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P1d40n3
Joined: 28 Jan 2008
Location: Rain
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 Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2011 5:53 am |
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Kinda OT, but what happened to that Israel/Palestine thread we had in the Axe? It was starting to go places.
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Dark Age Iron Savior
king of finders
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
Location: Spacecraft, Juanelia Country
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| Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2011 8:29 am |
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| unexpected but completely natural death by auto-prune, oddly enough. |
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evnvnv
hapax legomenon
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: the los angeles
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| Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2011 2:22 pm |
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| psiga wrote: |
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/11/1458205/Cancer-Cured-By-HIV
Got some bizarro-world medicine news goin' on this week. |
in other news, being on fire is cured by drowning
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Dracko
a sapphist fool
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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Dark Age Iron Savior
king of finders
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
Location: Spacecraft, Juanelia Country
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| Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2011 3:37 am |
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/8705212/Facebook-riot-inciters-among-those-to-get-toughest-jail-terms-yet.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/16/facebook-riot-calls-men-jailed
from the guardian:
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Two men who posted messages on Facebook inciting other people to riot in their home towns have both been sentenced to four years in prison by a judge at Chester crown court.
Jordan Blackshaw, 20, set up an "event" called Smash Down in Northwich Town for the night of 8 August on the social networking site but no one apart from the police, who were monitoring the page, turned up at the pre-arranged meeting point outside a McDonalds restaurant. Blackshaw was promptly arrested.
Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, of Latchford, Warrington, used his Facebook account in the early hours of 9 August to design a web page entitled The Warrington Riots. The court was told it caused a wave of panic in the town. When he woke up the following morning with a hangover, he removed the page and apologised, saying it had been a joke. His message was distributed to 400 Facebook contacts, but no rioting broke out as a result.
Sentencing Blackshaw to four years in a young offenders institution, Judge Elgan Edwards QC said he had committed an "evil act". He said: "This happened at a time when collective insanity gripped the nation. Your conduct was quite disgraceful and the title of the message you posted on Facebook chills the blood.
"You sought to take advantage of crime elsewhere and transpose it to the peaceful streets of Northwich. The idea revolted many right thinking members of society. No one actually turned up due to the prompt and efficient actions of police in using modern policing."
Sutcliffe-Keenan, the judge said, "caused a very real panic" and "put a very considerable strain on police resources in Warrington". He praised Cheshire police for their "modern and clever policy" of infiltrating the website. |
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protoblax
bootleg pokemon
Joined: 08 Mar 2011
Location: MARIOZONE
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Winona Ghost Ryder
lives in a monochromatic world
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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Dracko
a sapphist fool
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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sawtooth
heh
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: flashback
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| Posted: Sat Aug 20, 2011 5:35 am |
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"Needless to say I did not mean to use any offensive racist term and was referring to the urban jungle."
lol
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remote
Joined: 11 Dec 2006
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Winona Ghost Ryder
lives in a monochromatic world
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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The King
Joined: 14 Dec 2010
Location: Japan
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| Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2011 8:33 pm |
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Bulletproof skin is so wildly impractical it's funny.
If you had bulletproof skin your odds of dying from trauma would spike dramatically.
Bulletproof skin would make any bleeding a surgical emergency.
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remote
Joined: 11 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2011 10:47 pm |
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I mean, the obviously question to ask going by those logistics would be: what's going to make you bleed if you have bulletproof skin, anyway? Unless we're talking about internal bleeding, here—any emergency requiring surgery is obviously going to be even more disastrous unless the surgeons are using lasers or diamond-tipped scalpels or something.
To back you up, though, even with bulletproof skin just imagine what sort of bruising and/or hemorrhaging one might suffer from bullet impact.
Seems a more practical application would be to use this "human skin" on a new kind of bulletproof vest or something, though that would be... kind of weird.
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parker
a wolf adventuring
Joined: 31 May 2007
Location: suplex city
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| Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2011 11:47 pm |
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Don't knives go right through bullet proof vests? Don't they have stab vests as a separate thing?
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Rud31
forum ruler of Iraq
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: SanAnTex
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Shiren the Launderer
Joined: 25 Sep 2008
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| Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2011 4:46 am |
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| So, the Popular Resistance Committee launched some rockets into southern Israel. The PRC isn't part of Hamas. Israel has responded to the PRC rocket attacks by bombing Hamas compounds in Rafah. In a televised statement, a Hamas spokesman issued the following response to the airstrikes: "Pretty sneaky, sis." |
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Shiren the Launderer
Joined: 25 Sep 2008
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The King
Joined: 14 Dec 2010
Location: Japan
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| Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2011 4:56 pm |
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Remote, Yeah, I was talking about internal bleeding. Bulletproof skin would make most bleeding internal. If your skin didn't open at the point of trauma, then you'd need to be cut open by a surgeon just to find the bleeding. :0
Pre-hospital care would need to be completely overhauled, or just outright scrapped.
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2011 5:54 pm |
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| parker wrote: |
| Don't knives go right through bullet proof vests? Don't they have stab vests as a separate thing? |
More or less. They don't "go right through," but they're only as good as any equivalent mass of thick, heavy cloth (which is actually pretty good) at preventing stab wounds.
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armed police catrider
Joined: 03 Dec 2009
Location: toronto
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| Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2011 6:00 pm |
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The leader of Canada's official opposition, Jack Layton, passed away today.
He was generally regarded as the one prominent figure in Canadian politics with actual integrity, the proverbial good man. He will be sorely missed, fondly remembered as our country drowns in a sea of tar |
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2011 6:20 pm |
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Yeah, and Russ Feingold may as well be dead too.
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option
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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Mr. Mechanical
ontological terrorist
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: Scare Room 99
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koholinttakeout
Joined: 16 Aug 2008
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GrimmSweeper
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Canada
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| Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2011 6:45 pm |
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Felt it out here in Mississauga, Ontario. Helps to be at the top of a five story building.
EDIT: Or apparently there was a quake in Ottawa and I felt that instead. Hrm. |
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Shiren the Launderer
Joined: 25 Sep 2008
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| Posted: Thu Aug 25, 2011 6:50 am |
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| Quote: |
Shoplifters of the World Unite
Slavoj Žižek on the meaning of the riots
Repetition, according to Hegel, plays a crucial role in history: when something happens just once, it may be dismissed as an accident, something that might have been avoided if the situation had been handled differently; but when the same event repeats itself, it is a sign that a deeper historical process is unfolding. When Napoleon lost at Leipzig in 1813, it looked like bad luck; when he lost again at Waterloo, it was clear that his time was over. The same holds for the continuing financial crisis. In September 2008, it was presented by some as an anomaly that could be corrected through better regulations etc; now that signs of a repeated financial meltdown are gathering it is clear that we are dealing with a structural phenomenon.
We are told again and again that we are living through a debt crisis, and that we all have to share the burden and tighten our belts. All, that is, except the (very) rich. The idea of taxing them more is taboo: if we did, the argument runs, the rich would have no incentive to invest, fewer jobs would be created and we would all suffer. The only way to save ourselves from hard times is for the poor to get poorer and the rich to get richer. What should the poor do? What can they do?
Although the riots in the UK were triggered by the suspicious shooting of Mark Duggan, everyone agrees that they express a deeper unease – but of what kind? As with the car burnings in the Paris banlieues in 2005, the UK rioters had no message to deliver. (There is a clear contrast with the massive student demonstrations in November 2010, which also turned to violence. The students were making clear that they rejected the proposed reforms to higher education.) This is why it is difficult to conceive of the UK rioters in Marxist terms, as an instance of the emergence of the revolutionary subject; they fit much better the Hegelian notion of the ‘rabble’, those outside organised social space, who can express their discontent only through ‘irrational’ outbursts of destructive violence – what Hegel called ‘abstract negativity’.
There is an old story about a worker suspected of stealing: every evening, as he leaves the factory, the wheelbarrow he pushes in front of him is carefully inspected. The guards find nothing; it is always empty. Finally, the penny drops: what the worker is stealing are the wheelbarrows themselves. The guards were missing the obvious truth, just as the commentators on the riots have done. We are told that the disintegration of the Communist regimes in the early 1990s signalled the end of ideology: the time of large-scale ideological projects culminating in totalitarian catastrophe was over; we had entered a new era of rational, pragmatic politics. If the commonplace that we live in a post-ideological era is true in any sense, it can be seen in this recent outburst of violence. This was zero-degree protest, a violent action demanding nothing. In their desperate attempt to find meaning in the riots, the sociologists and editorial-writers obfuscated the enigma the riots presented.
The protesters, though underprivileged and de facto socially excluded, weren’t living on the edge of starvation. People in much worse material straits, let alone conditions of physical and ideological oppression, have been able to organise themselves into political forces with clear agendas. The fact that the rioters have no programme is therefore itself a fact to be interpreted: it tells us a great deal about our ideological-political predicament and about the kind of society we inhabit, a society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out. Opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst. What is the point of our celebrated freedom of choice when the only choice is between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence?
Alain Badiou has argued that we live in a social space which is increasingly experienced as ‘worldless’: in such a space, the only form protest can take is meaningless violence. Perhaps this is one of the main dangers of capitalism: although by virtue of being global it encompasses the whole world, it sustains a ‘worldless’ ideological constellation in which people are deprived of their ways of locating meaning. The fundamental lesson of globalisation is that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilisations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East: there is no global ‘capitalist worldview’, no ‘capitalist civilisation’ proper. The global dimension of capitalism represents truth without meaning.
The first conclusion to be drawn from the riots, therefore, is that both conservative and liberal reactions to the unrest are inadequate. The conservative reaction was predictable: there is no justification for such vandalism; one should use all necessary means to restore order; to prevent further explosions of this kind we need not more tolerance and social help but more discipline, hard work and a sense of responsibility. What’s wrong with this account is not only that it ignores the desperate social situation pushing young people towards violent outbursts but, perhaps more important, that it ignores the way these outbursts echo the hidden premises of conservative ideology itself. When, in the 1990s, the Conservatives launched their ‘back to basics’ campaign, its obscene complement was revealed by Norman Tebbit: ‘Man is not just a social but also a territorial animal; it must be part of our agenda to satisfy those basic instincts of tribalism and territoriality.’ This is what ‘back to basics’ was really about: the unleashing of the barbarian who lurked beneath our apparently civilised, bourgeois society, through the satisfying of the barbarian’s ‘basic instincts’. In the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse introduced the concept of ‘repressive desublimation’ to explain the ‘sexual revolution’: human drives could be desublimated, allowed free rein, and still be subject to capitalist control – viz, the porn industry. On British streets during the unrest, what we saw was not men reduced to ‘beasts’, but the stripped-down form of the ‘beast’ produced by capitalist ideology.
Meanwhile leftist liberals, no less predictably, stuck to their mantra about social programmes and integration initiatives, the neglect of which has deprived second and third-generation immigrants of their economic and social prospects: violent outbursts are the only means they have to articulate their dissatisfaction. Instead of indulging ourselves in revenge fantasies, we should make the effort to understand the deeper causes of the outbursts. Can we even imagine what it means to be a young man in a poor, racially mixed area, a priori suspected and harassed by the police, not only unemployed but often unemployable, with no hope of a future? The implication is that the conditions these people find themselves in make it inevitable that they will take to the streets. The problem with this account, though, is that it lists only the objective conditions for the riots. To riot is to make a subjective statement, implicitly to declare how one relates to one’s objective conditions.
We live in cynical times, and it’s easy to imagine a protester who, caught looting and burning a store and pressed for his reasons, would answer in the language used by social workers and sociologists, citing diminished social mobility, rising insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, the lack of maternal love in his early childhood. He knows what he is doing, then, but is doing it nonetheless.
It is meaningless to ponder which of these two reactions, conservative or liberal, is the worse: as Stalin would have put it, they are both worse, and that includes the warning given by both sides that the real danger of these outbursts resides in the predictable racist reaction of the ‘silent majority’. One of the forms this reaction took was the ‘tribal’ activity of the local (Turkish, Caribbean, Sikh) communities which quickly organised their own vigilante units to protect their property. Are the shopkeepers a small bourgeoisie defending their property against a genuine, if violent, protest against the system; or are they representatives of the working class, fighting the forces of social disintegration? Here too one should reject the demand to take sides. The truth is that the conflict was between two poles of the underprivileged: those who have succeeded in functioning within the system versus those who are too frustrated to go on trying. The rioters’ violence was almost exclusively directed against their own. The cars burned and the shops looted were not in rich neighbourhoods, but in the rioters’ own. The conflict is not between different parts of society; it is, at its most radical, the conflict between society and society, between those with everything, and those with nothing, to lose; between those with no stake in their community and those whose stakes are the highest.
Zygmunt Bauman characterised the riots as acts of ‘defective and disqualified consumers’: more than anything else, they were a manifestation of a consumerist desire violently enacted when unable to realise itself in the ‘proper’ way – by shopping. As such, they also contain a moment of genuine protest, in the form of an ironic response to consumerist ideology: ‘You call on us to consume while simultaneously depriving us of the means to do it properly – so here we are doing it the only way we can!’ The riots are a demonstration of the material force of ideology – so much, perhaps, for the ‘post-ideological society’. From a revolutionary point of view, the problem with the riots is not the violence as such, but the fact that the violence is not truly self-assertive. It is impotent rage and despair masked as a display of force; it is envy masked as triumphant carnival.
The riots should be situated in relation to another type of violence that the liberal majority today perceives as a threat to our way of life: terrorist attacks and suicide bombings. In both instances, violence and counter-violence are caught up in a vicious circle, each generating the forces it tries to combat. In both cases, we are dealing with blind passages à l’acte, in which violence is an implicit admission of impotence. The difference is that, in contrast to the riots in the UK or in Paris, terrorist attacks are carried out in service of the absolute Meaning provided by religion.
But weren’t the Arab uprisings a collective act of resistance that avoided the false alternative of self-destructive violence and religious fundamentalism? Unfortunately, the Egyptian summer of 2011 will be remembered as marking the end of revolution, a time when its emancipatory potential was suffocated. Its gravediggers are the army and the Islamists. The contours of the pact between the army (which is Mubarak’s army) and the Islamists (who were marginalised in the early months of the upheaval but are now gaining ground) are increasingly clear: the Islamists will tolerate the army’s material privileges and in exchange will secure ideological hegemony. The losers will be the pro-Western liberals, too weak – in spite of the CIA funding they are getting – to ‘promote democracy’, as well as the true agents of the spring events, the emerging secular left that has been trying to set up a network of civil society organisations, from trade unions to feminists. The rapidly worsening economic situation will sooner or later bring the poor, who were largely absent from the spring protests, onto the streets. There is likely to be a new explosion, and the difficult question for Egypt’s political subjects is who will succeed in directing the rage of the poor? Who will translate it into a political programme: the new secular left or the Islamists?
The predominant reaction of Western public opinion to the pact between Islamists and the army will no doubt be a triumphant display of cynical wisdom: we will be told that, as the case of (non-Arab) Iran made clear, popular upheavals in Arab countries always end in militant Islamism. Mubarak will appear as having been a much lesser evil – better to stick with the devil you know than to play around with emancipation. Against such cynicism, one should remain unconditionally faithful to the radical-emancipatory core of the Egypt uprising.
But one should also avoid the temptation of the narcissism of the lost cause: it’s too easy to admire the sublime beauty of uprisings doomed to fail. Today’s left faces the problem of ‘determinate negation’: what new order should replace the old one after the uprising, when the sublime enthusiasm of the first moment is over? In this context, the manifesto of the Spanish indignados, issued after their demonstrations in May, is revealing. The first thing that meets the eye is the pointedly apolitical tone: ‘Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic and social outlook that we see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice.’ They make their protest on behalf of the ‘inalienable truths that we should abide by in our society: the right to housing, employment, culture, health, education, political participation, free personal development and consumer rights for a healthy and happy life.’ Rejecting violence, they call for an ‘ethical revolution. Instead of placing money above human beings, we shall put it back to our service. We are people, not products. I am not a product of what I buy, why I buy and who I buy from.’ Who will be the agents of this revolution? The indignados dismiss the entire political class, right and left, as corrupt and controlled by a lust for power, yet the manifesto nevertheless consists of a series of demands addressed at – whom? Not the people themselves: the indignados do not (yet) claim that no one else will do it for them, that they themselves have to be the change they want to see. And this is the fatal weakness of recent protests: they express an authentic rage which is not able to transform itself into a positive programme of sociopolitical change. They express a spirit of revolt without revolution.
The situation in Greece looks more promising, probably owing to the recent tradition of progressive self-organisation (which disappeared in Spain after the fall of the Franco regime). But even in Greece, the protest movement displays the limits of self-organisation: protesters sustain a space of egalitarian freedom with no central authority to regulate it, a public space where all are allotted the same amount of time to speak and so on. When the protesters started to debate what to do next, how to move beyond mere protest, the majority consensus was that what was needed was not a new party or a direct attempt to take state power, but a movement whose aim is to exert pressure on political parties. This is clearly not enough to impose a reorganisation of social life. To do that, one needs a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness.
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Mr. Mechanical
ontological terrorist
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: Scare Room 99
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spectralsound
fromdrone
Joined: 15 Mar 2011
Location: below the salt
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| Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2011 7:53 pm |
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| Comics Alliance wrote: |
Prominent Syrian cartoonist and human rights advocate Ali Ferzat was hospitalized for serious injuries Thursday morning after being kidnapped near his Damascus home by a group of masked gunmen believed to be part of the government's security forces under President Bashar al-Assad. The gunmen beat the 60-year-old Ferzat, singed his beard, broke both of his hands, covered his head with a bag and dumped him by the side of the road, threatening the cartoonist that the attack was "just a warning."
Though they often deal with controversial social and political issues, by American standards Ferzat's cartoons are visually tame and contain the kind of all-ages gags one might read in a newspaper's sports or business pages. Ferzat's latest cartoon compared Assad to the recently ousted Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, depicting Syria's president as a hitchhiker. |
http://graphicpolicy.com/2011/08/26/ali-ferzat-responds-to-his-beating-in-syria/
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Winona Ghost Ryder
lives in a monochromatic world
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2011 9:24 pm |
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| :X |
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remote
Joined: 11 Dec 2006
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Dracko
a sapphist fool
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2011 10:15 am |
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2011 11:02 am |
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| Dracko wrote: |
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This coloring book sucks. Like half of it isn't even pictures.
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psiga
saudade
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2011 12:07 pm |
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Maybe you're supposed to use colors to highlight which parts of the text are jingoistic, which are lies, which are racist, etc.!
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2011 1:03 pm |
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Black and grey and brown crayons down to nubs.
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Mr. Mechanical
ontological terrorist
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: Scare Room 99
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| Posted: Wed Aug 31, 2011 8:54 pm |
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Joining Wilkerson and Goodman to discuss Cheney’s new book “In My Time,” Salon’s Glenn Greenwald said that it was disturbing to see the former vice president treated simply as an “elder statesman.”
“The evidence is overwhelming… that Dick Cheney is not just a political figure with controversial views, but is an actual criminal, that he was centrally involved in a whole variety not just of war crimes in Iraq, but of domestic crimes, as well, including the authorization of warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens in violation of FISA, which says that you go to jail for five years for each offense, as well as the authorization and implementation of a worldwide torture regime that, according to General Barry McCaffrey, resulted in the murder — his word — of dozens of detainees, far beyond just the three or four cases of waterboarding that media figures typically ask Cheney about,” Greenwald explained.
“And as a result, Dick Cheney goes around the country profiting off of this, you know, sleazy, sensationalistic, self-serving book, basically profiting from his crimes, and at the same time normalizing the idea that these kind of policies, though maybe in the view of some wrongheaded, are perfectly legitimate political choices to make. And I think that’s the really damaging legacy from all of this.”
“Colonel Wilkerson, do you think the Bush administration officials should be held accountable in the way that Glenn Greenwald is talking about?” Goodman asked.
“I certainly do,” Wilkerson replied. “And I’d be willing to testify, and I’d be willing to take any punishment I’m due. And I have to say, I agree with almost everything [Greenwald] just said. And I think that explains the aggressiveness, to a large extent, of the Cheney attack and of the words like ‘exploding heads all over Washington.’ This is a book written out of fear, fear that one day someone will ‘Pinochet’ Dick Cheney.”
Wilkerson was referring to former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was arrested in London in 1998 after being indicted for crimes against humanity. It was the first time the principle of universal jurisdiction had been applied to a former foreign head of state.
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| internisus wrote: |
| You are a pretty fucked up guy. |
True Doom Murder Junkies - Updated On Occasion |
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psiga
saudade
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Aug 31, 2011 9:31 pm |
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~Hooray for allowing psychopaths to climb the ranks of organizations that should otherwise call for empathy and ethical behavior.~
If we don't let the minority of people with the genetically imposed disability of red-green color confusion become fighter pilots, then why on earth do we let etc etc I'm going to sleep
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spectralsound
fromdrone
Joined: 15 Mar 2011
Location: below the salt
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| Posted: Wed Aug 31, 2011 11:11 pm |
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| Dracko wrote: |
| You can fool yourself, but never a glitch. |
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Mr. Mechanical
ontological terrorist
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: Scare Room 99
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| Posted: Thu Sep 01, 2011 2:01 am |
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The Black Hole of 9/11
As we assess the legacy of the 10th anniversary of America's seminal terrorist attack, it's worth looking at 10 events from the past decade that have actually been more important.
| David J. Rothkopf wrote: |
Recently, I've started to get calls from reporters doing pieces on the upcoming 10th anniversary of 9/11. The thrust of the conversations is the same: How were we changed by that watershed moment?
But in responding to their questions and mulling the question in my head, I keep coming back to the same conclusion: 9/11, for all its tragic and heroic drama, is an easy event to overestimate. Indeed, we have been overestimating its significance since almost the moment it happened. (According to President George W. Bush, his chief of staff, Andrew Card, leaned forward to whisper the news of the attack in his ear and said, "America is under attack." Although factually accurate, the statement was in the language of traditional wars with traditional enemies and implied that the United States as a nation was somehow at risk in ways much broader than was actually the case.)
In fact, the success of Osama bin Laden was in masterminding a low-cost, comparatively low-risk action by a handful of thugs that produced one of the most profound overreactions in military history. Trillions of dollars were expended and hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the emotion-fueled maelstrom unleashed by a shaken and clearly disoriented America. Bin Laden aimed for Wall Street and Washington, seeking to strike a blow against symbols of American power, but in so doing he also hit us where it would hurt the most -- right in our sense of perspective.
We spoke of 9/11 as though it were somehow equivalent to Pearl Harbor, the beginning of a global war against enemies bent on, and at least theoretically capable of, destroying the American way of life (unlike al Qaeda, a ragtag band of extremists with limited punch). We spoke of cultural wars and a divided world. We reorganized our entire security establishment to go after a few thousand bad guys. We went mad.
And now, as we are recovering our senses, withdrawing from Iraq, and soon starting to exit Afghanistan, having buried bin Laden and hosts of his henchmen, we are beginning to be able to see this. At least in theory we can. For the next couple of weeks, we will witness documentary after editorial mega-feature, interviews with victims and heroes, the American legend machine producing historical bumpf at full blast. That is not, by the way, to diminish the brutal blows struck 10 years ago or the deeply felt human experiences associated with it and its aftermath. Rather it is to say that once again we will seek to frame 9/11 as a great event, the definer of an era, when in fact, its greatest defining characteristic was that of a distraction -- The Great Distraction -- that drew America's focus and that of many in the world from the greater issues of our time. That distraction and the opportunity costs associated with it were bin Laden's triumph and our loss -- and our ultimate victory will come as we get a grip back on reality. |
Spoilers:
10. The American Response to 9/11
9. The Arab Spring
8. The Rebalancing of Asia
7. The Stagnation of the U.S. and Other Developed-World Economies
6. The Invention of Social Media
5. The Proliferation of Cell Phones and Hand-Held Computing Devices
4. The Crash of 2008
3. The Eurozone Crisis and the Crash of 2011-2012
2. The Failure to Address Global Warming
1. The Rise of China and the Other BRICs
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| internisus wrote: |
| You are a pretty fucked up guy. |
True Doom Murder Junkies - Updated On Occasion |
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Winona Ghost Ryder
lives in a monochromatic world
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Sep 01, 2011 1:26 pm |
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| This is a rather disconcerting trend that I began to notice with the many photos coming out of Tripoli. |
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Winona Ghost Ryder
lives in a monochromatic world
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Thu Sep 01, 2011 4:08 pm |
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lol
"Time out" parses out to "Shut up."
Also his response to the APA equates to "that's just your opinion, man," when he's deferring to another organization for moral authority in his argument (on much less substantive grounds) through his deference to Catholic teaching.
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