National Post helpfully providing epilogues for the 9/11 attackers like the end of an 80s coming of age comedy
Nick Wright
@nickthewright.com
909 followers 311 following 436 posts
I make the webcomic Treading Ground (a raunchy romcom about broke people), videos, games, and burritos. I talk about Star Trek, lefty stuff, and old anime. he/they Comic! - treadingground.com NSFW! - patreon.com/treadingground
![Not unrelatedly, I am noticing that a lot of--oftentimes even well-intentioned--people are spending time trying to delineate exactly which historical referent best captures what's going on now, as if we have to pick only one. There is the now well-circulated meme that says: no, ICE isn't the Gestapo, it's actually American--it's slave catchers. But this is a kind of odd distinction: the Nazis were themselves influenced by the Americans (if you're curious read the excellent book by James Whitman, _Hitler's American Model_). Nazis came here and studied American legal systems and statutes ... and remarkably a group of "liberal" Nazis decided that they couldn't make German laws as *extreme* as American ones (and this "liberal" group in fact won the day; German laws weren't as extreme as many of ours). Equally, Nazi jurists and theorists like Carl Schmitt were deeply influenced by American notions of manifest destiny. So the Nazi and American contexts were already fused. The idea of foreign/domestic is already quite complex in this context. (And this is before we even speak of the many actual Nazis that existed here and the many people who materially supported Hitler and the regime).
We can complicate this picture more by noting that Nazism itself, even apart from these American influences, wasn't something that sprouted up out of thin air: it, too, had a(n experimental) history. Many of its barbaric practices and aims were developed and tested on colonial and imperial victims (as I have written elsewhere: there is a direct line from Shark Island concentration camp [called frequently simply "Death Island" where the Germans committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people] to the entire Nazi camp system). Thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire drew our attention to this already in the middle of the last century.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ybkylffhwhn2an2ic2lxh76k/bafkreifucubotcz54scclzmnpxlnv6x5olf2zb6ow5xufzdyqbflhuzcn4)
![[Rose is reclining on a couch in a coffee shop, looking up and to the left, bored]
Rose: So anyway, the only difference is his kids all have four fingers, while the other Na'vi only have three.
Rose: I'm not, like, an Avatar geneticist. But I'd expect a Human-Na'Vi hybrid to be, I don't know, shorter? Less blue?
[Camera pans out to show Aya sitting next to Rose on the couch, looking at her hand.]
Aya: Ok, sure, but...
Aya: Why four fingers?
Rose: Uh, because that's the standard number of fingers for a person to have?
[Aya, skeptical, holding up three fingers and a thumb with her right hand]
Aya: FOUR fingers?
Rose (laughing, holding up her hand): No! Four fingers and a thumb.
Aya (dour): A thumb IS a finger.
Rose: I guess? But you wouldn't say that like, MICKEY MOUSE has four fingers.
Rose: He's got three fingers. The thumb is just assumed.
Aya: Why would we assume that?
Aya: Some people don't have THUMBS!](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:rjaig2emvustaj2ulcwhgpxh/bafkreienrnb33mlo7c26kyinxvu2i53thfkknhurom7cqrhsdk4uhlpqja)
