Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

I would be quite surprised if the EU decided against further intervention by this. If anything, I would expect them to intervene more.

http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20Effective

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/sleepwalking-toward-armag...

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.)

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.

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.

http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

* 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"

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.

If your goal is to terrify a nation in order to pressure it to change its foreign policy then it is quite rational. And there are quite a few examples of this approach actually working.

It's not intentional but I doubt ISIS sympathisers see the distinction.

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.

The point is that for a phycologicaly healthy and balanced human being these actions can not be called rational by any stretch of logic

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]