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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10550 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 24, 2025

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Two National Guardsman shot in DC.

Situation is still developing... conflicting reports about deaths. Trump has already requested 500 more guardsmen to be deployed in the capital. I'm afraid that any commentary on my part will be pure speculation: I'll edit this OP as more information comes to light. Apologies for the shortness of this initial post.

I would expect ICE to be shot at, especially during active operations: but the National Guard? They're literally doing nothing but stand around. They're dads and uncles pulling overtime shifts away from their real jobs, not stormtroopers. I'm highly suspecting some sort of mental illness or dumb radicalization, but I'll refrain on coming to conclusions for now.

Edit 1: Suspect has been identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a Afghan national evacuated back in 2021.

Edit 2: Speculatively, a linkedin profile of the same name seems to point him as being connected to a bunch of American NGOs. I'm always skeptical of these - the world is big enough for strangers to have the same names - but the face on the profile seems to match the suspect.

Or perhaps I don't have an eye for Afghans, and they all look the same to me.

Afghan national

We now have a new addition to the list embarrassingly wrong Scott Alexander quotes:

Many Afghans had collaborated with the Americans, eg as translators, in exchange for a promise of US citizenship. As the Taliban advanced, they called in the promise, begging to be allowed to flee to America before they got punished as traitors. The article focused on a heroic effort by certain immigration bureaucrats, who worked around the clock with minimal sleep for the last few weeks before Kabul fell, trying to get the citizenship forms filled in and approved for as many translators as possible. It made an impression on me because nobody was opposed to the translators getting citizenship, and the bureaucrats were themselves the people in charge of approving citizenship applications, so what exactly was forcing them to go to such desperate lengths?

How is that wrong?

The Afghan 'collaborators' were often drug-ridden, totally undisciplined, shamelessly corrupt, traitors and/or child rapists. These are the guys who gave us green-on-blue attacks. That's why the combined power of the US bloc lost to semi-literate goat-herders, the people we were allied with were in many respects worse than the Taliban and commanded less legitimacy among the population.

Plus the average Afghan refugee in the West is one of the most rapey and ill-mannered refugees.

That's why the combined power of the US bloc lost to semi-literate goat-herders, the people we were allied with were in many respects worse than the Taliban and commanded less legitimacy among the population.

This sounds like a cope. I am certain that allying with child-fucking warlords did not help win the hearts and minds of the Afghan population, but I also think that the eventual outcome was overdetermined the minute W invaded. Even if the US had made a point of murdering every alleged boy-fucker on the spot, the fact remains that few Afghans preferred freedom and democracy to the point where they were willing to die for it, while plenty were willing to die for the Taliban cause.

We could've installed a more effective puppet government and that would've worked. The Soviet puppet govt outlived the Soviet Union! Really not that hard to administer basic justice and secure a power base.

Realistically the US and co weren't going to do that or win because of these political factors you've identified - because freedom and liberal democracy was the goal. Would've been far easier to install a friendly govt that doesn't shelter Islamist terrorists. The bulk of the people we allied with were either feeble or corruptible, they were willing to give lip service to democracy or whatever they thought we would pay for. That's the problem.

Also I think the political value of murdering child rapists is underrated. That was the Taliban's original source of legitimacy, that was their starting mythology, hanging paedophiles from a tank barrel.

And it's worth noting that when we went in, the US still had the geniuses behind operation condor. Say what you will, but Pinochet was not soft on crime. It wasn't lack of ability.

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