If it turns out that this latest terror plot was entirely homegrown in Britain
Then we bomb the shit out of the UK, right?
Only those neighborhoods known to harbor Pakistanis, apostropher, and only after we drop leaflets.
"Root causes" is just theocon for "Islam."
I had noticed that, as it happens, and am struck by the extent that "root causes" as an explanation for crime or poverty or child neglect, is a style of argument for which these same people have endless contempt. Except that there, where we are discussing social problems with individual autonomous actors making the decisions, "root causes" makes a lot more sense than it does speaking of crises controlled by a few strategic actors.
There's no way this will be found to be "entirely homegrown in Britain". If there's even one cent that came from Iran or elsewhere in the Middle East and the other 99.99% of the funding came from the UK, it'll be considered "financed by al Qaeda".
Can we also move to strike 'Islamofascism' as a term on the grounds that it doesn't fucking mean anything in words?
Funny, I wanted to mention this a while ago. Apparently agency, like partisanship, stops at the water's edge.
Also, in case you didn't see, our fellow Americans suck:
Some 30 percent of Americans cannot say in what year the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington took place, according to a poll published in the Washington Post newspaper.
How can they not? The poll's got to be wrong. This country deep-fries Twinkies, but we're not that dumb.
8 -- yikes -- but I guess it's not so bad, probably a majority of this 30% were born yesterday so cannot be expected to know.
Yeah, but 95% of respondents got the month and day right (were able to correctly answer that 9/11 happened on 9/11). So that's something.
I seriously would love to see the other 5% of responses. Did people just guess badly? Say they had no idea? Or did they not understand the question?
This is so typical. They adopt the language of reason while retaining all of their policy prejudices. "Root causes" means thwacking nation-states, just as it always did. Very pre-9-11 thinking.
It reminds me of how mad I still am about the right wing's weaselly co-optation of women's rights in Islamic countries.
The left and the right have changed places in terms of many underlying policy motivations. We're now about being pragmatic and moving cautiously towards a better tomorrow; they're now about high-flown rhetoric and utopian dreams. If we had any sense at all, we'd take all of the language they've been using for the last forty years and turn it on them. "Criticizing the President hurts the troops" is the new self-esteem movement, with the same complete disconnect between claims and reality.
9: Apparently we're dumb enough to allow policymakers to pay lip service to the idea of root causes while formulating a rationale for war -- the fight against islamofascism -- entirely dissociated from what the supposed Islamofascists have repeatedly identified as the root cause of their hostility. Some of us, at least.
It reminds me of how mad I still am about the right wing's weaselly co-optation of women's rights in Islamic countries.
It wasn't just the right. Many liberals beat me over the head with that ala Polly Toynbee when I expressed reservations about Afghanistan.
8: I remember seeing news coverage about a memorial plaque somewhere near Ground Zero that had to be changed because it originally referred to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2002. And this was a year or two ago.
6: yes, please, that term is the emptiest of empties.
that term is the emptiest of empties
Unless "family values" enters the competition.
12: Well, the percentage of the population suffering from Alzheimer's, senility, or head trauma might be close to 5%.
16.--But anybody who's been following the international feminist movement knew that "liberating" the women of Afghanistan would be much more complicated than simply killing all the men and changing a few laws to comply more with Eleanor Roosevelt's ideals. I feel as though all of the rancorous 1990s debates within the left about globalization and human rights a) have been totally forgotten and b) are now being lived out, piecemeal, lurchingly, stupidly, and at tremendous costs.
In the latest Zogby interactive national poll, 95% of Americans correctly identified the color of an orange.
Then again, 95% might be an outlier and the real number is lower.
30%, however, could not identify an orange as a fruit. 16% said they had "no idea," 8% thought it was a vegetable, and 6% suggested an orange might be "some kind of foreigner."
21: I followed those debates, and remembered with respect to Afghanistan what I'd heard at the time of the Soviet war: the virulence of the opposition was not so much to socialist ideas as that the Russian-backed government would have forced them to send their daughters to school. What was naively asserted at the time of our war was that removing the Taliban would start bringing such universals as female education to Afghanistan.
All of the most hopeful steps of the '90's, such as micro-lending, are rendered useless by invasion, occupation and civil war.
Think you know how dumb we are? I suspect you misunderestimate us.
Re: 8.
First off, am I dense or is the data behind this poll glaringly absent? Can't find it on the Washington Post site, can't find it by Googling, can't find it as a link to the Yahoo article that Becks links. I want to know the methodology, and the question phrasing.
And second, not to be argumentative, but I for one wouldn't care if 95% of my fellow citizens couldn't name the year in which the Sept. 11 attacks took place. I don't think that kind of ignorance is a useful proxy for much else.
If we're going to run around polling people, I care tremendously about who they think was responsible for 9/11 and what the country should (or should not) do as policy changes in response. But honestly - the specific year? Does it really matter? (Not being snarky; I'm really trying to think why.)
Concerning the Soviet war in Afghanistan -- I'm just a guy, so I don't really know, but faced with a choice between Soviet rule and clitoridectomy, I'm guessing I'd go with the Soviets.
(Okay, re-banning self)
29: I think this kind of ignorance is seen as a useful proxy for much more troubling ignorance. (As in, if you don't know what year it happened in, how much could you possibly know about it.) It's a zinger, not an argument, but it's a good zinger.
When right-wingers say they want to go after the "root causes" of terrorism, what they mean is they want to kill darkies until there aren't any darkies left. That's what they mean. That's why they aren't raising hissie fits over, say, the current situation where the U.N. is not being allowed into southern Lebanon by the Israelis in order to re-stock the hospitals with food, medicine, and fuel for their generators. In their feeble little minds, Arabs are a bunch of camel-riding savages who don't *have* hospitals, and if they do, well, gosh, they'll just have to do without, won't they? They will not be happy until southern Lebanon is a stark desert and every male Arab of military age in the surrounding countries has been rounded up and exterminated as a terrorist.
-BT
You know, as a card carrying right winger I get awfully tired of the ridiculous notion that I want to kill "brown people". I really don't care what color or religion they are- if they need killin' they need killin'.
I think we should just dedicate more international funds to establishing abstinence-only educational programs in the middle east. Surely if we just teach young people to say no to terrorism, it will go away.
I don't think that kind of ignorance is a useful proxy for much else.
If you just plain don't know the agreed-upon facts about something, your understanding of the larger and more controversial issues is likely to be poor too. I understand that someone might have something interesting to say about a given historical event even if they are a little off on the dating, but not if it's a loudly-publicized date from five years ago. So yeah, I think it's a useful proxy, and actually find your disagreement baffling.
Dudes, the only way I can remember for sure what year it was is by remembering that PK was less than a year old.
Every time I see this post in the sidebar, the song "Root Down" by the Beastie Boys goes through my head.
Only those neighborhoods known to harbor Pakistanis, apostropher, and only after we drop leaflets.
Good bye then. Since the smart bombs will be targetting the nice family next door, it'll be just my luck to be having a chat with them over the garden wall when we get hit.
36: I'd thought he was a little older than that -- Newt was a month old.
38 -- obviously smart bombs would not be targetting anybody nice -- these ones are using state-of-the-art evil-seeking technology.
40: And we know that they are perfectly-targeted to only hit areas full of evil people who hate us because -- and we have long experience with this -- after we drop a bomb on a neighborhood it turns out that all the survivors in the area hate us and are therefore evil.
Good luck, Londoners!