September 11

Some of the News, every Once in a While

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smiley_cow
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September 11

Post by smiley_cow »

Al-Qa'ida, and the myth behind the war on terrorism

Interesting article about the nature and structure of Al Quaida.
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Re: I read the news today, oh boy

Post by Eisbreaker »

On a slightly unrelated note, the US needs to take its collective head out of its collective ass and get over 9/11. Other countries regularly go through disasters on an even larger scale and yet they somehow manage not to make an overly big deal out of it (like Japan, Thor bless their poor souls).
The US needs to realize they're not untouchable, and maybe then they won't be so mindblown when someone they've been screwing up the ass for a good number of years (valid or invalid reasons not withstanding) decides to screw them back.
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Re: I read the news today, oh boy

Post by smiley_cow »

I think it makes sense to do a remembrance for fallen people, but I think the US has learned all the wrong lessons from 9/11. This should have been a wake up call to Americans that they don't exist in a bubble, and that their foreign policy needs to be seriously examined and rethought. Instead it was used as an excuse to take away rights, increase government power and start unnecessary wars.

I'm also disappointed we've heard so little today about the 9/11 first responders who are still fighting just for basic healthcare to treat conditions sustained from being there on the day. Or from Muslims who have been on the receiving end of much worse sectarianism than before the attacks. Or even just people calling out how much more sensationalist the media and western governments have become since the 9/11 attacks. We should be examining ourselves and looking at what led us here and what needs to be fixed. Not licking our wounds in a corner and feeling sorry for ourselves. Or using it as an excuse to enact some ill-thought out revenge mostly against people who didn't do anything.
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Re: I read the news today, oh boy

Post by Astrogirl »

Today the wars are mentioned a lot, controls/limitations in air travel like nude scanners, homeland security ... but I have seen nobody mention the torture camps like the one in Guantanamo Bay and in countries around the world. -.-
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Re: I read the news today, oh boy

Post by Eisbreaker »

http://www.zurinstitute.com/victim_psychology.html

Take a look around the 9/11 bit, which starts from the 11th paragraph (or read the whole thing, it's a damn good use of your time). It's basically what I posted above in more coherent, verbose and clear wording.
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Re: I read the news today, oh boy

Post by Kimra »

Eisbreaker wrote:On a slightly unrelated note, the US needs to take its collective head out of its collective ass and get over 9/11. Other countries regularly go through disasters on an even larger scale and yet they somehow manage not to make an overly big deal out of it (like Japan, Thor bless their poor souls).
The US needs to realize they're not untouchable, and maybe then they won't be so mindblown when someone they've been screwing up the ass for a good number of years (valid or invalid reasons not withstanding) decides to screw them back.
Wow. You're a bit of a wanker.
Which disaster, out of curiosity, are we talking about in Japan? The Tsunami? That was a natural disaster, people are much better are getting over things that happen because of accidents than intentional attacks (ask someone who just got mugged and compare their response to someone who's had a branch fall on them). Hiroshima and Nagashima perhaps? That was a long time ago, and if you look, they are not over it. They don't hold such open hostility towards Americans as they would have, but they still mourn, and they still remember.
It's just stupid to think, and say, that people should get over something that traumatic on your schedule. Let them mourn for as long as they want to. Let them remember the terrible things that happened as a result as well. And maybe as a country, they will learn from it.
Tosser.

smiley_cow wrote:Or using it as an excuse to enact some ill-thought out revenge mostly against people who didn't do anything.
Is this directed at the wars or something else? I just need clarification on that.

Astrogirl wrote:Today the wars are mentioned a lot, controls/limitations in air travel like nude scanners, homeland security ... but I have seen nobody mention the torture camps like the one in Guantanamo Bay and in countries around the world. -.-
Wouldn't that be fault of YOUR media Astro? These last few weeks our news has covered many issues. A woman who's muslim husband died in the 9/11 attacks and who has suffered religious and racial prejudice since. David Hicks, who was held in Guantanamo Bay for six years.* A story about the people who have serious lung problems as a result of the towers falling (all that asbestos and fine rubble had to go somewhere). And several other such documentaries.** Not to mention, of course, documentaries about the actual event but I didn't watch tv yesterday so I missed them.

*I may have the number of years wrong, I apologise.
**there were other non-9/11 related documentaries too, but they are not the point at this time.
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Re: I read the news today, oh boy

Post by smiley_cow »

Kimra wrote:
smiley_cow wrote:Or using it as an excuse to enact some ill-thought out revenge mostly against people who didn't do anything.
Is this directed at the wars or something else? I just need clarification on that.
Partly. On a national scale one of the big reasons at the time for justifying Iraq and why the government was able to do it was because people wanted revenge. We got hit and wanted to hit back. On a more day to day scale, it's much harder to be Muslim post 9/11 here in the west, and that's part of people being irrationally angry and not properly understanding the situation.
Eisbreaker wrote:http://www.zurinstitute.com/victim_psychology.html

Take a look around the 9/11 bit, which starts from the 11th paragraph (or read the whole thing, it's a damn good use of your time). It's basically what I posted above in more coherent, verbose and clear wording.
I could be wrong, but I think this article is pointing out the culture of victimization around 9/11, which is a different thing entirely than mourning victims of a horrible attack. Yes worse things have happened, but you can say that for almost everything. A lot of lives were lost and changed in that attack. And on the ten year anniversary, that should be acknowledged.
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Re: I read the news today, oh boy

Post by Astrogirl »

Kimra wrote:Wouldn't that be fault of YOUR media Astro?
Obviously.
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Re: I read the news today, oh boy

Post by Kimra »

Astrogirl wrote:
Kimra wrote:Wouldn't that be fault of YOUR media Astro?
Obviously.
Sorry! I was riled up by whats-his-faces post and took everything everyone wrote after that as a negative attack. Don't you hate media? All those docos I mentioned were all on the one channel, I bet the other channels have all be talking about the terrible muslims and heart stopping attacks on 9/11.

Again sorry for my predisposition, it's a dangerous thing sometimes. :)
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Re: I read the news today, oh boy

Post by Eisbreaker »

Sorry if I wasn't clear, I wasn't talking about mourning the actual victims of any disaster, of course they deserve to be mourned.

I was talking about how the US*'s general population seems to almost enjoy bringing it up at any opportunity, use it to declare war on anything that moves out of a desire for "safety" as if they are the only country entitled to it, and whine constantly about something that, unless they were related to a victim somehow, should have no personal or emotional impact on them, no matter how much they want it to.

*Notice I don't say "Americans" because, as some guy from Argentina once told me: "Dude, I don't want to be lumped together with those guys.".
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Re: I read the news today, oh boy

Post by Kimra »

It's strange, because I'm not American, and I recall it having a massive emotional impact on every single person who knew about it. I didn't cry about it, I was willing to go on with my work that day, but it was shocking and it was horrifying. On the other side of the world people were staring at their tv screens and listening to radios, trying to make sense of what had happened. Trying to figure out what was happening.

I'm not saying worse things haven't happened. I'm not even going to touch on the 'they had it coming' topic that seems to be lingering in your comments. I'm saying that no matter what came before or after it, it was huge. No matter how many people died, it was horrifying, and no matter how much you think it shouldn't affect anyone who was not immediately involved in it, it did.

How old are you? Your profile says eighteen, I'll take that at face value. Just because you were an infant when it happened doesn't mean it didn't have an affect on the psyche of the entire western world. I respect maybe you can't remember something from when you where eight, but it doesn't mean the rest of us will forget it.

Now, I don't condone war, I don't condone torture, and I don't condone a lot of things that happened as a result. I also don't think they should be ignored. But you are either the least sensitive person I've ever encountered or have a terrible way of expressing yourself.
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Re: I read the news today, oh boy

Post by DonRetrasado »

I do feel that we use the term "American" (as in, people from US) to represent what seems to me is a very vocal minority of crazy war-mongering people, and I feel like that's inappropriate in itself. And what's there we can blame on the American government, democrats and republicans alike, for galvanising people into the modern culture of terror and making "first strikes" seem more appropriate than trying to resolve conflicts peacefully. Never mind that 9/11 has been largely unrelated to modern military campaigns, and the increase in security it spawned was unnecessary and frequently embarrassingly useless. I don't blame Americans who feel like they were attacked (which is a reasonable belief) but I do feel like people to be less afraid of terrorists and muslims/south asians and need to be more willing to opt for peaceful solutions. And stop being so fucking racist. I don't think it's wrong for people to have been affected by 9/11 (I wasn't, and frankly the response shocked me much more) but I do think we need a less emotional and a more rational response, and try to learn from these events.
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Re: I read the news today, oh boy

Post by Eisbreaker »

Kimra wrote:But you are either the least sensitive person I've ever encountered or have a terrible way of expressing yourself.
Probably a combination of the two, English is my third language, so I might be screwing up the 'tone'. I absolutely didn't try to imply that they deserve it.

I'm not going to elaborate on it, but I know what it's like to live under a threat, I'm not talking out of my ass and I'm not making assumptions about the experience. I'm 100% certain I know it better than you.

Maybe I just deal with it better than those people, or maybe I'm objectively a cold bastard of a man, but I don't see what the big deal is. The world is a mean place, deal with it. Work with what you've got.
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Re: I read the news today, oh boy

Post by Astrogirl »

Eisbreaker wrote:Sorry if I wasn't clear, I wasn't talking about mourning the actual victims of any disaster, of course they deserve to be mourned.

I was talking about how the US's general population seems to almost enjoy bringing it up at any opportunity, use it to declare war on anything that moves out of a desire for "safety" as if they are the only country entitled to it, and whine constantly about something that, unless they were related to a victim somehow, should have no personal or emotional impact on them, no matter how much they want it to.
Uh what?! Do you suffer from some kind of mental disability that makes you unable to feel sympathy or empathy? Do you live in a place where large-scale bombings with lots of civilian victims, outside of a war, are so commonplace that they don't bother you?
- Yes, the US "had it coming" (like: something like this was going to happen sooner or later; nobody _deserves_ such a thing). They messed with too many countries' politics, supported dictators and wars. The CIA trained Osama bin Laden and his buddies when they were still fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. It's sad that US civilians suffered as an indirect result of (mostly past time) US politicians' bad actions.
- Yes, the US has done a ton of bad things in response. The war in Iraq. Some of the things in Afghanistan. The torture. The limitations of rights of their own citizens. And it's outrageous that many US citizens seem to be more concerned about nude scanners than about the torture and the Iraq war. And that quite a number of people still deny that the Iraq war was illegitimate and either that the torture in Guantanamo happened or that it was wrong.
- But what's this stupid nonsense about that it should not have had an emotional impact on them? There are certainly things that USians are upset about that they have no real right to be upset about (think Pearl Harbor). But 9/11?! How could anyone not be emotionally impacted by this?
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Re: I read the news today, oh boy

Post by carbonstealer »

I was 9 years old when 9/11 happened so I don't think infancy can be an excuse for not having empathy. I remember coming down that morning to the television being on and watching the second tower fall. I don't have much respect for the way the US has handled the political side of the affair but the emotional side is another thing. This was an attack, a deliberate, premeditated attack that killed over three thousand civilians. Not men who had been trained, who were prepared for going out into a battlefield. These were people who had left home that morning with every expectation of returning back to their families. And they didn't. If you've ever known anyone ever that has died, you can't help but emphasise with all these people who have had their world turned upsidedown. Not because the ocean rose up from its habitual place, not because a bushfire got out of control, not because the earth crumbled away beneath their feet or decided to dump itself in the place where your village was meant to be. There was clear cut intent to cause this destruction, this waste of innocent human life. Add fear on top of this emotional distress and well I can understand the hype. Sure I'm not a fan of the way that events in America are always painted as more tragic in Australian news than events in any other country, but I would not agree there is no room for empathy. The only reason my uncle wasn't there was he missed a flight, and there are thousands of people out there who can't tell a story of a miraculous near miss that happened to their people.
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