Keep Calm, Everyone

I don’t even have to look to know that right now the internet is exploding with speculation and finger-pointing with regard to the terrorist attacks in Paris. Whoever turns out to have done it, what we all ought keep in mind right now is that the purpose of terrorism is to cause terror. It’s to put fear in the hearts and minds not only of the immediate victims, but of everyone.

We can’t let that happen.

People make bad decisions when they’re afraid. Just look how far off the deep end we went here in the US after 9/11. We passed the Patriot Act and then started an unrelated war on the flimsiest of pretexts, a war where we lost our soul by torturing prisoners and that cleared the space for ISIS to come into being. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

What happened is terrible. And I hope the French catch whoever did this. I think they will. They’ve closed the borders and President Hollande said they know who they’re looking for. And in spite of the American habit of bashing the French, they’re more than capable of handling this, and I have every faith that they will. As should you.

As the hours and days pass, we’ll learn what happened. Who did this and why. Until then, what’s important is to keep calm and not jump to conclusions. This is the world we live in now, and until we know more all there really is to do — unless you are actually in Paris — is to stand in sympathy and solidarity with our friends and allies on this tragic, tragic day.

In Case You Missed It: Weekend Reading 10/23/15

Another eventful week, full of domestic terrorism, Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony, a new Star Wars Ep 7 trailer, some helpful life advice, and, for those in the know about how awesome she is, a new Kelly Link story for our Fk Yeah! finisher.

Short on time today, so let’s get down to it. Continue reading “In Case You Missed It: Weekend Reading 10/23/15” →

In Case You Missed It: Weekend Reading 10/16/15

Hello there, and welcome to (what will hopefully be) the first of many installments of In Case You Missed It, where I’ll post links to the most interesting things I read on the web in the previous week and linked on my facebook page.

The big news this week was the first Democratic Presidential Debate. But I also found some interesting think pieces on Columbus Day (or, as we celebrate in my adopted home city of Seattle, Indigenous Peoples’ Day), violence, and socialism in the modern day and age.

And, in what I hope and expect to become a weekly tradition, we’ll end with a dueling WTF?/Fk Yeah! pair of stories to make you scratch your head and cheer. Continue reading “In Case You Missed It: Weekend Reading 10/16/15” →

Fourteen Years After

I wanted to write something about 9/11 today, even though most anything worth saying has been said and said again many times over the years. I think in the end my hero Charlie Pierce got it right when he wrote that “the sad, lasting legacy of that day 14 years ago today, and of all the different things that have been made of it since then, is that it is the day that America finally went mad.”

It’s hard to refute that, from where I sit. Like a nose-punched bully, we ran rampant, and the damage we did to ourselves and the world will take a very long time to repair. We are now an America that’s tortured, that’s executed our own citizens by drone strike without due process of law. We spent a trillion dollars to go to war with a nation that didn’t have anything to do with the attack (and continued our strong alliance with the nation most of the hijackers were actually from), and made room for the Islamic State to come into being when we left at the behest of the government we installed. Domestically, we went from a proto-fascist state where folks with the wrong t-shirts were escorted away from political rallies to a failing state whose political process has been hijacked by a faction who doesn’t believe government should be allowed to govern. And those are just the highlights.

Despite the patriotic memes in my facebook feed, I don’t want to remember 9/11. I don’t want to remember the fear and the pain and the determination to exact vengeance.

No, I want to remember the days and weeks after, when the divisions between us fell away. When we weren’t Democrats and Republicans and liberals and conservatives but Americans united by grief, shocked out of our petty disputes and tribalism by this unthinkable enormity. I want to remember how we all came together, how the world was ready to rally behind us. I want to remember the moment when it seemed possible we could make something good out of this horrible tragedy, when our common humanity united us and we were kinder and more real with each other.

A lot has happened in the fourteen years since then, and those days when what united us was stronger than what divided us seem very far away now. But it’s important we remember them. It’s vital to our well-being, both as a nation and as individual human beings. Because we’re all in this together, whether we remember it or not.

Why I Wouldn’t Kill Hitler with My Time Machine

So, it’s a pretty classic thought experiment: If you had a time machine, would you go back and kill Hitler before he had a chance to start WWII?

Thanks to my daily internet divagations, I found myself revisiting this classic hypothetical today, and, given my brain’s penchant for the road less traveled (and for giving concrete answers to rhetorical questions), I found myself answering the question with a pretty definitive ‘no,’ though for practical rather than the usual moral or ethical reasons. I offer my rationale below, not as any sort of definitive answer, but as food for thought for hungry thinkers.

It goes like this: Continue reading “Why I Wouldn’t Kill Hitler with My Time Machine” →