# eyeshadow-wearing Taliban men? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [January 10, 2005, 4:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eyeshadow-wearing-taliban-men/284052 "2005-01-10T16:05:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2005, 6:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eyeshadow-wearing-taliban-men/284052/41 "2005-04-22T18:26:57Z")
Oh tish, **Acsenray** , who cares about **Altaic language family** anyway? You pickaxers weren’t content to pick away at **Ural-Altaic** until you broke it. No, then you had to go and pick **Altaic** and break it up too. Even before we’d had a chance to get Korean and Japanese properly stuck on. Well, who cares? **Turkic, Mongolic,** and **Tungus-Manchu** all go back to **Nostratic** anyway. They form some sort of loose local “node” within Eastern Nostratic, as Merritt Ruheln would put it. ---
**Author:** ![Tamerlane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tamerlane/32/7602_2.png) [@Tamerlane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tamerlane)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2005, 6:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eyeshadow-wearing-taliban-men/284052/42 "2005-04-22T18:48:29Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > Oh tish, **Acsenray** , who cares about **Altaic language family** anyway? I think you meant **Excalibre** ;). By the by since this thread was resurrected, I’ll mention that The Lion’s Grave:_Dispatches from Afghanistan_ by John Lee Anderson does briefly go into hisimpression of the rather ornate nature of Pashtun culture in the south of the country and Qandahar’s reputation as a hotbed of pederasty ( deserved or not ): \*The austerity of the Taliban was particularly anomalous in the Pashtun homelands of eastern and southern Afghanistan, of which Kandahar is the principal city. Mosques, for instance, are more architecturally ornate in the Pashtun regions than the north. The streets are filled with motorized rickshaws covered with fanciful bronze embossing and shiny decals. Trucks are decorated with painted tin panels and wooden bulwarks like the prows of old-fashioned schooners. Metal geegaws dangling from their fenders tinkle as the trucks lumber along. Pashtun men, Kandaharis in particular, are very conscious of their personal appearance. Many of them line their eyes with black kohl and color their toenails, and sometimes their fingernails, with henna. Some also dye their hair. It is quite common to see otherwise sober-seeming older men with long beards that are a flaming almost punklike orange color. Burly, bearded men who carry weapons also wear **chaplis** , colorful high-heeled sandals. I noticed that to be really chic in Kandahar you wear your **chaplis** a size or too small, which means that you mince or wobble as you walk. Afghans from other regions joke about the high incidence of pederasty among Kandahari men. They say that when crows fly over Kandahar they clamp one wing over their bottoms, just in case. One of the first things the Taliban did - a popular move - was to punish mujahideen commanders who were accused of rape or pederasty. Homosexuals who were sentenced to death faced a particularly grisly end. Tanks or bulldozers crushed them and buried them under mud walls. Pederasty was evidently a continuing source of concern to Mullah Omar, who decreed that Taliban commanders couldn’t have beardless boys in their ranks.\* - Tamerlane ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2005, 7:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eyeshadow-wearing-taliban-men/284052/43 "2005-04-22T19:39:32Z")
> [@El Cid Viscoso](#): > > You need to bone up on The Enemy, I’m afraid. And bone we shall! (If the plane ticket goes through) ---
**Author:** ![Excalibre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/898d66/32.png) [@Excalibre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Excalibre)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2005, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eyeshadow-wearing-taliban-men/284052/44 "2005-04-22T20:31:30Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > Oh tish, **Acsenray** , You’re confusing me with _that_ jackass? 😃 And anyway, it’s very important to demonstrate the falsehood of the Altaic hypothesis because the relationship between Turkic and the Indo-European languages (did you know that the Turkic languages are actually a group of Romance dialects?) is key to my Proto-World theory proving that all languages are descended from Euskara. I’m very close to finished with the website that I will use to prove this claim to the world. Within weeks, it (alongside its sister project at [http://www.timecube.com/](http://www.timecube.com/)) will “absolutely blow the lid off the present civilization.” Finally I will end the reign of evil of educated stupid people like you, **Johanna**. In conclusion, I am of Nature’s Harmonic Time Cube - in which both word and god are outlawed. No plant nor animal speaks word, a fraud by evil adults. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2005, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eyeshadow-wearing-taliban-men/284052/45 "2005-04-24T00:14:08Z")
My apologies, **acsenray!** You were nice to me and I snarked out on you (by mistake). Got snarked at in return. **Excalibre** , I may snark, but I don’t call fellow Dopers “stupid.” Not here in the hallowed halls of The Dope. ---
**Author:** ![Excalibre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/898d66/32.png) [@Excalibre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Excalibre)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2005, 12:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eyeshadow-wearing-taliban-men/284052/46 "2005-04-24T00:44:45Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > My apologies, **acsenray!** You were nice to me and I snarked out on you (by mistake). Got snarked at in return. > > **Excalibre** , I may snark, but I don’t call fellow Dopers “stupid.” Not here in the hallowed halls of The Dope. I’m sorry. That wasn’t how that was intended to come across. I was making a reference to various crazy theories of language evolution, and comparing them to the Timecube website, which uses the phrase “educated stupid” in reference to academia. I thought it was a familiar reference around here. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2005, 4:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eyeshadow-wearing-taliban-men/284052/47 "2005-04-24T04:25:15Z")
:smack: whoops OK, I’ve had enough hijacking this thread, how about you? ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2005, 4:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eyeshadow-wearing-taliban-men/284052/48 "2005-04-24T04:53:26Z")
**Excalibre** , don’t feel too bad. I’ve gotten bit by someone misunderstanding that ‘educated stupid’ thing as well. **Johanna** , great information. You are a real wealth of knowledge. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eyeshadow-wearing-taliban-men/284052.md?page=2)