Official friend-of-Registan.net Sean-Paul Kelley, of The Agonist fame, has set forth an offer I simply cannot refuse: He is willing to pitch in $1000, if I can raise the remainder of my costs for going to Afghanistan August 22. That would mean that, in order to buy my plane tickets without their cost rising into unaffordability, I would need to raise $3000 by August 7, or I won’t be able to go.
I have received some support from some pretty incredible people so far. The meter on the left is about $70 short of my actual total raised representative of what remains, so I need more help to be able to head off to the country I love and cover so much here.
This represents an extraordinary show of support on his part. So let’s call this pushing into official blegging territory: pass this link around to whomever you can think of, link from your blogs, email with gleeful abandon.
Help send me to Afghanistan!
UPDATE: Another friend-of-Registan.net, who wishes to remain anonymous, has pledged an additional $1000 to the cause of sending me to Afghanistan. In addition, I see in the last 12 hours several people have contributed significant sums of money as well. Which means I really only require about $1200 more to make this happen. I am, in a word, stunned by your generosity. Thank you! And keep on spreading the word!
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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Your second-hand, book-learned, hearsay-based, sneering ‘genius’ is so completely at odds with your evident ignorance of the actual situation in Afghanistan that I think it would do a whole lot of good for you to go there and learn a bit about the place at first-hand, rather than sitting in the midwest (again, now, where is it you developed your expertise — Iowa? South Dakota?) and woofing about things you don’t understand.
But I wouldn’t contribute a nickel to that cause.
I’d rather give the money to someone who’d shut off your access to the server you use.
Why is it that the most insulting commenters on the web are also the biggest fucking cowards on the internet?
It’s at times like these — those chance encounters with a total lack of human decency and textual incoherence (seriously, read the first few lines of your comment) — that I’m tempted to drop the IP banhammer. Unfortunately, I’d have to block a whole range of Deutsche Telekom users to have any effect. We actually have a fair number of German readers though, and like all sad, little, anonymouses on the web, you’ll soon find someone else to bitch at from behind your safe, warm mask.
Anonymous, we’d all like to hear what it is that qualifies you to make judgments on this topic.
Otherwise, we might just think you disagreed with Josh on some past posting of his, and this is how you treat people you disagree with (wishing they would be silenced).