31–40 of 78 posts
9/11 was used as an excuse to create more mass spying on Americans even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year.
The sentiment here seems pretty anti-surveillance -- but why the false dichotomy? Both are important issues. It just comes off as demeaning to the people that died in 9/11. So much vitriol here today, jeez.
9/11 was used as an excuse to create more mass spying on Americans even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year.
It definitely precipitated the surveillance state and the erosion of civil liberties across not just the USA but large parts of the west, but it's not about body count. Everyone knew, even in the immediate aftermath, that a copycat situation would never happen again, because passengers now knew to fight back and risk possible death vs certain death being used as living munitions inside a flying death tube. Don't forg…
9/11 was the starting point for profiting from many places, but mainly for keeping Americans afraid and prompting them to turn against people from outside the country to justify military spending.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_and_the_War_on_Terror
“Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that,” said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan agreed, writing in his memoir, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Then-Sen. and now Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the same in 2007: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juha...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It definitely precipitated the surveillance state and the erosion of civil liberties across not just the USA but large parts of the west, but it's not about body count. Everyone knew, even in the immediate aftermath, that a copycat situation would never happen again, because passengers now knew to fight back and risk possible death vs certain death being used as living munitions inside a flying death tube. Don't forg…
>then the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris Not that it really matters to your point, but this happened in 2015. Seems kind of odd to include that in this list.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It definitely precipitated the surveillance state and the erosion of civil liberties across not just the USA but large parts of the west, but it's not about body count. Everyone knew, even in the immediate aftermath, that a copycat situation would never happen again, because passengers now knew to fight back and risk possible death vs certain death being used as living munitions inside a flying death tube. Don't forg…
Most of that fear was driven by the response, not the attacks themselves. The government could have tried to calm the people down, but instead it amped them up and treated terrorism as the most dangerous thing imaginable. You can't say that the ridiculous over-the-top response was justifiable because people were terrified, when that is a big part of why people were terrified.
9/11 was used as an excuse to create more mass spying on Americans even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year.
The sentiment here seems pretty anti-surveillance -- but why the false dichotomy? Both are important issues. It just comes off as demeaning to the people that died in 9/11. So much vitriol here today, jeez.
Now all they gotta do is ring up Google or Meta or the other usual suspects and they get the data on a platter in cheerleader font with the I's dotted with hearts.
9/11 was the starting point for profiting from many places, but mainly for keeping Americans afraid and prompting them to turn against people from outside the country to justify military spending.
I'd amend this slightly to say that it wasn't really a starting point for anything, but certainly an extremely efficient accelerant for many things that various people already wanted to do or were already doing on a smaller scale.
Random anecdote somewhat related to the topic of 641A, but pre-9/11:
I remember visiting the temporary FSF offices when they were sharing space with the MIT AI Lab back in what must have been 1993 or 1994, and someone (since deceased, RIP) was showing me some of the server rooms including the Thinking Machines CM-5, which was kind of a big deal at the time (so many blinking lights) and during the tour they casually pointed to a locked door across the hall from one of the larger server rooms that looked like a cleaning closet or something from the outside (completely nondescript) and claimed it housed a room where the government taps into all of the network traffic routing through the building.
I kinda just thought it was a joke at the time, but it wasn't delivered as one. Was it a joke? or a serious statement but driven by an unreliable rumor mill? I have no idea, but given what we do know since, I wouldn't bet a lot of money against it having been at least somewhat true.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They died from car crashes. Not accidents. Fixing this broken language and attitude is a step towards ending these deaths.
> Fixing this broken language and attitude is a step towards ending these deaths. Is it? The person you responded to sees car crashes as an important issue to solve yet still calls it "car accidents". So maybe it's not that important after all. Nothing makes me saltier than language policing; I'd say fixing _that_ broken language is more of a step towards fixing issues than the actual language itself.
If the person running with the knife hurt someone they'd be a murderer. But the car? Oh, it was just an accident.
9/11 was used as an excuse to create more mass spying on Americans even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year.
I’m therefore not sure what weight this argument is supposed to carry.