Had an IM with Biggest Guy, who’s in Brazil for 6 months:<\/p>\n
BiggestGuy:<\/b> actually, i had an interesting conversation with the cable guy<\/p>\n
\nBiggest Guy:<\/b> tried to talk about he thinks other countries are better places to live than the us and whatnot<\/p>\n
\nBiggest Guy:<\/b> sly little smile on his face, ‘im not trying to offend’<\/p>\n
\nBiggest Guy:<\/b> like i care<\/p>\n
\nme:<\/b> interesting…<\/p>\n
\nBiggest Guy:<\/b> and then i explained he would easily make 20 reas an hour in the us to do the work he does<\/p>\n
\nBiggest Guy:<\/b> he was much more thoughtful after that<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And it made me think of a piece in Vanity Fair<\/a> linked by democracyarsenal<\/a>. It’s about the growing crisis in Egypt as the state oppresses harder in response to it’s citizens’ discontent, and how America is seen through that prism.<\/p>\n
Read the whole article, but the quotes cited are telling. First:<\/p>\n
[Farouk’s] ultimate dream, though, was to win the American-visa lottery. Every year, the U.S. awards some 50,000 work visas around the world, and this was the fourth year in a row that Farouk was applying…<\/p>\n
\nFor some minutes, Farouk rhapsodized about what his life would become if he won the lottery, how it would answer all his dreams. “Because I know in America I would be a great success. Everything would be wonderful for me then.” After a short time, though, Farouk seemed to reflect on just how improbably small the odds were of this happening, and grew more solemn.<\/p>\n
\n“You remember my friend Ashraf?” he asked. “He didn’t tell you this, but last year he got an Iraqi visa. He wanted to join the jihad – as a fighter or as a shaheed [martyr], he didn’t care – but so many Egyptian men have gone there that they have closed the land routes. To go to Iraq now, you first have to fly to Syria, and he didn’t have the money for that.” <\/p>\n
\nIt sounded like some bad joke, a guy so down on his luck he couldn’t even get himself killed, but then Farouk continued in a soft voice.<\/p>\n
\n“Sometimes I think maybe I should do that. They talk about it a lot in the mosques, about all the young men going there. I think I’m too soft to be a fighter, that it’s not in my spirit, but I don’t know … If I could go and kill some Americans before I die, then maybe my life would have had some meaning.”<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The amazing cognitive dissonance here – between desiring the dream of America so badly and then, rejected, feeling that “killing some Americans before I die” is the thing that would give his life meaning – is mind-boggling. <\/p>\n
And in there is the seam of belief that we need to somehow exploit to split people away from adopting beliefs that will ultimately mean we will have to kill them.<\/p>\n
So…how do we do it? That’s the three-pipe problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Armed Liberal reflects on the love and hate that individual Muslims have for America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1232"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1232\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}