The truth is far more terrifying than any dirty bomb.

[kpete]

The true threat is not a super-villain skulking in the desert
Posted by Laurie Penny - 06 September 2011 17:51
In the ten years since 9/11, we have been starved of the meaning and context of global disaster.

............

Even ten years on, we refer to the events of that day in superstitious shorthand. When we say 9/11, everyone knows that we don't mean the mediocre mid-1990s boy band. Fear of a name, as Dumbledore teaches us, increases fear of the thing itself, and fear is just what leaders on both sides of the war on terror were counting on.

.........................
Ten years after 9/11, the world has moved on. Realisation is dawning that the great danger to western democracy was never a shadowy super-villain skulking in the desert, but inequality, alienation and economic collapse. The main threat to our collective way of life is not sudden and brutal,
but gradual and callous: it's the wearing away of everything that made ordinary life decent and bearable, the slow erosion of civil society into something mean and desperate. And that truth is far more terrifying than any dirty bomb.

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2011/09/desert-became-threat-world

[swilton]

1. Absolutely

These villains are just conjured up to make 1/2 of the poor fight the other half..

In the great socialist schism in the last part of the 19th century - Bernstein's critique of Marx focused on the notion that class divisions were diluted by 'nationalist' loyalties. Uber nationalism/militarism is the raison d'etre of our government as it is configured and it explains why our government as configured is unable to deal with the more critical dilemmas and crises of the late 20th/early 21st century: globalization that is eroding its very existence and power over corporations, global warming and reliance on fossil fuels as a source of energy; climate change.....

[bullwinkle428]

2. K&R. Dirty bombs sure make a great boogey-man, though, when

it comes to keeping the minds of many off of the real issues.