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pancake_hero

pie hero...demoman...?

1) I'm just gonna springboard off of this point to talk about a mostly unrelated but important topic, which is the exaggeration of the link between mental illness and violence- http://depts.washington.edu/mhreport/facts_violence.php

That is not to say that mass shootings are not often perpetrated by mentally ill people, I was just reminded of something that I thought people in this thread ought to know about.

2) saam's point does not require the two situations/motivations for them to be the same, it's about the level of overreaction and racial profiling that the rest of us commit after these events occur. Unless you have statistics to show that a larger percentage or even a larger total number of Muslims living in the U.S. are involved in terrorism than the percentage/amount of white people in the U.S. who commit gun violence, then acting that way afterwards is the same in both situations.

You probably shouldn't say mean things about facts like that, I like facts which is why I try to use them in discourse whenever possible. You should try it out too!

Yes, and we have lots of words for people like you!

I found one! ^^^^^^^

Yes, and we have a lot of words for people like them!

This is known as racial profiling, it is or should be illegal everywhere, and it will not have any affect on the ability of terrorist groups to commit atrocities, it will only hurt ordinary people.

What the fuck are you talking about you racist freak

Yes, and we have lots of words for people like you!

Weird, all of the news reports I saw seemed to suggest there were roughly 8 ISIS members responsible for this attack, I guess the French authorities let the other 1,569,999,992 perpetrators escape.

This, to me, represents exactly what I was talking about in regards to American exceptionalism. Your statement boils down to "these people kill us indiscriminately, so we should do the same to them, but we're still morally superior to them". Do you not see how this begets yet more violence, and allows us to, say, react to a terrorist attack by invading a country that didn't do it and killing over 200,000 civilians? And yet, you think we're more civilized and evolved? Why do our actions not deserve as much scrutiny as theirs?

It is true that, by percentage, the number of religious extremists in our country is lower than that in some Middle Eastern countries. They still exist, and exert a pretty ridiculous influence on our school boards and local legislatures, but they're still in the minority nationwide...slightly. But if we can find non-religious motivation to justify our acts of violence, then it's irrelevant from a foreign policy standpoint, what matters are the acts themselves.

As for the Samuel Huntington "clash of cultures" model, it's ridiculous. The majority of Arab countries are still allies with us, because the global neoliberal capitalist order creates pretty strong incentives for countries to remain so. The few exceptions do not break the rule, and most of the countries most utterly outside this system are not in the Middle East.

Ahem,

Please do not cite Milo Yiannopoulos in any serious context

Please do not act like your (also partisan) position holds the monopoly on sympathy for the victims of an atrocity. Please do not also act like you are the one staying out of the political arena when you have a) already quoted someone using a tragedy as an attempt to attack liberal media outlets he does not like and b) when you say "getting shit done so this could be prevented in the future" in the same sentence which, judging by the tone of your post, probably implies making it harder for people to immigrate to France despite how utterly irrelevant that is to this issue.

Yeah, those are the only people piggybacking off a horrific event to espouse their normal political rhetoric, something Milo "Fucking" Yiannopoulos would never ever do

The person splitting hairs over a definition is the person playing the semantics game

I am saying that there is no true definition and the entire construct of terrorism as you are using it was manufactured by the West, and the United States in particular, for the purposes of denying agency from our enemies and giving ourselves the moral high ground in order to justify any and all foreign policy actions we take ever

I guess we are allowed to stop caring about our own country's imperial actions once they hit their 40th birthday or so?

Every example I posted fits this definition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_state_terrorism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_regime_change_actions

Again, it depends on whether your definition of terrorism includes state terrorism

Some quotes from this wiki page that are apt:

"There is no general consensus on the definition of terrorism. The difficulty of defining terrorism lies in the risk it entails of taking positions. The political value of the term currently prevails over its legal one. Left to its political meaning, terrorism easily falls prey to change that suits the interests of particular states at particular times. The Taliban and Osama bin Laden were once called freedom fighters (mujahideen) and backed by the CIA when they were resisting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Now they are on top of the international terrorist lists. Today, the United Nations views Palestinians as freedom fighters, struggling against the unlawful occupation of their land by Israel, and engaged in a long-established legitimate resistance, yet Israel regards them as terrorists. Israel also brands the Hizbullah of Lebanon as a terrorist group, whereas most of the international community regards it as a legitimate resistance group, fighting Israel's occupation of Southern Lebanon. In fact, the successful ousting of Israeli forces from most of the South by the Hizbollah in 2000 made Lebanon the only Arab country to actually defeat the Israeli army. The repercussion of the current preponderance of the political over the legal value of terrorism is costly, leaving the war against terrorism selective, incomplete and ineffective." ~Sami Zeidan

"There are multiple ways of defining terrorism, and all are subjective. Most define terrorism as "the use or threat of serious violence" to advance some kind of "cause". Some state clearly the kinds of group ("sub-national", "non-state") or cause (political, ideological, religious) to which they refer. Others merely rely on the instinct of most people when confronted with innocent civilians being killed or maimed by men armed with explosives, firearms or other weapons. None is satisfactory, and grave problems with the use of the term persist. Terrorism is after all, a tactic. The term "war on terrorism" is thus effectively nonsensical. As there is no space here to explore this involved and difficult debate, my preference is, on the whole, for the less loaded term "Militancy". This is not an attempt to condone such actions, merely to analyse them in a clearer way." ~Jason Burke

"Despite the shifting and contested meaning of "terrorism" over time, the peculiar semantic power of the term, beyond its literal signification, is its capacity to stigmatize, delegitimize, denigrate, and dehumanize those at whom it is directed, including political opponents. The term is ideologically and politically loaded; pejorative; implies moral, social, and value judgment; and is "slippery and much-abused." In the absence of a definition of terrorism, the struggle over the representation of a violent act is a struggle over its legitimacy. The more confused a concept, the more it lends itself to opportunistic appropriation." ~Ben Saul

Only if you use the United State's legal definition of terrorism, which only allows for non-state actors to be perpetrators of terrorism regardless of the act itself

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_terrorism

There is absolutely zero unified definition of terrorism because each individual/state/international governing body has a point of view and an agenda and will attempt to define it in means that exclude those they support from the definition

you can reverse + and - frags by pressing the opposite button my friend

the real problem is fundamentalism, and not just religious fundamentalism

I mean the "religion" that kills the most civilians violently right now is american exceptionalism, which I think it's fair to describe as fundamentalism if not religious