5 Years Ago Today...

[dalem]

He thought I was the crazy one.

I think it's just more of the Avoidance and Apathy disease.

"A missile" is a passionless alien object that cannot be stopped. A jumbo jet on a morning commute is an everyday thing full of normal people and commandeered by a few evil barbarians.

You can't do anything about a sourceless missile except rebuild the target and move on, but you sure as shinola can do something about planeloads of victims and barbarians. Avenge the victims and kill the barbarians.

And many people just don't want to do anything about anything.

-dale

[Amled]

[...I asked him that question: how can you just SIT there, living with a government that would commit such a monstrous act?

He thought I was the crazy one.

I'd be interested to know what his; and others who hold to this line of thought, reply was, or would be?
Simply thinking you crazy is a null answer.
The question is succinct and requires an equally succinct answer.
That is if you are not just some spaced-out brainless rote repeating moron.

[entropy]

Even if they believe everything they crap out orally, they are too stoned and lazy for an armed revolt.

[Amled]

Even if they believe everything they crap out orally, they are too stoned and lazy for an armed revolt.

Maybe so, but they are usually an extremely gabby crowd.
It would be fun if they used the "too proud to fight" gambit.
That's an argument I'd love to tear into.

[entropy]

Maybe so, but they are usually an extremely gabby crowd.
It would be fun if they used the "too proud to fight" gambit.
That's an argument I'd love to tear into.

They listen to revolutionary music, adore "revolutionaries" and their sex symbol is Ernesto Guevara. Some of them are ready to fight, but most of them just sit on the couch with a joint and post angry messages at boards.

[Parihaka]

I think it's just more of the Avoidance and Apathy disease.

"A missile" is a passionless alien object that cannot be stopped. A jumbo jet on a morning commute is an everyday thing full of normal people and commandeered by a few evil barbarians.

You can't do anything about a sourceless missile except rebuild the target and move on, but you sure as shinola can do something about planeloads of victims and barbarians. Avenge the victims and kill the barbarians.

And many people just don't want to do anything about anything.

-dale

Good point, I hadn't thought of that.

[bonehead]

No, it's YOU who didn't understand ME. You asked why didn't our people just bum-rush the jackasses that were only armed with box cutters?

And I answered: because we weren't SUPPOSED to do that. Hijackings were always about HOSTAGES until 9/11, and then, all of a sudden the rules changed, and it became about KILLING. Well, nobody knew that until it was too late, except on Flight 93, and THEN we understood the new game.

So NO, you would NOT have done any such thing as attack the hijackers; you'd have sat in your seat until impact, just like everybody else. THAT was the point of the articles, mate.

And I don't believe the Republicans are 'good', but they sure as hell are a helluva lot BETTER.

The only thing I really, REALLY care about is winning the war. That's it. I think that overall, the GOP is right about a great many more things than the Democrats, and I'm in more-or-less agreement with the party about the issues of the day, and they line up with better with my conservative philosophy, so I track with them much better.

BUT...I've said numerous times I'll go with the party that is most likely to bring us victory in the war, and I'll hold my nose and go along with an adminstration that is WRONGWRONGWRONG on every other dam thang...as long as they've got The One Big Thing RIGHT.

Well, the Democrats have it exactly WRONG, and whatever the GOP manages to screw up (and BOY!, can they find new ways to do THAT!), at least they SEEK VICTORY, and haven't given up, which is all the Democrats want to do.

THERE. I hope you understand a bit better about the two items you didn't seem to get.

Once again you underestemate others. The question was rhetorical. Just because someone does not agree with you 100% does not mean they do not understand. As for cowering and standing by while the terrorist do their thing, well, we each follow our own conscience. You may sit back and do nothing (though I doubt you would), but I have not been not brought up to let the bullies do their worst without putting up some sort of a fight, govermental brainwashing/training be dammed. I too desire victory, but I have no illusions the war will be over any time soon, nor do I want a pyrrhic victory. We need competant, visionary leadership that will engage all Americans if we are to fight effectively for the decades it will take to win this war of ideals. Engaging this half or that half of Americans is not good enough to win this war. I do not see the type of leadership in the ranks of either party.
I am really having a difficult time believing that, for the sake of argument, Hillery had a fool proof way of winning the war, you would freely vote for her. Not even for all the butter cookies in the world.

[dalem]

I am really having a difficult time believing that, for the sake of argument, Hillery had a fool proof way of winning the war, you would freely vote for her. Not even for all the butter cookies in the world.

Ahh, but you're changing the terms to erect a false argument. Bluesman didn't imply he would "freely" vote for a Dem, especially Hillary, if she produced Magic Carbuncle Of Success from under her witches' robes, he just implied he'd vote for them.

-dale

[TopHatter]

I have not been not brought up to let the bullies do their worst without putting up some sort of a fight, govermental brainwashing/training be dammed.

I was not necessarily "brought up" in a certain way, but I was definitely influenced by my stature (very short and slight of built) to gradually realize that letting others pick on me was a one-way ticket to more bullying.

Thus, at a certain point in my life early on, I didn't give a damn who was doing what to me...if I didn't like it, I fought back...the consequence be damned.

[JAD_333]

And he's RIGHT: these dumbshits are just in LOVE with the notion that they've got it all figgered out, while us sheeple blindly do the bidding of the faceless Star Chamber overlords, controlling all in their nearly-perfect machine of deceit, the only ***** in their armor being the plucky, brilliant, but meddlesome kids in their moms' darkened basements, e-mailing each other furiously and with righteous indignation of what they, and only they, have uncovered about the TRUE story of the events of 9/11.

The envelope, please:

And the award for the Longest and Most Entertaining Sentence of the Month goes to...Bluesman!

Loved it, Blues; hung together like a Catepiller D6.

[TopHatter]

I have never met anyone who believes in the WTC being an inside job pre-ordained by the President. It is just too absurd.

You have to log onto the Internet to find such morons.

As I've said, these idiots should be down on their knees thanking whatever god they worship that the World Wide Web gives them a platform for their moonbat theories of government competency.

[Ray]

Internet or otherwise, to believe that Bush planned it, is a bit too thick.

Indeed, if he did, then the world has 'misunderestimated' the intelligence of Bush!

[Bluesman]

Once again you underestemate others. The question was rhetorical. Just because someone does not agree with you 100% does not mean they do not understand.

I didn't underestimate you; I don't really think that's possible. You think I'm talking about something else, when I was answering your original post, which was complete tripe.

As for cowering and standing by while the terrorist do their thing, well, we each follow our own conscience.

No, you silly man, we would follow FAA guidelines, or at least we USED to, back on 9/11, so don't give me a bunch of BS about how YOU wouldn't have just sat there like EVERY SINGLE PERSON did, you'd have DONE something, by Gawd. You would NOT have, and don't claim anything different, because that makes every single person on the first three jets a coward, and YOU a HERO.

You may sit back and do nothing (though I doubt you would), but I have not been not brought up to let the bullies do their worst without putting up some sort of a fight, govermental brainwashing/training be dammed.

You really are an idiot. YEAH, I'd have sat there, thinking, 'This is going to come out okay; the Feds can get us outta this.' And I'd have the same incorrect expectation as everybody else about the nature of the hijackers. Same as YOU.

I too desire victory, but I have no illusions the war will be over any time soon, nor do I want a pyrrhic victory. We need competant, visionary leadership that will engage all Americans if we are to fight effectively for the decades it will take to win this war of ideals. Engaging this half or that half of Americans is not good enough to win this war. I do not see the type of leadership in the ranks of either party.

Nice rant, but it doesn't bear on what I've been trying to explain to you, so I'll leave this part.

I am really having a difficult time believing that, for the sake of argument, Hillery had a fool proof way of winning the war, you would freely vote for her. Not even for all the butter cookies in the world.

TOTALLY SERIOUS: if she can win the war, I'll hold my nose and send her a check, work down at her campaign HQ, and proudly cast my vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton, and think I'd done a huge service to the country. Won't happen, but there it is: I'm a single-issue voter, and my issue is THE WAR.

We've done this before, you and I, where you post something dense, I tell you a fact that you haven't considered or didn't know, and you think I'm talking about something else.

You're doing it again.

YOU posted THIS:

What really burns me is that the rest of the passengers cowered and stood by for so long before doing anything. Has the U.S.A. really been P U S S I F I E D so much that a plane load of everyday people can't take on a few maniacs, armed with the all powerful box cutter?

I have had to fly quite often since 9/11 and I can tell you this. No terrorist is going to take over any plane I am on unless he takes me out first.

And I posted THIS:

You don't understand: in the world of 9/10, that's what we were all SUPPOSED to do: sit tight, and the big ole government know-it-alls of the FAA would sort it out in a jiffy.

And backed it up with an excellent comment from an even more excellent column by the most excellent Mark Steyn:

The first named victim I was aware of was the wife of the Solicitor-General, Barbara Olson, whom I sat next to at dinner a few weeks ago. She was one of the “blonde former prosecutors”, which sounds like a rock band but was the standard shorthand for the good-looking female commentators who turned up on CNN every night during impeachment – she was smart, witty, a fearless scourge of the Clinton Administration. She’d postponed her trip to California by a day so she could wish her husband Ted a happy birthday on Tuesday morning and so found herself on American Airlines flight 11. She had time to call to tell him her plane was being hijacked and that she had been hustled to the back of the cabin with the other passengers and flight crew. By then, the Solicitor-General knew that two planes had deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center. He told Barbara what was happening –that she wasn’t in the hands of some jerk who wants his pals sprung from jail and a jet to Cuba but cooler customers with bigger plans. A few seconds later her flight ripped through one side of the Pentagon.

AND:

The perfect symbol of what Dave Kopel (in National Review) calls “the culture of passivity” is the airline cabin, the most advanced model of the modern social-democratic state, the sky-high version of trends that, on the ground, progress more slowly. Massachusetts and California can only aspire to cloud cuckoo land, but up there where the air is rarefied a Federal regulatory authority can bring Utopia into being at the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen. The commercial airliner is an Al Gore dream. There is no smoking. There is 100% gun control. You are by obliged by law to do everything the cabin crew tell you to do. If the stewardess is rude to you, tough. If you’re rude to her, there’ll be officers waiting to arrest you when you land. The justification for all this is a familiar one - that in return for surrendering individual liberties, we’ll all be collectively better off. That was the deal: do as you’re told, and the Federal Aviation Administration will look after you.

Last Tuesday morning, the FAA failed spectacularly to honour their end of the bargain – as I’m sure the terrorists knew they would. By all accounts, they travelled widely during the long preparations for their mission, and they must have seen that an airline cabin is the one place where, thanks to the FAA, you can virtually guarantee you’ll meet no resistance. Indeed, in their FAA-mandated coerciveness the average coach-class cabin is the nearest the western world gets to the condition of those terrorists’ home states. We’ve all experienced those bad weather delays where you’re stuck on the runway behind 60 other planes waiting to take off and some guy says, “Hey, we’ve been in here a couple of hours now. Any chance of a Diet Coke?”, and the stewardess says he’ll have to wait, and the guy’s cranky enough to start complaining. And one part of you thinks “Yeah, I’m pretty thirsty, too”, but the rest of you, the experienced traveller, goes, c’mon, sit down, pal, quit whining, don’t make a fuss, they’ll only delay us even more.

And so, on those Boston flights that morning, everyone followed FAA guidelines: the cabin crew, the pilots, the passengers. There were four or five fellows with knives or box-cutters, outnumbered more than ten to one. If they’d tried to hold up that many people in a parking lot, they’d have been beaten to a pulp. But up in the air everyone swallowed the FAA’s assurance: go along with them, be cooperative, the Feds know how to handle these things. I’m sure there were men and women in those seats thinking, well, there’s not very many of them and they don’t have any real weapons, maybe if some of us were to… But by the time they realised they were beyond the protection of the FAA it was too late.

Appended with this note, specifically for you:

[And there's your answer. - Bluesman]

So, you see, the fact is, you did NOT understand EITHER thing I was telling you: 1) you would NOT have acted in any way whatsoever, because that's not how we did these kinds of things on 9/11, and 2) you didn't understand that what I was telling you that you didn't understand was that your original post was bunk. And you went off on a tangent that had nothing to do with anything I was trying to get across to you.

What really burns me is that the rest of the passengers cowered and stood by for so long before doing anything. Has the U.S.A. really been P U S S I F I E D so much that a plane load of everyday people can't take on a few maniacs, armed with the all powerful box cutter?

Americans are not 'P U S S I F I E D', they're doing what they have been told is the best way to handle a hijacking, which, up until then, resulted in hijackers demanding something, negotiations take place, and either we give in or we kill 'em all, usually at immense risk to the hostages, which was the whole point of taking them in the first place; it gives the terrorists something to bargain with AND to hide behind.

Well, not anymore, and now we KNOW that, so YEAH, nobody's going to get away with it AGAIN. But we didn't back then, and as butch as you think you are, you'd have stayed in your seat, too, right up until 1) impact, or 2) somebody informed you what was REALLY going on. THEN and ONLY then would the passengers rise and do whatever they thought they could. NOT BEFORE, which was the point of me pointing out to you that outnumbering a handful of nutters with cutters wasn't at all relevant.

See, if the boneheads of the world were to have even a remote possibility of, you know, swarming the vastly-outnumbered and poorly-armed hijackers like Flight 93 did, then this plot would have ALL been about airliners crashing into empty fields, and it would've been a stupid, poorly-conceived, unsuccessful goat-rope. THE POINT OF THE WHOLE PLOT is that they KNEW how the people would react, and if the Flight 93 hijack team had gone into action just an hour earlier, that plane, too, would've hit its target. The only reason it did NOT was by then, we knew the new rules of the game: there weren't going to be any demands from the hijackers; NObody could save the people on the plane then, and the only thing they COULD do then was fight back.

But NOT BEFORE, so back off the chest-thumping and THINK for a minute before you post crap like that again.

Do you GET that?

[Bluesman]

The envelope, please:

And the award for the Longest and Most Entertaining Sentence of the Month goes to...Bluesman!

Loved it, Blues; hung together like a Catepiller D6.

Thanks, man; I enjoy getting a good ripper like that off once in awhile.)

[jame$thegreat]

Jesus Bluesman remind me never to disagree with you (I usually dont anyway).