Terrorism in 'Murica (aka The Homeland)

troo

I get to fly home to Portland tomorrow, domestically. This should be interesting and/or retarded.

i'm gonna stick with amtrak. no security at all!

xp, let us know how you get on.

seriously regretting not springing for virgin atlantic direct now. i think i saved about $50. american carriers are misery at the best of times.

i was on amtrak today and someone was in the bathroom for like half an hour and i made a joke about hoping it wasnt an engineering student and everyone in line laughed nervously and stopped making eye contact with me

was that engineering student you, max

oh max

the irony was... it was osama bin laden

the further irony was... he was just feeling sick he wasnt even plotting anything

the even further irony was... even though he wasnt plotting anything my wisecrack turned him against americans forever

the ultimate irony... jews did 9/11

... from an amtrak bathroom

its all connected

ok no tv wtfffffff http://gawker.com/5435131/jetblue-pilots-agonized-announcement-the-tsas-draconian-reactionary-rules

ill vote against obama dont test me tsa

(i mean obv terror attempts are "alarming" and of course i wish no one blew up a plane ever, but suddenly being all "oh my goodness a terrorist!" is some naive chicken little bullshit. fact: lots of ppl want to blow up america, and it is at least half our own fault. other fact: there is a 1.0 x 10^(-7)% chance that this will ever become a problem for you, personally. but fretting about it in a way that is more vocal than shaking yr dang head or saying RIP victims is ~actually~ counterproductive, and gives crazy assholes license to run roughshod over ppl (both domestic and int'l) that they didn't give a shit about in the first place)

― dome plow (gbx), Monday, December 28, 2009 2:05 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

"it is at least half our own fault"

ah.... no.

fuck knows how to prevent these bastards from doing what they do, but this is mad. rights or wrongs of the afghanistan war aside, you can't do foreign policy based on whether it will annoy radical islamists/any other crazy motherfucker.

im guessing that the american media's hysteria produces this kind of response. in england the media is calmer; but then, england is also much more tolerant of radical islam. this guy, product of my university, is partly "our bad" and his dad is rightly peeved.

The point isn't whether it will annoy some already crazy motherfucker, it's whether US foreign policy will give birth to new crazy motherfuckers.

Britain also has post-colonial baggage x10000 and part of acknowledging it is dealing with a multitude of groups that have a sideline in using homemade explosives to underscore their grievances. The American right is in complete denial about the flipside of USA! USA! being the kind of post-imperialist baggage that has explosives in it.

i mostly agree. on a rational level, i totally agree. but the reaction to these things is not 100 percent rational -- which is why terrorism works is rational.*

tbh i think they should just get on with building this thing already: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_tunnel

The main barriers to constructing such a tunnel are cost—as much as $12 trillion[1]—and the limits of current materials science.

pfft.

After 9/11 (and a decade of living in a country used to taking precautions against suspect devices, whether IRA or nail bomb etc.) the paranoid narcissism of the average lo-info American ('they're gonna bomb my local mall!') became to me akin to those male homophobes who think any random gay man is eyeing them up for a cornholing.

I don't think it's the average American who cares about airline terrorism as much as it is people who fly frequently---that is to say, it's an elite concern, hence the attention this gets from the chattering class.

I don't have a great feeling for how much terrorism against malls and the like concerns non-elites; my recollection from polls is that it's about the same in the US and UK.

That scheme is crazy - what they should do is reclaim land west from Portugal and east from New York until they're close enough to build a bridge across.

Most frequent flyers I know are more annoyed with the inconvenience of being pawed by min-wage imbeciles at Security than are afraid of terrorism. It's the people who don't fly (or fly to a cheap holiday once or twice a year) who let loose with all the paranoid shit. My mom, who is somewhere in the middle, is more scared of a backyard incident than an onboard one. I've seen her get a bit chafey when asked to remove her jewelry at a checkpoint but mostly she's like everyone else going airside, rolling their eyes at the thought of shoe removal.

Britain also has post-colonial baggage x10000 and part of acknowledging it is dealing with a multitude of groups that have a sideline in using homemade explosives to underscore their grievances. The American right is in complete denial about the flipside of USA! USA! being the kind of post-imperialist baggage that has explosives in it.

― days of wine and neuroses (suzy), Monday, December 28, 2009 11:13 AM (58 minutes ago) Bookmark

don't agree we have a large amount of baggage with this guy tbh. complex-ish issue, but -- i live with a rich-parented nigerian, and also with a less rich guy-whose-dad-was-a-colonial-administrator in nigeria. we all *seem* to get along. i don't think this bomber, born into wealth some decades after independence, had a legitimate grievance against the (no doubt nefarious and perfidious and generally terrible) british.

i can understand how subjectively he may feel differently, but HMG does do its fair share of handwringing and mea-culpa'ing about the dreadful legacy of colonialism. not sure what else it is supposed to do; but were it to go further, into the realm of reparations (which to me seems historically moronic but ne way) -- is this chap really one of the victims? his father at least seems to think not.

the question isnt "is this specific nigerian terrorist justified in his actions against the US" (spoiler: no) its "what actions has the US govt taken both directly and indirectly that lead to conditions where this is seen as a legitimate way to air grievances" (answer: take your pick)

but my guess, given that my mayne is talking specifically about the UK, is that this is a US/UK divide thing

don't want 2 sound like charles krauthammer (tho: balla name) but if you tailor policy around not offending the nutters then... that is not a good thing. we have this talk every time, but imo there is a difference between a grievance and a total and all-consuming hatred of the decadent west/the jews/etc. etc. maybe this guy is single-issue and im all wrong and jumping to conclusions, but the last round of british-based bombers (who lived down my street) certainly were *not* making a "rational response to british foreign policy" or that have you. they really did have a problem with... women going to nightclubs, etc. that is not a "legitimate" grievance.

xpost

yes this is really a uk thing and the iffiness of the british left in opposing radical islam.

right, but were not talking about "tailoring policy," were talking about, you know, "do you or do you not arm mujahedin" (no) or "to what extent should we be partnering with a country that pumps money into hardline madrassas" (less than we are now) or "how can we minimize civilian casualties" (stop invading countries)

i.e. its not about mollifying radicals its about doing everything "we" can to not aid their radicalization in the first place

I see history mayne's point: some motherfucker is obsessed with English women showing lots of leg, and it's silly to think that ceasing to bomb the shit of civilians in Yemen, e.g., is going to change that. Arguably the crazy motherfuckers are getting material support by people with "legit" grievances, but Qutb-like psychos aren't going to stop being psycho even if we do clean up our foreign policy. Maybe they'd stop if we installed sharia, who knows. And those of us who always turn to blaming Western foreign policy for creating terrorism are using the terrorism we've actually had in the US and UK this decade as a proxy war against Western militarism.

in the last sentence I mean: the actual terrorism in the West we've had this decade (e.g. 9/11, Madrid, London, shoe bomber and the burning blanket guy) was done by crazies obsessed with Western decadence. Turning the discussion to Western militarism as having caused these episodes both misses the focus of these crazies' obsessions, and suits a Leftist agenda aimed at ending Western militarism.

theyre obsessed with western militarism too!

i mean this isnt "just" about western decadence for "them" or for "us"

yeah I'm just trying to articulate history mayne's Krauthammerian point (whether it's in good faith or not I don't care): in this view their obsession with Western decadence is what gets the one's who've actually acted in the West, to act---as opposed to the USS Cole bombers, e.g., who may have been concerned with US militarism more than our sailors fucking Yemeni whores or whatever.

there will always be crazy people obsessed with purity and decadence. the question is whether these people become violent radicals or whether they, on the other hand, just become that nutter rocking back and forth in the corner muttering about whores. it is endlessly demonstrable that foreign occupation, violence and torture radicalize people. remember that quttub was tortured. so was zawahiri. either by the cia or cia-trained agents.

Apparently the seat-back maps are back on, so they didn't win this time.

imo the most important factor in u.s. foreign misadventuring isnt necessarily the creation of crazy angry people but the encouraging of tolerance for their loco views - if the absolute nutters are screaming death to the great satan a much bigger chunk of normals is going all whatevs ive got bigger problems than trying to defend some country of assholes

you're making me wonder if there's an iranian version of lolspeak and for that i love you ice cr?m

All my Nigerian friends are from Christian families and funnel their post-colonial ambivalence through things like being annoyed about Shell Oil and globalism.

imo the most important factor in u.s. foreign misadventuring isnt necessarily the creation of crazy angry people but the encouraging of tolerance for their loco views

otm. and this works in both directions, obviously -- the actions of al qaida open up space in the u.s. domestic discourse for dick cheney and the mad torturers of Neoconnia. and really this suits the interests of radicals on both sides and can end up trapping everybody in endless cycles of retaliation.

not really sure about that. the last time i checked pretty much everybody hated al qaeda and dick cheney.

well cheney never cared about personal popularity because he understood that it didn't matter much to what he was trying to do. 9/11 gave him the opportunity to push government in a lot of directions that would have been impossible under non-9/11 circumstances, and he took advantage of it.

fuck knows how to prevent these bastards from doing what they do, but this is mad. rights or wrongs of the afghanistan war aside, you can't do foreign policy based on whether it will annoy radical islamists/any other crazy motherfucker.

what i said was kind of a throwaway comment, and fuck if i know how you pulled this from it

it is endlessly demonstrable that foreign occupation, violence and torture radicalize people. remember that quttub was tortured. so was zawahiri. either by the cia or cia-trained agents.

― Tracer Hand, Monday, December 28, 2009 1:19 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

both of them were tortured (which im not defending, obviously) because they were already radicalized and were deemed a threat to the egyptian state. zawahiri in particular was a violent radical before his imprisonment.

perhaps left to its own devices, the muslim brotherhood would have settled down to harmless nutterdom; perhaps without the cold war, the CIA would never have supported bad regimes the world over (and regimes in general would have been naturally good); perhaps if, in the present, the US refused to arm israel, then we wouldn't have young idiots trying to blow up jets.

but perhaps it would take more than that?

maybe when this guy recovers he can talk us through his thinking -- what it would take to assuage him, his vision for a peaceful afghanistan, etc.

i wish US foreign policy were cleaner, but i'm not convinced that it's possible or in every case desirable to run it without making enemies.

All my Nigerian friends are from Christian families and funnel their post-colonial ambivalence through things like being annoyed about Shell Oil and globalism.

― days of wine and neuroses (suzy), Monday, December 28, 2009 3:01 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah my housemate is christian. none of the nigerians i've lived with in the uk have been annoyed by globalism to my knowledge -- i mean, our entire situation, their being educated here, is a product *of* globalism. (and so indirectly, often, of the oil industry.) we all feel ambivalent about the material bases of modern western-style society, of course.

perhaps left to its own devices, the muslim brotherhood would have settled down to harmless nutterdom; perhaps without the cold war, the CIA would never have supported bad regimes the world over (and regimes in general would have been naturally good); perhaps if, in the present, the US refused to arm israel, then we wouldn't have young idiots trying to blow up jets.

but perhaps it would take more than that?

not sayin that yr doing this, but: that last part is what's often leveraged by the US media (don't know about UK) and talking heads and bloviating holiday relations into ugly generalizations about ragheads and apologies for actual, regrettable, shouldn't-have-happened foreign policy missteps. "it" taking "more than that" so often scans (to me) as "there's just no changin those ~muslims, they'll NEVER be happy," as if that applies to normal, non-radicals and not just obsessive nutters.

but the point isn't about *all* muslims, but about the actual terrorists we've seen from 9/11 onward in the West. Look at what motivated *them*; and ask to what extent changing Western foreign policy would have assuaged them.

i know it isn't! i said that that point (about the actual radicals) is very often used by domestic morons to tar *all* muslims. which is why it gets my hackles up, etc.

obviously a lot of things, internal and external, led to the rise of fundamentalist islam over the last several decades. and it's not a morally straightforward story in any way, not least because there aren't many real good guys you can point to either in the middle east or in other countries' dealings with the region. but i think the fundamentalists themselves are essentially at this point a cult -- it's a big cult, with a lot of cultural complexities in different countries, but the point is that having come into existence it is not going to fade just because or even if the conditions that helped bring it into existence start to change. it is running on its own gas (literally and figuratively) and it's going to be a problem at some scale for a long time to come. the problem is that we (i.e. the west) has to somehow separate how we deal with the death cult from how we deal more broadly and diplomatically with the region at large.

as for whether or not changing foreign policy would have assuaged some now blown-up terrorists: it is a mystery. i'm not at all suggesting that we conduct foreign policy in a way specifically designed to not annoy terrorists, but the idea that our mistakes don't ~really~ have that much to do with radicalization (or popular support/tolerance of radicalization) is patently absurd.

this may be apples and oranges, but the guys setting road side bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan are not doing it because women go to nightclubs in London.

but some of the people supplying the money that buys the bombs are doing it because of that. or they're doing it to ingratiate themselves with the local religious leadership. or who knows, it's all complicated and it's not an either/or situation.