Apparently, the Taliban post thanking /pol/ for identifying a thot in need of patrolling was not a one-off, and they are indeed long-time lurkers. They are tapped in on all of the issues.
During a press conference on Tuesday, a Taliban spokesman was asked if their new government would honor “free speech.”
He replied: “This question should be asked of those people who are claiming to be promoters of free speech, who do not allow publication of all information. Indeed, I can ask that Facebook company. This question should be asked to them.”
How utterly ruthless of this man. People have noted that this time around, the Taliban was not dragging mangled corpses from the back of their Toyotas. However, watching this reply was much more brutal than watching a mangled corpse flop around at the end of a rope dragged by a Toyota.
The Taliban has never claimed to promote free speech. They’ve claimed to promote Sharia Law, which is what they do promote. The West, on the other hand, goes around talking about how they promote free speech, while literally everything they disagree with is censored.
Leftists make bizarre Libertarian arguments in support of censorship, claiming that “private companies” (they’re not private companies) are allowed to do anything to anyone – including organize together to strip people of their guaranteed rights. Now, the White House is admitting to actively being involved in directing the censorship.
The First Amendment of the US Constitution is very straightforward.
There is nothing there that says “but a coalition of private companies can organize together to target individuals for silencing, at the behest of the White House.”
The contracts, tax incentives and infrastructure plans that the US Government signs with Facebook, Google, etc. amount to “laws abridging freedom of speech.”
But you shouldn’t need that level of detail to understand that regardless of the mechanism, the effect is the same: huge swaths of the population is banned from expressing their opinion freely. From the position of a person who is blocked from freely speaking, it doesn’t matter if there is some load of mangled libertarian gibberish justifying his being silenced. In terms of practical reality, a person can either speak freely or he cannot, and in Western countries, a person cannot speak freely.
The same promise in the US Constitution is in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the basis of the globalist democracy order.
And yet in Europe, there are laws against various forms of speech (now including informational speech with regards the alleged virus and the vaxx).
These are the stated values of the Western order, which they do not even pretend to uphold.
The Taliban is very straightforward: their system is Sharia Law. That is the promise they are making to the population – that they will uphold the traditional Sunni doctrine of Sharia.
Therefore, they are not obligated to uphold freedom of speech. They have a completely different social contract.
So then the West comes in and says “will you agree to uphold a part of our social contract that we ourselves refuse to uphold?”
This is far beyond “ridiculous.” This is a farce.
The Taliban are serious people.
The people who run our countries are not even remotely serious.
They barely even pretend to be serious.
#1: Pinguinite To: Ada (#0)
The Iranians are Shiites, who have a running serious feud with Sunnis. If the US wasn't so mad at Iran, they could have helped. Iran must not be pleased to see the Taliban retake Afghanistan, though maybe they better understood it was destined to happen sooner or later.
Pinguinite posted on 2021-08-18 09:10:18 Reply Private Reply
#2: randge To: Pinguinite (#1)
And refugees, fleeing the new regime, are not being afforded entry to Iran, which they might more easily gain in places like Tajikistan.
randge posted on 2021-08-18 09:55:48 Reply Private Reply
#3: Pinguinite To: randge (#2)
I can see that as they have a very strong denominator in the form of resisting US interests and dominance in the region. We'll see how long that lasts now that the US is out of Afghanistan.
Pinguinite posted on 2021-08-18 10:19:40 Reply Private Reply
#4: randge To: Pinguinite (#3)
Lots of folks have been good with the warm and fuzzy signals coming from the new mullahs, but it's more likely than not that the greasers with the Taliban are setting up a police state. That is even more probably the case in that the Taliban do not control all of the country at this point. They can still expect a lot of resistance, and another civil war is very much in the cards.
Another stinkin' Pentagon mess. Another pile you and I have paid for.
randge posted on 2021-08-18 14:00:41 Reply Private Reply
#5: Pinguinite To: randge (#4)
Of course the admin can't guarantee safety. What does "guarantee" mean? It means if a promise is not kept that the party making the guarantee will compensate the other party in equal measure for the loss.
How can the admin "guarantee" the lives and safety of people that are now under Taliban control? The admin could have taken care of them last month, but they blew that chance. So now they are pretty much at the mercy of the Taliban, and their best chance is to do their best to covertly escape to the airport that is still under fragile US military control.
Pinguinite posted on 2021-08-18 14:45:34 Reply Private Reply
#6: randge To: Pinguinite (#5)
Did The NY Fed Confiscate $1.3 Billion In Afghan Gold: Striking Revelations From Afghanistan's Central Bank Chief
And it's not just gold. There are many billions in securities and other holdings administered by the Afghan national bank in safekeeping by all sorts of institutions globally.
I wonder where and how 10,000 Americans will be held up and until the mullahs get what they regard as rightfully theirs.
Do you get the feeling that this catastrophe is far from come to full flower?
randge posted on 2021-08-18 16:35:26 Reply Private Reply