Is Common Wisdom post 9-11 Actually 'Wise'?

Great Debates
101

Well. actually you made a direct and specific comparison, but anyway…
So you are saying that the United States “merely exists” in the world, and has no power or influence, takes no meaningful actions, has no particular effects? That the US is the national equivalent of an innocent child playing in her yard? Would that be your contention?

Or are you saying that you know the mind of Osama and all of his followers, and you know for a fact that nothing the United States has ever actually ** done ** entered into his mind, he thought only of our existence, divorced from our actions? That he was the equivalent of the sick fuck that murders for pleasure and picks on that particular little girl because she’s so pretty as she innocently plays with her dolls?

Clarity on this point would be helpful.

102

You can, of course, back that up. Something I have said, something you can cite. Or, more likely, will you dive behind that vacillatory “seem” for wiggle room?

Implied slander is slander nonetheless, Gobear. If the potential for embarassment exists within you, now would be a good time to use it.

“The left” is not a monolith, it has no identity, it is not incarnated in any single group, person, or ideology. Micheal Moore is on the left, so to speak, as is Ms. Sontag, as is myself. They do not speak for me. I speak for me, and rather well, too.

The merest smattering of awareness, the slightest attempt to truly hear the voices, would reveal that to you.

By the same token, I might insist that G. Gordon Liddy ( or “Ol’ Headshot”) speaks for John Mc Cain. If I were an asshole, that is. Opinions vary on that.
That noise? Thats the ghost of Barry Goldwater, puking his ethereal guts out. He just read your post.

103

Dont’ be silly. Obviously, the US is enormously influential and our actions have effects. And I have already agreed that our foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. What I don’t get is how disapproval of our presence in Saudi Arabia or our support of Israel in any justifies murdering 3,000 innocent people.

Bin Laden is evil; his cause is evil. There are no shades of grey here–Bin Laden and his followers are solely responsible for 9/11.

Why, yes, I do know his mind, and so does anyone who has watched CNN or read a newspaper.

I think any rational person can figure that moving our troops out of Saudi (even if we should, which I disagree with) would not mollify him.

Yes. If you don’t think he’s a sick fuck, then your values are not the same as mine. Are you saying he’s not a sick fuck, or that you can see his point of view?

Clarity on this point would be helpful.

104

Apos:

**
Who ever said that wasn’t the purpose of the mention of it on the list? I only said it is inappropriate, and not a very good fit to a 9/11 discussion. Would be great for a lesson on another day; is inappropriate for a commemoration of when America was victimized as never before.

Were Germany remembering a day when its citizens were victimized by a particular group, I don’t think I’d bring up the Holocaust from 60 years ago.

If you disagree, disagree. Wanna know where you can shove your personal attacks, Mr. “I’m so above it all?”

Our foriegn policy is “sloppy” because we have troops in the Middle East? Because we don’t abandon Israel to the dogs?
Methinks you’d better do some re-reading on what OBL actually says. And you might want to take another look at the policies of the Taliban re: its people. You know, the Muslim Utopia that Al Qaeda was fruggating with.

Osama wants to bring us all “to the light.”

I guess I am characterized as being of “The Right,” though I vote for Democrats regularly, and have even voted for a Green Party candidate.

I don’t blame Clinton for 9/11 anymore than I blame any other president, or any other member of government. Hindsight is 20/20. Looking back now, Clinton’s responses to a terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center and bombings of U.S. Embassies seems woefully tepid. But it can also be said that there was information within the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities in 2001, of which the buck stops with George W., that should have shot up red flags, and apparently didn’t. Hindsight is 20/20.

BTW, more evidence emerging of a nation complicit with Al Qaeda. “But Dad, my teacher told me in school that the terrorists work independently of any nations.”

Want to know another reason the Japanese internment analogy doesn’t really work? We apparently have something to actually worry about, domestically, this time.

That doesn’t mean citizens should hate or attack their Arab or Muslim neighbors, the vast, vast majority of whom are as great of Americans as anybody. I used to work with an Iraqi immigrant. He was my employer, on occasional contract work. During the Gulf War, I would challenge anyone to find any other individual who spoke with more hatred and venom about Saddam Hussein.

Leave it to law enforcement and intelligence to figure out who our domestic enemies are.

And again I ask, who is attacking Arabs and Muslims in America now?

**
Ha. Ha ha. Ha ha ha ha. HAH!

Um, maybe you can be the one to lead us out of the darkness, by stopping misrepresentation, personal attack and questioning the intelligence of those who disagree with you.

Let it begin with me, Lord. You know; that kind of thing.

105

Is this ** deliberate ** obtuseness, gobear? Can you point to anyone in this thread (or almost anywhere, actually, but I’m particularly interested in this thread, since you keep repeating it and repeating it) saying that Osama’s actions were ** * JUSTIFIED * **? Because if you can’t (and you can’t), PLEASE STOP SAYING IT. My GOD, man, I know you are more intelligent than that. These are really simple ideas. Every murderer has a MOTIVE, but the MOTIVE doesn’t mean the murder is JUSTIFIED to anyone but the murderer!

Godammit!

When you demostrate that you understand what is REALLY being said, perhaps we can discuss other aspects of this. But until then, it is an exercise in pointlessness.

106

Let’s see, you called me a “rabid little warmonger” and a host of other names, so you have some nerve accusing anyone else of slander. I suggest that you ought to be embarrased for your unaplogetic attemtos to namecall anyone who disagrees with you.

I went back over this thread, ready to rip you into shreds, when I came across this.

So I’m going to say I was wrong and retract my comments on my misperception of your position. Unlike you, I don’t believe my politics convey moral superiority, and I’m not too good to apologize when I’m wrong.

Now you can continue to look down on the rest of us from your throne.

107

I agree, but then you also wrote

Either America’s actions in the MidEast incited bin Laden’s attack or America was attacked without provocation. Which is it?

108

Or let me put it more plainly:

Is there a course of action the US can take right now that will make bin Laden call off his campaign against us? Please be specific.

109

I’ve had an idea about how I can make this clearer.

There were two steps involved in what Osama did.

  1. He became angry.
  2. He acted on that anger.

Now, it is perfect reasonable (although arguable, certainly) to say that Osama and Co. * had a right to be angry. *

It is a separate (and unacceptable, to me and most people I know) thing to say that * he had a right to act on his anger in the manner he did. *

You, gobear, and many others, are mashing these two ideas together. They are not the same.

Now, here’s what we need to do: We need to all agree and sign off on the fact that * Osama’s actions were wrong, unacceptable, unjustfied, and in no way a reasonable response to anything at all. *

Now, if you want to argue whether or not he was angry, he had a right to be angry, his anger was understandable, or anything else related to the feelings and beliefs that drove him * ** to acts which we have all agreed were not in any way justified ** *, that is a different argument and I’m sure many on both sides will be glad to take it up.

Is that clearer?

110

Good, I’m glad to hear you acknowledge it.

Fine by me–you can start by answering my previous question: what can the US do to get bin Laden to stop?

111

—Our foriegn policy is “sloppy” because we have troops in the Middle East? Because we don’t abandon Israel to the dogs?
Methinks you’d better do some re-reading on what OBL actually says. And you might want to take another look at the policies of the Taliban re: its people. You know, the Muslim Utopia that Al Qaeda was fruggating with. —

I don’t remember saying that our foriegn policy was sloppy: I said that many people, both on the right and the left, said such things about it.

If you really care, I was personally for destroying the Taliban as soon as their practices came to light. I am heavily for interventionism, though I realize that it is a very dicey policy when the only option is unilaterialism.

But I try not to pretend that everyone who thinks differently is a raving loon, and paint fantasitic pictures of their real aims simply to make myself feel superior.

—I guess I am characterized as being of “The Right,” though I vote for Democrats regularly, and have even voted for a Green Party candidate. I don’t blame Clinton for 9/11 anymore than I blame any other president…—

You know, this is out of left field. First of all, I didn’t post this in a response to you. But second of all, these points are not about whether YOU do or do not clame Clinton: the point is that many sane rational individuals on both the left and right DO make such criticisms (and also some irrational individuals as well, but that’s always to be expected).

I cant figure out if you’ve somehow convinced yourself that your last quote was actually by me, but it wasn’t.

—And again I ask, who is attacking Arabs and Muslims in America now?—

There have been many problems just in my local school systems, and many others with kids and how they think about Muslims. I think you are forgetting that we’re talking about kids. This whole list is talking about how to talk to kids about tolerance, and being that it is just one resource out of many much more prominent ones, I still think your furor over it can only be entirely contrived, a forced reading and practiced outrage. And that’s only because I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt.

Indeed, there have and continue to be incidents of anti-Muslim violence. This is exactly what our left-wing President, and both recent mayors of my city, strongly condemned.

—But that would not satisfy bin Laden, for he will settle for nothing less than the destruction of the United States and the death of its people.—

I don’t buy it, and not simply because of what I’ve learned from reading all the interviews I could get my hands on.
I think this is the nature of having a bad guy: once they do something immensely evil, they immediately become the ultimate, irrational evil with no past, no history, no motivation, no goals other than total destruction of everything nice and good. But I don’t think that sort of thinking helps us figure out how to defeat villians like Osama.

112

First, I think that is a drastic oversimplification of my views at least. Sure, bin Laden has his reasons, so did every other dictator ro maniac in history. Did it really matter during WWII if we understood Hitler’s racial theories? Did knowing kKim Il Sung’s juche philosophy matter to fighting the Korean War?

Bin Laden wants to get all Westerners out of Dar al-Islam. He wants to purify Islam of heresy and modernism and return to a pan-Islamic caliphate as in the days of the Ummayyad dynasty (with guess who as caliph)?

So what? He needs to be found and killed, and he can babble his beliefs to the devils in Hell, for all I care.

113

Is there more you can add to this analysis, or is that the limit of your brilliance?

I’ve never questioned your intelligence (or Jackmannii’s), nor have I misrepresented you, nor have I personally attacked you. I’ve questioned your honesty, and actively impugned Jackmannii’s, but that’s because of your repetition of assertions you’ve been shown time and again to be incorrect. If the shoe doesn’t fit, quit trying it on.

114

—what can the US do to get bin Laden to stop?—

Kill him. None of the things he wants, whether they would mollify him or not, are good things. They are to a very high point, worth any harm people like Osama could inflict on us. We NEED troops in Saudi Arabia, whether it ruffles feathers or not, because Saddam’s weapons programs and attempts to purchase weapons are a real threat to us and Israel and all of the Middle East on a much larger scale than a handful of terrorists.

I do think that there were lots of very stupid and shortsighted things that our country did that most certainly set the stage for nutballs to take a swing at us, and reasonably expect to be cheered on for it by some. We really let Afghanistan go to pot after playing it so hard against the Russians. We let the Sudan become a horrid mess. We left Saddam in power, necessitating our continued military presence in Suadi Arabia. Further back, we screwed up Iran big time, supporting a hated dictator over a potential democracy. I think it’s fair to say that all of this was dumb, for reasons that have nothing to do with Osama. But it looks extra dumb in light of Osama. And after we get over beating our chests with flushed pride about last century, hopefully we can sit down a strategize so that we don’t make these sorts of mistakes again.

The problem with terrorism in the modern age is that ever increasingly, anyone can do huge amounts of damage very easily, and there’s really not much we can ultimately do to prevent it beforehand (though we can easily blow people up afterwards: but so what when they expect that anyway and seem cool with it?). You can’t prevent the violence if someone is determined and willing to die in it anyway. All you can do in the long run is try to make sure there are less violent, angry people in the world in the first place, or at least give them meaningful outlets.

My general idea of what that means we should do is this: take much more seriously the importance of spreading democratic civil institutions and practices (since good democracy seems to work pretty well at limiting political conflict to words instead of bombs), stabilizing or even resolving conflicts instead of being okay with leaving them a mess after they’ve served our short term interests, speak out against violent and hateful ideologies. We’re already doing a little more of that now. But even after we really do that well, and other methods, there will still be nutjobs (Tim McVeigh?). But hopefully less of them, and much much much more isolated (Tim McVeigh) instead of whole movements.

I certianly think that the main reason the Middle East is so violent, and so commonly breeds desperate terrorist types, is lack of something like democratic civil society that would allow people to feel more control of their destiny, even when people disagree. Democracy is great at that: the system where parties can lose, but still feel committed to trying again next election instead of ceceding.

The irony here is that the real reason people seem to hate the U.S. so much is NOT that it’s a democracy. To foriegners with no vote in our country, whether we are a democracy internally makes absolutely no difference to their experience!
All that’s relevant is that our foriegn policy actions impact their lives, oftentimes even much more fundamentally than even their own governments do… and yet they have absolutely no say whatsoever in those policies that affect them.

Most people do, or at least would, hate their dictators too for the same reason: but that actually works twofold in the interests of the dictators: the dictators crush any dissent against them horridly, so people get used to not being able to complain about them, which leaves just us as the major influence in their life they have no say in. And of course, this plays right into the hands of the dictators, who can then encourage them to focus their anger on us in lieu of on focusing it on the dictators themselves.

115

Kill him. Destroy al Qaeda.

Next question becomes -what can the US do to change conditions in the Middle East toward those less favorable to terrorist organizations? In order to discuss that, we must put 9/11 into the context of US foreign policies in the Middle East and foreign extremist reactions to those policies. Oops! That’s kinda what we (you know, the “left”) have been shouted down for the past 11 months.

116

Goodness, did I just state my actual opinion on this subject, rather than defending others from what I saw as false charges? Something must be wrong with me…

117

Resolved: no one in the U.S. can plausibly be said to be forcibly crushing or physically stopping anyone’s speech. I think, if anyone was making that charge, that it’s fairly silly. This is still America, and we still frown on that sort of thing.

However, I do think there is a real and legitimate debate over the pervasiveness of right wing accusations against all liberals and even some liberals in particular, that are wildly unfair, but are very effective at marginallizing the positions of their enemies (hence their popularity).

I really do think that the comments of, for instance, Ashcroft, do have a chilling effect on our public debate. When a high ranking government official says that dissent helps the enemy, lots of people listen, and suddenly it becomes a lot harder to have any legitimate debates over dissent.

When talking heads can so easily perpetrate ridiculous trumped up slanders, the ground is ripe for some very dishonest attempts to demean people and shove them out of mainstream debate by making them look like loonies. What the political pusuasion of the most influential talking heads is seems to change: but the same sort of tactic remains. I can certainly remember the say when leftists did this routinely to honest conservatives all the time on issues that the left dominated: and I personally DO think that there has been lots and lots of turnabout since Sept. 11: conservative talking heads very nastily and dishonestly smearing leftists in order to put their opinions beyond the pale. That is, after all, the whole POINT of rhetorical politics and spin: not to forcibly stop people from speaking, but rather to make sure no one reads, listens, or understands anyone but you. It’s a war for hearts and minds: but it can be done honestly or dishonestly.

118

Good point, Apos. Maybe instead of you stopping that, we can all try emulating you.

119

This question leads me to conclude that you still are not entirely clear on the concept.

To ask what we could “do” or not “do” to control his behavior assumes something not offered into evidence, namely that we ** have ** control over his behavior. (Especially at this point).

The point is: our actions as a nation do not occur in a vaccuum. Others will have opinions and feelings and reactions. The question is then: do we care? Are we going to consider the responses of other people and nations to our actions as being meaningful enough to consider in terms of what further actions we undertake? Should we perhaps consider the response of other people in deciding how we are going to behave ourselves?

The events of 9/11 did not occur in a vaccuum, either. They can be seen as a source of information.

Now, perhaps some will argue that the only information that was provided was that Osama is completely insane, period, nothing further to learn here. Others may counter that argument with the idea that it is unlikely that one madman could get so many others to carry out his crazyness just by virtue of his compelling personality, and it is equally unlikely that Osama managed figure out who was just as nuts as he is and bring them all together to act out their insanity. What is more likely is that Osama and the people who follow him are pissed off about something. It is reasonable to assume that they are pissed off at us, probably for something we did. Some of us believe it is perfectly legitimate to consider whether the actions of one nutcase * reflect the feelings of millions of others who wouldn’t take such drastic actions? *

Now, we can look at that and stop to consider what we might have done that could make someone THAT mad, and whether we might consider doing things a little differently (and perhaps decide in the end that we won’t, but at least we could think about it); or we can decide that we don’t care.

Some of us advocate self-examination, some of us don’t care.

In any case, I added my voice to this thread to simply clarify the separate ideas of “Osama being pissed vs. Osama acting pissed” and I have done that as best I am able.

I now cede the floor to my learned and articulate comrades, who have more time and patience than I.

stoid

120

(My last post was in response to Apos’ post of 4:10 pm; not the 4:23 pm post.)