barnesandco:

Kabul has fallen, Afghanistan is almost completely under Taliban rule now, and President Ashraf Ghani, has fled. I wasn’t alive during the Vietnam war, but having seen the images of Saigon at the end of it, it’s impossible not to think of them when seeing the footage of Chinooks airlifting US embassy workers to Kabul airport. l cannot tell you how surreal it is to be watching the news from neighboring Pakistan, sitting next to my grandfather who has been alive for every change of government since the Brits left after the war.

History repeats and repeats and repeats, nobody learns a damn thing, and innocent civilians are the ones that suffer.

250 000 Afghans have left their homes. Many more are going to do so. And that’s just the ones who flee. Those who don’t will live under a conservative rule that is going to commit crimes against humanity on a daily basis, that is going to ruin the lives of generations to come.

The worst part is, I don’t know what else there is to be done at this point. I can only pray that my country will accommodate the incoming refugees, though I fear they won’t.

All I ask is that international community keep Afghanistan in their thoughts, and that everyone raises their voice against what is happening, both in terms of what the Taliban is doing, and how the actions of foreign powers led us to this point. The US, the UK, Pakistan, are all at fault, and must be held accountable

apas-95:

As much as I do love the ‘SpaceX is just burning money for no reason, Elon Musk is personally designing these rockets badly, the whole company is a joke, Elon’s going to blow up on his way to Mars’ banter, I think it’s important to reckon with the actual reality of SpaceX as a military contractor.

Their ‘Starship’ is not, and never was designed to fly to Mars - that’s a marketing scheme, and it makes no sense if you actually look at the vehicle. SpaceX is able to throw money at this project because they’ve got a military contract to produce it as a military cargo drone. Their ‘Starship’ is designed to deliver a C-130′s load of US military cargo to anywhere in the world within an hour.

SpaceX, from before its first ever launch, has been partnered with the US military - as noted in the incident where the company stranded its workers without food on an island owned by the US Army. SpaceX’s constant failures with their rocket come from a simple calculation - cost versus time. To slowly and methodically design a rocket such that, by your first test flight, you’re confident in it, is just that: slow. Blowing up rocket after rocket and iterating is fast, but expensive - but when you have military contractor money, it’s worth it.

This is far from SpaceX’s only time contracting for the military, having launched military payloads with their Falcon rockets, and even designed satellites for the military. There’s a reason only USAmerican citizens are allowed to work at SpaceX.

The image of SpaceX as an eccentric billionaire’s quest to colonise Mars serves as a marketing ploy which distracts from the company’s real existence as part of the US military industrial complex, beholden not to the Reddit-fueled whims of an egocentric moron, but to the massive economic and structural forces of modern capitalism.

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brendanicus:

Israel is a vile, sadistic, cruel, immeasurably pathetic country that will go down in history as one of the most despotic regimes of all time. An entire nation of settlers and colonizers so drunk on their own ethnonationalist wet dreams they can’t see how utterly fucked they are. Not even with their billions of dollars of military gear and the unyielding patronage of the greatest empire on Earth have they been able to crush the Palestinian people. Palestine will be free again in our lifetimes and Israel will only be remembered as the insane orgy of cruelty it has always been. Deal with it Zionists.