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Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

(www.nytimes.com)
623 points franzb | 2 comments | 14 Nov 15 00:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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jules ◴[14 Nov 15 02:48 UTC] No.10564189[source]▶
This is what many people think, but it is demonstrably false. Most terrorists are highly educated and some are rich. The terrorists involved in 9/11 all had university degrees, for example, and some of them from western universities. These are not people who would be committing suicide anyway out of depression caused by miserable circumstances.

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.

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toyg ◴[14 Nov 15 03:39 UTC] No.10564334[source]▶
I know very well what you mention, but you're not reading what I wrote: "either in material or spiritual terms". Well-educated people are the first to know that society is full of lies and deceit, and without some spiritual rooting (be it familial love or something else), they are at high risk of being depressed but functional individuals. Alienation is a very powerful force. We used to say that only the rich can worry about being sad.

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.

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1. jules ◴[14 Nov 15 10:15 UTC] No.10565184[source]▶
I'm not sure what your stance is in that case. I certainly agree with you that these people are spiritually maladjusted. They way I see it there are two competing theories. One is that terrorism is mainly the result of economic and political grievances against the west and already present psychological disorders. The other is that in addition to economic and political grievances, religion and theological grievances play a major role, and that these people aren't crazy people but people who have become convinced of a crazy idea. The former is the mainstream left wing theory, and while I am generally sympathetic to the left, this theory simply does not fit the data.

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.

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2. toyg ◴[14 Nov 15 13:38 UTC] No.10565610[source]▶
The two are nonexclusive. If you are a disaffected/disenfranchised third-generation Algerian immigrant, you have a predisposition to pick a fight with the old colonial power, and you just need an excuse. Same if you come from Syria or Egypt and are well-educated; you have no idea of the amount of propaganda and West-blaming people in these countries grew up with for generations, because of things like the never-ending problem with Israel/Palestine, the Iranian coup against Mossadiq, the Iran/Iraq war and all the other conflicts "we" had an active role in. In the '70s, a lot of violent action was justified with marxism or fascism; today they can be justified with wahabism. If a particular religion was so magic, we would have had "islamic" suicide bombers for 5 centuries, and we just hadn't. You can't make chocolate cake with just chocolate.

> 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...