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Can we stop making fun of 9/11 here?
(hexbear.net)
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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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chapotraphouse
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Perhaps I haven’t steeped in the irony here long enough, maybe no one here is serious and I’m missing the point. If the joke is civilian deaths, that’s fucked up. Otherwise if it’s about the subsequent hysteria and propaganda, then that makes sense. Just having trouble parsing some of the comments.
The joke is that 9/11 was blowback from decades of US meddling in the middle east, especially it's support for Saudi and it's actions in Afghanistan. While the specifics weren't readily predictable a major attack on the US from al-Qaeda or affiliated groups was inevitable. They'd already tried to blow up the WTC once in I want to say 1994. The US then used this blowback to gut it's own civil rights, re-structure it's government along more explicitly fascist lines, and launch a totally unrelated war to pillage Iraq that murdered a million people an destabilized the region. The GWOT was used as a blanket excuse for regimes all over the world to pass sweeping new police state powers and suppress or exterminate challenges to their power under the pretense of counter-terror operations. The US officially made torture legal, crushed numerous domestic pro-democracy movements, and diverted trillions of dollars to the MIC.
Basically the whole situation is so utterly, madness-makingly absurd what can you do except joke about it? It changed the course of the history of the world, touching almost every country in the world, highlighting the naked hypocrisy of The West, strengthening many of The Wests enemies in entirely predictable ways, and slaughtering vast numbers of innocent people totally unrelated to the nominal causus belli. If it hadn't actually happened you'd only expect to reach about it in something like a Pinchon novel.
There's a lot of existentialism, nihilism, and absurdism on the left, given it's broadly materialist grounding and tendency towards athesim or agnosticism. Humor is one of the main ways to cope with the inherent meaninglessness of existence. Joking about a US tragedy also undermines the power of US propaganda - By mocking the event we deny the religious, sacred significane placed on it by the US's twisted American Civic Religion.
I also forgot to mention - It greatly strengthened Saudi's dominance over the Islamic world, leading to the further spread of the very Wahhabist ideology that influenced al-Qaeda in the first place.
I read through the thread again and it makes more sense, thank you.
This comment in particular confused me but I'm taking it that @happybadger@hexbear.net is being ironic here suggesting that the weather is what brought the planes down? Coupling that with the Bin Laden quote ... wasn't a great look for me tbh. The fact of it being a corporate building full of businesspeople (neglecting that there were also administrative staff there too) doesn't justify killing. I also don't love comparing the magnitude of tragedies by sheer body count. A needless death is a needless death. Now I'm not a complete pacifist, I recognize that revolution will be resisted with violence, but 9/11 wasn't class struggle or an organized popular movement. It was retribution against civilians for the crimes of their government, no matter how "complicit" they were by virtue of being American businesspeople.
Yeah, we have a lot of pitch black humor to cope.
I think Honeybadger is doing a reverse 9/11 was a conspiracy bit.
You'll sometimes see arguments that in addition to it's symbolic value the WTC was picked because many of the people who work there are directly involved in the business of US imperialism in some way. Up to you to decide what that makes them from an anti-Imperial perspective.
Another thing to consider - The WTC gets emphasized to the point where the other targets are rarely discussed. The 9/11 attacks were an attempted de-capitation strike on the US military and government. One plane hit the Pentagon, but did relatively little damage due to the Pentagon's nuke-resistant design. Another plane was heading to the white house in the passengers attacked the hijackers and forced the plane down in Pennsylvania. The WTC was a symbolic target. The military goal was to either kill the POTUS or severely damage the white house, and to destroy or severely disrupt the Pentagon. The WTC ended up being far and away the most dramatic part of the attacks when the towers unexpectedly collapsed, but there was much more too the attacks than the WTC.
Ok, thanks for spelling it out for me
What do you mean ironic? I'm not saying it was the weather. I'm saying the weather is a factor in many plane crashes. In all likelihood it was mechanical which is hard to reconstruct when the planes were obliterated. Helios 522 was brought down by a single pressurisation lever not being toggled properly and it flew normally for quite some time. Shit happens.
Passenger plane crashes are extremely rare in the US. Four of them striking related targets within hours due to random chance is so unlikely that it’s not unreasonable to take the news of hijacking more seriously.
One time I was walking into the grocery and found $100 on the ground.
I've gone to the grocery at least weekly for like 25 years since and have never once found more than a quarter.
Sure the normal distribution of plane crashes is finding a coin every few months. There's nothing precluding you from finding that $100 though. Random chance doesn't mean no chance, only that it's statistically improbable to bet there will be a 9/11 on 9/12. It's tragic that five planes had five separate accidents but lumping them together ignores how complex a plane is. So much could go wrong.
The other explanations are magnitudes more likely, which is why they are taken more seriously than the astronomically small chance of your scenario. Quantum mechanics is probabilistic, yet the probability of your body teleporting to the moon today is so vanishingly small that you can consider it impossible.
More likely but not certain, just like the accident theory is less likely but possible. Rejecting it over probability is saying that rare things can't exist. Sometimes there's a one-in-a-million mutation, sometimes I find $100 on the ground, sometimes asteroids hit the earth and sometimes they don't. Shit happens without any higher purpose or grand conspiracy behind it.
Rejecting nearly impossible things is practical. I understand there is a technical possibility that if I drive my car into a wall, that the atoms will line up in such a way that I go right through it. But as a practical matter I operate as though that were impossible, because it might as well be. I think you are downplaying just how unlikely your scenario is. For example, you say that "people want to make [9/11] into some kind of conspiracy" but don't acknowledge that the scenario of several random accidents would require an even larger conspiracy in which the relevant parties agree on a hijacking story. You argue that people believing the vastly more likely possibility is wishful thinking, while seriously considering your almost certainly untrue scenario is the reasonable take. It seems like the reverse: you want to believe it's something other than the likely and commonly accepted story, and are therefore overly concerned with the option no one else is bothering to consider.
This is why I was confused and decided you were joking.
Wishful thinking would be 19 people coordinating 5 separate plane attacks on the same day. All of whom are conveniently just the Muslim passengers on those planes in the most Islamophobic country outside of Europe. That's empty propaganda from the same people who brought you the War on Terror.
Sure in theory you could pass right through a wall if your atoms are intact. That's a much lower probability, but you acknowledge that it's possible. You haven't tested it so you can't even tell me how likely it would be, only that rarity isn't grounds for precluding it. 9/11 however tested it and we don't know how many more planes succeeded that day. Surely those five didn't.
Random chance, normal distributions, etc do not apply to everything. It would be incorrect to show up to a football match and say "the odds of these 22 random humans playing football right now, while thousands of spectators happen to be here, are astronomically small!" Likewise, it is not like there is some random probability inherent in each passenger that they will spontaneously hijack the plane on grounds of revenge for decades of US meddling in Muslim countries... an organized attack would make it a completely non-random event.
The odds of a football game occurring are tied to the external conditions of a schedule. The odds of a plane crash occurring are tied to the external conditions of mechanics, atmosphere, and pilot error. If any of those three fail then it happens as surely as a scheduled football match. An organised attack would mean all plane crashes can potentially be attributed to that but we have clear documentation that they are caused by plenty of other things. You just ignore those potential causes in favour of the one that makes the most dramatic story.
That's what Camus called "philosophical suicide" because you're taking a leap of faith into the explanation which provides the most potential meaning to a chaotic system that lacks it. It's human nature to do so.
This is one of the worse bits I've seen you do and it's still pretty solid.
Still a work in progress. I have this beautiful vision of a Guy more infuriating than the confident flat earther.
I think the references like what I quoted elevate it so it feels less like just talking in circles. Depending on what you're going for, another (similar) technique is distracting yourself with overly-specific anecdotes that you were obviously fed by a conspiracy community or whatever media outlet would be most appropriate.
Trying to find new ways of framing it is the challenge. I like the anecdote strategy with the $100 bill and doubling down on nonsensical ways of proving random chance exists, but I need to somehow translate that into a conspiracy theory that disproves every other conspiracy theory and conspiracism in general. Rational gibberish while gaslighting them and pointing out all of the fallacies behind whatever they believe. It's a hard Guy to get right but I want to be able to do it completely deadpan any time people start talking about conspiracies or 9/11.
It just occurred to me that you could fill out the character by characterizing other events as freak accidents.
"This country was founded on that kind of slander, or do you believe the Boston Massacre wasn't caused by a rifle malfunction?"
Or freak accidents as being fabricated
"Conversely, the dude who shot Archduke Ferdinand had staked out the position but made up his excuse to try and get a lesser murder charge"
I already do that with JFK's assassination. Yes I believe Oswald was the lone gunman, yes I believe he fired three shots from the 6th floor of the Texas book depository, yes I believe two struck and killed Kennedy. However I think that was a complete freak accident. If I shot 100 times outside of my window I wouldn't hit a presidential motorcade. The odds of one passing by at that exact moment in that exact place are astronomically low. It's a tragic reminder that sometimes shit happens.
That account likes doing character bits. They post threads about being in a "no sleep" community and ridiculous things like that.
I don't think those comments were punchy enough, but generally I think they are like top 3 on the site in terms of comedic writing.
Hard to boil it down but I’ll say what goes through my mind when I read jokes about it. First, it was the consequences of our own imperialism coming home to roost, and the death toll is nothing compared to our previous or subsequent “adventures” in the Middle East. Second, remember during the height of Covid counting daily deaths in 9/11’s, but half the country slept on that, and 4x as many people starve to death here every year but food stamps get cut and poor people get spat on instead of having memorials built for them. Third, the reaction to 9/11 basically ended any serious anti war energy this country ever had, it gave our leaders justification and consent to do the shit they already wanted to do, it ushered in the blood thirsty imperial era many of us grew up in. So for me, the way people talk about it like this totem, this singular National tragedy, this moment of unimaginable American victimhood… It’s so incredibly tone deaf and uninformed that it sickens me, and seeing someone mock that kind of tone sarcastically is cathartic in a way.
I think in general one of the sticking points for libs is the attitude of some Bernie-bros/dirtbag left as they called it and people like Hasan that unironicaly said exactly this, "the US deserved 9/11". Its been a talking point for years really.
Personaly I agree with this and I don't see any problem, I guess one issue is that many leftists still don't understand that violence isn't just justifiable, but sometimes necessary and sometimes literaly the only way. We have
after all.
The talks about revolution, how to deal with class traitors etc this goes back to the 19-20th century, nothing here is new.
I think also before we even talk about American working class having to suffer as a consequence of revolutionary or just anti-imperialist actions from American capitalists enemies, in the 9/11 case specifically this is a false premise since both towers were realy just very high end financial/big corporate offices.