Well, at least their spamming this post reminded me to block their account, so there is that.

Just say no to fascists, kids.

Thank you for this - this was a fantastic explanation.

OBL had written and communicated frequently his opposition to what he saw as the US occupation of what he considers holy land, and it was very much a known driving factor in his actions. We knew about it since the Clinton administration.

I think it’s good and necessary to get rid of “they hate us for our freedom” as particularly stupid western propaganda. Of course they do. They see the West as a decadent cesspool that disobeys god. So does the Islamic Revolution government in Iran, so does North Korea, so does China, and so on. That’s not why you 9/11, any more than you invade Vietnam to end oppression and bring peace. And they’re definitely pissed about Israel too, but my point is that everyone up to and including (iirc) the Red Army Faction issued statements about Palestine. Palestine is a cause celebre. There’s a saying “When all was said and done, more was said than done.” That’s what we’ve been seeing since the Yom Kippur war. OBL could have gone after Israel. There could have been Al Qaeda fighters on their borders. Hell, they could have been funneling weapons in and training Palestinian fighters. It’s lip service and de rigueur.

The problem comes in when people view international relations like a Marvel movie with good guys and bad guys. Note that I am absolutely not saying everyone is the same. As a member of Team Rainbow, I’d rather live in the US than Saudi Arabia, and I’d rather live in California than Texas. The hero story - Reagan’s Shining City on a Hill - has deep roots in American exceptionalism and the beacon of democracy stuff. While not exactly false, it’s also not exactly true, and the idea was weaponized deliberately by people like Leo Strauss at Chicago to create a mythical America that people would think about using exactly the ideas you’re talking about. That’s where “they hate us for our freedoms” comes from. They don’t. They hate us because they’d rather be the ones in charge.

From a moral perspective, I consider something like 9/11 and the bombing of Hiroshima at the same level, just to be clear. That’s not a popular opinion with a lot of people.

But at the end of the day, you have to decide whether Hitler had a point, Pol Pot had a point, Idi Amin had a point, or whether, despite them having a point of view, we’d rather see an international order one way or the other.

I’ve stopped working on that kind of thing because I do believe it’s morally ambiguous at best. I do think people should be fully aware of the motivating factors of all of the actors involved - whether AQ, PLO, IRA, UK, USA, and so on. Just don’t take any of it at face value and instead think about actual, not idealized, outcomes.

I was in downtown NYC when 9/11 happened, and I saw the second plane hit. I then went and did some military and intelligence stuff for about a decade and a half. All of that is to say I’ve been involved with 9/11 and what happened after since Day 1.

My question is this - we all knew this was OBL’s point of view. I mean, after the towers fell I was standing in a crowd outside of Penn Station on 9/11 waiting for it to reopen, and everyone was talking about how it was probably OBL. He has been on that narrative for a decade or more, had executed other attacks, and was a known major actor.

It was very widely known that what had really set him off was the alliance between the Saudi government and the US, and in particular the US military presence in SA, which he saw as a holy land now occupied by infidels.

Everyone involved in “terrorist” operations always gives lip service to the Palestinians. I’m using scare quotes there because I think we throw around the word too much and it has lost all meaning except “people fighting using unconventional means.”

All of that aside, I’m honestly curious if this is the first time what I’m assuming are younger people are finding out that people like OBL and Arafat had a point of view and were not cardboard cutout bad guys. Nobody really believed they hate us for our freedom. I mean, there is a conflict in worldviews between conservative Islam and liberal western culture, but there’s also a conflict between conservative Islam and everything that isn’t conservative Islam, and there’s a conflict between conservative Christianity and liberal western culture that also results in acts of terrorism.

There are multiple geopolitical and moral dimensions to US involvement in regions around the world including the Middle East. They’re all worthy of debate and discussion.

I just am confused that a) this is new material for anyone and b) that people are treating it like they discovered Mein Kampf or the Protocols for the first time and are taking them at face value.

Given the world’s “second greatest army” is unable to defeat a smaller nation directly on their border after having an unlimited amount of time to train, prepare, and move forces into position, it’s pretty much a defeat on their side.

Given the world’s “second greatest army” is unable to defeat a smaller nation directly on their border after having an unlimited amount of time to train, prepare, and move forces into position, it’s pretty much a defeat on their side.

I did this kind of work for a bit. I really do think this was more of a 9/11 slash Pearl Harbor kind of thing. It has that feel all over it. I think it was an epic and world (or at least region) changing fuckup.

I do not doubt the current government of Israel has used Hamas as a cat’s paw. I think the constant low level violence cost them little and produced huge political returns for the most far-right government in the history of the country. But I think this was unanticipated in scale and scope, and that both the attack and the response were far beyond what anyone - Israel and Hamas included - would have intended.

There will always be the Monday morning quarterbacks who will quite rightly point out that the information was just there. Looking backwards, we can reverse-solve the problem and say that we could have (or even did) know about Pearl Harbor, 9/11, or Oct 6. The truth is that we know shitloads of things, all the time. We have a constant flow of information, from all corners of the world. We even have constant fire hoses of information from our allies and even our own citizens.

The paradox of the panopticon is that when you’re looking everywhere, you’re really looking nowhere. There’s not ten thousand people in a bunker in North Dakota watching monitors. There’s a few thousand people in cities like Langley around the world who commute to work and get there around 9, and read through what happened yesterday and overnight, and write up summaries that themselves get summarized. If they have too many sources of information, it’s all processed algorithmically first, but it’s still a process of sorting the wheat from the chaff.

We need to fix that. We cannot surveil everything, even with our best and brightest working on technical solutions. But at the end of the day, these are human in the loop systems, and sometimes people fuck up. Sometimes they fuck up royally, and they lose the playoffs or they start a war.

I think it’s done at this point. The system fucked yo, and now a lot of people are going to die, afraid and in pain, because that’s what we do and we just don’t have it in us to stop doing that kind of thing quite yet. I quit the business and know others that did, but at the end of the day there’s still people who think other people need to be killed, and a second group of people who buy the argument and are good with doing it.

I think that the conspiracy theories will continue to fly as they tend to do, but this really just smells like a colossal fuckup in which 20-30k civilians are going to die, and it’s just a train that doesn’t have the ability to stop at this point.

One of my first computer jobs was working in a student computer lab at my undergraduate university. This was back in the mid 90s-ish.

We had three types of computers - windows machines running 3.1 or whatever was current then, Macs who would all do a Wild Eep together when they rebooted en masse, and Sun X Windows dumb terminals that were basically just (obviously) unix machines for all intents and purposes. This was back when there were basically like 5 websites total, and people still hadn’t heard of Mosaic.

So everyone wanted the windows and Mac boxes, and only took the xterms when there was nothing else open. I was the primary support person for them since none of the other people wanted to learn Unix and I was the only CS major.

The X boxes suffered from two main learning hurdles. One was that backspaces were incorrectly mapped into some escape key sequence, and the other is that it would drop you from (I think) pine into emacs as a mail editor as soon as you hit it. 90% of my time was telling people how to exit emacs. It was that, putting more paper into the printers, and teaching myself more programming than I was learning in classes.

Do you think this is outside of the expected number of deaths at this point?

Israel usually kills 10-20 Palestinians for every Israeli killed, so we can expect about 15-30k total Palestinian deaths from this, most of whom will be civilians.

I expect the number of deaths per day is going to ramp up once the hospitals and food centers run out of resources.

Yes. that was the argument put forward. Similar arguments have been put forward for almost every military and major terrorist action ever taken. People can subscribe to the justifications, or not, as they see fit. The real thing to be cautious about is if you accept such justifications but only when your country is the one making them.

I haven’t seen the film yet so I don’t know if they get into this, but a large number of the scientists involved with the Manhattan Project were working because they were terrified that the Nazis would build a bomb before the Allies. When, for several reasons, that failed to happen, they were relieved that the bomb wouldn’t have to be used. They felt betrayed when it was used against Japan, who were not developing a bomb and who could have been defeated using conventional means.