Self immolation as a form of protest. For anyone unaware of it there was a Buddhist monk who immolated themself to protest the oppression of Buddhists by the Catholic PM of Vietnam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thích_Quảng_Đức
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_Against_the_Machine_(album)
https://time.com/3791176/malcolm-browne-the-story-behind-the-burning-monk/
Maybe this is why I’m not seeing it, it was a few months ago.
Edit: The link says this was in DC recently though.
“A US Air Force soldier is in critical condition after he set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, Sunday.”
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The posting essentially says there is no risk than tosses out mercury and lead vapors which don’t exist in a HDD. Then it talks about the lead in solder. You’d have to vigorously rub and handle the solder on circuit boards to get any amount on your skin worth worrying about and then you just wash your hands. That risk is true of all boards that don’t use low or lead free solder. The whole comment is very hypothetical.
If your hard drive has dust it would’ve failed a long time ago. They are designed to be extremely clean. The head is like a 747 flying an inch above the ground. It sounds like an urban myth to scare people.
I used to collect AOL cds. I had a stack a few feet high. I was going to make some sort of artwork out of them.
“It isn’t war crimes or ethnic cleansing if we do it”
Chain themselves to private jets if they really want to hassle execs
“You should’ve extended the war by a few more decades!”
Other militaries DID go in and pushed out the Taliban and you know what happened? The people, especially in the rural areas, were indifferent at best and frequently hostile. They didn’t ask for anyone to “help them”, even if they politely accepted it but they still saw them as outsiders vs the Taliban who were at least from there. They also knew the US and others weren’t going to be there forever and the day would eventually come when they’d leave and then what? The Taliban would be there to fill the void. The moral in the ANA was crap so they weren’t going to stop them. So the people kept on the best terms with both sides best they could and tried not to piss off the Taliban so they wouldn’t take revenge when they returned.
You can go back to Alexander the Great. Mountainous regions have always been notoriously hard to control with other regions like the Caucasus and the Balkans as examples. They tend to be fragmented and loosely connected.
We went there because the Taliban didn’t want to kick Al Qaeda out and 9-11 had just happened.
We built schools and got girls into the schools. The first thing the Taliban did was close all of those schools.
I hate it when you see the media (e.g. the BBC) going on about the latest awful government somewhere or some nation falling apart. The implication of course is they want someone to march in and save it, of course this means using force because the people there who are the problem aren’t going to leave willingly. So then you end up with a war and all the things that go with war (our guys dying, civilians get killed, accidents, etc) and then the media comes back and says how awful this war is, how civilians are getting killed, how things aren’t much better, etc.
Iraq started to protect the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. Afterwards we stayed to keep it from going into chaos and keep Iran from filling the void.
You tend not to go to war (which are really bad things) until you are attacked.
I’d just like the US to stop playing world cop and have a decade or two without some intervention somewhere.
I think they looked at the Taliban as a pragmatic choice and a familiar force. They also saw the US leaving as at least an end to years of war and a return to something resembling normalcy.
Outside of Kabul it seemed the average rural person felt that they had to choose between a temporary US occupation supporting an uninterested government vs the Taliban who were all around them on a daily basis and would take over the second the US left. They did the safe thing and sided with the Taliban.
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