for creating Communist ‘blowback’ in Afghanistan and declare that the Mujahidin were the origin of the Communist terrorists?

If that made any sense at all, sure? The US was aligned with Pakistan during the war, and much of the aid was distributed to the groups Pakistan thought favored them. From the US’s perspective, it didn’t matter who was fighting against the Soviets, only that they fought the Soviets. If Pakistan was preferencing communist militants instead of islamic fundamentalists, would the US have still worked with them against the Soviets? Doubtful, but also the culpability for what came after would have been the same regardless.

The US thought that there was going to be an intervention by the Soviet Union, and considered frustrating that aim to be worth the risk that it might not happen.

I’m pretty sure this is exactly my point (your phrasing makes it a little ambiguous).

so if I were to say, then, that support of socialism caused fascism, and that fascism was blowback to those who dared support socialism?

Err, yea I mean you could try arguing that I suppose. Seems like you’re just trying to find something to argue about though - I think it’s unlikely you actually believe this.

The leaders you’re discussing were largely detached from Mujahedeen organizations by the time of the formation of the Taliban, and were armed by Pakistan

Eventually, sure. Just like the Mujaheddin were largely detached from US material support by the time they were actively fighting against the Taliban.

This is the first legitimate point made so far, but still makes no sense as a claim of ‘sharing an origin’.

Sure it does, but not if you take ‘sharing an origin’ to mean ‘sharing a political alignment’. The US supported and emboldened religious extremist militants, and then those extremists started abusing children and fractured into oppositional factions (also religious extremists) who were then funded by Pakistan. The US thought that destroying the Soviet Union was worth creating whatever militant fundamentalist groups that happened to rise out of the ashes of that conflict, and here we are 40 years later.

Sorry for having a sense of pattern recognition.

I haven’t been anywhere near as hostile as you have been in this thread, and I don’t think it has anything to do with some previous interaction you had with me.

So if I were to say that fascism shares an origin with socialism, you would say…?

100% agree.

“You armed the people who ended up fighting the Taliban; therefore, you’re responsible for arming the Taliban!”

They also armed the people who ended up becoming the Taliban, to say nothing of the atrocities conducted by the mujahadeen themselves that fueled the Taliban’s rapid initial popularity.

Playing dumb is your specialty, like I said.

I’m not going to engage with this - I think you’re misdirecting frustration from somewhere else at me.

I don’t really know what you think that proves?

Nothing… I’m not claiming any kind of political alignment here, only that the taliban shares an origin with the mujaheddin

that’s not even close to fucking true.

You detailed the relationship between the Taliban and the ISI, which I don’t disagree with. But Mullah Omar was absolutely a part of the Hezb-i Islami Khalis, and then later formed the Taliban. You can disagree with the relative influence of that relationship with the US and mujaheddin if you want, but the relationship is there either way.

But playing dumb is your specialty, isn’t it? You do this all the fucking time.

I don’t know who you think I am, but I haven’t had that many interactions with you. I’m a little confused by the hostility.

“If only the Soviets were allowed to massacre Afghanistan with impunity, we wouldn’t have to deal with this pesky BLOWBACK of Pakistani imperialism in Afghanistan!”

Jesus fuck, not at all, and where you got that conclusion from is completely beyond my comprehension. The soviets share just as much blame for the chaos that ensued after they withdrew as the US does, and Pakistan bears responsibility, too. Arming militant fundamentalist groups as your method of intervention doesn’t come without consequences.

where did this happen? And to whom? And what relevance does it have to the meme?

The first Taliban leaders were former Mujaheddin militiamen… the same mujaheddin that were backed by the US against the Soviets

Yes, the Taliban are different from the group the US backed in the 80s, but only because they specifically split from those anti-soviet militias against the factional war-lords who had taken power in the chaos of the second civil war.

I think it’s a little weird to be passionately dismissing the US’s role in setting the stage for the taliban, though. I didn’t think I was disagreeing with the meme, but it does seem like you really don’t like the implication that the US bears some responsibility for what happened in Afghanistan after the Soviets withdrew.

Well that wouldn’t make any sense at all - blowback isn’t a description of something you wanted to have happen that you didn’t expect, it’s a description of something you didn’t want to happen that you didn’t expect

Like the militant extremists you supported fracturing into new adversarial militants that fuck your shit up later.

Are we taking about the same comment here? Where did I contradict you?

I can’t say for sure but I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.

I wonder if there’s a term for these kind of ‘unintended’ consequences to reckless foreign subterfuge

A simple toggle, secured with a password would do it.

Yea, that’s the thing - I don’t think it would ‘do’ it for legislators. Like you mentioned - it’s not really about protecting children, but also the only way to enforce a law like this would be to log or register devices to specific people or children. This would essentially just shift the point of verification from the individual website to the point of sale of the phone or tablet. Verifying the age is the part that necessitates identification - the only thing a hardware-locked strategy does is centralizes that verification to a governing body instead of individual websites, but it still associates individuals with specific devices.

I get why this might seem preferable, but the problem of online privacy still persists.

I’m so tired of this civility meta.

Lemmy is half as uncivilized as any other social media space I’ve ever been in, including reddit or Twitter. I think people are just confused by a lack of centralized authority to settle disputes on what is or isn’t ‘civil’ behavior - but it certainly isn’t the case that it’s any less civil than just about any alternative.

Maybe this places extra stress on instance admins for constantly addressing complaints of users on and off their server, but that has less to do with the kind of user civility people are talking about and more with a culture of mob justice evidenced by communities like MoG and PTB.

People seem uncomfortable with multipolar systems, and maybe it’s because of my political bent but I think distributed systems are way better.

I don’t think this is a good idea…

This is even more invasive - it would mean all the traffic and activity in every device would be traceable to a registration. Whereas now they might have a pretty good lock on individual device ids, they’d then have an actual registry of devices and owners to verify it against

K but who gets the fatwa? The doctor?

Yes, and they are not required to run in a primary because those are run by each party (being independent means you don’t have a party to begin with)

There’s no limit (AFAIK) to the number of candidates on the ballot, but there is a deadline to file and that deadline has passed. Cuomo had preemptively filed as an independent candidate in case he didn’t win the primary (I think Mamdani did this too), but had not publicly stated whether he would use it until now.