Harlequin5942
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User ID: 1062
Bin Laden got his start in the mujahideen in Afghanistan, fighting the Soviets, supported and trained by the US.
(1) I specifically said Al-Qaeda, because the original claim was about groups, not individuals. For the specific claim I made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_to_Osama_bin_Laden
Bin Laden was able to get Al-Qaeda going with his own money.
That bin Laden was a CIA proxy turned rogue makes for a great story and many people find it "too good not to be true". It supports non-interventionist ideologies, especially those who have never forgiven the US and the mujahideen for defeating the Soviets. The only problem is that it is not true, unless the CIA is far better at covering its tracks than we know. The suggestion in your comment (which may just be amphiboly) that he was trained by the US is a new one to me, though. I suppose it makes the story even better?
You could say that Al-Qaeda benefited INDIRECTLY from US aid to the mujahideen, but that's a clear motte-and-bailey. The original claim was (sarcastically) "we've never given weapons to some indigenous radical group because they were fighting the Russians, only to have them turn on us once that war was over!"
(2) "Didn't the Taliban get significant support from the US as well?"
You mean the organisation founded two years after the war with the Soviet-backed government ended? No.
However, someone could argue that the Taliban was the successor group of some mujahideen (specifically Pashtun ones around Kandahar) who had US support during the war, so I deliberately focused the discussion on Al-Qaeda, who seem to have undertaken 9/11 independently of the Taliban. Bin Laden claimed that Al-Qaeda was operating independently of the Taliban in the 9/11 attacks. He also did not attribute responsibility to the Taliban in tapes discovered in Afghanistan that (apparently) recorded bin Laden talking candidly. This was prior to his later (2004) admission of responsibility for the attack.
Indeed, the Taliban condemned the attack and were open (officially) to extraditing bin Laden to an Islamic country, if the US presented evidence. Of course, this offer was probably bullshit, and the US was justified in attacking the Taliban. However, the point is that 9/11 was not blowback for supporting a side in Afghanistan. If anything, it was the failure by the Bush I and Clinton administrations to support the establishment of a non-Taliban government in the mid-1990s that led to Afghanistan becoming a safe haven for bin Laden.
Harlequin5942
1d ago
9/11 was Al-Qaeda, not the Taliban.
The Taliban fought the US after (a) the US demanded that Bin Laden etc. were handed over and (b) the US joined with the Northern Alliance to overthrow the Taliban. If the Taliban had demanded the extradition of Pinochet (if he had been in hiding in the US) and allied with China to invade the US, I imagine that Americans would also have turned on the Taliban - not that the US was ever actually allied with or directly helping the Taliban, but I'm sure your suggestion to the contrary was just terse writing.
Harlequin5942
1d ago
Given that males and females both tend to prefer submissive to dominant roles in fantasy (if I recall the surveys correctly) the intended audience for that sort of thing might generally be generic women consumers of porn, rather than you.
Harlequin5942
1d ago
Not a normie job, but Sylvester Stallone's career went ok:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Party_at_Kitty_and_Stud%27s
An interesting parallel with the Russian Revolution, which started out being sexually liberatory, until it was decided that sexuality outside of marriage was "uncommunist" and "bourgeois decadence" (for the non-nomenklatura).
As Orwell discusses in Nineteen-Eighty Four, there is a tension between totalising ideologies and sex, because if you're thinking about the latter, you're not thinking about the revolution, and it forms loyalties that are transient, chaotic, personal, and potentially conflicting with loyalty to the ideology's preferred authority. And Dionysus unleashed really IS dangerous.
I think another factor is Mrs. Grundy. When Christian conservativism is the norm (at least when she is growing up) her prudishness will take a Christian conservative form. However, when progressive liberalism is the norm, it will take a progressive liberal form. I remember noticing this with the Feminist Society at university 15 years ago, who literally dressed like puritans (modest all-black clothing) and would almost literally march on stage to give their pre-agreed speeches at student meetings, like a set of militant evangelicals, to explain why "Pimp My ..." marketing or "Lads' Mags" should be banned from campus.
See e.g. the Friends episode where Phoebe discovers that her twin sister is a porn star. This is played for laughs, with the only shame being (some) men's enjoyment of porn and implicit inability to get the real thing. The idea of this being truly scandalous would be about as out of place in the Friendsverse as a serious episode about fighting communist infiltration or one of the women being kidnapped by cruel Native Redskins.
Depends by whom and how you define the porn industry. Playboy was mainstreamed through the 1970s. The 1980s saw somewhat of a reaction due to AIDS and the Traci Lords scandal that revealed that some (many?) pornstars were underage. Val Venis was a wrestler on children's TV, with a pornstar gimmick, in the 1990s. By the 2000s, Jenna Jameson was a celebrity who could be at a Holywood party without people particularly noticing. Nudity and simulated sex has long been common in Holywood films, with fairly artificial distinctions from "real" sex, and even then, softcore "porn" indicates that the difference was supposed to be a blurry line of genre/artistic merit. Wild Things circa 1950 would be regarded as a pornographic film, albeit one with high production values, yet it was a mainstream movie in the 1990s.
Harlequin5942
2d ago
I think a lot of people on the left have a power model of sexual agency (and agency in general, e.g. low wage work) which is extremely dangerous, because there's no way to translate a power model into a predictable legal system, in the same way that e.g. a classical liberal or (Abrahamic) religious conservative model can be predictable. Classical liberalism: people have freedom and responsibility, outside of some explicitly demarcated boundaries. Abrahamic religions provide a textual basis for law that can be either consulted directly by the literate, or at least (in a functioning Abrahamic society) there is probably a set group of widely respected interpreters (priests, ministers, imams, rabbis etc.) whose advice is a reliable guide to what is acceptable behaviour, even if you (or they) don't know the whole system of laws.
In turn, this inherent unpredictability of power models of agency transfers huge power onto those social forces with the authority to determine what power relations make interactions "exploitative" or "not real choices", as well as who gets victim status and its perks. A cheap but clear example of this chaotic authoritarianism is given by the handling by the MeToo movement of sexual assault accusations against Brett Kavanaugh vs. those against Joe Biden: there was no predictable and explicit principle, so what you end up with is trial-by-media of a partisan and special-pleading sort.
Harlequin5942
2d ago
Yes, it's a strange yet common view, where women are both inert objects AND people whose autonomous choices regarding abortion, adultery, prostitution etc. are sacred.
Harlequin5942
2d ago
I knew someone who embodied this confusion, from a very generic middle-class Western background. She was very excited to do "Slut Walks", but she was worried that they were being appropriated by "actually slutty women" i.e. strippers, prostitutes, pornstars etc., and she's opposed to the sex industry in all its forms. Her ethos was basically that sex workers should never be judged negatively (at least if women or gay) but also that their industries should be abolished.
Harlequin5942
3d ago
Do you really think every guy in this 63% is an unreasonable neurotic mess?
No, but I also I don't think every guy in the 63% is willing to get laid with any woman. If anything, you have to be a neurotic mess to want to sleep with ANY woman.
I'm not saying that young men have it easy in dating (quite the opposite) but that's not because it's impossible for them to get laid (with women - obviously it's easy for them to find some man willing to pound their ass) but rather it's because dating is a matching problem where relatively few people want to match with young men, especially the neurotic ones - which is a high proportion of young men.
In my experience, this strongly reverses once you go under a certain age (an age at which most people period would have been married not too long ago).
At that age, I would imagine we are talking about lizardman constants for both men and women, in terms of their desire to marry?
Harlequin5942
4d ago
The problem is that when female hypergamy is left totally unchecked (as it is now), the standards become so high that you can't meet them simply by being a hard-working guy with reasonable achievements. And even if you can, that takes time. Meanwhile the alleged prize waiting for you at the end of the tunnel already has a bodycount of 20 with guys who were born with a better jawbone or a few more inches of height. Not worth it.
It's really not that hard for men to get laid in the modern world, even if you're not good looking, and women tend to be more interested in getting married than men. Most ugly guys I know as friends have long-term girlfriends, but these are the types of guys I'd be interested in having as friends, whereas there are plenty of non-ugly guys I wouldn't be interested in having as friends and who don't (I don't say can't) get laid, largely it seems because of their neuroticism.
However, I agree that earlier marriage (at least involving men who grow up quickly - get a good job, a good trade, and have a reputation as a moral law-abiding god-fearing citizen) would be good. Promiscuity should be a reward of status for successful, artistic, or high-born men, like the old days.
Harlequin5942
4d ago
Can't think of any other reason so many cities have adopted policies of "decriminalizing" theft and lesser assaults.
Welfare state + ageing population -> reduced resources for anything else, including law & order and defence (ironically, what a classical liberal would regard as close to the entire purposes of the state).
Harlequin5942
5d ago
Men are fair (at least as regards this subject of evaluating the distribution of characteristics). Women are equivalently not.
In the sense of "fair" as a uniform probability distribution, I agree. And I think this creates enough social problems / advantages to think about. On the problem side, men often have a feeling of being valued only for what they do and provide in romance, which can create the feeling of being exploited. (The male counterpart of objectification, perhaps.) On the advantageous side, for most men, they must achieve something to be regarded as attractive; moreover, the more they achieve, the more opportunities they have; for mentally healthy men at least, this can serve as a motivation.
Harlequin5942
6d ago
My point is simply that it's mathematically coherent, though I'd add that when preferences are involved (such as sexual attractiveness) then human traits are often more Pareto distributed, e.g. wealth, income, popular success of people in creative fields, cities vs. towns, and movie profits. There are also human traits, such as incurring healthcare costs, which are not normally distributed.
Ratings of sexual attractiveness ARE "amorphous feelings", so the main challenge of justifying their existence would be to evince their existence. I suppose it's possible that women understate their ratings of men's appearances, e.g. to avoid seeming slutty.
As it happens, the Slavs were categorised by the Nazis as an Aryan race until 1939, after the conquest of Poland.
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