this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
1440 points (98.2% liked)
Microblog Memes
8719 readers
2447 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I joined the US military literally a month before 9/11 happened. The day I felt really old was the day we started getting new enlistees who weren't even born during 9/11. One of them told me they didn't understand why "ancient US history" was so important in our modern military climate.
This January, Biden officially declared an end to the "War on Terror" that Bush Jr. started, which was a response to 9/11. The way our military operates today is mostly thanks to America's response to 9/11; we evolved so much in the past 2 decades to keep up with a dangerous new decentralized threat to our nation. It's kind of a big deal.
While that response is probably very relevant to current US military doctrine, I feel compelled to mention that the "threat" was very centralized in Saudi Arabia, and that while its sad that many innocents died in 9/11, at no point during the last 22 years was an actual credible threat to america. W's lies and subsequent invasion of Iraq no doubt shaped the US military into the fedex-on-steroids that is is today's as well as destabilized the entire middle east (and maimed and killed countless people on both sides), but ultimately they were just that - lies. None of the countries the US has fought in since 2001 have ever been an actual threat to the nation.
Remember that sound bite people were being fed, and repeating all the time: I'd rather fight them over there than over here. Preposterous
It also assumes the same "them" - because of course the type of moron to share/believe this message thinks all brown people are a singular terroristic honogenate.
I think it specifically referred to al queda or Iraq or whoever but yeah. Besides random terror attacks the idea of pretty anyone being able to truly project power in any meaningful sense to require us to "fight them over here" presumably in the streets or whatever is just, well like I said, preposterous. Whoever or whatever "they" might be.
This also precludes that "fighting them over there" will not itself create an deep-seated hatred of the united states in countries with now-unstable governments, radicalizing more people to a point they would be capable of committing terrorism on US soil, not less.
What I mean to say is that if I'm an Iraqi who grew up with my country being ravaged by a war it had nothing to do with in the first place, I'm going to blame the united states.
Yeah people talked about how "there's a billion Muslims!" all the time, as if all of them were personally dedicated to serving as soldiers to invade the US. That's not hyperbole btw, that's literally what people believed.
Yes if a billion people want us dead, we’d be dead.
Last time I looked into it, it was around 1.5 billion worldwide.
I just checked again; estimates in 2020 were around 1.9 billion.
And yeah, it's silly to believe that that many people would be a monolith.
I feel you with my August 27, 2001 enlistment date. Thought I was getting easy college money instead I got a lifetime of mental problems from a war we shouldn’t have been in.
I feels you. Didn't get in until 2003, but that was in time to take part in Op Phantom Fury, and then do a 2nd tour when Anbar was getting ugly.
Awful lot of misery for a bunch of bullshit. Alls I have to show for it is knee and back problems, and occasional panic attacks if/when stuff looks like tracers; a nephew damn near gave me a heart attack playing with some broken fairy lights one time. Still not comfortable with fireworks or FPS shooters.