Something I’m going to amuse you all with.
Note: I did not write “Something with which I am going to amuse you all.” I did not use a complete sentence before this paragraph, nor will I use one after it.
But anyway… Me. Amusement. Y’all. Heh. Yer damn eyes. Peeled.
1. Working again is good. I may have had a lot going on with moving and post-moving, but the “break” was just getting too long.
2. I love that Bill Clinton got so angry on the Fox La-La Land Network. Emotion is something that makes the old days and old ways of politics look so nice. Nowadays, everyone is so guarded and so afraid to be human. Clinton turning red and yelling was a nice change from the usual stone-faced high school acting we get from politicians these days. In other words, even if it was an act, even if it was calculated, it was a performance way more to my liking than if he’d said something stupid like, “I believe that if you examine the substantive details of our outward-facing anti-unlawful-combatant processes, you will discover that we effectively impacted the issue as it was globally understood at that point in time. Damn it!” Politicians are just not as good entertainment as they used to be.
3. Cee Lo Green, to me, represents a continuation and logical progression of the R&B of the 70’s. You know, that logical progression that never happened in the 80’s, when R&B turned into Casio demos under sterile robotic vocals? You’ve maybe already noticed Gnarls Barkley and that seems like a good start. I’m loving it. Or something.
4. Finally, I am losing my mind waiting for the Wii. Anyone have any suggestions on what I can do to pass the next 50 days or so?
Note for the lj world: In case anyone was curious or cares, my post of 9/11 thoughts here doesn’t look like it appeared on anyone’s friends page. Too long? Too boring? LiveJournal filtering out my mind?
For more context, I was thinking about folks who think we need to act more politely/gingerly/diplomatically towards to rest of the world so that we don’t encourage terrorism. I do think that we should be “nicer” to the rest of the world. But NEVER as a response to terrorism. Working to end the economic, educational, and social settings that make recruiting easier for terrorist organizations is a vital part of any winning strategy. And you can certainly have a tiny bit of sympathy for the “foot soldiers” of the big terrorist groups. But the leadership of these groups and the governments in bed with terrorist groups must be ruthlessly crushed. When you get up to the top, we are not dealing with rational human beings or an enemy that can be engaged diplomatically.
Curious what your thoughts are, people…
I got most of my news from the Web. I still do. And the web coverage that day was horrendous. And slow.
I woke up and did my usual: dragging myself to a cup of coffee, outside for a smoke, then to the computer to check my mail and glance over news headlines.
My first impression of the news was that a small craft had collided into one of the towers and the news wires were blowing it out of proportion. This is how bad the coverage was. The headlines contradicted each other, the updates trickled in, and there was at least one little slice of time where you could assume that it was all being blown out of proportion. I think I even laughed. Or maybe just rolled my eyes.
But a few minutes later, I checked the story again. A fucking tower had fucking collapsed. That fact cut right through all the crappy reporting. And the rest of the day was like a bad dream–a subtly creepy bad dream.
I remember getting to work and discussing with my boss the initial estimates, that ten thousand people may have died. I hinted to my boss that I wanted to just go home. He missed it. I remember pacing the halls and trying to understand why even psychotic scum bags would do this to us, to anyone. I could not understand. I remember asking myself how this could happen, to a country I had come to see as invincible.
And that’s the whole point, isn’t it? The inhuman beasts who commit these atrocities want to remind us that we’re not invincible. And if they twist us around enough, we’ll come to think we’re not even strong. And they must cackle to themselves every time one of our own people actually suggests this all might partly be our fault.
And how do we win? I don’t know, of course. But part of it is to never give an inch to the monsters who have the moral capacity to kill innocent people, to blindly mass murder. I don’t care if these killers are our enemies, our leaders, our allies, or people we don’t know a damn thing about. We can not and must not blame ourselves. We can not and must not morally compromise.
Our only option is vigilance against those who kill without reason, those who kill to promote their religions or ideologies, those who kill purely for power, those weak bastards who do unthinkable evil to frighten us into thinking we are weak. This vigilance must guide our words, our actions, our thoughts. We must recognize an enemy. And treat that enemy as an enemy until the enemy dies or reforms.
All I can hope is that someday soon the disease of moral relativism that has gripped the West will clear up. That’s the day we can really fight. Don’t make excuses–beyond sheer stupidity, great evil, or both–for someone who would fly a plane into a building. For someone who will kill anyone, sympathetic to their cause, unsympathetic, adult, child, man, woman… Someone who would kill thousands of people. Because most of them are American. If you think it’s all relative, you don’t have any morals. Don’t you dare say this is even one one-thousandth of one percent our fault. None of you dare say that.
this is the new blog. come see.
is it still carolina?