#where was all this sympathy when veterans were saying this is like objectively the worst day of the year for them?

[lem0nademouth]

someone make a fucking bingo card i have officially encountered leftists saying that hearing fireworks tonight (4th of july) is making them think “this is what gaza sounds like” “this is what ukraine sounds like”

ITS NOT ABOUT YOU SHUT UP SHUT UP ITS NOT FUCKING ABOUT YOU

[qqueenofhades]

How did 9/11 affect the American psyche? I’ve heard people say that 9/11 is when America went insane, but I was born into the post-9/11 America, so it’s a bit hard for me to wrap my head around.

Oh man. You kids are asking the easy questions tonight, I see.

I’m not even sure I can adequately describe the effect that 9/11 had on the American psyche and the ways in which the entire world would be massively, almost unimaginably different if it had never happened, but here goes.

Basically, in the almost exactly ten-year period between the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the terror attacks in 2001, life for Americans was pretty damn good. They had won the Cold War, the economy was doing great, everybody was feeling rich and optimistic and like there was nothing but blue skies ahead. (Side note, I wonder if this resurgence of ‘90s nostalgia has to do with the fact that that’s the last time that we collectively felt safe.) The Columbine school shootings happened in 1999, back when that was completely still a shocking thing that nobody would expect, and not a semi-regular feature of the news every few months. I was 11 years old. Littleton was about an hour from where we lived at the time. I spent the whole morning crying about it and insisted on organizing a memorial service for the victims. The 2000 presidential election was bitterly contested between Bush and Gore, coming down to a handful of votes in Florida and the Supreme Court decision. Man, you also have to wonder how all of recent American history would have gone differently if Bush had lost.

Then…. 9/11. I was 13. It was an ordinary, sunny Tuesday, my dad came upstairs with a funny look on his face, and said that apparently the World Trade Center had been attacked. We didn’t have cable TV, so we didn’t watch any of it live, but I don’t remember that we discussed anything else for the whole day. We were at home, which was far away from the East Coast or where any of it was happening, so I don’t have any dramatic memories of seeing people freaking out or anything like that. At dinner that night, THAT NIGHT, my mom said that Osama bin Laden had probably done it. I repeat: everyone knew on the same night that it had happened that Osama was almost definitely responsible. You may note that Osama bin Laden was a Saudi national, all the hijackers were Saudi, and al-Qaeda was an organization with deep Saudi roots. (Remember the part where America attacked… Afghanistan? Yep. Seems legit. Then again, they weren’t the biggest oil producers in the region and a major US ally.)

It is impossible to overstate the shock that this caused. This had never happened. Even through both world wars and the long, dangerous 20th century and the turbulence and tension of the Cold War, there had never been an attack like this on mainland American soil. (And on that note, America got into World War II, despite all the heroic mythology about freeing the world from tyranny, because of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which in 1941 was an American territory. There were plenty of Nazi sympathizers among the establishment and government, and as soon as the war was over, America brought plenty of Nazis, including Wernher von Braun, to work in the space program. To say nothing of our problems with Nazis NOW. So yes.) The psychological effects were literally devastating for both Americans and many other people. Not to downplay the obvious horror of what happened on 9/11 and the people who were killed, but it turned America into a siege state. Everyone was terrified, and yet now we had a War on Terror, helpfully called a “crusade” by President Bush before European allies forced him to walk it back. His approval ratings hit 90%+ in the days after 9/11, and support to bomb Afghanistan – again, not in any way directly connected to this, aside from the fact that it was where Osama bin Laden had been active, and when the US government had armed him and fellow mujahadeen in the 1980s to fight against the Soviets, who had invaded in 1979, making it a Cold War proxy battlefield, and anyway – was MONUMENTAL. The whole public was behind this. International sympathy for America was incredible. Everyone was on our side and willing to say that we had been wronged. It didn’t really matter that Afghanistan was not really connected to this. Someone needed to suffer for this outrage. And boy, did they suffer.

Then came March 2003, and the infamous declaration that we were now going to invade Iraq, because Saddam Hussein (supported by the US in the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, in retaliation for Iran overthrowing their puppet shah in 1979, after CIA and MI6 staged a coup to remove Iran’s democratically elected prime minister in 1953 to protect their access to oil) apparently had weapons of mass destruction and was about to use them to kill more Americans. Everyone knew at the time that this was pretty much bullshit. But boy, did the Bush administration go hard to work selling it to us. The Department of Homeland Security was founded in 2002, after the attacks. The Patriot Act and other intrusive new surveillance methods and measures were quickly authorized. Americans became watched, spied on, mistrusted, and suspected of wrongdoing in ways never really tried on a large scale before. Any dissent was framed as taking the side of the terrorists; couldn’t you see that we needed all this to be safe? The state of national emergency that was declared after 9/11 was never actually revoked; we are all still living in it 19 years later. The culture of hyper-militarism, all these huge flags at sporting events and the visibility of these “Salute to Service” months and this aggressive fasciso-patriotism all grew up directly from the seeds of 9/11 and the sense of unforgivable affront to America, which could do what it wanted anywhere else in the world but could never forgive anyone for inflicting it in return.

It’s a mark of how badly all that public sympathy was mismanaged that by the time 2003 rolled around, the international community (except for Great Britain and Bush’s loyal compadre, Tony Blair) was… to say the least, skeptical of this Iraq adventure. It was pretty clearly a pretext to resume the Gulf War from Bush Senior’s tenure, unrelated to any actual justification or revenge for 9/11, and demonstrated the fact that far from resting on our laurels and feeling safe after winning the Cold War, America was now locked in mortal combat with an enemy that could be everywhere at any time. Nobody should feel safe, because the terrorists were out there. Despite the condemnation, Bush got re-elected in 2004, in part by painting his opponent, John Kerry, as someone who just couldn’t be trusted on national security. In short, Kerry, a Vietnam veteran, was “Swift Boated,” though he also did run a pretty wooden and uninspiring campaign. I just missed being old enough to vote in this election, though my parents and older sister all voted for Kerry, and Bush’s failings were a frequent subject of discussion in our house. He was getting more and more unpopular, was a figure of national ridicule, and yet this never actually discredited the whole War on Terror and the apparatus that sustained it. There were reports of war crimes, including Abu Ghraib, committed by the American forces. The indiscriminate torture and murder of detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba was also an object of national concern, but allowed to keep happening. Less than 5 years after 9/11, and all this sympathy for America, America had… well, lost its mind.

So… yes. There’s an entire generation now that is too young to remember 9/11 and thinks that America has always been this way, but it is, again, completely impossible to overstate how 9/11 turned this sense of comfortable complacency and national prosperity upside down. Everything was now justified in the name of freedom, and any disloyalty was suspect. Our “The Greatest!!” state had to be repeated and reissued and emphasized at every point. Many innocent Americans died on 9/11, sure. But the way that it was turned into the worst violation that any country had suffered anywhere, led to the death of thousands of Afghans, Iraqis, American servicepeople, Muslims, and everyone else involved in the wars and the system that was built to sustain them, and turned America into this paranoid, brutal, out-of-control war-machine juggernaut is, it can be well argued, its worst and most lasting tragedy.

[uozlulu]

Banana Fish episode 6 reaction post. Spoilers.

Overall, I was kind of surprised that this episode seemed slow given the pace they’ve been setting with the other episodes, but I can also understand why this one was slowed down since ending the episode with Los Angeles was the most logical ending point. There was a lot of tough information to get through in this episode and I’m kind of glad I already read the manga because I think it would have been too much for me had I not already known what was coming, especially since they were able to flesh a lot of things out more than the manga did. I’m not a fan of the whole you have to forgive people anime trope that came along with this episode but I do appreciate that in some ways the forgiveness was left up to interpretation, though I do not for one second believe Ash’s father loves him. I do, however, believe that Ash’s feelings towards his father are very complicated and I can see how all the things that have happened in the episodes leading up to this one would put him in a position in which he would prefer his dad not die at this moment. He is, lest we forget, seventeen after all.

Please be aware that there are spoilers below.

Wow, the guy’s only said like two sentences and I’m already going to fight Ash’s dad.

I’m kind of curious about the baseball picture because they’re both wearing the same uniform. Like I know it’s stylized like the Dodgers maybe to imply that the shirts are in support of a local team, though usually you don’t wear full baseball gear when messing around for fun. Like if Ash was in little league and Griff played for the high school team the shirts would be different. I’m going to chalk this up to some sort of cross culture telephone that got lost along the way, though the picture is cute.

”Don’t look at me like that. I won’t back out now. It’s too risky to go back to Manhattan anyway.” I wonder if Ibe ever looks back on this moment as things unfold since this is where he’s finally on board for the most part with seeing this through and letting Eiji stay.

So, it takes about 45 hours to drive from Cape Cod to Los Angeles not counting pit stops or sleep breaks. So, if I use my calculations for breaks that I used for a novel concept that required a road trip, counting sleep breaks, and assuming all eating is done on the road, that’d put the trip close to a week, depending on several factors.

Ibe must be younger than I think he is. Or perhaps they’ve fleshed more of this conversation with Max out than there was in the manga which allows me to peg his potential age better.

I’m going to put a cut for the rest of this reaction post because the subject matter got triggering.

Given the stigma a lot of our younger veterans face right now and the struggles they have with a VA that isn’t functioning properly and a lack of support for the wars they fought, I don’t particularly like the canon divergence of the baseball coach being a veteran. I mean like all you need is someone’s dad or grandpa who’s been coaching little league for years given the whole bones in the basement part of it all.

I feel like the lack of reaction to the whole the guy was pimping his elementary school son out is very unsettling. I also think that while Ash is strong, there’s also numbness in a situation like this. It relates back to what Ash said earlier about him having a detachment to Cape Cod. His strength likely comes from that numbness. I think also this relates to the theme of not just others but also Ash himself treating himself as an object that can be used as a means to an end.

I think one of the weakest tropes in anime is the need to garner sympathy for abusers so then we can forgive them. There is nothing to forgive here, but I think also, especially if you’ve not been in an abusive situation that’s lasted for a long period of time, it’s hard to see why Ash’s stepmom trying to insist that his dad loves him is just…I don’t know how to put it but I want to reject it viscerally. We know that Griff and Ash were living apart from his dad after Ash's mom disappeared. Considering their age difference, this means Griff was likely raising Ash when he was in high school because their dad couldn’t be assed. Then we find out that Ash’s dad basically pimped him out to his rapist when the cops let them down instead of creating a situation in which Ash stays away from the rapist. These things are not love. He doesn’t love this child. He maybe never loved this child. They can cram this concept of Ash’s dad loving him up their asses. There is no love here.

Growing up, I had someone who abused me more than anyone else and rewarded those who abused me in kind, and the situation got so out of hand that even to this day I can’t think of myself as human. So, while my experience was of course less horrific than Ash’s, what I can say about abusers and forgiveness is this: Even when you’re faced with someone who’s the source of the worst time in your entire life, that doesn’t necessarily mean you want them dead. Their death would have of course maybe stopped the abusive time period you spent with them but now that that’s over, their death doesn’t really serve a purpose. I also think that had this person been related to me and perhaps if I had some positive association with that person before the abuse, it would also make it harder to just let them die. That said, when I got to be as old as my worst abuser was when they were abusing me, I realized just how mentally ill that person was and that it was not me who started that mess but them. Their need to inflict psychological abuse was their motivating factor and I was just an easy target because I had social and emotional developmental delays so the kids already were wary of me. When the weight lifted from me, I thought I had forgiven this person, but what I realized years later was that it wasn’t really forgiveness but more of an understanding of the situation and an understanding of my function within the situation as a child with no power. I know that Eiji and the narrative want to see this as some kind of forgiveness thing, see this as some sort of validation of familial bonds and such, but I just can’t see it that way. I think that it’s very complicated, and I think that it’s a moment in which we see just how affected Ash is by all the things that have happened to him and his own lifestyle as part of his gang. Perhaps it’s not forgiveness that makes him shout “Tousan!” and beg his dad not to die, but the stress of losing Griff, losing Skp, fighting against Dino, getting Jennifer killed, etc…etc…that just can’t take another death, that just can’t be the blame for another death. Or perhaps there’s still a part of Ash that holds onto whatever he felt for his father before he could understand that his father had rejected him as a person.

Interesting. They kept the Yut-Lung name for the translation but they’re clearly saying Yue-Lung. Although that does make sense since they kept Arthur as well, which is also a mistranslation.

That was a gorgeous cityscape.