Toro Bora was partially built with CIA support and had been used for years before the US invasion. It was a fairly formidable complex, and the image in the tweet would not have been mistaken as a to-scale depiction by newspaper readers in 2001, even if it apparently has been by twitter users in 2021.

I read that final paragraph, and then looked at all the Amazon sponsored posts on the Inventory, and now my two brain cells aren’t even speaking to one another.

Correct: It isn’t just indulging our prurient interest when we can justify it with some armchair psychology.

I saw that. I disagree. It seems like a very easy affair to condense into a little correction note.

Your second point was that she went after a married father when he was neither, and that he was a “shitty dad,” which he isn’t. Valuing accuracy more and anger less would save you a lot of energy wasted on writing multiple paragraphs about the many strong opinions on a man about which you care not at all.

I don’t know why this couldn’t be handled in a correction/clarification: that the pretextual event for the riot appears to have at least somewhat corroborated doesn’t make it any less pretextual. The Proud Boys didn’t care if it were true or not, and nothing in what Butler said was predicated on it being false.

Glad someone else said it. I don’t know how the author escaped the cognitive dissonance that results from reading that something is “officially” over in a headline immediately followed by a reference a petition to end it in the sub-head.

The owners were probably under the impression that New Yorkers aren’t the sort of bumpkins that are unfamiliar with the existence of non-English languages. More fool them.

Given Jezebel’s editorial stances, I would have thought that the choice between directing traffic to the New York f**king Post or driving traffic to The Root would be so obvious as to not be a real choice at all, but what do I know.

Yes. There’s the U.S. women’s soccer team. The WNBA will sometimes flicker into existence when a Republican complains about them.

Pointing out that there are additional ethical implications to the body takeover is also not the debate-ending rebuttal this guy seems to think it is.

It isn’t, even a little bit. I acknowledge her degree and that she gained skills from it. She has a science education - I know three of the four people that signed off on her dissertation at UCLA, and they are heavyweights in their field. All that said, having a science education is not the same thing as being a…

Bialik has a PhD in neuroscience, but she is not a “neuroscientist” in that she is not running a lab, designing or conducting experiments, testing the rigor of her idea through peer review, or attending conferences to keep up with the latest insights of her field. She did the work, and undoubtedly gained certain…

It’s an idea that depends on the notion that there are sufficient numbers of willing “Queer Feminists” exist in Afghanistan to form even a battalion’s worth of fighters, that they would be willing to serve the aims of the US Empire, that US notions of gender and identity would trump what are - as you noted - powerful…

That you were patient enough to write this whole thing, rather than collapse into giggles at the need to write this whole thing, makes you a much better person than I.

Old journalism saying: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can always be answered by the word no.”

“disestablishing the tribal systems, for the last twenty years like we said we were gonna, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

The specific claim in the story seems to be saying that the US provided money and arms to the Taliban. They did not. This is an oversimplification of the history, but the Taliban arose *in reaction to* groups that the US had supported. Those groups, in turn, existed before and after US funding. The Taliban arose after…

America did not create a Vietnam, the Soviets and Afghanis did. The groups that were fighting the Soviets and then each other were not doing so at the request of the US: they had their own motivations, and would have done so without US involvement or encouragement. America is not the fulcrum of history.

Ahmad’s book talks extensively about the ISI. The Taliban eventually became a client of the ISI, but not one of their principal ones. Part of the reason they did so well in getting support from significant portions of the people of Afghanistan is precisely because they were different from the various tribal groups…