They actually ran riot *within the protest the left was holding*, the dance party.
This sounds equiv to a wedding party where (as expected) the best man gets drunk and starts a fight. It's a problem, but it's an "inter-family" problem.
Everyone knows who the problem person is but the Bride is going to invite her brother so everyone is stuck with the drama.
What you sorta missed is…they mostly *are* upset about it!
Upset enough to have them arrested? Because this sort of thing happens way too often to call it rare, and normally you claim it's someone else's fault.
As long as they're the top priority of law enforcement, and as long as the rest of the world is low hanging fruit, Yes.
Because ISIS is less a threat to Western nations than it is a threat to their fellow Muslim nations.
Agreed.
Because the battle is not a “clash of cultures” between Christendom and the Muslim world. Instead it is a battle within the Muslim world, and the West is largely irrelevant to the Shia/Sunni schism.
Mostly agreed. Although the West is largely irrelevant, I think the problem goes deeper than Shia/Sunni. Large regions were basically still in the 14th century, and then they were given Oil money. They spent the money on keeping the peasants down, or bribing people to stay in charge, or building armies to stay in charge, or bribing the priests to stay in charge.
They mostly didn't try to overhaul their religion and culture to mimic the West because, well, why would they? Problem is the West's culture is what created all this prosperity and good things, and it's already been thoroughly scrubbed from the 14th century. We've already given up the parts of our culture that can't work in the modern era (for example the Bible forbids the charging of interest).
If the reverse had happened, if a group of ancient Christians had somehow found themselves in the modern era, then we'd have massive fights on the charging of interest, the world being flat, the earth being the center of the universe, and so on.
So whats with the Murdoch/ Pam Geller/ Christianist fear campaign? According to them, ISIS is coming, tomorrow, to rape YOUR daughter, and install Sharia Law in Oklahoma.
Some of that is the Christian religion needs an enemy to "defend" against in order to stay relevant, some of it is xenophobia, some of it is political opportunism, some of it blaming others for our own problems. So it's the right wing equiv of BLM.
Dark Matter: However in the mean time we’re going to have the occasional mass murder by professionally-trained highly-functional fanatics, and that’s a tough political sell.
Chip: No, that’s demonstrably false. We have had multiple mass murders, including the slaughter of 26 children and the political consensus is “Meh, Shit Happens, get used to it“.
The typical response of an incident like that "26" is to arrest, maybe even give the death penalty to, everyone involved. With AQ, everyone involved includes the people deliberately either creating or channeling these sorts of incidents, and they're overseas... trying to create more.
Saying that it's a manageable problem is very far away from saying there is no problem.
911 killed about 3k people and inflicted between $100 Billion and $2 Trillion in economic damage. That's what happens if law enforcement takes their eye off the ball, and it's a good example of what AQ state resources should be used for.
No, what Chip and others are talking about is that a) the existential threat ISIS poses to the US is effectively zero, b) that the threat to American lives ISIS poses is statistically negligible, and c) that Islamic terrorism against the West is causally created and justified by the US/West (as you said) “attacking” Islamic countries in the ME.
I agree with the first two but disagree with the last. Our "existence" is a bigger problem for them than the odd country we invaded years ago and the bulk of Islamic terrorism is against their fellow Muslims.
The conclusion of that argument is to challenge the view that the US must or should engage in unilateral action against ISIS and to provide reasons to think the conclusion is based on faulty reasoning.
The ME is a snakepit. There's always going to be countries which disagree with us and basically all of them are following their own interests at the expense of everyone else. Worse, a lot of really bad ideas are popular there.
Should we be more multilateral? Sure. Should we continue to act if we decide it's in our best interests and we can shoulder the cost? Also sure.
Clinton was bombing AQ camps in Afghanistan in ’99 and ’00 .
One camp in '98. '99 and '00 were crickets chirping which makes me wonder how serious he was, or how much his sex scandles affected his ability to do things.
It's an example of "US unilateral action" which some on this forum claim they're against but whatever.
And does your second comment apply to all presidents?
Yes.
There’s no question why Reagan invaded Grenada the day after all those Marines were killed in Beirut.
Unless he had a time travel machine that invasion was planned and set into motion before Beirut.
Reagan should have resigned because he had Alzheimer's and it deeply affected his work to the point where he "forgot" who was doing what and what orders he'd given.
OK, so if we are only talking about AQ/ISIS, then we should also be honest about the threat level they represent.
True. AQ/ISIS can field armies which threaten countries. They've actually gone as far as set up regions where they *are* the government, which includes taxation and control over Oil, i.e. state level resources. They kill maybe 10k people a year. They're creating refugees in the millions.
We're actively bombing them in multiple countries and will probably be doing so for many decades. Because dealing with them is the TOP PRIORITY of multiple levels of law enforcement, we don't have problems in the US beyond the occasional mass murder.
They're not an existential threat and they don't threaten to become one any time soon. Their culture is a joke compared to ours, we have the most aggressively assimilative culture on the planet, so the odds that they'll come here and supplant ours, even in the Muslim community, is up there with finding out the world is flat.
Conclusion: There's a problem, it's manageable, what we're doing is buying time, enough decades and the Muslim community will get their act together enough to deal with their own demons. Eventually ISIS will be a matter the police (as opposed to the army) can deal with.
However in the mean time we're going to have the occasional mass murder by professionally-trained highly-functional fanatics, and that's a tough political sell. ISIS, both the organization and the ideology, is legitimately a MUCH bigger problem than groups like the KKK.
Dark Matter: no way to be at peace with these guys.
Chip Daniels: What the hell else is this supposed to mean?
We are talking about ISIS, AQ, and Islamic Terrorism. You and others are talking about how everything would be fluffy bunnies if we'd just stop interfering.
No, ISIS and AQ are not going to stop hating us because we stand back and let them enslave women and kill their gays and religious minorities. This is the equiv of claiming the KKK would be nice and gentle if we'd just let them lynch any black they consider uppity.
The problem is AQ is way more popular and influential than the Klan, and I expect they're going to remain so for a long time.
I think we're going to be blowing up these guys with drones for the next generation or three.
When you make these statements about “Muslims” who are you talking about?
AQ is to the general Muslim community what the KKK is to the general White community.
Which doesn't change that AQ/ISIS can field armies and threaten countries while the KKK can't even carry out a lynching now days.
You’re forgetting real meddling: (in the modern era) colonialism, economic imperialism, OIL!!, post-WWII straight-line nation construction, Israel/Palestine, subjugation, assassination, OIL!!, sponsorship of state terrorism, invasion, bombings, rendition, enhanced interrogation, OIL!!, fucking over AQ after they kicked the Rooskies outa Afghanistan…
To sum up: They're weak, and we've repeatedly shown them just how weak. Their culture and holy book teaches them to be strong, and they're not handling being weak very well. We haven't cared about them beyond "OIL" because we haven't needed to care.
They want to be strong, and they've tried Bad Idea after Bad Idea. Communism. Big man in charge. Doubling down on religion and what worked in the 14th century. Having Oil instead of an economy.
So what would "strong" look like? (Not in order of importance)
1) Not wasting human capital by refusing to educate women and refusing to let them have jobs. Give women rights so they have motivation to be economically productive.
2) Not taking religion so seriously, if god's will conflicts with economics (i.e. math) then economics wins. Similarly they should separate church and state because to oppose the state shouldn't be to oppose god.
3) Don't use the power of the state to repress people, don't mishandle Oil money, don't use the power of the state to repress economic growth and activity (and unfortunately, some social programs count).
4) Educate the masses in math, science, language, and economics (not religion).
5) Have rule of law. Be able to enforce contracts so you don't need to depend on personal relationships.
And a LOT of this is going to be strongly opposed by the big power players. The Priests aren't in favor of God not being in charge, and they're going to preach this is an evil idea. Rule of law implies everyone doesn't need to kiss the ruler's ass, and the ruler may disagree with that.
They want to be strong, but they haven't yet made the cultural transitions which make much of the modern economy really work... and important parts of their society don't want to.
The way you so airily talk about 1 billion people you obviously know little about, using bits and fragments of Rupert Murdock most lurid fantasies
Truly impressive Straw man. I'm claiming every Muslim is a Terrorist? Seriously?
However it does seem to be the case for some of the people on this board that none of them are. That we're not dealing with a culture clash. That things would just magically become flowers and bunnies if we let the people we know are into genocide do their thing without our "interference".
Do you know why OBL called the house of Saud the “Near Enemy”?
Yes, but it doesn't sound like you do.
OBL went to Afghanistan and became a war hero organizing the fight against the Russians and putting together a solid crew of soldiers who backed him.
Then Saddam invaded and took Kuwait, showing that "Arab Solidarity" wasn't a real thing. Saudi Arabia didn't have an army by Saddam standards, they've always been afraid that their army would be used to take over Saudi Arabia by whoever was in charge.
Saddam's army could have trivially taken over Saudi Arabia, there's an argument that if he'd done that then, with a lot of the world's oil, he could have sued the West for peace.
OBL offered to deal with the situation by bringing in his crew. Creating a *real* army of battle hardened Arabs (mostly not from Saudi Arabia)... who answered to OBL.
The Saudis (correctly IMHO) figured that if they did this OBL would be taking over the country in a few years, so they exiled him, and brought the Americans.
So the Saudis are why OBL was living in a cave in Afghanistan rather than a Billionaire's palace in Arabia. Without their "betrayal" he'd literally have been king of one of the most important countries in the world.
Of course if the US hadn't put army bases in SA or invaded Iraq then SA might have had no choice but bring in OBL's guys and use them as the backbone of a real army... but given what we know about OBL it's very hard to see that ending well.
But doesn’t constitute an example of the benefits of US “meddling in the ME”.
It doesn't? Most cities have police, if the cop isn't around then the local bad actors do bad things.
More importantly, the bad actors which we thought we could leave to their own devices (i.e. not interfere) have shown twice now that we simply can't.
We didn't understand that AQ could pull off 911 on us. We didn't understand that ISIS would beat the Iraqi army.
Now that we do understand these things, what exactly are you suggesting we do? Let them kill & genocide their way back into power and hope for the best?
When "non-interference" means "let AQ/ISIS kill all the local gays/Christians/etc", why is this supposed to be the ethical course of action?
that this is just another example of you arguing something to the effect that IF ONLY the US engaged in rational policy (by your view) and understood all the information at hand (by your view, sometimes including information that only subsequently is at hand) then we wouldn’t be in all the problems we’re in.
Just the opposite. I'm arguing that there is no way to be at peace with these guys.
This is a culture clash, and they are wrong, and by our standards, evil. However they're not evil from their own point of view.
From their point of view, even when we were willing to look the other way at them murdering their gays, and adolescent girls who wanted to read or wear something other than a veil, we were still attacking them.
Every 13 year old girl they shoot in the head for the crime of wanting to learn is our fault because we're the ones who put that idea in her head.
The internet has pictures of women wearing illegal clothing, and it's common knowledge that they can have forbidden jobs and lead forbidden lives here. What's worse, we're richer and more successful than they are, our armies can defeat theirs, our scientists create stuff theirs can not, etc. Their culture teaches that this is impossible and vast parts of our society are evil. The idea that Islam shouldn't be running the government is abhorrent and heretical.
From their point of view, we're the nazis. Being in their lands is a problem but so are their countries own leaders because they're hardly following God's path themselves.
Everything that's wrong with their place in the world is our fault and there's no way we can appease them into peace.
Exactly! We attack their culture! (In large part by meddling.)
The cultural aspects they want to stop (i.e. our attack), is giving women rights, letting women learn to read, not killing homosexuals, separation of church and state, and not letting people to be put to death for leaving Islam.
This is what they consider meddling. It's a war of ideas, and those are the ideas they want to stop... and us giving up on them is a non-starter.
Yes. We walked away from Afghanistan and let them sort themselves out.
So they did, and victory went not to the nicest, but the most ruthless and brutal... and their idea of what to do in a cultural war is kill lots of people.
. _2%_ of the people aged 18-29 are Muslim, and if we’re comparing which groups are violence vs. their population, we should be comparing proportions of that specific group,
Fair enough. We need a 50x adjustment rather than a 100x adjustment.
In those last five years, there have been three hypothetically radical Islam-related terrorist attacks. Granted, the Pulse nightclub had an *extremely large* amount of casualties, and the San Bernardino mass shooting was also pretty high. (The other one, the Chattanooga military recruitment center, just had 5.)
No. You're claiming "terrorist attacks" are "successful mass shootings". "The Boston Marathon bombing" and the guys who attacked the "Draw Muhammad contest" were obviously Islam-related terrorist attacks.
The ones you skipped were:
1) The Boston Marathon bombings - 3 dead, 183 injured.
2) NY Subway hatchet attack - 0 dead, 5 injured
3) Curtis Culwell Center attack (during the draw Muhammad contest) - 0 dead, 1 injured (amazingly two heavily armed and armored guys and both get shot before they get to do their thing).
4) 2016 Ohio State University attack - 0 dead, 11 injured (attacked with a car)
Further, even with your numbers, you're ignoring percentage of population. Multiple either the number of attacks or (especially) the number of dead by 50 (because 2%) and we get really high numbers.
But that was Pulse, and any random chance could have had that attack ‘fail’ at five people, or some other random non-Muslim guy to be wildly successfully.
The problem with ignoring the high number attacks is they're more successful because of professional training.
The Boston Marathon bomber had overseas training on how to do it and Pulse's attacker was a high functioning guard.
Typically high functioning people don't run amuck, and low functioning people can't get professional training on how to kill lots of people. We have an Islamic movement out there actively trying to train life-failures into mass murderers, and actively trying to convince high functioning people that it's part of their job to commit mass murder.
Further, all these numbers are in the context of society putting lots of resources into preventing Islamic terrorism. That's the first priority of law enforcement. That's why the Curtis Culwell Center wasn't Pulse, if the attackers had gone to a gun free bar rather than "Draw-Muhammad" law enforcement wouldn't have been waiting for them and the body count would have been awful.
Stalin committed enough heinous deeds that we don't need to make stuff up.
That people need to spin, putting the death penalty on a Klan member into an act of racism, says Sessions apparently hasn't. The case against him is so weak that *this* is what they need to resort to.
Sessions hauled these *victims* of vote tampering to Mobile for…what? Fun? Spite?
I've no clue. But let's just recap.
Sessions was accused of racism...
...and the best piece of evidence against him (the KKK) turns out to be a politically motivated lie...
...and the 2nd best piece of evidence against him turns out to be the word of a guy with mental problems including paranoia, and it also looks like a politically motivated lie.
Those are the two points (out of two) that I bothered to research.
But hey, gosh darn it, the Dems called him a racist and they never use that word for politics, so he's got to be a racist somehow. So, knowing that he's a racist, we'll look at his entire career and just assume racism was why he did anything we can't explain or don't have the details on, and we won't check the accuracy or whatever.
Better still would be to find accounts where we *can't* check the accuracy, because that deals with all these annoying issues and we can finally hold the racist accountable for his racist views.
So, no, I'm not going to bother doing more research on Sessions' racism. The first two points didn't convince you, if I find a third you'll just move to a fourth. I'll just assume he's not a Democrat, because that seems to be what you really mean.
If we're talking about HSBC Bank then the problem is what they did was legal... so what should have been done was firing the top two or three layers of management with clawback of their bonuses.
But what do you make of the argument that we shouldn’t prosecute people who loot and steal, since it would simply be too much effort, and disruption?
I think it's politically motivated.
Parts of the Left wants it done to let everyone know that the next group of rioters can do their thing without consequences... so we (society) had darn well knuckle under to their demands.
The only thing some of these groups put on the table is a lack of their own bad behavior, i.e. make nice with us or we'll burn something and wreck your whatever.
The GOP? The Biden rule was created by former Vice President Biden.
And mostly it's about political power and costs, but the fig-leaf ethical covering is that we have a President attempting to make a Supreme Court choice in an election year while Congress (who faced the voters more recently) was elected on a mandate to stop him.
The question of which groups are more dangerous in aggregate doesn’t seem like it has any real policy implications for this problem.
We make policy decisions based off of aggregate group behavior all the time.
Not every doctor is going to be competent, but imho "brain drain" is a good thing for us. Similarly not every immigrant is going to be a entrepreneur, but enough are that it's a really good thing. Some of the smartest people in the world come to our colleges.
There are all sorts of policy implications from all that. For example IMHO we should be handing out free green cards with every Masters Degree from the top 200(ish) colleges.
We're actively bombing groups of people because their culture does nasty things and isn't willing to play nice with ours. There are immigration policy implications in that too.
It’s capped at 85,000, and is pretty much entirely full every year.
Yeah but that's all countries combined. If we're talking about just these 7 countries, or even just Muslims, then it's a lot less.
And, yeah, we really do have that many mass shootings.
Only if "mass shootings" includes "drug dealers killing drug dealers" and "man shoots wife and wife's lover". Exclude dealers, gangs, and families and those numbers go way down.
But this is mostly because every Muslim that snaps turns into a ‘terrorist’ (Both because the media assumes it, and because they’ve spent three days reading ISIS stuff and yell something about Allah.), whereas 99% of other people that snap become a ‘mass shooters’ with no obvious goals.
Afaict, excluding outliers, the terrorism done by 1% of the population roughly matches the rest of the population. Include outliers and it's even more lopsided. Further while McVay discredited his organization, 911 and that gay bar didn't discredited theirs.
The world is fighting an organization and ideology which actively promotes terrorism and encourages losers to become terrorists. That ideology isn't just channeling violence that would happen anyway, it's also creating violence.
We have lunatics who have been given a cause who would have killed anyway. We also have losers, small time criminals, and engineers being turned into terrorists.
So sometimes we get Bill and Ted, and sometimes we get a professional gun bunny (thus that gay bar).
The nasty part is at the moment, most serious players go elsewhere in the world to do their thing and/or get training... but that doesn't have to be true forever.
Having said all that, I don't have better ideas on what to do differently than what we have... but trying to claim there isn't a problem is basically trying to avoid uncomfortable cultural questions. There clearly is a problem.
@davidtc
@nevermoor
You're presenting the "Bork" arguments at face value, often ignoring the context it itself often supplies.
In big every large bold letters it says he said "The NAACP (etc) are Anti-American", and in the fine print it turns out he was talking about their support for murderous Pro-Communist rebels in foreign countries, and how that costs them moral authority.
He said "I thought those guys [the KKK] were OK until I learned they smoked pot", while he was trying them for murder and the like.
And Thomas Figures, the now-dead star "witness" for all this (although he wasn't under oath), is known for things like bribing witnesses, paranoia, and thinking Dan Rather was talking to him specifically through the television.
(replying to David)
So when he's not executing members of the Klan and racially integrating schools, he's suppressing the black vote?
Or maybe legit policy differences are being exaggerated and misrepresented so the Dems can once again play the "he's a racist" card on anyone who isn't a Dem?
Since him executing a member of the Klan is portrayed as an act of racism, I find it hard to trust his critics.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Stop Feeding Milo Yiannapolous”
This sounds equiv to a wedding party where (as expected) the best man gets drunk and starts a fight. It's a problem, but it's an "inter-family" problem.
Everyone knows who the problem person is but the Bride is going to invite her brother so everyone is stuck with the drama.
Upset enough to have them arrested? Because this sort of thing happens way too often to call it rare, and normally you claim it's someone else's fault.
On “Trumpwatch: on prioritizing Christian refugees”
As long as they're the top priority of law enforcement, and as long as the rest of the world is low hanging fruit, Yes.
Agreed.
Mostly agreed. Although the West is largely irrelevant, I think the problem goes deeper than Shia/Sunni. Large regions were basically still in the 14th century, and then they were given Oil money. They spent the money on keeping the peasants down, or bribing people to stay in charge, or building armies to stay in charge, or bribing the priests to stay in charge.
They mostly didn't try to overhaul their religion and culture to mimic the West because, well, why would they? Problem is the West's culture is what created all this prosperity and good things, and it's already been thoroughly scrubbed from the 14th century. We've already given up the parts of our culture that can't work in the modern era (for example the Bible forbids the charging of interest).
If the reverse had happened, if a group of ancient Christians had somehow found themselves in the modern era, then we'd have massive fights on the charging of interest, the world being flat, the earth being the center of the universe, and so on.
Some of that is the Christian religion needs an enemy to "defend" against in order to stay relevant, some of it is xenophobia, some of it is political opportunism, some of it blaming others for our own problems. So it's the right wing equiv of BLM.
The typical response of an incident like that "26" is to arrest, maybe even give the death penalty to, everyone involved. With AQ, everyone involved includes the people deliberately either creating or channeling these sorts of incidents, and they're overseas... trying to create more.
Saying that it's a manageable problem is very far away from saying there is no problem.
911 killed about 3k people and inflicted between $100 Billion and $2 Trillion in economic damage. That's what happens if law enforcement takes their eye off the ball, and it's a good example of what AQ state resources should be used for.
"
I agree with the first two but disagree with the last. Our "existence" is a bigger problem for them than the odd country we invaded years ago and the bulk of Islamic terrorism is against their fellow Muslims.
The ME is a snakepit. There's always going to be countries which disagree with us and basically all of them are following their own interests at the expense of everyone else. Worse, a lot of really bad ideas are popular there.
Should we be more multilateral? Sure. Should we continue to act if we decide it's in our best interests and we can shoulder the cost? Also sure.
"
One camp in '98. '99 and '00 were crickets chirping which makes me wonder how serious he was, or how much his sex scandles affected his ability to do things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Infinite_Reach
It's an example of "US unilateral action" which some on this forum claim they're against but whatever.
Yes.
Unless he had a time travel machine that invasion was planned and set into motion before Beirut.
Reagan should have resigned because he had Alzheimer's and it deeply affected his work to the point where he "forgot" who was doing what and what orders he'd given.
"
Maybe. Bill's claims to have been focused on stopping AQ only came out after 911 and seemed self serving.
That we can even have a conversation speculating on whether Bill's thing was W-T-D or Legit suggests he should have resigned.
"
True. AQ/ISIS can field armies which threaten countries. They've actually gone as far as set up regions where they *are* the government, which includes taxation and control over Oil, i.e. state level resources. They kill maybe 10k people a year. They're creating refugees in the millions.
We're actively bombing them in multiple countries and will probably be doing so for many decades. Because dealing with them is the TOP PRIORITY of multiple levels of law enforcement, we don't have problems in the US beyond the occasional mass murder.
They're not an existential threat and they don't threaten to become one any time soon. Their culture is a joke compared to ours, we have the most aggressively assimilative culture on the planet, so the odds that they'll come here and supplant ours, even in the Muslim community, is up there with finding out the world is flat.
Conclusion: There's a problem, it's manageable, what we're doing is buying time, enough decades and the Muslim community will get their act together enough to deal with their own demons. Eventually ISIS will be a matter the police (as opposed to the army) can deal with.
However in the mean time we're going to have the occasional mass murder by professionally-trained highly-functional fanatics, and that's a tough political sell. ISIS, both the organization and the ideology, is legitimately a MUCH bigger problem than groups like the KKK.
"
We are talking about ISIS, AQ, and Islamic Terrorism. You and others are talking about how everything would be fluffy bunnies if we'd just stop interfering.
No, ISIS and AQ are not going to stop hating us because we stand back and let them enslave women and kill their gays and religious minorities. This is the equiv of claiming the KKK would be nice and gentle if we'd just let them lynch any black they consider uppity.
The problem is AQ is way more popular and influential than the Klan, and I expect they're going to remain so for a long time.
I think we're going to be blowing up these guys with drones for the next generation or three.
AQ is to the general Muslim community what the KKK is to the general White community.
Which doesn't change that AQ/ISIS can field armies and threaten countries while the KKK can't even carry out a lynching now days.
"
To sum up: They're weak, and we've repeatedly shown them just how weak. Their culture and holy book teaches them to be strong, and they're not handling being weak very well. We haven't cared about them beyond "OIL" because we haven't needed to care.
They want to be strong, and they've tried Bad Idea after Bad Idea. Communism. Big man in charge. Doubling down on religion and what worked in the 14th century. Having Oil instead of an economy.
So what would "strong" look like? (Not in order of importance)
1) Not wasting human capital by refusing to educate women and refusing to let them have jobs. Give women rights so they have motivation to be economically productive.
2) Not taking religion so seriously, if god's will conflicts with economics (i.e. math) then economics wins. Similarly they should separate church and state because to oppose the state shouldn't be to oppose god.
3) Don't use the power of the state to repress people, don't mishandle Oil money, don't use the power of the state to repress economic growth and activity (and unfortunately, some social programs count).
4) Educate the masses in math, science, language, and economics (not religion).
5) Have rule of law. Be able to enforce contracts so you don't need to depend on personal relationships.
And a LOT of this is going to be strongly opposed by the big power players. The Priests aren't in favor of God not being in charge, and they're going to preach this is an evil idea. Rule of law implies everyone doesn't need to kiss the ruler's ass, and the ruler may disagree with that.
They want to be strong, but they haven't yet made the cultural transitions which make much of the modern economy really work... and important parts of their society don't want to.
"
Truly impressive Straw man. I'm claiming every Muslim is a Terrorist? Seriously?
However it does seem to be the case for some of the people on this board that none of them are. That we're not dealing with a culture clash. That things would just magically become flowers and bunnies if we let the people we know are into genocide do their thing without our "interference".
"
Yes, but it doesn't sound like you do.
OBL went to Afghanistan and became a war hero organizing the fight against the Russians and putting together a solid crew of soldiers who backed him.
Then Saddam invaded and took Kuwait, showing that "Arab Solidarity" wasn't a real thing. Saudi Arabia didn't have an army by Saddam standards, they've always been afraid that their army would be used to take over Saudi Arabia by whoever was in charge.
Saddam's army could have trivially taken over Saudi Arabia, there's an argument that if he'd done that then, with a lot of the world's oil, he could have sued the West for peace.
OBL offered to deal with the situation by bringing in his crew. Creating a *real* army of battle hardened Arabs (mostly not from Saudi Arabia)... who answered to OBL.
The Saudis (correctly IMHO) figured that if they did this OBL would be taking over the country in a few years, so they exiled him, and brought the Americans.
So the Saudis are why OBL was living in a cave in Afghanistan rather than a Billionaire's palace in Arabia. Without their "betrayal" he'd literally have been king of one of the most important countries in the world.
Of course if the US hadn't put army bases in SA or invaded Iraq then SA might have had no choice but bring in OBL's guys and use them as the backbone of a real army... but given what we know about OBL it's very hard to see that ending well.
"
It doesn't? Most cities have police, if the cop isn't around then the local bad actors do bad things.
More importantly, the bad actors which we thought we could leave to their own devices (i.e. not interfere) have shown twice now that we simply can't.
We didn't understand that AQ could pull off 911 on us. We didn't understand that ISIS would beat the Iraqi army.
Now that we do understand these things, what exactly are you suggesting we do? Let them kill & genocide their way back into power and hope for the best?
When "non-interference" means "let AQ/ISIS kill all the local gays/Christians/etc", why is this supposed to be the ethical course of action?
"
Just the opposite. I'm arguing that there is no way to be at peace with these guys.
This is a culture clash, and they are wrong, and by our standards, evil. However they're not evil from their own point of view.
From their point of view, even when we were willing to look the other way at them murdering their gays, and adolescent girls who wanted to read or wear something other than a veil, we were still attacking them.
Every 13 year old girl they shoot in the head for the crime of wanting to learn is our fault because we're the ones who put that idea in her head.
The internet has pictures of women wearing illegal clothing, and it's common knowledge that they can have forbidden jobs and lead forbidden lives here. What's worse, we're richer and more successful than they are, our armies can defeat theirs, our scientists create stuff theirs can not, etc. Their culture teaches that this is impossible and vast parts of our society are evil. The idea that Islam shouldn't be running the government is abhorrent and heretical.
From their point of view, we're the nazis. Being in their lands is a problem but so are their countries own leaders because they're hardly following God's path themselves.
Everything that's wrong with their place in the world is our fault and there's no way we can appease them into peace.
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The cultural aspects they want to stop (i.e. our attack), is giving women rights, letting women learn to read, not killing homosexuals, separation of church and state, and not letting people to be put to death for leaving Islam.
This is what they consider meddling. It's a war of ideas, and those are the ideas they want to stop... and us giving up on them is a non-starter.
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Yes. We walked away from Afghanistan and let them sort themselves out.
So they did, and victory went not to the nicest, but the most ruthless and brutal... and their idea of what to do in a cultural war is kill lots of people.
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This makes intuitive sense. When we've tried it...
...we got 911
...and then we almost put ISIS in charge.
The terrorists don't hate us because we meddle. They hate us because they (correctly) view our culture as attacking theirs.
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Fair enough. We need a 50x adjustment rather than a 100x adjustment.
No. You're claiming "terrorist attacks" are "successful mass shootings". "The Boston Marathon bombing" and the guys who attacked the "Draw Muhammad contest" were obviously Islam-related terrorist attacks.
The ones you skipped were:
1) The Boston Marathon bombings - 3 dead, 183 injured.
2) NY Subway hatchet attack - 0 dead, 5 injured
3) Curtis Culwell Center attack (during the draw Muhammad contest) - 0 dead, 1 injured (amazingly two heavily armed and armored guys and both get shot before they get to do their thing).
4) 2016 Ohio State University attack - 0 dead, 11 injured (attacked with a car)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_attacks
Further, even with your numbers, you're ignoring percentage of population. Multiple either the number of attacks or (especially) the number of dead by 50 (because 2%) and we get really high numbers.
The problem with ignoring the high number attacks is they're more successful because of professional training.
The Boston Marathon bomber had overseas training on how to do it and Pulse's attacker was a high functioning guard.
Typically high functioning people don't run amuck, and low functioning people can't get professional training on how to kill lots of people. We have an Islamic movement out there actively trying to train life-failures into mass murderers, and actively trying to convince high functioning people that it's part of their job to commit mass murder.
Further, all these numbers are in the context of society putting lots of resources into preventing Islamic terrorism. That's the first priority of law enforcement. That's why the Curtis Culwell Center wasn't Pulse, if the attackers had gone to a gun free bar rather than "Draw-Muhammad" law enforcement wouldn't have been waiting for them and the body count would have been awful.
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I don't, but looking it up, what's your point?
Are you trying to suggest this is the average?
Edit: Sorry, your post may not have been meant for me.
On “Stop Feeding Milo Yiannapolous”
Stalin committed enough heinous deeds that we don't need to make stuff up.
That people need to spin, putting the death penalty on a Klan member into an act of racism, says Sessions apparently hasn't. The case against him is so weak that *this* is what they need to resort to.
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If they'd only stolen it'd be easier. They *lost* money by the truckload.
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I've no clue. But let's just recap.
Sessions was accused of racism...
...and the best piece of evidence against him (the KKK) turns out to be a politically motivated lie...
...and the 2nd best piece of evidence against him turns out to be the word of a guy with mental problems including paranoia, and it also looks like a politically motivated lie.
Those are the two points (out of two) that I bothered to research.
But hey, gosh darn it, the Dems called him a racist and they never use that word for politics, so he's got to be a racist somehow. So, knowing that he's a racist, we'll look at his entire career and just assume racism was why he did anything we can't explain or don't have the details on, and we won't check the accuracy or whatever.
Better still would be to find accounts where we *can't* check the accuracy, because that deals with all these annoying issues and we can finally hold the racist accountable for his racist views.
So, no, I'm not going to bother doing more research on Sessions' racism. The first two points didn't convince you, if I find a third you'll just move to a fourth. I'll just assume he's not a Democrat, because that seems to be what you really mean.
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If we're talking about HSBC Bank then the problem is what they did was legal... so what should have been done was firing the top two or three layers of management with clawback of their bonuses.
I think it's politically motivated.
Parts of the Left wants it done to let everyone know that the next group of rioters can do their thing without consequences... so we (society) had darn well knuckle under to their demands.
The only thing some of these groups put on the table is a lack of their own bad behavior, i.e. make nice with us or we'll burn something and wreck your whatever.
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The GOP? The Biden rule was created by former Vice President Biden.
And mostly it's about political power and costs, but the fig-leaf ethical covering is that we have a President attempting to make a Supreme Court choice in an election year while Congress (who faced the voters more recently) was elected on a mandate to stop him.
On “Trumpwatch: on prioritizing Christian refugees”
We make policy decisions based off of aggregate group behavior all the time.
Not every doctor is going to be competent, but imho "brain drain" is a good thing for us. Similarly not every immigrant is going to be a entrepreneur, but enough are that it's a really good thing. Some of the smartest people in the world come to our colleges.
There are all sorts of policy implications from all that. For example IMHO we should be handing out free green cards with every Masters Degree from the top 200(ish) colleges.
We're actively bombing groups of people because their culture does nasty things and isn't willing to play nice with ours. There are immigration policy implications in that too.
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Yeah but that's all countries combined. If we're talking about just these 7 countries, or even just Muslims, then it's a lot less.
Only if "mass shootings" includes "drug dealers killing drug dealers" and "man shoots wife and wife's lover". Exclude dealers, gangs, and families and those numbers go way down.
Afaict, excluding outliers, the terrorism done by 1% of the population roughly matches the rest of the population. Include outliers and it's even more lopsided. Further while McVay discredited his organization, 911 and that gay bar didn't discredited theirs.
The world is fighting an organization and ideology which actively promotes terrorism and encourages losers to become terrorists. That ideology isn't just channeling violence that would happen anyway, it's also creating violence.
We have lunatics who have been given a cause who would have killed anyway. We also have losers, small time criminals, and engineers being turned into terrorists.
So sometimes we get Bill and Ted, and sometimes we get a professional gun bunny (thus that gay bar).
The nasty part is at the moment, most serious players go elsewhere in the world to do their thing and/or get training... but that doesn't have to be true forever.
Having said all that, I don't have better ideas on what to do differently than what we have... but trying to claim there isn't a problem is basically trying to avoid uncomfortable cultural questions. There clearly is a problem.
On “Stop Feeding Milo Yiannapolous”
@davidtc
@nevermoor
You're presenting the "Bork" arguments at face value, often ignoring the context it itself often supplies.
In big every large bold letters it says he said "The NAACP (etc) are Anti-American", and in the fine print it turns out he was talking about their support for murderous Pro-Communist rebels in foreign countries, and how that costs them moral authority.
He said "I thought those guys [the KKK] were OK until I learned they smoked pot", while he was trying them for murder and the like.
And Thomas Figures, the now-dead star "witness" for all this (although he wasn't under oath), is known for things like bribing witnesses, paranoia, and thinking Dan Rather was talking to him specifically through the television.
(replying to David)
So when he's not executing members of the Klan and racially integrating schools, he's suppressing the black vote?
Or maybe legit policy differences are being exaggerated and misrepresented so the Dems can once again play the "he's a racist" card on anyone who isn't a Dem?
Since him executing a member of the Klan is portrayed as an act of racism, I find it hard to trust his critics.
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