Alphas Fuck, Beta Bucks

That would be fun. I love chewing the fat and shooting the shit.

Good reading recommendation, Mark :) Now I kinda want to dare you to make a fun porn version of the 1001 nights ;) Extra cool points if you add PolPorn to it 😂

Arys

I was… 16, I think, and I remember having lunch with my dad. He looked at the screen while the plane crashed live, and we were all serious at the restaurant. My dad only said “welp, good times are over, kiddo: I hope you keep good at studying…” I’m not American, but I do have several American friends who have lost brothers or boyfriends there, and… I’m sorry, guys, if that serves: both for the loss, and for the added offense to injury 😓

Arys

One day, we’ll go drinks together and it’ll be epic, I swear, Mark 🤩💪🏼 Onwards to #PolPorn! The thing is that this is already a treaded road: I had to read and write a lot about Toynbee once, and I fully recommend it to anyone interested: as John Smith says, you cannot force “advanced” technology —in this case, ideas— into others. It *always*, with the textbook in hand, ends badly. Toynbee also discovered that hubris accumulates over time: that is why every generation believes “oh, but the others got it wrong: this time it will be different”, and… Well, we learn by example 😂

Arys

It wasn't just one day. The Taliban were advancing for months, the media just weren't telling people about it.

Wild Bill

(ominous music plays).

This end was predictable and you are correct you cannot force a National Identity on a group of people. They have to do it organically and having your National ID defined as we hate outsiders doesn't work unless that threat is near permanent. Our infrastructure is shit at home is anyone really surprised we cannot build another nation? Should have spent that cash at home and not on the Military Industrial Complex.

John Smith

WOW Taiwan!! Taiwan people here lol

BEN W

And worst of all, Chadiban is Uncle Sams adopted son.

Julian Fratzscher

I feel for America, all those lives lost, all that money that could have been used to benefit its own peoples.

SorrowBorn

I’ve long stopped caring, life is too short to worry about every single problem that happens overseas

DwarfDaddy

I guess from my perspective, nothing really 'fell apart' because nothing was ever brought together. One of my favorite writers, Abū Zayd ‘Abd ar-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad ibn Khaldūn al-Ḥaḍramī (1332-1406) wrote a lot about this sort of thing. I read his work The Muqaddimah a long time ago, and it dedicates several chapters to countries like Afghanistan. He describes them as lacking in 'Asabiyyah' (nationalism), but that doesn't mean that they're submissive or even disorganized. They're actually quite resentful of outsiders, nationalists, and anyone who would force them to group up into groups that they don't want to be grouped up in. You can't force people to accept 'Asabiyyah,' it has to develop organically, usually around a single ethnic group, or a single ruler, or a single religion. The purpose of Islam was to be the ultimate asabiyyah, uniting the whole world, but LOL, obviously not. Multi-tribal territories like Afghanistan only develop asabiyyah in response to an invasion, so what unites them and defines them is their hatred of a mutual enemy. That becomes their entire culture. Their entire purpose. They begin having children just to raise soldiers to fight their enemy. This asabiyyah empowers them, but only for that one goal. Once the enemy is defeated, the residual asabiyyah can last for about three or four generations, all of whom will stay united, simply from the memory of defeating a common foe (like how we glorify our defeat of Nazi Germany), but this asabiyyah fades with the third generation, because they'll have no living memory of the enemy that their grandparents defeated.

Yeah. The most I can do about Clown World is honk back. In Hinduism it's called the Kali Yuga, and it's only getting more powerful.

yeah after 20 years of bullshit, it's kind of hard to be deathly serious all the time about this situation, I was 11 when the towers went down, my grandma's birthday was that same week (she's a few years gone now), I'm now 31... I've seen friends go over there and not come back and the few that came back are hurt mentally or fucked physically... so laughing at the situation seems better especially since the alternative is crying about it.

That black guy

Really is just amazing how in one day. Everything just fell apart like a stoner comedy.