Googled cause it raised the question for me - looks like even 2005 USA wasn’t quite this bloodthirsty - I wonder how America would respond to another Abu Ghraib today. Wasn’t able to find a poll of Americans on this current event, I may suck at googling or there may not be a high profile one.
ABC News on torture and various tortures, 2004
Ouch. From the third source, americans originally 65% supported “it’s worth it going to war with Iraq”.
In 2006, I think, a tv movie United 93 or whatever that damn plane was aired when I was at a friend’s house. I forget the exact argument but it started with me trying to say I thought it was bad the way we thought of people generally after 9/11 (sand n-word was a common phrase to hear until Obama in my neck of the woods, and not just from crackers) - again I don’t remember the actual word for word of it and I’m sure teenage me said everything the msot confrontational way because teenagers be like that, but what I do remember is ending at something like “That makes me ashamed to be an American”
CW: Abuse
spoiler
I was blacklisted, in the entire neighborhood, at school, at work, my damn probation officer heard about it – I was on probation because my step father beat the shit out of me and I got charged with assault, the police told him to do it because I tried to run away, guess why I was doing that … . anyway, I had a lot of extra bullshit in my last two highschool years because one time I said maybe Muslims are human.
I remember the Bush years - America lost its fucking mind. It was, without a doubt (and in my experience), worse than anything vis pure racism until Oct. 7. We lost our minds again. It’s all back. And my ass is keeping my head down this time cause. . there’s nothing else to be done.
CW: Dark thoughts, this made me spiral a bit, only read if you’re okay with that and you either have no comment or “yeah, sucks” or similar. Still, the idea someone might read and have that response makes it worth posting, feel a little better.
spoiler
I really don’t know what else to say there . . I wish I could do something. I live in BFE, almost everyone here is just awful, and the ones who aren’t are just as scared as I am. I don’t want to die a pointless, useless, death because I came back out of the closet (went in after Biden, stuff started going bad fast in reaction and I had to move again anyway) or I said Free Palestine to the wrong fascist. These people terrify me, I’ve seen what they will do, and I have nowhere else to go. Mum let me live in her barn when my landlord sold my place and I couldn’t make new rents and Walmart laid me off shortly after the eviction notice anyway. How do you fight a genocide if you can’t even be who you are? If you can barely keep yourself and your fuzzy friends fed? I don’t even have a bathroom or hot water or insulation. No orgs, no allies, just . . . America, in all its not-so-subtle evil. There’s a reason I love (old) Stephen King novels - small towns do be like that tho.
Things are bad.
edit: I do feel a little better an hour later after just having a little spiral, as a treat.
I’ve posted as well about how sickening the post 9/11 years were. It was a fucked up time if you were keeping tabs on things, even though not that much of it was hidden. People just ignored or accepted it. It became the background noise. It was like it was designed to make you feel insane if you had doubts, let alone voiced them.
It was up and down but that’s not even peak support, if you look at polls for about a year after 9/11, when Americans were peak bloodthirsty, it was over 70% support.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/4966/public-overwhelmingly-backs-bush-attacks-afghanistan.aspx
This one is mostly about Afghanistan (90% support for “military action” btw!) but asks about other countries that “the government believes are harboring terrorists” which polls at 78% support.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2002/01/22/americans-favor-force-in-iraq-somalia-sudan-and/
This one is a few months later and specifically asks about Iraq, 73% in support of war.
I wonder what the numbers would be like when the US was in the more open and brutal phase of its own indigenous genocide.
The Californian genocide was quite popular at the time, is the impression I had from studying it back in college. I frankly wouldn’t know how to really delve into that without access to a college library to do a more rigorous analysis than vibes from the books and articles I happened to read and as remembered 15 years later
If you oppose prosecuting rapists, you are a bad person.
Cool, this poll was in a university as well. Wonder what they teach in ethics class over there.
Are young people more or less reactionary than old people in Israel?
Can you pop into edit post and toggle the NSFW box?
Is it if I wish every single Isn’traeli a slow violent death?
