a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  1200 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: ‘Never Forget’ Is Breaking America

Same journalist wrote this:

    I know she's a writer or whatever but generally successful writers don't need to beg for donations. I can appreciate the type of insight here but the bigger problem is why are you doing this to begin with.

    Want to make it up? Get a job. I'm not picky about this. I would never demean someone for honest work. Starbucks is hiring. Thing is, they demean others, calling them "bootlickers."

Your problem last November was she had a Patreon. This is in Rolling Stone. So now your problem is she tweeted "it's time to forget 9/11"? After writing an article for Rolling Stone explaining exactly why?

And look. I know "low-effort snark" is your way of relating to the world. And i know that you fart about squirting low-effort snark into your tightie whities to see if anybody recoils at the stink and then changing your underwear to do it again if they don't. And I know that eventually you've pissed off so many people with your low-effort snark that you have to run and hide until enough people forget the low-effort snark to wait for something insightful to come out of your mouth but

- you were kind of five? In 2001?

- And Canadian?

- And sure as shit weren't designing mosques and airports with Pakistani colleagues? Like some of us?

- And definitely didn't sign up for two tours in Afghanistan because of it like the author

So I'm going to tell you this:

The reason there's no middle in politics is because we get it from both fucking sides.

Here you are, shitting a Michelle Malkin-grade purity test into a discussion about the harmfulness of purity tests. And you're doing it to score points, and you're doing it because you're lazy, and you're doing it because maybe someone somewhere will pat your little head for salivating when the bell rings. And I really shouldn't give a fuck because you don't care, nobody you know cares, you were indoctrinated into this whole macrocosm some of us have been trying to elbow back into Pandora's Box since September 12 and you know that "burn the witch" is always a safe thing to shout from the back of the crowd but if I can get you to listen to one tiny thing before you fuck off back to your spider hole to lick your wounds and wonder anew why you don't have any friends, it's this:

If you LISTEN when you don't have anything to say, you might LEARN SOMETHING. But if you SHOUT INTO THE VOID all you'll do is chase away anybody who might actually have a clue.

    By the time the bombs began to fall in Afghanistan, 88 percent of us wanted war. The remaining 12 percent were either ignored or, worse, attacked as traitors.

I had lunch with a rep, sometime between September 13 2001 (when my girlfriend of 4 1/2 years left me) and September 18 2001 (when the first anthrax attacks happened). And we're sitting out on the terrace eating clam chowder and he says "the dumb thing is bin Laden totally won. This is exactly what he wanted - all of us freaking out, lashing out against anyone else and clamping down on liberty." Never saw his ass again; dude was fired a week later, probably for being part of that 12 percent vocally rather than silently. Week after that we're all holding our breath while we're opening our mail; week after that my buddy Mohammed told me he couldn't run at lunch anymore because the longshoremen were spitting on him and yelling "go home sand ni__er".

Your tax dollars didn't pay nearly as much to kill a half million Afghans and Iraqis as mine did, and not just because I've been paying taxes since before you were born. I'll bet you don't know anybody who worked on Guantanamo Bay for the US Attorney. Dollars to donuts you've never been friends with anyone who ended up on Diego Garcia waterboarding hajis. You're still at that "one time in Band Camp" stage of storytelling about all the hijinks you used to get up to in high school eight months ago or whatever. So please take this in the convivial spirit of one retired Edgelord to one who should:

You're making the world worse. Stop it.