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10 Year Anniversary 9/11 Tribute Thread (pg. 8)
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| srussell0018 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Moongoose
i use bigger words taht you are perhaps familliar with. |
Perhaps I am. Perhaps I am.
I suppose I'm just having trouble apprehending your posts. Maybe I'm just not cut out for this whole reading apprehension thing. Maybe I should do something less intellectually cumbersome like joining the police force. At least then I could comprehend some criminals and do some good for this world. Although I'm a bit comprehensive about going through with the police academy. |
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| Nrg2Nfinit |
| what the are you talking about ? |
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| EddieZilker |
| quote: | Originally posted by Trance-MB
Demolition, just of Building 7, few days later would make sense as the dutch demolition guy says in the video, but as far as I know the government didn't say they used demolition and as far as I know it also went down at 911.
Some videos where people think the see something strange doesn't mean there is something strange happening.
Explosions at ground level just before the first plane hit sound strange to me. So if that would be true I would like to have an explanation unless the time frame is incorrect. And if it's not true then it's interesting to know why all windows were gone in the lobby and why people we burned at this level. There might be logical explanations for all of this, like parts which landed near the lobby from outside. So called experts don't have the same opinion what I think is strange.
I don't have a theory and have an open mind on different views. |
Do you have a credible source for any of your conjecture about explosions prior to plane crashes or windows being blown out? The scope of your knowledge - qualified with the phrase, "as far as I know" - seems rather paltry against the scope of the public record.
As far as I know, you're either not very good at trolling or you suffer from an advanced form of scoliosis, so severe, that it has impelled your head almost completely up your ass. |
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| EddieZilker |
| quote: | Originally posted by Nrg2Nfinit
what the are you talking about ? |
He finds his posts, arresting. |
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| idoru |
It gets a little Christ-y in the middle for my tastes, but...
| quote: | The Cycle of Revenge
By Simon Critchley
I’ve never understood the proverbial wisdom that revenge is a dish best served cold. Some seem to like it hot. Better is the Chinese proverb, attributed to Confucius, “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” Osama bin Laden’s grave was watery, but the other still appears empty. Is it intended for us?
Revenge is the desire to repay an injury or a wrong by inflicting harm, often the violent sort. If you hit me, I will hit you back. Furthermore, by the logic of revenge, I am right to hit you back. The initial wrong justifies the act of revenge. But does that wrong really make it right for me to hit back? Once we act out of revenge, don’t we become mired in a cycle of violence and counterviolence with no apparent end? Such is arguably our current predicament.
Of course, moving from ends to beginnings, the other peculiarity of revenge is that it is often unclear who committed the first wrong or threw the first stone. If someone, George W. Bush say, asserts that the United States is justified in revenging itself on Al Qaeda, by invading Afghanistan, then Iraq and the rest of the brutal saga of the last 10 years, what would Bin Laden have said? Well, the opposite of course.
In a scarily fascinating 2004 video, called “The Towers of Lebanon,” in which Bin Laden claimed direct responsibility for 9/11 for the first time, he says that the Sept. 11 attacks were justified as an act of revenge. If the United States violates the security of the Muslim world — especially by using his homeland of Saudi Arabia as a base during the first Gulf War — then Al Qaeda is justified in violating American security. If there had been no initial violation, he claims, there would be no need for revenge. Bin Laden contrasts the United States with Sweden: as the Swedes have never been aggressors in the Muslim world, he says, they have nothing to fear from Al Qaeda.
Bin Laden then reveals the extraordinary fact that the idea for 9/11 originated in his visual memory of the 1982 Israeli bombardments of West Beirut’s high-rise apartment blocks. He recalls his intense reaction to seeing images of the destroyed towers there and formed the following notion: “It occurred to me to punish the oppressor in kind by destroying towers in America.” (“Missile into towers,” he might have whispered; the idea stuck.) The Sept. 11 attacks, which most of us remember as a series of visual images, repeatedly televised and published, originate with an earlier series of images. For Bin Laden, there was a strange kind of visual justice in 9/11, the retributive paying back of an image for an image, an eye for an eye.
Opposites attract — the awful violence of 9/11 is justified by Al Qaeda as an act of revenge that in turn justifies the violence of America’s and Bush’s revenge. My point is that revenge is an inevitably destructive motive for action. When we act out of revenge, revenge is what we will receive in return. The wheel of violence and counterviolence spins without end and leads inevitably to destruction.
This is exactly what Bin Laden hoped to bring about. He admits that Al Qaeda spent $500,000 on the 9/11 attacks, while estimating that the United States lost, at the lowest estimate, $500 billion in the event and the aftermath. He even does the math, “That makes a million American dollars for every Al Qaeda dollar, by the grace of God Almighty.” He concludes, ominously, “This shows the success of our plan to bleed America to the point of bankruptcy, with God’s will.”
Like it or not (I don’t like it at all), Bin Laden had a point. The last 10 years of unending war on terror has also led, at least partly, to the utter financial precariousness that we see at every level of life in the United States: federal, state, city and individuals laden with debt. We are bankrupt.
But why grant Bin Laden some sick posthumous victory? Consider an alternative scenario.
In a 1999 Republican debate George W. Bush, then a candidate, responded — to the accompaniment of complacent guffaws from liberals — to a question about which political philosopher he most identified with: ”Christ, because he changed my heart,” Bush said. In that case, it was fair to wonder what might Jesus have recommended in response to 9/11. The answer, of course, is clear: turn the other cheek.
In the New Testament, Peter asks Jesus about the quantity of forgiveness: How many times should we forgive someone who had sinned against him. Is seven times enough, he wonders out loud? To which Jesus replies, from his full messianic height, “No, not seven times, but seventy times seven,” meaning, there is no quantity to forgiveness, just an infinite quality.
Think back 10 years, if you will. In the days and weeks that followed 9/11 the people of New York City, Washington and indeed the entire United States were the recipients of an unquantifiable wave of empathy from across the world. The initial effect of 9/11 (I was still living in England at the time) was the confirmation in the minds of many millions of people that New York was an extraordinary place that rightly engendered huge affection, indeed love.
Ask yourself: what if nothing had happened after 9/11? No revenge, no retribution, no failed surgical strikes on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, no poorly planned bloody fiasco in Iraq, no surges and no insurgencies to surge against; nothing.
What if the government had simply decided to turn the other cheek and forgive those who sought to attack it, not seven times, but seventy times seven? What if the grief and mourning that followed 9/11 were allowed to foster a nonviolent ethics of compassion rather than a violent politics of revenge and retribution? What if the crime of the Sept. 11 attacks had led not to an unending war on terror, but the cultivation of a practice of peace — a difficult, fraught and ever-compromised endeavor, but perhaps worth the attempt?
As we know all too well, this didn’t happen. Instead, all of that glorious global fellow feeling was wasted and allowed to dissipate in acts of revenge that have bankrupted this country, both financially and spiritually.
Perhaps the second grave is ours. We dug it ourselves. The question now is: do we have to lie in it? |
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.co...ge/?ref=opinion |
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| EddieZilker |
I think he took it to a bit of an extreme with the whole Christ/forgiveness angle, too. I thought Steven Spielberg did a really good job, in Munich, of illustrating the legacy of the conflict leading up to 9/11. When I saw the Twin Towers in the background of the final scene, it was apparent that eye-for-an-eye is what had lead up to September 11 and has only ever successfully contributed to making the problem much, much worse. |
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| Nrg2Nfinit |
| quote: | Originally posted by EddieZilker
He finds his posts, arresting. |
lol ok.. i get it now.. 1 point for srussell :p |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| quote: | Originally posted by Trance-MB
Demolition, just of Building 7, few days later would make sense as the dutch demolition guy says in the video, but as far as I know the government didn't say they used demolition and as far as I know it also went down at 911.
Some videos where people think the see something strange doesn't mean there is something strange happening.
Explosions at ground level just before the first plane hit sound strange to me. So if that would be true I would like to have an explanation unless the time frame is incorrect. And if it's not true then it's interesting to know why all windows were gone in the lobby and why people we burned at this level. There might be logical explanations for all of this, like parts which landed near the lobby from outside. So called experts don't have the same opinion what I think is strange.
I don't have a theory and have an open mind on different views. |
there were no explosions before the planes hit. grow up. |
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| EddieZilker |
| quote: | Originally posted by Arbiter
Well this thread is mildly amusing.
I dedicate this post to the other 150,000 or so people who died on September 11, 2001. Now, if I thought that life began at conception, then I might need to raise that figure as high as 2,500,000, but I don't, so all those dead fetuses and embryos can go themselves. Well, at least insofar as a mass of undifferentiated cells can itself, as the case may be. To the extent that they can't themselves, they can go to hell--metaphorically speaking, of course, since hell doesn't exist and, even if it did, they still couldn't go there because they already would be there, having arrived roughly ten years ago. Give or take a few days.
But I digress. The "Other 150,000" were a low-profile bunch. Their deaths were neither entertaining nor moving enough to warrant much mainstream attention. While their counterparts' deaths generated untold fortunes worth of economic activity, creating a massive windfall for those prudent enough to take advantage of those opportunities. Objectively speaking, it's an inescapable fact that the deaths of the Other 150K were worth less than those of their counterparts. If they wanted people other than their friends and family to give a about their deaths, then they should have gotten themselves killed more dramatically. I seem to recall that flying aircraft into large structures was a popular fad around that time; something like that probably would have sufficed. Fame and fortune were there for the taking, but the Other 150K chose to die in obscurity instead.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm grateful for that. The news coverage alone would have been a disaster. Based on my rough calculations, if all the Other 150K's deaths received, on average, as much related news coverage as their counterparts' deaths, then they would have consumed more than 99% of all news coverage in the past decade. They might have been able to squeeze in a short story about "Some Black Guy elected U.S. president." Maybe. Furthermore, if each of their deaths had facilitated the same amount of armed conflict as their counterparts', then it could have resulted in a death toll exceeding 30,000,000. Oh, and if fetal and embryonic deaths created the same amount of war and mayhem, we'd be looking at a death toll over half a billion--well, maybe less. At some point we might start running out of people to die.
So, the way I see it, we owe a lot to the Other 150K. By expiring without fanfare, they not only saved millions of hypothetical lives, but, among other things, they also made it possible for both my television and window to remain intact. I can't offer much in return. Any grief I might be capable of divided 150,000 ways does not amount to anything of significance. The best I can give them is equality. I can't give a about their deaths, but I can refrain from giving a about the equally insignificant ends to a few equally insignificant lives which happened to occur on the same calendar day as theirs. And that is the most heartfelt 9/11 tribute I can offer. |
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| FuzzQi |
It's my parents' wedding anniversary :D
Except they're divorced so it doesn't count I guess. |
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| FuzzQi |
ITT:
PKC lambasting anyone who is remotely skeptical of the official story |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
oh off :stongue:
the people that are "skeptical" (lol) of the consensus narrative at this stage are those who have had 10 years to improve their knowledge and answer these "unanswered questions". their apparent inability to do so after all this time says far more about their reasoning abilities than the credibility of the "official story".
ITT: fuzzqi pretends he knows what skepticism means. |
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