Joe Biden looks a bit daft with his quote about how it won't all just collapse, but that will have been the military/security agencies lying to him like they have been all the others, so anyone blaming him is being a bit unfair. The best reactions are all the British idiots thinking we can lead some sort of effort to fix it. It's one thing being wrong about something, but anyone that deluded should be disqualified from having a say.
Granted, but those Planes and Missiles are what kept the Taliban quiet for so long.Originally Posted by Disco
They might not die doing it whereas they're pretty sure the Taliban will cut their heads off and rape their families.
I would say it was the American commitment behind them, whatever weapons they left behind (whoever they left them with) were just presents for the Taliban.
You're not going to beat the Taliban if you let them sit about in Pakistan while they wait for you to fuck off.
Has anyone who works in new media or comedy writing said they are 'angry' about it yet? That should solve things if nothing else has.
The problem with Old Taliban was them openly hosting most wanted terrorists, which was largely down to Mullah Omar being a top tier autist who refused to turn them away (or hand them over) because Islam, so if they can manage not to do that then they're just another shithouse country to ignore and our focus can turn back to supporting the very same people oppressing Women and Girls in Syria.
And they took the entire place in a fortnight with little more than technicals and AKs, a pile of aircraft or missiles that they don't have the infrastructure to properly deploy are unlikely to have slowed them down very much.
That's kind of in there with giving them the gear in the first place and I wasn't arguing that it was a workable solution. I was saying it's the only possible solution, but the outcome would have likely been worse than the current one. (See: Saddam Hussein)
The whole reaction in (social) media to this is so confusing (well, not really). On a fundamental level, the populace seems to prefer Taliban rule to anything else, so of course the "Afghan army" was gonna roll over in 5 seconds flat.
I saw some Pew survey or something that listed 99% of the local muslim population being in favor of Sharia (40% in Russia, 20% in Bosnia) which just makes you wonder what the fucking point of it all was other than boosting Lockheed profits for a couple of decades.
It's all just dumb liberal guilt.
I think there's a good argument that we might have actually been able to do something in Afghanistan if we hadn't fucked off to Iraq. Dick Cheney just happened to be the CEO of Haliburton and let's take a look at how their stock price was affected by the decision, pushed for by Dick Cheney. to go into Iraq.
Weird.
Take away any Islamic wording and ask our population if they'd be in support of chopping the hands off thieves etc. and I reckon we'd pull similar numbers.
I've said it before but if a party suggested their main policy was "Reinstating the death penalty, but only for pedophiles", they'd win in a landslide.
The Taliban became popular for hanging nonces, but I would like to see it expanded to other groups before I voted for it.
I don't doubt you're right for a second either.
Quite, even if you decide to leave them the slice of the USAF they would need to run everything you still just armed a potentially hostile Islamic nation and made them a sizeable power in the region with no real assurances that they're going to be your friends or run their country in the way you want them to. The alternative is staying there forever, like Korea, without any of the strategic upsides.
Relatedly I saw this and I'm like 'looks like the same platform as 49% of the country voted for last time round'
You can definitely turn this into a viable democratic nation by sending troops there for 20 years and holding some classes on how to treat women.
They're basically becoming the Southern States of America.Relatedly I saw this and I'm like 'looks like the same platform as 49% of the country voted for last time round'
'Rejection of science'.
These people can't poll a western election between two parties correctly and I'm supposed to believe their findings when it comes to Afghanistan public sentiment? How the fuck did they even survey them?
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tan...und-the-world/
https://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/...-about-sharia/
"Interviews".
38 thousand interviews representing the views of 2 billion people lol.
Sampling a population, how does it work?
Edit: Hey, they even had specifics per country.
Afghanistan
Sample design: Stratified area probability sample of all 34 Afghan provinces (excluding nomadic populations) proportional to population size and urban/rural population.
Mode: Face-to-face adults 18+
Languages: Baloch, Dari, Hazara, Pashto, Uzbek
Fieldwork dates: Nov. 27–Dec. 17, 2011
Representative: Nationally representative of 94% of the adult population.
Design effect: 3.4
I don't think this stuff can ever be truly representative because the real wingnuts are going to stop for a chat with a cunt with a clipboard. If you want to get their opinions you'd have to do it via the Muslim version of Fox News or something.
Overall point I was making is that the country is an irredeemable shithole (to borrow from Donny's vocab) with zero overall interest in anything Western. It's not like a silent majority is suddenly going to be oppressed by the Taliban. A few high-profile women will be dragged through the streets, a few interpreters who got left behind will be stoned to death, and it'll return to the general state it's been in for the decades before the invasion.
Last edited by Bernanke; 16-08-2021 at 05:53 PM.
Yes and that's absolute nonsense. 1500 people are representative of 94% of the population of Afghanistan (38 million people) give or take 5%?
Sampling a population, how does it work?
Edit: Hey, they even had specifics per country.
Afghanistan
Sample design: Stratified area probability sample of all 34 Afghan provinces (excluding nomadic populations) proportional to population size and urban/rural population.
Mode: Face-to-face adults 18+
Languages: Baloch, Dari, Hazara, Pashto, Uzbek
Fieldwork dates: Nov. 27–Dec. 17, 2011
Representative: Nationally representative of 94% of the adult population.
Design effect: 3.4
It's nonsense and lies and a scam.
So your argument is that statistics as a whole is bullshit?
Yes. From an economic standpoint it's used to produce something that supports the conclusion of whoevers paying you to do it.
From a political standpoint they've proved themselves absolutely useless over and over and over.
Well, 82% of them are.
Based on an interview with me and there being about 30 active posters (a far higher ratio than 1500:38000000) I can presume with a 5% margin of error that 100% of the board thinks the same as I do on every subject ever.
I'm not sure that's how maths works.
Statistics? No. Surveys? Definitely.
It's amazing that sampling a population is suddenly useless. You should write a paper on it before big Survey crushes you.
Similar to the stat on Afghanistan, I’m talking to my editor now and he said ‘Change the number to 99% so they don’t think we’re just making it up.’
I am not afraid of them.
Statistics as a whole aren't bullshit but as with Pepe's email the other day, they very easily can be. Especially with small samples, which this has.
If you are in fucking Afghanistan and someone comes around asking you questions about Sharia, I am sure most people will just answer whatever they think is less likely to get them killed.
Which is the number one issue with surveys: people answer based on what they think is the correct answer, not on what they actually "believe" (believe goes in quotations since very few people hold actual beliefs on anything). If you want to really know what people value, watch their actions. They tell you a lot more than what they respond when asked.
"Oh, I loved her first album." <sound of a gun being loaded>
A couple of thoughts;
1) Looking at the members of ‘The British Polling Council’, most of the ones big enough to have their own wiki page have only existed since the mid to late 2000s. I don’t think they suddenly got shit, I think they always were we just have statistical data (lol) to show how it’s flawed.
2) Maybe older polling pre-2000s was more correct thanks to a more homogenous opinion/Overton Window due to; a low information populace, less diversity in media etc. Going back to this being an American company. Only 2/3rds of the country could read in the 1950s. Considering how thick everyone is we’re a far more educated populace now which creates nuance that you can’t get from talking to 300 people and saying it speaks for 3 million.
My employer sends out Resident Satisfaction Surveys every year and they are absolutely pointless. They were wringing their hands over it last year because the "Very Satisfied" percentage went up (great) but so did the "Very Unsatisfied" one () and they were fretting over the lack of Middle ground.
They employed a fucking team to phone around the people that didn't return the survey and were somehow surprised that it was the entirety of the middle ground they were missing. Well fucking obviously lads, no cunt fills out a survey to say "yeah s'alright".
That don't impress me much
I think you just know when surveys are bullshit. I knew the Conservative Party were going to win in 2015, in spite of the polls, just as phonics can presumably feel that Afghanistan is a lot more enlightened than that survey would suggest.
My colleague knows this legend, who he says was actually arrested because he put his prices up, so nobody was really worried about him since it was just a routine shakedown thing. But obviously things have slipped a bit over there, so the prison officers released him with a mobile phone and a rag for his head and told him to run for it. He rang his wife and posted a Facebook appeal for help, and his old network got him on a flight back. The balls on that man. He was making a fortune as well.
I look forward to my mates in China stabilising the country while turning it into the world's biggest open cut mine.
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