Beside, in many ways the 9/11 attack was entirely rational, i.e. it involved correct reasoning, albeit reasoning from invalid premises.
Bin Laden disliked - strongly disliked - certain aspects of US foreign policy and their consequences. You or I might not share his dislike, but that does not make it either irrational or insane. He felt that he could apply emotional and financial pressure to the US with the 9/11 attacks, and to a large extent he was right. He may have miscalculated in thinking about how the US government, or the American people, would respond to that pressure but, even if he did, miscalculation in such a matter is not necessarily either irrational or insane.
It’s not difficult to find examples of other people - including the US government - being willing to launch a deadly attack against a large number of noncombatant civilians in order to exert pressure on a country or a government. We might judge this to be evil, but that doesn’t make it insane or irrational. And we might make distinctions between differetn such attacks and judge some to be evil and others to be morally justified but, again, that doesn’t make either of them irrational or insane.
As I alluded before, I’m not sure what does equal insane.
Similarly for the woman who recently murdered someone because she thought she was in the matrix and he was an agent.
Her insanity plea was accepted, but didn’t the judge realize she was just reasoning from invalid premises?
I wasn’t arguing that 9/11 was irrational because civilians were killed. And I’m fine with saying evil and irrationality are two separate things.
But I’m not being inconsistent here. If the US or any other country attack civilians for political reasons I would condemn such actions as immoral and (depending on the circumstances) often irrational too.
I’m a little confused about what people are really saying. Is anyone claiming that killing civilians to achieve a goal is intrinsically insane or irrational. If so, can someone please explain why?
Intrinsically irrational would be too far for me. I’d say killing an innocent person against their will is of a similar level to, say, deliberately driving your car through the front of a shop.
In that, I’m sure there are cases where they could be justified (at least from one perspective), but they would not be common. Note that I am making a distinction here between this and morality. Killing someone against their will is always immoral, and usually irrational, IMO.
Some people upthread pointed out that killing comes naturally to our species. Sure it does. Acting on impulse or emotion is natural. That doesn’t make it rational.
Many people on the dope have no problem with saying religious belief is irrational. And yet in the context of 9/11 many here are using irrational as though it means something like acting against your own will, or an uncaused action or something. It doesn’t mean that.
Just to make sure we’re on the same page: imagine a hitman kills someone for money and, to coin a phrase, gets away with murder; he plans ahead, makes sure to leave no fingerprints, and so on. Imagine too, if you like, that he later kills someone else for money, gets spotted, and after weighing his options also kills the witness to keep from being identified; imagine that also works. Is he irrational?
Possibly.
Did he weigh the options in all cases (and that doesn’t mean just planning how he’ll get away with it)? Did he understand the consequences? And if he was starting with any… unusual… premises, did he challenge them?
If yes to all of these, then sure, it’s rational (though immoral).
I have not claimed that any action is inherently irrational.
I’m saying that 9/11 is irrational, because the normal reasons given for it don’t make sense, and clearly were not thought about in any kind of objective way. And because attempts to justify actions with even 1% of the death toll have always been about emotion and little thought IMO.
Just to make sure we’re on the same page: is anything that anyone does irrational? What does irrational mean to you?
AQ was just bringing the war to American turf. We have been blowing up and killing Middle East people for a long time. One of the reasons we are so aggressive is because we don’t feel the effects of our warring. Hell we didn’t even have to pay for them. Perhaps if we took some hits, we would fight our military control.
I understand why they wanted to attack us. It did not work out very well for them though.
Well, by way of example, imagine you decided to kill your target of choice by simply wishing him dead. Or by shouting the magic word “SHAZAM” while leaping off the top of a tall building, so you can fly over to his apartment like Captain Marvel before pulping the guy with your impending superstrength. Or by knocking politely on his door and loudly announcing your intention to kill him with your bare hands, figuring he’ll surely then let you in rather than call the police or retrieve and load his revolver or whatever.
The wars cost over 3 trillion dollars. That does not include the billions more that will be spent on medical care for the injured soldiers. That cost will be addressed by denying coverage. That is what we do.
That’s a narrow distinction at best. Wikipedia says “Quantrill apparently did secure a Confederate commission as a captain of partisan rangers.” Partisan rangers were not regular army, but a Confederate commission as an officer – not to mention the adulation of the Confederate press and public – tends to identify him as a Confederate.
Besides, the original comparison was between al Quaeda and “any Confederate,” not something as specific as “A Confederate regular army officer of the line,” or what have you.
I would be interested in seeing some kind of citation for that (not being sarcastic – I really am interested).
Killing enemy civilians in as large of numbers as was possible was just the universally-recognized done thing in wars, as recently as WWII. Nobody regarded the firebombing of Hamburg and Tokyo, or the V-2 attacks on London, or the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as insane, even though most of the casualties of all of those actions were civilians. If bin Laden regarded himself as being at war with the US, then it was not at all irrational for him to seek an inexpensive way of doing something similar. Evil, sure, but rational.
Different kind of invalidity. The woman’s premise claim was a fact-claim which could be empirically demonstrated to be false. We wouldn’t normally say that her premise was invalid, in fact; we’d say that it was false.
But Bin Laden’s premise was that it was ethically acceptable to kill thousands of uninvolved noncombatants in order to put pressure on the US government to take certain actions. I might not agree with that premise, but I cannot empirically demonstrate it to be false. And it’s a premise shared, and acted upon, by a great many people and agencies besides Bin Laden.
I appreciate that. But the question I’m addressing here is not whether these actions are immoral or irrational, but whether they are insane.
The woman you mentioned was insane because she laboured under a delusional believe, easily empirically demonstrable as false. I don’t think we can say that of Bin Laden.
I’m not sure about this distinction between “invalid” and “false”.
But if it can be empirically demonstrated that we are not in the matrix, then it can be empirically demonstrated that there is no afterlife (and therefore the hijackers have made at least one, very similar error).
But of course we can’t rule out that we are in the matrix.
So it’s not the falseness of the premise, it’s the fact that she accepted as a premise something which she could not have tested fully and objectively.
The hijackers acted similarly.
I wouldn’t consider that a premise.
It’s a vague wording of a complete argument, and of course I can’t disprove it because it includes a value judgement.
I inserted bracket text for context in Sailboat’s quote.
Below is a timeline from the 9-11 Commission report. I haven’t read it in years, but I’ve attached what I believe is the relevant part, the transition of power from Clinton to Bush and events leading up to 9/11. 9/11 Report - Chapter 6.4: Change and Continuity (PDF)
There’s plenty more, and I suggest a full reading of Chapter 6 for more context of the above select quotes. I don’t think Bush said “lay off bin laden” or anything like that. I’m always open for correction of course as I just skimmed through this report. I think the administration was planning for a longer, different approach - defensive to offensive - but was taking it’s sweet time (which frustrated some working in counterterrorism, as also stated in the 9/11 report). It’s important to remember that bin laden was a legit target since about 1996 and had yet to be killed.
Your link is to a statement bin Laden made more than three years after 9/11. Since some of his original goals, like getting the Jews and crusaders out of the lands of Islam, were obviously not working out, he came up with this after-the-fact justification.
Economic harm was the way he intended to accomplish that goal. Bankrupt us, forcing us to get out of the Middle East because we simply could no longer afford to be there, and could no longer economically support Israel.
9/11 was not the Osama Bin Laden Show contrary to popular discourse. Bin Laden was the leader of simply one of many Middle Eastern groups, all of whom despised Western interference and power. Al Queda proved to be one of the strongest groups because of the intelligence and leadership of Bin Laden and his close associates. But it was (and is) a large group of Muslim people spread around the world who share common anti-Western views.
My somewhat laboured point is 9/11 could not have happened without a lot of people being committed to a cause. Osama was the spokesman - clever, didactic, but far from alone.
Anyway, the reasons for 9/11? In the most simple terms it was to provoke the USA into attacking the Middle East. In turn the Muslim world would arise as one nation and throw the Crusaders into the sea. Then the Second Caliphate would rise again and purity would be brought to the holy lands.
It hasn’t got that far yet, but in terms of humiliating the USA and causing longterm harm, it was a very effective act.