Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

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.

You are trying to rationalize with people who are irrational. They don't reconcile. It sucks. It's depressing.

>You are trying to rationalize with people who are irrational.

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.

They are doing what they are doing because they have interpreted their primary religious text as explicitly instructing them to kill people that don't believe as they do. Killing another human being that poses no threat to you, regardless of what books you like to read or what instructions you believe they contain, is absolutely irrational - regardless of your "goal". Rational people have no way of understanding these actions, nor should they.

Rational.. irrational.. I hope you can see that it's a pointless argument. The word "rational" is highly subjective so we shouldn't pretend there's some objective measure of rationality.

* 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"

It's important because to start to solve these problems you have to be able to see things from their point of view, you can't really do that if you think they are irrational.