{"id":71947,"date":"2022-05-29T01:00:49","date_gmt":"2022-05-29T05:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=71947"},"modified":"2022-05-28T09:00:05","modified_gmt":"2022-05-28T13:00:05","slug":"qotd-was-bidens-afghan-evacuation-driven-by-twitter-optics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/05\/29\/qotd-was-bidens-afghan-evacuation-driven-by-twitter-optics\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Was Biden’s Afghan evacuation driven by Twitter “optics”?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Take the Afghanistan bugout. As Z Man pointed out in his column today, it was gonna happen. And it was going to be a cock up; that’s just the nature of these things. A halfway competent Apparat<\/em> would’ve let Bad Orange Man own it. They could’ve milked it for years. Hell, decades \u2014 it was 2012 before we were finally<\/em> allowed to stop talking about who did or didn’t do what in Vietnam.<\/p>\n

But the Apparat<\/em> didn’t do that, and the reason was: Twitter.<\/p>\n

All the Blue Checkmarks on Twatter agreed that “letting” Bad Orange Man pull out of Afghanistan would be “handing him a win”. After all, he said he was going to do it! And if he somehow got out before<\/em> the 20th anniversary, that’d be an even bigger win. Obviously, then, they had to “let” Biden do it, because that’s a “win”. And of course he had to do it in August, so that he could “spike the football” on 9\/11\/2021.<\/p>\n

So the withdrawal had to be pushed into 2021, and it had to be slapdash. Indeed, it had to be the exact opposite of whatever Bad Orange Man was planning to do, so that there was no possible way Bad Orange Man could claim a “win”. It had to be<\/em> all Biden …<\/p>\n

… and so it was. With results that anyone smarter than a concussed goldfish \u2014 which of course excludes everyone with a Blue Checkmark \u2014 could’ve predicted.<\/p>\n

If the Blue Checkmark Borg on Twatter, then, decides that Brandon needs to look tough by nuking Moscow, then it’s go time. And since the social dynamic on Twitter is ever-spiraling lunacy \u2014 the only way to “win” Twitter is by being more screechingly insane about everything than everyone else \u2014 then whoever gets there fustest with the mostest is going to drive the “decision”.<\/p>\n

Severian, “Ukraine”, Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2022-02-24.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Take the Afghanistan bugout. As Z Man pointed out in his column today, it was gonna happen. And it was going to be a cock up; that’s just the nature of these things. A halfway competent Apparat would’ve let Bad Orange Man own it. They could’ve milked it for years. Hell, decades \u2014 it was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,5,53,41,13],"tags":[218,1037,1406,1462,593,310],"class_list":["post-71947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia","category-military","category-politics","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-afghanistan","tag-donaldtrump","tag-joebiden","tag-severian","tag-socialmedia","tag-twitter"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-iIr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71947"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73911,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71947\/revisions\/73911"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}