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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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The freedom to live any life, as long as it's the Taliban's life.

No. It's freedom to live any life that does not go against Taliban rules, not forced to live the Taliban life. It's a blacklist system, not a whitelist one. In return for the blacklisting of certain practices you get a strong social structure that over centuries has been tweaked and optimised to fit at least decently well with the human condition, I would say unless a person is at least IQ 120+ they would on average do better under it (assuming same economic situations etc. which is manifestly not the case in the real Afghanistan) than living under rootless modernity where "anything goes" and short term convenience without regard to long term social costs is the name of the game.

Also: from a western point of view from far away it looks like there is only one "way of life" of the people of Afghanistan or the Taliban, that is manifestly not true even amongst just the Pashtun people...