Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy. (Politics General)

@Dustcan  
I took the shot to spite my dad who is pretty anti vax. Not all the way Anti Vax but he doesn’t want to get the shot and is pretty anti mask too.

@Latecomer  

I wish the same lack of attention can be given to brown losers, too. If the loser idiot is brown they get two weeks of media attention and their entire browsing history exposed to the public, even his ironic shitposts.

Don’t give shooters, regardless of belief or ethnicity, any fucking mass attention.
 
Let their faces be forgotten and focus on the victims.

@tehwatever  
When was the last one found to be part of a terror group?

The Taliban going into power is only gonna make the situation in Afghan worse.

@tehwatever
 
The Chinese government thinks that wearing a hanfu in official settings would make them look less “modern” and “respectable” (at least to outsiders), even as the Chinese nationalists themselves would disagree.

@tehwatever  
Hanfu is pretty ugly tbh. It’s just too much clothing.

@Latecomer  
Not recently, despite the France and Vienna attacks.
 
Wikipedia lists the perpetrator as Lone Wolves but the attacks were categorized as Islamic Terrorism so they were lone wolf terrorists.
 
If Hatun had died from the knife attack in Hyde Park it’d also probably be considered islamic terrorism even when the perp hasn’t caught, considering the obvious motive behind it.
 
@Background Pony #7480  
I disagree. As a guy who unironically wears non-western dress on a regular, or maybe a slim-fit knee-long shirts and generally anything BUT a bidniz suit, I find them really appealing.
 
I would wear a hanfu without irony if it wasn’t cultural appropriation on my part.

@tehwatever  
cultural appropriation is a meme, wear what you want. I just don’t like it because it looks too cumbersome, too much cloth and I don’t like how it falls.

The Taliban inside the presidential palace. They will soon declare “the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan”. There will be no transitional government, the president has fled alongside the police and army.
 

 
Also notice the fully specced out M4 on the table there, another sign of the total collapse of the afghan army.

Combing through the census data is interesting.
 
The white population declined in the US for the first time in history. Was not just outpaced, mind you, actually declined. And not unsubstainally either, 8.6%. The white population now accounts for around 57.8% of the population. The fastest growing population was those who considering themselves multiracial, surging a dramatic 276%, from 9 million in 2010 to 33.8 million in 2020.
 
What’s more, rural communities accounted for a majority of population decline, while the cities grew and the suburbs went nuclear. Suburban growth is the highest it’s been since suburbs became a thing.
 
There was much umming and awwing about “white flight” from the cities to the suburbs and rural areas, with a prediction that cities would become majority nonwhite, suburbs majority white, and that rural growth would pick back up.
 
That has not occurred, at least not fully. White folk have left for the subs, but so have minorities. Leading to incredibly diverse, and particularly large suburbs.
 
 
This complicates redistricting for both parties. Population decline gives Republicans less buffer zones to shove into suburbs to beef their support. And dems have only recently gotten a foothold in the suburbs, so relying on voting data from the last two cycles carries risks.

@tehwatever
 
Mostly on the basis that the ones who would do something like this tend to be relatively asocial to begin with. I mean, if you spend a lot of time on the internet interacting with other incels, it implies that you aren’t out interacting with people IRL.
 
@Goku Black
 
My condolences then.
 
@Latecomer
 
No, but doing the same thing that they do with Tarrant here is idiotic and counterproductive, as it immortalises them amongst similar people.
 
@CaptainXtra
 
There’s a difference between not giving them media attention and treating them as Voldemort.
 
I was reading the other day about media coverage of climate change, and one thing said there also applies to terrorist attacks and mass shootings (and LGBTQA+ issues too): overtly focusing on the victims doesn’t sway the skeptics of whatever you’re trying to push, policy-wise. Hell, I can use an example from discussions in this very thread to demonstrate this:
 
A lot of media surrounding the Afghanistan withdrawal and Taliban advancement has focused on both the current victims and the possible future victims of their shitty practices (they are puritanical islamists, after all), and the subtle hints with that coverage are that the withdrawal is a bad idea, and the coalition should stay longer “for the women and children.” While me and many other sympathise with their plight, that in no way justifies terrible policies like extending the occupation or reneging on the agreements with the Taliban. My sympathies don’t sway me, and more unsympathetic people are especially unswayed by it, and will see through what the media-industrial complex is trying to do, thus will argue to effect “fuck them, not our problem!”

Best case scenario would be if the Taliban pulled an upset and in a decade or two, started churning out decent human resources that could compete internationally in secular fields, proving that they’re capable governors.
 
But alas. Taliban isn’t China, who managed to claw right out of being the laughing stock of the world into a mega-trillionaire superpower.  
China is still oppressing people, tho. Yet no country in their right mind is even trying to fight Xi Jinping militarily. Trump could have picked a fight with China. That woulda been fun, but we would have a major tech and gadgets shortages if China was to go to war with somebody.
 
Decisions, decisions.

@silbasa  
So Trump was a fascist racist Hitler white supremacist insurrectionist traitor who destroyed everything he touched.
 
Biden was billed as the savior of the universe and was going to restore America’s standing by rolling back everything Trump did.
 
Along comes Afghanistan…  
Now leftists are like “The withdrawal from Afghanistan was designated by Trump. Biden had no choice but to follow the plan.”
 
Right.
 
Biden had no choice but to implement the racist Hitler white supremacist fascist plan.
 
He. Had. No. Choice.
 
Only… Here is Biden saying that HE consulted with the military on the best way to execute the withdrawal after *HE decided to end the war.
 
Got that? Biden’s plan, Biden’s decision.
 
Trump wanted this in May. When the participation of the Warlords held the Taliban in check.  
Not 3 months later, when even the Warlords are outraged that Biden broke the original withdrawal agreement.  
This is ALL Biden administration. Biden is the one who insisted on keeping the US presence there for 3 additional months, without a single effort to evacuate military goods/personnel. We ought to have withdrawn back in May as initially brokered.
 
Now?  

 
 
Skyrocketing gas prices and inflation, mass business closures, a complete goatfuck in the Middle East…
 
All we need now is an Afghan Hostage situation and the Jimmy Carter 2.0 tableau will be complete.

@Ebalosus  
Thank you  
We should not have outsourced most of our manufacturing to China.

@Goku Black  
The only non-food, non-comic item I own that wasn’t manufactured in China is my pants, which were made in Bangladesh. I’ve never, ever seen an inedible object mass-produced locally.

@Goku Black
 
Even Xi Jinping points out how deindustrialisation is a bad idea:  

@tehwatever  
Yeah, once China realized moving towards capitalism and a more open economy it started to really take off. I say more open, they aren’t some free market utopia, but they saw the failures of communism and actually managed to transition away from it.

There is a trending hashtag on Twitter that says #WeStandWithTaliban. Not surprisingly, it’s trending in Pakistan.

China, Afghanistan, Russia… It seems the whole world is doomed…

@MethidMan  

 

@Background Pony #15B5  
The Taliban was negotiating their return to power as soon as the ink was dry on the Doha deal. Leaving three months earlier just means we would have had this clusterfuck three months earlier.

@tehwatever  
China and Afghanistan are in somewhat different leagues.

@Background Human
 
@Latecomer  
What is with MethidMan?

@CaptainXtra  
China becoming more powerful, Afghanistan coming back into Taliban rule, and Russia…well, you know how Putin is his own dictator and all.
 
Everything’s just fucked up and the whole world is in trouble from these 3 countries and others.