I don’t know about 9/11, but I feel like the US has been creeping towards another Oklahoma City for some time now.
prolly more than one. Lots of nutters out there.
I think it definitely will, but it will probably be carried out by domestic terrorist Nazis er uh, I mean “white nationalists”
I get that 9/11 is a big cultural event for you guys, but you also have mass shootings like every other day…
9/11 killed more in one day than mass shootings have in the last 20+ years. https://www.statista.com/statistics/811504/mass-shooting-victims-in-the-united-states-by-fatalities-and-injuries/
Tangentially, Covid was a 9/11 per day or more for like 2 years. It’s around a couple 9/11s a week now.
That’s entirely the point. Instead of small problems that are consistent and easy to ignore, it was a singular event that’s much easier to focus on. That’s why so many politicians used it as an opportunity to consolidate power and enact draconian legal protections.
9/11 wasn’t just “bad thing happen” it was “big bad to distract from small bad”.
In Europe we’ve been ignoring the real issues with excuses for a long time. Now we see a lot of discontent and a political shift right. That’s not gonna solve anything, but it’s a symptom or result of not facing the problems we have.
A majority of Americans want stricter gun laws, and that’s been consistent for quite a few years.
We also have a dysfunctional political system that prevents popular ideas from getting anywhere, but we’re not really unique in that I suppose.
Yes we have a serious problem with that. I’m not sure what that has to do with a large threat like 9/11 though. We lost 3000 Americans in a day. We can discuss that without having to bring in every problem at once.
Gonna be civil unrest. I really don’t see a different outcome with the right wing screeching hatred 24/7.
Pretty broad question.
A massive terror attack? I consider that unlikely.
A generation-defining historical event? We had one in Covid.
A mass casualty event? Again, Covid.
An excuse to wage war on another country, remove American rights, consolidate government power, and enrich certain people? I think that’s quite possible. It worked extremely well for that purpose once.
(note I’m not one of those “9/11 was an inside job” conspiracy nuts, I just think there were some very smart, very greedy, and very evil people who seized the opportunity of 9/11 to effect the awful stuff)
at its peak (which lasted for months), covid killed more people daily than 9/11 did, and noone cared.
so the question is more about whether people blow up some highrise buildings that will cause chaos and despair.
Bush isn’t president anymore, and there’s already a reason to justify another two decade war.
In any case, theres domestic terrorism happening every day in the US including Trump’s Jan 6, and the twice a week school shootings.
I think it’s more likely that we will see smaller scale attacks by domestic terrorists, ranging from mass shootings to something on the scale of a Timothy McVeigh. I can also see a probability of a return to a 1960s/1970s level of political violence and assassinations.
I think those are more likely than a large scale attack from foreign terrorists.
I think we’ll have an environmental “9/11” moment fairly soon where a major American city gets flooded and the waters don’t recede and large parts of the city will need to migrate elsewhere. There will be a lot of handwringing, and news channels going, “How could this have happened?”, and stuff like that. Similar to Katrina I think, but it’ll affect more white people this time, so that’ll make it worse.
As for terrorist attacks, yeah that shit will keep happening, maybe not at the scale of planes crashing into stuff, but there will probably be significant, mass-casualty events I should think.
Maybe a natural disaster that causes civil unrest which triggers a domestic terrorism event.
We lose more than a 9/11’s worth of people every day still due to COVID. The presence of other factors that result in death in no way erases this amount of loss, and yet we’re so numb to this it almost feels like it isn’t happening anymore to most of us.
Unfortunately I think we’re all too desensitized from the last decade or so to care if anything does happen, but I genuinely hope I’m wrong. It’s not looking good, though.
Ignoring domestic terrorism, an outside attack to me seems most likely in terms of cyberattacks on weak infrastructure (utilities, signals, etc.)
I recently read a book by a retired agent about the effort against terrorism. If I remember correctly, terrorism has changed substantially since 9/11. The author described that terrorist nowadays are still organised more or less centrally but have a focus on smaller activities. I remember them describing them as “Nike terrorists” because of Niles slogan “just do it”. The smaller and more isolated activities are apparently much harder to detect and counter than massive attempts like 9/11
I sure fucking hope not.
You mean an event blown way out of proportion to justify draconian overreach? The Republicans trot one of those out literally every week.
Yes!
As someone who is not American, it’s so obvious that your shit is a bit fucked. Everyone is so deeply unhappy, it’s being channelled into political partisanship.
Honestly I don’t think there’s any way to get back on track without some kind of event that galvanises you.
If COVID didn’t galvanize us, what possibly could?? I really can’t think of anything short of a military attack directly on the homeland.
Probably a really good point.
I was thinking that a more imminent or physical threat would be “galvanising” but then, the way information gets all twisted around these days, I don’t think such an event really exists.
