Our Post 9/11 World: What Might Have Been...

[Stark]

Just like all those times destroying the Temple in Jerusalem ended religions. Don't you remember that?

The Suez canal stuff is just the atavistic icing on the cake.

[evilsoup]

Wow. I thought people like this only existed in shitty parodies. Do these people really think that a moral response to the 9/11 attacks, which killed thousands of innocents, is to nuke Tehran etc., which would kill tens of millions of innocents?

I think my favorite bit was when he suggested taking all the money away from the JewsArabs after The Reichstag building burnt downThe WTC attack.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Why are all the nukes being delivered by 'RAWR SEKRUT DRONEZ!' Do they have something against jets or bombers?

[Crossroads Inc.]

Sounds like he is just one of those people who is cut from the same cloth as the proponents of "Chick Tracks"
They believe that the moment you show someone The Truth they will magically cast off hundreds of years of traditions and repent to follow 'Da Lorda'.
So just to turn things around and play Devils advocate, lets change a few things...

The first dropped a two-kiloton bomb on The Vatican. The second dropped a two-kiloton bomb on Jesus's burial place in Jerusalem. The Kaaba in Mecca and the Green Dome in Medina were rendered gaseous. Tens of thousands of pilgrims perished in the blasts.

More stunned than Westerners by the operation were Christians. Their holy shrines were erased from existence in milliseconds. The expected wrath of God did not materialize. He had forsaken his chosen people. The sun did not rise in the West. The stars did not begin to vanish. The beliefs of Christianity were rendered redundant, proven meaningless. The absence of supernatural retaliation and vengeful global punishment resulted in mass disorientation among Christians, a species of trauma still being studied by top psychologists in major universities. Suicide rates among Christians skyrocketed –suicides that did not include bombs detonated in public, but which were private affairs of family heads killing their own families before themselves.

Countless other Christians simply ceased adhering to the faith. Once-faithful Christians proclaimed their apostasy, preaching tearfully and angrily to sympathetic crowds about what a fraud Christianity was. Women discarded their Crosses and even burned them in the streets in demonstrations of freedom.Bibles were turned into Lavatory Paper or converted into waste paper. Churches in Western nations were eventually abandoned by the dozens. Once-influential Priests preached to ever diminishing congregations. Several clerics were arrested by authorities for plotting terrorist acts against the U.S. government and are serving life sentences.

I don't know about you but that seems just as believable as what was originally posted!
(sighs)

Really if you want to try and imagine a REAL change in 9/11, just imagine how different the world would be if Al Gore was elected President instead of Bush.

[MKSheppard]

Really if you want to try and imagine a REAL change in 9/11, just imagine how different the world would be if Al Gore was elected President instead of Bush.

The probability of the invasion of Iraq, or a very strong punishing aerial campaign against the Iraqi regime in a Gore Presidency is very strong, given that Al Gore and his staff were very quite interested in the regime change plans during their years in the White House, and Gore himself was one of the most vocal supporters in the Clinton Administration for action against Iraq -- his behavior during the night of 14 November 1998 is quite instructive.

[EDITIED to clean things up a bit]

[Simon_Jester]

Shep, key question: would Gore have adopted Bush's policy of basically firing any general who told him he didn't have enough manpower to occupy Iraq? That was a big part of what Bush did in the runup to the invasion- the interest in invading Iraq had to be strong enough not only to get him to invade, but to steamroll over all the people going "but... but... but..." because of problems with the idea.

There might be something to that, but even then I think Rand is worthy of the title. Her work is interesting on a number of levels, both as a parallel Post-Nietzschean discourse to Post-Modernism (the other and more established Post-Nietzschean philosophy) and as a curious update of a number of Enlightenment ideas to contemporary political philosophy. I suppose it's subjective, but she is a woman who dedicated her life to expounding, detailing, revising and debating ideas, so that's about as objective a qualifier as you're going to get.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, but I think that's the linchpin of the explanation. She breaks so far with existing philosophical tradition, and throws away so much of what that tradition values, that there exist people reluctant to call her a 'philosopher' at all.

[Thanas]

I think that is the perfect example of one being a wider and one a narrow definition. She is not a philosopher in the narrow sense (steeped in tradition, primarily building on or arguing against existing philosophies, instead taking a rather basic concept and declaring it true) but she is certainly a philosopher in the wider sense of the word.

I doubt however that it is an academically viable philosophy.


EDIT: deleted one misleading word.

[Simon_Jester]

Possibly an illustration, in some sort of abstract sense, of the difference between the prophet and the philosopher. The philosopher operates within the narrow tradition you describe, though they may strain at the boundaries of it. The prophet has one big Truth and proclaims it to all and sundry, all else be damned.

Which would make Ayn Rand a prophet of... whatever you want to call her ideas.

[MKSheppard]

Shep, key question: would Gore have adopted Bush's policy of basically firing any general who told him he didn't have enough manpower to occupy Iraq?

I honestly don't know enough about Gore's makeup to speculate on that.

But what I do know is that Gore had a preoccupation with Iraq somewhat similar to Bush's, albeit for different reasons; so the future of Iraqi Children in a Gore Presidency post 9/11 isn't going to be all buttercream and lollipops.

Upon further reflection, I have to shift the odds in favor of aforementioned punishing aerial campaign designed to oust Saddam from power by destroying the instruments of regime control -- essentially something similar to the Clinton-era DESERT FOX campaign, which actually did cause severe regime unrest in Iraq in it's aftermath, but turned up to 11.

[Pelranius]

Diogenes, Kierkegaard and Nietzche were all philosophers. Ayn Rand at best can be at best described as a self help author. Christopher Hitchens has a quite amusing video out there where he comments about the absurdity of praising selfishness.

You know what, fuck it, I'll bite. What exactly makes Ayn Rand not a philosopher? She worked out a systematic philosophy with clear positions on aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics, and she published a great deal of commentary on a number of philosophers and philosophical traditions. Her work betrays a clear descent as an interesting hybrid of Aristotelian and Nietzschean traditions. Further, calling her 'at best' a 'self help author[sic]' is simply a lie, or ignorance, as she was also a critically- and popularly-acclaimed playwright.

I believe that Rand's philosophy is largely facile and wrong, but that is also true of the philosophies of Bataille, Lacan, and Althusser (and they were not only wrong, but unrepentantly French). This does not make them any less philosophers, no less than the foolish positions of Rick Perry make him not a politician, but 'at best a rancher'. The proclivity of dogmatics and children to turn their enemies into caricatures never ceases to amaze me.

Thank you. I will go ponder on that.

[evilsoup]

Uh,

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Maybe a mod should edit the OP...

[Tsyroc]

I thought it was interesting that the author appears to be a Tom Clancy fan but apparently didn't read The Sum of All Fears, where a strong point was made that the president does not just fly off the handle and start nuking cities to get the handful of people he thinks might be behind some attacks. I guess the nuking makes sense in the context of the story if he really thinks he's at war with all of Islam but that in itself is a crazy leap.

I recently saw clips from some TV show where they were showing photos of the towers during 9/11 to men in Afghanistan. Only a regional police chief sort of knew what he was seeing. All the rest of the people had no idea and did not know that was the reason why the Americans were in their country. They seemed to be more understanding in that regard after finding out about the attacks. In the author's reality these innocent people would have been nuked or dealing with living in a country where nukes had been used.

[MKSheppard]

I thought it was interesting that the author appears to be a Tom Clancy fan but apparently didn't read The Sum of All Fears, where a strong point was made that the president does not just fly off the handle and start nuking cities to get the handful of people he thinks might be behind some attacks.

Don't get me fucking started on Sum of All Fears. In retrospect, it's where Clancy's downfall began.

We figure out who's responsible for nuking the superbowl, killing thousands, plus VPOTUS; the Soviet Premier comes on the line and basically says "fuck those guys, you can nuke them if you want to" and.....we don't nuke them, because JACK RYAN suddenly has an attack of conscience and convinces POTUS not to do it?

[Scottish Ninja]

I thought actually the Iranian fingered was framed by the terrorists, hoping as a fallback (after their broader plan to start a nuclear war between the US and Russia) to get the US to nuke Qom and thereby destroy all the progress towards peace that had been made in the Middle East, with the whole situation with the Swiss Guard in Jerusalem and all that.

Though I think you're correct overall since I think that's the information that they had to go on there at the time.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

I think that is the perfect example of one being a wider and one a narrow definition. She is not a philosopher in the narrow sense (steeped in tradition, primarily building on or arguing against existing philosophies, instead taking a rather basic concept and declaring it true) but she is certainly a philosopher in the wider sense of the word.

I doubt however that it is an academically viable philosophy.


EDIT: deleted one misleading word.

I that to an extent Objectivism is given a little less respect than it warrants in academic circles, because while admittedly, Ayn Rand wasn't a thoroughly educated philosopher, so, for instance, her critique of Kant is way the fuck off, a lot of her ideas were very well-developed, and are more comprehensible and applicable to life than, for example, Lacan, whose popularity will forever baffle me. And, ironically, among this 'crowd' I think that Ayn Rand herself doesn't get a lot of respect for being one of the few people who laid the groundwork for what we call 'New Atheism' today (along with more impressive and well-remembered figures such as Bertrand Russell), in that she went out during a more Christianized era and laid out in popular media like talk shows and things the case for Reason over Faith, and helped shift the discourse (you can find a couple appearances she did on Phil Donohue on youtube if you like). Further, she clarified and systematized a lot of Enlightenment ideas, for which I think she deserves some credit, such as about what 'Evil' means in a secular world (her conception of Evil as the Initiation of Force).

I mentioned earlier her Post-Nietzschean connection, and that may be the thing I find most amusing and interesting about all this. Foucault took Nietzsche's ideas and warped them into a contorted metaphysics and called it Post-Modernism, and it was embraced whole-heartedly by Academia for a long time while being totally disdained by the public. Ayn Rand took Nietzsche's ideas, sheared off his psychological insights, and called it Objectivism, and it was embraced by the public and captains of industry while it was and still remains completely reviled by the academy.

It's also worth noting that she was strongly against Libertarianism itself; like Marx, her views on just what an Objectivist society would look like are fuzzy at best.

[Simon_Jester]

The comparison to Marx is interesting. Marx, too, does not get full respect as a philosopher from many- although fewer of these critics are part of academia, perhaps, they're still there.

What do Rand and Marx have in common? I submit that one of the big things is that both of them promoted philosophies which stripped out a lot of what we might call 'moral philosophy' in favor of a very economics-centered, materialist worldview.

For Marx, the linchpin of everything* was the right of the individual (ideally blue collar, not white) to be their own person rather than a slave, a serf, or a 'company man;' this is why the distribution of capital in society was such a big deal to him.

for Rand, the linchpin of everything* was the right of the individual (ideally white collar, not blue, I think) to... I'm going to go with... to control as much as possible of their own products, for a rather white-collar definition of "your product:" what you pay other people to make for you is as much "yours" as what you make yourself, which is not a theory Marx would embrace. This is why making sure that no person was forced to give up much of what they make against their will was such a big deal to her.

The reason this becomes a problem is that these are economics-oriented philosophies: what matters is what you make, not what kind of person you are, and to find prescriptions about morality beyond economics you really have to take a step beyond the philosophy in question. Marx as the proletarian philosopher and Rand as the bourgeois philosopher have very little to say to anyone outside their chosen class beyond "lie down and submit to the new economic order."

This makes their philosophy somewhat, shall we say, incomplete. And vulnerable to abuses, because it makes economic prescriptions and equates them to ethical good, in the name of which terrible things can be done by someone who's zealous enough about the philosophy.
_________

*Please forgive me if I oversimplify; I'm trying to keep this sort of concise and still get at the core idea.

[Patrick Degan]

How exactly is the nuclear slaughter of tens of thousands of pilgrims a 'most courageous act'?! There are so many fucked up things about this article I don't know where to start...the outcry to such an act would tear society apart, not make it better. It's the equivalent of smashing your arm with a mallet to get rid of a wound...

This formulation turns on the alleged "courage" of taking an active step to alter the course of "inexorable" history before it's TOO LATE! The 1950s version of this was: carpet-bombing Russia with nukes or else by 1980 the whole world would be Communist.

Suffice to say, the argument is quite insane.

[Lord of the Abyss]

I thought it was interesting that the author appears to be a Tom Clancy fan but apparently didn't read The Sum of All Fears, where a strong point was made that the president does not just fly off the handle and start nuking cities to get the handful of people he thinks might be behind some attacks.

Don't get me fucking started on Sum of All Fears. In retrospect, it's where Clancy's downfall began.

We figure out who's responsible for nuking the superbowl, killing thousands, plus VPOTUS; the Soviet Premier comes on the line and basically says "fuck those guys, you can nuke them if you want to" and.....we don't nuke them, because JACK RYAN suddenly has an attack of conscience and convinces POTUS not to do it?

I thought actually the Iranian fingered was framed by the terrorists, hoping as a fallback (after their broader plan to start a nuclear war between the US and Russia) to get the US to nuke Qom and thereby destroy all the progress towards peace that had been made in the Middle East, with the whole situation with the Swiss Guard in Jerusalem and all that.

Yes, that's the scenario.

Though I think you're correct overall since I think that's the information that they had to go on there at the time.

No, he's not correct. They had information from one known terrorist - no other supporting data at all. And the President was going to nuke a city to kill one man in it*, instead of waiting to get better data - which in fact came in shortly. Ryan was right.


*The same man that Jack Ryan later had assassinated when he really did secretly use WMD on America (Ebola). He was hardly a pacifist; he just wasn't interested in killing millions of people to get just one.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

The comparison to Marx is interesting. Marx, too, does not get full respect as a philosopher from many- although fewer of these critics are part of academia, perhaps, they're still there.

What do Rand and Marx have in common? I submit that one of the big things is that both of them promoted philosophies which stripped out a lot of what we might call 'moral philosophy' in favor of a very economics-centered, materialist worldview.

For Marx, the linchpin of everything* was the right of the individual (ideally blue collar, not white) to be their own person rather than a slave, a serf, or a 'company man;' this is why the distribution of capital in society was such a big deal to him.

for Rand, the linchpin of everything* was the right of the individual (ideally white collar, not blue, I think) to... I'm going to go with... to control as much as possible of their own products, for a rather white-collar definition of "your product:" what you pay other people to make for you is as much "yours" as what you make yourself, which is not a theory Marx would embrace. This is why making sure that no person was forced to give up much of what they make against their will was such a big deal to her.

The reason this becomes a problem is that these are economics-oriented philosophies: what matters is what you make, not what kind of person you are, and to find prescriptions about morality beyond economics you really have to take a step beyond the philosophy in question. Marx as the proletarian philosopher and Rand as the bourgeois philosopher have very little to say to anyone outside their chosen class beyond "lie down and submit to the new economic order."

This makes their philosophy somewhat, shall we say, incomplete. And vulnerable to abuses, because it makes economic prescriptions and equates them to ethical good, in the name of which terrible things can be done by someone who's zealous enough about the philosophy.
_________

*Please forgive me if I oversimplify; I'm trying to keep this sort of concise and still get at the core idea.

That is rather over-simplistic, but I think you might be on to something there. The trouble with Rand is that it's difficult to imagine the nature of a society where everyone is a Reasoning, Apollonian Alpha Objective Man, just as with Marx it's difficult to discern how the Post-State brotherhood of Proletarian Man would function. In both cases, it only seems to make sense in some kind of Anarchistic Post-Scarcity state.

[Scottish Ninja]

Though I think you're correct overall since I think that's the information that they had to go on there at the time.

No, he's not correct. They had information from one known terrorist - no other supporting data at all. And the President was going to nuke a city to kill one man in it*, instead of waiting to get better data - which in fact came in shortly. Ryan was right.

Yeah, I didn't mean that the nuclear strike necessarily should have gone ahead; I was just saying that the fact that the information was flawed doesn't alter his analysis of the situation.

As for the OP - I love how Islamists conveniently destabilize Kuwait so that the US can step in and take over the country. That's almost as good as the massive proliferation of "drones armed with battlefield nuclear bombs". I wonder where these magical nuclear-armed super-Predators came from? And how are they launched from submarines? And what happened to regular aircraft and missiles, both cruise missiles and ballistic?

Bizarrely, why do so many other targets get the drone-fired instant sunrise treatment while Baghdad gets a conventional attack by stealth bombers?

It's also marvelous how Western oil companies are the "rightful owners" of the Middle East oil fields. National sovereignty is only reserved for white folks; they're the only ones who deserve it, of course.

And Egypt just hands the Suez canal over to the British and the French; I'm vaguely surprised that Panama doesn't do likewise. This shit just gets crazier and crazier on repeat readings.

[Thanas]

I that to an extent Objectivism is given a little less respect than it warrants in academic circles, because while admittedly, Ayn Rand wasn't a thoroughly educated philosopher, so, for instance, her critique of Kant is way the fuck off, a lot of her ideas were very well-developed, and are more comprehensible and applicable to life than, for example, Lacan, whose popularity will forever baffle me.

Yeah, but that would make her more of a sophist than a philosopher (in the classical sense).

More seriously, I think what she is missing is an element of nobility. (More below on that).

And, ironically, among this 'crowd' I think that Ayn Rand herself doesn't get a lot of respect for being one of the few people who laid the groundwork for what we call 'New Atheism' today (along with more impressive and well-remembered figures such as Bertrand Russell), in that she went out during a more Christianized era and laid out in popular media like talk shows and things the case for Reason over Faith, and helped shift the discourse (you can find a couple appearances she did on Phil Donohue on youtube if you like). Further, she clarified and systematized a lot of Enlightenment ideas, for which I think she deserves some credit, such as about what 'Evil' means in a secular world (her conception of Evil as the Initiation of Force).

Maybe she deserves some credit for that, but it is not as if she was the only one doing that - like you mention - and her enlightement interpretation....well, you already mentioned how she is way off on Kant. I really can't give her much credit for anything despite being a popular voice on these matters.

I mentioned earlier her Post-Nietzschean connection, and that may be the thing I find most amusing and interesting about all this. Foucault took Nietzsche's ideas and warped them into a contorted metaphysics and called it Post-Modernism, and it was embraced whole-heartedly by Academia for a long time while being totally disdained by the public. Ayn Rand took Nietzsche's ideas, sheared off his psychological insights, and called it Objectivism, and it was embraced by the public and captains of industry while it was and still remains completely reviled by the academy.

Well, here is the main disconnect IMO. Nietzsche wanted to create a perfect human being - the prime example of that being at some point the artist who creates work that better society as a whole. And I think this is the main difference and a large part of the reason why Rand is so reviled - her work primarily focuses on self-interest, on egotism (albeit "rational egotism"). Philosophy in itself - particular classical philosophy - has always the more prominent element of the betterment of all society and there is a certain sense of nobility in it - particularly the self improvement focused on becoming a better person, a sort of hero in the classical sense, peppered with a medium of self-sacrifice.

With Rand, you get: "My philosophy in essence is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason as his only absolute"

Now, had she simply said "My philosophy in essence is the concept of man as a heroic being with productive achievement as his noblest activity" she would have been just a bog-standard philosopher and the end goal would have seperated her little from her intellectual predecessors. Instead, she introduced a concept of egotism that overshadows nearly everything else. And this concept is both dangerous and vile. I am sure I do not need to elaborate on that, everyone who has read Atlas Shrugged notices how utterly idiotic this view is.

It's also worth noting that she was strongly against Libertarianism itself; like Marx, her views on just what an Objectivist society would look like are fuzzy at best.

I think the reason she does not offer any utopian version of society itself is that main disconnect in her works because it would just not work. Productive achievement and happiness as a moral purpose clash and it only gets muddier when you add reason to the mix. The practical application of it is problematic - she defends the right to not give anything to people that do not deserve it. Of course, the judgement of that is supposed to be done by the person who has the funds. However, without self-sacrifice on the part of at least some persons or the sacrifice of the overwhelming majority of people you cannot have a functional society.

Her denial of self-sacrifice, no matter how small (her famous do not give a dime to a beggar example) is what sets her apart from Nietzsche and the others and what makes her unworthy as a philosopher, because her ethics system is simply a vile and stupid one. She claims to create a better human being when she simply reduces us to a moral system that is worse than that of cavemen. "I got mine and have the right to refuse to give anything to you" is not a philosophy, it is dreck. Her utter disdain for charity (you know, what we would describe just as a decent human being) is not something that is worth anything. It is just somebody being an utter sociopath.

The problem is that she denigrate self-sacrifice but her own philosophy cannot work without it. Without a powerful person sacrificing his ability to crush all others and therefore sacrificing his own happines, her philosophy would lead to huge problems. (Sure, she tries to explain it by reason and a productive life, but these are all buzzwords essentially describing a form of self-sacrifice).

Heck, even the word she uses "heroic" implies self-sacrifice, for a heros is he who sacrifices for the collective.

On top of that, she is simply boring to read or you would think she is an idiot. I mean, things like:

Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. Today, the conflict has reached its ultimate climax; the choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequence of freedom…or the primordial morality of altruism with its consequences of slavery

you would think said person an extremist nutjob.



But it has been a while since I read Rand, so feel free to correct me if I am wrong here.

[SpaceMarine93]

Frankly, Edward Cline simply got it all wrong.

[K. A. Pital]

Since when being a humanist is a requirement to be a philosopher? Being an antihumanist is pretty much possible for a philosopher, and one's moral qualms do not translate into "banishment from the holy grail of knowledge". Being an extremist is likewise not indicative of philosophical contributions. An evil ethics system or even a complete lack of an ethical system, a complete denial of ethics and/or morality does not make one "not a philosopher".

[Thanas]

By that token everybody who espouses any sort of creed to live by is a philosopher.

[K. A. Pital]

Philosophy is the study of fundamental problems; ethics might be tangential or even detrimental to the study. Someone's ethnical system might seem horrendous (Middle Age Christian philosophers espouse horrendous morality, if you ask me), but it does not make them suddenly "no philosophers". It is also reasonable to conclude that during the study one can come to amoral or even antimoral viewpoints. It does not detract from the philosophy. Antimoral philosophies are a completely valid part of philosophy itself.