Voice from the Commonwealth Commentary, World Views and Occasional Rants from a small 'l' libertarian in Massachussetts
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest for freedom, go home and leave us in peace. We seek not your council nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams
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This is old but, still pretty amusing. The overthrow of the Taliban meant sprouting sattelite dishes which meant men watching porn.
Despite their lurid names - one is called "100 percent hardcore" - the porn channels are mild by Western standards, showing topless women gyrating around poles or reclining languorously as telephone numbers for sex chat-lines and mail-order videos scroll across the screen. But most Kandahar men, cut off from the outside world by decades of conflict and warlordism and then by the harsh rules of the Taliban, have never seen anything like it.
Many are uneasy. "This is not good for our society," said a 26-year-old man who works for an educational foundation. "People should not be watching such things. It's not right." But there is no shortage of viewers. In one guesthouse a group of bearded Afghan men sit glued to the screen, one of them frantically stabbing at the remote control to change the channel when a female Western aid worker walks into the room.
Abdul Wasi runs one of the many satellite television shops that have emerged in Kandahar since the Taliban left. He sells six-foot dishes for about $100 and eight-foot dishes with a digital receiver for about $250, importing the equipment from Pakistan. The small brick shop is surrounded by dozens of dishes littering the pavement. "I've been in business a month, and I have sold nearly 400 dishes," Wasi said. "My shop is always busy. Everybody wants to watch satellite television."
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