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.
Whitey Bulger was #1 on the FBI's most wanted list and was living openly in San Diego for years. I'm fairly certain San Diego is not generally controlled by Irish organized crime. Its entirely possible the terrorist had support there, but its not that hard to hide really.
That's some good political instincts that guy has.
Minister's brain: This attack gives us an opportunity to advance our interests in regards to Islamic terrorism.
Minister's mouth: You mean an opportunity to make fun of the victims as chocolate eating slackers.
Minister's brain: Damnit.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
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.
To me, as a Canadian, the culture that I want all immigrants to have or to assimilate to is that they believe that everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice as administered by the state, and that everyone is equally a person with all of the rights and responsibilities thereof in the eyes of the law and of society, in particular with regards to race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age and mental or physical ability.
What a person eats, drinks or wears, how they decorate, to whom or to what they pray to, what sports they play, what television and movies and books they follow, what language they speak, what goals they have in life, none of those things are at all relevant to how I define Canada. If an immigrant takes an interest in hockey and discovers new ways to use maple syrup, that's neat, but doesn't say much one way or another to me about how Canadian they are. I want them to assimilate to the principles that I outlined above, but whatever culture they bring with them beyond that just adds to the mosaic of society in a way that's almost always positive.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
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Captain Marcusnow arrives the hour of actionRegistered Userregular
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.
Are you shitting me? EVERY time there's a radical Islamist attack on the West, there's always people like you who wring their hands and say "oh maybe it's our fault we're getting blown up".
No. That is unfair to the actual victims of the attack and it's a bullshit argument besides. I'm sure there are poor Buddhists and Hindus in Europe, but they're not committing terrorist attacks. There are no Buddhist bombings. There are no Hindus strapping bombs to themselves and detonating them in bus stations while screaming a chant to Vishnu. Why is it only Islam?
Despite what my conservative colleagues think, it's not because of the beliefs or teachings of Islam itself. It's because there are multiple organizations dedicated to promoting terror and Wahhabist hatred and they're pouring money, agents, and materiel into Europe. They need to be cut off. Interpol needs to step up its game, known radicals should be tracked, mosques that teach hate and radicalism should be shut down and their imams deported- there's a precedent for this in Frances anti-cult laws. Think Scientology. Importantly, Europe's police should be given the latitude, laws, and funding needed to do their job properly, instead of relying on patchwork jurisdictions and antiquated laws- radicals willing to come back to the light can't even plea bargain to inform on their cronies.
And perhaps most importantly of all, Europe should stop whistling past the graveyard on this one. The more bombings, the more massacres, the more beheadings- all of those feed into the anti-Muslim elements. The proper response is not to tell those elements to shut up, the proper response is to stop the bombings. Singing "Kumbaya" is not going to stop a single bombing and there will always be young idiots willing to bomb, no matter how well treated they are. Remember, most of the terrorists have been middle-class kids from good families.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
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.
Are you shitting me? EVERY time there's a radical Islamist attack on the West, there's always people like you who wring their hands and say "oh maybe it's our fault we're getting blown up".
No. That is unfair to the actual victims of the attack and it's a bullshit argument besides. I'm sure there are poor Buddhists and Hindus in Europe, but they're not committing terrorist attacks. There are no Buddhist bombings. There are no Hindus strapping bombs to themselves and detonating them in bus stations while screaming a chant to Vishnu. Why is it only Islam?
Despite what my conservative colleagues think, it's not because of the beliefs or teachings of Islam itself. It's because there are multiple organizations dedicated to promoting terror and Wahhabist hatred and they're pouring money, agents, and materiel into Europe. They need to be cut off. Interpol needs to step up its game, known radicals should be tracked, mosques that teach hate and radicalism should be shut down and their imams deported- there's a precedent for this in Frances anti-cult laws. Think Scientology. Importantly, Europe's police should be given the latitude, laws, and funding needed to do their job properly, instead of relying on patchwork jurisdictions and antiquated laws- radicals willing to come back to the light can't even plea bargain to inform on their cronies.
And perhaps most importantly of all, Europe should stop whistling past the graveyard on this one. The more bombings, the more massacres, the more beheadings- all of those feed into the anti-Muslim elements. The proper response is not to tell those elements to shut up, the proper response is to stop the bombings. Singing "Kumbaya" is not going to stop a single bombing and there will always be young idiots willing to bomb, no matter how well treated they are. Remember, most of the terrorists have been middle-class kids from good families.
You come close to arguing against your point here. Yes, these protections can and should be done. Yes there are precedent.
Why are these attacks being funneled towards Europe rather than, say, China or Russia or Brazil or even the US? Lax security isn't the reason, if that were the case any number of tiny western countries would have been hit first across the globe, and not jest in Western Europe. Generally speaking these attacks are performed by people of the states they attack, driven to these attacks as their only form of outlet for systematic othering and discrimination.
This isn't blame the victim. The ~400 Belgians that were hit by these attacks are not to blame, but Belgian culture and government does have a broken system for handling their immigrant populations which makes finding the saps willing to kill themselves much, much easier for extremists. Part of the reason you dont find Buddhist or Hindu or Sikh or Shinto militants in Europe is that those of these backgrounds generally are more tolerated and better integrated by the societies they represent. If you looked back in the 1890s there were actually considerable elements of Hindu protest for the time in London. However, in the modern world we as western culture are both friendly and accepting of these groups more than Islam. This is due to many, many complicated historical problems between the west and Islamic culture which cannot be ignored.
No one is suggesting to not take reasonable actions to stop attacks. Security services should do what they can. But this isn't a simple issue and without understanding just how people actually get to the point of becoming radicalized you cannot truly make effective efforts to prevent it. It's ignoring the housefire while extinguishing the bedroom. Yes, you solved all of your immediate fire problems, but they will only get worse unless you deal with the source.
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.
Are you shitting me? EVERY time there's a radical Islamist attack on the West, there's always people like you who wring their hands and say "oh maybe it's our fault we're getting blown up".
No. That is unfair to the actual victims of the attack and it's a bullshit argument besides. I'm sure there are poor Buddhists and Hindus in Europe, but they're not committing terrorist attacks. There are no Buddhist bombings. There are no Hindus strapping bombs to themselves and detonating them in bus stations while screaming a chant to Vishnu. Why is it only Islam?
Despite what my conservative colleagues think, it's not because of the beliefs or teachings of Islam itself. It's because there are multiple organizations dedicated to promoting terror and Wahhabist hatred and they're pouring money, agents, and materiel into Europe. They need to be cut off. Interpol needs to step up its game, known radicals should be tracked, mosques that teach hate and radicalism should be shut down and their imams deported- there's a precedent for this in Frances anti-cult laws. Think Scientology. Importantly, Europe's police should be given the latitude, laws, and funding needed to do their job properly, instead of relying on patchwork jurisdictions and antiquated laws- radicals willing to come back to the light can't even plea bargain to inform on their cronies.
And perhaps most importantly of all, Europe should stop whistling past the graveyard on this one. The more bombings, the more massacres, the more beheadings- all of those feed into the anti-Muslim elements. The proper response is not to tell those elements to shut up, the proper response is to stop the bombings. Singing "Kumbaya" is not going to stop a single bombing and there will always be young idiots willing to bomb, no matter how well treated they are. Remember, most of the terrorists have been middle-class kids from good families.
There's a lot to respond to here, but more extensive monitoring, increasing public treatment of Islam/Muslims as "other", especially by designation, and what have you seems rather counterproductive from an integration/assimilation standpoint, if that's what Western governments are interested in.
It's also probably wrong to think of this as simply radicalization of domestic citizens, as though that radicalization exists in a vacuum. I'm not super knowledgeable about it but I think the general "radical" viewpoint is that acts of terror in the west are (often) intentional responses to Western military action in the Islamic world, which is an ongoing thing which has killed a shitload of people over the course of the last century.
Also, it is not accurate to state that there are no Buddhist or Hindu terrorists. There aren't really many noteworthy examples of terrorism from those religious traditions in the West, but as a rule (and I could be wrong here, I am not a member of either community) Buddhists and Hindus are not generally singled out and marginalized in those societies the way that Muslims are (except when Hindus are brilliantly confused with Muslims). I'm not seeing anyone on TV advocating that all Asians be deported from the United States, or that Indians be prohibited from immigrating "until we know what's going on", or any other such responses.
Also, Christian terrorism is fairly common in both the States and (to a lesser extent) Western Europe. I'm sure you're old enough to remember when the IRA was still a pretty big deal and Catholic/Protestant Irish/English terrorism and gangs were still a pretty huge deal that got a lot of people killed. The latest Bundy family antics were arguably a (dismally failed) suicide-attack attempt. Et cetera.
I'm also not sure that we should be going on the assumption that Muslim communities are simply not policed enough, and that if they were, terroristic acts would be easier to stop. In the states we've seen extensive monitoring of the Muslim community, often in ways that are blatantly discriminatory, and it's generally turned up bupkes.
International terrorism and ISIS is an extremely complex problem that has developed out of a history of decades of violence and warfare in dozens of countries. There, frankly, is no silver bullet that will stop it from happening. It is a Gordian knot of the worst possible kind and enhanced surveillance is not going to cut through it.
Duffel on
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered 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.
Not to mention ignoring the reasons people tend to immigrate.
I'm not going to post it here, but a few weeks after the Paris attacks, someone posted a picture of that "peace sign Eiffel Tower" that was going around with the caption "200 years into colonialism and chill, and he gives you this look"
More info is out on the 2 brothers that are part of the group of 4. They have extremely direct ties to Abdeslam, up to the point that both of them probably stayed hidden together post Paris. They may have even been the other escapees in the shooting where Abeslam narrowly escaped.
Both of them were career criminals that turned radical, not the other way around. One of them had fired a Kalasjhnikov in a bank robbery, the other had performed a series of carjackings.
They were both already on wanted lists post Paris.
Steam: SanderJK Origin: SanderJK
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
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.
Are you shitting me? EVERY time there's a radical Islamist attack on the West, there's always people like you who wring their hands and say "oh maybe it's our fault we're getting blown up".
What I often see are people questioning why it happened, which is a particularly effective technique of not repeating the same mistakes. One we do not use often enough.
However, you are correct, there are people saying what you said. They're usually right-wing pundits talking about imaginary people that don't exist.
No. That is unfair to the actual victims of the attack and it's a bullshit argument besides. I'm sure there are poor Buddhists and Hindus in Europe, but they're not committing terrorist attacks. There are no Buddhist bombings. There are no Hindus strapping bombs to themselves and detonating them in bus stations while screaming a chant to Vishnu. Why is it only Islam?
Of course there aren't, because there isn't much of a connection between poverty and terrorism in a vacuum. However, active suppression of a people and terrorism? Definite link. I'm sure you remember the Catholic/Protestant terrorism that happened in Ireland so many years ago.
Despite what my conservative colleagues think, it's not because of the beliefs or teachings of Islam itself. It's because there are multiple organizations dedicated to promoting terror and Wahhabist hatred and they're pouring money, agents, and materiel into Europe. They need to be cut off. Interpol needs to step up its game, known radicals should be tracked, mosques that teach hate and radicalism should be shut down and their imams deported- there's a precedent for this in Frances anti-cult laws. Think Scientology. Importantly, Europe's police should be given the latitude, laws, and funding needed to do their job properly, instead of relying on patchwork jurisdictions and antiquated laws- radicals willing to come back to the light can't even plea bargain to inform on their cronies.
Using an iron fist to suppress an extremist philosophy is like trying to squeeze the air out of a balloon. The only thing that happens is it pops out everywhere where you have holes in your grip. We have seen decades of iron fist rule by the Soviets (and subsequently the Russians) in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Chechnya, and all they've succeeded in doing is being largely responsible for the islamic extremists we have today. Also, I know the idea of "funding it fully" sounds great, but I don't think you've really thought it through on how much funding that would require. We've spent trillions fighting a plant in South America, killed hundreds, ruined entire nations, toppled cartels and propped up governments... and that fucking plant is still winning.
And perhaps most importantly of all, Europe should stop whistling past the graveyard on this one. The more bombings, the more massacres, the more beheadings- all of those feed into the anti-Muslim elements. The proper response is not to tell those elements to shut up, the proper response is to stop the bombings. Singing "Kumbaya" is not going to stop a single bombing and there will always be young idiots willing to bomb, no matter how well treated they are. Remember, most of the terrorists have been middle-class kids from good families.
Yes, the proper response is to stop the bombings. Just like the proper response to a potential flood is to stop the rain. How are you gonna do it? We have the proverbial "more security" here in the US and a pressure cooker still ruined the lives of so many people in Boston. Are you suggesting a worldwide police state to combat terrorism? Because that brings me back to what the Russians were doing in Afghanistan...
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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Suicide bombing is more effective than timers or remote controls because abandoned packages are immediately suspicious to the general public, much less law enforcement or trained security.
A suicide bomber just looks like a dude that is a bit pudgy or is wearing a heavy sweater.
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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Man you're terrified.
I have a morbid curiosity.
What would winning look like to you?
How best should we get to that?
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered 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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
There's about 4500 dead US servicemembers who would like to tell you.
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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Man you're terrified.
I have a morbid curiosity.
What would winning look like to you?
How best should we get to that?
Winning is when these people never bother us again in our lives.
0
Options
jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered 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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Man you're terrified.
I have a morbid curiosity.
What would winning look like to you?
How best should we get to that?
Winning is when these people never bother us again in our lives.
Well, if we're going to have unreasonable expectations, might as well go all the way over the moon.
How exactly would you accomplish this? We still have people who think the earth is flat. Ideals don't completely die out.
jungleroomx on
+2
Options
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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Man you're terrified.
I have a morbid curiosity.
What would winning look like to you?
How best should we get to that?
Winning is when these people never bother us again in our lives.
The only way to have that happen would be to literally kill everyone in the world, because once you wipe out the first group that disagrees with you a new one will form from the remainder, then a new one from that, and so on until you are the only person left. That isn't winning a war, its being the monster you think your enemy is.
Also this is horrifically and tragically cowardly. Its a global world, and you are living in the hegemony that dominates and strangles it for your own culture's success. You want to live in a culture that leaves you alone? Move to a tiny island in the pacific with no ties to major powers and no natural resources worth noting. Else, someone is always going to bother you.
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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Man you're terrified.
I have a morbid curiosity.
What would winning look like to you?
How best should we get to that?
Winning is when these people never bother us again in our lives.
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.
Are you shitting me? EVERY time there's a radical Islamist attack on the West, there's always people like you who wring their hands and say "oh maybe it's our fault we're getting blown up".
No. That is unfair to the actual victims of the attack and it's a bullshit argument besides. I'm sure there are poor Buddhists and Hindus in Europe, but they're not committing terrorist attacks. There are no Buddhist bombings. There are no Hindus strapping bombs to themselves and detonating them in bus stations while screaming a chant to Vishnu. Why is it only Islam?
Despite what my conservative colleagues think, it's not because of the beliefs or teachings of Islam itself. It's because there are multiple organizations dedicated to promoting terror and Wahhabist hatred and they're pouring money, agents, and materiel into Europe. They need to be cut off. Interpol needs to step up its game, known radicals should be tracked, mosques that teach hate and radicalism should be shut down and their imams deported- there's a precedent for this in Frances anti-cult laws. Think Scientology. Importantly, Europe's police should be given the latitude, laws, and funding needed to do their job properly, instead of relying on patchwork jurisdictions and antiquated laws- radicals willing to come back to the light can't even plea bargain to inform on their cronies.
And perhaps most importantly of all, Europe should stop whistling past the graveyard on this one. The more bombings, the more massacres, the more beheadings- all of those feed into the anti-Muslim elements. The proper response is not to tell those elements to shut up, the proper response is to stop the bombings. Singing "Kumbaya" is not going to stop a single bombing and there will always be young idiots willing to bomb, no matter how well treated they are. Remember, most of the terrorists have been middle-class kids from good families.
Please don't talk about the lack of Buddhist terrorism or Hindu terrorism when you clearly don't know the history of these religions. They might not happen in the West, but they absolutely happen in other parts of the world.
hippofant on
+18
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
I need to expound on this, because it's this kind of thinking that just pisses me off.
These terrorists are not goat-herding cave people. They know how to use technology. Some of them have degrees from Europe or America. I have seen the bombs they've created first hand (but in an IED safety course, thankfully), and there are bombs which are pressure sensitive, temperature sensitive, remote detonated, cell phone detonated, GPS detonated. We create vehicles that are resistant to explosions, they create bombs with a bigger shockwave so it turns people into soup on the inside or use brass shape charges which is a molten brass arrow that can pierce anything. Then when we pull out the signal jammers they go back to pressure plates.
These people are smart, some formally educated. Stop underestimating them. Suicide bombing is done as much for ease as it is a control method.
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.
You're right! Muslims should just assimilate to being treated as 2nd class citizens. They're guests, so they deserve to be treated like shit.
Nah, proper etiquite applies and not being a shit applies to hosts as well as guests.
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.
Are you shitting me? EVERY time there's a radical Islamist attack on the West, there's always people like you who wring their hands and say "oh maybe it's our fault we're getting blown up".
No. That is unfair to the actual victims of the attack and it's a bullshit argument besides. I'm sure there are poor Buddhists and Hindus in Europe, but they're not committing terrorist attacks. There are no Buddhist bombings. There are no Hindus strapping bombs to themselves and detonating them in bus stations while screaming a chant to Vishnu. Why is it only Islam?
Despite what my conservative colleagues think, it's not because of the beliefs or teachings of Islam itself. It's because there are multiple organizations dedicated to promoting terror and Wahhabist hatred and they're pouring money, agents, and materiel into Europe. They need to be cut off. Interpol needs to step up its game, known radicals should be tracked, mosques that teach hate and radicalism should be shut down and their imams deported- there's a precedent for this in Frances anti-cult laws. Think Scientology. Importantly, Europe's police should be given the latitude, laws, and funding needed to do their job properly, instead of relying on patchwork jurisdictions and antiquated laws- radicals willing to come back to the light can't even plea bargain to inform on their cronies.
And perhaps most importantly of all, Europe should stop whistling past the graveyard on this one. The more bombings, the more massacres, the more beheadings- all of those feed into the anti-Muslim elements. The proper response is not to tell those elements to shut up, the proper response is to stop the bombings. Singing "Kumbaya" is not going to stop a single bombing and there will always be young idiots willing to bomb, no matter how well treated they are. Remember, most of the terrorists have been middle-class kids from good families.
"Europe should force Muslims into areas where they can quarantine their numbers. Camps where they can concentrate them, if you will."
I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
I need to expound on this, because it's this kind of thinking that just pisses me off.
These terrorists are not goat-herding cave people. They know how to use technology. Some of them have degrees from Europe or America. I have seen the bombs they've created first hand (but in an IED safety course, thankfully), and there are bombs which are pressure sensitive, temperature sensitive, remote detonated, cell phone detonated, GPS detonated. We create vehicles that are resistant to explosions, they create bombs with a bigger shockwave so it turns people into soup on the inside or use brass shape charges which is a molten brass arrow that can pierce anything. Then when we pull out the signal jammers they go back to pressure plates.
These people are smart, some formally educated. Stop underestimating them. Suicide bombing is done as much for ease as it is a control method.
Gambetta and Hertog speculate that engineers combine these political predilections with a marked preference towards finding clearcut answers. This preference has affinities with the clear answer that radical Islamist groups propose for dealing with the complexities of modernity: Get rid of it. They quote the famous right-wing economist Friedrich von Hayek, who argues that people with engineering training “react violently against the deficiencies of their education and develop a passion for imposing on society the order which they are unable to detect by the means with which they are familiar.”
This raises an important question: who would design the yuge wall we need to build to keep out the dangerous engineers that menace our societies?
Shadowhope on
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
Engineering is as close to nihilism as you can get
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
I need to expound on this, because it's this kind of thinking that just pisses me off.
These terrorists are not goat-herding cave people. They know how to use technology. Some of them have degrees from Europe or America. I have seen the bombs they've created first hand (but in an IED safety course, thankfully), and there are bombs which are pressure sensitive, temperature sensitive, remote detonated, cell phone detonated, GPS detonated. We create vehicles that are resistant to explosions, they create bombs with a bigger shockwave so it turns people into soup on the inside or use brass shape charges which is a molten brass arrow that can pierce anything. Then when we pull out the signal jammers they go back to pressure plates.
These people are smart, some formally educated. Stop underestimating them. Suicide bombing is done as much for ease as it is a control method.
Gambetta and Hertog speculate that engineers combine these political predilections with a marked preference towards finding clearcut answers. This preference has affinities with the clear answer that radical Islamist groups propose for dealing with the complexities of modernity: Get rid of it. They quote the famous right-wing economist Friedrich von Hayek, who argues that people with engineering training “react violently against the deficiencies of their education and develop a passion for imposing on society the order which they are unable to detect by the means with which they are familiar.”
This raises an important question: who would design the yuge wall we need to build to keep out the dangerous engineers that menace our societies?
Well, we'd just need to consult an engineering firm to--
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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Man you're terrified.
I have a morbid curiosity.
What would winning look like to you?
How best should we get to that?
Winning is when these people never bother us again in our lives.
So how do you propose we make that happen?
Suppress their propaganda, freeze their funding sources, find them and kill them by any means necessary.
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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Man you're terrified.
I have a morbid curiosity.
What would winning look like to you?
How best should we get to that?
Winning is when these people never bother us again in our lives.
The only way to have that happen would be to literally kill everyone in the world, because once you wipe out the first group that disagrees with you a new one will form from the remainder, then a new one from that, and so on until you are the only person left. That isn't winning a war, its being the monster you think your enemy is.
Also this is horrifically and tragically cowardly. Its a global world, and you are living in the hegemony that dominates and strangles it for your own culture's success. You want to live in a culture that leaves you alone? Move to a tiny island in the pacific with no ties to major powers and no natural resources worth noting. Else, someone is always going to bother you.
For reference: see all human history.
So let me ask you, do you just think that every war ever fought in human history in response to an enemy threat has been horrific and tragically cowardly?
Savge on
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered 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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Man you're terrified.
I have a morbid curiosity.
What would winning look like to you?
How best should we get to that?
Winning is when these people never bother us again in our lives.
So how do you propose we make that happen?
Suppress their propaganda, freeze their funding sources, find them and kill them by any means necessary.
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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Man you're terrified.
I have a morbid curiosity.
What would winning look like to you?
How best should we get to that?
Winning is when these people never bother us again in our lives.
The only way to have that happen would be to literally kill everyone in the world, because once you wipe out the first group that disagrees with you a new one will form from the remainder, then a new one from that, and so on until you are the only person left. That isn't winning a war, its being the monster you think your enemy is.
Also this is horrifically and tragically cowardly. Its a global world, and you are living in the hegemony that dominates and strangles it for your own culture's success. You want to live in a culture that leaves you alone? Move to a tiny island in the pacific with no ties to major powers and no natural resources worth noting. Else, someone is always going to bother you.
For reference: see all human history.
So let me ask you, do you just think that every war ever fought in human history in response to an enemy threat has been horrific and tragically cowardly?
What do other wars have to do with this? "Other wars" don't compare and are a terrible analog.
So let me ask you, do you think every war ever fought in human history in response to an enemy threat been horrific and tragically cowardly?
Horrific? Yes. Every last one of them.
But that is kind of besides the point, because this is not some conventional war being fought. Most of the martyrs are proxy agents that are born again and then wrap themselves into the mess. Most are entirely disconnected from what is happening in Syria / Iraq; they just want to do something (because they feel alienated / marginalized, for any number of reasons), they end-up reaching out to the wrong people and become radicalized as a result (the process of buy-in to violent action is often a little more involved, but nevertheless rarely follows a traditional logistics chain).
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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Man you're terrified.
I have a morbid curiosity.
What would winning look like to you?
How best should we get to that?
Winning is when these people never bother us again in our lives.
Well, if we're going to have unreasonable expectations, might as well go all the way over the moon.
How exactly would you accomplish this? We still have people who think the earth is flat. Ideals don't completely die out.
We're gonna have to accept this new normal, I take it?
0
Options
jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered 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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Man you're terrified.
I have a morbid curiosity.
What would winning look like to you?
How best should we get to that?
Winning is when these people never bother us again in our lives.
Well, if we're going to have unreasonable expectations, might as well go all the way over the moon.
How exactly would you accomplish this? We still have people who think the earth is flat. Ideals don't completely die out.
We're gonna have to accept this new normal, I take it?
Yes. It's either completely wipe out an entire race of people/kill everyone on earth or just sit back and let it happen.
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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Man you're terrified.
I have a morbid curiosity.
What would winning look like to you?
How best should we get to that?
Winning is when these people never bother us again in our lives.
Well, if we're going to have unreasonable expectations, might as well go all the way over the moon.
How exactly would you accomplish this? We still have people who think the earth is flat. Ideals don't completely die out.
We're gonna have to accept this new normal, I take it?
It's not really a new normal; as people like @RMS Oceanic have pointed-out, violent radicals have been setting off bombs in Europe for a long time.
But no, we certainly don't have to just accept it (we didn't back when the IRA & communists were doing it, either) - we just probably should at least try to do what is likely to impact the problem, rather than what is emotionally satisfying & feels like it provides some kind of immediate result (when said result is often superficial at best).
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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Man you're terrified.
I have a morbid curiosity.
What would winning look like to you?
How best should we get to that?
Winning is when these people never bother us again in our lives.
So how do you propose we make that happen?
Suppress their propaganda, freeze their funding sources, find them and kill them by any means necessary.
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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Man you're terrified.
I have a morbid curiosity.
What would winning look like to you?
How best should we get to that?
Winning is when these people never bother us again in our lives.
The only way to have that happen would be to literally kill everyone in the world, because once you wipe out the first group that disagrees with you a new one will form from the remainder, then a new one from that, and so on until you are the only person left. That isn't winning a war, its being the monster you think your enemy is.
Also this is horrifically and tragically cowardly. Its a global world, and you are living in the hegemony that dominates and strangles it for your own culture's success. You want to live in a culture that leaves you alone? Move to a tiny island in the pacific with no ties to major powers and no natural resources worth noting. Else, someone is always going to bother you.
For reference: see all human history.
So let me ask you, do you just think that every war ever fought in human history in response to an enemy threat has been horrific and tragically cowardly?
What do other wars have to do with this? "Other wars" don't compare and are a terrible analog.
Also it should be pointed out that the question of other wars fails on the very face of the argument.
Many other wars have ended in "Victory" but have not prevented conflicts from resuming within living memory of the original wars participants.
0
Options
jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered 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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Man you're terrified.
I have a morbid curiosity.
What would winning look like to you?
How best should we get to that?
Winning is when these people never bother us again in our lives.
So how do you propose we make that happen?
Suppress their propaganda, freeze their funding sources, find them and kill them by any means necessary.
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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Man you're terrified.
I have a morbid curiosity.
What would winning look like to you?
How best should we get to that?
Winning is when these people never bother us again in our lives.
The only way to have that happen would be to literally kill everyone in the world, because once you wipe out the first group that disagrees with you a new one will form from the remainder, then a new one from that, and so on until you are the only person left. That isn't winning a war, its being the monster you think your enemy is.
Also this is horrifically and tragically cowardly. Its a global world, and you are living in the hegemony that dominates and strangles it for your own culture's success. You want to live in a culture that leaves you alone? Move to a tiny island in the pacific with no ties to major powers and no natural resources worth noting. Else, someone is always going to bother you.
For reference: see all human history.
So let me ask you, do you just think that every war ever fought in human history in response to an enemy threat has been horrific and tragically cowardly?
What do other wars have to do with this? "Other wars" don't compare and are a terrible analog.
Also it should be pointed out that the question of other wars fails on the very face of the argument.
Many other wars have ended in "Victory" but have not prevented conflicts from resuming within living memory of the original wars participants.
Yup. There will always be rebels or resistances towards victors of war.
This isn't even a war right now. It's the wrong thing to call it. I don't know what the right thing is to call it, but war is not it.
So let me ask you, do you think every war ever fought in human history in response to an enemy threat been horrific and tragically cowardly?
Horrific? Yes. Every last one of them.
But that is kind of besides the point, because this is not some conventional war being fought. Most of the martyrs are proxy agents that are born again and then wrap themselves into the mess. Most are entirely disconnected from what is happening in Syria / Iraq; they just want to do something (because they feel alienated / marginalized, for any number of reasons), they end-up reaching out to the wrong people and become radicalized as a result (the process of buy-in to violent action is often a little more involved, but nevertheless rarely follows a traditional logistics chain).
If someone radicalizes, it's too late for us to save them, they have signed their death warrant. Better for them to be killed off on our own terms than to let them carry out a terrorist act and kill hundreds of innocent people.
Yea, this may not look like any other conventional war, but given the state of militaristic asymmetry in the modern world, this is probably what most wars are going to look like going forward, so we better get used it, lest we never fire a bullet out of fear of appearing heavy handed.
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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Man you're terrified.
I have a morbid curiosity.
What would winning look like to you?
How best should we get to that?
Winning is when these people never bother us again in our lives.
So how do you propose we make that happen?
Suppress their propaganda, freeze their funding sources, find them and kill them by any means necessary.
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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Man you're terrified.
I have a morbid curiosity.
What would winning look like to you?
How best should we get to that?
Winning is when these people never bother us again in our lives.
The only way to have that happen would be to literally kill everyone in the world, because once you wipe out the first group that disagrees with you a new one will form from the remainder, then a new one from that, and so on until you are the only person left. That isn't winning a war, its being the monster you think your enemy is.
Also this is horrifically and tragically cowardly. Its a global world, and you are living in the hegemony that dominates and strangles it for your own culture's success. You want to live in a culture that leaves you alone? Move to a tiny island in the pacific with no ties to major powers and no natural resources worth noting. Else, someone is always going to bother you.
For reference: see all human history.
So let me ask you, do you just think that every war ever fought in human history in response to an enemy threat has been horrific and tragically cowardly?
You don't really grasp how the internet works do you? You literally can't kill the propaganda. It is there, and it is likely there forever. Even if it gets deleted someone will still have it. This is an impossible task.
Freezing their funding sources is quite difficult as that would require knowing all members of the organization (of we knew that there wouldn't be a problem in the first place). This is again a completely unrealistic goal, though a bit more realistic than suppressing information on the internet.
Then there is that find them and kill them by any means necessary tid bit. What do you think we're fucking doing?! We do this all the time. In fact it is the left's biggest problem with Obama is that on Tuesdays he gets a big list of targets in this war and he signs off on droning them and any bystanders next to them into freaking oblivion.
So I ask again because maybe I'm missing some steps from your glorious fucking plan here, what are the plans to enact these three fucking bullet points?
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
So let me ask you, do you think every war ever fought in human history in response to an enemy threat been horrific and tragically cowardly?
Horrific? Yes. Every last one of them.
But that is kind of besides the point, because this is not some conventional war being fought. Most of the martyrs are proxy agents that are born again and then wrap themselves into the mess. Most are entirely disconnected from what is happening in Syria / Iraq; they just want to do something (because they feel alienated / marginalized, for any number of reasons), they end-up reaching out to the wrong people and become radicalized as a result (the process of buy-in to violent action is often a little more involved, but nevertheless rarely follows a traditional logistics chain).
If someone radicalizes, it's too late for us to save them, they have signed their death warrant. Better for them to be killed off on our own terms than to let them carry out a terrorist act and kill hundreds of innocent people.
Yea, this may not look like any other conventional war, but given the state of militaristic asymmetry in the modern world, this is probably what most wars are going to look like going forward, so we better get used it.
Yes. As we all know, there are no former Neo-Nazi's in this world.
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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Man you're terrified.
I have a morbid curiosity.
What would winning look like to you?
How best should we get to that?
Winning is when these people never bother us again in our lives.
So how do you propose we make that happen?
Suppress their propaganda, freeze their funding sources, find them and kill them by any means necessary.
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."
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Man you're terrified.
I have a morbid curiosity.
What would winning look like to you?
How best should we get to that?
Winning is when these people never bother us again in our lives.
The only way to have that happen would be to literally kill everyone in the world, because once you wipe out the first group that disagrees with you a new one will form from the remainder, then a new one from that, and so on until you are the only person left. That isn't winning a war, its being the monster you think your enemy is.
Also this is horrifically and tragically cowardly. Its a global world, and you are living in the hegemony that dominates and strangles it for your own culture's success. You want to live in a culture that leaves you alone? Move to a tiny island in the pacific with no ties to major powers and no natural resources worth noting. Else, someone is always going to bother you.
For reference: see all human history.
So let me ask you, do you just think that every war ever fought in human history in response to an enemy threat has been horrific and tragically cowardly?
You don't really grasp how the internet works do you? You literally can't kill the propaganda. It is there, and it is likely there forever. Even if it gets deleted someone will still have it. This is an impossible task.
Freezing their funding sources is quite difficult as that would require knowing all members of the organization (of we knew that there wouldn't be a problem in the first place). This is again a completely unrealistic goal, though a bit more realistic than suppressing information on the internet.
Then there is that find them and kill them by any means necessary tid bit. What do you think we're fucking doing?! We do this all the time. In fact it is the left's biggest problem with Obama is that on Tuesdays he gets a big list of targets in this war and he signs off on droning them and any bystanders next to them into freaking oblivion.
So I ask again because maybe I'm missing some steps from your glorious fucking plan here, what are the plans to enact these three fucking bullet points?
I don't know. Let me consult my foreign policy advisors.
So let me ask you, do you think every war ever fought in human history in response to an enemy threat been horrific and tragically cowardly?
Horrific? Yes. Every last one of them.
But that is kind of besides the point, because this is not some conventional war being fought. Most of the martyrs are proxy agents that are born again and then wrap themselves into the mess. Most are entirely disconnected from what is happening in Syria / Iraq; they just want to do something (because they feel alienated / marginalized, for any number of reasons), they end-up reaching out to the wrong people and become radicalized as a result (the process of buy-in to violent action is often a little more involved, but nevertheless rarely follows a traditional logistics chain).
If someone radicalizes, it's too late for us to save them, they have signed their death warrant. Better for them to be killed off on our own terms than to let them carry out a terrorist act and kill hundreds of innocent people.
Yea, this may not look like any other conventional war, but given the state of militaristic asymmetry in the modern world, this is probably what most wars are going to look like going forward, so we better get used it, lest we never fire a bullet out of fear of appearing heavy handed.
I don't even follow your logic. If we knew who the Brussels bombers were & where to find them before the attacks, we would have likely raided their home, arrested them, put them through due process & not had to worry about any attacks. Note the total lack of a need to kill them on site for [???] reasons.
'Well fuck it, just kill 'em all!' is an attitude that's as foolish as it is reprehensible, because it assumes that somehow we've already figured-out who is or isn't radicalized in a given community and the only thing holding us back is some gosh gee whiz PC attitude. There is no way to effectively guarantee security against people that want to commit acts of violence so long as we value being in a free society, not because we treat criminals with kid gloves (we often don't), but because privacy protections also unwittingly protect people who want to build bombs in their basements.
Even draconian 'Big Brother' security measures don't solve problems (just ask Turkey or Saudi Arabia or Israel), because attackers have an inherent advantage & will simply escalate as necessary to defeat the new security.
The Ender on
With Love and Courage
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Russia did what @Savge is suggesting for years. Decades.
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.
Are you shitting me? EVERY time there's a radical Islamist attack on the West, there's always people like you who wring their hands and say "oh maybe it's our fault we're getting blown up".
No. That is unfair to the actual victims of the attack and it's a bullshit argument besides. I'm sure there are poor Buddhists and Hindus in Europe, but they're not committing terrorist attacks. There are no Buddhist bombings. There are no Hindus strapping bombs to themselves and detonating them in bus stations while screaming a chant to Vishnu. Why is it only Islam?
Despite what my conservative colleagues think, it's not because of the beliefs or teachings of Islam itself. It's because there are multiple organizations dedicated to promoting terror and Wahhabist hatred and they're pouring money, agents, and materiel into Europe. They need to be cut off. Interpol needs to step up its game, known radicals should be tracked, mosques that teach hate and radicalism should be shut down and their imams deported- there's a precedent for this in Frances anti-cult laws. Think Scientology. Importantly, Europe's police should be given the latitude, laws, and funding needed to do their job properly, instead of relying on patchwork jurisdictions and antiquated laws- radicals willing to come back to the light can't even plea bargain to inform on their cronies.
And perhaps most importantly of all, Europe should stop whistling past the graveyard on this one. The more bombings, the more massacres, the more beheadings- all of those feed into the anti-Muslim elements. The proper response is not to tell those elements to shut up, the proper response is to stop the bombings. Singing "Kumbaya" is not going to stop a single bombing and there will always be young idiots willing to bomb, no matter how well treated they are. Remember, most of the terrorists have been middle-class kids from good families.
You come close to arguing against your point here. Yes, these protections can and should be done. Yes there are precedent.
Why are these attacks being funneled towards Europe rather than, say, China or Russia or Brazil or even the US? Lax security isn't the reason, if that were the case any number of tiny western countries would have been hit first across the globe, and not jest in Western Europe. Generally speaking these attacks are performed by people of the states they attack, driven to these attacks as their only form of outlet for systematic othering and discrimination.
This isn't blame the victim. The ~400 Belgians that were hit by these attacks are not to blame, but Belgian culture and government does have a broken system for handling their immigrant populations which makes finding the saps willing to kill themselves much, much easier for extremists. Part of the reason you dont find Buddhist or Hindu or Sikh or Shinto militants in Europe is that those of these backgrounds generally are more tolerated and better integrated by the societies they represent. If you looked back in the 1890s there were actually considerable elements of Hindu protest for the time in London. However, in the modern world we as western culture are both friendly and accepting of these groups more than Islam. This is due to many, many complicated historical problems between the west and Islamic culture which cannot be ignored.
No one is suggesting to not take reasonable actions to stop attacks. Security services should do what they can. But this isn't a simple issue and without understanding just how people actually get to the point of becoming radicalized you cannot truly make effective efforts to prevent it. It's ignoring the housefire while extinguishing the bedroom. Yes, you solved all of your immediate fire problems, but they will only get worse unless you deal with the source.
No, Belgium was targeted because their security sucks:
U.S. counterterrorism officials are frustrated and angry at Belgium’s inability to tackle ISIS terror cells that are successfully plotting murderous attacks on the West from inside the country’s tiny capital city.
The twin terror attacks in Brussels that left at least 30 dead and 230 injured on Tuesday, despite repeated warnings from Washington, left U.S. officials fuming.
A senior U.S. intelligence officer likened the Belgian security forces to “children.”
“It’s really shitty tradecraft,” the agent told The Daily Beast.
Brussels has become a hotbed of terrorism—concentrated in the Molenbeek district near the city center—and yet the Belgians have made little progress in disrupting a network of violent extremists linked to last year’s Paris attacks that killed 130 people.
Even before the arrest last week in Brussels of Salah Abdeslam, a suspected terrorist behind the Paris attack, there were worries among many U.S. counterterrorism officials of an attack in Belgium. The Belgian authorities had long struggled to resource a counterterrorism campaign. At the same time, it ostracized its burgeoning minority communities, creating isolated enclaves like Molenbeek where potential jihadists could easily hide.
After Abdeslam’s arrest, many in Belgium feared a retaliatory attack. But while U.S. officials sought to help as part of a growing push for U.S. and European cooperation, there were limits, given Belgium’s limited security resources and amid a growing migration community from places like Syria.
News of Tuesday’s attack was met in some parts of Washington with resigned frustration.
“There was only so much we could do to help,” one official explained to The Daily Beast.
“Belgium has been stepping up the amount of people they’re devoting to intelligence and law enforcement but they’re playing catch-up and we’re seeing the terrible results of that today,” Rep. Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said on MSNBC.
Indeed, an official said there were warnings as recent as this weekend.
A frustrated U.S. intelligence official bemoaned the state of the counterterrorism apparatus in Belgium and across Europe.
“Even with the EU in general, there’s an infiltration of jihadists that’s been happening for two decades. And now they’re just starting to work on this. When we have to contact these people or send our guys over to talk to them, we’re essentially talking with people who are—I’m just going to put it bluntly—children. They are not pro-active, they don’t know what’s going on. They’re in such denial. It’s such a frightening thing to admit their country is being taken over.”
The end result is that Belgium has been targeted as a base camp for violent extremists.
“Jihadists think that Europe is the soft underbelly of the West and Belgium is the soft underbelly of Europe,” said French terror expert Gilles Kepel.
Many of the major recent attacks in Europe have clear links to Belgium. In May 2014, French ex-Syria jihadist Mehdi Nemmouche went to the Belgian capital to attack the Jewish museum in Brussels. There are Brussels links to the weapons used by Amedy Coulibaly in his attack on a Jewish supermarket on Jan. 9, 2015, shortly after the Jan. 7 attacks on Charlie Hebdo, and the Paris attack in November last year has clear ties to the Molenbeek neighborhood specifically. Many of its attackers either resided or grew up in the borough.
Jean-Charles Brisard, the author of a biography of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of ISIS’s earlier incarnation al Qaeda in Iraq, said it’s more useful to think about the ISIS phenomenon in Western Europe as a Francophone network because the operatives in Brussels are a mix of French and Belgian nationals.
Brisard calculates that 534 Belgians have gone to Syria and about 200 have returned; he believes the French-Belgian ISIS apparatus is much greater than European security officials initially thought.
Tracking the individuals is a mammoth task.
“For now, the networks comprise basically 20 individuals around the 10 [Paris] terrorists,” he said. “So it’s least 30. It’s still looking like four or five connected but there might be more that we don’t know yet.” For every terror suspect being surveilled it takes between 20 and 25 counterterrorism officials to track him. Coulibaly, for example, was using 20 different phones, according to Brisard, and each required a different officer to monitor the incoming and outgoing calls.
The Belgians are unwilling or unable to commit that kind of manpower, one of the country’s counterterrorism officials told BuzzFeed a week before the attack.
“Frankly, we don’t have the infrastructure to properly investigate or monitor hundreds of individuals suspected of terror links,” he said.
The problem is exacerbated in Brussels because the local police force is divided into six police corps spread over 19 boroughs (particularly odd since the population is only 1.3 million). Sharing intelligence is complicated by the silos.
Robin Simcox, a British-born specialist on European terror networks who now works at the conservative Heritage Foundation, says the Paris and Brussels attacks prove that European intelligence agencies have been comforting themselves—and their constituencies—with a fallacy for a decade.
“What have they been saying since 7/7?” Simcox asked, referring to the al Qaeda bombings in London in July 2005. “‘Oh, those kinds of attacks are not possible anymore. Any time a network gets too big, we find out about it. Anyone tries to construct a suicide vest, we’ll get it. The attacks will be knives and guns.’ Well, it’s the emperor has no clothes, isn’t it? It happened in Paris, now Brussels; it nearly happened in Verviers back in January [2015]. All kinds of assumptions about the kind of threat we were going to be facing in coming years. And we were all too complacent about it.”
The Belgian field commander, if not quite the “mastermind” of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, had previously been linked to four separate terror plots in Europe. He got away each time.
He was thought to have “guided” Nemmouche, the Frenchman who shot up the Jewish museum in Brussels. In the attack planned but later aborted in Verviers, Abaaoud had remotely instructed two Belgian nationals, Sofiane Amghar and Khalid Ben Larbi, who fought with ISIS’s elite Battar Brigade.
Abaaoud had been in Greece at the time, and subsequently returned to Syria after Belgian commandos raided Amghar and Ben Larbi’s safe house in Verviers. (The operation constituted the largest firefight in Belgium since the end of World War II.) Abaaoud was also involved in the failed attack on a high-speed train from Paris to Amsterdam in August 2015. It failed only because three American tourists, two of them in the Oregon National Guard, wrestled the AK-47-wielding gunman to the ground before he could kill anyone.
In a February 2015 issue of ISIS’s propaganda magazine Dabiq, Abaaoud boasts about being able to slip by a continent-wide dragnet for him, despite the fact that European security services all had a recent photograph of him, which had been published by a Western journalist.
“I suddenly saw my picture all over the media, but… the kuffar were blinded by Allah. I was even stopped by an officer who contemplated me so as to compare me to the picture, but he let me go, as he did not see the resemblance! This was nothing but a gift from Allah!”
Abaaoud’s turn from first-generation Belgian into international terrorist follows an all-too-familiar script to those who monitor European jihadism. Although he was once enrolled in the Catholic college Saint-Pierre, an elite school in a tony suburb of Brussels, he dropped out and took to a life of gangsterism and petty crime.
He met Salah Abdeslam and Abdeslam’s brother Brahim (another one of the Paris attackers) when all three were in their late teens or early twenties, hanging about Molenbeek. In 2010, Abaaoud and Salah Abdeslam were convicted of armed robbery after they tried to break into a garage in Ottingnes, a town southeast of Brussels. In 2012, Abaaoud went to jail again for hitting someone in the town of Dendermonde.
Abaaoud apparently radicalized in prison and upon his release, he fell in with a crowd of Islamists, including a veteran of the Afghan jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s, a Moroccan called Khalid Zerkani. The man went by the sobriquet Papa Noel (Santa Claus), owing to his generosity with money: he’d disburse as much as 4,500 euros for aspiring mujahidin seeking to travel to Syria.
Many of those wandering mujahidin have now returned to Brussels; and there is little confidence that the Belgian authorities will be able to stop their murderous plots against the West.
Also, since Erdogan is human trash, I want independent confirmation, but Erdogan claims Belgium was outright specifically warned about one of the terrorists after they were deported, likely trying to join ISIS in Syria, so case in point.
Moreover, that is absolutely victim blaming, and it's wrong. These are shitty people who are being radicalized by a dangerous ideology, intentionally. It's not Belgium's fault that Wahhabism and some other strains of Islam are morally bankrupt, and are used as a foreign policy tool / weapon by major regional powers. Terrorism isn't the fault of all Muslims, but it sure is the fault of reactionary Muslims, because they encourage a pre-modern and dangerous ideology that causes these conflicts with the west.
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Whitey Bulger was #1 on the FBI's most wanted list and was living openly in San Diego for years. I'm fairly certain San Diego is not generally controlled by Irish organized crime. Its entirely possible the terrorist had support there, but its not that hard to hide really.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
That's some good political instincts that guy has.
Minister's brain: This attack gives us an opportunity to advance our interests in regards to Islamic terrorism.
Minister's mouth: You mean an opportunity to make fun of the victims as chocolate eating slackers.
Minister's brain: Damnit.
To me, as a Canadian, the culture that I want all immigrants to have or to assimilate to is that they believe that everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice as administered by the state, and that everyone is equally a person with all of the rights and responsibilities thereof in the eyes of the law and of society, in particular with regards to race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age and mental or physical ability.
What a person eats, drinks or wears, how they decorate, to whom or to what they pray to, what sports they play, what television and movies and books they follow, what language they speak, what goals they have in life, none of those things are at all relevant to how I define Canada. If an immigrant takes an interest in hockey and discovers new ways to use maple syrup, that's neat, but doesn't say much one way or another to me about how Canadian they are. I want them to assimilate to the principles that I outlined above, but whatever culture they bring with them beyond that just adds to the mosaic of society in a way that's almost always positive.
No. That is unfair to the actual victims of the attack and it's a bullshit argument besides. I'm sure there are poor Buddhists and Hindus in Europe, but they're not committing terrorist attacks. There are no Buddhist bombings. There are no Hindus strapping bombs to themselves and detonating them in bus stations while screaming a chant to Vishnu. Why is it only Islam?
Despite what my conservative colleagues think, it's not because of the beliefs or teachings of Islam itself. It's because there are multiple organizations dedicated to promoting terror and Wahhabist hatred and they're pouring money, agents, and materiel into Europe. They need to be cut off. Interpol needs to step up its game, known radicals should be tracked, mosques that teach hate and radicalism should be shut down and their imams deported- there's a precedent for this in Frances anti-cult laws. Think Scientology. Importantly, Europe's police should be given the latitude, laws, and funding needed to do their job properly, instead of relying on patchwork jurisdictions and antiquated laws- radicals willing to come back to the light can't even plea bargain to inform on their cronies.
And perhaps most importantly of all, Europe should stop whistling past the graveyard on this one. The more bombings, the more massacres, the more beheadings- all of those feed into the anti-Muslim elements. The proper response is not to tell those elements to shut up, the proper response is to stop the bombings. Singing "Kumbaya" is not going to stop a single bombing and there will always be young idiots willing to bomb, no matter how well treated they are. Remember, most of the terrorists have been middle-class kids from good families.
You come close to arguing against your point here. Yes, these protections can and should be done. Yes there are precedent.
Why are these attacks being funneled towards Europe rather than, say, China or Russia or Brazil or even the US? Lax security isn't the reason, if that were the case any number of tiny western countries would have been hit first across the globe, and not jest in Western Europe. Generally speaking these attacks are performed by people of the states they attack, driven to these attacks as their only form of outlet for systematic othering and discrimination.
This isn't blame the victim. The ~400 Belgians that were hit by these attacks are not to blame, but Belgian culture and government does have a broken system for handling their immigrant populations which makes finding the saps willing to kill themselves much, much easier for extremists. Part of the reason you dont find Buddhist or Hindu or Sikh or Shinto militants in Europe is that those of these backgrounds generally are more tolerated and better integrated by the societies they represent. If you looked back in the 1890s there were actually considerable elements of Hindu protest for the time in London. However, in the modern world we as western culture are both friendly and accepting of these groups more than Islam. This is due to many, many complicated historical problems between the west and Islamic culture which cannot be ignored.
No one is suggesting to not take reasonable actions to stop attacks. Security services should do what they can. But this isn't a simple issue and without understanding just how people actually get to the point of becoming radicalized you cannot truly make effective efforts to prevent it. It's ignoring the housefire while extinguishing the bedroom. Yes, you solved all of your immediate fire problems, but they will only get worse unless you deal with the source.
There's a lot to respond to here, but more extensive monitoring, increasing public treatment of Islam/Muslims as "other", especially by designation, and what have you seems rather counterproductive from an integration/assimilation standpoint, if that's what Western governments are interested in.
It's also probably wrong to think of this as simply radicalization of domestic citizens, as though that radicalization exists in a vacuum. I'm not super knowledgeable about it but I think the general "radical" viewpoint is that acts of terror in the west are (often) intentional responses to Western military action in the Islamic world, which is an ongoing thing which has killed a shitload of people over the course of the last century.
Also, it is not accurate to state that there are no Buddhist or Hindu terrorists. There aren't really many noteworthy examples of terrorism from those religious traditions in the West, but as a rule (and I could be wrong here, I am not a member of either community) Buddhists and Hindus are not generally singled out and marginalized in those societies the way that Muslims are (except when Hindus are brilliantly confused with Muslims). I'm not seeing anyone on TV advocating that all Asians be deported from the United States, or that Indians be prohibited from immigrating "until we know what's going on", or any other such responses.
Also, Christian terrorism is fairly common in both the States and (to a lesser extent) Western Europe. I'm sure you're old enough to remember when the IRA was still a pretty big deal and Catholic/Protestant Irish/English terrorism and gangs were still a pretty huge deal that got a lot of people killed. The latest Bundy family antics were arguably a (dismally failed) suicide-attack attempt. Et cetera.
I'm also not sure that we should be going on the assumption that Muslim communities are simply not policed enough, and that if they were, terroristic acts would be easier to stop. In the states we've seen extensive monitoring of the Muslim community, often in ways that are blatantly discriminatory, and it's generally turned up bupkes.
International terrorism and ISIS is an extremely complex problem that has developed out of a history of decades of violence and warfare in dozens of countries. There, frankly, is no silver bullet that will stop it from happening. It is a Gordian knot of the worst possible kind and enhanced surveillance is not going to cut through it.
Not to mention ignoring the reasons people tend to immigrate.
I'm not going to post it here, but a few weeks after the Paris attacks, someone posted a picture of that "peace sign Eiffel Tower" that was going around with the caption "200 years into colonialism and chill, and he gives you this look"
Both of them were career criminals that turned radical, not the other way around. One of them had fired a Kalasjhnikov in a bank robbery, the other had performed a series of carjackings.
They were both already on wanted lists post Paris.
However, you are correct, there are people saying what you said. They're usually right-wing pundits talking about imaginary people that don't exist.
Of course there aren't, because there isn't much of a connection between poverty and terrorism in a vacuum. However, active suppression of a people and terrorism? Definite link. I'm sure you remember the Catholic/Protestant terrorism that happened in Ireland so many years ago.
Using an iron fist to suppress an extremist philosophy is like trying to squeeze the air out of a balloon. The only thing that happens is it pops out everywhere where you have holes in your grip. We have seen decades of iron fist rule by the Soviets (and subsequently the Russians) in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Chechnya, and all they've succeeded in doing is being largely responsible for the islamic extremists we have today. Also, I know the idea of "funding it fully" sounds great, but I don't think you've really thought it through on how much funding that would require. We've spent trillions fighting a plant in South America, killed hundreds, ruined entire nations, toppled cartels and propped up governments... and that fucking plant is still winning.
Yes, the proper response is to stop the bombings. Just like the proper response to a potential flood is to stop the rain. How are you gonna do it? We have the proverbial "more security" here in the US and a pressure cooker still ruined the lives of so many people in Boston. Are you suggesting a worldwide police state to combat terrorism? Because that brings me back to what the Russians were doing in Afghanistan...
We are not winning. This is not what winning looks like. A new terrorist attack with hundreds killed or injured every 4-6 months is not "winning". I shiver to think what would happen when they discover the convenience of remote detonated bombs or even timers instead of suicide bombing.
Every successful terrorist attack radicalizes people who are on the edge. A radical doesn't sit around thinking "Wow, a lot of innocent people died maybe these guys aren't as good as I thought", they think "Awesome, but I bet I can do better"
Suicide bombing is more effective than timers or remote controls because abandoned packages are immediately suspicious to the general public, much less law enforcement or trained security.
A suicide bomber just looks like a dude that is a bit pudgy or is wearing a heavy sweater.
Man you're terrified.
I have a morbid curiosity.
What would winning look like to you?
How best should we get to that?
There's about 4500 dead US servicemembers who would like to tell you.
Winning is when these people never bother us again in our lives.
Well, if we're going to have unreasonable expectations, might as well go all the way over the moon.
How exactly would you accomplish this? We still have people who think the earth is flat. Ideals don't completely die out.
The only way to have that happen would be to literally kill everyone in the world, because once you wipe out the first group that disagrees with you a new one will form from the remainder, then a new one from that, and so on until you are the only person left. That isn't winning a war, its being the monster you think your enemy is.
Also this is horrifically and tragically cowardly. Its a global world, and you are living in the hegemony that dominates and strangles it for your own culture's success. You want to live in a culture that leaves you alone? Move to a tiny island in the pacific with no ties to major powers and no natural resources worth noting. Else, someone is always going to bother you.
For reference: see all human history.
So how do you propose we make that happen?
Please don't talk about the lack of Buddhist terrorism or Hindu terrorism when you clearly don't know the history of these religions. They might not happen in the West, but they absolutely happen in other parts of the world.
I need to expound on this, because it's this kind of thinking that just pisses me off.
These terrorists are not goat-herding cave people. They know how to use technology. Some of them have degrees from Europe or America. I have seen the bombs they've created first hand (but in an IED safety course, thankfully), and there are bombs which are pressure sensitive, temperature sensitive, remote detonated, cell phone detonated, GPS detonated. We create vehicles that are resistant to explosions, they create bombs with a bigger shockwave so it turns people into soup on the inside or use brass shape charges which is a molten brass arrow that can pierce anything. Then when we pull out the signal jammers they go back to pressure plates.
These people are smart, some formally educated. Stop underestimating them. Suicide bombing is done as much for ease as it is a control method.
You're right! Muslims should just assimilate to being treated as 2nd class citizens. They're guests, so they deserve to be treated like shit.
Nah, proper etiquite applies and not being a shit applies to hosts as well as guests.
"Europe should force Muslims into areas where they can quarantine their numbers. Camps where they can concentrate them, if you will."
Steam: pazython
Steam: pazython
There was a study on education among terrorists a while back - "nine times as many terrorists were engineers as you would expect by chance".
This raises an important question: who would design the yuge wall we need to build to keep out the dangerous engineers that menace our societies?
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Well, we'd just need to consult an engineering firm to--
Oh.
Wait...
Suppress their propaganda, freeze their funding sources, find them and kill them by any means necessary.
So let me ask you, do you just think that every war ever fought in human history in response to an enemy threat has been horrific and tragically cowardly?
What do other wars have to do with this? "Other wars" don't compare and are a terrible analog.
Horrific? Yes. Every last one of them.
But that is kind of besides the point, because this is not some conventional war being fought. Most of the martyrs are proxy agents that are born again and then wrap themselves into the mess. Most are entirely disconnected from what is happening in Syria / Iraq; they just want to do something (because they feel alienated / marginalized, for any number of reasons), they end-up reaching out to the wrong people and become radicalized as a result (the process of buy-in to violent action is often a little more involved, but nevertheless rarely follows a traditional logistics chain).
Yes. It's either completely wipe out an entire race of people/kill everyone on earth or just sit back and let it happen.
Those are the absolute only choices.
It's not really a new normal; as people like @RMS Oceanic have pointed-out, violent radicals have been setting off bombs in Europe for a long time.
But no, we certainly don't have to just accept it (we didn't back when the IRA & communists were doing it, either) - we just probably should at least try to do what is likely to impact the problem, rather than what is emotionally satisfying & feels like it provides some kind of immediate result (when said result is often superficial at best).
Also it should be pointed out that the question of other wars fails on the very face of the argument.
Many other wars have ended in "Victory" but have not prevented conflicts from resuming within living memory of the original wars participants.
Yup. There will always be rebels or resistances towards victors of war.
This isn't even a war right now. It's the wrong thing to call it. I don't know what the right thing is to call it, but war is not it.
If someone radicalizes, it's too late for us to save them, they have signed their death warrant. Better for them to be killed off on our own terms than to let them carry out a terrorist act and kill hundreds of innocent people.
Yea, this may not look like any other conventional war, but given the state of militaristic asymmetry in the modern world, this is probably what most wars are going to look like going forward, so we better get used it, lest we never fire a bullet out of fear of appearing heavy handed.
You don't really grasp how the internet works do you? You literally can't kill the propaganda. It is there, and it is likely there forever. Even if it gets deleted someone will still have it. This is an impossible task.
Freezing their funding sources is quite difficult as that would require knowing all members of the organization (of we knew that there wouldn't be a problem in the first place). This is again a completely unrealistic goal, though a bit more realistic than suppressing information on the internet.
Then there is that find them and kill them by any means necessary tid bit. What do you think we're fucking doing?! We do this all the time. In fact it is the left's biggest problem with Obama is that on Tuesdays he gets a big list of targets in this war and he signs off on droning them and any bystanders next to them into freaking oblivion.
So I ask again because maybe I'm missing some steps from your glorious fucking plan here, what are the plans to enact these three fucking bullet points?
Yes. As we all know, there are no former Neo-Nazi's in this world.
Also, this man would like a word with you.
I don't know. Let me consult my foreign policy advisors.
This young woman, who stepped away from the edge, signed her death warrant at 18 by doing what most 18 year olds do (make poor life choices)?
I don't even follow your logic. If we knew who the Brussels bombers were & where to find them before the attacks, we would have likely raided their home, arrested them, put them through due process & not had to worry about any attacks. Note the total lack of a need to kill them on site for [???] reasons.
'Well fuck it, just kill 'em all!' is an attitude that's as foolish as it is reprehensible, because it assumes that somehow we've already figured-out who is or isn't radicalized in a given community and the only thing holding us back is some gosh gee whiz PC attitude. There is no way to effectively guarantee security against people that want to commit acts of violence so long as we value being in a free society, not because we treat criminals with kid gloves (we often don't), but because privacy protections also unwittingly protect people who want to build bombs in their basements.
Even draconian 'Big Brother' security measures don't solve problems (just ask Turkey or Saudi Arabia or Israel), because attackers have an inherent advantage & will simply escalate as necessary to defeat the new security.
It doesn't work.
No, Belgium was targeted because their security sucks:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/22/u-s-officials-bash-shitty-belgian-security-forces.html
Also, since Erdogan is human trash, I want independent confirmation, but Erdogan claims Belgium was outright specifically warned about one of the terrorists after they were deported, likely trying to join ISIS in Syria, so case in point.
Moreover, that is absolutely victim blaming, and it's wrong. These are shitty people who are being radicalized by a dangerous ideology, intentionally. It's not Belgium's fault that Wahhabism and some other strains of Islam are morally bankrupt, and are used as a foreign policy tool / weapon by major regional powers. Terrorism isn't the fault of all Muslims, but it sure is the fault of reactionary Muslims, because they encourage a pre-modern and dangerous ideology that causes these conflicts with the west.