{"id":28,"date":"2001-09-16T17:21:51","date_gmt":"2001-09-16T22:21:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2001\/09\/16\/\/"},"modified":"2005-10-27T19:35:39","modified_gmt":"2005-10-27T23:35:39","slug":"butt-was-not-kicked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2001\/09\/16\/butt-was-not-kicked\/","title":{"rendered":"Butt Was Not Kicked"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I had told myself I was going to stop blogging about things related to the WTC aside from updating my list of new security measures designed to make people think something was happening when it really wasn’t.<\/p>\n

But I never can keep my mouth shut.<\/p>\n

Re: “acts of war” — This phrasing has bothered me since it first came up, but it took a while to percolate before I realized exactly why. These weren’t acts of war. It’s very misleading to call them that, because it conjures up images of us sending troops into battle to fight back against… and there’s the problem. War is something waged between nation-states. All the information suggests that this was NOT the act of a nation-state. It was an act of terrorism. To call it an act of war conferrs upon it a legitimacy that it should not have; it gives people the idea that we’re going to go and attack something. And maybe we will, since as a result of his ill-chosen words, Bush has probably backed himself into a corner. But this was, at its heart, a criminal act. It was on a much grander scale than the man who stabs another man in anger, but the result should be the same: the perpetrator should be arrested and tried. BECAUSE THAT IS HOW OUR LEGAL SYSTEM WORKS.<\/p>\n

Re: “you don’t do that to america, we’ll kick your butt” — This is hardly the first time someone has committed a terrorist act against America. We have had embassies blown up, troops blown up, military vessels blown up, and even portions of the WTC blown up. So you certainly DO do this to America. We are a big and very tempting target. And in general, America has been outraged after each attack, has made an effort to catch the criminals responsible, and then has moved on. Because that is how you respond to terrorism — you refuse to be terrorized. As to the issue of our military might, it is true that we surely do have the ability to bomb any small country out of existance. And it is true that Kuwait was liberated handily in the early 90s. The US has had an advantage for a long time, in that it is pretty isolated. We have a very large and stable country to the north, and a very large and very poor country to our south. East and West is water. A LOT of water. To invade us would be difficult; you simply cannot move large numbers of ground troops through the air or the sea without being noticed long before you arrive. And this fortunate situation has led to complacancy. Our lack of a sense of immediate danger is what held us out of the World Wars. But our history of “kicking butt” is hardly established. In the past century there were any number of wars and smaller conflicts that the US participated in: WW1, WW2, Korean War, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Bosnia, Somalia, Nicaragua, and so forth. At best, our record is 50\/50; our more recent record is far worse than that. <\/p>\n

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I had told myself I was going to stop blogging about things related to the WTC aside from updating my list of new security measures designed to make people think something was happening when it really wasn’t. But I never can keep my mouth shut. Re: “acts of war” — This phrasing has bothered me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}