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huwujiu · 2 years

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The Beggar

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Sanjay hated India. He was Indian by birth, but had lived in the United States since the age of five and was an American citizen. He had become a wealthy entrepreneur in northern New Jersey, owner of a dozen apartment buildings, a chain of coffee shops, and two hotels. Although Hindi had been spoken in his home, he refused to speak it after the age of eight or so, and had long since forced every word of the language from his memory. He was proud to speak American English, not the clownish dialect of the Subcontinent that Western comedians loved to ridicule.

Although his parents were both reasonably devout Hindus, Sanjay was not. He regarded a religion that worshipped elephant-headed gods and phallic symbols an embarrassment to civilization, and permitted no Hindu images in his own house. Neither were Bollywood films, cricket matches, or curry welcome in Sanjay’s family. He ate like a Westerner and enjoyed Western forms of entertainment, and made his family do likewise. His wife, a fellow business major he had met at Penn, was of a respectable lineage of Brahmins – of the Boston, not the Indian, variety. Sanjay’s two high-achieving children had never been to India nor met any of his distant relatives still living there. He had no desire to subject any of them to the cultural pressures that his Indian family members would exert – to go back to India to marry a proper Indian woman, to consult an astrologer in order to determine a career track, and so forth. His son was a high school track star and his daughter had made the honor roll every single semester since starting Middle School.

And now Sanjay was back in India, sans family, for the first time since he had boarded that flight to New York with his parents almost forty years earlier. A major international conference of hoteliers in Delhi had finally drawn him back, although it was his wife who had persuaded him to go. Such conferences often afforded opportunities for networking, and even Sanjay had to admit that many of the most successful hotel managers in the United States were Indian. But he notified none of his relatives in India of his visit, and vowed not to leave the opulent, air-conditioned confines of the Oberoi Hotel in what passed for a swank neighborhood of Delhi. Though it had been four decades ago, he still remembered the smells, the noise, the chaos, and above all the heat and humidity of India, and he had no desire to experience any of them again. Sanjay was also mortally afraid of diseases, and knew that the streets of India’s cities literally teemed with filthy beggars carrying all kinds of contagious pathogens. So while most of the other foreigners at the conference took advantage of downtime to tour the city, Sanjay locked himself in his room watching CNN and BBC – the only Western channels available – and running his businesses via the Internet.

But on the next-to-last day of the conference, the featured speaker – along with the breakout sessions and workshops based on his presentation – were all cancelled unexpectedly when the speaker came down with dengue fever. To compensate, the conference organizers announced an all-expenses-paid day trip to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. Five state-of-the-art air-conditioned buses had been chartered, and competent tour guides were retained to ensure a thoroughly sanitized experience. And Sanjay, who had not left the hotel for six days, decided reluctantly to go along. The Taj Mahal, after all, was one of the few things India could justifiably take pride in (he thought). As long as his exposure to the streets of India was kept at an absolute minimum, he was willing to risk the trip. Besides, several friends he had made at the conference, whom he was cultivating for possible future dealings, were taking the trip, and he had no desire to be the only foreigner at the conference who missed the chance to see the world’s most beautiful building.

His newfound colleagues chattered happily as the huge bus cut its way through Delhi’s tangles of traffic. From his window, Sanjay could see what he regarded as India’s human refuse: beggars (many of them deformed), unkempt autorickshaw drivers, untouchables sweeping sidewalks and gutters, street urchins, homeless men defecating in public, and mangy street dogs living off the mounds of garbage that filled every vacant lot. Even through the tinted window-glass, from within the deliciously air-conditioned confines of the bus, Sanjay felt that old revulsion. How could so many hundreds of millions of people be content to live like this, choking on one another’s exhaust fumes and sewer odors? Even on the highway, the traffic was unspeakably clotted, with horns blaring and the tiny Bajaj autorickshaws weaving amongst the larger vehicles, holding up everyone else. As the miles went past, Sanjay began to doubt the wisdom of coming on this trip.

Hours later, the buses pulled up not far from the Taj Mahal, along a broad, thoroughly Indian avenue that somehow always got cropped out of the promotional photographs of the place. Sanjay saw with horror that they would indeed have to walk several blocks through Agra’s crowded streets to get to the grounds of the Taj itself – several blocks of heat, exhaust, obnoxious touts, and revolting beggars. He considered staying in the bus, until the driver shut off the engine and the outside heat began to creep in through the vents and open door. With extreme reluctance, Sanjay got off the bus with everyone else, where the late morning heat and humidity hit him like a physical wave. He felt his pores open wide and begin spurting sweat down his back and chest. The near-tropical sun rays caused his scalp to prickle. And his composure began to fray amid the insistent clamor of dozens of touts and hawkers, who had descended on the bus the moment it stopped.

The guides, who spoke impeccable English, began their spiel about the history of the Taj Mahal, whose white minarets loomed over the scorching chaos of Agra like pristine mountain peaks. They walked towards the gleaming towers, threading their way past hundreds of vendors with their goods spread out on dusty blankets or crammed into makeshift wooden stalls amid drifts of discarded juice cartons and banana peels.

And there were beggars, of course. Dirty-faced urchins clamoring for rupees and pencils. Women dressed in rags, clutching infants against pancake-flat breasts. Victims of hideous birth defects and crippling diseases, displaying their monstrous deformities in hopes of eliciting greater sympathy from well-heeled tourists. Sanjay felt sick, unwilling and unable to give money to any of them, knowing that if he did, he would instantly be mobbed by others, as many of his more naïve traveling companions were finding out. Also, Sanjay had no desire to come into direct physical contact with anyone who could possibly transfer to him some hideous disease. All of which, he told himself, was more than enough reason to keep his distance and give to no one.

But inwardly, his Western-cultivated conscience nagged. He was rich and successful, having enjoyed opportunities these wretched souls could never begin to comprehend.

Suddenly he noticed, seated apart from the others under a small peepul tree, a sadhu dressed in a dirty orange dhoti. His hair was tangled and filthy, and his torso emaciated. He had gotten this way, Sanjay reflected, by having renounced family, job, and friends and adopting the mendicant lifestyle of a Hindu holy man, as ordinary Indian professionals sometimes inexplicably did.

He gaped at the man’s legs, or what was left of them. All of his toes were gone, and what remained of one of his feet was horribly eaten away. Several fingers were missing also, and unsightly sores covered his legs and arms. The man was suffering from an advanced case of leprosy. Sanjay knew that leprosy first robbed the body’s extremities of the ability to feel pain, resulting in fingers and toes worn away by unwitting self-abuse. In places like India, rats often accelerated the process, chewing away at unresponsive leprous limbs while their owners slept.

Sanjay noticed that the brass tray on the ground in front of the leprous holy man had more than the usual scattering of coins. Most Hindus were especially likely to give to beggars with an aura of piety, to bolster their own karma. Sanjay’s gaze lingered on the sadhu a split second too long. The man had noticed Sanjay and was looking directly at him with coal-black eyes. Sanjay wanted to look away, but the man’s eyes held him, imploring. The beggar spoke no words, but Sanjay knew what he was thinking: Come here, rich man, son of India. Open your pockets, buy me another few days of sustenance. You whom the gods have blessed, share your substance with a brother.

Involuntarily, Sanjay put his hand in his pocket and took hold of a crisp 1000-rupee bill. He took a half-step forward before a wave of revulsion stopped him short. He let go of the bill and withdrew his hand from his pocket. Glaring at the beggar, he shook his head and stepped back. The man’s face fell, and turned to look at another passerby, who tossed a ten-rupee coin on the tray.

Sanjay hurried forward to keep up with his group, still feeling sick. For some reason, he was no longer able to hear what the guide was saying. The hubbub of traffic and teeming humanity, in combination with the burning sun, was overwhelming his senses.

“Hey, sar, you, come here!”

Too exhausted to resist the wiles of yet another tout, Sanjay turned toward the voice. A small, slender Indian with eyes that seemed a bit too narrow was gesturing at him.

“You too hot. Come inside! Have cool drinks and A/C!”

Sanjay’s eyes followed the man’s pointing finger. Over the entrance to what looked like a very dark little restaurant, a grimy sign in Hindi and English advertised “cool drings” and A/C. Gratefully, Sanjay made his way into the establishment, which proved to be as deliciously dark and cool inside as the sign promised.

The man pointed at a table. This time of day, there were no other customers, which suited Sanjay just fine. He sat down, and the man brought him an ice-cold bottle of Mirinda. As he drank gratefully, enjoying the too-sweet liquid sloshing down his parched throat, he noticed several other men, who evidently worked behind the counter, watching him closely with smiles that made him a bit uneasy. But he finished the bottle and leaned back, savoring the stream of cold air pouring out of the A/C unit directly above his head. He thought about the cool, dry airplane he would be boarding the following day that would take him back to civilization, and felt his eyelids drooping irresistibly.

Many hours later, Sanjay awoke. He had fallen asleep somehow, but he did not remember dreaming. It had been more like oblivion, and for a moment, he was unsure who he was. Then memory returned. He remembered the cool drink inside the air-conditioned shop, the men watching him….

Sanjay groaned. He felt the thick, humid Indian air and smelled the awful smell of offal. He opened his eyes weakly, his head throbbing, and saw that it was dark out. He was lying on his belly on some rough surface, and in his limited field of vision he could make out what looked like a pile of garbage inches from his face.

He tried to move, but his limbs felt numb, doubtless an after-effect of whatever drug they’d given him. Then he felt something touch his back, and heard a strange voice humming what sounded like a mantra in Hindi.

Appalled, Sanjay struggled to move, and managed to roll partially over, realizing as he did so that he was completely naked and covered in dirt. In a panic, he rolled again, over onto his back and what felt like more refuse, some of which oozed pulpily against his bare skin. He shuddered, partly at the garbage and partly at the vision of someone kneeling over him, someone gaunt, with lank, tangled hair, who held a small round object in one hand. In the background, an orange streetlamp glowed, giving enough light for him to see that he was lying in an alley amid piles of garbage.

The figure kneeling over him straightened slightly, allowing the light from the lamp to reveal his features. Sanjay shuddered. It was the leprous sadhu. The man smiled at him and, reaching out with a clawlike hand with only three remaining fingers, daubed some kind of ointment on his chest.

Sanjay tried to scream, but only a gurgle came out. He shook his head, but the hand continued to apply ointment, doubtless some kind of horrid ayurvedic concoction.

Exerting all his strength, Sanjay convulsed his body, jerking his head backwards and moving his arms for the first time. In his effort to get away from his ghastly caregiver, his head knocked into a pile of garbage, causing it to cascade onto his face. Since his mouth was open attempting to scream, some of it fell into his mouth, including some unmentionable piece of discarded meat that seemed to have things wriggling in it.

Choking and retching on the refuse, Sanjay tried to sit up, spitting out the foulness as best he could.

Finally, he managed to croak at the sadhu in Hindi that he thought he had forgotten, “Door jao! Go away!”

The man withdrew his hand, and Sanjay managed finally to sit up, still spitting. With one hand, he waved angrily at the sadhu. “Door jao! Mujhe akela chhod do! Leave me alone!”

The man stood up, his expression unreadable, and slowly backed away. When Sanjay gestured again, the sadhu turned and limped painfully up the alley, disappearing around a corner.

With the sadhu gone, Sanjay was able to focus on his predicament. He was stark naked and covered in garbage, and his mouth was full of the foul taste of unmentionable filth. Not only that: his back and chest were covered with ointment that the sadhu had applied with his leprous hands.

Sanjay stumbled to his feet, dizzy from the smell of garbage and the after-effects of the drug. He looked frantically around for his clothes, but everything was gone. His clothes, cards, money, passport, everything had disappeared. He groaned in despair and sank to his knees, fully aware of his predicament. The buses had long since left without him, and no one knew or cared where he was. He was covered in filth, looked and stank like some street person, and didn’t have a stitch of clothing on him. He, Sanjay the man of means, was in serious trouble.

Suddenly he noticed a dhoti lying beside him on a comparatively clean patch of ground. It was old and frayed, but folded neatly. He realized that the sadhu must have left it for him. Gritting his teeth, he girded himself with that most Indian piece of clothing, and stumbled down the alley towards the orange streetlight, still gagging.

Emerging from the narrow cul-de-sac, Sanjay realized he was no longer on any familiar street. In the humid, clouded dark he could make out no landmarks. He knew the Taj Mahal could not be far off, but in which direction? The dimly-lit street wound past mostly silent padlocked storefronts and grubby concession stands, now all but abandoned except for a few scrawny stray cats and – something else. Sanjay could not see any other human beings aside from a bearded man sleeping on a piece of cardboard across the street, but he could see constant, furtive movements in the dark corners and interstices all around him. He caught a brief glimpse of baleful red eyes and a narrow, whiskered snout that whisked back into the darkness as he turned to look. Rats! Sanjay felt a shaft of terror. There were rats all around, larger and far more aggressive than the feral cats, prowling fearlessly in search of anything – anything – to consume. Some of these monstrous rodents might have been snacking on the fingers and toes of the leprous sadhu, he realized. Or perhaps they had grown fat and predatory on some abandoned waif too small to fend them off and too slow to outrun them. As it was, they had already apparently sensed that he was no threat, and had begun emerging from the shadows, some to forage without regard for Sanjay’s presence, and some simply to perch atop the refuse and stare at him.

Got to find help, Sanjay thought. He had no money, no clothes, no identification, no food, and no water – and no way to obtain any of these unless he could locate and convince some good Samaritan to help him. The nearest United States government office was hours away, back in New Delhi, and he doubted that the local police would be willing to help. But he had to try. He turned and stumbled painfully forward, and the rats followed. He heard the obscene rustle of dozens of tiny claws and scaly tails as he willed his legs, suddenly and inexplicably racked with shooting pain, to propel his filthy, exhausted body up the street. Each step he took produced agonizing pain from the soles of his feet to his thighs, and he wondered in his terror whether the knockout drug he had been given was responsible.

Unable to support his weight, he leaned against a dusty, shuttered shopfront, willing his legs not to buckle. The rats chittered triumphantly, and he felt several furry bodies brush against his ankles.

“Get away! Back off!” Sanjay was shocked at how weak his voice sounded, and how ineffectual his flailing arms were. The rats were all around him, their eyes glittering red in the dim light. Some of them were nearly the size of woodchucks, and they all clearly sensed that Sanjay was no threat. There were at least thirty of the bristling brutes now, some of them sitting up on their haunches, watching and waiting.

Sanjay turned, still leaning against the wall, and resumed his slow, lurching progress. The pain in his feet and legs, he noticed, was giving way to a strange numbness that made him feel as if his feet were no longer attached, and that each step was into a sort of bottomless liquid. There was no reassuring contact of sole upon stone or hardpan, no contraction of muscle and tendon propelling his body weight forward.

There was, momentarily, an odd tickling sensation somewhere near where his right ankle used to be. Glancing down, Sanjay saw two rats gnawing at his lower leg, just above where the Achilles tendon was anchored. He saw spurting blood – his own – followed by a surge of furry bodies drawn to the smell. Sanjay screamed in horror and lashed out with his other foot, kicking savagely at the rats, which withdrew a few paces, squeaking and hissing threateningly. Why can’t I feel any pain? What is happening to me?

Sanjay looked around desperately for anything that might fend off the ravenous little beasts, and noticed a street-sweeper’s handmade broom leaning against a dirty garbage cart. As it was the property of someone of very low caste, it was unlikely that any of the local merchants or other residents of this particular street would touch it. Sanjay, however, was long past caring about such niceties. With a clumsy sweeping grab, he snatched the broom and began smacking the street threateningly. The rats knew better than to come within reach. They withdrew a few meters, but they did not abandon the chase. And there were more coming, dozens more, swift dark shadows converging down the street from both directions.

“Help!” Sanjay began calling desperately in English, his mostly forgotten childhood Hindi no longer adequate to the purpose.

A few paces ahead of him, he saw a stirring in a dark doorway. A slender arm flashed into view, beckoning wildly at him. Sanjay wobbled forward, no longer caring if he was being lured into a den of thieves. Slender gray fingers grabbed his hand and pulled him through the dark doorway, and a heavy door banged shut, cutting off the awful whisper of rat’s feet. Sanjay thought he could hear some of the little brutes scrabbling at the door, trying to dig underneath or gnaw through. But the wood was thick. It might just be the blood vessels hammering in his ears.

He turned to his rescuer. It was the sadhu, holding the dirty stub of a candle and staring at him with something like pity. And there was something else in those dark eyes, perhaps a bit of fatalistic satisfaction.

“Thank you,” Sanjay said unsteadily. “Dhanyavaad.”

The beggar raised his hands and pressed the leathery palms together, along with what remained of his fingers, but said nothing. He turned silently and headed off down a narrow dark passageway, and Sanjay had little choice but to follow.

His legs and feet completely insensate and feeling detached, Sanjay stumbled heedlessly after the beggar, sensing that upon him alone his survival now depended. He heard rather than felt a sickening crunch underfoot. Looking down, he saw that he had trodden on an empty bottle that had shattered underneath his lacerated bare foot, one of the razor shards slashing his right big toe almost to the bone. The toe gushed blood over the damp floor, but no sensation of pain was forthcoming. With a moan, Sanjay hurried forward behind the shrinking light of the beggar’s candle.

They came to another door, which looked to be of very ancient workmanship, probably from long before the Raj. Sanjay knew little of Indian history, but he had read somewhere that, before the British came, the Moguls had been masters of India. They had built the Taj Mahal and, by all appearances, the massive bronze door in front of them as well, which was covered with what looked like Persian writing.

The beggar pulled on a tasseled rope, and from somewhere within, a bell bonged dully. The door swung open, pulled by two men in turbans. Seeing their open sores and missing digits, Sanjay realized that they, too, were leprous. The sadhu walked through the door without looking back, seemingly indifferent to whether Sanjay followed or not. The two door attendants waited impassively. Sanjay looked over his shoulder at the inky black tunnel behind him and thought of the rats. Beyond the door, he could hear the murmur of voices and see light from a few dim electric bulbs.

Squaring his shoulders, and trying to ignore the pitiful condition of his feet and legs, he walked through the door as steadily as he could. Trying to ignore the heavy sound of the door closing behind him, Sanjay looked around at the people inside.

He was in a dilapidated hall of some kind, its vaulted stone ceiling supported by crumbling pillars. The odor of decay and filth was overpowering. The beggar – his beggar – was facing him, and dozens of others like him were spread across the dirty tiled floor, staring silently at the newcomer. They were young and old, men and women, some dressed in the saffron garb of sadhus, others in filthy, threadbare rags. All were gaunt and undernourished. And every single one was visibly leprous.

Sanjay recoiled at the sight of oozing sores and missing fingers and toes. The floor on which his bare feet stood – the feet he could no longer feel – was doubtless covered with whatever nightmare pathogen was responsible for their condition. He tried to back away, but felt his legs buckle beneath him. He fell backwards, flailing helplessly, his head smacking the floor hard. He blacked out for the second time.

Sanjay came to almost immediately, jarred back into nightmare awareness by the touch of many hands and the jabber of whispering voices speaking Hindi. Or was it Hindi? The throbbing in his head seemed to have distorted the sounds, but he recognized none of the more or less familiar cadences of his long-neglected native tongue. In his addled condition, the whispering sounded like demented, incomprehensible gibberish.

He opened his eyes and struggled to sit up, feeling the filth on the floor peel off his bare back. All around him a ring of intense, lean faces studded with gumdrop-black eyes drew back, and the whispering subsided. His head was full of pain, but his legs and arms seemed to float on air, bereft of all sensation. Sanjay looked in the direction that he knew his legs must be, and screamed. Though the cut toe had stopped bleeding, it still hung at a crooked angle, clotted with gore. Two more toes had turned a deep purple color, and his feet and lower legs had also turned patchily purple, with several open breaks in the skin oozing blood and pus. Somehow, he realized with a sudden, fierce certainty, leprosy had invaded his body. With inexplicable speed, it had deadened the nerves in his feet, legs, and hands, rendering his limbs helpless against the merciless forces that tore, abraded, cut, and severed. He was no longer, he grasped numbly, Sanjay the prosperous American businessman, proud husband and father of four high-achieving children. He was a nameless, destitute leper among his own kind.

He felt a warmth on his chest, and saw that someone – possibly his beggar, who sat closest to him, staring intently into his eyes – had rubbed more of the foul-smelling ointment on him. Touching his forehead, his hand came away grayish-white; he had been doused with vibhuti, the sacred ash.

Why? Why me? The despairing thoughts crowded into his throbbing head. From somewhere outside his head came thoughts from some Other. He felt the powerful will of the sadhu, his sadhu, contending with his own, vigorous and in deadly earnest, despite the man’s ravaged body. Why not you, son of India? Do you believe yourself apart from us? It is our blood in your veins, the tainted blood of ten million lepers, the most wretched of all, the refuse upon which your world has been built. Why not you, and all your family, and all of your friends and colleagues, those with whom you have gotten rich and enjoyed the fatness of the earth, while we suffer in darkness?

To this Sanjay had no reply. He moaned and tried again to stand, but it was no use. The ring of feral faces around him pressed closer, the eyes darkening and features seeming to narrow in the dim light. The whispering began again. They were human rats, nothing more, Sanjay thought. Like foul vermin they lived in hidden places, scavenging from the living to prolong the living death that their disease had visited upon them. They were the foul night soil beneath every street, plaza, highway, and building, the raw face of vicious, untamed, predatory nature that even a hundred generations of progress had not wholly eradicated.

The faces around him seemed to swim and coalesce, shrinking and darkening, and the soft whispering rose in pitch. Dark eyes focused on Sanjay’s unprotected legs and feet, and shriveled hands reached out eagerly, pawing at his flesh. Yet they were not hands but tiny claws, Sanjay realized, and the faces behind them were no longer recognizably human. He saw blunt gray snouts and broken whiskers where noses and cheeks had been, and dirty gray fur in the place of dhotis and tee shirts.

Sanjay shrieked and tried to crabwalk away from the chittering mob, but he found his retreat blocked by a column. Then they were upon him, pressing his torso to the floor for the final time, swarming over his legs and arms. His last coherent impression was of the vaulted, skylike ceiling above him, not heaven but the covering of what was to be his tomb.

And then the chewing started.

#horror #india #beggar #horror stories #original writing #original fiction

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 2 years

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Roughly 20 million viewers reportedly tuned in to watch Thursday night’s opening statements by the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

The major networks ran live coverage in prime time, where ABC attracted 4.8 million watchers, according to Nielsen ratings. NBC, which attracted 3.5 million viewers, narrowly edged out CBS. Others tuned in to cable outlets including CNN and MSNBC to listen to riveting testimony from witnesses who were in Washington, D.C., when extremists loyal to former-President Donald Trump attempted to stop the certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral win.

More than 4 million viewers tuned in to MSNBC to follow the hearing.

Nielsen’s figures do not include viewers who may have tuned in online.

Not only did Fox News Channel broadcast its regularly scheduled programming Thursday, it showed no commercials during the hearing, according to Mediate.com. Fox News has not returned a request for comment amid speculation anchors Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity took no breaks out of concern their viewers might change the station.

The right-wing cable operation did air the historic proceeding on its Fox Business Network, which according to The Hill, attracted 223,000 viewers.

Hannity was mentioned during the hearings by Republican Committee member Liz Cheney. He, along with host Laura Ingraham, texted Trump’s Chief of Staff during the attack on the Capitol urging Trump to order insurgents out of the Capitol, then told their audience it was unclear who was responsible for the chaos.

Fox News attracted 3 million viewers during prime time Thursday, according to Nielsen.

In 2020, Nielsen said more than 37 million viewers tuned in to watch former-President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address. President Biden’s SOTU speech was seen on more than 38 million televisions. When the two men debated, their first argument attracted 73 million viewers, while 63 million tuned in for the rematch.

Congressional hearings on the insurrection will resume Monday at 10 a.m.

#us politics #news #new york daily news #ny daily news #house select committee #capitol protests #capitol riot #capitol riot investigation #nielsen #nielsen ratings #abc news #nbc news #cbs news #cnn #msnbc #fox news #Mediate.com #2022

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ausetkmt · 1 year

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Chaos on Twitter Leads a Group of Journalists to Start an Alternative

Nov. 21, 2022Updated 8:50 p.m. ET

It’s one thing to hope for a better community online, and another, very different one, to build it. Just ask the users and administrators of journa.host, which was started by journalists concerned over the direction of Twitter.

“Come on in, the water’s confusing but fine — and more swimmable,” the journalist Virginia Heffernan wrote on journa.host on Nov. 6.

On Nov. 7 the MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan posted: “I feel like a new kid in a new school.”

The network is the brainchild of Adam Davidson, a journalist who helped found “Planet Money” and has worked at The New York Times and The New Yorker. He said the jump from Twitter to the new site reminded him of his family’s move to Vermont from New York City, a few years ago.

Journa.host is part of Mastodon, a vast network of thousands of servers that look and function much like Twitter. Over the past three weeks, hundreds of thousands of people, seeking an alternative to Twitter as Elon Musk took over, have signed up for Mastodon, according to Eugen Rochko, who created the software in 2016. Many of them are journalists.

But because so much news happens on Twitter — and because Twitter itself is such a news story — the social network symbolized by a tiny bird casts a very large shadow over the social network named after a giant prehistoric beast.

Shortly after Mr. Musk bought Twitter, he offered up the blue check mark verification to anyone willing to pay $8 a month. (The rollout has since been put on pause.) To Mr. Davidson, this was a crisis for journalists. If anyone could pass themselves off as, say, Adam Davidson, who could trust that Adam Davidson was Adam Davidson?

“It felt scary to imagine a world where false verification would reign,” Mr. Davidson said.

Indeed, a wave of verified impostors followed Mr. Musk’s decision, including a fake LeBron James account that tweeted a trade request and a fake Eli Lilly account that claimed the drugmaker would be providing insulin to the public for free.

On Nov. 4, Mr. Davidson started journa.host. To join, applicants have to prove that they are journalists, through a working professional email account, say, or recent clips.

The network currently has almost 2,000 members, and they include the hyperlocal and the national, weathermen and sports reporters. Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School, is a member, as is Kasie Hunt, the CNN anchor.; some journalists from The Times are also members.

To manage the flood of applicants, Mr. Davidson has been joined by a part-time volunteer staff of nine journalists, who verify new members; Mr. Davidson said that a few applicants had been rejected because they work in public relations. Journa.host received $12,000 in funding from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY’s Tow-Knight Center, which has been used so far to pay server and domain registration fees.”

For the many journalists who use Twitter, it serves several roles: assignment editor, ombudsperson, sourcing tool, clubhouse, hype machine, pillory, legitimizer.

Journa.host bills itself as “a reliable home for journalists,” and it has greater ambitions than just verifying journalists’ identities, though its rollout has not been without bumps.

Mr. Musk’s early run at Twitter has been chaotic, as he has slashed thousands of jobs and reinstated banned accounts. Many journalists have publicly criticized these and other moves, often on Twitter itself, and some have started, or joined, conversations about Twitter alternatives.

“The period in which Twitter served as a clubhouse for journalists was valuable for journalism as a profession,” said Steven I. Weiss, an investigative journalist who is one of the moderators of journa.host.

Mastodon is an idiosyncratic place, a so-called federation of nearly 8,000 servers, many with their own community norms. Users pick a server — such as journa.host — and can interact with other users throughout Mastodon, with exceptions. If this all sounds complicated, that’s because it is; links to guides and F.A.Q.s about the service are frequently “boosted” (similar to a retweet).

Journa.host users are figuring out almost everything about Mastodon on the fly, including, for starters, what to call Twitter. For many, it’s “the bird site.” For others, it’s “the bird app” or “the Bad Place.” For years, the Mastodon equivalent of “tweets” were “toots,” as from a trunk. On Nov. 14, as part of a software update, the service replaced “toot” with “publish.”

Using journa.host feels a little like crossing the border to a kinder, more rule-bound, less dynamic country. Susanne Althoff, a user and former magazine editor, compared journa.host to zine culture.

“The conversation is still very much a low murmur,” Mr. Weiss said.

Many journa.host members use the service no differently than they use Twitter, sometimes posting the same text simultaneously to each platform.

Indeed, at times, journa.host looks a lot like Twitter, just without all the non-journalists and most of the nastiness.

Frequent topics on journa.host include the deficiencies of Twitter (hate-filled, attention-addled, ruled by an impulsive billionaire), the deficiencies of Mastodon (hard to use, lacking a quote-retweet function, boring), and journalists’ ambivalence about the transition.

“I am having a hard time letting go of the birdsite but I was raised by an alcoholic so I understand what a trauma bond is,” the political journalist Ana Marie Cox wrote on journa.host on Nov. 20.

Mr. Davidson said that he had become concerned in recent years about what he called the “extreme emotional engagement” encouraged by Twitter. The slower pace and calmer rhythms of Mastodon have made him appreciate how a platform’s algorithms and options for, say, retweeting, shape the way its users interact, he said.

“I’m not sure the versions of me on these different platforms would like each other,” he said.

And some of the relative calm Mr. Davidson sees may also be a function of journa.host’s narrow user base. It’s a server just for journalists — or more accurately, the people the administrators of journa.host deem to be journalists. That has led to accusations (on Twitter, where else?) that the server is an attempt by the moderators to “gatekeep their peers.”

In response, Mr. Weiss said that being denied entry to journa.host doesn’t currently prevent access to journa.host content, which users of many other Mastodon servers can see.

Regardless, any attempt to turn journa.host into a walled garden, free from the issues of Twitter, is probably doomed to fail: The conflicts that have at times inflamed Twitter have already caused problems for Mr. Davidson and his team.

On Nov. 18, the journalist Mike Pesca, who hosts the popular news podcast “The Gist,” posted a link to a Times story about health concerns associated with the puberty-blocking drugs sometimes prescribed to transgender youths, writing, “This seemed like careful, thorough reporting.”

In response, Parker Molloy, a journalist who writes the Substack newsletter “The Present Age,” accused Mr. Pesca of anti-trans bigotry, and then posted angrily at Mr. Davidson for not removing the post.

“@adamdavidson’s decision not to take action on anti-trans content isn’t inspiring confidence and I totally understand why other places are doing instance-level blocking,” she wrote on journa.host. (Instance-level blocking refers to the ability, on Mastodon, for one server to block content from another.)

Zach Everson, one of the journa.host administrators, responded that he agreed with Ms. Molloy, then added, “Banning someone for posting a link to an NYT article sets a precedent that we really need to work through.”

On Saturday, journa.host suspended Mr. Pesca, who was informed via a text message from Mr. Davidson, a longtime friend. (The two are currently writing an exchange of letters hosted on Substack, about the nature of cancel culture.) According to Mr. Pesca, Mr. Davidson told him he had been suspended for referring to Ms. Molloy as an “activist,” which was dismissive. The suspension “seemed arbitrary and ad hoc,” Mr. Pesca said in an interview; Ms. Molloy didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.

“We want to be a place for passionate engaged discussion,” said Mr. Davidson, who recused himself from the decision because of his relationship with Mr. Pesca. “But we don’t want to be a place where people insult each other.”

Also on Saturday, Ms. Molloy appeared on a different Mastodon server, and announced that she, too, had been suspended from journa.host for her posts.

“Did it break their rules over there? Yes, so they were certainly in their rights to suspend me from there,” she wrote. And then, in a subsequent post she wrote, “I mostly just want to be left alone.” (Later, Ms. Molloy posted an apology to Mr. Pesca.)

The staff will have to confront issues that will be familiar to anyone who has used Twitter, including bots.

“So far no Nazis in my Mastodon feed,” Bill Grueskin, a Columbia Journalism School professor, wrote in a post on journa.host on Monday, referring to the widely held perception that Mr. Musk has relaxed restrictions against hate speech. “But these ladies have shown up.”

Mr. Grueskin attached a picture of a young woman who said her name was Emma, from another Mastodon server, who had tagged him in a post. She appeared to be a bot.

“Your pictures look so elegant,” it read. “I love meeting new people and learning by sharing with each other, I think it’s good for improving yourself too.”

For the volunteers who run journa.host, it has all been a brutal introduction to the no-easy-answers world of content moderation, one that might have engendered, if not exactly empathy, a better understanding of the challenges that big social media platforms face.

According to Kelly McBride, senior vice president and chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at the nonprofit Poynter Institute, Poynter is in talks with the journa.host team about bringing the social network under its umbrella. For the overworked administrators of the server, it would come as a relief.

“We don’t have the time to be doing this,” Mr. Weiss said.

#From Twitter to Mastodon: What Happens When Journalists Flock Platforms #twitter

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onenettvchannel · 5 months

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BALITANG LOKAL: Unexpected Counterflow Traffic prompts 'No Left Turn' experiment in Dumaguete City [#OneNETnewsEXCLUSIVE]

DUMAGUETE, NEGROS ORIENTAL -- In recent weeks, local commuters and residents of Dumaguete City have been grappling with an unprecedented surge in traffic, particularly around the bustling intersection of Veterans Avenue and Rovira Road near Saint Paul University (SPU). Since November 6th, 2023 on Monday morning (Dumaguete local time), the city has witnessed a consistent gridlock, prompting intervention from the Traffic Management Office (TMO).

In an exclusive radio interview on DWFH-FM 97.7mhz K5 News FM: Dumaguete (formerly Radyo Bandera: Sweet FM network) as TMO Chief Traffic Officer named Gilbert E. Ablong Sr. addressed this month-long issue, emphasizing the severity of the traffic congestion during the upcoming holiday season by December 2023. Commuters heading both North and South were facing challenges navigating the intersection, leading to an escalation of the problem.

To tackle this issue head-on, the local Traffic Management Office (TMO) has decided to implement an experimental "No Left Turn" policy at the Veterans Avenue and Rovira Road intersection. The decision was influenced by the heavy traffic flow, and the experiment is set to commence starting Monday from 6:30am on November 27th, 2023.

During a flexible schedule, student participants from Saint Paul University (SPU) - Dumaguete will experience the "No Left Turn" policy during peak commuting hours, specifically from 6:30am to 8:30am, 11:30am to 1pm, and 4pm to 7pm on regular school days. Outside the academic schedule, commuters using routes such as Sibulan to Bantayan, Bantayan to Qualfon, Qualfon to Pulantubig, and Pulantubig to Sibulan town are advised to plan their trips meticulously, adhering to the newly implemented traffic policy.

The decision to enforce a "No Left Turn" policy reflects the city's commitment to finding a sustainable solution to its traffic woes. In a series of Facebook posts and videos circulating widely (whose owned by Meta Platforms Inc.) and initially reported from Headz Up! NegOr News with CNN Philippines' Negros Oriental correspondent (Roy August Bustillo), concerned citizens documented the traffic chaos, drawing attention to the urgent need for intervention.

Mr. Ablong, in the said radio interview, stressed the importance of public cooperation for the success of the experiment. The goal is to create a safer and more efficient traffic system in Dumaguete City, providing relief to both local residents and the countless students navigating the area daily.

As the experiment unfolds, the local Traffic Management Office will be closely monitoring the situation through the effectiveness of the "No Left Turn" policy. The success of this initiative hinges on the collective efforts of the community, fostering a sense of responsibility and discipline among residents of The City of Gentle People.

PHOTO COURTESY: Roy August Bustillo via Headz Up! NegOr News BACKGROUND PROVIDED by: Tegna

SOURCE: *https://www.facebook.com/1837868953134880/videos/1742985726147128 [Referenced FB LIVE Video #1 via Headz Up! NegOr News] *https://www.facebook.com/1837868953134880/videos/1032136738108245 [Referenced FB LIVE Video #2 via Headz Up! NegOr News] *https://www.facebook.com/1837868953134880/videos/877099743999080 [Referenced FB VIDEO #1 via Headz Up! NegOr News] *https://www.facebook.com/1837868953134880/videos/1513954496060780 [Referenced FB VIDEO #2 via Headz Up! NegOr News] *https://www.facebook.com/1837868953134880/videos/2883967905089995 [Referenced FB VIDEO #3 via Headz Up! NegOr News] *https://www.facebook.com/1837868953134880/videos/258335503897297 [Referenced FB VIDEO #4 via Headz Up! NegOr News] *https://www.facebook.com/100050636672555/posts/903978531300028 [Referenced FB Captioned Post via Headz Up! NegOr News] *https://www.facebook.com/61550972826016/posts/122142171446032427 [Referenced FB Local Advisory via The Paulinian - Saint Paul University Dumaguete] *https://www.facebook.com/100093531061967/posts/215781001549601 [Referenced FB News Article #1 via DWFH-FM 97.7mhz's K5 News FM: Dumaguete] and *https://www.facebook.com/100093531061967/videos/3215315128767370 [Referenced FB News Article #2f via DWFH-FM 97.7mhz's K5 News FM: Dumaguete]

-- OneNETnews Team

#local news #dumaguete #negros oriental #crossing #intersection #congested #traffic #saint paul university #SPUD #awareness #traffic report #exclusive #first and exclusive #OneNETnews

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ear-worthy · 11 months

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Chasing Life Podcast Seventh Season: Getting Older And How To Deal With It

With declining ratings, the firing of its CEO Chris Licht last week, the meddling of new, entitled owner David Zaslov, and the firing of some of CNN's best correspondents, you would assume that CNN is close to self-immolation. However, amid all the chaos and confusion, a bright spot for CNN has been CNN Audio. The podcast network has performed well in the last two years. More importantly for those concerned with quality, CNN Audio has given listeners some true gems -- from The Assignment with Audie Cornish, The Axe Files with David Axelrod, The Prince Mixtape, and All There Is with Anderson Cooper. I think what the people at CNN Audio have figured out about what content to deliver to what audience needs to be communicated to the people at CNN TV. CNN, the TV network, doesn't seem to be able to navigate the shark-infested political waters that exist between MSNBC and Fox News and its meaner, sillier cousins like Newsmax.

With documentaries flourishing on streaming TV and investigative reporting disappearing along with local print journalism, perhaps CNN could revive itself with a combination of impactful documentaries and hard-nosed investigative journalism.

However, watching David Zaslov and his penchant for cutting costs to pay down debt at all costs to a network's reputation, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that Dr. Pimple Popper would launch a ten-part CNN documentary into blackheads and then, as a follow-up, whiteheads. Don't squeeze blackheads, people.

Despite the "red alert" status at CNN, a bright spot for CNN has been Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent. Gupta has been a consistent voice of scientific reason in the face of weirdos and wingnuts who deny science because it doesn't comport with their current political viewpoints. Witness former Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate and current GOP chair Kandiss Taylor who has recently advanced her conspiracy of globes. While claiming she's not a flat-earther, Taylor commented, "every store, you buy a globe, there's globes everywhere. Why?" With globe antagonists around every corner, Gupta took a constant barrage of virulent criticism from anti-vaxxers, COVID conspiracy theorists, and anti-science advocates during the pandemic. Despite the poisonous nature of some of those attacks, Gupta remained steadfast and reasonable in his commitment to science-based treatments and support for vaccines. Gupta's CNN podcast has been around for six seasons and consistently been one of its best. This week, CNN Audio announced that "award-winning journalist and CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta will soon embark on a mission to explore the concept of getting older in the seventh season of his podcast, Chasing Life with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, premiering Tuesday, June 20." We’re all getting older – every minute of every day – and there is nothing we can do to change that. Building upon decades of Dr. Gupta’s own reporting and the latest, cutting-edge research, he will explore how he and all of us – whether we are in our 20s, 50s or 80s – can get better at getting older and begin to look at aging in a new light. Dr. Gupta, now in his 50s, will be talking to experts, people defying the odds, and some of his closest friends and family to discover how we can optimize our health at any age. “With such stigma surrounding aging, it is evident that society has a deeply entrenched fear of getting older,” says Dr. Gupta. “I hope that this new season of Chasing Life provides our listeners with key insights on the best ways to find beauty and joy in the inevitable.” Dr. Sanjay Gupta is the Chief Medical Correspondent for CNN, a practicing neurosurgeon, and a multiple Emmy® Award winner. Since Gupta joined the network in 2001, he has covered some of the most important health stories in the United States and around the world. Season seven of Chasing Life will debut new episodes every Tuesday and will be available to listen on CNN Audio or wherever you get your podcasts.

After all, 70 is the new 50. 90 is the new 70. And 110 is the new...who are we kidding? You're still a goner. You can listen to CNN Audio content at www.cnn.com/audio.

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theyoungturks · 1 year

Video

youtube

Elon Musk has agreed to requests from Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to censor tweets. Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur discuss on The Young Turks. Watch TYT LIVE on weekdays 6-8 pm ET. http://youtube.com/theyoungturks/live Read more HERE: https://www.mediaite.com/news/enes-kanter-freedom-rips-elon-musk-censoring-twitter-at-turkish-governments-whim-literally-bowing-down-to-a-dictatorship/ "The way Enes Kanter Freedom sees it, Elon Musk lost the right to call himself a free speech champion by obeying the Turkish government’s demand that critics be silenced on Twitter. The Turkish-American former NBA star joined CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Monday to discuss the implications of Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan facing a runoff election. Kanter Freedom has been an outspoken critic of the human rights abuses and media censorship that the Turkish government has committed under Erdoğan’s regime. He predicted the Turkish president would foment chaos before accepting any possible defeat in the contentious election. *** The largest online progressive news show in the world. Hosted by Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian. LIVE weekdays 6-8 pm ET. Help support our mission and get perks. Membership protects TYT's independence from corporate ownership and allows us to provide free live shows that speak truth to power for people around the world. See Perks: ▶ https://www.youtube.com/TheYoungTurks/join SUBSCRIBE on YOUTUBE: ☞ http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=theyoungturks FACEBOOK: ☞ http://www.facebook.com/TheYoungTurks TWITTER: ☞ http://www.twitter.com/TheYoungTurks INSTAGRAM: ☞ http://www.instagram.com/TheYoungTurks TWITCH: ☞ http://www.twitch.com/tyt 👕 Merch: http://shoptyt.com ❤ Donate: http://www.tyt.com/go 🔗 Website: https://www.tyt.com 📱App: http://www.tyt.com/app 📬 Newsletters: https://www.tyt.com/newsletters/ If you want to watch more videos from TYT, consider subscribing to other channels in our network: The Watchlist https://www.youtube.com/watchlisttyt Indisputable with Dr. Rashad Richey https://www.youtube.com/indisputabletyt Unbossed with Nina Turner https://www.youtube.com/unbossedtyt The Damage Report ▶ https://www.youtube.com/thedamagereport TYT Sports ▶ https://www.youtube.com/tytsports The Conversation ▶ https://www.youtube.com/tytconversation Rebel HQ ▶ https://www.youtube.com/rebelhq TYT Investigates ▶ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwNJt9PYyN1uyw2XhNIQMMA #TYT #TheYoungTurks #BreakingNews 230515__BE01Elon_V2 by The Young Turks

#IFTTT #YouTube

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fahrni · 1 year

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Saturday Morning Coffee

What a week! That dude that took over Twitter is driving it in the ground with a gigantor hammer all while we watch from the cheap seats sipping our soda and eating popcorn. What a spectacle.

This week was a busy week at work, promotion time. Lots of meetings. I’m all Zoom’ed out.

Enjoy that morning elixir of life. I certainly am. ☕️

Wired

Eugen Rochko looks exhausted. The 29-year-old German programmer is the founder of Mastodon, a distributed alternative to Twitter that has exploded in popularity in recent weeks as Elon Musk’s ownership of the platform has rained chaos on its users.

I’ve heard some folks doubt the survivability of Mastodon and doubt hate can be squashed there. In my experience on the platform it’s quite the opposite. If you’re running a server full of racist white nationalists, Nazis, or other hate groups it’s extremely easy for the admin of your server to block federation of that entire server.

I’ve found Mastodon to be so much better for conversation with folks outside my little friend bubble on Twitter.

Brent Simmons

For writers, artists, podcasters, journalists, and people who make things in public, Twitter was the one social networking site we all had to use.

Brent is a long time blogger, Mac programmer, creator and leader of the NetNewsWire team, and all around great guy. If you’re a consumer of RSS point your feed reader to his site. It’s a great read.

Platformer

Musk went on to say that “Twitter will be much more engineering-driven,” and that while design and product “will still be very important,” engineers “will have the greatest sway.” And then Musk presented employees with an ultimatum: click “yes” on a Google form affirming your desire to “be part of the new Twitter,” or leave in exchange for three months’ pay.

I’ve heard from a friend that most of the US Engineering staff left. That’s just wild.

Last week, I made the decision to leave my role leading Trust & Safety at Twitter. Today, I'm sharing a few thoughts about what comes next for the site. https://t.co/QPAQR6zpqU

— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) November 18, 2022

I don’t have a NY Times subscription but I’ll bet this piece by Mr. Roth is quite good.

Daring Fireball

If you had told me three weeks ago that Twitter, as a company, would today be embroiled in turmoil — perhaps outright existential crisis — over a company-wide email from Elon Musk centered around the phrase “extremely hardcore”, v-1 is not the scenario I’d have imagined.

In my career I’ve worked for some hardcore companies, like the old Microsoft, it’s not fun. Don’t do it.

NEW: Email from Elon to the engineering team: "Anyone who can actually write software, please report to the 10th floor at 2pm today. Before doing so, please email me a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past 6 months" 1/

— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) November 18, 2022

I don’t understand why he continues to ask for snippets of code from his employees. It’s just some random metric he’s using to what what end? What about the devs who made Twitter better by removing code?

CNN www.cnn.com/2022/11/1…

Amazon confirmed on Wednesday that layoffs had begun at the company, two days after multiple outlets the e-commerce giant planned to cut around 10,000 employees this week.

It’s been a rough couple weeks in the tech sector. I’m sorry to see so many folks having to deal with this. Here’s hoping they land on their feet quickly.

Fresnoland fresnoland.org/2022/11/1…

While Central Valley agricultural leaders warn of jobs loss during California’s ongoing drought, some local leaders say it’s time for less water-dependent economic opportunities.

California is in deep trouble so the United States food supply is in deep trouble. You’ll see it at the grocery store.

Becky Hansmeyer

When I tweeted my way into the iOS community so many years ago, I felt the same energy and excitement, if not necessarily the same level of closeness. You all gave me the confidence I needed to keep going with programming when I felt like giving up. We’ve person. Like her I lament the loss of the Twitter we knew but all good things come to an end, right?

America, America

I’m not anywhere close to assuming redemption for Rupert Murdoch or his publication for their role in empowering the dangerous desecration of the last six years, particularly since Fox News showed reluctance in quitting the man by airing nearly all of his sour announcement. (For me, the announcement at Mar-a-Lago had more of the air of a man running from the law than running for the presidency.)

How TFG avoids jail time at this point is beyond me.

The Register

Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich has had it with C and C++, time-tested programming languages commonly used for native applications that require high performance.

Russinovich is a legendary software engineer. It’s gonna be interesting to see how many new products come out of Microsoft and other companies written in 100% Rust.

The Brookings Institution

In this second edition of our October 2021 report, we review the investigation and its basis. We assess the publicly known facts and relevant law and analyze the extent to which the former president may be held criminally responsible for his conduct in Georgia. We conclude that Trump is at substantial risk of criminal prosecution in Fulton County.

At substantial risk? How is he not already in handcuffs? If any of us “regular” people had done this we’d be thrown in a dungeon.

Jalopnik

Haas’ Kevin Magnussen just scored his first-ever pole position in Formula 1 during the Brazilian Grand Prix. Yes, I intended to write that sentence. It’s not April Fool’s Day. Kevin Magnussen is polesitter for Saturday’s sprint race.

I support Haas. It’s an American F1 team and I’m happy for Kevin Magnussen and Haas. Now, get some podiums! 😂

PZ Meyers

Between the Church Militant and Nick Fuentes, it’s pretty clear what the theocratic Right wants to do: they want to kill you or force you to be as mad as they are.

Nick Fuentes is a piece of work but at least he’s not hiding his White Christian Nationalism behind dog whistles, no sir, he’s just saying it out loud.

From: @twittereng To: @elonmusk Subject: pic.twitter.com/EiDADFtMCN

— DM of Engineering 🎲 (@dmofengineering) November 17, 2022

Go check out that tweet thread. It’s full of Twitter Employees saying goodbye after the hardcore time limit expired.

It’s a sad day for the social network. How long will it stay up?

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 years

Link

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 18, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

It is still early days, and the picture of what is happening in Afghanistan now that the Taliban has regained control of the country continues to develop.

Central to affairs there is money. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, with about half its population requiring humanitarian aid this year and about 90% of its people living below the poverty line of making $2 a day.

The country depends on foreign aid. Under the U.S.-supported Afghan government, the United States and other nations funded about 80% of Afghanistan’s budget. In 2020, foreign aid made up about 43% of Afghanistan’s GDP (the GDP, or gross domestic product, is the monetary value of all the goods and services produced in a country), down from 100% of it in 2009.

This is a huge problem for the Taliban, because their takeover of the country means that the money the country so desperately needs has dried up. The U.S. has frozen billions of dollars of Afghan government money held here in the U.S. The European Union and Germany have also suspended their financial support for the country, and today the International Monetary Fund blocked Afghanistan’s access to $460 million in currency reserves.

Adam M. Smith, who served on the National Security Council during the Obama administration, told Jeff Stein of the Washington Post that the financial squeeze is potentially “cataclysmic for Afghanistan.” It threatens to spark a humanitarian crisis that, in turn, will create a refugee crisis in central Asia. Already, the fighting in the last eight months has displaced more than half a million Afghans.

People fleeing from the Taliban threaten to destabilize the region more generally. While Russia was happy to support the Taliban in a war against the U.S., now that its fighters are in charge of the country, Russia needs to keep the Taliban’s extremism from spreading to other countries in the area. So it is tentatively saying supportive things about the Taliban, but it is also stepping up its protection of neighboring countries’ borders with Afghanistan. Other countries are also leery of refugees in the region: large numbers of refugees have, in the past, led countries to turn against immigrants, giving a leg up to right-wing governments.

Canada and Britain are each taking an additional 20,000 Afghan women leaders, reporters, LGBTQ people, and human rights workers on top of those they have already volunteered to take, but Turkey—which is governed by strongman president Recep Tayyip Erdogan—is building a wall to block refugees, and French President Emmanuel Macron asked officials in Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey to prevent migrants reaching their countries from traveling any further. The European Union has asked its member states to take more Afghan refugees.

In the U.S., the question of Afghan refugees is splitting the Republican Party, with about 30% of it following the hard anti-immigrant line of former president Donald Trump. Others, though, especially those whose districts include military installations, are saying they welcome our Afghan allies.

The people fleeing the country also present a problem for those now in control of Afghanistan. The idea that people are terrified of their rule is a foreign relations nightmare, at the same time that those leaving are the ones most likely to have the skills necessary to help govern the country. But leaders can’t really stop the outward flow—at least immediately—because they do not want to antagonize the international community so thoroughly that it continues to withhold the financial aid the country so badly needs. So, while on the streets, Taliban fighters are harassing Afghans who are trying to get away, Taliban leaders are saying they will permit people to evacuate, that they will offer blanket amnesty to those who opposed them, and also that they will defend some rights for women and girls.

The Biden administration is sending more personnel to help evacuate those who want to leave. The president has promised to evacuate all Americans in the country—as many as 15,000 people—but said only that we would evacuate as many of the estimated 65,000 Afghans who want to leave as possible. The Taliban has put up checkpoints on the roads to the airport and are not permitting everyone to pass. U.S. military leaders say they will be able to evacuate between 5000 and 9000 people a day.

Today, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark A. Milley tried to explain the frantic rush to evacuate people from Afghanistan to reporters by saying: “There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.” Maybe. But military analyst Jason Dempsey condemned the whole U.S. military project in Afghanistan when he told NPR's Don Gonyea that the collapse of the Afghan government showed that the U.S. had fundamentally misunderstood the people of Afghanistan and had tried to impose a military system that simply made no sense for a society based in patronage networks and family relationships.

Even with Dempsey’s likely accurate assessment, the statement that U.S. military intelligence missed that a 300,000 person army was going to melt away still seems to me astonishing. Still, foreign policy and national security policy analyst Dr. John Gans of the University of Pennsylvania speculated on Twitter that such a lapse might be more “normal”—his word and quotation marks—than it seems, reflecting the slips possible in government bureaucracy. He points out that the Department of Defense has largely controlled Afghanistan and the way the U.S. involvement there was handled in Washington. But with the end of the military mission, the Defense Department was eager to hand off responsibility to the State Department, which was badly weakened under the previous administration and has not yet rebuilt fully enough to handle what was clearly a complicated handoff. “There have not been many transitions between an American war & an American diplomatic relationship with a sovereign, friendly country,” Gans wrote. “Fewer still when the friendly regime disintegrates so quickly.” When things started to go wrong, they snowballed.

And yet, the media portrayal of our withdrawal as a catastrophe also seems to me surprising. To date, at least as far as I have seen, there have been no reports of such atrocities as the top American diplomat in Syria reported in the chaos when the U.S. pulled out of northern Syria in 2019. Violence against our Kurdish allies there was widely expected and it indeed occurred. In a memo made public in November of that year, Ambassador William V. Roebuck wrote that “Islamist groups” paid by Turkey were deliberately engaged in ethnic cleansing of Kurds, and were committing “widely publicized, fear-inducing atrocities” even while “our military forces and diplomats were on the ground.” The memo continued: “The Turkey operation damaged our regional and international credibility and has significantly destabilized northeastern Syria.”

Reports of that ethnic cleansing in the wake of our withdrawal seemed to get very little media attention in 2019, perhaps because the former president’s first impeachment inquiry took up all the oxygen. But it strikes me that the sensibility of Roebuck’s memo is now being read onto our withdrawal from Afghanistan although conditions there are not—yet—like that.

For now, it seems, the drive to keep the door open for foreign money is reining in Taliban extremism. That caution seems unlikely to last forever, but it might hold for long enough to complete an evacuation.

Much is still unclear and the situation is changing rapidly, but my guess is that keeping an eye on the money will be crucial for understanding how this plays out.

Meanwhile, the former president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, has surfaced in the United Arab Emirates. He denies early reports that he fled the country with suitcases full of cash.

—-

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/18/world/asia/ashraf-ghani-uae-afghanistan.html

https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/afghanistan/overview

https://asiatimes.com/2021/08/the-root-of-russias-fears-in-afghanistan/

https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/quarterlyreports/2021-07-30qr-section2-economic.pdf#page=14

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-afghanistan-funding-int/u-s-other-aid-cuts-could-imperil-afghan-government-u-s-watchdog-idUSKBN2B72WJ

https://www.dw.com/en/eu-will-have-to-talk-to-taliban-but-wary-of-recognition/a-58890698

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/08/17/treasury-taliban-money-afghanistan/

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/08/18/business/afghanistan-lithium-rare-earths-mining/index.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-taliban-afghanistan-putin/2021/08/17/af53a9ec-ff4c-11eb-87e0-7e07bd9ce270_story.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/18/afghanistan-kabul-taliban-live-updates/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/aid-groups-warn-of-possible-refugee-crisis-in-afghanistan-far-beyond-western-evacuation-plans/2021/08/18/0d7094fc-0058-11ec-825d-01701f9ded64_story.html

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/21/1008656321/how-does-the-u-s-help-afghans-hold-on-to-gains-while-withdrawing-troops

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/18/afghanistan-kabul-taliban-live-updates/

https://www.reuters.com/world/canada-accept-20000-vulnerable-afghans-such-women-leaders-human-rights-workers-2021-08-13

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/07/us/politics/memo-syria-trump-turkey.html

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/18/afghan-refugee-debate-fractures-gop-506135

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/18/politics/us-must-rely-on-taliban-for-evacuation/index.html

John Gans @johngansjrFrom what I'm seeing and hearing, the reasons for the mess in Afghanistan might be far more 'normal' than many are suspecting/suggesting -- driven more by typical pathologies in government & Washington. More to be learned. But a few thoughts. 1/x

533 Retweets2,195 Likes

August 18th 2021

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/15/1027952034/military-analyst-u-s-trained-afghan-forces-for-a-nation-that-didnt-exist

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#quotes #political #Afghanistan #Heather Cox Richardson #Letters From An American #money #corruption

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moonsubinpr · 3 years

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[Lee Soo Hyuk — 35 — he/him] Introducing MOON SUBIN. Word on the street is they are a PRESS SECRETARY FOR THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY affiliated with the DEMOCRATIC PARTY. Though they are RESERVED and INTIMIDATING, they can also be DEPENDABLE and HARDWORKING. In the chaos of New York City, they’re sure to fit right in.

Biography. Ask. Wanted Connections.

I. WRITER’S INTRODUCTION

First of all, I want to introduce myself. You all can call me Jackie, and I am a twenty-one year old graduate student residing within the Eastern Standard Timezone (EST). I have been roleplaying for about 10 years now, however, I took a hiatus from writing on Tumblr due to migrating to other platforms that are more mobile friendly in terms of writing. Now that I have a greater availability, as well as not fond of the newfound style of roleplay on platforms such as Twitter or MeWe, I have returned in hopes to better develop characters and build better connections with other writers. Aside from writing, I enjoy spending quality time with my cat, going out to explore newfound areas, thrifting, reading, and watching random reality television shows. I look forward to getting to know everyone! Feel free to message me for plotting, headcanoning, or for a casual conversation.

II. BASICS

NAME: MOON SUBIN

AGE: THIRTY-FIVE

DATE OF BIRTH: 1986 MAY 31

GENDER: CISMALE

PRONOUNS: HE / HIM

SEXUALITY: PANSEXUAL

HOMETOWN: IOWA CITY, IOWA

AFFILIATION: THE GOVERNMENT

JOB POSITION: DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S PRESS SECRETARY

EDUCATION: BA IN JOURNALISM FROM NYU

RELATIONSHIP STATUS: SINGLE

CHILDREN: NONE

POSITIVE TRAITS: ELOQUENT, INDEPENDENT, INTELLIGENT, RESPONSIBLE, MATURE, REASONABLE

NEGATIVE TRAITS: RESERVED, BLUNT, INTIMIDATING, DEMANDING, SARCASTIC

FACECLAIM: LEE SOO HYUK

III. POINTS ABOUT THE MUSE

Moon Subin was born into a rather average household in Heukseok-dong, Seoul, South Korea. His mother, a down-to-earth woman with a contagious smile, worked alongside her mother as a food vendor in one of the city’s largest market. The two were acutely known for their blood sausages as well as jangeo-gui (grilled eel). In fact, this is how the young woman met the young businessman. Running from a class with only a few cash in hand, he stopped at mother’s spot, asking for anything he could get with the amount of money available. She laughed at his lack of time management, and he only stated that he’ll make time to see her better next time. The following day, he returned and sat to chat with the woman.

Subin was unplanned. The two were not yet wedded when discovering that the woman fell pregnant. However, never did the young couple refer to the baby as a mistake. Rather, they saw Subin’s life as a blessing to better plan for their fast approaching future. During the time in which the woman was pregnant, the man was offered an opportunity to continue his university studies abroad. Sent to Iowa City, Iowa, the young couple packed their belongings and settled within the United States. It’s in this city where Subin would be born, granting him American citizenship despite his parents yet to become naturalized citizens.

Falling in love with the environment, the mother and father went through various means in order to further extend their stay within the country. From a student visa to a work visa, the father was granted more time to better prepare for the examination of becoming U.S. citizens. While his father began to work in a local company specializing in medical prosthetics, his mother worked at a local Chinese restaurant where she befriended Chinese immigrants who helped her with assimilating into the culture.

Subin grew up in an environment where he witnessed the benefits of hard work. His parents worked many hours in order to provide for him as well as to their community. He found this to be admirable, and this encouraged the young boy to succeed in his academics so that he could provide for his parents in the future.

He became interested in the field of communications due to constantly acting as the translator for his parents when making doctor appointments or trying to pitch the best deal at a cars dealership. Words were fascinating, and he especially thought this was the case after reading a number of novels written by authors such as H.G. Wells and Amy Tan. His interest in communications got him involved with the morning news at his middle school and high school. During his four years at high school, he also participated in Model UN and the Debate team. These involvements were the result of his great achievements in social studies courses, and his teachers encouraged him to get involved with these extracurricular activities.

Due to awards achieved in high school, he was granted a scholarship to attend New York University in New York City. Although his parents did not want him to leave their home, they eventually came to terms that this would be good for his future successes. Thus, he went to attend NYU for a Bachelors in Journalism with a minor in Politics. Thanks to amazing professors and establishing connections through networking events, the young man was able to maintain a number of internships---such as volunteering for the current Governor’s former campaign in the creative team for marketing. He later volunteered alongside CNN professionals, and he gained an internship experience with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office as Press Office Intern. By the time he graduated from university, he’s already met a number of influential, powerful people of the big city.

Upon graduation, he was able to get a job at the Manhattan District Attorney Office as Press Officer due to his wonderful performance during his internship with the office. He held this position for two years before being promoted as Deputy Press Secretary for the office. However, in less than 2 years, he was able to maintain the Press Secretary position due to the former Press Secretary’s leave to another office. In another year, he was granted the position of Deputy Director of Communications for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. Subin held this position up until he was given the opportunity to work as the city’s District Attorney’s main Press Secretary.

During his years working for the city and learning about the mishaps behind the scenes, Subin has been able to learn a lot about the dirty truth. He is aware that some of the crimes dealt with in the office are a result to the existing gangs within the city. Although his DA remains slightly oblivious to the people surrounding them, Subin maintains awareness due to the connections he’s established during interviews as well as conferences. They threaten Subin to keep quiet. They ask Subin to twist the truth. He does what keeps him safe, but he holds the knowledge close to his heart. The quiet man knows a lot----perhaps more than what the gangs wish for him to know, and this can be dangerous. One never knows what he can do with all of this knowledge. He could expose them to the public whenever he dares to do so. If he really wanted to, of course.

But, for now, he keeps quiet. He does his job and remains cordial with those he establishes some sorts of connection with. If someone he cares about, though, ever gets hurt, he’s not sure what he’ll do. No one knows.

IV. WANTED CONNECTIONS

Any and all possible connections within the Government. I would love to further develop and establish connections within the affiliation in order to better understand Subin’s position in the government as well as with Law Enforcement, for he works within the District Attorney Office; therefore, he has connections with lawyers as well as officers. This can be good or bad, I am open to all possibilities.

For those in Media, Subin is responsible for addressing those in Media in order to report information given by the DA. Those in media could have interviewed Subin, have gone to a number of his press hearings, as well as questioned his intentions or morales within this position. Anyone who does not trust him is very much wanted. A person who trusts him a lot is also wanted.

To those in any gang, people who has paid him or threatened him to withhold information from the public is very much wanted. Give me some angst in regard to perhaps threatening his family. Perhaps people question how Subin can offerd such a luxurious home or car, and this could be due to payments accepted from those within these organizations. I am open to anything.

I am also interested in a secret relationship that should not be a relationship, however, the two continue to pursue one another in sexual and romantic rendezvous. Subin is not entirely the most relationship-orientated person, however, due to a lot of stress within his career, some fun would be favorable.

#pinned.#wb.intro

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uomo-accattivante · 4 years

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I think HBO Max should have used this image of Oscar Isaac to promote A World of Calm 😉:

(📷: David Burton)

Los Angeles, July 16, 2020 – HBO Max, the direct-to-consumer offering from WarnerMedia, announced today that it wants to help you relax with a ten-episode order of A World of Calm. A totally new type of television experience that combines mesmeric imagery with narration by A-list stars – including Mahershala Ali, Idris Elba, Oscar Isaac, Nicole Kidman, Zoë Kravitz, Lucy Liu, Cillian Murphy, and Keanu Reeves. HBO Max’s first project in the Health and Wellness space, A World of Calm is the result of a unique collaboration between the makers of Calm, the no. 1 app for sleep, meditation and relaxation, and Nutopia, the team behind Nat Geo’s critically acclaimed series One Strange Rock.

A timely antidote for our modern lives, each half-hour episode takes audiences on an immersive visual journey into another world. Building on the record-breaking success of Calm’s Sleep Stories™ – bedtime stories for grown ups with over 250m listens – each relaxing tale is designed to transform how you feel. Transporting the viewer into tranquility through scientifically-engineered narratives, enchanting music and astounding footage, to naturally calm your body and soothe the mind. Each story is brought to life by a different iconic voice.

“With the considerable amount of stress and chaos we are all experiencing at this particularly challenging time, we could all use a bit of guided relaxation and A World of Calm is here to help,” said Jennifer O’Connell, executive vice president of non-fiction and kids programming for HBO Max. “With soothing imagery and tranquil narration, this is one HBO Max original that we hope becomes part of your daily routine.”

“We are thrilled to work with such amazing partners as HBO Max and Calm for this new cutting edge endeavor,” said Nutopia CEO and founder Jane Root. “ Although this collaboration has been in the works for many months, this series has been entirely created during quarantine using Nutopia’s worldwide network of award winning cinematographers and filmmakers. We hope this series of serene stories will bring a sense of much needed calm to audiences.”

“Calm started life as a meditation app but the brand has evolved far beyond that,” said Calm co-founder and co-CEO Michael Acton Smith. “We are delighted to bring the magic behind our audio Sleep Stories to the screen for the first time. These experiences are visual Valium and will help people relax and unwind during these stressful times.”

The series is co-produced by Calm and Nutopia with Jane Root, Nicola Moody, Michael Acton Smith and Chris Advansun serving as executive producers, and Sara Brailsford and Fiona Caldwell as co-executive producers.

###

About HBO Max HBO Max is WarnerMedia’s direct-to-consumer offering, which debuted May 27, 2020. With 10,000 hours of curated premium content, HBO Max offers powerhouse programming for everyone in the home, bringing together HBO, a robust slate of new original series, key third-party licensed programs and movies, and fan favorites from WarnerMedia’s rich library including motion picture and TV series from Warner Bros., highlights from New Line, and catalog titles from DC, CNN, TNT, TBS, truTV, Turner Classic Movies, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Crunchyroll, Rooster Teeth, Looney Tunes and more. Website: HBOMax.com

#oscar isaac #a world of calm #mahershala ali #idris elba #nicole kidman #zoë kravitz #lucy liu #cillian murphy #keanu reeves #hbo max

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aois21 · 3 years

Text

September 2021

The September 2021 edition of the World’s Only Podcast is here to bring the top news as Ian and Silby give you their own unfiltered and congenial feedback. This episode the boys discuss Afghanistan, the California Recall, OnlyFans, and Trigger Warnings on video games.

Be sure to read more about the topics Ian and Silby discussed:

Washington Monthly: Afghanistan meant Nothing

Council on Foreign Relations: The US War in Afghanistan

WaPo: Biden administration scrambled as its orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan unraveled

NYT: This Is How the US's Afghanistan Exit Plan Unraveled

Council on Foreign Relations: How Will China Deal With the Taliban?

Progressive lawmakers, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, have largely stayed quiet as Afghanistan descends into chaos

The Week the Left Stopped Caring About Human Rights

Let’s Not Pretend That the Way We Withdrew From Afghanistan Was the Problem

Intelligence Warned of Afghan Military Collapse, Despite Biden’s Assurances

The clash within a civilization

Why the Arab world has an identity crisis

NYT: What You Need to Know About the California Recall, Explained

NYT: How Did Larry Elder Become a Front-Runner in California’s Governor Race?

WaPo: Analysis | Embattled California Gov. Newsom, facing recall election, says it’s time for Democrats to wake up

538: Latest Polls Of The California Recall Election

CNBC: YouTube star Kevin Paffrath is Democratic leader in California recall

Opinion: Gavin Newsom is in trouble. Here’s why

Big donors helping Newsom fight California recall also have a big wish list in Sacrament

Why San Francisco’s city government is so dysfunctional

California leaving: State population declines for first time

NYT: OnlyFans Says It Is Banning Sexually Explicit Content

CNN: OnlyFans says it will ban sexually explicit content

Tech Crunch: OnlyFans bans explicit content

The Verge: OnlyFans to prohibit sexually explicit content beginning in October

The Verge: OnlyFans won't ban porn after all

BBC: OnlyFans: How it handles illegal sex videos

The Information: The Numbers Behind The OnlyFans Flip-Flop; Clubhouse Teases a Creator Marketplace

The Daily Beast: The Real Reasons Why OnlyFans Is Banning Porn

OnlyFans CEO on why it banned adult content: ‘the short answer is banks’

The Children of Pornhub

The children selling explicit videos on OnlyFans

The Daily Beast: The Shady Evangelical Group With Trump Ties Waging War on Pornhub

Time: Why Did OnlyFans Reverse Its Ban on Sexual Content?

The Onion: OnlyFans CEO Admits Decision To Ban Pornography Was Made In Shame-Filled Moment After Orgasm

The Guardian: Boyfriend Dungeon review – a video game where you can date your weapons

Pink News: Controversial dating sim Boyfriend Dungeon given new content warning over stalking plot

The Mary Sue: Indie Game Boyfriend Dungeon's Content Warning Discourse

Inverse.com: 'Boyfriend Dungeon' creator responds to content warning controversy

Scientific American: Are Trigger Warnings Actually Helpful? - Scientific American Blog Network

The Performative Antiracism of Black Students at the U. of Wisconsin

Trigger warnings appear to have little impact on emotional responses or learning

Family Guy - Brah gets fired

https://www.doesthedogdie.com/

You can follow Silby on Twitter at @Silby_Says and Ian at @IRLibrarian.

This episode is brought to you by Audible. Get access to over 180,000 audiobooks with your first month free. Visit www.audibletrial.com/aois21 and your first book is on us!

Additional sponsorship is provided by Fanatics.com! Get your gear for any sports team old and new! League authorize jerseys and hats, and special deals are now on! Visit our website and click on the banner and stock up now!

We have merch! Visit the aois21 store at TeePublic and get your own World’s Only Podcast t-shirts, mugs, phone cases and more! Visit teepublic.com/stores/aois21-market/ and show your support!

Want more? Check out the Fifth Segment of The World’s Only Podcast on the aois21 Patreon feed later this week! Visit Patreon.com/aois21 and become a patron for just $1 a month!

This month’s Fifth Segment is on International Travel with firsthand information from Silby’s two week sojourn.

Find us on Podomatic, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher Radio, Google Play, TuneIn, Facebook.com/WorldsOnlyPodcast, and our home on the web, www.aois21.com.

#The World's only podcast #Ian Roberts #Joshua Silberman

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96thdayofrage · 3 years

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Media Rediscover Afghan Women Only When US Leaves

Just as US corporate news media “discovered” Afghan women’s rights only when the US was angling for invasion, their since-forgotten interest returned with a vengeance as US troops exited the country.

After September 11, 2001, the public was subjected to widespread US news coverage of burqa-clad Afghan women in need of US liberation, and celebratory reports after the invasion. Time magazine (11/26/01), for instance, declared that “the greatest pageant of mass liberation since the fight for suffrage” was occurring, as “female faces, shy and bright, emerged from the dark cellars” to stomp on their old veils. In a piece by Nancy Gibbs headlined “Blood and Joy,” the magazine told readers this was “a holiday gift, a reminder of reasons the war was worth fighting beyond those of basic self-defense” (FAIR.org, 4/9/21).

The media interest was highly opportunistic. Between January 2000 and September 11, 2001, there were 15 US newspaper articles and 33 broadcast TV reports about women’s rights in Afghanistan. In the 16 weeks between September 12 and January 1, 2002, those numbers skyrocketed to 93 and 628, before plummeting once again (Media, Culture & Society, 9/1/05).

Suddenly remembering women

Now, as the US finally is withdrawing its last troops, many corporate media commentators put women and girls at the center of the analysis, as when Wolf Blitzer (CNN Situation Room, 8/16/21), after referring to “the horror awaiting women and girls in Afghanistan,” reported:

President Biden saying he stands, and I’m quoting him now, squarely, squarely behind this decision to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan, despite the shocking scene of chaos and desperation as the country fell in a matter of only a few hours under Taliban control, and the group’s extremist ideology has tremendous and extremely disturbing implications for everyone in Afghanistan, but especially the women and girls.

This type of framing teed up hawkish guests, who proliferate on TV guest lists, to use women as a political football to oppose withdrawal. Blitzer guest Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R.-Illinois), for instance, argued:

Look at the freedom that is being deprived from the Afghan people as the Taliban move into Afghan, or moving into parts of Afghanistan now, and you know how much freedom they had. Look at the number of women that are out there making careers, that are thought leaders, that are academics, that never would have happened under the Taliban leadership…. The devastation you are seeing today is why that small footprint of 2,500 US troops was so important.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R.-Iowa) gladly gave Jake Tapper (CNN Newsroom, 8/16/21) her take on the situation after CNN aired a report on the situation for women:

As you mentioned, for women and younger girls, this is also very devastating for them. The humiliation that they will endure at the hands of the Taliban all around this is just a horrible, horrible mar on the United States under President Joe Biden.

‘America rescued them’

Charity Wallace claimed in the Wall Street Journal (8/17/21) that Afghan “women and girls…made enormous progress over the past 20 years.”

Such analysis depends on the assumption that the US invasion and occupation “saved” Afghan women. In the Wall Street Journal (8/17/21), an op-ed by former George W. Bush staffer Charity Wallace ran under the headline : “The Nightmare Resumes for Afghan Women: America Rescued Them 20 Years Ago. How Can We Abandon Them to the Taliban Again?”

Two days later, a news article in the Journal (8/19/21) about the fate of women in Afghanistan explained: “Following the 2001 invasion, US and allied forces invested heavily to promote gender equality.”

The Associated Press (8/14/21), in a piece headlined, “Longest War: Were America’s Decades in Afghanistan Worth It?,” noted at the end that “some Afghans—asked that question before the Taliban’s stunning sweep last week—respond that it’s more than time for Americans to let Afghans handle their own affairs.” It continued, “But one 21-year-old woman, Shogufa, says American troops’ two decades on the ground meant all the difference for her.” After describing Shogufa’s experience for five paragraphs, the piece concludes with her “message to Americans”:

“Thank you for everything you have done in Afghanistan,” she said, in good but imperfect English. “The other thing was to request that they stay with us.”

Perhaps the most indignant media piece about Afghan women came from Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic (8/19/21), “The Week the Left Stopped Caring About Human Rights.” Flanagan argued:

Leave American troops idle long enough, and before you know it, they’re building schools and protecting women. We found an actual patriarchy in Afghanistan, and with nothing else to do, we started smashing it down. Contra the Nation, it’s hard to believe that Afghan women “won” gains in human rights, considering how quickly those gains are sure now to be revoked. The United States military made it possible for those women to experience a measure of freedom. Without us, that’s over.

Flanagan pointed to Afghan activist Malala Yousafzai, whom she accused “critics of the war” of forgetting, saying Yousafzai “appealed to the president to take ‘a bold step’ to stave off disaster.”

Next to last in women’s rights

Such coverage gives the impression that Afghan women desperately want the US occupation to continue, and that military occupation has always been the only way for the US to help them. But for two decades, women’s rights groups have been arguing that the US needed to support local women’s efforts and a local peace process. Instead, both Democrat and Republican administrations continued to funnel trillions of dollars into the war effort, propping up misogynist warlords and fueling violence and corruption.

Contra Flanagan’s insinuation, Yousafzai didn’t ask Biden to continue the occupation. In an op-ed for the New York Times (8/17/21) that most clearly laid out her appeal, she asked for humanitarian aid in Afghanistan and for refugees fleeing the country. In fact, her take on the US occupation’s role in women’s rights (BBC, 8/17/21) is much more critical than most voices in the US corporate media: “There had been very little interest in focusing on the humanitarian aid and the humanitarian work.”

As human rights expert Phyllis Bennis told FAIR’s radio program CounterSpin (2/17/21), Malalai Joya, a young member of parliament, told her in the midst of the 2009 troop surge that women in Afghanistan have three enemies: the Taliban, warlords supported by the US and the US occupation. “She said, ‘If you in the West could get the US occupation out, we’d only have two.’”

Things did get better for some women, mostly in the big cities, where new opportunities in education, work and political representation became possible with the Taliban removed from power. But as Shreya Chattopadhyay pointed out in the Nation (8/9/21), the US commitment to women was little more than window dressing on its war, devoting roughly 1,000 times more funding to military expenses than to women’s rights.

Passive consumers of US corporate news media might be surprised to learn that Afghanistan, in its 19th year under US occupation, ranked second-to-last in the world on women’s well-being and empowerment, according to the Women, Peace and Security Index (2019).

As the Index notes, Afghan women still suffer from discriminatory laws at a level roughly on par with Iraq, and an extraordinarily low 12.2% of women reported feeling safe walking alone at night in their community, more than 4 points lower than in any other country. And just one in three girls goes to school.

Wrong kind of ‘help’

In 2015, a 27-year-old Afghan woman named Farkhunda Malikzada was killed by an angry mob of men in Kabul after being falsely accused of burning a Quran; US-backed Afghan security forces watched silently (Guardian, 3/28/15). The shocking story spread around the world, but the only US TV network to mention it on air was PBS (7/2/15), which offered a brief report more than three months after the murder, when an Afghan appeals court overturned the death sentences given to some of the men involved.

FAIR turned up no evidence of Caitlin Flanagan ever writing about Malikzada, either—or about the plight of any Afghan woman before last week.

According to a Nexis search, TV news shows aired more segments that mentioned women’s rights in the same sentence as Afghanistan in the last seven days (42) than in the previous seven years (37).

The US did not “rescue” Afghan women with its military invasion in 2001, or its subsequent 20-year occupation. Afghan women need international help, but facile and opportunistic US media coverage pushes toward the same wrong kind of help that it’s been pushing for the last two decades: military “assistance,” rather than diplomacy and aid.

For more than 20 years, US corporate media could have listened seriously to Afghan women and their concerns, bringing attention to their own efforts to improve their situation. Instead, those media outlets are proving once again that Afghan women’s rights are only of interest to them when they can be used to prop up imperialism and the military industrial complex.

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lofimp3 · 4 years

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SERBIA JULY 2020: OVERVIEW

posted july 12th (tw: violence, police brutality)

before the protests:

the catalyst for the protests were the parliamentary elections that took place on june 21st.

leading up to the elections, people were assured that the number of covid patients was three times lower than it really was.

cafes, stadiums, clubs, other such spaces were all opened to the public. this caused a major spike in cases of covid-19. hospitals are reaching capacity again.

the voter turnout was under 50%, and voter fraud was high. the results came out, keeping the president aleksandar vučić’s party (srpska napredna stranka/serbian progressive party) the majority in the parliament.

in march, when cases of covid started appearing in serbia, the president mocked the severity of the situation and refused to take it seriously. nonetheless, soon after that, national lockdown and curfew were imposed.

this interrupted over a year of weekly protests against vučić’s control over the media (1 u 5 miliona/1 in 5 million, look it up) which ties into

the beginning of the protests

july 7th

this was the first night the citizens went out to protest the dictatorship of aleksandar vučić, government spreading misinformation, and the poor handling of the pandemic.

people from all political backgrounds gathered in front of the national assembly building in belgrade to boycott the current regime, hours after a new curfew and lockdown was announced.

they clashed with the police, who used tear gas and deployed stun grenades on the crowd. when protesters progressed towards the building entrance, the clash turned to physical violence.

since all national media is under the president’s control, every tv station apart from n1, which is owned by cnn, was ignoring the situation and playing movies or reality tv. (rts - radio and television of serbia - was playing jackie chan films.)

n1 journalists were out in the field, reporting on the police brutality the citizens were suffering, and they themselves got teargassed and harassed too.

by the end of the night, 24 people were detained and 60 were injured.

july 8th

the protests in belgrade lasted well until after nightfall, and other cities in serbia got involved with protesters marching in novi sad, niš, kragujevac, smederevo, and jagodina. the only city besides belgrade to face chaos and police brutality was novi sad, but on a much smaller scale.

police patrols, cavalry, and gendarmery were set up around the city of belgrade. protesters were violently attacked with batons, kicked while on the ground. non participating bystanders were attacked by the police under suspicion of being protesters.

the president claimed any policeman acting inappropriately would be punished but we still haven’t seen any policemen face consequences for the violence.

people have called for replacing the current covid-19 team since there’s reason to believe they’re “too politicized” and they cannot fulfill their duties objectively.

both prime minister brnabić and deputy pm stefanović called the protests “unnecessary violence” the deputy pm claimed that “it’s not about politics, it’s about being violent”.

the president attributed the protests to “extremist groups” and claimed they were complaining about “migrants, the 5g network, and the flat earth.”

the eu (brussels) releases a statement saying that restrictive measures used to minimize contagion cannot have a disproportionate effect on human rights and liberties.

by the end of the night, 19 policemen and 17 civilians were injured. 153 people were detained.

july 9th

the protests have spread to, beside the cities that participated on july 8th, to kruševac, kraljevo, čačak, and požega. serbian diaspora communities in usa, france, and austria have gotten involved. belgrade is still the hub of all activity, and the place reported on the most.

as a way of showing they don’t want the violence, protesters peacefully sat in front of the national assembly building. police both in and out of uniform patrolled anyway, and instigator groups tried turning the peaceful protest into chaos.

there were minor clashes with instigator groups, but there were no severe injuries and any disaster that could have occurred was averted. a number of journalists were among the people attacked by instigators.

the curfew announced on july 7th was revoked, and lighter measures were put into place. (gatherings must be 10 people or less, masks still mandatory)

the president claimed that the protests are “an act of terrorism” but that also “they do not bother [him] at all.”

july 10th

yet another city joins, zrenjanin. citizens start blocking off highways and other important roads. when they tried blocking the highway between belgrade and novi sad, they were stopped by the police. protests everywhere but in belgrade are peaceful and end with no incidents.

the protest in belgrade started out peacefully too, but it escalated. a group of protesters incited a riot, throwing rocks and firecrackers at the national assembly building, making their way to the entrance.

policemen in riot gear responded by pushing them away, hitting them with batons and shields, and then chasing the citizens in order to break up the protest. tear gas and stun grenades were used, again.

once again, police and cavalry patrol the city and anyone suspected of participating in the protests gets searched and/or attacked. violence is intense and there’s been cases bad enough that people might spend days in the hospital.

ambulances have been coming only to pick up injured policemen, citizens have to walk to a stationary vehicle, but that’s risky since policemen use the stationary ambulances as a stakeout point.

there’s no official number of injured people yet, 71 people were detained.

the president called the rioters “thugs” and said they’d be arrested.

this is the day covid cases reached a new peak, 368 new cases and 18 dead in 24 hours. the government blames protests, but their opposition blames the government’s prior negligence, like allowing major soccer games and parties to take place.

july 11th

the protest in belgrade was peaceful with no rioters or instigators. people stood in front of the national assembly building calling for president vučić to resign.

police patrolled the city regardless of how the protest went, stopping people to search or interrogate them.

there are no more official statements released at this point.

july 12th (today)

police has been patrolling the city all day, cops posted on busy streets and near parks are stopping people and interrogating them, and detaining them if they find them suspicious. there’s been no signs of protest activity at this point today.

i will do my best to post about this and add new updates as things happen, please share this, informing people of what’s happening is crucial. thank you for reading.

#serbia #covid19 #belgrade #pls share if u can thanks!!!

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