Grant Morrison’s … unique … take on events in New York contains this comment: “Did we bomb Boston to stop the Boston Strangler ? Did we level New York City to get at Son of Sam ? No we did not. So why the fuck should we flatten Afghanistan just to get at a bunch of murderous bastards who have the country’s people in a repressive death grip?”. [via Darren, the Linkmachine]
An Afghan-American speaks: “What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of “having the belly to do what needs to be done” they’re thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let’s pull our heads out of the sand. What’s actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden’s hideout. It’s much bigger than that, folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we’d have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I’m going. We’re flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.”
Needed: a new age of enlightenment: “You’d think that every possible angle would already have been covered by people writing about the events of September 11th. So why am I writing this, and why now? Because in all the media coverage I’ve seen so far, nobody has been asking the right, the important, questions. Like: why did this happen, what circumstances got us into a de facto state of undeclared war with the Islamic world, and what can we realistically do to prevent those circumstances from ever recurring.” [link via Prolific]
Cool: Hadn’t noticed this before. Go to Webmonkey and hover over the little monkey’s wrench!
When you are bored and have nothing to do, you do stupid stupid things. This is actually the result of following a tutorial on teaching oneself complex Photoshop operations (although god knows you can’t tell by looking at it):
Today on Barbelith: New York: On the Ground – “I could feel the heat three hundred yards away; everything on four or five floors, people and office equipment, came raining down on the crowd. We all ran north while it fell and got away before it hit because it was high up. As I glanced back I saw the contents of the floors: all on fire, people and building, killed without a second to reconsider their life. George Minarik was in New York.”
From the Guardian’s letters pages, via linkmachinego: The omnipotence of American culture and childhood innocence ended in our house on September 11. I sat with my young son watching the images from the World Trade Centre. Suddenly we saw people hanging from the windows at the top of the stricken tower. “Mum,” he said, “where’s Spiderman? He could save them.” Later, as I tucked him up in bed, he asked sleepily, “Is Spiderman not real, mum?” [link]
8.30am: Tom awakens on the sofa in the sitting room. He has spent the night there and feels stiff, cold and creaky.