plasticbag.org

The terrifying lunacy of America’s fringe manifests itself: Falwell blames gays, liberal groups for terrorist attacks [Metafilter]. This is why it is not simply enough to mourn – people must investigate the background of these events before they can make sense of them. Otherwise the extremists in the west will make this battle their own. [song of the moment?“>Song of the moment?]

Don’t inflate the size of the enemy to fit the crime: “Searching for parallels to help them understand what has happened and what they should do next, Americans cite Pearl Harbour. A better reference would be the Cuban missile crisis. Then, as now, the United States had a new and untried president, John F Kennedy, and faced a danger that the wrong moves could turn a bad situation into a worse one.”.

The BBC’s attempts to start a new digital youth channel have failed, in an extraordinarily bizarre decision by the culture secretary. Interestingly, the blocked channel was to be called BBC Three, which (since BBC Four was passed) will result in an interesting hole in the TV pages…

A weblog post that I disagree with

I am extraordinarily tired and frayed at the moment. I look around me and everyone is engaged in the worship of this tragedy. Much like with Princess Diana, everyone is busy feeling. Some people are mourning, some are in violent rages. Everything that is being done is being done on instinct, and while we’re busy wondering what will happen, civil liberties are under threat (worldwide), ethnic minorities are being hounded (worldwide) and cities are building trenches to hide in when the inevitable apocalypse rains down from the sky. There’s a danger in uniting countries – do they unite behind the attitudes of the progressive, the mournful, the violent? And does anyone have the strength – or the inclination – to work through the issues from the beginning. At the moment, people are all running in one direction, and no one knows whether it’s the future or a cliff…

The full experience of going to, and coming from the World Trade Center in pictures in chronological order: framerate.net.

Background: The Counterterrorist Myth

Michael Moore speaks about the recent events in the US:

When the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, the CIA trained him and his buddies in how to commits acts of terrorism against the Soviet forces. It worked! The Soviets turned and ran. Bin
Laden was grateful for what we taught him and thought it might be fun to use those same techniques against us.

We abhor terrorism — unless we’re the ones doing the terrorizing.

We paid and trained and armed a group of terrorists in Nicaragua in the 1980s who killed over 30,000 civilians. That was OUR work. You and me. Thirty thousand murdered civilians and who the hell even remembers!

We fund a lot of oppressive regimes that have killed a lot of innocent people, and we never let the human suffering THAT causes to interrupt our day one single bit. We have orphaned so many children, tens of thousands around the world, with our taxpayer-funded terrorism (in Chile, in Vietnam, in Gaza, in Salvador) that I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised when those orphans grow
up and are a little whacked in the head from the horror we have helped cause.

I’m not sure whether I should be linking to this. It’s an article from The Guardian – a comment piece – called They can’t see why they are hated. It’s about the reaction to the events in New York and Washington from everyday Americans, who are viewing it as an attack by faceless madmen. The article goes into details about the way that the American government has treated much of the developing world and the Middle East – and how (particularly in Afghanistan) the very same people that they are now blaming for the attack were trained by the CIA. America has to look to its actions abroad and decide how it wants to interact with the world. If it doesn’t then we will have learnt nothing from this whole catastrophe.

What you see above is a syndicated piece of code that will carry the latest news about the disaster at the WRC and Pentagon, as well as help people support the relief efforts. Many of us don’t really know what to write about at the moment – well this is a step in the right direction. There’s a team of volunteers finding appropriate news stories behind the scenes and it seems like a good idea to just stick it up on one’s site for at least a week after the events. It’s a simple piece of code to insert into your pages – and I’d ask you to do it, please.