Open Thread

Happy 9/11 everyone. Seriously, why isn’t this a national holiday at this juncture? 3,000 people sacrificed their lives that fateful day and yet we do not commemorate them and thank them for their service.

Let’s Roll, or better yet, Let’s Rollover!!

Twenty years on, what’s changed?

I was going through old papers the other day and found the receipt from the Executive Hotel Pacific in Seattle where I was staying from 9/10/ to 9/14/ 2001. Huh. Well, I burned it along with a lot of other papers I’d kept for no particular reason. And I thought about what was different now and what might have been.

I was in Seattle for a work assignment. I retired early from that job in part because the Government was going insane. With the distance of time, I can see how 9/11 was the catalyst for changing the dynamics of Government — not just in the US — to divorce it almost completely from the public interest. Congress doesn’t work. The courts snigger at the masses and more often than not seek to cause harm to the public and their welfare.

The presidency is an odd joke on all of us. Trump didn’t start that but he made it manifest constantly.

Local and state governments mirror the worst of what’s happened in DC since 9/11. Even the post office has at times behaved like a monstrous mockery of what it once was, assuming that all patrons are potential terrorists.

Many of us assumed that when the Bush/Cheney regime was installed (arguably illegally) the US would be in a war within a year, and sure enough. We were right. And some of us wonder if that’s why they were installed against the wishes of the voters. It must have been very important to some interests that the US and its forsaken allies enter into a period of neo-imperialist Forever War, and we know who has benefited. Not us.

Pulling the plug on that bullshit has proved to be nigh impossible. But we keep trying, and we keep thinking about what might have been. Where might we be now if not for the manufactured horrors of the last 20 years?

The world has changed since 9/11. Back then, the loss of 3,000 Americans for no other reason that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time was shocking. Now we lose that many a week from covid and it isn’t even a blip on the screen. Biden finally after twenty years gets us out of a pointless war in Afghanistan, and he catches grief for it, from Republicans, from the media, from the Europeans. Some of the Republicans are critical just because it was a Democrat who did it. Others like Lindsey Graham never met a war they didn’t like, and defend. The media after ignoring Afghanistan for years suddenly develops a bad case of faux outrage, the women! like they just discovered there are women in Afghanistan. As there are in every other war and failed country on the planet which they continue to conveniently overlook. The Europeans never like what we are doing, and like us stopping it even less.

As for the Taliban, it’s still early days, but their PR is already showing holes. And their new government looks a lot like their old government. The core problem remains the same: feeding the population. I don’t think the Taliban has either the interest or the smarts to do it. As for its neighbors, I can’t help thinking that they deserve each other, and we are and should stay well out of it.

“Happy 9/11 everyone. Seriously, why isn’t this a national holiday at this juncture?”

Absolutely! The annual bathos festival. Or the annual “Remember to hate the Muslims” holiday. Holloween without the candy.

The fact that GW Bush can ever appear in public is a testament to Americans lack of perspective.

Well gosh, NL, I don’t know. I mean, sure we have a ton of data showing that vaccines do in fact protect people from COVID:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/09/10/moderna-most-effective-covid-vaccine-studies/

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/coronavirus/article253787033.html

But on the other hand, we have one unverified anecdote from an anonymous poster on the internet about a vaccinated person with COVID. Hmm, I really don’t know what to think here. A difficult problem to be sure!

NR, sounds like (I really hate to put words into your mouth, so correct me if I am wrong) what you are saying is that ‘don’t blame me, I am just parroting the media’, and you are sending me to some dinky news articles that you are parroting. Now, do you realize that I can send you to other news articles saying the opposite? For every expert, there is a counter-expert. You can argue that the other sources are political claptrap all you want – how would you know, you are not an expert, you are just echoing? And I do not want to make it a battle of news sources.

Furthermore, there is no reason for you to doubt my sincerity. I am just sitting here alone in isolation, instead of having a fun weekend with fiends and family. At first, I thought of letting Hugh and you slide, but then why should I? You promised that the vaccines will keep us safe. What happened?

Fully vaccinated, 49, good physical shape Oscar De La Hoya spent 3 days in a hospital with severe symptoms. Will you claim that he is a liar about his vaccination status too? Everyone is liar, the reality is a liar!

NR, sounds like (I really hate to put words into your mouth, so correct me if I am wrong) what you are saying is that ‘don’t blame me, I am just parroting the media’,

You are wrong, and I will correct you. The articles I linked to are merely reporting on the data that shows that vaccinated people are much less susceptible to COVID than non-vaccinated people. The articles include links to the studies and data that shows this, so if you don’t trust “the media,” you can click on the links and review the studies and data directly without any “media” bogeyman in between. The data is quite clear about the fact that vaccines work.

And that is the last I will say on the subject since Ian requested that vaccination stuff be kept out of this thread. I wouldn’t have even said anything in the first place except that NL mentioned me by name.

Hugh,
It depended on who the victims were and are. On 9/11 most of the victims were financial big shots or closely adjacents. That was why there was such a bloodthirsty and immediate reaction by Government. If they had been mere schlubs, like most of the dead and disabled from Covid, the reaction — while still bloodthirsty — would have been quite different.

The class of the victims determines their worth and what’s to be done about it. In the case of 9/11 what’s been done about it is sheer madness in part because so many of the High and Mighty were victims. In the case of Covid it’s been a matter of protecting the Overclass at all costs (vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, sequestration in secure locations and so forth) and essentially indifference to what happens to anybody else. Nobody’s going to war over it — so long as the Overclass is protected at any rate.

Several hundred first responders were lost on 9/11 and thousands were sickened, and the response was… if not exactly indifference by their betters, far from more than minimally considerate. Much the same has been happening with regard to Covid first responders. Again, it all about class.

Ché Pasa, I agree, but still the deadness of the response to the covid deaths gets to me. And that isn’t just the indifference of our powers that be. It is the dismissal of those deaths, more than two hundred 9/11, and often seen here, by people who aren’t of the powers that be, because those deaths undermine their denial and conspiracy theories.

Oh yes, there is something crazy-deliberate about the Overclass indifference to the deaths and misery caused by the virus, mirrored in both major parties, sorry to say, but enthusiastically supported by a faction of the Rs and the R leadership in thrall to a virulent media-plex that was once in thrall to Trump but mostly seems to have shaken it off. They don’t want to wake up. Eventually, they won’t be able to.

Wasn’t it Jay Gould during the previous Gilded Age who said he could hire one half the working class (and petit bourgeoisie) to kill the other half? Well, that’s basically what’s been going on throughout the pandemic, and it shows no sign of letting up.

And this time, they don’t even have to pay their underlings for their service.