I encourage anyone who cares about this to travel to Afghanistan themselves and see it with their own eyes before relying on what publications like the Guardian have to say about it. One thing about the article that is probably not true is the claim that the girls were labeled “infidels” by the state. Why this claim is suspicious is that there is no word for “infidel” in the languages spoken in Afghanistan. The closest equivalent would be کافر (kafir), which can refer to someone who isn’t Muslim, but not wearing hijab is not considered to be any kind of proof that someone is not a Muslim. It’s highly doubtful that they were excommunicated for this.

The guardian claims that the government in Afghanistan mandates that women must be covered “from head to toe, revealing only their eyes”, which is clearly not true. When I was in Kabul I saw many women without their faces covered. This is one clear case where the Guardian gets facts on the ground wrong. A lot of women there are wearing surgical masks as a form of face covering that also doubles as protection from pollution and disease. As the girl quoted in the article said, they are doing this as a “precaution”, in other words, the government doesn’t in fact require face covering, but they are doing it anyway because they think they have to.

The article implies that girls were specifically targeted for going to English class, as if they have an issue with learning English. Government officials themselves also go to English classes, so that in and of itself was not a relevant matter to the story.

As for them getting beaten for “confronting the men”, of course you are going to get beaten if you resist arrest or argue. That’s true in most countries, but particularly in Afghanistan the authorities tend to hit people if they are not compliant.

The other issue is that the rule in Afghanistan is not well developed or consolidated, which means that these men who committed these acts like the beatings and arrests were acting outside the law, and the central government doesn’t necessarily support this action. Because of the rudimentary form of government different local elements of the Taliban can act differently or independently, so what the spokesperson quoted in the article said about this being unusual was probably telling the truth. This was only one incident, and hopefully it won’t be repeated elsewhere.

I prefer Matrix

Says Apple lol

That’s why I’m never gonna do that shit

I hesitate to call such people friends

Discord is no match for Matrix

Has anyone ever drunk that many beers?

We are the intelligent few

He may joke about it, but he’s not going to do it

it looks like they removed it in 10.15

Things have really gone downhill

Did OS X even include emacs???

Not smoking, drinking

Already there agha

His family also got the first iMac running OS X, and that was such a beauty to behold. I mean, maybe the design wasn’t as colorful or iconic as the G4 generation, but man that OS was sweet.

It was such an iconic machine. Ironically, at the time I hated them. (I probably still wouldn’t want to use one even now, but now I only have to look at pictures of them, and they admittedly are nice to look at.)

I had a friend in high school whose family had one of these in their living room, and it was running OS 9. It was practically useless, but I forget what he did on it. I seem to remember that it ran World of Warcraft, but now I’m questioning my memory if that was really possible or not.

looks like a mistake

I’m sick and tired of reading this sentence…

Me too, but when I think about it, I realize its necessity

Slippery slope fallacy. Also a lot of people actually don’t know that alcohol causes cancer and heart disease as well as homicide, etc. A lot of gullible people drink it because they are socially led to believe that it’s OK or perhaps even necessary, but these are not thinking or informed people. The fact that you call legitimate health information about alcohol “propaganda” shows that you’re not really in the “know” camp, doesn’t it?

It’s just a warning label not a prohibition

Given that it’s all open source, there will always be a way to get all of this working, but maybe one potential or temporary low-tech solution is to offer accounts on the XMPP server for Lemmy users individually per request, meaning not everyone gets one automatically, but anyone can ask for one. It would however, be nice to have it all linked together and be automatic.

Maye one day Lemmy could even have a chat feature in the browser which just uses the XMPP backend. Anyway, I think it would be great to have an XMPP account on slrpnk.net. Maybe e-mail too?