Memorial
Today is 9/11. Your Glorious Leader was in college when the towers fell. And initially, I found myself sympathetic to and supportive of the American response. These emotions dissipated quickly. I watch the United States use an attack by a non-state agent as a pretext to invade two different nations. As a young man, I was willing to grant the United States a certain amount of leeway on the invasion of Afghanistan, in so much as the Taliban were officially harboring Osama Bin Lade, and he had taken credit for the attacks. I doubted the wisdom of invading a nation known colloquially as: The Graveyard of Empires. But I was, at the time, willing to give tacit approval of their military action in Afghanistan. I would not grant that approval were the same to occur now, but I was a younger man then and my views were a young man’s views. I could not approve of their invasion of Iraq. I did not doubt that Saddam Hussein was a dictator, but this was clearly an excuse and not a reason.
I further could not approve of the USA PATRIOT Act or the so-called War on Terror, which seemed paper thin excuses to drag the United States further towards overt police state status. And watching the Republicans leap of the slippery slope into full far right jingoist militancy was disheartening. Reagan could only dream of the level of damage George W Bush and his accomplices achieved following 9/11. The United States is a much worse place in the wake of 9/11. And this was not due to 9/11, but the pre-fascist response to 9/11. And so 9/11 evokes in me a deep and conflicted ambivalence. I don’t know what to think, and that not knowing is a powerful and disquieting feeling.
Remember those who died as a result of 9/11.
- Casualties of the 9/11 attacks: 2,996 (“September 11th Fast Facts”. CNN. March 27, 2015. Archived from the original on June 3, 2019. Retrieved May 14, 2015.)
- First Responder Casualties: 1,400 (“The death toll from 9/11 continues to rise”. Archived from the original on December 22, 2014. Retrieved September 24, 2014.)
- United States military deaths in the Invasion of Afghanistan: 2,372 (“Defenselink Casualty Report”(PDF)),
- Civilian casualties in the Invasion of Afghanistan: 360,000 (Crawford, Neta (22 May 2015). “War-related Death, Injury, and Displacement in Afghanistan and Pakistan 2001–2014”(PDF). Costs of War. Brown University. Retrieved 22 May 2015.)
- Casualties of the Invasion of Iraq: 655,000 (per the 2006 Lancet study)
Remember all of them.
Quotes to Ponder
- “A cult is a religion with no political power.” – Tom Wolfe
- “I can not approve that monarchs desire to rule over the conscience of their subjects and take away from them their freedom of belief and religion.” – William of Orange
- “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” – Mark Twain
Interesting Role-Playing Games
I want to draw readers attention here to a pair of Role-playing games: Thousand Year Old Vampire, and Dialect. Thousand Year Old Vampire is a solo RPG where the player chronicles the experience of the eponymous thousand year old vampire. And Dialect is a collaborative game where players create an isolated community by constructing the community’s language. Both are dramatically different than the murder-hobo combat simulators that fill the bookshelves of most role-playing aficionados.
Professor Harbinger's School for Villains 
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