Want to see a hotter and dumber take, possibly the dumbest take, on why "We lost Afghanistan"?
https://prestonbyrne.com/2021/08/15/did-america-just-lose-afghanistan-because-of-whatsapp/
You win. I've got to hand my pinball crown to you. That boils my brain. Holy fuck.
That article is wondrous panoply of awful. In the opening there's a von Clausewitz name drop.
This phenomenon is known as the "Fog of War," a phrase which originated with Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz in his magnum opus, On War:
War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and discriminating judgment is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.
[...]
I'm a tech guy, not a military guy. And in terms of the kind of tech I'm into it's that weird decentralized crypto tech like Bitcoin, not SaaS.
From a good article in the New Yorker, The Other Afghan Women:
I met Wakil, a bespectacled Taliban commander. Like many fighters I’d encountered, he came from a line of farmers, had studied a few years in seminary, and had lost dozens of relatives to Amir Dado, the Ninety-third Division, and the Americans. He discussed the calamities visited on his family without rancor, as if the American War were the natural order of things. Thirty years old, he’d attained his rank after an older brother, a Taliban commander, died in battle. He’d hardly ever left Helmand, and his face lit up with wonder at the thought of capturing Gereshk, a town that he’d lived within miles of, but had not been able to visit for twenty years. “Forget your writing,” he laughed as I scribbled notes. “Come watch me take the city!” Tracking a helicopter gliding across the horizon, I declined. He raced off. An hour later, an image popped up on my phone of Wakil pulling down a poster of a government figure linked to the Ninety-third Division. Gereshk had fallen.
Wow if only the coalition had good SIGINT they would have been able to hold
The Other Afghan Women
You reminded me I have that article bookmarked with an Archive link to read "later". I really have to read it tonight after I come home from work so "later" becomes now. I have "to read later" bookmarks that go back to 2018.
Glancing through it, the only connections are tortured ones the writer tries to draw; like how military personnel who were involved in the War on Terror were also involved with Theranos (like Jim Matthis! Remember how libs couldn't stop fawning over him? Yeah, he was involved in the Theranos scam lol).
The rest are just abstract ideas which were apparent in both, things like 'optimism'.
Somebody just wanted to get as many clicks as possible, and just got a bit too insane about it.
Somebody just wanted to get as many clicks as possible
It's funny when a "serious' writer tries clickbait and it fails. If you're not going to have any integrity - you should just go whole hog. He could have gone with something like this...
Did superhero movies lose Afghanistan?
They are more connected than you think.
I wrote the following using the article as inspriation...
Hollywood will eventually face a calamity with the failure of a nine digit superhero movie and the genre will quickly collapse. It'll be just like Afghanistan. Tinsel Town is a long way from Kabul, where U.S. citizens are still being evacuated following the withdrawal of American forces last month. But there's a tighter link than meets the eye. Consider the incredible success of superhero movies. Hackneyed plots, insipid dialog, and annoyed critics are no match for celebrity worship and CGI. Whether or not intentional deception was involved, both situations display the dishonesty and incompetence of interlocking tech, finance, media, and military elites.
I never watch superhero movies so I don't know how to use Tony Stark convincingly at all. But if I did - I could riff on him for 50+% of an article by using the theme of "dishonesty and incompetence of interlocking tech, finance, media, and military elites". This stuff is word salad anyway.
Theranos was an American privately held corporation which was touted as a breakthrough health technology company, with claims of having devised blood tests that required only very small amounts of blood and could be performed very rapidly using small automated devices the company had developed. However, these claims were later proven to be false.
Founded in 2003 by 19-year-old Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos raised more than $700 million USD from venture capitalists and private investors, resulting in a $10 billion valuation at its peak in 2013 and 2014.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos
