According to iTele there are now 118 dead.
Edit: Now it's up to 140. What a sad day :(
replies(5):
The knowledge that a network could carry out such a widespread and well-coordinated attack without being preempted, in a situation of maximum alert, will heavy on the minds of any French citizen regardless of whether victims were 118 or 119. Basically, the French security system has been revealed as completely ineffective. That is a huge problem.
Edit: no need to further downvote as parent has changed his statement. Thanks parent poster.
You can't even prevent them when not being a free society. Its not like terrorism only occurs in free societies.
Plan multi attentats: Sudden surge of multiple situations
Plan blanc (in Île de France): surge of unpredictable activity of a hospital
Plan rouge: when there are significant casualties in a small area
Edit: no need to further downvote as parent has changed his statement. Thanks parent poster.
As an aside, strong suveillance laws were voted earlier this year.
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
Bomb the hell out of the Syrians? Surely they have suffered enough.
Iraq III? Maybe this time.... maybe....
Send the ground troops into Saudi? Quatar?
Acknowledging that some of ISIS / Al-Qaeda gripes do have some merit, stop interfering in other countries affairs, stop propping up dictators because they are "our" dictator.
Something else?
Unfortunately for the Syrians, my money is on bomb the hell out of them, trying to limit the number of "collataral damage" of dead women and kids, but hey, not our fault.
And so we go round the merry go round again.
Terrorism doesn't need weaponry. The only deterrent would be to read people's minds, and you've probably watched Minority Report and other such dystopian scenarios. It's something that needs to be solved at the root, and TBF I don't believe it can be fixed.
The attacks are horrible and a security system which effectively prevents them would be just as horrible.
This problem won't be fixed without a major shift in paradigm on either side. Perhaps not in our lifetime but oh how nice it would be...
We terrorise you, you terrorise us. Only difference is we kill you in far greater numbers than you can ever dream of.
The war on terrorism will end when a new enemy can take it's place. The smart money is on China, but don't never count the Red Menace out, good outside bet they come good at the last minute.
Now obviously option 1 is probably the best approach, option 2 is the most likely, and option 4 is the one that is appealing in the wake of hundreds of innocent people dying.
The discussion needs to turn to how can people defend themselves. How 10/20/30 people trapped in a theater CAN overwhelm 3 attackers. How these people will not be willing to spare you no matter how cooperative you are or how sympathetic you are.
If you can't flight, fight.
Beyond that, there's not much more we can do.
The French intelligence and counter terrorism units are either not doing their best or these terrorist are getting much better at covering their tracks.
It's much more likely that the terrorists come from the frustrated youth born and raised in France, than some fresh immigrants.
Though fusion is a long way out, hypothetically, if we didn't have any reason to interfere and could just leave the Middle East to figure out its own problems, they wouldn't have a reason to see us as the enemy.
The events are most likely unrelated, but there is a habit to generalize. And escalation of that generalization is what is a concern to me.
On the street and in restaurants, that's another story.
I don't know who came up with "an eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth would lead to a world of the blind and toothless" but I believe it.
I'm sure it's something I'd struggle with when the hard choice arises, but I honestly believe I'd try to keep to it.
http://sofrep.com/44480/french-and-german-police-knew-paris-...
I work near rue Bichat and Le Petit Cambodge, a warm little restaurant in the 10e that my colleagues and I frequent, where people were tonight killed. The Bataclan is a well-known concert venue for metal bands, where I've seen several bands play live. Les Halles is at the center of Paris. Everyone who lives here has close connections to these areas; they took place very close to our everyday lives. Even those of us fortunate enough to know that our friends are safe are reeling from what has happened.
This is the first time since the Second World War that France has declared a state of emergency.
It's too early to come to any conclusions. It's too early to talk about immediate and long-term ramifications, about connections to the refugees, how these events will make France more 'communautariste'. That time will come, but it's too early right now.
It's 2am right now, Paris is mostly awake. We mourn those who lost their lives.
If it is a small group of just half a dozen people you should be pretty much invisible if you act a bit clever. Coordination can be done via throw away sim cards and personal meetings so you don't really need to communicate that much.
Should have been picked up?
You think secret services are omnipotent? That they can get a whiff of every conspiracy.
>The French intelligence and counter terrorism units are either dangerously incompetent or these terrorist are getting much better at covering their tracks.
Or, there is way, way more of them. Currently, thousands of migrants are entering Germany each day. No one is checking them, fingerprinting them, taking their photos or running those against databases.
You can find useful idiots decrying such treatment: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/refugee-crisi...
Doing so would require a lot of coercion, so no one is doing that.
My guess is that the Daeshi idiots slipped in a martyr cell or two. These guys got weapons from black market and executed a well-planned attack.
One important feature:
Closure of public places
Minister of the Interior or the prefects may
"order the temporary closure of theaters, pubs and meeting places" and
"meetings of nature to cause or maintain disorder"
The political establishment in France is in thrall to a radical, globalist agenda that seeks to increase its power by performing 'divide and conquer'.
A multicultural society has many more fault lines that can be exploited for political gain. One has only to look at how miserably the US is faring and how Americans are getting it good and hard from the donor class..
We don't know if the attackers had anything to with the flux of Syrian migrants moving across Europe now, but my guess would be: they had nothing to do with it.
There are about 5 million Muslims in France, which accounts for about 7 percent of France's total population. France has deep, long-standing and often troubled ties to several Muslim nations, notably Algeria. The French presence in Algeria lasted from 1830-1962.
During the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, France was targeted by terrorist attacks several times. One of those bombings EDIT: injured more than 100 people, which may be the number lost in the attacks today.
There are several basic facts that may help people understand why these attacks happen in France (I'm going to make some crude and unsympathetic generalizations that stem from the years I spent there):
* It's close to Middle Eastern and North African countries torn by conflict, notably Libya and Syria. These are training grounds for would-be attackers, many of whom originate in the west.
* Because of that, and of the fact that France rejoined NATO in 2009 and put itself firmly on the side of the US, it is also a proxy for the US, and will be targeted by those unhappy with American policies.
* It's racist. France has not dealt with the fact that people other than the French live on its soil. If you are the child of immigrants who were invited to France to help its post-War growth, you soon learn that a Muslim name will exclude you from many opportunities.
* Its economy is stagnant. France is no country for young men. They will face limited opportunities regardless of their ethnicity, unless they belong to the elite passing through the grandes écoles. This leads to a lot of frustration. When people cannot build a life in one direction, sometimes they are susceptible to morbid, violent ideologies.
* It's sloppy. I lived in France for 14 years, on either side of the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan. The French were really slow to put respectable security systems in place. CDG airport leaked like a sieve for years and I have no reason to believe that has changed.
Anyone who wants to know more about Islam in France should read Gilles Kepel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Kepel
He wrote a particularly good book in the 1980s called "The suburbs of Islam".
It could be, I suppose, that someone could simply hate western culture due to the acts of one nation, but that doesn't make it right. If you hate all Muslims because of the acts of few, you're most likely in the wrong. The same morality should apply to the people on the other side.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Terrorism_in_the_Sovi...
Their attempts to fight back will only escalate the situation, and the carnage will continue.
Edit: I'm not advocating that we not support Israel. I'm simply stating a hard truth regarding "why they hate us".
And there's little the state can do about THAT. they can't send war planes to the banlieus -- it's a lot easier to play tough and send warplanes somewhere else, ignoring the local problem of the ghethos.
And I don't have a proposal to make it all better either. It was an unsolvable problem already in france when I grew up there, and there's very little that can be done that hasn't been tried already.
Their problems are rooted in abuse of power.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/nov/11/...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/nov/12/...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/nov/13/...
Being a muslim in a foreign country is an increasingly difficult and isolating experience.
Not hard to get, but when you're talking about dozens of assault rifles, someone somewhere will know what is going where. If your intelligence people are worth their salt, of course.
> whether some of those people were let in under the guise of "refugees".
Yeah, because it's extremely effective to drop your people for months in a Turkish refugee camp, hoping that 1) they will survive in shocking conditions, 2) they will be processed and sent to France, or 3) they will jump on a dinghy and make it to the other side (when chances are that they will just sink), or 4) they will walk through half a dozen borders on high alert and across unsympathetic countries. Pure tactical genius.
More likely, these people had good passports and went through friendly airports smelling of roses. Once on-site, they were armed by existing networks that the French security apparatus still doesn't know how to infiltrate effectively. That's so much easier than leaving people to their own devices across two continents and hope they'll somehow manage to make it to la Gare du Nord at 10 o'clock on Friday morning.
Completely different.
And a weak one.
Killing civilians doesn't work, and it never has... terrorism never wins... unless your a huge nation like the USA, then it wins...
This is not a Breivik, or a "Shoe Bomber" Reid; this is '70s-style, organised, cross-border terrorism -- the sort of which "we" were supposed to be good at handling by now.
Sooner or later, we will have to come to the realization that terrorism cannot be eliminated by force. Stop destabilizing Arab countries, stop imperial interference in Northern Africa, and perhaps we'll see an end to this nonsense.
Cross border travel within the EU is like moving between states in the US, easy to miss.
For those curious about 2005 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_French_riots#State_of_eme...
Edit: I was wrong, the President said the borders were closed, but then clarified that they weren't.
My point is that to expect security forces to stop such attacks is reasonable up to a point. Escelation on one side builds escelation on the other and eventually its becomes an established norm. The problem Europe has is real, and difficult, tragic.
My heart is with those in Paris, France and Europe . I cannot sleep.
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/sleepwalking-toward-armag...
The other complicating factor is that not-intervening will mean sitting on our hands while civilian populations get badly treated by their governments.
What to do? what to do? I don't know the answer.
But that is not the point. Targeting civilians for political purposes is not an act of insanity, but it is an unacceptable means, no matter the ends.
(Not saying that the ends are good in this case, nor the opposite. It just really doesn't matter.)
You don't like your local police officer, call him terrorist and see the world's most expensive bludgeon deal with him. Don't want to deal with rebellious village? Tell Americans they are terrorists.
This particular operation is either ISIS-conducted or ISIS-oriented vigilanteism; whichever it is, backing down in Syria will only embolden them. (Or rather, embolden those like them; I don't imagine that very many of the specific attackers here are going to have particularly many opportunities to do this again in the future.)
ISIS is specifically out for either world empire or apocalyptic defeat (see http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi... ); tactical concessions will work about as well as they did with the Nazis and the Communists -- or even less well than that, since neither Naziism nor Communism believed that success was a sign that Divine Providence was smiling on them.
If you know the attacks were carried out by Muslims, there's no reason to assume these attacks were carried out by refugees.
No doubt there are other factors involved, but to deny this key enabling factor which makes suicide terrorism an eminently rational thing to do is laughable and makes you blind to an important and maybe even the most important strategy against religious terrorism: education that sheds doubt on the literal interpretation of holy books. When you have even 1% of doubt that this is what God wants you to do, you may not be so inclined to blow yourself up.
I'm fully aware that this is a very unpopular observation to make, but ask yourself not whether it would be nice if this were false, but whether it is actually true or false. Wishful thinking does not get us anywhere.
You forget the fact that the communication channel is always being monitored, but in this sad case, nothing was caught. Someone has already smuggled the weapons in before hand, just like how the bomb was able to made it to the plane early this month. Someone must have been tipped and bought the weapons from possibly local gangs and bam...
Feel free to suggest improvements in the comments and/or request other relevant documents to be translated.
[edit: source France24; http://mashable.com/2015/11/13/france-border-airlines-flight... . Hollande did refer to 'fermeture des frontières' which is confusing https://twitter.com/Elysee/status/665314066106159104 ]
Our dependence on foreign oil is no longer an excuse for our meddling in the Middle East.
Edit: Why downvotes? Idea of communism does not propose violence, Nazis and ISIS on the other hand do.
42% of young Muslims in France believe suicide bombings are justified (35% overall).
http://www.pewresearch.org/files/old-assets/pdf/muslim-ameri...
We'd have to make more electric cars and find a way to make them affordable to replace gas powered cars. Have electric car conversion kits to replace the engine and take out the gas tank and replace it with batteries. You got used gas powered cars as low as $500 and owners that can't afford electric cars so you have to do a government program for them to subsidize the conversion.
Getting off fossil fuels will help fight climate change as well. So it is a win-win.
I'd hope for the former but I fear it will be the latter.
42% of young Muslims in France believe suicide bombings are justified (35% overall).
http://www.pewresearch.org/files/old-assets/pdf/muslim-ameri...
We'll never be able to stop those that abuse religions and causes for political gain, but we can starve their number of "soldiers" by not giving impressionable people more reasons to hate a country.
What the hell is wrong with people, suggesting guns as a solution to unpredictable violent situations where guns wouldn't make any difference.
You arm citizens, now what? Shoot anyone that looks mildly suspicious? Hear a bomb go off, you take out your gun then scare the shit out of people surrounding you, then get shot by somebody else that thinks you're part of the bombing?
[1] http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/calais-migrant-camp-...
A fairly large number of people die from influenza every year, but we don't have a mass surveillance dragnet to try and isolate flu vectors, for good reason. We do, however, have a fairly robust vaccination system which is a sensible precaution to take.
...or Maoism "struggle sessions" which resulted in 2 million deaths [1]
...or just read about mass killings in communist regimes[2]. Clearly communist governments have mass killed a lot of people.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...
If you control for these gangland shootings, the per capita rate in the U.S. is about the same as Western Europe and Canada.
The U.S. has a socio-economic problem in the ghetto areas, not a gun problem per se, unless you want to argue that it's too easy for gangbangers to obtain guns.
Law abiding citizens with guns aren't doing most of the shootings. Suicides, that's a different story.
All madness has its own logic.
I want a raise so I terrorize my boss until he gives me one is a logic, but it is not a rational approach.
Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
Which is why (in my understanding) ISIS does not do attacks on foreign soil. Their idea is to re-establish a caliphate (ei Islamic empire, which existed from around the time of Mohamed for centuries). ISIS would probably be okay with those that cannot join the jihad in Syria conducting a terrorist attack on their home turf, but would not actively plan one.
All I'm saying is I would not be surprised if this isn't specifically ISIS.
I saw this happen with the London bombings. A colleague was almost in tears because her son lived in London and she couldn't contact him on the phone. It turned out he was fine, as approximately everybody else in the city was too.
The real sad thing is that it puts a lot of other people in the wrong sort of focus, all the people who ARE integrated, who made the efforts, who overcame the hurdles of segregation and racism; these are the 'visible' people who'll get in trouble in the next few weeks/months in the daily lives, and perhaps make them wonder if it was such a good idea to identify and 'join' a population that is just angry and looking for a soft target.
I believe the solution is to look inward (as I've already, "do no harm"), rather than to condemn outwards.
And yes, I'm willing to concede the naiveté of my viewpoint.
In the 70s, European communist terrorism was widespread because of support from the Soviet Union. Now, European islamist terrorism is widespread because of support from the middle east. I'm aware that the CIA et al. have been doing exactly the same thing, but it's just a sad pattern.
Being a police state is one thing; being an _effective_ police state is something else, much harder (at least in the pre-computer era). In the Soviet case, it didn't help that they didn't really care much about crime...
You don't even have to imply that they are intentionally up to no good.
Groups of young men without possibilities of pairing off with young women are far more prone to crime and violence.
Nevermind refugees. People everywhere are much more dangerous than any terrorists. Somehow we don't like the idea of banning everyone from everywhere so we feel justified in judging one group as more dangerous than another to give us a sense of safety.
We've closed this thread to noob accounts because of trolls. If you've got a new account and want to comment here, feel free to email hn@ycombinator.com.
Those attacks done "in the name of islam" create islamophobic reactions from people. Media spreads this islamophobia further, to people who just trust whatever they see on TV. The climate grows to marginalize muslims further. The ones closest to the edge, who were surrounded by violence in the past (war climates) and are now surrounded by hatred from the country they live in, end up knowing only violence and seeking to be understood by their own violence.
The cycle of terrorism. We enable it. What can you do once you understand it? Tell other people? You'll be silenced. You'd get shit on on facebook. Attacked on twitter. Downvoted on reddit. HN is still a sane place but what % of the population does that really represent? Can it even make a change? And it's not like you wouldn't ever get downvoted here. There's a lot of people who believe in the direct "more immigrants = more terrorists" idiocy.
Today is such a fucking depressing day. Having to worry about my sister, my brother, my guild mates and on top of that seeing the attackers get exactly what they want: more fear. More knee-jerk reactions.
Let it fucking end...
Pretty much all the world powers have vested interests in Syria. Russia has started to intervene in Syria very recently. NATO is there from the beginning. There is Iran, Turkey, Saudis, Israel, you name it.
There was supposed to be a G20 event tomorrow (will probably get postponed) and the hot topic was supposed to be Syria. What happened a few hours ago is just diplomacy played with blood.
If you're going to restrict speech, restrict all mentions of religion, not just the ones that contradict your preconceived notion.
You didn't study your history, comrade! Communist orthodoxy believed in a historical inevitability that overlapped very closely with a sort of man-made Divine Providence. The Nazis had their own set of religious and spiritual motivations, their racial destiny and so on.
They differed from Abrahamic religions in the sense that they expected "victory" in this world and in their time, as opposed to vague posthumous compensations and end-of-times prophecies; but they did believe in a "greater power" manifesting itself in their successful deeds.
> backing down in Syria will only embolden them.
That's a false dichotomy. The problems in Syria won't go away with bombs, and it was manifestly stupid for Hollande to join the party willy-nilly, especially after having experienced first-hand the inefficiency of his security apparatus. What is needed is a real agreement between the real power brokers (Turkey, Saudi, Russia, Iran) to cut off the crazies for good. We need hard diplomacy, not hard policies.
'Eagles of Death Metal' is not a death metal band.
What they do play is eclectic and hard to label as anything more specific than "rock", but doesn't fit even a very inclusive definition of metal. See: https://www.youtube.com/user/EaglesDeathMetalVEVO/videos
0: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/salafismus-als-jugendkult...
> on top of the estimated 20 million Soviet troops and civilians who perished in the Second World War
What does it have to do with Stalin? It was a war and people perish during a War.
> estimated that the death toll directly attributable to Stalin’s rule amounted to some 20 million lives
Just think about it, Stalin was in power for 30 years, so he had to "directly attribute" to a death of 2000 people every single day? Sounds quite bizarre to me. No official data of the 20Mln of "dead by Stalin's attributing", if you want to down vote me - at least show me official data.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#Calculating_the_...
[2] - http://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/sep/12/highereduca...
What happened today was not "civil unrest".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior
It's cool that the twitter user in Australia has a message of sympathy. But if you urgently need a safe place to stay in Paris, and you can't find the people making that offer, in a place meant for that offer, because the non-parisians are making too much noise, then that's a problem.
114 and still rising at the Bataclan theater
19 at Le Belle Equipe bar
14 at the Cambodian restaurant
4 in the area of the Avenue de la Republique
4 outside the Stade de France (remarkably low death toll here given that there were two suicide bombers there)To avoid having to endure the consequences of your own actions. For people with nothing to lose, suicide attacks are actually the most risk-averse choice: regardless of the possible existence of an afterworld, you're certain to escape punishment in this world. Look at Columbine-style attacks - no religion there, just semi-rational choices.
People don't blow themselves up because a book or a preacher tells them so; they do it because they are fed up with living shitty lives (either in material or spiritual terms). That is what education should bring them: the consciousness that there is always something worth living for. At that point, whether god exists or not, it doesn't matter.
> They differed from Abrahamic religions in the sense that they expected "victory" in this world and in their time, as opposed to vague posthumous compensations and end-of-times prophecies; but they did believe in a "greater power" manifesting itself in their successful deeds.
Good point; I forgot about the historical-determinist side of Communism. I'm more familiar with the Nazis, who believed in an empty, Providence-less cosmos that was more or less Lovecraftian (and who accordingly made themselves a pretty convincing Cthulhu) -- see _Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning_ for the details.
> That's a false dichotomy. The problems in Syria won't go away with bombs, and it was manifestly stupid for Hollande to join the party willy-nilly, especially after having experienced first-hand the inefficiency of his security apparatus. What is needed is a real agreement between the real power brokers (Turkey, Saudi, Russia, Iran) to cut off the crazies for good. We need hard diplomacy, not hard policies.
Surely both at once wouldn't hurt. We need concerted ground action to defeat ISIS -- and in particular, we need Turkey to decide once and for all which side they're on -- but I don't think it's a bad idea to present a united front; I _do_ think that it's a bad idea to imagine that making concessions will inspire fewer lone wolves and opportunists, rather than more.
If there's any lesson from the past 15 years, it is this: state engineering does not work. Period. You cannot control it. You don't "allow" anything. You cannot stop anything. The forces are beyond your control.
Americans and Europeans have to step out of the colonial mindset of trying to control the world. Then we'll have peace.
I think that the level of HN is rare online but offline things are much better (at least, in my experience).
> And it's not like you wouldn't ever get downvoted here. There's a lot of people who believe in the direct "more immigrants = more terrorists" idiocy.
So talk to them and stand your ground. Sure there will always be jerks but don't let that stop you from trying and who cares about the occasional downvote.
> Let it fucking end...
Yes, please. But I fear that won't happen in my lifetime, maybe in yours depending on your age. This took decades to fuck up it will take decades to restore and a completely different approach.
Frankly, I suspect that at least part of this comes from the aversion of highly educated and rich people to the idea that somebody much like them in those respects could do such a thing, and that it must be a poor lowly educated person doing it.
Anyone who's upset by this and doesn't have a personal connection to the victims is not being rational. They should be upset by all other killings - the vast majority which don't get into the international news, let along HN. Those are far more prevalent, and perhaps easier to prevent because they're done by amatures.
Remember, Stalin didn't go in for executions; he preferred slave labor. Deaths in the GULAG -- which could be as high as in the non-death-camp Nazi concentration camps, or higher -- should be counted as well as executions. (Remember how part of Stalin's price for peace with Japan was 300,000 Japanese slaves, none of whom ever returned to Japan after the war.)
Also, some deaths in the war should be attributed to Stalin -- at the very least, deaths in the punishment brigades. If you force someone to march through a minefield, and he hits a mine and dies, it's your fault.
More people have been killed in pragmatic endeavours, like colonialism, and land grab/turf wars, than from "utopias".
This includes smaller scale utopias -- far less innocent people have been killed by ...hippies than by policemen.
At least, that's what the sorta person who bunches together ISIS, Nazis, and Communists has in mind. He fails to realize that Capitalism is just another utopian philosophy that will fail just like the others. It is also as violent as the others, even if its violence is covert.
We meddle a lot less overall in the Middle East the last 8 years than the prior 8, right? If we don't then Russia steps up to do it themselves (for better or worse US has no leadership there anymore so maybe why not Russia give it a shot?)
In the end I personally don't believe the massacre is in any way "caused" by US or other foreign involvement in the Middle East. This is not the first caliphate, nor will it be the last, and it's not about righting wrongs or a struggle for independence, it's literally about inflicting mass casualties on the infidels in as an atrocious and terrifying (i.e beheadings) manor as possible.
Over 100 murdered is a mind boggling atrocity but also a terrible security failure. Not just in failing to catch and prevent it, but failure to take out the shooters at the concert sooner. (I haven't read a detailed account of how the shooters were stopped if there is one)
The general consensus is that Germany under Hitler killed around 11 million noncombatants. The USSR under Stalin killed at least 20 million, with some estimates ranging much higher.
Many people in the west still say that Hitler was worse because he tried to exterminate entire ethnic groups, where Stalin mostly killed anyone that he thought might get in his way. I think they were both monsters, and there's no profit in trying to measure which one was worse.
Stalin did help defeat the Nazis. Don't make the mistake of thinking that makes him the good guy. In stories, the villain's enemy is always a hero, but in real life, villains fight other villains all the time.
Heck, there were 2 world wars in which communists countries were only involved in the second, and only on the allies side. How many people were killed there, including civilians?
And let's not get started in the 18th-19th century history, before marxism was even invented...
War, murder and dictatorship are what they are -- they don't just belong to one single side of the political spectrum.
In Indonesia, for one example, nearly a million communist sympathizers were executed by right wingers (as were in Pinochet's Chile and elsewhere). This is an interesting watch:
It is the central dynamic that perpetuates all this violence. Someone from Group A kills dozens or hundreds of Group B, which uses the violence as an excuse to oppress thousands of Group A, which uses the oppression as an excuse to kill more of Group B, and this goes on and on for decades long after everyone's forgotten who "started" it or why, because both sides have convinced themselves, against all logic and evidence of history, that if they just hurt the other guys enough they'll give up and be nice.
It is never going to end until we find a way to break the cycle. The only way I can think of to contribute is to be a voice condemning the violent bigots on both sides, and trying to separate them from the millions of innocents that they claim to represent. It's not much. It probably isn't anything at all. But what else can I do?
Really we need to ban guns from shooters. But there's no way to identify them without catching a lot of harmless people up in the same net. Even poor black gang members can be harmless.
'Chatter' is a sign of stuff not working as expected, if terrorists are half as intelligent as I give them credit for they'll know to stay off the phone and off the internet. You'd have a bigger chance locating them by the absence of traffic than by traffic assuming they are not as dumb as we'd like them to be.
Incidentally, and violating my own rule, that's why I don't believe in the whole 'snooping makes us safer' rubbish. If anything it just increases the size of the haystack for a constant number of needles.
"Can Suicide Bombing of Civilian Targets to Defend Islam be Justified?" (p. 53)
Not a lot of wiggle room in that one. Thought perhaps the question might've been a bit more vague or general. However, it states specifically "civilians". Really...? ...42%? That's astonishing.
If god is great and non-believers are bad and "god" says it's righteous and just to punish the non-believers, then naturally doing "god's work" is doing no harm?
Actually the truth is even messier... most of these young men committing atrocities are merely indoctrinated pawns who know very little of their own religion and instead defer to their "emir."
This ideological poison is being propagated by those individuals, with power/financial interests back in the middle east. I think the individual committing the act believes they are doing good, and the individual who convinced them to do it is too morally corrupted & detached to care about ideals such as "civilian life."
There are far more atrocities that occur in this world than there are psychopaths in the general population.
If we hope to make any progress toward peace, I think we need to truly understand the reasons why and how weak, impressionable minds with poor cultural integration can be manipulated to commit such atrocities.
It's easy to label these individuals as determined, unreachable psychopaths (particularly out of fear) but the sad truth is, most extremism is borne not of evil but of weakness. A select few manipulate this weakness to convince otherwise insignificant people, often with desires of grandeur to commit unthinkable acts. This power of perspective becomes increasingly obvious as you realize most problems with immigrants in European countries occur in the 2nd and 3rd generations -- those who have seen the true horrors of war first hand are not so easily fooled.
The hard truth is: if society doesn't provide susceptible minds with alternatives first, a small but steady % will be at the mercy of whomever comes along promising "answers."
That's a war, Nazi Germany attacked USSR, people had to fight them, Stalin is not a field officer to force solders to march through a minefield, people die in a war, I don't think you are right here equating people who died fighting for their country with those who were executed for whatever reason.
So these indoctrinated individuals don't really see it as too horrendous of a crime to kill someone.
That's a caricature. A lot of the perpetrators, like in 9/11, are highly educated and even westernized people, not some backwater goat herders believing such BS.
They could be attracted to those tactics as a mean of compensating for personal issues etc (same way weirdos shoots up a school or a cinema elsewhere), but the political element is involved too.
The fundamendalist is not someone who believes naively such things (most devout village folks are peaceful and pragmatic and could not care less), but rather someone who "goes back" into believing such things (and even has self-doubt he tries to shake by action etc).
Soviets did have some organized crime, but they were well, Russians.
GDR, Czechoslovakia, etc, somewhat less inept countries had very little crime and no organized crime to speak of.
You're just perpetuating the nonsense. Yes, you're against it, but your comment is little more than the sentiment you're against, plus a statement of opposition.
That's what confuses me the most about these attacks. Many people have legitimate grievances against NATO forces, but how does that lead to shooting random Parisians? It's so wasteful and counterproductive.
My dad is a WW2 veteran. He fought on the front lines of Normandy Beach, The Battle of France, and Liege, among other places like the Battle of the Bulge.
He was housed in France by people there who welcomed and supported him. He was assisted by the underground resistance. He has an enormous amount of love for the French people that he helped liberate and who helped liberate themselves.
There was a family that took him in somewhere in the French countryside and fed him the first meal he'd had in weeks that wasn't out of a can. They cooked food, washed his clothes, and gave him some wine and a decent bed to sleep on.
My dad is 96 now, and about 10 years ago the granddaughter of that family tracked him down and sent him a letter telling him how she had always heard about this man who came there to help them. He has treasured this person ever since and stayed in touch with her.
When I talked to him on the phone tonight, he was in tears about what has happened in that country he fought so hard to protect so many years ago and the people who are experiencing what you are going through.
Best wishes to you and yours. From Texas and New York, Vive la France.
A reminder than the free societies must remain and and continue to defend themselves despite such terror attacks. It is important that politicians don't cave into the political goals that these terrorists might have.
If 1,000,000 people try to figure out whether the 1 person they know in a city of 2,000,000 are ok within a very short time-frame then the phone network will stop functioning.
A place to post a simple 'I'm ok' will cut down tremendously on the number of calls that will then still need to be made. Unfortunately (1) not everybody has facebook and (2) a 'no show' will now certainly lead to a phonecall when before it would be assumed the person was ok so I'm not sure whether it helps or not but the basic idea is probably a good one. It would be even better if this functionality was available outside of having a facebook account.
A college classmate on 9/11 died in the Windows of the World restaurant. Her death may be a statistic to you, but it is not to me.
I remember trying to call friends in NYC that day, all the exchanges were overloaded. I'm grateful that we now have ways to connect without worrying about possibly preventing emergency calls from going through.
But it's completely wrong to conclude that the right thing to do is therefore nothing. As we learn more about who, what, why, and how this happened the first goal is to hunt down, arrest, put on trial, and if found guilty imprison for the rest of their lives (or execute) anyone who contributed to this attack. Every angle must be criticized to understand what effective countermeasures could have been in place to detect, disrupt, or kill the attackers sooner. There should be a tremendous outpouring of support for all the people and families impacted.
The most sickening is the celebratory response from various camps, and I wonder if that's happening anywhere inside France.
Particularly if this turns out to be a home brew attack, the Islamic communities bear a tremendous responsibility, not for the attack, but going forward, in significantly strengthening and mobilizing all their resources towards preaching nonviolent protest and leading the efforts to root out radicalized groups in the community. Where are the Islamic MLKs to rally the community against radicalization? The fear-and hate-fueled backlash against French Muslims may only be stemmed by a disproportionate response against the violence from within the communities.
And just a pedantic point, we actually do spend a reasonable sum on detecting flu trends by "surveillance" of hospital visits and even monitoring Google searches to identify and better respond to possible outbreaks.
Yeah, that's bad situation.
My second statement is coherent with this view: what education should give people is such a rooting. This is not necessarily what it does currently give them. In fact, a lot of academic tracks do their best to kill off any ounce of sentimentalism in one's heart. If it's really "all about data", killing a few hundreds "for the greater good of billions" doesn't look like such a terrible choice. This is something we really should keep in mind.
In my opinion, this is the most dangerous statement in this thread. Saying the actions of these people is irrational loses any ability to understand why they're doing what they're doing and how we can stop them. It turns them into a faceless enemy who are doing things because of hate, which is easy and makes my ego feel better, but doesn't really explain their actions or the actions of anyone. Nobody thinks they're the bad guy of their own story.
There is nothing more rational than terrorizing civilians to achieve a goal. It is the logical conclusion of rationality.
Particularly re. phones / internet, it only takes one mistake to link a phone number used for nefarious activities with your identity.
(I would expect them to use phones, at least - they have to coordinate somehow.)
And he ignores that over-complicated (in gwern's view) cost over a trillion dollars in US response, from NSA to TSA to Afghan and Iraq war.
Yes, they will make those comments. They always do, even if nothing is happening.
To quote from the page: 'In videos released during the course of the Syrian Civil War, Free Syrian Army, Al-Nusra Front, other rebel and Islamist groups and ISIL are heard shouting "Takbir" and "Allahu Akbar"'
Some of those are Islamist groups, some are not.
Also, we don't know if the perpetrators were French or not, so what 42% of young French Muslims believe is not relevant at this point. Even if it was relevant, it would be hard to draw any conclusions from it. In the same link you provide, it seems that over 75% of French Muslims are concerned about the rise of Islamic Extremism.
It's like being mugged for your wallet and then when someone comes to help you mug them for their wallet, then you wonder why no one wants to help you.
So that's one. And one overseen and enforced by an autocrat.
My takeaway from it would be "why does one-third of this population support this heinous thing?" but it's impossible to have that conversation with people like you piping in and asserting that any interpretation of data that could offend anyone's sensibilities, is off limits.
What's your reference here? I'd be quite shocked if people "had no problem" with such actions; "felt they were justified" is entirely believable however.
There was a lot of mess already with the current immigration crisis. Now add that attack, and like you said, it's a powder keg, except I'm afraid that this shooting may have just lit the fuse. People will be connecting those two issues. They already are, judging from things that start popping up on my Facebook feed.
I fear the overreaction coming, of both citizens and governments. I fear the Europe will split, or start a war with someone, or draconian security measures will be introduced by the government. Charlie Hebdo was symbolic. This was a real terror strike. I just hope that sanity prevails and we won't amplify the damage further.
But it doesn't change the fact that general population will say these things, and it's them, not HN crowd, that shapes policy. I am seriously, true to God, afraid of what's going to happen now - afraid of overreaction of people and governments.
Definition from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_eng...:
"An insinuation or allegation about someone that is likely to insult them or damage their reputation"
Saying that "Islam soils the reputation of islam" is a slur by any reasonable interpretation. The link provided some information but the first sentence did nothing to that effect and was simply inflammatory.
Terrorists are by definition extremists. They want to upset the status quo to force people to take sides and create a situation where they feel they, who are righteous, have a better chance of being successful or at least relevant. Whether that is a race war, holy war or revolution. The killing itself isn't particularly relevant until your fighting over land and then normally in form of ethnic cleansing.
The analysis you linked misses a the point of e.g. the terrorist plot in Norway. It's wasn't just about killing people, he deliberately tried to effect politics by killing a generation of people he disagreed with. He also believed that it was part of and going to lead to a larger conflict.
Maybe you choose your surroundings better, but one of the reasons I like hanging out here is because I can experience some semblance of sanity that, from my point of view, GenPop is lacking. I know few people who try to understand what's going on, but rest just repeat whatever they read on the news.
> Yes, please. But I fear that won't happen in my lifetime, maybe in yours depending on your age. This took decades to fuck up it will take decades to restore and a completely different approach.
Yes, please. But let it please not end in the collapse of what we've achieved as humanity. That's what I'm afraid the most - that at some point those tensions will explode and bring down civilization with them. The world is a fucked up place, but we're at the point in history in which we must fix it, not reboot it.
I don't know many Muslims and it's just too easy to let bigoted remarks go, but this attack feels like it could really bring out the worst in reactionary people. So stay safe and know at least one person has your back.
Without security, talking about freedom is meaningless.
If your goal is to integrate Muslims living in Western nations into Western society, what is going on here is not helping to achieve it.
That's all well and good to say when you know enlisting in the US military in conventional warfare against ISIS has a good chance of succeeding.
But what if the US was the small poor state and ISIS was the world's largest economy whose military targets were too well-defended to attack?
I'm sure you'd find lots of recruits in Texas for "guerilla special units behind enemy lines". Especially if cruise missiles and drone strikes were hitting US soil every other day.
Be alert.
You'd be really surprised. Your point is a valid one, but one I seldom see brought up - most people are just worried that for every 100 immigrants there's a couple of actual terrorists in the lot... Mostly because nobody's told them how stupid that notion is.
All I can say is; don't change your fundamentals. Then they have won. It's just a larger version of your bitcoin demanding DDOS bandits. Once you give in, humanity will fail.
I am more worried about the innocent people who are going to suffer because of this.
Here is an article that explores a bit more the attitudes among American Muslims in particular. I don't have time to find the actual study, sorry:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/08/a-fascin...
https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/dt https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2009/september/domterror_09...
This isn't a game won by winning a debate. When one side can be essentially removed from the field, that is an option, even if the side being removed wanted that line of strategy to unfold. Controlling the plays doesn't mean you win the game.
Unbeknownst to me, I have a proclivity for alcoholism. I am libertarian during a prohibition and work to remove limitations on what, when, where, and how I imbibe. I am successful in deregulating alcohol... then I become alcoholic and die from liver failure... I WIN!
-----
Here are 12.
http://controversialtimes.com/issues/constitutional-rights/1...
I would send the wife and kids first before going myself.
I've seriously considered the "arm your citizens" argument, and honestly can't think of it helping, at all.
These guys aren't your run-of-the-mill muggers; they're actively thinking about inflicting the highest casualties in the most efficient manner.
Today it's shootings since most people wouldn't be armed, tomorrow it's something else that guns won't prevent.
Oh some people try. Hell, I told that to many people myself. People don't care about things like actually being reasonable. Instead, they're afraid and are looking to rationalize it.
I don't see any parallel whatsoever to the events of today.
No one can predict the outcome of today's events so by definition they are irrational. I would bet that no good would come out of this to anyone.
I know that for me it would depend a lot on circumstances. Is the current refugee camp safe? Is the trip overseas that dangerous? Can my family handle it there, maybe caring for our grandparents while being protected by our parents? Then I would probably, with my heart broken, go alone to safeguard a place to live for them. I know I would be the kind who's naive enough to play by the books instead of just showing up in another country. But if my family staying would put them in danger, I'd definitely take them with me.
But I guess my point is that the amount of young males among the refugees can be explained by them going to secure a place for their entire family, and not willing to risk taking kids and grandparents on such a dangerous trip.
eg lets say we load a bunch of shrapnel into a tree so it maims or permanenly injures whoever the next logger is...tha is basically the same thing as lobbing hand grenades into the public square. the attacks are meant to target random people, caught unawares, in a way that conveys a persistant threat of continued, scalable future action.
Now lets take some other shady randome violence like the KGB assinating a civilian in London with radioactive isotopes in his tea. Is that terrorism? No, its a specific threat carried out in a limited capacity against a designated target. It might be criminal or a war crime or wahatever bad thing describes it, but its not "anti civilian warfare", in the same way that not all war casualties are "war crimes" in the normal usage.
[1] http://www.dhs.gov/news/2015/11/13/statement-secretary-jeh-c...
He then went on to say "42% of young Muslims in France believe suicide bombings are justified (35% overall)." So why wasn't his original statement "Islam in France among 42% of Muslims less than 30 years of age (that were prompted to answer a survey question in an environment we know nothing about) soils the reputation of Islam?"
So, he began by making a broad generalization about Islam as a whole and then quoted a statistical observation about a small percentage of Muslims. Sorry, but 2 + 2 = 4. Broad generalization + no proof = slur.
While the regime exercised strong control of information prior to glasnost, and had plenty of motive to repress information that would indicate weakness of the regime, there are numerous known hijackings, the 1977 Moscow bombings, and others. (While reliable information about responsibility for some, and any broader organizational responsibility that might be behind those clearly responsible for others, is hard to come by, there does seem to be a disproportionate link to Armenia among the known incidents, with some specifically linked to Armenian nationalists.)
Here's [1] the discussion of the black bar in the Amdahl thread and I agree that it's a very proper show of respect for that man.
I find it sometimes asphyxiating to realize humanity has come so far and yet can devolve into baseline animal behavior at the drop of a feather. We are very far away, as a whole, from being an enlightened species.
Clearly there's a huge problem with a small percentage of people in the Islamic world. It seems obvious the "adults on the planet" could and should have the power to truly unite against this ridiculous minority and stop these lunatics cold. Now. Not in ten years. Now.
I don't know what the solution might be but it certainly isn't anywhere near appeasing or accepting them (the minority is what I am talking about). I do know it is sad and ridiculous that in the year 2015 we have to take off our shoes to get on planes and worry about getting shot in a theater or restaurant.
Haven't we all had enough?
Is it derived from the slang term that train hoppers and other people in hobo culture use for the temporary, makeshift residences they hold in the woods near train yards during travel?
The world is full of real people, with real understandable concerns for their families and friends.
Not only that, but it isn't about the number who were killed anyway. It is about the probability of your friend being in that location at the time of the disaster which is much, much higher.
No one thinks 'I wonder if Jack was killed, he was at that park today'. They think 'I wonder if Jack was in the CBD, he works nearby!'
Statistically validated concerns or not, the very real effect of this part of human nature is that the phone infrastructure goes down and that sucks for everyone.
It goes away and you realize that the equilibrium in a civil society is normalcy, and to give in to fear is to lose. Recency bias, forgetting your math/probability/statistics--you're smarter than that. Lead the way for others to keep calm and carry on.
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...
Trains are a tiny 6%.
> THE senior British official was unequivocal. The murder of the former KGB man Alexander Litvinenko was "undeniably state-sponsored terrorism on Moscow's part. That is the view at the highest levels of the British government".
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/world_news/article6...
You might think that some forms of terrorism are worse than others, but that doesn't mean that those are the only forms of terrorism.
I also agree that he would have been better served to clarify in his post that the problem is particularly acute in France rather than in general, but even a cursory glance at the document he provided will bear that out. However that is something to bring up in further discussion (as I have actually done in a sibling comment). Then you can have a conversation about what France is doing differently from other countries that are having relative success, even to the point of e.g. the US where Muslims tend to be more peaceful than the wider population.
But when you just shut down the discussion as was done here, none of that can happen. That's why, as I say, if your goal is to integrate Muslims living in the West into Western society (and French Muslims into French society), then what happened here is counterproductive.
I hope Western Society/Media or elsewhere will not bring faith factor in discussion just like they don't bring it up during US shootings or killing in Palestine or elsewhere.
Most of those Japanese POWs who survived the winter of 1945 / 46 had been repatriated by 1956, with mediation by the Red Cross.
Furthermore:
In 2005, the Russian government provided the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare microfilms of personal information of 40,940 Japanese POWs who had died during their detention.
Still horrific but less than 10% of the total number.
There is a fascinating history of those who returned to Japan but couldn't fit-in again due to Soviet indoctrination.
As 'NotHereNotThere said, terrorists attack in a way adequate to the conditions. They have time to prepare, so whatever means of defense you have, they'll strike in a way in which those means won't help you.
You have articulated the opposite of what self defense proponents want. Here in AZ proponents of humans being able to defend themselves got a recent (partial) win with United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez. Talking large groups of people hostage is logistically extremely difficult when even a few % are armed.
And to those who say "they will use bombs instead of attacking armed people"... Should bombs be banned too?
Terrorism doesn't need weaponry.
(and I'm not talking about 9/11, although it could count as such as well)
It's not. I'm sure the terrorists would actually prefer to be shooting soldiers and high-ranking politicians instead of innocent civilians. But since those targets are too well protected, in their minds the only thing they can do to retaliate against their enemies is to commit terrorist attacks against civilians in their enemies' homeland.
If the roles were reversed and ISIS were the world superpower launching cruise missiles against Houston (some) Americans would surely sign up to do similar things to get back at them. The only reason we don't is because we're rich and powerful and don't have to stoop to that level, not because we're incapable of it or somehow more morally enlightened.
Edit: see the firebombings and nuclear attacks on Japan in WWII for what the US is capable of when they don't have an overwhelming military superiority.
Sure there are many good muslims, most of whom you will find adhere to a secular ideology and western value system despite labelling themselves "muslim".
* Kill an innocent civilian * Have or perform an abortion * Eat meat * Fight in a war * Drop an atomic bomb on a city * Commit suicide
That's all shit that some people call rational and others call irrational. The truth is that "rational" is a word we choose because it sounds objective and authoritative, but it really means: "something that makes sense to me"
My first thought about Paris is not to pray for it. It is to bring harm to those who brought the attack on the Parisians.
"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." George Orwell
There are lots of e.g. Indian, Chinese, South-East Asian, immigrants in Europe. And all over the world. If anything, they look less caucasian than people from Middle East / North Africa, so one would assume them to face even more racism. But they have not produced terrorists.
Actually the truth is even messier... most of these young men committing
atrocities are merely indoctrinated pawns who know very little of
their own religion and instead defer to their "emir."
That said I'm fortunate that the muslims I meet daily don't appear to know
"their own religion" - or at least don't follow the example from which it
started - and instead are peaceable and as virtuous as one would expect
of anyone in UK society in general. They seem much like those who
call themselves Christians: following a generally moral code
without a deep understanding of what being a true adherent entails.
I expect civil war in a relative short term in Europe (< 10 years), since politicians seem passive (afraid to offend muslims by making some drastic choices) or too politically correct and the populace is still too divided. I just hope I'm able to emigrate from Europe before all this happens.
so... As an American who is old enough to very clearly remember America both before and after the 9/11 attacks? to the extent that America is like France, I can speak some to those fears.
We did several of those things. We massively overreacted; I mean, we didn't split, but we did pick a war with a country who's people kind of looked like the people who attacked us (and another war with a country we had some evidence that they had something to do with the attack) - and yes, both wars were pretty costly in terms of money, geopolitical power and credibility, commodity prices and world stability, but it didn't break us, and it didn't spill out into a major war between industrial powers. It didn't turn into Vietnam, or even something as bad as the CCCP's experience in Afghanistan. I'm not saying it was a good experience, just that it's survivable, and not as life changing as you seem to think. This isn't a war of the 19th or 20th century between major powers. This is a 21st century asymmetrical war, and while that's still pretty bad for whoever ends up getting blamed for these attacks, it's not the end for Europe.
Yes, the security measures were very costly. Airplane travel is dramatically less convenient, which means more traffic. Lots of lost productivity. We've lost so many human-years standing in line, waiting to be groped... or driving instead of flying; that has caused who knows how many extra deaths. (re-reading this... while I logically stand by the idea that we've lost more to the security measures than to the original attacks... on an emotional level, I feel shame for saying so out loud.) Personally, my perception is that this is slowly getting better with the pre-groping of the 'tsa pre-check' or the straight up money check of the "CLEAR" program. I mean, air travel is never again going to be as easy as it was when I was 19 during my lifetime, but it's not as bad as it was when I was 22, let me tell you, and it's getting better.
But... even at it's worst? This wasn't world war two. This wasn't even the Crimean war, at least on my side of the conflict. I mean, I don't want to diminish the sacrifices of our soldiers, it's not a job I would want to do, but being deployed in the wars we engaged in after 9/11 was less dangerous than delivering pizzas, if you only count the chance of getting killed or maimed, rather than harder to quantify mental traumas associated with fighting a war (which personally, I find to be a much larger deterrent to becoming a soldier than the danger. I was... just about at prime recruiting age on September 11th, 2001.
And for the rest of us? Yeah, 9/11 was a big deal. A bigger deal than I understood it to be at the time. A much bigger deal. but... it wasn't the end of life as we know it.
That was the weird thing about my 9/11 experience. So I had a dot-com job, and my boss was watching the news on a very early live-streaming website. (I want to say it was CNN or something, but I don't remember) I was mildly annoyed with her for not working and instead subjecting me to, you know, video news.
My thoughts at the time were the opposite of yours. It did not occur to me that this was going to change my country; It took me quite some time to understand that this was hugely impactfull.
Interpretations of the Quran can be a channel for rage, but they are not the cause of it. If they were, we'd have Moroccan terrorists and Malaysian terrorists and Turkish terrorists, all of which we don't have. We have Arab/Pashtun terrorists, mainly from countries where the West interferes. Is that a coincidence?
> I fear the overreaction coming, of both citizens and governments.
This is pretty much the standard official and media reaction to these kind of events. You're supposed to fear the "backlash" more than the terrorism. Yes, dear French people, this was bad, but the real catastrophe would be voting for Le Pen or ending Mid-East and African immigration.
That's what the OP probably meant. If you think about it, don't you think it is a somewhat unnatural reaction to being under attack, to always end up fearing those who didn't initiate the attack?
How many of the attacks happened because it was easy to get guns in the first place?
A terrorist will always be able to procure guns. But what about an unhappy employee, an angry teenager ?
Arming people is no solution to terrorism.
It is, but natural reaction is wrong. I still have much bigger chance of dying in a car accident than a terrorist attack. In general, the natural reaction to such events was fine 6000 years ago, but in today's hyperconnected, media-driven society, awareness of a danger is usually inversely proportional to the chance of it happening to you.
But I also know that general population has this natural reaction, and - as politicians follow the voice of people, instead of the voice of reason - it leads to very bad outcomes. I am afraid of those bad outcomes.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/world/middleeast/isis-abu-...
[2] http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/islamic-st...
> I mean, we didn't split, but we did pick a war with a country who's people kind of looked like the people who attacked us
The problem here is that 'people who kind of look like the people who attacked us' are not foreign, they're here, in Europe. The hot topic of past months was the waves of immigration, and before that it was Islam minorities. I fear that people will retaliate on those communities and it will turn into a civil war. Or even if not, the tension between policies of various European countries RE immigration were high, and overreaction here may just be enough to split us apart.
> My thoughts at the time were the opposite of yours. It did not occur to me that this was going to change my country; It took me quite some time to understand that this was hugely impactfull.
My experiences are informed by what happened to your country over the last 14 years. I've learned that such events can be very impactful.
There's a difference between terrorism with clear political goals and terrorism that's targeted at our very way of life. One can be attributed to circumstances and can be dealt with in a more or less peaceful matters (e.g. 'give them what they want'), the other cannot.
The purpose of ISIS is exactly what they say it is. To establish their own state governed by hard-right Islamic ideals. And the reason they have so much support is largely driven from the perceived persecution of Muslims worldwide e.g. xenophobia in Western countries, drone strikes on innocent civilians etc.
( Café, croissant, birthday party, and tonight, i'll go watch Spectre - as previously planned, because f.. them. )
This argument is so stupid.
Everyone is blaming the people responsible. That's a given. The reason people are blaming Israel and the US is because they are indirectly responsible since their actions are used as recruitment tools.
This is of course a slightly academic use of the word. Many people have a hard time seeing even traditional domestic terrorism (like the unabomber) as terrorism.
That is true as far as it goes, but the fundamental problem is not IS, nor Al-Qaeda, nor any single terrorist group out there, nor even all terrorist groups taken together. It's the extremist ideology that appeals to young, angry men across the Muslim world. Taking out Al-Qaeda in 2001 didn't have any effect in the long term. Going to war with Iraq in 2003 actively made the problem worse. Killing bin Laden in 2011 didn't really do anything one way or the other. If the West goes in now, and (figuratively) nukes Syria, then why would we think that will solve the problem, when it never has before?
If you want to win this like you win a war, by killing your way to victory, then you have to kill not just everyone who's currently carrying a gun, but everyone who may pick up a gun as a reaction to that killing, and everyone who may pick one up as a reaction to killing them, and so forth. That kind of total war is immoral, in my view.
Our approach to defusing this threat should not be focused on killing individuals, but on removing the motivations they have for fighting us in the first place, without judging whether, in our view, they are valid or not. The fact that they have them, right or wrong, is all that matters. I don't know what will achieve that, but after responding to over 30 years of Islamic violence with force and force alone, and failing to really have much impact, we should recognize that a change in strategy is required.
I don't see the distinction either. If you drop a bomb and kill some people that you didn't intend to kill, you're still 100% responsible for those kills.
It is the saddest thing that we have found no better response to terrorism than limiting civil liberties and sending 18 year old boys with guns to foreign countries.
What a load of complete and utter nonsense. I am embarrassed to even see that link on this site.
Multiculturalism is working just fine in Australia right now. In fact it is largely how this country was built. And just like most Western countries we have a fringe right who are xenophobic and anti immigrant but by and large the population welcomes different cultures and the benefits they bring.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/21/amsterdam-paris...
There are plenty of examples: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-manual-al-qaeda-and-no... http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/king-of-jordan-isis-used-gaza-...
In your earlier comment you wrote:
> Stop destabilizing Arab countries
Isn't supporting the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia pretty much supporting stability? How can you stop supporting a dictator without a big risk of causing destabilization (as happened in Libya)?
Seems like you want two logical opposities simultaneously?
So what I mean is that for a small incident like this, it's usually not reasonable to check on your friends. If they worked in the WTC on 9/11 then their risk is higher so it certainly can be reasonable. Similarly for a tsunami or other disaster with a high death toll.
How about getting out of other people's countries?
Swedish Muslim terrorists also tried to create a massacre at Jyllandsposten because of their drawings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_carto...).
These terrorists were born and raised in Sweden, had a better standard of living than me, studied engineering in university and had nothing to complain about. Sweden doesn't attack any countries, we love Palestine and dislike Israel (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/30/sweden-official...) and we shelter 80-100,000 Muslim refugees/year. What should we do exactly? Jail all cartoonists and make it a crime to insult Islam?
If said young male gets to the country on the other side they are probably the most employable too.
If true we would expect terrorists to be more lowly educated and poor people who mainly come from countries that have suffered under the west. We would expect these to be people who hate life, not people who love death. We would expect terrorism to be weakly or not at all correlated to religion. We would expect that the terrorists are not explicitly telling us that they're doing it because of religious dogma. We would expect terrorist groups to be fighting against the west, and not mass murdering Yazidi's for example, who have absolutely nothing to do with what happens in the world. Of all western countries, we would not expect these attacks to be against France so many times. Why have previous attacks and outrages focused on cartoonists? I could go on and on. What we actually observe is the opposite.
All of this is explained perfectly well by the second theory.
My feeling (being a European) is that I would feel much more threatened by the fact than people I can see in the street can have a gun than I would feel safer because some random strangers could protect me with their guns.
From time to time there are some news that someone get stabbed because for having allegedly had a bad look on someone else. With guns, you don't even have the option to run.
Thanks to military defeats at the hands of Americans, English, and Dutch.
When people like, say, Angela Merkel, advocate blindly accepting all those thousands of refuges smuggled to the EU, I just can't really understand - what's the point?
This isn't "end of story." These ISIS guys aren't just buying tickets to CDG airport. How are they getting into Europe? What's the easiest way to get into Europe if your from Syria? It isn't going through traditional entry routes, it's blending in with refugees.
Why are so many people attempting to vindicate the refugees? If the bad guys are from Syria and 38% of the hundreds of thousands of refugees are Syrian, then wouldn't it follow that some percentage of those refugees could logically be nefarious actors? To think otherwise is to be incredible naive and perhaps blinding by an ideological desire for these refugees to not be part of the problem.
Sure there's tragedy in Syria, however, I'm unwilling to open my home if that exposes my family to any risk. There's no upside for me. There are plenty of poor people here in France that could use my help -- my capacity to care deeply about every single person in every single war zone is limited.
Let's export 50,000 Syrian refugees and dump them in the Mission District in San Fran and see how opinions change.
There are civilians lawfully carrying guns in Europe, just not many of them, so be free to already feel threatened. I'm not saying we should give guns to every kid out there, but if 1% of citizens were armed, shooting up 100 people wouldn't be such an easy endeavor.
I am fully aware of this, I said so in other comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10564189 The mistake you are making here is the idea that otherwise intelligent and educated people cannot believe crazy things. Just look at the Christian nutjobs.
The terrorists you see today would become terrorists in the name of Christ just as well. Having said that, it's true that certain groups can be identified as "bad" and labeled so, and it seems that the one unifying characteristic is their islamic faith, although there are other national characteristics as well. Saying that we need to defend against "Islam" would be too broad a target, and the terrorists use that to their advantage. In Europe, we need to stop treating muslim populations as minorities, start treating them as european citizens, and demand that their religious leaders contribute to public safety. They need to actively engage in the expulsion of radicalized people from their religious communities and preach against the sentiment that justifies the attacks. Laisez-faire comes at a price to everyone, and muslims are not excluded from it.The terrorists have been bastardizing the meaning of Islam for 4-5 decades now. Maybe Islam should be having it's own velvet revolution.
What about thought leadership? I know its a cliche beaten to death perhaps, but still I think people are able to see a raised level of discourse, than theirs, while they may not always leave their hard positions and immediately agree.
But there's also this balancing act, that we need to do, of not wanting to get into an argument of certain kinds.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/europes-small-arms-plague/ (1998)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/getting-a-gun-le...
And many many others, unfortunately. It's a very nasty thing and it will take an extraordinary effort to put this genie back into the bottle.
Open borders has been a blessing in many ways but at the same time it has caused a whole bunch of un-intended side effects and this one and cross border heavy crime are two of the not so nice ones, to put it very mildly. We now have actual gangs with heavy arms in Amsterdam which was a fairly peaceful city not all that long ago.
Well, ok. It took me a while after I posted my responses to (sort-of) understand where 'mikeash was going. I initially thought he was disputing the existence or possibility of those comments, so me and others were providing proofs and arguments that they in fact exist.
I think now that 'mikeash wanted us to not accidentally fall from quoting some arguments to actually using and discussing them, but I also still think the meta-level issue is something worth thinking about. We all know general population will say stupid things, because GenPop always says stupid things in situations like that, and those calls will drown reasonable public discussion and they will shape public policy - so it is worth asking, what to do about it? How to prevent this situation from spiralling out of control?
If the western world starts feeling it is at war with Islam, Muslims will unite under those terrorist's banner and we're in for a very long, shitty haul.
The worse we treat Muslims in our own countries, the easier simple individuals will be to turn to the terrorist course.
If we attack a Muslim country, hordes of Muslims will travel there to fight for the Prophet.
These attacks are all desperate attempts at starting an avalanche. Don't let them play you, talk with your friends, stay calm.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/nov/14/paris-terr...
These usually get planned well in advance by some very sick people who are trying to kill as many people as they can and go out in a blaze of glory. Sure, the existence of opportunistic terrorists networks that get these people to coordinate their attacks and stamp a ideology on them tends to mean that the one day body count is higher for a particular incident. Still, the body count per attacker is often comparable, it's just that the attacks happen on the same day instead of a few weeks apart.
But yeah, if we ignore the non-Muslims who do things like this we can say it's all the fault of Muslims.
ChickenInASuit8h535: ISIS aren't really trying to "solve" anything in the countries they're attacking, the main motivation behind these attacks is to widen the rift between Islam and the West and bring more moderate Muslims over to their side
alpual7h345: And I'm sure backlash and discrimination resulting from this attack will further alienate Muslims in France. I'm sure that's part of their intention, and I wonder why I don't see that being discussed much. Thanks for pointing that out.
Their actions could absolutely be called rational and logical if you were to accept their premise - which is what I'd argue is irrational.
> Of all western countries, we would not expect these attacks to be against France so many times.
And why not? They have been among the most brutal colonial powers, with shocking behaviour in Northern Africa and ongoing active military engagement across Africa -- in large part because of their ideological bent on absolutist superiority of the French republican model. They actively worked to blow up Lybia and actively support anti-islamic forces there. And of course they have now joined the anti-IS bombing campaign, because they hate to be left behind when there is to engage around the Mediterranean Sea. All the while, they have huge swaths of disenfranchised 2nd and 3rd generation-immigrant youth in their midst that they simply don't know what to do with. They are the easiest target after the UK, but unlike Britain they are not an island, their borders are very porous, and their security services are clearly less effective than the Five Eyes axis. On top of that, this: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/14/france-active-p...
Still, people don't find it inappropriate to bring up Columbine when they talk about VTech or Aurora. When people try very hard to exclude all the other mass attacks and single out only the ones connected to Islam in situations like this speaks more to their personal biases than anything else.
Only under the naive assumption that we assess things in isolation and not comparatively and in historical perspective.
>It's akin to saying, "We excuse X for doing something bad because Y (something to which we are ideologically opposed) did the same bad thing".
No, it's more akin to saying "You singled out X as the cause of something bad when it's also an attribute of Y".
E.g. something like: "- Python is slow because it's a GC language". "- Nope, Java and Swift also have GC and are very fast".
Also note that I never said anything about "excusing" -- I actually condemn both.
>In other words, it's the "side", not the "principle" you are arguing. If you take that position you can be an apologist for practically anything that happens.
What you can actually be is pragmatic, someone who assesses things in historical and relative perspective, instead of taking sides and singling out.
It's amazing how someone that begins by saying that "this discussion is only about X, anything else is irrelevant", accuses someone adding the stats for Y for comparison as "taking sides".
Well, why single them out then if both sides can be dangerous?
If you think they are the "more dangerous", then I think the previous 2 milenia of bloodshed for pragmatic land/power grabbing, including WW I, refute that.
Besides, even so-called utopians are quite pragmatic in their actions. When Mao executed tons of people, it wasn't some "utopianism" guiding him, but a very pragmatic power grab to stay in power and get rid of possible contenders.
(You might say that this was only possible because his subordinates were deluded by some utopian zeal. But lots of other cases, from the Belgian colonies and Pinochet to Indonesian "death squads", prove that you don't need that to have mass killings, just unquestioned power and the upper hand).
>Did you reply this way because you approve of communism?
No, I replied this way because I approve of utopias. The US was one too at some point -- for persecuted from Europe religious nuts.
Also because I like being objective, which needs taking all sides into account. Of any binary (utopia/pragmatism e.g.) I'd never say "the first is dangerous" if the second has been historically proved just as dangerous.
They did not terrorize citizens, they murdered them in the name of their non-existent god. Life will go on in Paris just as it did in New York. There is no goal other than blood lust and grim spectacle. All because of their nonsense and yes, irrational religion.
And a ton of other news articles on the same subject. Pakistan is super dangerous because it is not all that hard to imagine a number of groups within Pakistan switching allegiance. It is also super dangerous because it is a nuclear power and has a long history of factions inside it trying to pull Pakistan into a much more radical direction.
I agree that an overreaction is likely, though considering how crazy the latest security law are, I don't see how much worse it can get in this regard.
Ok. So if it indeed can be attributed to them, or if they go out and admit, then fine, send in the tanks - the Paris attack would be an act of war.
> considering how crazy the latest security law are, I don't see how much worse it can get in this regard.
Oh it can. We have a long way to go from what we have now to what was in USSR or Nazi Germany. I just hope we don't decide to run the distance.
What worries me more is that the overrection will be aimed at immigrants and minorities who live in Europe. There already are reports of this beginning to happen.
They claimed responsibility. As for sending in the tanks, I don't see that happening.
> Oh it can. We have a long way to go from what we have now to what was in USSR or Nazi Germany. I just hope we don't decide to run the distance.
Yeah, but neither were democracies. The Red Scare-era US would be a better example. I really hope it doesn't go this way.
> What worries me more is that the overrection will be aimed at immigrants and minorities who live in Europe. There already are reports of this beginning to happen.
Probably not from the government, but who knows what the population will do?
Wrong, those taxes were already used to pay the pensions in the same year they were collected. Now the shrinking work force is straining itself to pay for the increasing number of old farts, and the future is bleak.
We need young immigrants in Europe. We need them to work for us and make children for us. At least until they get rich and complacent like us and settle for 1 child per family.
There are ways to integrate them culturally, once their children are in our school system. And there are ways to avoid the chronic poverty and marginalization that plagues french banlieues. What we don't have is a way to keep paying those pensions with more and more pensioners leeching on fewer and fewer workers.
About the only link between the ISIS members from Western Europe is that they're muslims. Even that is "not 100%" true, since there are also Christians and some Kurds traveling to Syria/Iraq. The examples of that I know went there to help, of course (medically in 2 cases, sort of an amateur doctors without borders, mostly because neither doctors without borders, nor the red cross risk sending people there, but they did have family there). Of course we don't know that's all they did. At least they're claiming to provide medical help, none of the muslims who got caught going to Syria ever even bothered to say they were going for any reason other than fighting, and some saying they went off for killing and some shit about allah.
This is a convicted ISIS terrorist that went off to kill people and came back, talking to a reporter of the public service about how and why : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKg2UsfnxHc
Claiming that people like this are poor or treated badly by the country they were born into is moronic.
Meanwhile the tensions between (sunni) muslims and everybody, literally everybody else are rising ever more. Fights and crimes against the "natives", and every other minority, from the Jews of Antwerp to the Turks of Molenbeek (there is a large (sometimes very) atheist contingent amongst Turks).
Yes, Islam is a particularly violent religion -- if you have read the Koran, many of its concepts seem very incompatible with the idea of a free secular society. Then again, the bible has the crusades.
I'm personally an atheist and I honestly don't think the problem is the the text itself but the cultural, ideological conflicts of an impoverished region that allows whoever "shouts the loudest" to assume power. The kids committing these atrocities probably couldn't even tell you what you just told me about Mohammad -- my point is that they are brainwashed and utterly uneducated so whomever comes along and says "this is god's word" is who they will listen to.
Anger + Desperation - Education = Extremism
You won't solve this problem by banning the Koran, but if you can get Muslims everywhere to renounce this "us-or-them" culture in favor of a more moderate interpretation (you know, how all religions seem to evolve if they want to survive) then perhaps we can neuter these kinds of groups before there's a power-vacuum?
I realize that life in Germany is more pleasant than life in a refugee camp in Turkey (or has been, historically... that seems to be changing), but that's an entirely different thing.
I think, however, that it's a bit of an absolute statement, as even skirmishes in the combat theaters still heavily rely on small arms from both sides. Perhaps it is possible for that to become the world we live in, however I don't see that being the case given past history.
Keep in mind the idea of an armed populace isn't a one dimensional outcome to only defend against terrorists, but as an equalizer against any assailant in a life or death situation, be they foreign or domestic.
I just want people to have the option to defend themselves if they choose. In this case, the French people did not and do not have that option. Gun laws in France makes NYC look like a paradise for gun owners.
I was saying that if we have armed citizens, the offenders will only use methods that don't get them shot before they strike. So suicide bombings are on the table. Compare with this attack, where the assailants must have known they're not walking out of that one alive.
> I just want people to have the option to defend themselves if they choose.
The core question here is - defend from what? Guns won't help you defend from a terrorist attack anymore than they can help you defend from an asteroid strike. Since we don't use extinction of dinosaurs as a pro-gun argument, we shouldn't use terrorist attacks either. Note that I'm not supporting pro- or anti-gun stance here, I only refuse to accept invalid arguments - from either side.
No, it's exactly the other way around: if the comment had omitted the first sentence, it would have been fine. That bit could be taken out without any loss of information, and should have been.
Despite how much you've posted about this, there's no serious argument here. A slur followed by a factual statement is obviously still a slur.
As for "shutting down the discussion", that's a bit of a stretch with 650 comments in one thread and 500 in the other.
From any assailant, be it a mugger, rapist, breaking and entering, "terrorism" (whatever that actually means), an oppressive state, etc.
Would you rather just do nothing and accept whatever comes your way as fate?
Please think what would happen if the tables were turned - your country is invaded by a much bigger nation with a technological advantage. Would you organize a peaceful protest for your enemy to ignore?
- The King David hotel is in Jerusalem. Not in the UK.
- Warnings were given before the explosion.
- The hotel was housing the occupying British government, military and police. This isn't blindly targeting civilians in an attempt to terrorize the population.
There are a lot more details that make this very different. This is not to say that the outcome was not terrible in cost of human lives or that the perpetrators aren't responsible. It's just very different.
From the article: "American author Thurston Clarke's analysis of the bombing gave timings for calls and for the explosion, which he said took place at 12:37. He stated that as part of the Irgun plan, a sixteen-year-old recruit, Adina Hay (alias Tehia), was to make three warning calls before the attack. At 12:22 the first call was made, in both Hebrew and English, to a telephone operator on the hotel's switchboard (the Secretariat and the military each had their own, separate, telephone exchanges). It was ignored.[5] At 12:27, the second warning call was made to the French Consulate adjacent to the hotel to the north-east. This second call was taken seriously, and staff went through the building opening windows and closing curtains to lessen the impact of the blast. At 12:31 a third and final warning call to the Palestine Post newspaper was made. The telephone operator called the Palestine Police CID to report the message. She then called the hotel switchboard. The hotel operator reported the threat to one of the hotel managers. This warning resulted in the discovery of the milk cans in the basement, but by then it was too late.[5]"
...
"Security analyst Bruce Hoffman has written that the hotel "housed the nerve centre of British rule in Palestine".[13]"
...
Security analyst Bruce Hoffman wrote of the bombing in his book Inside Terrorism that: "Unlike many terrorist groups today, the Irgun's strategy was not deliberately to target or wantonly harm civilians. At the same time, though, the claim of Begin and other apologists that warnings were issued cannot absolve either the group or its commander for the ninety-one people killed and forty-five others injured ... Indeed, whatever nonlethal intentions the Irgun might or might not have had, the fact remains that a tragedy of almost unparalleled magnitude was inflicted ... so that to this day the bombing remains one of the world's single most lethal terrorist incidents of the twentieth century."[13]
You raise a good point, though. I would ask, where do you have reasonable public discussions? I want to see reasonable discussions here, but it's purely selfish, and I don't think it matters much in the bigger picture. Popular media is full of idiots, because they're pandering to the loudest idiots in the population. What alternative venues could there be?
> By the same logic that a wound heals when you stop poking the scab.
Except that our governments see themselves as providing first aid to an infected wound. Infected wounds only get worse without treatment.
> If there's any lesson from the past 15 years, it is this: state engineering does not work. Period.
Their intention was (probably) good, execution on the other hand was less then stellar.
> You cannot control it. You don't "allow" anything. You cannot stop anything. The forces are beyond your control.
1940's France would beg to disagree. The Allies in WW2 clearly stopped the Axis powers and controlled their aggression.
> Americans and Europeans have to step out of the colonial mindset of trying to control the world.
Agreed.
The reality, I believe, is much closer to the same reason it always comes down to when men commit acts of brutality in order to subjugate or terrorize a population. They do it because of ego, pride, opportunity, and a desire for establishing their own power, not because someone else made them do it or in seeking justice in face of tyranny.
If anything, I think it's more likely the premature US withdraw from the Middle East and a lack of stronger support for Israel which has contributed to ISIS flourishing. A perceived faltering of support between two allies is the best invitation for increased pressure and targeted attacks (physical, political, clandestine, and otherwise) against the bonds between those allies. It doesn't surprise me at all that countries and religious fanatics with the stated goal of the destruction of Israel would work tirelessly to popularize the notion that if only not for the US "supporting Israel" the Middle East would somehow be more stable.
Mostly I pin the blame for the flourishing of ISIS collectively on the Middle Eastern countries which themselves have epically failed to confront the rising threat of ISIS on their own turf, while doing seemingly everything possible in their own domestic policies to in fact encourage ISIS recruitment. Assad'd deployment of chemical weapons is mirrored in Egypt's own treatment of citizens in Sinai, and over and over again throughout the Middle East, we see effectively a ceaseless and brutal civil war stretching back, what, 1400 years, only interrupted by periods of apparent calm when one tyrant or another manages to temporarily cement themselves so far above reproach that their own raping and plundering goes uncontested for a relatively short while.
The Middle East has been facing endemic war between Islamic sects basically for the entire history of Islam itself. The "holy wars" (call it barbarism or medievalism) being carried out in the name of Islam (by so-called "Islamic terrorists") is evidence enough that this is not actually problem of foreign policy, but a deep seated and historically pervasive domestic problem.
The inescapable "defunding" of the Middle East over the next few decades is unsurprisingly leading to a surge of sound and fury, signifying little, and ultimately will disappear in a whimper. These are countries which by and large by their own actions and circumstances have squandered a most incredible glut of natural resources (as is human nature) and as that era comes to a close in relatively short order, will bring with it a humanitarian crisis throughout the region, which frankly, neither the US or any other World power, is either responsible for, nor has the political will, nor even the available resources, systems, or infrastructure to adequately address.
The massacre in France is abhorrently evil and sensationally shocking. Statistically, it is a drop in the bucket. I can't even comprehend, for example, the scale of horror and violence which is being inflicted daily against disenfranchised Muslim women and girls who are married into bondage, raped, and brutalized, as a token reward / enticement for ISIS recruits, even wrapping this torture in a veil of propriety and calling it Sharia.... A sickness like that, to me, can only be understood, explained, spread, and ultimately eradicated domestically.
I think you'll agree that giving a charitable reading to what a person says is the best way to have a clear discussion. While that first sentence, taken by itself and without context, could possibly be interpreted as a bigoted or racist statement, in the context of the whole post I took it to mean "Islam has a reputation for violence, but this reputation exists in part because adherents of Islam in the West support violence more than the rest of the population". I don't think I am going particularly out of my way or being overly charitable in reading it this way. Moreover the grammar "X spoils the reputation of X" is not harsh language, nor is it a tautology - it can be proven wrong. Therefore, I don't think this was an inappropriate comment. How am I wrong? If you bother to answer, please be specific.
That said, I don't fully agree with the statement, actually, as I already mentioned. If you look at support for violence and religious law, etc., in places like the US and Germany, it looks like Muslims do not support that stuff any more than the general population, or they support it less. But looking at the data for France OP might have a point. But, I don't know if he meant only France, or Islam in general, or what, because he never clarified. Maybe he didn't clarify because he stopped reading, or because he doesn't care, or because he realizes he's wrong. Maybe after elaboration he would have outed himself as being a simple Islamaphobe who cherry-picks facts to justify his bigotry. We'll never know that now. But, he also may have stopped posting because you inappropriately called him out in this thread before giving what he said due consideration.
Emotions were probably running high at the time as it was shortly after the attacks and so what you did, in that case, is actually quite understandable. Even if I think you were wrong here, I don't hold this one against you at all. But as the moderator of HN I have seen you time and again shutting down discussion because you perceived something that wasn't there. You are making HN into more of a boring echo chamber and that's sad.
If these reports are accurate then we have a staggering average above 4,000 violent daily deaths. (http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/7/2/104.full) (http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/67403/1/a77019.pdf)
ISIS formed in the power vacuum created by the United States toppling Saddam Hussein. [0,1] So yes, the country that had its leader and military demolished was unable to combat the rise of ISIS, you're right. But pinning the failure on them is to ignore the reasons they failed to do so.
>The Middle East has been facing endemic war between Islamic sects basically for the entire history of Islam itself. The "holy wars" (call it barbarism or medievalism) being carried out in the name of Islam (by so-called "Islamic terrorists") is evidence enough that this is not actually problem of foreign policy, but a deep seated and historically pervasive domestic problem.
To collapse the rise of ISIS into the same civil wars that have been raging for the past millennia and a half is the same willful ignorance of the complex cultural history that you deride in your first paragraph. The roots of ISIS are in Wahhabism, a faction that existed mainly in Saudi Arabia. It wasn't until Roosevelt met with King Ibn Saud in 1945 (following the discovery of oil there in 1938) that this nation had any serious ambition at exporting their brand of Islam further in the middle east. Then, with the Oil Crisis of 1973, Saudi Arabia proved its political power and was able to leverage it against the United States. When it came time to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan, the United States armed the Mujahadin, a proudly Wahhabist faction.
The US being the reason that ISIS has flourished is not an opinion, it's the conclusion made over and over by analysis of historical facts.
[0]http://www.cfr.org/iraq/islamic-state/p14811 "The group that calls itself the Islamic State can trace its lineage to the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in 2003. The Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi aligned his Jama’at al-Tawhidw’al-Jihad with al-Qaeda, making it al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)."
http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-inte... [1]"More pertinent than Islamic theology is that there are other, much more convincing, explanations as to why they’ve fought for the side they did. At the end of the interview with the first prisoner we ask, “Do you have any questions for us?” For the first time since he came into the room he smiles—in surprise—and finally tells us what really motivated him, without any prompting. He knows there is an American in the room, and can perhaps guess, from his demeanor and his questions, that this American is ex-military, and directs his “question,” in the form of an enraged statement, straight at him. “The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.”
ISIS is the first group since Al Qaeda to offer these young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe."
> there's no serious argument here
That's a pretty ridiculous opinion to have considering the voting in this thread. Even if you're right, I'm clearly far from alone in thinking that what you've done here is wrong. So, in fact, there is an argument to be had here, and trying to preempt discussion like that just shows a false and unjustified confidence in your assertion. A little humility goes a long way, you know?
I would say that in that respect you are probably an outlier, and urge you to remember that facebook is designed for the mean.
Solzhenitsyn in general gives a sense that the USSR wanted to keep things more or less held together, but wasn't that concerned about people who fell between the cracks.
You seam to have a very rosy picture of the Ottoman empire.Without going into too much detail, most historians would agree that it was an aggressive expansionist empire with intolerance to non-islamic sects.
"The terrorists you see today would become terrorists in the name of Christ just as well." - This is patently absurd, at least in this century, and a horrendously apologist argument.
I would recommend reading several key articles illustrating the Saudi Wahabi link to ISIS and how its clear that this is an intrinsically Islamist problem: eg.
http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2014/11/wahhabism-...
Also, I'd advise reading Sam Harris's "Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon"
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/sleepwalking-toward-armag...
What do you know about crime in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years? (A whopping 29 years combined.)