Nov 2023 Mod notice:
There may be other, more specific, threads about some aspects of US politics, but this one tends to act as a hub for all sorts of related news and information, so it's usually one of the busiest OTC threads.
If you're new to OTC, it's worth reading the Introduction to On-Topic Conversations
and the On-Topic Conversations debate guidelines
before posting here.
Rumor-based, fear-mongering and/or inflammatory statements that damage the quality of the thread will be thumped. Off-topic posts will also be thumped. Repeat offenders may be suspended.
If time spent moderating this thread remains a distraction from moderation of the wiki itself, the thread will need to be locked. We want to avoid that, so please follow the forum rules
when posting here.
In line with the general forum rules, 'gravedancing' is prohibited here. If you're celebrating someone's death or hoping that they die, your post will get thumped. This rule applies regardless of what the person you're discussing has said or done.
Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
The main reason Americans still can't let 9/11 go is because it wasn't just a massive death toll. It didn't just kill ~3,000 people. It was specifically an attack the likes of which Americans had spent decades convincing themselves was impossible on American shores, delivered directly to a major American status symbol.
The thing about the U.S. is that we're a very arrogant people. We tell ourselves that our nation is so powerful and our democracy is so great and our police and military are so perfect that invasions and terrorism and stuff is all just stuff that happens over there, in the land of lesser countries. We're inoculated by our specialness!
Really, the only advantage we have in that regard is an unfavorable geographic positioning for hostile powers in Europe and Asia. We're protected by two gigantic fucking oceans between us and our rivals. Without a nearby country to use as a staging ground, it is hard to stage a hostile action across an ocean; that's why we freaked out so much about Cuba. But we told ourselves that it's because we're Americans and Americans are just better. That's how we coped with the fear and uncertainty of the Cold War. And then 9/11 happened.
9/11 didn't just kill Americans. It wounded our arrogant sense of American Exceptionalism. It made Americans feel vulnerable to the rest of the world in a way we had been assured countless times over could not happen here. And it left a scar on one of our landmarks.
9/11 made our country feel vulnerable. And our country is built on a culture of hyper-masculine insecurity. We did not take being reminded that we're just as vulnerable as every other country in the world well, and so the overcompensation began. And is still going to this day.
The terrorists won 9/11. It broke us. Americans became terrified of everybody, and because of that hyper-masculine insecurity above, we react to fear by screaming, puffing out our chests, and pointing guns at everything. Twenty years later, people still think shit like, "If we let them take our guns away, THE TERRORISTS WIN. Gonna eat this red meat and drink beer. That'll show 'em." Still insisting that 9/11 is an ongoing conflict that we can win, to avoid acknowledging that it's an event that happened one time that we lost.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 11th 2020 at 8:34:41 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.I feel like part of the aftermath is also the complete unwillingness to actually engage with the enemy. They became EVERYTHING and EVEYWHERE. It was not a War against Al-Qaeda. It was a War on TERROR.
Osama Bin Ladin's goal was to drive the US military out of Saudi Arabia and when it left, it was with no acknowledgement that the terrorists would care.
And for years, Osama Bin Ladin's death/capture was almost irrelevant.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.Man, it was (and perhaps still is) complete unwillingness to engage with the event itself, both as a moment in time and a place.
The erasure of all imagery of the WTC from older media is telling, and disturbing. It is effectively cleansing the very location of tragedy from cultural history. It is an unwillingness to acknowledge this place even existed.
Hope shines brightest in the darkest times
edited because I forgot when the movie came out
I was just in history class (I live in the US) and the teacher asked for 15 seconds of silence because of 9/11 at the beginning of class. The teacher also talked a little about the Patriot Act and explained it as "if you were 'a detriment to the country' the US government could tap your phone" and so on, which is really misrepresenting the act itself, I feel, which was very controversial because it expanded the federal government's surveillance capabilities very drastically.
The ACLU page on it has more info.
The gist is that the federal government found very little terrorism threats even with the NSL (National Security Letters, issued without a judge's approval) allowing them to tap things like phone and computer history. The Freedom Act extended that, and that got extended in March of this year.
Also, Wikipedia says that there was a bill in the Senate that expands privacy protections (not from warrantless surveillance), but that failed. The House is expected to take up the bill and some House members have signaled support for its revival.
Edit: The USA Freedom Act also imposed some limits on bulk data collection and restored authorization for roving wiretaps (a wiretap following the surveillance target that gives the surveilling body permission to track other phones without applying for new surveillance orders once authorized ). The FISA Improvements Act would legalize the surveillance program but would impose some limitations on data availability, but it's been languishing in the government equivalent of Development Hell for seven years.
In a related-to-government-surveillance note, the CALEA Act
, which made companies (under threat of huge fines) restructure their communications so the FBI could wiretap them more easily.
You're right. Sorry.
Edited by Altris on Sep 11th 2020 at 9:27:19 AM
So, let's hang an anchor from the sun... also my TumblrNot really all that overblown, considering that the first Raimi Spider-Man came out in May '02, meaning 9/11 was still fresh in a lot of minds when the film was still in promotion. Plus, imagine how terrible the optics would have been at the time to have a flying vehicle smack in the middle of the Twin Towers.
Hitokiri in the streets, daishouri in the sheets.To be fair to the Spider-Man film instance, that one at least makes a bit more sense. It wasn't just the imagery of the WTC. It was the imagery of an aerial vehicle moving towards the WTC towers. Spidey catching a helicopter in a giant web between the towers was a bit too close to the events of 9/11 for a film being promoted at the same time as the attack.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Meanwhile, in "uh wut" takes on this day, we have Paul Krugman on Twitter
.
Watching historical revisionism in action is so much fun. Good thing he's getting heavily called out for it.
As for me personally, I'll definitely remember the events of the day, but for reasons that have nothing to do with the attack itself. And compared to the pain the people who lost loved ones in the attack, or the persecution of any person who looked vaguely Middle Eastern, my 9/11 experience means jack squat in the grand scheme of things. Which is why I'm not getting into details about what happened to me - it's absolutely not important in terms of what the day means.
Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)I don't understand why you bolded half the quotes.
They presumably did it to add emphasis to the bits they thought were most relevant.
Personally, that article pleases me. I don't want a China Hawk in the presidency, I know that Biden was a dove in the Obama administration and I'm glad to see that he's continuing that priority.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangMy class was on the way home from a PE excursion (kayaking) when we heard it on the radio. I don't remember anyone having much of a reaction to it in the moment, I don't think they really realized what that news meant. I think it may have been shown the next day in class.
Hope shines brightest in the darkest timesHonestly even at 6 I was too young to really understand what had happened. I remember hearing that the "twin towers" collapsed, and being confused when I saw an apartment complex of the same name in Silver Spring standing perfectly unharmed, and Pentagon Station being closed for a while, and that every morning in school since then we had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, but nothing else.
Edited by PhysicalStamina on Sep 11th 2020 at 1:15:39 PM
i'm tired, my friendI will never forget where I was that day...
I was in class, and then, all of a sudden, the entire school just stopped its regular schedule with some talk among the teachers, they talked, they got worried, and then they brought in a television into each classroom so the rest of us could get what was going on.
That day, the entire school, was completely quiet.
And that day, might have been the first time any of us came face to face with actual death in our world.
It was scary.
Incredibly scary.
And after the end of that broadcast, nobody said a word for the whole day.
That alone marked its significance into my memory.
A school full of kids is never quiet like that, ever.
...
May the departed from that day rest in peace.
Edited by TitanJump on Sep 11th 2020 at 6:58:48 PM
You have shows and movies in New York, but nobody afaik includes Lower Manhattan in establishing shots unless it's specifically about Wall Street or 9/11 or about that part — they go for the Statue of Liberty or the Brooklyn Bridge, maybe the Empire State Building.
Edited by megarockman on Sep 11th 2020 at 12:58:36 PM
The damned queen and the relentless knight.

Fortunately, Japan's opinions on our foreign policy are irrelevant. Being soft on China is a concern, especially with the shit they're pulling on the Uyghurs, but our foreign policy toward China does not outweigh the damage a second Trump term would do to our domestic integrity.
It's been fun.