We’re back for Week in Woke, a couple of days late, but the right-wingers haven’t exactly stopped calling everything they don’t like “woke.”
Here are the latest catches:
The American military in Afghanistan
It was always going to be a debacle when the US finally pulled out of this forever war. But right-wingers seem devoted to learning nothing from the experience, instead turning their attention to a new favorite scapegoat: military “wokeness.”
No, Afghanistan didn’t fall because the Generals were so “woke” that they forgot to do their jobs. It’s because we never should have been there in the first place. As Jacob Silverman notes in The New Republic,
nation-building at gunpoint is a moral and administrative disaster; and practically everything we did made the country worse and the Taliban, who now sport an impressive array of U.S. armaments, more powerful.
In short, our loss in that impossible war had nothing to do with anyone’s pronouns.
Megan Rapinoe makes a sandwich woke
The anti-woke chuds still can’t get over the American women’s soccer team kneeling for the national anthem at the Olympics. Now they’re directing their ire at Subway — the cheapo sandwich chain — for featuring the alleged “anti-American traitor” and team captain Rapinoe in a commercial.
“Far left American soccer player Megan Rapinoe … won’t stand up for the American national anthem,” complains Mike LaChance in the reliably batty Gateway Pundit,
but apparently she can be paid to stand up for fast food products. …
People are tired of the woke garbage. And why is Rapinoe profiting from an American business if she won’t even stand for the anthem?
Hey, LaChance, which one of you brought home a medal for America in the Olympics? Pretty sure it was Rapinoe, not you.
The Alternate Woke Royal Family
Ok, so Meghan Markle, widely hated by racist royal family buffs, put out a birthday statement on behalf of her and her hubby Prince Harry addressing COVID, the chaos in Afghanistan (where Harry served for two tours) and urging readers to send money to help with the current humanitarian catastrophe in Haiti.
Somehow this caused the haters to hate the two even more. In the Express Chloe Davies writes:
[T]he statement has been referred to as a “vague publicity-seeking word salad” on social media, with criticism facing the Duke and Duchess as there is no reference to how the couple will be personally helping the crisis. …
The statement which addresses the intention to “alleviate the suffering” of others has come under scrutiny by a royal expert which has branded the scheme as a “phoney” attempt to be “woke” and relevant.
Prince Harry’s biographer Angela Levin told The Daily Mail’s FEMAIL column: “I think Harry and Meghan’s grandiose, comfy and caring comments about [these issues] is another example of them trying to set up some sort of alternate woke royal family”.
Hey, I’ll take it over the original royal family any day.
PS: Still working on that second Plymouth shooter piece.
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It’s interesting that Tucker is basically aligning himself with the Taliban.
I don’t get it. Why aren’t they cheering the Taliban victory, which is putting women back in what these people would agree is their place?
ETA: Did Tucker have anything to say when the God Emperor initiated peace talks with the Taliban?
Tucker Carlson — who, as always, is the sharpest knife in the drawer — comes out in favor of Taliban-style gender relations in the video above.
“It turns out that the people of Afghanistan don’t actually want gender studies symposia.They didn’t actually buy the idea that men can become pregnant. They thought that was ridiculous. They don’t hate their own masculinity. They don’t think it’s toxic. They like the patriarchy. Some of their women like it too.”
There are people — and then there are women.
The Guardian has an article from an Afghan woman (her byline is “A Kabul resident”) who doesn’t like the patriarchy:
An Afghan woman in Kabul: ‘Now I have to burn everything I achieved’A university student tells of seeing all around her the ‘fearful faces of women and ugly faces of men who hate women’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/15/an-afghan-woman-in-kabul-now-i-have-to-burn-everything-i-achieved
@Kat, ambassador, feminist revolution (in exile)
Oh goddess. My heart goes out to her, and every woman in the Taliban’s path. In that line I cannot help but contemplate my own life and how I’d feel if I had to do the same or die/get seriously hurt.
My hopes, poof. My dreams, gone. Anything I could be other than an adjunct to a man – no longer possible. And that’s the better case for me – the more likely case is that I will be killed, my identity erased, the name I spent so long considering and fashioning for myself scattered to the winds, and I will be misgendered and lied about in any histories told.
One of the crueler things we did as a nation was lie to these people. Was pretend that we’d be there. Was pretend we gave a damn about their survival instead of just oil and the re-election potential of being a “wartime president”.
@IgnoreSandra
Yeah, I can’t help but wonder, What would happen to me if I were an Afghan woman in Afghanistan right now.
If only the woke soyboys Americans who were driven out of Afghanistan were like the manly masculine men Russians who…were driven out of Afghanistan.
When it comes to those who think that the US army would have triumphed in Afghanistan if only it would have been more brutal, I can only refer to them to Maslow’s Hammer. Also, I’m rather appalled that news pundits and politicians either know so little, even if it has been raging for almost 20 years, about the war in Afghanistan they would say such stupid things or that they would lie to cater to an audience that is generally misinformed.
I think the rightwingers might counter that by saying that the Soviets tried to install a communist puppet regime, which was obviously going to be wildly unpopular with the local people, whereas the Americans just tried to build a stable allied government, which is different and should have been much more feasible (/snark)
More seriously, rightwingers might be inclined to argue (at least now, in the wake of this disaster) that the US shouldn’t have been the there to begin with, because building nations abroad isn’t America’s responsibility and/or because people who live in third world hellholes are probably inherently uncivilized. But then, it’d be difficult to blame the current fiasco on Biden and/or wokeness.
I am of the opinion the USA presence in the Afghanistan was inevitable but should have been much shorter. Occupying a country hoping the population will suddenly like you is akin to waiting for a miracle.
Also, apparently Trump might have done a deal to make the Taliban back in power faster after America’s retreat ? That seem in character for him at least. Perhaps too complicated for him tho.
I can’t really understand why the Taliban are in any way or shape popular even compared to American, but it’s the choice of enough Afghan that there isn’t much to do about it. Let’s just hope at some point their califate emulate more the middle age califates.
Unpopular opinion perhaps, but I think the USA should run a refugee program for Afghans instead of leaving the surrounding nations and Europe to take in the diaspora. Again.
Don’t get me wrong, I am 100% in support of housing refugees wherever they go but there is something off about the USA starting a war, creating a mess and leaving others to tend to the victims while it packs up and sashays away.
My heart is breaking for the women of Afghanistan in the meanwhile. Taliban says “women will have rights within the framework of Islam” but misogynists are ALL extremely dishonest about what they mean when they’re talking to the general public.
There’s a reason why Afghanistan has been known as the burial ground for empires for over two millennia. The only time Afghanistan has been occupied for any length of time was during the reign of Genghis Khan and that was only because the Mongols killed every male in Afghanistan above the age of ten.
@IgnoreSandra, @Kat
Yeah, all of that. No words, only anger and hopelessness.
@sunnysombrera
Not that unpopular an opinion, I absolutely agree. Accepting pretty much anyone who wants to get away is the very least we can do.
@Monzach
I used to believe that too about the “graveyard of empires” thing… then I read this Twitter thread.
https://twitter.com/justinpodur/status/1427319573544583178
Turns out it’s more complicated than that, and also the phrase was originally propaganda to distract from the horrific war crimes of the British there.
@All
Sorry for the vanishing act 🙂 My life’s been a world of chronic pain lately, and also I just started a new job, so things have been hectic.
@Cyborgette
I’m very sorry to hear about the chronic pain. Best wishes for that vanishing very, very soon. And congratulations on the new job. I hope it works out well.
@Kat
Thank you so much. Unfortunately I’m probably stuck with at least some of this pain for life. Rheumatoid arthritis is a bastard of an illness, even with the highly effective modern drugs for it.
When you have biographers like that, who needs enemies?
I’m just so disgusted (although not remotely surprised) with the way the discussion of Afghanistan has played out. Very little analysis of how we got here. No connecting the dots of how the military industrial complex and the oil industry profit from endless was in the Middle East and how that controls our foreign policy. No discussion of how militaristic nation building comes at the expense domestic investment and services. No reckoning of how this little project was carrying out a long tradition of white supremacist colonialism. Just partisan bickering over who’s tactical errors are to blame for this, Trump or Biden. Obsessing over how this could effect future elections. Right wingers pretending to give a fuck about Afghan women to own the libs.
Meanwhile the corporate media is falling all over themselves to relegitimize the Republicans who’ve spent the last several months openly cheerleading their own base’s attack on democracy, letting them retake the always false narrative that they are the party of national security.
It’s all so exhausting and depressing. No one ever learns anything or wants to. Well, no one with any power anyway.
Hey all. Not really related, but I’m finally trying to leave my abusive spouse.
Problem is, I’ve found resources for LGBTQ+ (youths only, no parents with kids), or for women (FULL!)
Which means that even though I have a credible threat to my and my daughter’s life, I have nowhere to go.
There’s a big gap in the system here, no help for LGBTQ+ adults with children to get out of abusive situations.
I might be able to get a slot in the bigger city 60+ miles to the north, but I’m in my final year getting my physics degree and the commute will take so much study time away from me, especially with an early start class this semester (which starts Monday).
Even if I wanted to go to my parents’, which I REALLY don’t, because they’ve attached all kinds of strings to whether I live there, like church attendance and not being able to transition, I’d have a hard time justifying it, simply because he knows where they live and that’s the first place he’ll go looking for me if he wants revenge.
I’m really just kind of venting because there’s not much I can do… I can’t get out, without a place to go to and I don’t make enough money to get an apartment myself.
@Seth S : I don’t have good advice for that, but I can wish you good luck at least :/
Let’s hope you find enough resources to get away despite the lack of of societal support.
@WWTH : You are spot on the lack of analysis or anything. Very few people even say out loud that “bringing democraty with an army” isn’t something that can ever work anywhere, even tho it would be like the minimal amount of reflexion on that whole endeavor. I guess there’s too many “war for democracy” with big scare quotes going around a bit everywhere in the world.
Is the oil comment about the USA war in general or is there actually oil in that country too ?
Tragedy.
told my 13 &14 year old sons you have three choices there
1) get killed as non taliban outright today
2) forced join the taliban army and get killed
3) become a slave worker for a while, eventually get accused of a heretical transgression and get killed
all three choices are get killed and as bad as, worse than girls their age.
Meanwhile, a lot of GCers are saying that the Taliban is actually good for women’s rights because they aren’t woke enough to ask for preferred pronouns.
@bcb : I have an hard time believing any of the GC who held that opinion that honestly believe that the rest of what the Taliban do isn’t worse than pronouns.
Also get added to the “GC actions are impossible to tell from MTGOW actions” pile.
The irony is, in Farsi/Persian, you use ‘they’ as a singular pronoun if you want to be polite anyway.
I guess it’s cold fact vs. colonialist bullshit time again:
1) The very moment we invaded, this precise outcome became inevitable. If we’d left in 2 years or stayed another 20, this would still be the outcome. This is because
2) Our imperialist puppet regime had negative legitimacy. No significant number of Afghans considered it a valid government, and the vast majority of our local “allies” were trying to glom onto as much money/valuata as possible before the wheels inevitably came off. Many of them (e.g., the “president” we installed) planned to use that money to skip town, because
3) We were never going to make even the slightest effort to bring our local stooges and running dogs out with our troops, because that’s not what empires do. Never have, never will, and anyone with even a passing grasp of history knows this full well. Afghans of all people know it, because it’s happened to them every couple generations for most of recorded history.
4) Everyone involved in planning the invasion knew 1-3 before they ever started. They never gave a half dram of stale rat piss about the Taliban or anyone in Afghanistan (or anyone in the US military, come to that). They did it to test out their new bang toys and funnel ever more money into their pockets and those of their profiteering cronies.
5) Every single person who ever supported this fucking atrocity has Afghan blood on their hands, and really needs to re-examine any commitment they have to anti-racism and anti-colonialism. This war, like all US military adventurism, was a crime against humanity, and people who actually consider brown foreigners people wothy rights have been pointing this out since before the beginning.
@Seth S
I’m so sorry you’re going through this.
I don’t want this to sound patronizing, and I’m sorry if you’ve already ruled this out. Depending on how big your university is, they might have housing options for you. At my old university the undergrad students with families were offered housing in the grad apartments and there was discounted/emergency housing for (at least grad) students who needed the financial help.
Your university might also have an office for diversity affairs (possibly even people specializing in LGBTQ+ issues). If you contact them, they may be able to put you in touch with the right housing people and negotiate a place for you to stay.
If you’re not sure who to contact and you have a professor you’re comfortable reaching out to and explaining things to, they may be able to get you in touch with the correct office as well.
Ohlmann,
I’m reaching back into my memory banks from almost 20 years, so sorry if I’m too vague. Afghanistan is not an oil producing country. However, through the 90’s there was a corporation (can’t remember which one) connected to Bush administration people (again can’t remember which ones) that was looking to put an oil pipeline in Afghanistan but the Taliban was too unstable and unreliable to do business with. So there was a real good incentive to install a government a bit more friendly to oil interests.
The book/pamphlet Dreaming War by Gore Vidal lays out in really good detail the ways there was a profit motive for occupying Afghanistan. I think I still have it somewhere. Now I kind of want to dig it out. I’ve been thinking about it a lot this week.