The Taliban’s announcement that it is resuming publicly stoning women to death has been enabled by the international community’s silence, human rights groups have said.
Safia Arefi, a lawyer and head of the Afghan human rights organisation Women’s Window of Hope, said the announcement had condemned Afghan women to return to the darkest days of Taliban rule in the 1990s.
“With this announcement by the Taliban leader, a new chapter of private punishments has begun and Afghan women are experiencing the depths of loneliness,” Arefi said.
“Now, no one is standing beside them to save them from Taliban punishments. The international community has chosen to remain silent in the face of these violations of women’s rights.”
And somehow despite being obviously evil and despicable they believe themselves to be the good guys.
Religion is a hell of a drug.
In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion
- Christopher Hitchens
Except drugs aren’t always bad.
In reality religion is poison.Also, if we want to talk numbers, I’d guess religion has killed more people than drugs.
Orders of magnitude more.
The difference between drug and poison is dosage.
Taliban is obviously OD.
This though! You can be religious without being a delusional monster.
You can’t really be religious, especially a follower of Abrahamic faiths without
A: accepting what the texts actually say, which involves implicit acceptance of abhorrent views
Or
B: cherry picking and denying the abhorrent parts, which means you aren’t actually following the religion at all
If you go with B, you’re not really religious, you’re spiritual and searching for purpose and grabbing the easiest answer available.
Religion is poison
Well put. 👍
Religion is not always bad, just like people are not always bad generally. I’d agree that fanatism is always bad though.
Second this, no matter what you believe, the problem is that here you are forcing it on others by making it a literal state law, and I can guarantee that the taliban will use this to their advantage, not for ‘justice’
Republicans:
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Akhundzada said: “We will flog the women … we will stone them to death in public [for adultery].
“You may call it a violation of women’s rights when we publicly stone or flog them for committing adultery because they conflict with your democratic principles,” he said, adding: “[But] I represent Allah, and you represent Satan.”
Ah, the good old argument from “I’m just right and you’re wrong, OK?” with a garnish of “The Creator of the universe told me I’m great and said you suck.” Please may I never be this certain of anything.
When you can back up your arguments with the threat of death, you get used to saying bullshit and not having it challenged.
So Satan is a nicer dude than Allah?
Both are equally imaginary
He’s technically true in the last part though
This was always going to happen. Once Trump signed the surrender, and released Taliban fighters, some of which run this government, the die was cast.
The die was cast long before that when the US decided to fund the mujahideen to fight the Soviets. That destroyed the possibility of a secular Afghani state. The US later found that the easiest way to pacify the country was to simply bribe Taliban aligned warlords. Once the money spigot was turned off, a Taliban resurgence was inevitable. Every administration from Reagan to Biden shares some blame in what is happening today.
Once Trump signed the surrender, and released Taliban fighters
Can you please point me to more info on these two points?
Signed by Trump and allowed to take effect by Biden. Both US parties accepted this result.
Well Biden could have put in the troops needed that Trump removed I suppose. Tear up the capitulation, etc.
Don’t blame the president: WE decided to go in and kill a ton of Taliban, WE decided to spend actual trillions standing up and equipping an army that did not give enough of a fuck about anything but grifting. The ANA did not even try to slow down the Taliban when the US stopped acting as a backstop. Afghanistan never really thought of itself as a cohesive nation, we were never going to change their psyche.
I’d rather blame Bush and Obama for sinking trillions into helping their friends get rich at the cost of everyone pretending we were building a real country.
He’s not the president, dude…
Imagine, if you will, a scenario where things at one point in time cause other things at later points in time.
Cristofacists looking at this and thinking to themselves: “We can one up them”
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Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
John 14:6
Has anyone in history ever said anything this closed-minded and intolerant? If this sentence were true that means that there is one truth. Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism,… All of them are at best truth-like. There is only one answer to question of what to believe, this is one authority, and there is one way to live. As intolerant as Islam is at least it acknowledges that the people of the book have a valid way of being. Christianity doesn’t even approach this. And historically we know exactly what this doctrine produced. The Hindus are still here, despite a thousand plus years of Muslim domination, what happened to the pagans of Europe? Ok so you know which is worse. It took them under a century to get rid of them.
I’m more surprised they weren’t already.
Yeah, I didn’t realized they ever stopped.
Conservatism is a deadly, contagious social disease that destroys entire cultures.
In Afghanistan, we can see the natural, final stage of conservatism. This is what the future holds for any country that cannot offer sufficient resistance to this disease.
Honest good faith question: what can the international community do?
Nothing because it has no actual power. What have they done with regards to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine or Palestine?
Sadly but it’s all about selfish (state) interests, not human rights at all. Nothing new.
Maybe accept migrants from Afghanistan?
This is, IMO, the only true answer to many of the atrocities we see across the world.
I think that western countries should look to improve their infrastructure for the inevitable future where more people choose to live in Europe and North America.
Yeah, if we really care about improving people’s lives we should let people make the choice to come to countries where they will have rights. If enough people leave, eventually countries will have to start changing their policies. Inflicting centuries of war and colonialism seems more about big countries having access to land and resources.
Colonize the land in the name of oil /s
Drone strike a wedding party. Final offer
It depends. What are you willing to sacrifice to get something done?
Mind their business. Hard truth.
Horror from those of us who aren’t going to get stoned to death.
Terror from those who are.
Important to understand the distinction between these emotions.
Well, 20 years and what have we learned:
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If you invade a nation with no solid national identity that prefers tribal identity, you’re going to have to stay to build that national identity.
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To build that national identity you’ll need to stay until a whole generation has gone through the new way of life you have made: born, went to school, got a job, got married, had some kids, grew old, and died. The new way of life needs to be the only way of life in living memory.
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So you’re talking about a minimum of 100 years of occupation.
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If you pull out too soon because back home the appetite for a foreign deployment has wained, don’t get surprised when the old way comes back.
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Guerrilla fighting is super effective in the long run.
Great post. I’ll just quibble with one word. It took 20 years to re-learn what most of our ancestors knew well. It isn’t enough to occupy a country. If you want to replace an ancient tribal culture, you have to remove that culture’s elites, colonize and farm the land with your own citizens more or less permanently, put down any resistance violently, and then support the colony until it finally assimilates the existing population or is assimilated by it. All of the ancient empires did that when they could, Europe did it during the age of colonization where feasible. The Arabs did it during the Islamic conquest. China has done it throughout their long history. Russia is the largest country on Earth because it colonized all of the indigenous cultures from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean during the conquest of Siberia. The Soviet Empire tried to do it to Eastern Europe too with their Russification programs, but weren’t able to stay long enough because the Soviet Empire was destroyed after only 45 years.
The US was never going to colonize Afghanistan. It was folly to believe that Afghanistan was going to adopt western values in a mere 20 years of occupation.
That sounds like you announcing you cured HIV by simply shooting the infected. It might be true in one sense but even if that worked the cure is worse than the disease.
I really don’t want any country involved in genocide
Well I mean, that’s an effective cure, though just make sure to incinerate the remains so the virus has less chances to survive. /S
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Yeah god definitely waited until 1400 years ago to give out the -real- rules, and this made the list?
‘The international community won’t hold them accountable’ - Maybe for years under friendly occupation and support you should have held them accountable. I don’t believe for a second your husbands and sons have no involvement in the country’s culture. You effectively had years to erase the taliban and you collectively enabled them to fight the Americans instead. Anyone still in Afghanistan after all these years should not be having any surprise with the way things are going.
The international community is busy making sure hamas can create exactly the same brutality in Palestine,
Fuck these guys. Bunch of cowards.
And exactly what form of even potentially effective action are they expecting?
Obedience
