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"You have the watches, but we have the time" — Taliban fighters, addressing the Americans.

هذا الحجي عن الحرب البريطانية-الأفغانية الثانية، وفشلت مثل الأُولى... وراها بأكثر من 100 سنة دخلت أمريكا لهاي الهوسة وهمين انلاصت عليها وطلعت

In 1878, detecting new Russian interest in Afghanistan, the British tried to occupy Kabul again. Once again, however, they miscalculated the difficulties of occupying a mountainous territory inhabited by so many hostile and mutually antagonistic tribes. It wasn’t that the land was hard to “conquer,” as Europeans understood the term conquest. Great Britain easily marched into the capital, put its own compliant nominee on the throne, and appointed an “envoy” to direct him. In most contexts, this would have been conquest. But the British found that bending Afghan leaders to their will did them little good. The leaders they bent simply broke off in their hands and ended up as their dependents, not their tools, while the tribal people they were supposedly the rulers of operated in the hills as leaderless guerillas. The second Anglo-Afghan War took a nasty turn when the British envoy Cavagnari was killed and ruinous urban battles broke out; in the end the British were forced to pull back to India again.

معضلة الأوروبيين وية أفغانستان:

Europeans never invaded Persia, never made concerted war on it. They just came to sell, to buy, to work, to “help.” But there they were when things came apart. And like opportunistic viruses that lurk in the body unnoticed but flourish into illness when the immune system breaks down, the Europeans flowed into whatever cracks opened up in the fragmenting society, growing ever more powerful as the cracks grew wider, until at last they were in command. Europeans pretty much failed to notice they were taking over Persia; and that’s partly because there was no “they.” Westerners came to Persia from various European countries, and Persians were not the enemy to them but the backdrop. The enemy, for each group of Europeans, was another group of Europeans. The British, the French, the Russians, the Dutch and others kept moving into power vacuums in Persia not so much to conquer Persia as to block other Europeans from conquering Persia. — Destiny Disrupted

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كانَ عزلُ النساء عن الحياة العامة عادةً إجتماعيةً مستمرةً من مئات السنين في العالَم الإسلامي آنذاك. لكن حتى في زمن العثمانيين، لَم ينتشر هذا الأمرُ في كل المجتمع، إذ لم يكن شائعًا إلا في الطبقات العليا منه. فالمسافِر المارُّ في المناطق الريفية يمكنه أنْ يصادف فلّاحاتٍ يعملن في الحقول أو يَسُقنَ الحيوانات على الطريق. أمّا في المناطق الحضرية، فنساء الطبقات الدنيا كنّ يمارسن أعمالهن في الأسواق العامة أو يتسوّقن حاجيّاتٍ لبيوتهن أو يَبِعن ما صَنَعن بأيديهن. أمّا الطبقة الوسطى، فبعضُ نسائها مَلَكْنَ الأراضي وأدَرْنَ الأعمال وأمَرْنَ العُمّال. لكنّ مشاركة هؤلاء النسوة في الحياة العامة لم تكن إلا دليلًا على مكانةِ رجالهن المتواضعة. — كتاب 'Destiny Disrupted'

مَثَل إنكليزي، معناه بالضبط هو "تريد أرنب؟ هاك أرنب. تريد غزال؟ هاك أرنب"

Computers allowed financiers to complicate their gambles immensely. Instead of a simple option-to-sell boring old shares to Jill, Jack could now buy much snazzier options called derivatives. For example, he could buy a derivative that was in essence an option-to-buy a bundle containing shares in a variety of different companies plus bits of debts owed by homeowners in Kentucky, German corporations, even the Japanese government. As if that were not complex enough, Jack could also buy a derivative amounting to the option-to-buy a bundle of many such … derivatives that some super-computer would create. By the time these derivatives containing other derivatives had come out of the computer, not even the genius financial ‘engineer’ who created them could understand what was in them. Complexity thus became a great excuse not to delve into the derivatives that one bought. It liberated the Jills and the Jacks from the need to explain to themselves why they were buying them. Once computers had guaranteed that no one could possibly understand what these derivatives were made of, everyone wanted to buy them because … everyone was buying them. And as long as everybody was buying, anyone who could borrow huge amounts of money could become a billionaire (and avoid being branded a coward or a party-pooper or a loser by one’s colleagues) simply by purchasing them. For years, that’s exactly what was happening. Until, in 2008, it wasn’t.

Derivatives (finance)

At around the same time, in the late 1970s, the first personal computers began to enter engineering, architecture and, of course, finance. The joke then was that to err is human but to mess things up seriously one needs a computer. — Technofeudalism

Cafe in Cartagena, Colombia 1989

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