Speaking of which, arguing that hurricane Katrina was awesome because it destroyed the teachers union unquestionably qualifies this person for this week's "Most Loathsome Excuse for a Human Being on the Planet" award.
1: I liked this response.
https://twitter.com/tressiemcphd/status/631982695111901184
For folks on Twitter, there are moving, thoughtful, righteously angry responses to the above-linked article from a variety of people. I learned a lot about the continuing impact of Katrina by listening.
@SheSeauxSaddity
@Karnythia
@EbonyElizabeth
@thewayoftheid
@AIL24
@beauty_jackson
@JamilSmith
and many more.
1. I would kill myself for belonging to the same species as the author of that thing, except she would have won.
You could probably replace "Hurricane Katrina" with pretty much anything else Bush did during his eight years as president as well.
I am a disruptor! Creative destruction! I'm making the world a better place.
2 that was great, I had to retweet.
Yeah, normally I'm all about "well, you said something stupid, the best thing to do is apologize and admit that you posted thoughtlessly", but I'm not sure how you walk that one back. "I'm sorry I thoughtlessly said that it would be a good thing if a storm would demolish much of my city, killing or displacing huge numbers of the marginalized, most of them black, because then we'd have a chance to rebuild"...that's not exactly the same as "I'm sorry that I didn't acknowledge the racism of the early women's movement" or something.
Hiroshima: Totally worth it because Pokemon.
Wasn't there someone who called the Sept. 11 attacks the highest form of architectural criticism? I forget if they were joking or not.
Stockhausen went much further...
The events of 9/11, he'd enthused, were "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos." Things had gone from bad to worse to incendiary when, like Batman's Joker, he warmed to his theme: "Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn't even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for ten years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying; just imagine what happened there. You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 people are dispatched to the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn't do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing."
http://nymag.com/news/9-11/10th-anniversary/karlheinz-stockhausen/
My dad, but that may not be who you were thinking of. (Actually, what he said, and I repeated here, was "Architectural criticism has gone too far!")
13: That article also talks about how everyone was all angry and terrified by 9/11 and I've always wondered a bit about that -
Admittedly I am not from New York, and I think being terrified and dismayed, etc in New York or even on the eastern seaboard makes plenty of sense. But really, was everyone terrified elsewhere? I was in Beijing when it actually happened, so I missed much of the immediate hysteria, yeah, but even on my return it didn't seem terrifying. It seemed pretty obvious to me from the get-go that such a large, complicated terrorist procedure was a one-time thing and that there was no real reason to worry about significant additional attacks, especially not attacks of the same kind. And I'm an anxious person! I actually occasionally do worry about mass shootings!
The first time someone asked for my opinion about 9/11 in Beijing, they said it "9-1-1" as one would in Mandarin, and I thought they were talking about the emergency police/ambulance dispatch system and said something like I thought it was quite a good idea. Hilarity ensued, eventually.
13 Yeah well Stockhausen was always a bit OTT.
But really, was everyone terrified elsewhere?
I was in North Carolina. We had dinner reservations for a fancy restaurant. The restaurant closed on us.
But really, was everyone terrified elsewhere?
Maybe terrified isn't the right word, and certainly not everyone, but there was a fair amount of panic going around. The anthrax attacks soon after didn't help any.
17: That was when my wife and I proved our heroic mettle . We were scheduled to meet a real estate agent on the evening of 9/11 and we didn't cancel. Actually maybe the real estate agent was the true hero.
I was not eager to drive across the GG Bridge, to be honest. Or for loved ones to do so.
Let's also remember that the initial media coverage was about how planes had crashed into "New York City, Washington D.C., and Pittsburgh". Any city could be next!
19.last: They get like 6% for doing fuck all.
It seemed pretty obvious to me from the get-go that such a large, complicated terrorist procedure was a one-time thing and that there was no real reason to worry about significant additional attacks
At the time (that is, within a few days or weeks of the event), that didn't seem at all obvious to me. And the anthrax attacks made it way worse, because it did feel like there was some kind of ongoing, unknown, unknowable threat that was just beginning. Since the 9/11 attacks themselves only took 20 guys armed with (we think) box cutters, it didn't seem that hard to imagine another 200 guys with, say, machine guns shooting up shopping malls, or whatever. It took a while (for me, really, the realization came in reading the 9/11 report) to realize just how relatively weak and unprepared AQ was to prepare these kinds of attacks, and just how much deeply-embedded incompetence in the US government, along with bad luck, it took for the attacks to come off.
There was a fair bit of fear, but I don't think it was "they're coming to get me/I'm in danger" panic so much as "Oh shit they can see us" panic. It was pretty much the same kind of shock you see when fairly privileged people promote some or other policy under the basic assumption that any negative consequences would obviously only happen to other people that they don't know, only to get stung by those policies themselves. Rather than being afraid that something more would happen it was along the lines of "how dare they!?" and a sense that the entire world had suddenly become a lot more dangerous because someone had dragged us into it rather than letting us sit outside of any possible consequences - so it included fear in that respect but not in the way we think of as most typical.
Basically the entire United States became that guy exploding into road rage when someone else cuts him off in a really dangerous way.
It was when we lost our innocence. It took a few years to get it back.
I don't think Gloria ever got hers back.
26: Gloria? The girl from the song with the boyfriend who is so proud that he can spell her name? Or Meathead's wife? Or?
23: See, my immediate thought was "it's actually fairly difficult to recruit a group of suicide pilots, and then that's complicated by the whole business of getting them into location and assuming that no one will back out or tip their hand" - and I think that's true. It doesn't seem to be especially difficult to recruit a reasonable number of people to actually go fight a guerrilla war or support guerrilla fighters, but it seems hard to get people to sign up for absolutely certain, predictable death - people's beliefs seem to break down at that point. If it were easy, we'd be seeing suicide attacks far more often and in far more places, since it seems like making a giant terrorist mess isn't that difficult if you're planning to die in the process and aren't too fussy about methods.
Just like at the beginning of the Iraq war reloaded, when there were all those kidnappings where they would just turn the people loose, before the kidnappers were able to nerve themselves up to beheadings and so on. It seems to take a lot to make even the most determined person absolutely committed to suicide attacks and up-close-and-personal political murder, especially when it's not some kind of Khmer Rouge mass killing thing where everyone around is participating.
In general, I was thinking not of the immediate moment when it was all "a bunch of planes crashed into several cities", when it would seem fairly reasonable to be worried, particularly on both coasts, but in the days and weeks following, when it was clearer what had happened.
27: She took a lover in the afternoon.
It seemed pretty obvious to me from the get-go that such a large, complicated terrorist procedure was a one-time thing and that there was no real reason to worry about significant additional attacks, especially not attacks of the same kind.
This was my response, too, and I lived at the time in one of the targeted cities. It was clear that there could never be a repeat performance since passengers would resist as they did on the day of 9/11.
When the anthrax attacks happened I was certain it was domestic terrorism. They were just so badly done that it couldn't be the same people who pulled off 9/11. I was sure it was some militia nut out in Montana. Either way, whoever it was had certainly shot their wad for the time being, in my (then) opinion.
I could also see no good reason why a terrorist group would spread attacks out over time rather than hitting all at once. Spreading them out means as soon as you do the first attack everyone is on heightened alert and the following attacks will be far more likely to be stopped. I suppose there's real terror value in successfully hitting a target that's on high alert and ready for you, but far more likely you simply fail and look like incompetent clowns, which is the opposite of what you want.
28: I think the feeling Art Spiegelman had after 9/11 that he was "waiting for that other shoe to drop" was very common and took quite a while to go away. AIHMHB around the time when the invasion of Iraq started, our office manager called a meeting to discuss what we would do in case of a chemical warfare attack.
Maybe her too? Does nobody else have Laura Branigan songs in their head?
32: Shove wet paralegals under the door to seal the room.
17. I don't want to sound like GWB, but as long as you weren't bereaved or actually hindering the work of the emergency services, why on earth would you not go on with business as usual?
Here are the lyrics for those keeping score --
Making love in the afternoon with Cecilia
Up in my bedroom,
I got up to wash my face
When I come back to bed,
Someone's taken my place.
A-ha-ha, a-ha-ha, Gloria, how's it gonna go down?
Will you meet him on the main line, or will you catch him on the rebound?
Will you marry for the money, take a lover in the afternoon?
Feel your innocence slipping away, don't believe it's comin' back soon
Maybe a fancy night out was inappropriate while the fires were still burning. Maybe the owners or manager lost a relative or were still waiting for news about one.
35:My memory is that everything shut down. That classes got cancelled across the country. Actually, IIRC my grad school stayed open and held classes, and everyone was unsure if they should just lecture as usual, or dismiss classes, or what.
I also went to classes at law school. As we didn't have a television it was easy to avoid seeing any footage and I still haven't seen any.
39: ME TOO! On avoiding footage.
OTOH, I haven't watched any of the police shootings from the past year+ either. I'm consistent!
Television grandma? Even back then we followed it on line, at work.
Maybe a fancy night out was inappropriate while the fires were still burning.
Calling coastal liberals 5th columnists while the fires were still burning, on the other hand...
Good times.
28: we have, in fact, seen an absolute shitload of suicide attacks. Hundreds. Just not in the US.
It's funny how poorly I can answer the question of whether things shut down that day, compared to if it had happened in the age of Facebook and Unfogged. Now I find out if there's a power outage in Kentucky.
I had a professor on 9/11 cancel classes. I don't think he lost anyone but his family was in NY.
Another professor lectured but did not have any class participation. The class was Trusts and Estates, and the topic for the day was what happens when married couples die simultaneously.
It was weird being on maternity leave at the time -- there wasn't anything to shut down from.
But what happened to my childhood friends from summer camp?!
...and the topic for the day was what happens when married couples die simultaneously.
Apparently, you're supposed to write your will so that it says something like "if I am survived by my spouse by more than 30 days" to avoid all the stuff like in "The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club." Not that they were spouses, but still.
45: To me, even the increase in numbers globally in the past few years doesn't seem like a huge amount, from an "it's easy to recruit people as suicide bombers" standpoint. Especially if we're talking about one or two bombers per attack. Going from "every year there will be some suicide bombers globally" to "therefore, we should be worried about repeated large-scale multiple person attacks in the US" is a pretty big leap.
Again, compare the number of people that ISIS, for example, seems to be able to recruit for plain old fighting that obviously carries a risk of death and a likelihood of killing others. It seems like it's pretty easy to recruit people to risk their lives - but if ISIS could recruit all those people as suicide bombers things would look really different.
Although really, mass shootings in the US are basically suicide attacks, and it seems fairly easy for people to self-recruit to commit those.
Not sure why we're limiting it to suicide bombers per se (though, even there, I don't think the problem is recruitment -- surely there were and are at least hundreds of people willing to blow things up in the US in the name of Al Qaeda - but organization). Eg Timothy McVeigh wasn't exactly a suicide bomber, and it didn't seem insane to expect bombs set in non-suicide fashion.
But actually, I see that most of the suicide bombings that ISIS is responsible for were carried out by people recruited from abroad, so it seems to be much easier to recruit suicide bombers than I had believed.
And yet I'm having absolutely no luck on Craigslist.
"Looking for low self esteem young person to blow things up for me" isn't the same as "looking for low self esteem young person to blow me," Barry.
32 I think the feeling Art Spiegelman had after 9/11 that he was "waiting for that other shoe to drop" was very common and took quite a while to go away.
The media/Bush administration were certainly working very, very hard to keep that feeling alive as long as possible, too - like with that Terror Alert System where the Alert Level invariably ranged from something like "IT COULD HAPPEN AT ANY TIME" to "WE'RE DOOMED, DOOMED I SAY".
I don't know anyone who actually took that seriously or straightforwardly, though I'm sure they existed. But what I did see was a lot of people who instinctively tried to 'take it with a grain of salt' or something and ended up massively overestimating the dangers involved, because trying to downplay 'shrieking hysteria' to a reasonable level still left people with wildly unrealistic pictures of what was happening. They should, of course, have taken it with a grain of complete and utter disregard, but that's actually psychologically tricky for people and especially people who weren't abnormally interested in being informed about the entire situation.
I do remember a perfectly sensible liberal person I knew who casually remarked at one point that Al Qaeda posed 'an existential threat' to the United States (and this would have been in the very late stages of the Bush years - after 2006 at least). He was caught off guard by the fact that I just goggled at him and didn't think he was being reasonable in his assessment. (My guess is he'd heard someone on NPR, or read someone in the NYT saying this and hadn't thought to step back and ask "wait is that even remotely possible?")
54 - It might also be that there's only a certain percentage (which can vary based on local circumstances, but...) of people who are seriously willing to do something like that, and that the existence of the internet makes it easier to reach out to a really large group of people. So it makes sense to try to recruit from everywhere possible because it takes longer to run out of people that way.
30.4: If Al Queda had been capable of ongoing attacks, it would have been psychologically debilitating. And if they had the capacity, it would have been easy to mount attacks that would be hard to foil -- malls, power plants, schools.
59 Was it a question of capacity or interest? They got what they wanted out of the 9/11 attacks and then some, namely American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq which was a huge bonus. With the US in the region destabilizing ME regimes it was time to return to attacking the near enemy.
60: Isn't that a version of the " " theory? Can't remember the name of it! That attacking Iraq was a brilliant strategy, because then the terrorists would blow us up there, rather than disturb our lovely homeland.
60 -- interest may have something to do with it, but it became absolutely clear that they also didn't have the capacity.
perfectly sensible liberal person I knew who casually remarked at one point that Al Qaeda posed 'an existential threat' to the United States (and this would have been in the very late stages of the Bush years - after 2006 at least).
In the sense of bleak angst.
That's a good walk down memory lane, peep. I may be misremembering, but I thought the "flypaper" theory was that Islamic crazies from all over would show up to fight in Iraq, which was supposedly a good thing because we could defeat them and kill them all and make the world safe from Islamic crazies forever. The first part turned out to be right, the second part was a WHOOPS.
65 Yes, that's what the "flypaper" theory was. Better to fight them over there than here.
As usual I guess I misunderstood.
I wonder what the "Democracy, whiskey, sexy" guy is up to these days. Memories....
I think there was also a general "fight them abroad so we don't have to fight them at home"* rhetorical gambit, but I don't know if it was given a particular label. The Flypaper stuff was close though.
*If they really had the capacity to strike in the US some more wouldn't this have made no sense? If they were an army protecting a city or something, sure, but I'd think terrorists would just laugh and laugh at the idea of the US sending a lot of people where they didn't want to strike at civilians. In retrospect I guess it was a strong tell that they couldn't have cared less about terrorism itself and mostly wanted to be at war with Iraq.
21: It was a very stressful day hearing that a plane had crashed into Pittsburgh when I was on a business trip in Cleveland. Didn't have a cell phone, not that most people could get through. A lot of misinformation in the early hours.
I remember a lot of people being scared, but I also it remember taking off after the anthrax attacks. I think the Onion parodied this with something about the local Smallville library in Kansas working on its terrorist response program.
That airplane that crashed into Queens a couple months after 9/11 - it took me a hell of a long time to accept that it wasn't terrorism.
I crashed into a retaining wall in Pittsburgh. Nobody believed it was terrorism.
Enough to reimburse me for the new bumper I had to buy?
74: In my version, you are the terrorist . So, no.
The guy whose wall it was probably felt the same.
This is my most successful thread terrorism derailing ever.
The flypaper theory was proven correct, we were just wrong about who the flies would be.
I don't remember how soon I was back to work after 9/11. Day or two, I guess.
I guess I knew AQ didn't have much in the way of capability when the shoe bomber was captured. I'd been thinking at first that they could surely get a follow-up low attack going -- a single stick of dynamite at Metro Center or Mall of America would be devastating -- but then I realized that even the 9/11 attack wasn't really about us anyway.
We were already off and running with Bush's quest to eliminate evil from the world, announced with great fanfare to a joint session of Congress.