I'm certainly not reading into things that aren't there. It was ignorant. You asked who was being insulted? Hi! Hello.
I'm sure Tinwhiskers appreciates your ardent defense of his dumb attempt at a joke in order to defend a larger worldview that irreverent "criticism" of religions should be itself free of criticism or offense regardless of how many thin skinned lilies it bruises, but criticism is not what that was
Oh and when you say that pork is "ritually unclean" you sound like a honking goose give me a break you just don't eat pork when you're Muslim good god it's not like it's a fucking peanut allergy, when you want to dispel vegans from the area you don't wave full fat milk in their general direction, Muslims don't recoil from pork like vampires confronted with garlic ffs
Ritually unclean is a standard academic term for religious dietary restrictions. It doesn't contain any implication of vampire like aversion or even great psychological distress.
I am not contesting this point due to any such motivation.
I asked how it is insulting people. Not who. Not all offense is legitimate.
Is nailing down the precise definition of what you think people are allowed to find offensive going to do any person any good at all?
We got any updates on the situation in Brussels per chance?
Not right at the moment, no. Police are looking for the suspect in the white clothes & hat, and some of the most severely injured victims are just barely hanging on in hospital.
Transportation restrictions are still place & I get the sense that authorities are still feeling pretty on edge.
We have our first identified victim: Adelma Tapia Ruiz, a 37 year old woman who was killed at the airport while attempting to travel to NYC to meet with her sister. She was with her husband & two daughters, all of whom survived the attack.
Fertilizer and diesel - what most IED's in Afghanistan were made of as well.
PS4 - Mrfuzzyhat
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wiltingI had fun once and it was awfulRegistered Userregular
edited March 2016
It's being reported that the man in white photographed with the alleged airport bombers, allegedly a bomb maker also linked with the Paris attacks, has been arrested in Belgium.
Let me clear this up since it seems to have gone on for three pages: if you're the kind of person who thinks it's acceptable to plaster pictures of pork over Muslims, you can fuck off. If you need me to explain that to you because you, so innocently, are unable to understand what the problem is, you can fuck off. You aren't wanted. Go to Reddit.
The media over here hasn't reached consensus whether the arrested man is indeed Najim Laachraoui or not, though more sources say he is.
Two of the other terrorists have been identified and are two brothers (one of them being in the picture, the other one being involved with the subway bombing). Both have a criminal past (one of them being convicted in 2010 for firing at a police officer.) The youngest brother was connected to the events in Paris, having rented a house in Charleroi where they could hide out at the time.
On a personal note, it was very odd to see armed police officers at the train station I pass through daily. It didn't really hit me how close to home these events are till that point.
Apparently they arrested this guy in a pizzeria. Big pizza-terrorism link there, folks, worth following up on... (One reason they found Abdeslam was a 'suspiciously big pizza order'.)
At 13.00 local time (about half an hour from now), the police will talk to the press about the current status of the investigation.
The Belgian minister for Work and Economy has stated that employees who are unable to work as a result of the events of yesterday are eligible for unemployment benefits to prevent either employers or employees from taking a financial hit for this.
That's nice. My employer mailed us saying that if we got locked out of our customer's offices (EC buildings) we could take a paid day, but if we did not get to work because of, say, no transport being available, we wouldn't get paid.
Edit, mind you; some of the other consultants were offered paid hotel rooms if they got stuck in Brussels.
Cornucopiist on
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
Here's what I see, no matter what we do — they win.
Do nothing? They win.
Tighten security? They win.
Blow them away? They win.
Winning here is something I'm not sure you understand. The only way terrorists, ISIS or otherwise, win is if we dance like puppets every time they do these attacks. By doing nothing different, we are winning by showing that the west and modern, global society is implacable and can't be swayed by minor incidents of violence. By taking measured, reasonable steps to prevent attacks within legal boundaries, the west is doing what it can to mitigate these attacks.
By "blowing them away" however, we are radicalizing the friends and families of those attacking, creating a new generation of folk ready with anger and lack of resources or options for other outlets to that anger aside from following racial schools of thought that end with violence.
We already are winning, by default. The west is prosperous, a hegemony in fact, with unprecedented wealth and success and (comparatively speaking) quality of live and acceptance and tolerance of diverse cultures. The "grey area" being attacked is what we do to "win," specifically by creating an environment for the vast majority of peoples not to be attacked, marginalized, or othered simply by looking different or following different cultural beliefs. That's why places like Europe are more often attacked than the US, not because they are the biggest threat to radical Islam militarily, but because the cultural acceptance you see in places like Paris and Brussels and London are generally leading to more acceptance of tolerant western ways by seeing the advantages of them, which troubles and de-powers the radical elements as they see more moderate forms of faith and ways of life sapping away their power.
I know that this will be entirely lost in this discussion as your post history seems to imply you are a one-topic poster (pro-Trump) and by popping in here you mostly wanted to make fairly disgusting inroads to convincing people that Trumps politics of hate are somehow justified. I couldn't let this go though. Is disingenuous and ignores decades of widely accepted scholarship, statistics, and geopolitical theory on radicalization and is, like most of what Trump states, a knee-jerk and cowardly stance that is both unconstitutional and deeply rooted in preying upon the social anxieties of the uninformed American too lazy to look deeper into these topics beyond "gut feelings."
This attack has nothing to do with Trump, beyond his ability to try to insert himself into the spotlight with his demogogery. Real people died because real people were pushed to a point to where they felt the only possible way to make a statement or do good by their people was to kill themselves and others. Stopping that marginalization is how you "win."
So something just occurred to me, and I figure I'd post the thought here so that more knowledgeable folks could weigh in.
I've heard that it's more or less assumed that this attack was rushed. After the capture of Abdeslam last week, they hurried up and out these plans into motion. Speculation is that had he not been captured, this could have been a lot worse.
So that's my first thought, is there any actual evidence to support that kind of thinking? Or is that just folks filling in the blanks?
If they is the case, it kind of leads, in my mind, to the suggestion that they were afraid he'd talk. I mean, it also suggests a viable Intel network in place, which would itself be a reason to accelerate, but for me it seems like they sped up their plan for fear of being given up.
Which I think days something about presumed loyalties, and/or interrogation techniques used by the EU.
The speculation is based on the fact that they had a lot more explosives (the cab driver that took them to the airport noted that they had more suitcases than could fit in his cab and they had to leave some behind) and that next weekend (Eastern weekend), the airport would be a lot busier.
Also there were some sources that have said that Abdeslam was willing to talk in return for a reduced sentence, so that might have frightened them.
At the moment people have been pointing to the opposite. One major reason for this is that they've found arms before, and suspects, but not together. They've had to let suspects go because of this, too. So the assumption is that arms and people are only put together just before an operation. So that points to it being somewhat of a coincidence.
We don't interrogate suspects CIA style and Abdeslam will likely just go to trial without telling us anything- and his buddies must know that. There's not even a legal way for him to get a plea bargain.
On the other hand, the attacks were not very well executed (e.g. leaving bombs behind) so that points to rushing.
I think a big mistake was made by announcing his arrest. I think they should have dosed him with XTC and let him have a nice chat with an even nicer police officer. I think they should have shut down the subway the minute the bombs in Zaventem went off. I think our security services need more staff, more cooperation and more accountability...
And we're three decades late winning the hearts and minds of Belgian muslims.
And we're three decades late winning the hearts and minds of Belgian muslims.
I imagine this to be the case for so many European countries. Take Switzerland with its constitutional amendment banning minarets.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
I just realized that ISIS is Donald Trump in the way they abuse the media's inability to ignore them and essentially get free propaganda and recruiting material every time they commit even a partially-disrupted attack against a soft target. It would seem that the response would be to continue to investigate and prosecute those responsible, engaging in outreach programs with Muslim and other disaffected communities and actually addressing their grievances, and to stop making ISIS out to be something Joe Everyman in Idaho should be legitimately fearful of.
At the moment people have been pointing to the opposite. One major reason for this is that they've found arms before, and suspects, but not together. They've had to let suspects go because of this, too. So the assumption is that arms and people are only put together just before an operation. So that points to it being somewhat of a coincidence.
We don't interrogate suspects CIA style and Abdeslam will likely just go to trial without telling us anything- and his buddies must know that. There's not even a legal way for him to get a plea bargain.
On the other hand, the attacks were not very well executed (e.g. leaving bombs behind) so that points to rushing.
I think a big mistake was made by announcing his arrest. I think they should have dosed him with XTC and let him have a nice chat with an even nicer police officer. I think they should have shut down the subway the minute the bombs in Zaventem went off. I think our security services need more staff, more cooperation and more accountability...
And we're three decades late winning the hearts and minds of Belgian muslims.
Spiegel has an article today which was about that Brussels might not be a target because its the heart of Europe but more because the city is just a mess in regards to politics, social fabric, infrastructure, managment and policing which makes it exceptionally easy compared to other european cities to hide, plan and execute attacks there.
I'm in the bloody Berlaymont building, and I can see the bomb site from my window. If the bomb had gone off one stop earlier, which is only 200 meters, it'd have been right between the seat of the Council and the Commission. So I very much doubt that this was not meant to target the EU. If so he'd have pulled the trigger one stop further, in the busiest station on the line, killing many more people.
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wiltingI had fun once and it was awfulRegistered Userregular
It's not gone unnoticed - yesterday Italy's Prime Minister called for a common European defence & security policy.
“Today they hit Belgium, but they also hit the capital of the European Union,” Renzi said in a speech, vowing that “it will take months, perhaps years, but we will beat them”.
“This is not the time for jackals, but nor is it the time for doves. We need a European pact, a pact for freedom and security,” he said, referring to those who used the explosions as an opportunity to attack the EU or simply urge peace.
“Europe must go all the way this time. We must invest in a common security and defence structure,” he said, adding that the debate over defence integration has been raging since 1954, when a plan to form a European Defence Community (EDC) with a pan-Europe military fell through.
This is definitely something where the EU could and should show its value by facilitating cross-border collaboration. It's ludicrous that there are so many people who think you just need to batten down the hatches, i.e. close all the borders (as if this were possible), and hey presto, no more problems of this kind!
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
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HakkekageSpace Whore Academysumma cum laudeRegistered Userregular
This Vox interview with Peter Neumann, a radicalization expert, is illuminating
ZB: So why didn't Belgium build up its security establishment in response?
PN: No one saw this coming. [In] 2011-2012, you suddenly have people in large numbers — numbers that the agencies and authorities were not expecting — going to Syria and Iraq. And the threat perception wasn't so great, so the growth of these institutions didn't keep up with the growth of the threat....It's also very questionable whether you can grow security agencies as fast as the threat...So you cannot double the size within half a year, but that wasn't even the intention. Politicians in Belgium reacted too late to what was happening on the ground. It was a political failure, in terms of not allowing these agencies to grow.
But the more profound failure was to basically allow this situation to grow in the first place...If you have a vacuum that consists of alienated, marginalized people from migrant backgrounds who are socially and economically deprived, then it is only a question of time. Of when extremists go into that, take advantage, and push their narrative — which is basically that society is against you, and you need to engage in war.
(made some trims)
3DS: 2165 - 6538 - 3417
NNID: Hakkekage
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
Honestly, if abdeslam was able to hide in Brussels for 90 days during a state of alert that high..
That is not a good sign.
This means he has backing and money / tools.
How do you plan on protecting a city like that?
It's pretty much completely impossible, since all you need for major damage is a few weapons and home made explosives.
I'm appealed by these attacks. But I am not surprised in the least.
We don't know what his status was during that time, do we? It could have been as simple as "you can stay in my guest bedroom; don't go outside and don't use the phone"
Honestly, if abdeslam was able to hide in Brussels for 90 days during a state of alert that high..
That is not a good sign.
This means he has backing and money / tools.
How do you plan on protecting a city like that?
It's pretty much completely impossible, since all you need for major damage is a few weapons and home made explosives.
I'm appealed by these attacks. But I am not surprised in the least.
We don't know what his status was during that time, do we? It could have been as simple as "you can stay in my guest bedroom; don't go outside and don't use the phone"
According to the same Spiegel article he stayed at several places and even went to the barber and shopping for clothes in a market.
At the moment people have been pointing to the opposite. One major reason for this is that they've found arms before, and suspects, but not together. They've had to let suspects go because of this, too. So the assumption is that arms and people are only put together just before an operation. So that points to it being somewhat of a coincidence.
We don't interrogate suspects CIA style and Abdeslam will likely just go to trial without telling us anything- and his buddies must know that. There's not even a legal way for him to get a plea bargain.
On the other hand, the attacks were not very well executed (e.g. leaving bombs behind) so that points to rushing.
I think a big mistake was made by announcing his arrest. I think they should have dosed him with XTC and let him have a nice chat with an even nicer police officer. I think they should have shut down the subway the minute the bombs in Zaventem went off. I think our security services need more staff, more cooperation and more accountability...
And we're three decades late winning the hearts and minds of Belgian muslims.
This is such pernicious blame the victim bullshit. You shouldn't have to win the hearts and minds of people immigrating to your country. They should assimilate to the culture of the people whose country they are moving to or they can just stay in their home country.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
At the moment people have been pointing to the opposite. One major reason for this is that they've found arms before, and suspects, but not together. They've had to let suspects go because of this, too. So the assumption is that arms and people are only put together just before an operation. So that points to it being somewhat of a coincidence.
We don't interrogate suspects CIA style and Abdeslam will likely just go to trial without telling us anything- and his buddies must know that. There's not even a legal way for him to get a plea bargain.
On the other hand, the attacks were not very well executed (e.g. leaving bombs behind) so that points to rushing.
I think a big mistake was made by announcing his arrest. I think they should have dosed him with XTC and let him have a nice chat with an even nicer police officer. I think they should have shut down the subway the minute the bombs in Zaventem went off. I think our security services need more staff, more cooperation and more accountability...
And we're three decades late winning the hearts and minds of Belgian muslims.
This is such pernicious blame the victim bullshit. You shouldn't have to win the hearts and minds of people immigrating to your country. They should assimilate to the culture of the people whose country they are moving to or they can just stay in their home country.
And this is the same silly nationalist bullshit that denies all the kickass stuff we get from immigrants.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
edited March 2016
Also, a populace that stomps on another and then gets attacked isn't "Blame the victim" when we point out they were stomping on another. I'd say 99% of time the use of terroristic force is unjustified, but when a kid brings a knife to school and stabs the bully who has been stealing his lunch money and beating him up for months, the bully doesn't get much sympathy. The stabber goes to counseling/jail depending on the age, but the bully is still a fucking bully.
This is such pernicious blame the victim bullshit. You shouldn't have to win the hearts and minds of people immigrating to your country. They should assimilate to the culture of the people whose country they are moving to or they can just stay in their home country.
I'm not even 100% against the sentiment you're expressing here - I have zero sympathy for those who wish to enact sharia law, well, in any country, but doubly so in countries I consider my home - but it's still facile and useless in practical terms. Belgian culture, as much as any country's culture, isn't monolithic, and migrants influence it as much as those whose families have lived there for centuries. I know young Muslims who are closer to me (the son of two immigrants born in Switzerland) and my born-and-bred Swiss friends in terms of how they behave and what they believe than many of the people living in rural Switzerland - and in some respects there may be more of an overlap between devout Muslims and ultra-conservative Swiss people in terms of what they consider moral and decent. So while what you say may make some surface sense, it simply fails to be applicable in so many situations in real life.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Honestly, if abdeslam was able to hide in Brussels for 90 days during a state of alert that high..
That is not a good sign.
This means he has backing and money / tools.
How do you plan on protecting a city like that?
It's pretty much completely impossible, since all you need for major damage is a few weapons and home made explosives.
I'm appealed by these attacks. But I am not surprised in the least.
We don't know what his status was during that time, do we? It could have been as simple as "you can stay in my guest bedroom; don't go outside and don't use the phone"
According to the same Spiegel article he stayed at several places and even went to the barber and shopping for clothes in a market.
Grow/trim a beard and wear a hat and glasses, and he'd look different enough from any newspaper photos or wanted posters/ads that strangers would typically blame themselves for stereotyping rather than identifying him as a terrorist. And that's assuming that his image was commonly distributed enough for people to see it. To put it another way: the guy who plays Superman in the Superman/Batman movie stood around Times Square under a poster for Batman/Superman while wearing a Superman t-shirt and glasses and no one said anything to him.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
Posts
Yes.
Not right at the moment, no. Police are looking for the suspect in the white clothes & hat, and some of the most severely injured victims are just barely hanging on in hospital.
Transportation restrictions are still place & I get the sense that authorities are still feeling pretty on edge.
Fertilizer and diesel - what most IED's in Afghanistan were made of as well.
Two of the other terrorists have been identified and are two brothers (one of them being in the picture, the other one being involved with the subway bombing). Both have a criminal past (one of them being convicted in 2010 for firing at a police officer.) The youngest brother was connected to the events in Paris, having rented a house in Charleroi where they could hide out at the time.
(Sorry, sources are dutch and french:
http://www.dhnet.be/actu/belgique/attentats-de-bruxelles-deux-kamikazes-identifies-direct-56f23d7435702a22d5a57502
http://nos.nl/artikel/2094600-daders-brussel-waren-gezochte-broers.html)
On a personal note, it was very odd to see armed police officers at the train station I pass through daily. It didn't really hit me how close to home these events are till that point.
http://www.dhnet.be/actu/belgique/l-homme-arrete-a-anderlecht-n-est-pas-najim-laachraoui-56f2656235708ea2d3d54186
The Belgian minister for Work and Economy has stated that employees who are unable to work as a result of the events of yesterday are eligible for unemployment benefits to prevent either employers or employees from taking a financial hit for this.
Edit, mind you; some of the other consultants were offered paid hotel rooms if they got stuck in Brussels.
Winning here is something I'm not sure you understand. The only way terrorists, ISIS or otherwise, win is if we dance like puppets every time they do these attacks. By doing nothing different, we are winning by showing that the west and modern, global society is implacable and can't be swayed by minor incidents of violence. By taking measured, reasonable steps to prevent attacks within legal boundaries, the west is doing what it can to mitigate these attacks.
By "blowing them away" however, we are radicalizing the friends and families of those attacking, creating a new generation of folk ready with anger and lack of resources or options for other outlets to that anger aside from following racial schools of thought that end with violence.
We already are winning, by default. The west is prosperous, a hegemony in fact, with unprecedented wealth and success and (comparatively speaking) quality of live and acceptance and tolerance of diverse cultures. The "grey area" being attacked is what we do to "win," specifically by creating an environment for the vast majority of peoples not to be attacked, marginalized, or othered simply by looking different or following different cultural beliefs. That's why places like Europe are more often attacked than the US, not because they are the biggest threat to radical Islam militarily, but because the cultural acceptance you see in places like Paris and Brussels and London are generally leading to more acceptance of tolerant western ways by seeing the advantages of them, which troubles and de-powers the radical elements as they see more moderate forms of faith and ways of life sapping away their power.
I know that this will be entirely lost in this discussion as your post history seems to imply you are a one-topic poster (pro-Trump) and by popping in here you mostly wanted to make fairly disgusting inroads to convincing people that Trumps politics of hate are somehow justified. I couldn't let this go though. Is disingenuous and ignores decades of widely accepted scholarship, statistics, and geopolitical theory on radicalization and is, like most of what Trump states, a knee-jerk and cowardly stance that is both unconstitutional and deeply rooted in preying upon the social anxieties of the uninformed American too lazy to look deeper into these topics beyond "gut feelings."
This attack has nothing to do with Trump, beyond his ability to try to insert himself into the spotlight with his demogogery. Real people died because real people were pushed to a point to where they felt the only possible way to make a statement or do good by their people was to kill themselves and others. Stopping that marginalization is how you "win."
I've heard that it's more or less assumed that this attack was rushed. After the capture of Abdeslam last week, they hurried up and out these plans into motion. Speculation is that had he not been captured, this could have been a lot worse.
So that's my first thought, is there any actual evidence to support that kind of thinking? Or is that just folks filling in the blanks?
If they is the case, it kind of leads, in my mind, to the suggestion that they were afraid he'd talk. I mean, it also suggests a viable Intel network in place, which would itself be a reason to accelerate, but for me it seems like they sped up their plan for fear of being given up.
Which I think days something about presumed loyalties, and/or interrogation techniques used by the EU.
maybe?
Also there were some sources that have said that Abdeslam was willing to talk in return for a reduced sentence, so that might have frightened them.
No solid proof, but I think it's likely.
We don't interrogate suspects CIA style and Abdeslam will likely just go to trial without telling us anything- and his buddies must know that. There's not even a legal way for him to get a plea bargain.
On the other hand, the attacks were not very well executed (e.g. leaving bombs behind) so that points to rushing.
I think a big mistake was made by announcing his arrest. I think they should have dosed him with XTC and let him have a nice chat with an even nicer police officer. I think they should have shut down the subway the minute the bombs in Zaventem went off. I think our security services need more staff, more cooperation and more accountability...
And we're three decades late winning the hearts and minds of Belgian muslims.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
This was actually my point. Kind of a rebuke of Trump. But also I didn't consider that authorities wouldn't really talk to him at all
Spiegel has an article today which was about that Brussels might not be a target because its the heart of Europe but more because the city is just a mess in regards to politics, social fabric, infrastructure, managment and policing which makes it exceptionally easy compared to other european cities to hide, plan and execute attacks there.
That is not a good sign.
This means he has backing and money / tools.
How do you plan on protecting a city like that?
It's pretty much completely impossible, since all you need for major damage is a few weapons and home made explosives.
I'm appealed by these attacks. But I am not surprised in the least.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
http://www.vox.com/2016/3/23/11290174/brussels-attacks-belgium-jihadism
(made some trims)
NNID: Hakkekage
We don't know what his status was during that time, do we? It could have been as simple as "you can stay in my guest bedroom; don't go outside and don't use the phone"
According to the same Spiegel article he stayed at several places and even went to the barber and shopping for clothes in a market.
edit: Just saw it's available in english, too:
spiegel.de/international/europe/belgium-bureaucratic-chaos-partly-to-blame-for-attacks-a-1083806.html
No sources given for that though.
This is such pernicious blame the victim bullshit. You shouldn't have to win the hearts and minds of people immigrating to your country. They should assimilate to the culture of the people whose country they are moving to or they can just stay in their home country.
And this is the same silly nationalist bullshit that denies all the kickass stuff we get from immigrants.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Grow/trim a beard and wear a hat and glasses, and he'd look different enough from any newspaper photos or wanted posters/ads that strangers would typically blame themselves for stereotyping rather than identifying him as a terrorist. And that's assuming that his image was commonly distributed enough for people to see it. To put it another way: the guy who plays Superman in the Superman/Batman movie stood around Times Square under a poster for Batman/Superman while wearing a Superman t-shirt and glasses and no one said anything to him.
europe.newsweek.com/israeli-minister-blames-chocolate-loving-belgians-brussels-attacks-439909?rm=eu