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The following is an adaptation/repost of something that I posted to /r/theMotte a few years back. I had intended to post it yesterday but real life intervened. It feels strange to think that it has since been 10 years.
For me, as I sit in an airport lobby writing this, it is around mid-day September 11th. In Mecca it is late evening, the Sun has gone down and in the eyes of the more conservative/orthodox clerics it is already the 12th. The 11th and 12th of September are auspicious dates in political Islam as they represent the Caliphate's "high water mark" and end of the Islamic golden age. While it has largely passed from conscious memory in the West, the day that King Sobieski of Poland broke the Siege of Vienna (September 12th 1683) is remembered by many in the Islamic world as a bloody and shameful anniversary, the day that Islam lost it's way.
It is poetic, and likely intended by the attack's perpetrators, that the date of September 11th is now remembered by many Americans in much the same way. The end of a perceived golden age, the day we lost our way. That said, while the the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon in 2001 have overshadowed it is the twelfth that comes to mind when I think "bloody and shameful anniversary", and that I find more personally significant.
As I mentioned in /u/mcjunker's 9/11 memory thread, September 11th 2001 is the day I "picked a side". The towers went down on a Tuesday and I was talking to a US Navy recruiter the following Monday. While my feelings about the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are complicated I don't regret any of the choices I made. Solzhenitsyn said "Prosperity breeds idiots". I don't think that's right. What prosperity breeds is forgetfulness. To quote Lee Harris in the opening to Civilization and it's Enemies...
September 11th 2012 was also a Tuesday. When the attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi began at 9:40 PM local time I would have been eating lunch, maybe knocking out a last-minute homework assignment for my 2:00 PM class. As I said above it was on 9/11 that "I chose a side" but I don't think truly grokked or appreciated what that meant before those months leading up to the 2012 Election and September 12th 2012 in particular.
By this point I had already completed two enlistments where in I'd served as a rescue swimmer and combat medic, as well as the first of several shorter stints I would spend as a private military contractor for a large humanitarian NGO. I was, at this time, serving in the reserves as an instructor and range safety officer while going to college on the GI Bill. I was also the regional rep for a national-level veterans' organization and on a first name basis with my congressman. I'd gone into the Navy a pissed off 20-something looking for a fight, and come out almost a decade later still believing in the cause, but deeply pessimistic about the US in general and the current administration in particular's ability to see it through. It was clear to me that the sort of idealized liberal democracy that the administration seemed to have in mind wasn't going to work in Iraq. There just wasn't the sense of legitimacy or cultural background to support it.
It's a popular refrain that we all want the same things. To be warm and safe with full bellies and for our kids to have a better life than we did. To a degree this is true, I think it's fair to say that almost everyone wants these things. That said, different people will prioritize them differently. So even in discussing these fundamentals there is the potential for disagreement, and that is before we start talking about the best course of action to attain our fundamental wants. This is where the "disbelief in foreigners" comes in. Culture matters and it runs deep. Culture is not just about how one dresses or what they eat. It carries assumptions of language, social structures, flora, fauna, climate, and all sorts of unexamined axioms and assumptions about how the world works.
On Paper, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Rod Dhrer are much the same. They're both conservatives. They're both journalists. They're both Orthodox Catholics. They both lived in the American north-east. And they both made thier names writing about the crimes of Communism and the Soviet Union. That said Solzhenitsyn was Russian to his bones and Russians expect to get screwed. One of my favorite bits in Scott's Unsong was when Lake Baikal was revealed to be a portal to Hell and the Russian response is basically "whelp, that figures". That moment cracked me up because it really does figure. When viewed from ground level Russian history is basically a long string of things going wrong in new and revolutionary ways. When Jesus returns to Earth in The Grand Inquisitor he doesn't save the righteous or establish the kingdom of heaven, no Russian would've bought that, least of all Dostoevsky.
A sense of something akin to "the mandate of heaven" is baked into Iraqi culture the way "things go wrong" is baked into Russian culture. It's there in how they talk. "Inish Allah" literally "if God wills it", is used as a standard greeting/parting phrase, and at times almost like a punctuation mark. I'll see you again tomorrow if God wills it. Enjoy your lunch if God wills it. The train will arrive at 10:00 if God wills it. /u/HlynkaCG will share his stash of hot-sauce with us if God wills it. Emphasis on the If. Fact of the matter is that there is little in the Iraqis' history to suggest that they can trust a government to abide by it's word simply because it gave it's word. Yet we expected them to trust the government, and we expected a government comprised of Iraqis to be trustworthy. That was pretty stupid in hindsight, but understandable because we were thinking like Americans. People from a country that has had 200+ years of reasonably stable government that, even when it's corrupt, tends to be corrupt in fairly banal and predictable ways.
Coming back to 2012, my position gave me something of a front row seat to Romney's presidential bid and access to some of his advisors as well as state politicians. I had previously been aware of the Gell-mann Amnesia effect but hadn't really considered the implication of it. Namely that those who are supposed to be "in the know" often aren't. Having spent time in field some level of cluelessness and/or fecklessness on the part of politicians, pundits, and State Department weenies was assumed on my part. That said, I repeatedly found myself flummoxed by the ignorance and stupidity of highly intelligent people. Some corporate big-wig trying to get a pipeline built would be going on about how lazy the local workers were because they wouldn't work through the day. Meanwhile I'm thinking lets drop you in a place with 105 degree weather and no AC and see how much you feel like working. Someone else would be talking about backing some "moderate" Islamic group or another but then their rep would be a bearded Sunni man wearing a taqiyah and a black sash without a mustache. To translate this into a more familiar cultural equivalent here is a picture of some allegedly "moderate" American Jews. I used to joke about how HQ wanted me dead but the truth was in Hanlon's Razor. Don't attribute to malice that which can be explained by ignorance and/or stupidity. This may come across as me complaining. Something to the effect of "If only they had listened, disaster could have been averted". That's not my intention, if anything listening to me would have fucked things up in a completely different way. Instead remember that you are ignorant.
I may have joked that my superiors wanted me dead, but there was also an understanding. It was right there on page 13 of my service jacket. I had formally volunteered for hazardous duty in exchange for additional pay. The numerology was not lost on me, and I suspect it was intentional. I would be asked to do something stupid and dangerous and I would do it, in return my Chain of Command would have my back. This is something that I feel like a lot of Americans, especially those who haven't been in the military or haven't worked a specifically dangerous job don't really grasp. There are two key elements to a functional hierarchy. The shit rolling down hill, and the fire climbing up it. Yes the guys at the bottom get shit on, so it goes. The Task forced commander tells a captain that observation post X needs item Y. That captain tells a lieutenant to make it so. That lieutenant talks to his Platoon Sgt and eventually the shit comes to a rest at the bottom of the hill when some Corporal tells some PFC "Hey, Abe I need I need you and Garcia to hump this heavy-ass box up the hill to OP X-ray". This aspect is well known as most people have some experience with being at the bottom of the pecking order if only from childhood. What gets less attention is the fire. If a PFC has a problem his team leader has a problem. If the team leader can't solve with it the resources he has on hand, his platoon/detachment leader has a problem, and so on up the chain till the fire reaches the appropriate level and the officer responsible drops a new load of shit.
To be continued...
edit: fixed broken link.
How'd that age in 10 years? I'm not sure if it's gotten worse, or I've gotten more aware of it, but the level of corruption in the US government appears to me to have reached an extinction level event. They've sold off our proverbial seed corn to our strategic enemies, and are oblivious the suffering they've unleashed on the people they purport to represent from their mansions and yachts.
It's remarkable how even now, when people are starting to realize how truly fucked we are with Russia and China doing breath play with our economy, our elites are still mostly selling out to them. Last I heard all our tariff's on Russian oil have just allowed middle men to buy it at a higher price from Russia, enriching Russia, jack up the price even more enriching themselves, and selling it to Europe and America impoverishing us.
Apparently we've enormously depleted our stocks of many vital munitions sending them willy nilly to Ukraine, with zero accountable or tracking what so ever. Stocks that will take years to even begin un-mothballing the assembly lines for, because apparently we believed we never needed to make stinger missiles ever again?
It's hard for me to even count all the ways our government has fucked us, personally, tactically, strategically. It's like they are trying to end the nation, and our lives as we know it. And that they might be doing it to enrich themselves is literally the best case. The worst case is they are beholden to a cult of fucking Malthusians.
The world to me now is unrecognizable from before 9/11. Before 9/11, political correctness was more or less defeated. Now it dominates my life more than ever. Before 9/11 I actually had some sense of freedom and liberty, even in the most simple of acts of loitering almost wherever I pleased, and nobody had to know my business. Even before COVID, security theatre around shopping and entertainment, to say nothing of travel, was overbearing. The fever pitch of masks and vaccines being mandatory to do nearly anything has passed, but I don't trust it. I feel like after midterms, the D's will bust it right back out again because fuck you, that's why.
Pretty well I'd say. China still needs us more than we need them, Russia is in the process of commiting national suicide, and the US Government while corrupt, remains corrupt in relatively banal and predictable ways that aren't going to surprise anyone who was paying attention back in the 90s.
Meanwhile, the US president has recently decreed that he believes most Republican voters to be 'threats to democracy' and 'national security threats'. He is also apparently moving to have the obvious Republican candidate banned from running for next presidential elections.
This is not at all ominous, and no grief will come out of this.
Sure, you can posit some good outcome out of this if e.g. Trump gets banned but then de Santis wins and nothing happens, but between the tone of the debate and the absolutely bugfuck bonkers election procedures US has, I expect the elections to be deemed illegitimate by whomever loses and fun times to commence.
Does it ? They're getting their own electronics now, just a few years behind the bleeding edge. They are biggest trading partner for almost the entire world. Do they really need you that much ? For what.. credit ?
nope, you are conflating trump fans and republicans. Sure there is some overlap but biden was pretty clearly not making the claim that you are crediting to him.
That is "some" understatement there.
the overlap probably seems bigger when you are inside of it.
I am not inside of anything. Not even an American. I am just able to see that he is the front runner republican candidate by a large margin and the only competition is basically Trump-but-better-at-politics. That says something right?
You can't be a trump fan or pro-US-republican if you aren't american? I disagree with your observation that Desantis (i assume) is Trump-but-different. I also would argue that some quantity of trump voters aren't republicans in the traditional (pre 2016) sense of the word, and probably wouldn't vote if it wasn't for Trump.
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Which for anyone old enough to have clear memories of Clinton's first two years in office comes as no surprise. That's kind of my point.
So, you think it's all a big nothingburger, all the prosecutions, all the extra IRS agents, the new rules on credit card gun payment related data.
Nobody is going to tighten the screws and start kicking the dog till it bites, right, so he can shoot it then.
Basically what @JTarrou said below. Not that this is a "nothingburger" per se, more that this is not my first lap around around this particular course, and that I don't see the point in loosing my shit over something that hasn't happened yet.
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Do you remember Clinton's presidency? Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Federal Building bombing?
We have a ways to go before we get there again. Or take it back to the '70s and the Days of Rage.
That, I think, is the point. Not that things are so good now, but that they were much worse relatively recently. Biden is setting the stage for that sort of repression, but he hasn't actually done much yet. Maybe he'll sack up on the rhetoric and we'll get to fuck around and find out. Or maybe he won't. No sense catastrophizing before the fact. Just keep your head on straight and https://youtube.com/watch?v=O_3_-UrhZH0
Political polarisation is way, way higher than it was in either of these eras.
You're wrong
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Is it? People vent more online, but there was no online really in previous eras. I remember the '90s being pretty polarized, the 80s too. Clinton was impeached, so was Bush. You can still meet old leftists as pissed off about Reagan as modern lefties are about Trump. If political violence is our measure, the '80s and '90s were much worse. Reagan was shot, the feds murdered a bunch of people (Waco saw 76 dead) and some militia terrorists blew up a federal building in retribution (body count 168). And that's just the headlines.
Seems to me that people are pretty angry, but over less and less. The '80s had all the banana republic wars, Iran/Contra, AIDS, homelessness, the Cold War etc. The '90s had the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Gulf War, Kosovo etc. The oughts had Iraq and Afghanistan. What are people freaking out about now? Neopronouns and hysterical conspiracy theories? The Overton Window has never been smaller, yet people are as pissed off as ever.
I'm open to being wrong here, but your assertion just doesn't ring true to me. If you have a measure of polarization in practical terms, I'd love to see it.
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