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Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

(www.nytimes.com)
623 points franzb | 5 comments | 14 Nov 15 00:25 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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djfm ◴[14 Nov 15 01:12 UTC] No.10563795[source]▶
I live in Paris and was spending the night in the middle of the hot zone. I was a few hundred meters from the Bataclan but fortunately the area I was in was spared. I tried to get a Uber but they were unavailable, "State of emergency, please stay home", the app said. I took a city bike home, rode about 10kms and barely saw anyone in the streets all the way home. It was really, really weird. I'm awfully sad that people can be proud of having killed a hundred innocents. I'm not afraid, I'm just terribly sad. Please stop this pointless killing.
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bedhead ◴[14 Nov 15 01:21 UTC] No.10563844[source]▶
You are trying to rationalize with people who are irrational. They don't reconcile. It sucks. It's depressing.
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rquantz ◴[14 Nov 15 01:31 UTC] No.10563887[source]▶
Terrorism is usually a rational act. It is terrible, but it has political goals. This, for instance, may be aimed at ending the European involvement in Syria and their taking in refugees.
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bedhead ◴[14 Nov 15 01:37 UTC] No.10563914[source]▶
It is only "rational" within an irrational construct, such as extreme religious devotion.
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lazaroclapp ◴[14 Nov 15 01:50 UTC] No.10563966[source]▶
No. It can be rational in the context of anti-colonialism and sovereignist ideology and historical revanchism, as well as many other not at all irrational ideologies. It might or might not be effective, depending on the specific political goals in question. It is not, in general, about religion per se, except in so much as religion is part of group identity (in a similar vein as say, nationalism).

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.)

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jules ◴[14 Nov 15 01:53 UTC] No.10563979[source]▶
You really think that the sincere belief that you will spend an eternity in heaven and secure a place in heaven for 70 family members of your choosing and earn the love of God has nothing to do with it? It's hard for people who are not religious fundamentalists to understand that some people really believe this with as much certainty as you and I believe that the sun will rise tomorrow. This belief is precisely why so many of these attacks are suicide attacks. Ask yourself why so many suicide bombers? Why blow yourself up when you can make a bomb and then another and another? Mohamed Merah answers this question: "We love death more than the infidel loves life". To these people death is not death. This life is just a test, a test that you can ace by blowing yourself up, death is not the end but the beginning of the real and infinitely long life.

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.

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toyg ◴[14 Nov 15 02:45 UTC] No.10564180[source]▶
> Why blow yourself up when you can make a bomb and then another and another?

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.

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1. Chathamization ◴[14 Nov 15 04:08 UTC] No.10564408[source]▶
Very much so. My guess is if you decide to look at the angry dispossessed young men demographic, you're going to see a group more prone to violence than you would by looking at any racial or religious demographic.
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2. jules ◴[14 Nov 15 10:33 UTC] No.10565222[source]▶
Then why is it the case that virtually all these terrorist attacks come from 1 religion, which coincidentally happens to be the religion whose scripture makes this kind of behaviour rational when interpreted literally?
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3. Chathamization ◴[14 Nov 15 12:24 UTC] No.10565431[source]▶
Because people with certain biases who want to ignore evidence and blame this all on Islam to define "these terrorist attacks" in a way that excludes many similar attacks? We've been averaging about one mass shooting a day in the U.S. There are so many that I'd forgotten about some major recent ones, like the Umpqua Community College Shooting just a month ago.

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.

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4. jules ◴[14 Nov 15 12:57 UTC] No.10565495{3}[source]▶
There is a difference between a lone mass shooting and a terrorist attack coordinated by a government. It goes without saying that this is not the fault of Muslims in general. It's the fault of some Muslims, in this case IS.
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5. Chathamization ◴[14 Nov 15 13:48 UTC] No.10565642{4}[source]▶
I suppose, in the same way that Dylan Roof is the fault of some Conservatives, or some Southerners, or some Americans, etc. Yes, the existence of terrorist organizations that make use of these lost angry men means that in a minority of these cases a group can tell them to attack on the same day rather than weeks apart, and means they can stamp an ideology on them, like I said. So yes, there is a difference, just as there is a difference between the shooting that are done by a couple of friends (like Columbine) and the ones done by a lone wolf (VTech).

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.