One more twist
Over here men make better women than women do.
Over there……….
Over here it’s men stealing everything we have, over there it’s men forbidding women to have anything.
Tip Jar
Over here men make better women than women do.
Over there……….
Over here it’s men stealing everything we have, over there it’s men forbidding women to have anything.
Next time the US is pushed by whatever reason to invade some part of the Middle East (almost a guarantee, over a long enough period of time, sadly), we need to make it a priority to:
1: Go in knowing we’ll need to spend another 20 year occupation there, and;
2: Go in with a plan to arm all the women, and train them as a formal militia. Fully equip them with the sorts of weapons that will make mere physical strength a comparatively moot point, and give them both the confidence to fight, and a secular education to tell them why they shouldn’t fear doing so.
Imagine if we’d gone with that approach in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Freemage: In his early and revolutionary years, Mao had a useful dictum: ‘Support what the enemy opposes; oppose what the enemy supports.” OK within limits for most, but debateable regarding the Taliban. They are probably in favour of motherhood, provided those mothers are Islamic and of the correct persuasion; Sunni / Shia or whatever. And submissive. ‘Islam’ means ‘submission.’
Over at WEIT, someone in the comments claimed that FFRF had memory-holed another article back in 2008 about how presumably moderate, enlightened Muslims in Morocco treated women. I vaguely remember reading this back then and being chilled by the blatant misogyny. The Taliban freezes.
http://web.archive.org/web/20180510160356/https://ffrf.org/publications/freethought-today/item/12711-moroccan-feminine-wiles
Interesting to think that an atheist organization devoted to separation of church and state may have either deleted this article or not thought it worth preserving.
That was always a chafing point between Freethought blogs and me, even before they decided I was 100% evil and tranzfobik. Ew ick I kept pointing out that Islam is not a friend to women.
That’s interesting. It isn’t unusual for the convention to have speakers who point those things out, and they haven’t been censored. I wonder if some of the young wokesters on their staff sometimes go rogue? Or persuade them to act in censorious ways?
Not all, but certainly most, of the Middle East’s problems have the US as a leading cause.
Take the case of Afghanistan – The USSR was faced with threats from growing Islamisation in the various “stan” Republics and saw the threat from Afghanistan growing. Rather than aid the USSR in suppressing Islamism (not the religion, but the political use of it) the US chose to side with Islamists. Why? Not because it was good for Afghanistan, but because it was against the USSR.
Later, the US mounted its own invasion of Afghanistan on spurious grounds and took 20 years, expended $8 trillion, and caused over a million deaths. And for what? To replace the Taliban with the Taliban!
Perhaps you’d also like to consider the fate of the Iranian people, especially Iranian women and girls when the US conspired to overthrow a democratically elected government and replace it with he dictatorship of the Pahlavi family. How did that work out?
Iraqis would also like a word about US interventions. Sure, Saddam Hussein was a mad bad bastard, but Iraqi women were free to marry, learn, drive, work, own assets, and not go to Friday prayers or any other religious activity. Hussein’s Iraq was a secular Iraq, probably even more so than the US.
Then there’s the fate of Egypt’s nascent democracy, overthrown by a combination of a fading British Empire and a rising American Empire in desperate need of oil.
The American answer – more fucking guns. Yes, let’s teach those brown kiddies to cower in fear as their schools are shot up!
You can’t even form a decent militia in your own country, you know, those first four words of 2A that you lot forget. What makes you think you can achieve it in a foreign country, let alone what makes you think you have the right to impose your will on other nations?
Please, give up on this notion of being able to throw your weight around simply because you have bigger and better guns than anyone else. Stay the fuck at home. And maybe, given enough time, the rest of the world will ignore you and get on with building a better, fairer, more peaceful world.
Rev, there may be some of the details I disagree (somewhat) on, but this:
This is pure gold. Put it on a t-shirt, on posters, on whatever it takes to get people to listen. The problem is, MAGA don’t listen to anybody. Trump doesn’t listen to anybody. And, unfortunately, much of the left won’t listen, either.
Rev: Oh, I agree completely on that final point. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that will happen any time soon (unless, of course, Trump manages to actually induce a civil war, which will tie us up for a bit, I suppose).
(I will say I disagree with one key bit of your post–the pretense for the invasion of Afghanistan being ‘spurious’ is going to be a hard sell to any American who watched the Towers fall. Do I think the invasion was well-managed? No. But the Taliban were actively harboring Osama at that point, and made themselves a legitimate target.
Whether or not bin Laden was in Afghanistan, whether or not the Taliban were actively protecting him, is not the pretext for an all out war that you seem to think it is.
Ultimately bin Laden was found in Pakistan, Pakistan’s ISI was aware of his location.
Did the US launch a full on invasion of Pakistan? No, it mounted something more akin to policing than war.
As for my final point happening any time soon. I agree, it won’t. But not because of what happened in New York, but because Americans keep buying the lies – WMD, Cuban “Missile Crisis”, Gulf of Tonkin, and most fortuitous of all for the US was the (self) destruction of the USS Maine that was used as a pretext for the US grabbing Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines from Spain, and also overthrowing the Hawaiian monarchy.
Perhaps the USA should have been invaded after it harboured fleeing NAZIs, or Bosnians who fled to the USA before they could be arrested for war crimes at Srebenica and elsewhere. Some still live there, unmolested, today. Or maybe it’s better to leave the hunting and arresting of criminals to the Police.
Of course another thing that’s not going to happen any time soon is that the pussygrabber in chief starts giving a crap about women (incidentally one the few things the MAGA crowd and the woke crowd can agree on)
Exactly. Especially since most of the attackers were either Pakistani or Saudi. We didn’t invade Saudi Arabia, either. Dubya needed a war; his approval rating wasn’t good, and wars seem to lead (most of the time) to second terms.