8 thoughts on “Blog Recommendation”

  2. This writer seems to know what she writes about:

    Cheryl Benard is an academic, a lifelong feminist and supporter of Afghan women. Her publications include Women and Nation-Building, My Country My Vote, A Primer on Democracy for Afghan Women; Best of Muslim Family Law; Veiled Courage – Inside the Afghan Women’s Resistance.

    The truth about Afghan women
    The media has focused on a few feminists in Kabul
    https://unherd.com/2021/09/the-truth-about-afghan-women/

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    1. The only reason for the US presence in Afghanistan was to prop up a somewhat friendly and not completely unhinged regime in Pakistan and prevent fundamentalists from taking over a nuclear state. That we keep talking about feminism in this context is kind of crazy. It’s a fairy-tale.

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      1. Re US presence in Afghanistan, some descriptions of USA support of feminism there sounded suspiciously like USA behavior in FSU areas:

        // Afghan feminists and their international supporters had not seemed to care about the bulk of the country’s women, had made no real attempt to address their most pressing “disasters”: lack of food, lack of health care and basic physical safety.

        Personally, I had long since lost respect for the self-promoting feminists of Kabul, who knew exactly which Western buttons to push but deployed that skill almost exclusively for their own benefit. They loved attending conferences abroad, were expert at obtaining lucrative contracts to “train” each other in such skills as public speaking, leadership and “advocacy,” and enjoyed being celebrated for their “courage” in foreign news media. You wouldn’t find them in the provinces, trying to uplift rural women. And when leadership and their much-vaunted courage were urgently required, they decamped for the West.

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  3. OT: After nine days and 25,000 seismic events a/the volcano on La Plama, Canarias is erupting for the first time in 50 years.

    This was expected so hopefully evacuation plans will go smoothly…

    (live feed from Spanish TV)

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    2. What?? I don’t check in with volcanocafe for TWO whole days, and I missed that… a spectacular eruption, by all accounts. Better if there weren’t houses in its path, but I’m told they evacuated everybody?

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  4. Human Sacrifice and the Digital Business Model
    Debates over free speech ignore the deeper problem: The tech monopolies that control social media have built their profit model on burnt offerings to the digital platform god
    …
    It is not the arguments or ideas of any political group, but the structure of the digital platforms that sets the tone of the culture as a whole.

    And what is the structure? It is an arena for perpetual conflict driven by an accumulation of grievances collected in a mass program of decentralized surveillance. We are incentivized, by the coded logic of the social media platforms where public engagement now takes place, to find reasons to hate each other. The algorithms that encourage and reward particular behaviors on Twitter and Facebook play on our deepest human instincts and desires to create spectacles of symbolic violence and sacrifice. Much of the time, the violence and spectacle has the appearance of a game or a light amusement. To take it too seriously, therefore, is to risk being an alarmist, and likely of the reactionary sort. But it is precisely the gamelike aspect of the platforms that keeps us playing. Playing and paying because the point, finally, is profit.

    https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/sacrificial-games-cancel-culture

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