12 ms·

If watching this footage makes you want to stand up and do something, remember that Covid-19 is killing as many people in the US every two days as died in these

by ISL 5y ago

If watching this footage makes you want to stand up and do something, remember that Covid-19 is killing as many people in the US every two days as died in these attacks. Take small steps to make the world a better place, helping your neighbors, and you can take a stand against entropy.

chitowneats 5y ago
Heart disease and cancer kill many more: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.html https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm... Beware the myopia that sensationalist news coverage tends to encourage. Never forget all the lives lost. Not just the 3000+ we lost on that horrible day (RIP), but the millions more around the world lost in the wake of the actions we chose, as a nation, to take in the "war on terror".
- polytely 5y ago
  Heart disease and cancer aren't contagious, so your actions on that front will only improve your own life, while being a bit more careful with covid will potentially prevent sickness in a lot of people.
  - chitowneats 5y ago
    Social contagion is real. The U.S. has much higher rates of illness and death due to complications from obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, etc, than other developed countries, because of our shared culture of poor diet and sedentary lifestyle. You pass on your way of life to your children. Your friends and family reinforce each other's decisions every time you make a meal, make plans, etc. This stuff is all vitally important. And in fact, we would have lower rates of covid fatality if a larger percentage of our population took this seriously.
    - cornel_io 5y ago
      Lifestyle changes are really really hard for people to make, though I agree that it would be great if someone figured out a way to turn that tide. Luckily getting a shot is really really easy, so we do have a lot of influence over deaths from COVID.
      - chitowneats 5y ago
        I agree with the point you've made. The OP I was responding to in my first comment seemed to be suggesting something more extreme than, "get vaccinated, and then go live your life".
    - polytely 5y ago
      Fair point, but from a perspective of effort vs potential lives saved, self-quarantining when sick, avoiding large crowds & meeting in well ventilated spaces is probably easier than adopting a healthier lifestyle. But yeah, we should also live healthier!
      - chitowneats 5y ago
        Absolutely. Everyone should self-quarantine when sick. Is it your sense that large numbers of Americans aren't doing this? Anecdotally, I haven't seen a visibly sick person, outside of my immediate family, in a long, long time (needless to say, I don't work in a healthcare setting). Arguably, retrofitting every important building in the country to be well ventilated is a challenge on a similar scale to changing our deeply ingrained unhealthy cultural habits.
        polytely 5y ago
        Not American (I'm in the Netherlands) so I wouldn't know, but looking at the graphs it seems like there are a lot of contagions happening. I was getting take out a couple of weeks ago and a woman brought her coughing child to the restaurant, which doesn't seem great, so I have noticed people being less alert now that a significant portion of people has been vaccinated here. >Arguably, retrofitting every important building in the country to be well ventilated is a challenge on a similar scale to changing our deeply ingrained unhealthy cultural habits. Yeah, I hadn't looked at it that way, but that's indeed a big task.
  - tommymachine 5y ago
    So heart disease and cancer don't take up ICU beds?
    - polytely 5y ago
      Not what I wrote at all. But to respond to your point(?) covid patients that get sick enough to go to the ICU are there for a long time, while heart patients get better (or die) significantly faster, I recently heard an ICU doctor say on TV here (the Netherlands) that a covid ICU bed could help up to 8 heart patients, which makes it extra important to reduce the amount of covid cases.
      - tommymachine 5y ago
        Do heart disease and cancer exacerbate covid conditions, putting more people in icu (and for longer) than if they didn't have those comorbidities?
        polytely 5y ago
        Yes of course, just make your point already, this is not a chat, try to write a complete post.
        tommymachine 5y ago
        So you're not winning the argument to take away my medical freedom, so now you want to tell me how I'm supposed to post on here? Addicted to tyranny much?
        polytely 5y ago
        >So you're not winning the argument to take away my medical freedom That wasn't what I was trying to do at all, and I can't really see how you could get that from my initial reply, so I don't think we are going to agree on anything here, have a nice day.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/07/obesity-is-contagious/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/07/obesity-is-co... Actually there has been a lot of research showing obesity as a social virus is contagious.
    - dillondoyle 5y ago
      Off topic, but is there any research that connects the also burgeoning science of gut biome/bacteria to this? Maybe a total crazy stretch, but if our gut bacteria can be 'infectious', and if those bacteria have an affect on weight, that'd be crazy.
  - rkk3 5y ago
    >Heart disease and cancer aren't contagious, so your actions on that front will only improve your own life No, they inflict massive negative externalities on society through healthcare. > while being a bit more careful with covid will potentially prevent sickness in a lot of people. Classic Safety-ism. Even today, 20 years after 9/11 and we are still paying a ludicrous price for this logic.
    - nautilius 5y ago
      The ludicrous and horrible price - of wearing masks? You have a twisted logic, comparing terror attacks and follow-up global wars to the horrors you must be going through, masking up (or not) for the grocery store.
      - rkk3 5y ago
        Personal attacks aren't welcome on Hackernews. > The ludicrous and horrible price - of wearing masks? Of shutting down schools? of closing borders and separating families, which since you want to trivialize things I didn't bring up, a 3 year old in my family was separated from her mother for a year and a half. I didn't specify wearing masks.. but no one knows what the effect will be of kids wearing masks all day. They are at a time of critical development & learning to read faces, non verbally communicate etc. It may turn out to have a terrible price.
        nautilius 5y ago
        Several hundred thousand people could have been saved in the US if these measures had been taken seriously, early enough, compared to other first world countries. Social distancing, closing schools, etc. were proven methods that showed the difference between cities with horrible losses and much better outcomes for the Spanish Flu. (Edit: Washington had his troops in the revolutionary war quarantined, separated, and inoculated when small pox became a problem. ) We knew all that. This weekend, we are mourning the tragical losses of a terror attack that cost the lives of 3000 innocent people. Because of people like you, who call proven measures against COVID ‘safety-isms’ we lose that many people every other day. If anything, we clearly didn’t do enough ‘safety-isms’.
  - inkblotuniverse 5y ago
    Obesity is socially contagious, and causes higher rates of heart disease and cancer.
  - TeeMassive 5y ago
    > Heart disease and cancer aren't contagious And? They still kill people and clog the healthcare systems around the world. Worse a lot of those are aggravated by obesity and smoking, all of which not only are voluntary actions but also generate profits. Also obesity is contagious: http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1646997,00.html http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1646997,0... Also average Covid death age is only 4 years lower than the pre-pandemic life expectancy in the US. And what is the biggest aggravating factors for Covid-19? Obesity and smoking.
- tylerhou 5y ago
  Heart disease and cancer are an aggregate of very many diseases — there are many types of heart diseases (stroke, cardiac arrest, coronary artery disease), and many types of cancers. COVID is a single disease that has killed many multiples more than a single heart disease or cancer.
  - chitowneats 5y ago
    This is semantics. Taking just heart disease as an example, all of the types that you mentioned are heavily influenced by the same types of behaviors. Smoking, poor diet, lack of exercise, etc. I addressed this in another comment elsewhere in the thread.
    - tylerhou 5y ago
      Wearing a mask reduces COVID transmission by ~70% [1]. Adding vaccination on top of that probably reduces transmission to ~5% percent (just a guess). These are almost free interventions. In contrast, heart disease and cancer are much more expensive to mitigate. Regular exercise reduces the incidence of some heart diseases for the average person by about ~50% (estimating from the graph) [2]. We have no cheap way of reducing cancer incidence (besides vaccines for some viruses that cause cancer) — for example, intervening in cases of substance addiction is expensive. So even if your comparison was correct (it's not), how is it relevant? Are you trying to argue that the government should compel people to completely alter their lifestyles before they should mandate masks or vaccines? That makes no sense, because 1) preventing cancer requires mandating vaccines and 2) the interventions are orders of magnitude more expensive. Or, are you trying to suggest that the deaths of 650,000 people (in the US) are insignificant because there are some aggregate diseases that kill more? And therefore, because we can't stop all death, it's pointless to try to even mitigate some death? [1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/masking-science-sars-cov2.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br... [2] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/01.CIR.0000048890.59383.8D https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/01.CIR.00000488...
- deleted 5y ago
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- hardwaregeek 5y ago
  If there was a vaccine that in one fell swoop (or rather two fell swoops) reduced the mortality rate of heart disease and cancer by 11x, I'd be shouting from the rooftops about it. Until then, let's stop with the false equivalencies.
awrglkeh 5y ago
Government is not fucking entropy. Government brought down the twin towers. Government funded covid.
hutzlibu 5y ago
And maybe do not forget the >360 000 dead civilians the war on terror has cost so far. Innocent bystanders, whose relatives now might feel a urge to join the real terrorists as the only means for them to get revenge, too. Endless cycle. "War on terror" is just a ugly concept and not one that seem to work. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/911-civilian-casualties-iraq-afghanistan-b1912816.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/911-civili... Oh and something that does not get too much attention, either: the taliban back then only refused to hand over Bin Laden without evidence presented, that he indeed was responsible, which at that time was not at all clear. And even till date, there never was a proper criminal investigation and court ruling about it all. Probably because of the Saudi connections.
- yyyk 5y ago
  >do not forget the >360 000 dead civilians the war on terror has cost so far. Most of them killed by the same people the US targeted. Funny how all responsibility is always given to the West even when the people doing the killing are their enemies. >the taliban back then only refused to hand over Bin Laden without evidence presented Also after he publicly confessed, not to mention his previous crimes. Their refusal had nothing to do with 'evidence'.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    >Most of them killed by the same people the US targeted. That just sounds crazy given that our first retaliation for 9/11 was Iraq. Which had nothing to do with 9/11, and further...no "WMDs".
    - yyyk 5y ago
      This doesn't remove responsibility from Al-Q's Iraqi associate - Al-Zarqawi - and his insane anti-everybody-who-isn't-Sunni-Muslim war which directly bred ISIS.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
deleted 5y ago
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systemvoltage 5y ago
> If watching this footage makes you want to stand up and do something, remember that Covid-19 is killing as many people in the US every two days as died in these attacks. Please. This is just going to create more toxic conversation and politics. Can we just focus on 9/11 victims and mourne peacefully? Rest of the top level comments here are sharing stories about their personal experience. I know you mean well but its the wrong place to bring this up.
- rexpop 5y ago
  No. 9/11 has been mourned to death. Its importance has been cynically inflated by political PR mercenaries. It's impossible, after all the bad-faith grandiosity, to observe this day in any way approaching respect for the dead. It's far too late for that. Or else, it's too soon. Maybe some day we can mourn the society we could have been that wouldn't have wrung all humanity from this event by exploiting it to the point of ludicrousness. No, we cannot focus on the victims, and we cannot mourn peacefully. That has been shown. That is not something of which we are capable, sorry. Meanwhile, there are other, real issues facing real, living human beings that we still have a chance to save, and whose lives have not been propagandized beyond farce. If we came to our senses today, we could focus on COVID victims, and mourn peacefully. They, we, still have a chance at that. 9/11 is best left alone, frankly. It's not the national tragedy it's been made out to be.
GongOfFour 5y ago
You people. You'll never understand how arrogant you are.
badsoftware 5y ago
Comparing an intentional attack on our nation to a global pandemic is insulting.
- nautilius 5y ago
  At least this time it really was an inside job, hundreds of thousands could still be alive.
- bsdnoob 5y ago
  Do you really think it is insulting considering the pandemic response has been really bad. The extent to which the whole event is politicized which directly caused deaths of thousands of people every day is just mind baffling. The misinformation spread deliberately by the top leaders and their follower just to strengthen their power can hardly be called as "unintentional".
- hnbad 5y ago
  Just imagine the US had declared a "War on Covid" and initiated a global mass vaccination campaign, rallying its allies to either be "with us or against us" in the fight against the pandemic, using the emergency powers to shift national production towards vaccines and PPE and distributing them throughout the nation and globally to developing countries and disparaging allies who were unwilling to follow suit. Heck, we might have even avoided Delta, let alone whatever the new one is called. Instead all we got was 60 words in 2001 followed by that lousy PATRIOT Act, two decades of drone strikes, several case studies in failed nation building, and then for Covid a president pushing ineffective treatments and ridiculing medical experts. Yes, it's insulting. But not because it's untrue but because it's hurtful.
shepherdjerred 5y ago
“9/11 wasn’t a big deal because so many people die of natural causes anyway”
mistermann 5y ago
> Take small steps to make the world a better place, helping your neighbors, and you can take a stand against entropy. A different way to think about it: what if individuals independently taking small steps in only sufficient to maintain the status quo? What if the true state of reality is that something larger is needed, and is possible, but will never come to be because we never even tried to find it?
- hnbad 5y ago
  Sure but building solidarity locally is the first step unless you have billions of dollars at your disposal. In times of crisis, it's the local network that will support you, not the federal government. As much as we've been told to embrace individualism over the past century, we're still a cooperative species and will default to cooperation when things turn bad. If you want to see how well top-down nation building works out, ask the Afghans. The reason the new government never took hold was that there was no political will to address corruption so the old system still endured in local bonds and power structures. You can't have structural reforms without addressing root causes.
  - mistermann 5y ago
    > Sure but building solidarity locally is the first step unless you have billions of dollars at your disposal. Only for a given subset of implementations (ones that require billions of dollars). Also: there are many billions of dollars looking for a place to be deployed, so it's not even a hard stop either, only a major difficulty. I suspect there are other barriers in the mix that are a bit harder to see though (for some, at least), and may also have very powerful active defence measures that are maintained and improved on an ongoing basis. > In times of crisis, it's the local network that will support you, not the federal government. As much as we've been told to embrace individualism over the past century, we're still a cooperative species and will default to cooperation when things turn bad. I very much agree, and this is only one of many ~base-capabilities that ship as defaults from the factory. Perhaps one could make use of these services if one could reverse engineer their behavior, and discover the various API's that must be called. > If you want to see how well top-down nation building works out, ask the Afghans. This is but one example (therefore, not scientific thinking - the best kind of thinking...or so "they" say). > The reason the new government never took hold was that there was no political will to address corruption so the old system still endured in local bonds and power structures. You can't have structural reforms without addressing root causes. 110% agree. So if one was to dig down into the infinitely complex causality, deeper and deeper, what plausibly most important root cause(s) might one find at the very lowest levels?
sumedh 5y ago
> helping your neighbors How can you help the people who dont want vaccines? Are you going to force them to have it?
- herbst 5y ago
  By still wearing a mask in enclosed places for example. We still have to work together, whatever anyone's opinion on vaxing is right now
  - sumedh 5y ago
    Why do you need to wear a mask when you are vaccinated?
    - herbst 5y ago
      Because you don't want to spread a potentially deadly sickness to other people who might not have the choice (for whatever mental or health reason) to Vax? If it were for me super markets should be mask only anyway. I hate old people and kids running around coughing at everything I maybe would have wanted to eat. Even before covid
      - sumedh 5y ago
        > potentially deadly sickness to other people who might not have the choice Wait, so have you been wearing masks before Covid to protect other people who cannot be vaccinated for flu and other respiratory diseases? If not then you are a hypocrite.
        herbst 5y ago
        Not as often as I will now, mostly because of the strange looks. And usually not only because of others. But yeah since I catched a bad case of regional flu in the Airport of Kuala Lumpur about 8 years ago I do wear masks in some situations. Especially when I feel sick but have to go out.

by ISL 5y ago

chitowneats 5y ago

Heart disease and cancer kill many more: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.html https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm... Beware the myopia that sensationalist news coverage tends to encourage. Never forget all the lives lost. Not just the 3000+ we lost on that horrible day (RIP), but the millions more around the world lost in the wake of the actions we chose, as a nation, to take in the "war on terror".

polytely 5y ago
Heart disease and cancer aren't contagious, so your actions on that front will only improve your own life, while being a bit more careful with covid will potentially prevent sickness in a lot of people.
- chitowneats 5y ago
  Social contagion is real. The U.S. has much higher rates of illness and death due to complications from obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, etc, than other developed countries, because of our shared culture of poor diet and sedentary lifestyle. You pass on your way of life to your children. Your friends and family reinforce each other's decisions every time you make a meal, make plans, etc. This stuff is all vitally important. And in fact, we would have lower rates of covid fatality if a larger percentage of our population took this seriously.
  - cornel_io 5y ago
    Lifestyle changes are really really hard for people to make, though I agree that it would be great if someone figured out a way to turn that tide. Luckily getting a shot is really really easy, so we do have a lot of influence over deaths from COVID.
    - chitowneats 5y ago
      I agree with the point you've made. The OP I was responding to in my first comment seemed to be suggesting something more extreme than, "get vaccinated, and then go live your life".
  - polytely 5y ago
    Fair point, but from a perspective of effort vs potential lives saved, self-quarantining when sick, avoiding large crowds & meeting in well ventilated spaces is probably easier than adopting a healthier lifestyle. But yeah, we should also live healthier!
    - chitowneats 5y ago
      Absolutely. Everyone should self-quarantine when sick. Is it your sense that large numbers of Americans aren't doing this? Anecdotally, I haven't seen a visibly sick person, outside of my immediate family, in a long, long time (needless to say, I don't work in a healthcare setting). Arguably, retrofitting every important building in the country to be well ventilated is a challenge on a similar scale to changing our deeply ingrained unhealthy cultural habits.
      - polytely 5y ago
        Not American (I'm in the Netherlands) so I wouldn't know, but looking at the graphs it seems like there are a lot of contagions happening. I was getting take out a couple of weeks ago and a woman brought her coughing child to the restaurant, which doesn't seem great, so I have noticed people being less alert now that a significant portion of people has been vaccinated here. >Arguably, retrofitting every important building in the country to be well ventilated is a challenge on a similar scale to changing our deeply ingrained unhealthy cultural habits. Yeah, I hadn't looked at it that way, but that's indeed a big task.
- tommymachine 5y ago
  So heart disease and cancer don't take up ICU beds?
  - polytely 5y ago
    Not what I wrote at all. But to respond to your point(?) covid patients that get sick enough to go to the ICU are there for a long time, while heart patients get better (or die) significantly faster, I recently heard an ICU doctor say on TV here (the Netherlands) that a covid ICU bed could help up to 8 heart patients, which makes it extra important to reduce the amount of covid cases.
    - tommymachine 5y ago
      Do heart disease and cancer exacerbate covid conditions, putting more people in icu (and for longer) than if they didn't have those comorbidities?
      - polytely 5y ago
        Yes of course, just make your point already, this is not a chat, try to write a complete post.
        tommymachine 5y ago
        So you're not winning the argument to take away my medical freedom, so now you want to tell me how I'm supposed to post on here? Addicted to tyranny much?
        polytely 5y ago
        >So you're not winning the argument to take away my medical freedom That wasn't what I was trying to do at all, and I can't really see how you could get that from my initial reply, so I don't think we are going to agree on anything here, have a nice day.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/07/obesity-is-contagious/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/07/obesity-is-co... Actually there has been a lot of research showing obesity as a social virus is contagious.
  - dillondoyle 5y ago
    Off topic, but is there any research that connects the also burgeoning science of gut biome/bacteria to this? Maybe a total crazy stretch, but if our gut bacteria can be 'infectious', and if those bacteria have an affect on weight, that'd be crazy.
- rkk3 5y ago
  >Heart disease and cancer aren't contagious, so your actions on that front will only improve your own life No, they inflict massive negative externalities on society through healthcare. > while being a bit more careful with covid will potentially prevent sickness in a lot of people. Classic Safety-ism. Even today, 20 years after 9/11 and we are still paying a ludicrous price for this logic.
  - nautilius 5y ago
    The ludicrous and horrible price - of wearing masks? You have a twisted logic, comparing terror attacks and follow-up global wars to the horrors you must be going through, masking up (or not) for the grocery store.
    - rkk3 5y ago
      Personal attacks aren't welcome on Hackernews. > The ludicrous and horrible price - of wearing masks? Of shutting down schools? of closing borders and separating families, which since you want to trivialize things I didn't bring up, a 3 year old in my family was separated from her mother for a year and a half. I didn't specify wearing masks.. but no one knows what the effect will be of kids wearing masks all day. They are at a time of critical development & learning to read faces, non verbally communicate etc. It may turn out to have a terrible price.
      - nautilius 5y ago
        Several hundred thousand people could have been saved in the US if these measures had been taken seriously, early enough, compared to other first world countries. Social distancing, closing schools, etc. were proven methods that showed the difference between cities with horrible losses and much better outcomes for the Spanish Flu. (Edit: Washington had his troops in the revolutionary war quarantined, separated, and inoculated when small pox became a problem. ) We knew all that. This weekend, we are mourning the tragical losses of a terror attack that cost the lives of 3000 innocent people. Because of people like you, who call proven measures against COVID ‘safety-isms’ we lose that many people every other day. If anything, we clearly didn’t do enough ‘safety-isms’.
- inkblotuniverse 5y ago
  Obesity is socially contagious, and causes higher rates of heart disease and cancer.
- TeeMassive 5y ago
  > Heart disease and cancer aren't contagious And? They still kill people and clog the healthcare systems around the world. Worse a lot of those are aggravated by obesity and smoking, all of which not only are voluntary actions but also generate profits. Also obesity is contagious: http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1646997,00.html http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1646997,0... Also average Covid death age is only 4 years lower than the pre-pandemic life expectancy in the US. And what is the biggest aggravating factors for Covid-19? Obesity and smoking.
tylerhou 5y ago
Heart disease and cancer are an aggregate of very many diseases — there are many types of heart diseases (stroke, cardiac arrest, coronary artery disease), and many types of cancers. COVID is a single disease that has killed many multiples more than a single heart disease or cancer.
- chitowneats 5y ago
  This is semantics. Taking just heart disease as an example, all of the types that you mentioned are heavily influenced by the same types of behaviors. Smoking, poor diet, lack of exercise, etc. I addressed this in another comment elsewhere in the thread.
  - tylerhou 5y ago
    Wearing a mask reduces COVID transmission by ~70% [1]. Adding vaccination on top of that probably reduces transmission to ~5% percent (just a guess). These are almost free interventions. In contrast, heart disease and cancer are much more expensive to mitigate. Regular exercise reduces the incidence of some heart diseases for the average person by about ~50% (estimating from the graph) [2]. We have no cheap way of reducing cancer incidence (besides vaccines for some viruses that cause cancer) — for example, intervening in cases of substance addiction is expensive. So even if your comparison was correct (it's not), how is it relevant? Are you trying to argue that the government should compel people to completely alter their lifestyles before they should mandate masks or vaccines? That makes no sense, because 1) preventing cancer requires mandating vaccines and 2) the interventions are orders of magnitude more expensive. Or, are you trying to suggest that the deaths of 650,000 people (in the US) are insignificant because there are some aggregate diseases that kill more? And therefore, because we can't stop all death, it's pointless to try to even mitigate some death? [1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/masking-science-sars-cov2.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br... [2] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/01.CIR.0000048890.59383.8D https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/01.CIR.00000488...
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hardwaregeek 5y ago
If there was a vaccine that in one fell swoop (or rather two fell swoops) reduced the mortality rate of heart disease and cancer by 11x, I'd be shouting from the rooftops about it. Until then, let's stop with the false equivalencies.

awrglkeh 5y ago

Government is not fucking entropy. Government brought down the twin towers. Government funded covid.

hutzlibu 5y ago

And maybe do not forget the >360 000 dead civilians the war on terror has cost so far. Innocent bystanders, whose relatives now might feel a urge to join the real terrorists as the only means for them to get revenge, too. Endless cycle. "War on terror" is just a ugly concept and not one that seem to work. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/911-civilian-casualties-iraq-afghanistan-b1912816.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/911-civili... Oh and something that does not get too much attention, either: the taliban back then only refused to hand over Bin Laden without evidence presented, that he indeed was responsible, which at that time was not at all clear. And even till date, there never was a proper criminal investigation and court ruling about it all. Probably because of the Saudi connections.

yyyk 5y ago
>do not forget the >360 000 dead civilians the war on terror has cost so far. Most of them killed by the same people the US targeted. Funny how all responsibility is always given to the West even when the people doing the killing are their enemies. >the taliban back then only refused to hand over Bin Laden without evidence presented Also after he publicly confessed, not to mention his previous crimes. Their refusal had nothing to do with 'evidence'.
- tyingq 5y ago
  >Most of them killed by the same people the US targeted. That just sounds crazy given that our first retaliation for 9/11 was Iraq. Which had nothing to do with 9/11, and further...no "WMDs".
  - yyyk 5y ago
    This doesn't remove responsibility from Al-Q's Iraqi associate - Al-Zarqawi - and his insane anti-everybody-who-isn't-Sunni-Muslim war which directly bred ISIS.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]

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systemvoltage 5y ago

> If watching this footage makes you want to stand up and do something, remember that Covid-19 is killing as many people in the US every two days as died in these attacks. Please. This is just going to create more toxic conversation and politics. Can we just focus on 9/11 victims and mourne peacefully? Rest of the top level comments here are sharing stories about their personal experience. I know you mean well but its the wrong place to bring this up.

rexpop 5y ago
No. 9/11 has been mourned to death. Its importance has been cynically inflated by political PR mercenaries. It's impossible, after all the bad-faith grandiosity, to observe this day in any way approaching respect for the dead. It's far too late for that. Or else, it's too soon. Maybe some day we can mourn the society we could have been that wouldn't have wrung all humanity from this event by exploiting it to the point of ludicrousness. No, we cannot focus on the victims, and we cannot mourn peacefully. That has been shown. That is not something of which we are capable, sorry. Meanwhile, there are other, real issues facing real, living human beings that we still have a chance to save, and whose lives have not been propagandized beyond farce. If we came to our senses today, we could focus on COVID victims, and mourn peacefully. They, we, still have a chance at that. 9/11 is best left alone, frankly. It's not the national tragedy it's been made out to be.

GongOfFour 5y ago

You people. You'll never understand how arrogant you are.

badsoftware 5y ago

Comparing an intentional attack on our nation to a global pandemic is insulting.

nautilius 5y ago
At least this time it really was an inside job, hundreds of thousands could still be alive.
bsdnoob 5y ago
Do you really think it is insulting considering the pandemic response has been really bad. The extent to which the whole event is politicized which directly caused deaths of thousands of people every day is just mind baffling. The misinformation spread deliberately by the top leaders and their follower just to strengthen their power can hardly be called as "unintentional".
hnbad 5y ago
Just imagine the US had declared a "War on Covid" and initiated a global mass vaccination campaign, rallying its allies to either be "with us or against us" in the fight against the pandemic, using the emergency powers to shift national production towards vaccines and PPE and distributing them throughout the nation and globally to developing countries and disparaging allies who were unwilling to follow suit. Heck, we might have even avoided Delta, let alone whatever the new one is called. Instead all we got was 60 words in 2001 followed by that lousy PATRIOT Act, two decades of drone strikes, several case studies in failed nation building, and then for Covid a president pushing ineffective treatments and ridiculing medical experts. Yes, it's insulting. But not because it's untrue but because it's hurtful.

shepherdjerred 5y ago

“9/11 wasn’t a big deal because so many people die of natural causes anyway”

mistermann 5y ago

> Take small steps to make the world a better place, helping your neighbors, and you can take a stand against entropy. A different way to think about it: what if individuals independently taking small steps in only sufficient to maintain the status quo? What if the true state of reality is that something larger is needed, and is possible, but will never come to be because we never even tried to find it?

hnbad 5y ago
Sure but building solidarity locally is the first step unless you have billions of dollars at your disposal. In times of crisis, it's the local network that will support you, not the federal government. As much as we've been told to embrace individualism over the past century, we're still a cooperative species and will default to cooperation when things turn bad. If you want to see how well top-down nation building works out, ask the Afghans. The reason the new government never took hold was that there was no political will to address corruption so the old system still endured in local bonds and power structures. You can't have structural reforms without addressing root causes.
- mistermann 5y ago
  > Sure but building solidarity locally is the first step unless you have billions of dollars at your disposal. Only for a given subset of implementations (ones that require billions of dollars). Also: there are many billions of dollars looking for a place to be deployed, so it's not even a hard stop either, only a major difficulty. I suspect there are other barriers in the mix that are a bit harder to see though (for some, at least), and may also have very powerful active defence measures that are maintained and improved on an ongoing basis. > In times of crisis, it's the local network that will support you, not the federal government. As much as we've been told to embrace individualism over the past century, we're still a cooperative species and will default to cooperation when things turn bad. I very much agree, and this is only one of many ~base-capabilities that ship as defaults from the factory. Perhaps one could make use of these services if one could reverse engineer their behavior, and discover the various API's that must be called. > If you want to see how well top-down nation building works out, ask the Afghans. This is but one example (therefore, not scientific thinking - the best kind of thinking...or so "they" say). > The reason the new government never took hold was that there was no political will to address corruption so the old system still endured in local bonds and power structures. You can't have structural reforms without addressing root causes. 110% agree. So if one was to dig down into the infinitely complex causality, deeper and deeper, what plausibly most important root cause(s) might one find at the very lowest levels?

sumedh 5y ago

> helping your neighbors How can you help the people who dont want vaccines? Are you going to force them to have it?

herbst 5y ago
By still wearing a mask in enclosed places for example. We still have to work together, whatever anyone's opinion on vaxing is right now
- sumedh 5y ago
  Why do you need to wear a mask when you are vaccinated?
  - herbst 5y ago
    Because you don't want to spread a potentially deadly sickness to other people who might not have the choice (for whatever mental or health reason) to Vax? If it were for me super markets should be mask only anyway. I hate old people and kids running around coughing at everything I maybe would have wanted to eat. Even before covid
    - sumedh 5y ago
      > potentially deadly sickness to other people who might not have the choice Wait, so have you been wearing masks before Covid to protect other people who cannot be vaccinated for flu and other respiratory diseases? If not then you are a hypocrite.
      - herbst 5y ago
        Not as often as I will now, mostly because of the strange looks. And usually not only because of others. But yeah since I catched a bad case of regional flu in the Airport of Kuala Lumpur about 8 years ago I do wear masks in some situations. Especially when I feel sick but have to go out.