The article is a nuanced view of the present situation, but doesn't go into the historical perspective. Contemporary radical Islam is a response to Western modernity and perceived decadence and has been brewing for decades if not centuries. It is an outgrowth of Salafi Islam, a severely literal interpretation of the Koran that has become widespread over the past 70 years thanks to trillions of petrodollars that fund thousands of fundamentalist madrassas and other cultural dissemination centers all over the world, including in the United States and Western Europe.
It's important to note that ISIS, al Qaeda, al nusra etc. are Sunni movements and are bitterly opposed to Shi'ism. The rise of Shi'a political power, led by Iran since 1980, poses a huge ideological threat.
What we're seeing today is a tiny group of very clever, highly motivated people, patiently watching for opportunities to sow chaos because they believe it will tip the scales eventually toward a Caliphate. They are hugely aided by technology and by the West's earnest desire to integrate the East.
However, I believe the ISIS is doomed to failure. There are only so many young people willing to sacrifice everything for fanatic dreams of afterlife fulfillment as payment for promises of improving the here-now. Most youth, in other words, aren't that stupid. ISIS is siphoning off a certain kind of malcontents who make good fodder for the cannons, but history has shown that this approach is not sustainable. The Muslim world is already showing signs of backlash against the constant images of extreme violence, and reformists continue to call for tolerance and dialogue as the only true solution to territorial and ideological differences.
Whether the Levant succumbs to unending civil war for the next few decades, or is ultimately dominated by a set of secular dictatorships that suppress the jihadists, or can they achieve peaceful multiplayer democracy--these are questions to which no one has the answers.
I find your comment very relevant and I agree with all of it but I miss some references to the influence of not Levant nations in all this mess.
To your comments I would like to add:
the Russians invading Afghanistan, the CIA arming and training of all kind of "rebels", the invasion of Irak, the protection of the House of Saud by the EUA, the interest of Israel in being the only strong nation in the area, the support of dictatorial regimens (and their removal) by the "western powers", etc..
It's almost impossible to solve a problem without understanding it. And this is not a simple problem.
Also the funding of the Syrian rebels by Obama and other Western nations. ISIS was just one of the groups in the Syrian civil war, a bunch brutal and crazy idiots, that would have never amounted to anything.
At the same time CIA wanted to destabilize the region, to kick the currently Russia-friendly government out (and as a consequence kick Russia out of its pretty much only naval base in the region). So they kept funneling funds, training and weapons to the "moderate" rebels.
Of course all those weapons (along with many left behind in Iraq), and all those "moderate" rebels switched to ISIS. Now you can either say CIA is stupid or malicious. Stupid because despite the $100B in funding, they couldn't foresee it and it was a surprise, or it was pretty much the plan.
One can say, at the end of the day what are they (and many other military and intelligence) branches will do if is there is no new threat to worry about. "No drones or SIGINT targets, no promotions and paychecks". Both for military industrial complex and the government employees alike.
Either way I find it interesting how this was spun as a surprise to the media: "We had no idea why ISIS grew so fast, and managed to occupy so much territory. Not really sure how they got those modern tank killer missiles they keep making videos with...".
Source for "all those "moderate" rebels switched to ISIS"? Source for "$100B in funding"? This smacks of conspiracy claptrap that adds nothing of substance to the discussion.
I disagree that a request for sources is unwarranted in this situation. Your language assumed the reader agreed with your viewpoint based off of not-commonly-known facts: "of course... stupid because..."
I understand your decision to reply with snark to a snarky comment, but in this instance, "src pls!" does in fact add to the discussion.
I think if they are interested in the conversation it is worth throwing more than a drive-by "srs pls" comment into it.
For example it could have been "Well I think the budget is a bit off, CIA itself doesn't get that money, did you mean the total intelligence budget".
Or "Agreed, do you have any sources for the fighters who switched side? that would be interesting to see".
Imagine you are sitting by the fire and discussing something, and someone just chimes with "src pls", "srs pls", I wouldn't consider them contributing to the discussion, rather derailing it.
So I agree, source would help here, did provide sources but responded snarky to give the person asking for them a hint (not so subtle, perhaps) that in general that is not a constructive way to hold a conversation.
That budget includes all of the intelligence apparatus' budget, ongoing research programs, so on and so forth. So likely not even close to the $100B mentioned.
Secondly, I asked for source to support the claim that "all rebels switched to ISIS", but apparently you don't have that and are just of the opinion that that is what has occurred.
Isn't it funny that Wahabbists hate being called that ?
They get really agitated and say we're not Wahabbis we're just true muslims.
One interesting theory I read is that 19th Century Islam was forced to confront the reality that they had declined while Europe had soared.
In the ensuing conflict of ideas the one that won out was the thesis that the Islamic world had declined because they had gotten out of touch with the true values of Islam as practised by those at the time of the prophet.
Hence Salafism - Literally a return to the time of the prophet. Francis Fukuyama was laughed at for claiming the end of history a few years ago as he believed Western Democracy had achieved an eternal triumph.
What are we then to make of these people who believe that the end of history happened more than a thousand years ago ?
If one says "keeping up the articles of Magna Carta, rather than resort to catastrophic violence on the part of the powerful outlawed states, would likely help lessen some of the chaos in today's world", does it imply that one is physically calling to go back to the thirteenth century? Similarly, Americans calling to restore the fourth amendment may not mean taking the clock back to the nineteenth century. Salafism in essence doesn't mean any different within the relevant conceptual framework.
In the world of Fukuyama et al, rather than a basic religious worldview with precise tenets, is there a solid framework of meaningfully defining/determining good/triumph/progress? How/why does it matter in the long run whether or not a bunch of Amoeba get transformed into more complicated organisms, or hot elementary particles end up forming heavy atoms and structures, or killing and chaos spreads among the humans a la world war II? From a materialistic/nihilistic standpoint, everything -- or nothing, for that matter -- can be viewed as triumph or end of some (part of) history (or not).
Islam in the 19th century was no more and no less than what it was before, but the Muslims were (and still are) trying to come to terms with the colonial destructions and ensuing effects.
I don't understand what you're getting at but I'll try to explain.
Fukuyama said that Capitalist Democracy was the pinnacle of civilisation.
In the same way Salafi / Wahabbi ideology says that we must as much as possible live like the prophet and his contemporaries. Any innovation is derided as Bida/Heretical.
So its not possible to reform certain laws in response to changing circumstances. Eg: Women can inherit only half of what men do. Now I'm not justifying this but this might have been pragmatic (socially acceptable??) for a time where women were subjugated and men were often the sole breadwinners for the entire family.
However in the 21st century noone can really argue that its relevant. But if anyone tries to reform laws such as these you'll have the Wahabbis and Salafis going ape and branding everyone heretics.
There was a cleric in my part of the country who had a very unorthodox interpretation of the scriptures. He was a brilliant orator and a scholar who could hold his fort against the traditionalists. He began gaining a lot of followers however one day he just disappeared and was never found again.
Well, the key tenets of beliefs and the legal outline laid down in the revealed texts are essentially immutable, per what a Muslim is meant to subscribe to. If this core idea is not there, that is logically equivalent to not subscribing to the religion (whoever wants to change whatever at wherever renders any belief fundamentally void, let alone what one believes to be God's guidance). But the jurisprudential framework ('usul al-fiqh') encompasses the principles to formulate specific course of action according to the immutable legislative guideline (formulated from authentic texts) in the specific circumstances. An example, harming oneself is prohibited in the text, so smoking has the ruling of being impermissible as its harms are largely known now while earlier academics used to deem it disliked based on another textual principle.
In short, there are constants and there are variables; without any constants, it all becomes tendentious whimsy.
The ideas related to the roles, responsibilities and respectability of the individuals are different in the Islamic creed. Yes, a woman gets half from her father (her husband owes her, legally), and she is exempt from the basic responsibility to become the breadwinner. Any Muslim is meant to respect and care for his/her mother more than the father. Historically many Muslim women were scholars (https://archive.org/download/AlMuhaddithat/al%20-%20Muhaddit...) and rich (in the old Muslim heritage, many of the large endowments for public welfare are known to be from women). Besides, a merely demographically Muslim territory may not embody much of the Islamic ideals though.
In the other part, I was referring to the epistemological basis regarding the concepts of triumph/progress; in particular, in a framework where basically, "we are from nowhere, we are going to nowhere and we are here for nothing", nothing really signifies anything.
Yes, you can reply directly. Beyond a certain depth HN may not show a reply link when you view the whole thread, but you can still directly reply by clicking the direct link to the specific comment (the one that has the "5 minutes ago" or whatever the time interval is), and then the reply box will be shown.
I think this is intended to make people think before replying to a very deeply nested comment as a way of curbing unproductive Ping-Pong discussions, but it seems mostly to get people to post lateral replies (that is, replies attached to a comment somewhere upthread from the comment they actually respond to), invariably complaining about the inability to reply directly, which is worse for the flow of discussion than if they just posted direct replies.
Whatever a woman earns -- after taking care of her primary/general responsibility of largely being the minister/secretary of (informal) education, cultural and internal affairs within the realm of a budding family -- remains with her and is not obliged to spend for the basic subsistence of the family. She still gets her inheritances. Besides, as the last of the Abrahamic religions today, Islam presents itself as the continuation of the basic common messages that the prophets came with. The prophets came with robust messages to fix social reality (not necessarily every single aspect of it though), and they themselves were not primarily trying to fit-in and win mere popularity contests at any cost.
They were the last to be visited by god, and had the most-recent prophet, according to whom their mortal leaders speak ex-cathedra. Mormonism is even growing faster than Islam. It is the ultimate(1) Abrahamic religion.
Mormonism is even truly a religion of peace. Its leader was under persecution at the time and he does not speak out for killing and injustice.
1) Judging all religions objectively by the same standard of proof.
Mormon religion is a case in point given the timeline of its emergence.
It's not clear what objective standard you have in mind, and whether any consensus can be reached on that purely through an exercise of argumentation where a lot of predispositions and other factors quite often lurk behind (it's rampant even in sciences, more so probably in soft/wet sciences: http://www.nature.com/news/how-scientists-fool-themselves-an...).
The only objective standard possible, the words of the religions themselves, combined into one greater piece of theology. Everything is assumed true unless it conflicts a greater set of doctrine.
Thus we know mormon leadership speak ex-cathedra because Smith said so, and so forth. Where things conflict however, like Mohammed's statement that he's the last prophet, obviously he's wrong because Joseph Smith, etc, meet the same criteria.
Going by the truth revealed in each document, Mormon's are the closest to god - the latest, most direct, pipeline to the divine. It's essentially religious science.
Say, I claim Prophethood today, and therefore there is n+1 religions meeting the said 'objective standard' now. Well, that number is not quite correct 'now' that you are reading it though; it has to be n+k given other potential claims made in the meanwhile, and k remains effectively indeterminate due to the impossibility of a distributed synchronization.
The details of n+k don't matter as much. It's not just the latest, it's the latest that self-claims to be in a certain lineage, etc. Ultimate Abrahamic religion... And it has to make a non-self conflicting claim to be the definitive text.
Once you meet the rigorous standards of 1) writing it down and 2) claiming to override all previous prophets, yes. I'd count you. (However, this will void your membership in the CotFSM.)
I believe I, or anyone else for that matter, can do meet "your objective" standards 1. and 2. fairly easily (; you can help with clear points/texts and without cryptic acronyms). I mean there can be literally a billion 'fork' at will, which renders the whole thing meaningless.
I don't claim to know much of mormonism; however the conflicts in such notions as 'ultimate', 'objective' here are difficult to reconcile: mormonism conflicts with Vatican/pope with respect to the core of any religious thoughts, namely, the identity of God; hence it is quite strange to insist on a notion of non-conflicting ideas, which is both logically impossible and non-existent. If mormonism was not correcting some ideas, which necessarily implies that there are conflicts, why Mr. Smith bothered to bring mormonism in the first place? Isn't it redundant, as long as it is not claiming to fix something (=>conflict)?
And if you concede the possibility of other valid new prophets and religious claims possible in the future following this Mr. Smith, how can you even choose to use the word "ultimate"? You see the logical contradiction there is too glaring to work out, no?
Please make sure that the reasoning remains reasonably sound. Thanks and bye.
Sure you can. It's a low bar. That's the point. In the absence of any possible evidence we have to work with what we've got. As for cryptic - if you can google it I don't consider it too cryptic. lmgtfy
And I only mean ultimate, now. Compared to the other religions we could be squabbling over. In a future religion, god could be all that + offer you a pony. We'll never know. But for now, of the choices, they're all obvious losers compared to Mormonism. Literally, you could upgrade a catholic or a muslim by giving them Mormonism.
As for Smith's motivations, who's saying he wasn't fixing things. He just didn't feel the need to get all stabby and make killing a sacrament.
And it conflicts nothing - it tells it how it is. The pope is god's voice, there's no conflict. Perhaps the pope is the missing element in islam. As the ultimate religion we can only assume it has not just a point, but a great one.
>In the world of Fukuyama et al, rather than a basic religious worldview with precise tenets, is there a solid framework of meaningfully defining/determining good/triumph/progress?
Fukuyama himself considered capitalist democracy to be the End of History, so yes.
Though Fukuyama reportedly distanced himself from this later, I appreciate your answer. But don't you think it's redundantly tautological and circular/self-referential to approach it like "Fukuyama himself considered capitalist democracy to be the End of History, so it is the supreme progress/triumph (end of history?) to have that".
Besides, I was coming from a philosophical perspective to the point where the basis of the things transcend the transient notions; that is, from a materialistic viewpoint (which I presume is Fukuyama's and many of the fellows' here), how/why does having an oligarchy or a corporate tyranny or a state with social welfare somewhere at some point in time is any more significant than some predator somewhere making some species extinct or some big wave scattering across in the ocean a million year ago or after (or any other event, such as a massacre by some of the humans, in the universe, for that matter).
>But don't you think it's redundantly tautological and circular/self-referential to approach it like "Fukuyama himself considered capitalist democracy to be the End of History, so it is the supreme progress/triumph (end of history?) to have that".
I had considered you to be asking about Fukuyama's views. In my views, history doesn't have an end, except possibly for everyone dying out.
>Besides, I was coming from a philosophical perspective to the point where the basis of the things transcend the transient notions;
The what now?
>how/why does having an oligarchy or a corporate tyranny or a state with social welfare somewhere at some point in time is any more significant than some predator somewhere making some species extinct or some big wave scattering across in the ocean a million year ago or after
It's significant to the people living through it! How's that supposed to not count as significant?
I would recommend reading Bernard Lewis, _What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response_, which discusses the early stages of this conflict -- the failure of the Ottoman Empire. I'd also recommend reading up on the fall of the Qing dynasty, which occurred at about the same time, for about the same reasons; the two histories aren't the same, by any means, but they shed a little light on each other.
There are only so many young people willing to sacrifice everything for fanatic dreams of afterlife fulfillment as payment for promises of improving the here-now. Most youth, in other words, aren't that stupid.
Startups seem to be pretty good at convincing a never-ending stream of youth to surrender 500% productivity now in exchange for (usually lies about) riches in the future.
"Yeah, it's linkedfacebox, you know, a super cool startup and everybody there just works through the night because we're all so dedicated to the cause. Gotta keep crushing it so the founders can get a few billion dollars richer otherwise they won't let me cash out my 0.0001% for $3 million."
humans have limited psychological reactions to things. The "believe in a cause" bucket uses the same manipulation tools no matter if you're a startup, a cult, a thousand year old religion, or a radicalized intentional hate group with a persecution complex. You set up an enemy ("the others" / "the adversary", "disruption"), you rally your troops to beat the enemy at all costs (sacrifice yourself/your time/your health for the greater good and you will be rewarded), then perpetuate cycles of wins/losses to reinforce belief and dedication to externalized, and personally abdicated, leadership.
Last night, I was reflecting on the common point between people flocking to SV or to Syria to support Isis.
I know this is pretty far fetched, but at the end, I feel both have the same kind of appeal :
Stay where you are and remain an anonymous cog in the machine, or move to a place, where you will endure hardship, but where in the end you can change the world and you will create a legacy.
And in both case, the reality is less rosy. This is a kind of an archetypal "Call to Adventure", but it might have another name.
I would argue that ts the experience and not the result (I'm talking about SV of course, those that go to Syria are probably going to be dead so their experiences won't count for much).
I'd like to think there's a key difference between losing sleep all night making the latest social media fad and raping helpless women and girls after beheading their husbands, fathers, and brothers. Between siphoning off another million with a tweak to your high-frequency-trading algorithm and shooting dozens of people to death in a concert hall.
That goes without saying. They're saying that the parallel means there is an endless supply of people signing up to the vision. No matter how horrible it is, people are doing it now and in the future.
What you're saying makes sense, but I think joining a radical group known for brutality and joining a company promising to make you rich are two very different things. I think the chances of youth wanting to be successful in their lifetime is far greater than that of a youth joining a group with a promise of a fantastic afterlife.
Radical Islam is not solely a response to western influence. It sure is also that, but it is also due to the ideology of the islam itself and the failure to modernise it.
I vehemently disagree with this. Islam DID modernise; what we're seeing is a regression, and I think a good deal of the blame can be placed on Washington and Moscow.
A half-century ago, very little of what was happening in the Middle East had anything to do with Islam. Most of the leadership in the region was secular; some states were quite democratic.
Egypt is one of the most conservative places today, chafes under the yoke of a secular government, wants to be Islamist. A half-century ago under Nasser, Egypt was the source of secularism in the region and was pulling other Middle Eastern nations towards its secular nationalism. Similarly, Iran was extremely secular in the 50s, and remained so under the Shah; many secular elements were instrumental in pulling him down.
Both of these poles were toppled by American efforts. Egypt was slowly pulled towards the Washington Consensus by buying the government, which became increasingly repressive. The same result was achieved in Iran with a coup that toppled the democratic government. In both of these places the reaction to a repressive secular regime had a strong Islamist component (both Shia and Sunni).
It wasn't just in government that this reversal happened; the primary popular resistance organizations during the 20th century were also secular. The PLO, PFLP, and so on were all secular Marxist organisations, and young radicals fighting against American hegemony, the same space ISIS has colonised now, would not have given a fig for jihad. It was the failure of these organisations to provide the liberation sought that led to the eventual rise of Islamist alternatives, like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and al-Qaeda.
Contemporary Sunni jihadi ideology, in fact, had its origins in Egypt in the 60s thanks to people like Hassan al-Banna and Sayed Qutb, who developed much of the thinking that fueled al-Qaeda ideologically. This was a modern development, a reaction to the spread of secular thought and colonialism; it is not a continuous expression of Islam.
Finally, let's not forget the active American support of conservative religious Saudi Arabia, to the tune of billions in military hardware and ironclad political alliance, as well as the arming of the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets, both of which were signal events in fanning the flames of radical Sunni Islamism.
I agree with this. We shouldn't forget that Muhammad was basically a military leader.
Anyway, we are in danger that this narrative and others similar becomes the only explanation in the mainstream media, instead of only a factor that probably is not very relevant. After all, the majority of Muslims don't believe that they should go to war with other countries.
I believe it is relevant. The West is sticking it's nose into many places around this world. But the response is not always the killing of civilians. Take South America for example. Their answer is much smarter, because their approach is different. I think the middle east approach is tainted by some parts of the islamic ideology.
This is not to say, that I agree with what the west is doing. I think "what goes around, comes around" applies here very well...
There are sects of every religion that are just as violent - at least in rhetoric (and sometimes in action) - as ISIS.
Look no further than hate-motivated crimes against people of color, transgendered people, and non-heterosexual people - often backed up with violent rhetoric based on Christianity.
Does that mean the ideology of Christianity itself has failed to modernize?
It's also worth pointing out that even Salafi jihadism isn't a homogenous whole, with many of the other jihadist movements actively fighting ISIS
A key difference between al Qaeda, which could broadly be defined as trying to "tip the scales eventually toward a Caliphate" whilst battling for certain populist causes and ISIS is that the latter considers itself to be a Caliphate, and is actively pushing for the Islamic equivalent of Armageddon. That means it isn't going to calm down, but it also means that its claims to legitimacy based on fulfilment of prophecies about unification of territories are more readily defeated by military means than other jihadists' claims to be defending the Muslim world from infidels.
> That means it isn't going to calm down, but it also means that its claims to legitimacy based on fulfilment of prophecies about unification of territories are more readily defeated by military means than other jihadists' claims to be defending the Muslim world from infidels.
I agree. The fact that ISIS effectively seeks to become a nation state makes fighting them a lot more straight forward. It's very difficult to fight an insurgency or terrorist group which is not interested in holding territory and blends in with the population. It's pretty straight forward to bomb, lay siege to, or generally bleed a group which needs to have government buildings, infrastructure, police, logistics etc. The fact that their legitimacy is primarily based on continuous expansion is also great, as defeat creates a highly negative feedback loop for them making recruitment more difficult.
>> for opportunities to sow chaos because they believe it will tip the scales eventually toward a Caliphate.
From what I've been told and read, they've already established a Caliphate. The primary driver of having a Caliphate is that ISIS must control territory, without controlling territory, there is no Caliphate - correct?
This was one of the best explanations I've read about why ISIS is doing what it is doing:
If it loses its grip on its territory in Syria and Iraq, it will cease to be a caliphate. Caliphates cannot exist as underground movements, because territorial authority is a requirement: take away its command of territory, and all those oaths of allegiance are no longer binding.
These terrorist groups are becoming a recurring thing though, a failed one is replaced by another. They are aided by technology that allows inflicting powerful hits and of course by money from their patrons. The question is if there is something more than just extremism here, what is the failure of the western secularity to become attractive and engulf immigrants and whether this is phenomenon can spring up on its own or its dependent on someone funding it.
Hitting them with bombs can only achieve so much and should be just one step in many to understand this phenomenon. I do think that this attack in particular has seen so universal condemnation, (largely because France is not regarded as a major invading force like the US or NATO are), that it's actually going to hurt ISIS reputation, probably fatally. OTOH destroying them doesn't seem to be the end of the story...
"Universal condemnation" is precisely what they're seeking. The more notoriety, the better. Hence, pushing gay men off of buildings and drowning men in cages (with underwater cameras filming). They are seeking street cred, a rep, a mystique of fear.
Condemnation doesn't work. What does work is a combination of excellent police work in routing out cells of recruiters and operators, and precise, devastating bombing raids followed by boots on the ground to protect and empower the civilians, most of whom would never support these psychopaths by choice.
In comparison to the state of things in Iraq now, they did work. The problem is that the American public(rightly so) were tired of the decade+ long wars and wanted the troops home, so we pulled out. As we saw, the Iraqi military still wasn't able to stand on its own legs against a relatively organized and well-equipped guerilla force.
If Iraq had a fully capable military(instead of the partially capable one they have now), ISIS would never have spread into the country. For all the problems the US and its allies created in Iraq, the country was comparatively much more stable, and for the most part people got on with their lives.
They work but there has to be a commitment to seeing things through no matter the extent of the ensuing carnage, something most western countries have lost their stomach for. See: Chechnya.
> "Universal condemnation" is precisely what they're seeking.
I think they are seeking both selective (that is, among non-Muslims) and poorly focused (at Muslims in general, rather than focused on Daesh in particular) condemnation, rather than "universal condemnation". And they seek that specifically so that the Muslims, who are the population they target to establish dominion over in the form of a Caliphate, will see non-Muslims as a threat (because Muslims become seen by non-Muslims as a threat) against whom Daesh is the only defense, and that the cost of accepting the dominion that Daesh offers is lower than the cost of being outside of it (they also want Muslims to be afraid of defying Daesh, which also makes the cost of accepting dominion less than the cost of rejecting it.)
I agree that they are seeking universal condemnation, which at the same time confuses me. It seems to me that no matter what the differences are, eventually everyone will unite with a single goal to defeat them. Angering the entire world in order to get publicity and instill fear is only going to backfire on them in the end. It seems that they're already on a steady path towards failure.
> Contemporary radical Islam is a response to Western modernity and perceived decadence and has been brewing for decades if not centuries.
Contemporary radical Islam is brewing just for one (young) generation and is result of applying western individual freedom and reason to principles of Islam.
Of course there are answers: ISIS just attacked NATO -- definitely Darwin award material. NATO can "wipe the desert clean" in less than an hour anytime NATO is willing to do what ISIS does -- create civilian casualties. By clean, in the ISIS areas, no more buildings, oil infrastructure, vehicles, tents, flocks, camels, or people. None. Then, the end of ISIS and whatever beliefs, determination, goals, history, etc. Dead people don't attack NATO, and NATO can convert ISIS and everyone in the ISIS areas to dead people in an hour. The only question is, when will NATO do that.
When will NATO destroy an entire nation, civilians and all? How is that a remotely reasonable response? That's like suggesting that Pakistan would be justified in nuking Washington DC because American drone strikes have killed civilians there. There's no world where its justifiable to murder a nation of civilians, ever.
> There's no world where its justifiable to murder a nation of civilians, ever.
Yup, and that's just what ISIS is trying to do -- everyone in the world, convert to radical Sunni Islam and follow ISIS or die.
To heck with the details: The US, France, Germany, England, all of NATO has a right to defend themselves.
With the ISIS ideology, they will be trying to kill everyone else, infidels, as long as there is just one ISIS person left.
At this point it is not enough to stop the ISIS killings. Instead, we must stop the ability of ISIS to do harm outside of their area.
Sure, taking the desert area of ISIS and wiping it clean is not reasonable, but neither is ISIS.
I don't want to kill them. I especially don't want to hurt the girls and young women, especially the ones they have made into sex slaves. I don't even want to hurt their flocks and camels.
But I want to stop ISIS now and forever in the future. I don't want to spend even one drop of NATO blood. I don't want to spend even one US penny more than necessary. But I want ISIS stopped. We are not obligated to put up with their wacko nonsense. It is our responsibility that they be stopped. If they had any responsibility or deserved any from us, then they would long since have stopped their wacko, medieval nonsense. Since they have not stopped and have no sense of responsibility, we need just to stop them.
Stop them from the air. Take out their leaders and their oil infrastructure. Occupy their oil areas and take the oil. For the rest of the area, we might for a while try to send them back to tents, flocks, and camels cooking their food with camel dung. I I suspect it won't work, that all they have is what their radical clerics tell them, and those clerics will stop only when dead.
Basically they have a wacko, violent, ugly, stupid medieval culture enabled by oil money and nothing else, are 1000 years out of date, with no hope of moving ahead the needed several hundred years. No hope.
While I agree with the point you're making, how many civilians are left in ISIS controlled territory though? I don't have any numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if 50% has fled and another 40% has been killed by ISIS. So how many people are there, not including the people that chose to join ISIS?
I've seen some footage from Sinjar after it was retaken by the Kurds: not a single building was left standing. It's hard to imagine anyone still living there.
France isn't a part of NATO, and hasn't been for 50 years. Which is probably one of the reasons they were selected as a target.
Armies are good at breaking down nation-states by destroying the opposing military and means of production. Putting the middle east aside, as it's still happening, I think the history of the 20th century aptly demonstrates that organized military force isn't effective in defeating revolutionary movements. The Vietnamese were successful in ejecting France and the US, the Irish were able to defeat the British Empire, the Yugoslavians were successful against the Germans.
The Germans pretty much did what you suggest NATO is capable of, given the will. They executed hostages in reprisal. They blew up towns and burned crops. They rounded up partisan leaders and hung them on the roadside. Again, didn't really work. From a humanist perspective, I don't think that is the type of conduct NATO countries aspire to.
You don't stop revolutionary movements by blowing stuff up. You have to undermine the base of ideology or grievances.
(1) as many others have already pointed out France really is part of NATO
(2) France has something they label the 'force de frappe', which, though vastly reduced could turn a relatively large area of desert into a parking lot overnight, so even if they are part of NATO they don't actually need it to respond on an extremely high casualty level if the French get pissed off enough. Fortunately, France is one of the more levelheaded nuclear powers and has - to date - not even put that option on the table. But I would not take that as a given or forever.
> France isn't a part of NATO, and hasn't been for 50 years.
France is a NATO member, and has been the whole time NATO has existed. It withdrew from some NATO structures (e.g., the integrated military command) in 1966, but rejoined the integrated military command in 2009.
> You have to undermine the base of ideology or grievances.
Would be nice. That would be the nice way. For Viet Nam, my position was, and remains, just come home. And now the US and Viet Nam get along fine. We could have gotten along fine starting as soon as the Japanese left -- Viet Nam liked us then, we got rid of the Japanese
who had taken over
their country and they had
helped downed US pilots, and could have liked us
continually and more and more
to the present. I never did understand why Ho,
a dishwasher from Paris, was so eager to get free dinners in Moscow and Peking just to torque off the US.
What you said about Germany did work for a while, and what defeated Germany was mostly just the US, especially the US Eighth air force with B-17s leveling German cities, ones that were at all connected with war production
and likely more.
But ISIS is no longer a "revolutionary movement" and, instead, is essentially a nation state. So, I don't recommend occupying them and hanging their leaders from lamp posts. I don't want diplomacy, negotiations, surrender, unconditional surrender, or treaties. We can't settle for
their promising to stop their
nonsense or even stopping their
nonsense. And I don't
want to try to occupy them
like W did -- that would
cost US blood and treasure,
and not one drop of blood
and not one dime more
treasure than it takes
to defend the US.
Instead, given their
strong culture and many very
clear statements,
we have to make
sure they are no longer able in
any sense to pursue their nonsense. At this point,
I will pay attention their
capabilities, not their
statements or behavior,
and want to make sure
they have no capabilities
to inflict harm outside
their territories. Sure,
in part that would mean
that no one, except
maybe some boys under 6
or some girls under 10, from the ISIS
area is ever permitted to
leave.
They are eager to die
and to kill us. We can help
them die, and without dying
ourselves. We don't have to
be ashamed of helping them
die the way they want.
In particular they must not have the resources or ability to get a nuke bomb. Essentially they have to be sent back to tents, flocks, and camels, tightly controlled, with their oil taken, and that's at least. The only safe way to remove a boot on their necks and just forget
about them is, basically, to
kill all of them. It's come
to that -- they make that
fully clear in all their
propaganda. So be it.
They would love to light off
a nuke in NY harbor, and I'm
just 70 miles from there. 'Nuff for me -- defend ourselves.
The only serious tool they
have is our reluctance to
kill their civilians, which
are really just their children
and most of their women. They
have that tool only due to our
extreme, nearly suicidal,
generosity. We don't owe them
that.
I'm sure that in WWII the US
killed a lot of really
nice, wonderful civilian
people in both Japan and
Germany. But, we had to
win the war, and we did.
And Japan and Germany had
killed a lot of really nice,
wonderful civilians before
we did.
"Nuke" -- ISIS said the wrong
word. There are no extenuating grievances, history, or considerations. It's back to tents, flocks, and camels
right away or,
and likely soon,
just "wipe the desert clean".
Saddam said the wrong word -- nuke. ISIS is really slow at learning and really fast to
forget.
W was a total fumble bumble, but
his sense of responsibility
as POTUS to defend the US
was correct. I'm sure
the next POTUS, either Hillary
or any of the Repub candidates,
will also take that responsibility seriously. I
don't like Hillary, but she
is not stupid; I very much
don't like Hillary, but she
is likely the best informed
and brightest in the race;
I believe and very much hope
she loses, but I am fairly
confident that, as part
of being a responsible POTUS,
and I am sure she has plenty
of pride for that,
she would be
ready, willing, able, and eager to
tell the USAF to level the
ISIS areas -- wipe the desert
clean.
ISIS wants to take their
magic carpet ride to Allah, and
it's about certain they will. I'm very sorry the ISIS area
innocent women and children
have to go along for the ride.
A threat of a nuke in a US harbor -- we need to make sure we don't have to worry about that at all, and we can, and I believe that we should and will.
"We don't want the smoking
gun to be a mushroom cloud";
I didn't, and don't, think
that statement was appropriate
when C. Rice said it, but
I believe it's appropriate now. We don't want to wait;
the Paris attack was
enough for a Pearl Harbor
wake up call.
For the ISIS areas, France
is fully capable of
wiping "the desert clean"
in an afternoon -- they better
do it.
Michel Houellebecq alludes to an interesting idea in his novel Soumission - in the hierarchy that the West is using for identity politics, race and religion are less touchable than women’s rights and gender equality. The West will not criticize muslim culture with its implicit patriarchy and unequal treatment because they are the underdogs. Everything I see indicates that this is true especially in the UK. The question is how far accepts and lack of criticism will go before rights that we consider sacrosanct in the West are eroded by demographics in Europe.
Want to know what ISIS is up to ? Just take it from their official magazine - it is right there, explicit. The strategy is called "The extinction of the gray zone" - it is about polarizing western society by eliciting islamophobia: "Muslims in the crusader countries will find themselves driven to abandon their homes for a place to live in the Khilāfah, as the crusaders increase persecution against Muslims living in Western land. [..] Eventually, the gray zone will become extinct and there will be no place for grayish calls and movements. There will only be the camp of īmān versus the camp of kufr". So, if you want to counter ISIS influence in our society, you know what to do: love each other... Turning to epidermic identity politics won't help a bit. Even ISIS remarks that our "response is often violently reactionary instead of forward-thinking" - and that is just the way they want it.
Everybody should read this. I'm skimming through it, and I'm realizing how little I know about the complexity of Daeshi culture. I think many of us, whose extent of exposure to the subject is listening to and watching the news, have no idea what is actually happening, and are completely unaware of what life is within ISIS borders. This magazine is first hand information from inside the minds of ISIS members. Yes, it's a propaganda magazine, but how can we even being to try to understand ISIS without knowing what they believe, and what their media says?
Their definition of an apostate Muslim is basically identical to our definition of an assimilated Muslim. Simply being more tolerant may avoid one horn, but gets you gored by the other. They are not dumb, their strategy is more complex than what they lay out in their official publication. Their goal is to put the West into an unwinnable situation no matter what we do. When you say "erase identity politics" well this applies to a massive chunk of non-radical Western Muslims as well, you are in effect talking about eliminating the gray zone also. That is why their strategy is so threatening, there is no winning move for the West as long as the West holds on to its ideological contradictions.
> Their goal is to put the West into an unwinnable situation no matter what we do.
No, their goal is to place Muslims in a situation where the fear of hatred from the West against Muslims (which Daesh kindles by provocative attacks on the West designed to get the West to blame, and retaliate against, Muslims generally) and fear of the consequences of defying Daesh (which Daesh creates by violent attacks on those Muslims who defy them) leave Muslims to perceive accepting the dominion of Daesh as the least bad option open to them. That's how the Caliphate is formed and grows.
So you are proposing that the French should respond to having over a hundred of their fellow citizens killed, and hundreds more injured by loving the supporters and leaders of ISIS?
No, I think he meant other Muslims that aren't/weren't involved with ISIS. Remember, ISIS is still a radical minority, and there are Muslims who don't support ISIS.
If what you are supposing is true, it fails to address what should be done now; should the French increase air attacks on ISIS, abandon their effort, or lead a ground incursion?
Over 50% of the population in many Muslim majority states believe that terrorism is at least 'rarely', and over 5% (, which is a large number of people,) believe it is justified 'often'.[1] There are obviously a large number of Muslims who do not support ISIS (probably a great majority, given sectarian and other considerations), but ISIS is not the only extremist Islamist organization in conflict with western values and/or governments.
I made no straw-man; I would actually like to know what the parent was proposing the French should do. The parent proposed that Westerners should be kind to everyone, but that does not address what should be done about the current problems.
Ok, let me make this a little bit more clear then. Taken straight from wikipedia we have the definition of a straw man argument.
A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument which was not advanced by that opponent.
Your reply to the parent poster was "So you are proposing that the French should respond to having over a hundred of their fellow citizens killed, and hundreds more injured by loving the supporters and leaders of ISIS?".
I was correcting you because you suggested that the parent was "proposing that the French..." and leaving the absurdity of the proposition to be its own refutation, when in fact the whole statement was "an argument which was not advanced by [the parent poster]".
Let us be clear that you can still desire to know what the parent was proposing the French do while also attacking his original position with a straw man arguemnt, which is exactly what occurred.
This is what makes me upset about the many US governors who say they will refuse Syrian refugees. They are playing right into their hand: letting their fear guide their politics.
The fact that the EU’s replacement rate is 1.59 children per couple and the continent needs substantial levels of immigration to maintain a productive workforce
The idea here is that all people are the same, and all you need to do is shoehorn enough to keep the economy going. Beyond the complete lack of humanity in the outlook that we are like barrels of brent, it's simply wrong. If this was the case, the entire world would already look like Europe and there would be no waves of migration.
It's also bizarrely narcissistic to think that ISIS care about how Europeans feel about Islam or how Muslims are treated since according to OP they will be replacing locals anyway.
> Beyond the complete lack of humanity in the outlook that we are like barrels of brent, it's simply wrong.
Indeed. And there seems, to me, to be something nihilistic in the idea that Europeans should simply let immigrants replace them. Maybe instead, European nations should look into instituting domestic policies that encourage the population to maintain a healthy replacement rate.
The article appears to be implying that Western nations should not make war against Daesh because "that's what they want." Well, the status quo of surveillance, arrests, and half-hearted airstrikes isn't stopping them. There seems something profoundly suciidally nihilistic in the idea that Europe should simply do nothing different and simply be more and more welcoming as attacks happen in an attempt to appease extremists until at last Europe is no longer populated by Europeans.
On the timescale of centuries and millenia, it's amazing how little has changed in the past thousand years. This could be just another couple chapters in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. (Which, for those who don't know, covers mostly in later chapters the European nations and the various Muslim empires.)
> Maybe instead, European nations should look into instituting domestic policies that encourage the population to maintain a healthy replacement rate.
So, 18 months maternity/paternity leave, 180€ per month per child you have, plus tax breaks, plus better credit rating, plus 12 more sick days a year, plus subsidized kindergarten and daycare (with guaranteed daycare place from age 3 on), cheap whole-day school for children, and after-school care for them, is not enough?
What else are we supposed to do? Seriously? We have all this, and still birth rates below 1.2 children in Germany. Seriously.
I can only speak from a German perspective but the real problem from my point of view is that in todays world everything seems as if it is going down slope.
Todays generation has less job security than the generation before.
Todays generation does not have a secured pension (like the generation before had).
It is expected of todays generation to be a life-long learner (if you are not, your economic value drops immediately and if your job gets terminated you fall back to the same support someone receives, who has never worked in their life before).
Affordable housing has decreased.
It is expected of both parents to work (tell me again why I should have children, if I rarely see them?).
Pressure on children has increased as there is less time at school and less time at Uni to learn the same things (do I really want to do this to my possible future children?).
Especially for women having a child still is very bad for your career. Also if you have a fixed-term contract (which there is an increasing number of, your maternity employment protection is severely limited).
Of course this is just an anecdote, but at least in my circle of friends, those with secured government jobs are the ones having the most children. I would love to see some large-scale data on this subject.
The few generations before were the only generations ever to have job security. I suspect it was because Europe was so devastated by the war (and so many of the previous generation were dead), that the economy couldn't help but grow.
You're also dealing with a labor market that punishes people who actually take their maternity/paternity leave, or who actually leave the labor force to raise children, by simply never letting them back into a career-track position ever again.
So not only does 180€/month not substitute for a second salary, it doesn't substitute for the permanent hit to the second wage-earner's career caused by raising children.
The economic message is clear: raising children is intended to be a low-paid, part-time job done on top of a full-time career for economically non-valuable warm-fuzzies.
> You're also dealing with a labor market that punishes people who actually take their maternity/paternity leave, or who actually leave the labor force to raise children, by simply never letting them back into a career-track position ever again.
By the way, in Germany usually you are guaranteed to get back into your old job after the 18 months of maternity leave.
Industrialise child raising, like everything else.
Artificial wombs. Group day-care. Have women donate eggs, men donate sperm and combine them randomly. Make it the duty of every person to be a parent to 2 to 3 children with fines for not doing their part until they hit 30/40 years of age. The babies will be born never knowing their biological parents. Then they're sent to child-raising facilities, either government or private, which are subject to strict regulation against mistreatment and indoctrination. Only the mega-rich, or very rural will afford/choose to have babies the usual way.
This seems to be the only choice in a society where everyone has to work 40 hours per week to secure a living for him/herself. If you had guaranteed basic income that can cover the cost of children, people could leave their position for one to two years, maybe do contracting work from home on the side. You will need very strict laws against discriminating against those who chose to have children. Or, you know, make making children a specialised industry like everything else.
I certainly hope there is some sarcasm intended with this. A world where raising children is turned into an industry (makes me think of Orwell's 1984) is one that I would not enjoy being a part of.
It does however seem that the flow of the economy, the fact that no one is willing to slow down for anything, and everything needed to be finished yesterday, certainly hinders people from things such as having children. Companies simply see a mother on maternity leave as an employee that isn't producing, as cold as that sounds. It's sad how emotionless companies can be when they're focused solely on the dollar signs...
Not so much sarcasm, as cynicism... I mean it, if the current employer-employee dynamic persists, either you need women to sacrifice their career, or pay someone to bear your children. Which you then have no time to raise, so you pay someone to do it for you. You can find a certain parallel with characters in novels who are children of rich people who are never home and thus the child is raised by the wet nurse/maid/etc. If you do the same at scale, it should be cost-effective and probably the only option.
Fortunately, I'm pretty sure we'll run out of resources long before our greed for growth pushes us that far.
Edit: of course companies are emotionless. They aren't people. You should view any company of more than about 200 people as a super-organism. Every actor in the company acts in their own best interest, while kept in check by the people on top. The emergent behaviour is one of calculated exploitation.
advanced, wealthy, egalitarian societies simply do not produce babies because nobody really needs them and they're extremely expensive both in actual cost and opportunity cost, especially for females. sure you can shift the cost from the family to the taxpayer or employer, but that doesn't actually remove it.
and this phenomenon is not limited to white people, i.e. japan, korea, singapore, taiwan.
It is not the fact that nobody needs them. It is rather that members of such societies delay this step (to an uncertain extent) due to having a large amount of possible/alternative life choices, which sadly a negative consequence of such a blossoming society.
It's not that people delay having children, it's that society punishes having children.
My fiancee's pregnant coworker was told (we live in the USA, unfortunately) that she would have six weeks of unpaid leave after giving birth, followed by two weeks of short-term disability insurance, and then she could return to work or lose her job. This is for a salaried, postdoctoral scientist at a biotechnology company. In a related matter, the same HR employee who explained that policy says that he opposes the very idea of paternity leave -- and he's a male homosexual.
Likewise, the largest wage gap between men and women isn't actually a gap between men and women, it's a gap between men and mothers.
It takes two incomes to support a household these days, and yet society punishes women for childbearing as if it only took one. What did they expect would happen under these conditions, that people would stop responding to economic incentives "because babies"?
apparently all the benefits that exist in europe and asia still don't work, so i'm not really sure what your point is here, other than you want some free money for having a baby.
society doesn't 'punish' you for having children, having children is simply an expense somebody has to pay for, and nobody wants to do it.
you clearly don't want to pay the opportunity cost, as evidenced by your post, so what makes you think the employer wants to do it either? or the taxpayer?
His / her point is that de facto the industry takes a point of view biased on an economical perspective towards the situation. (Your answer ironically does reflect this as well). The benefit of having children is to have a family and to, in a more biological sense, have offspring which ensures your dna remains within the society. Having a family takes time and enforcing a young parent (especially a person with such a background) to start working in a relative short amount of time is very taxing on their personal life. A better possible solution would be to let the young parent have the ability to work home for a couple days, rather than just giving the option to be fired.
Myself and my fiancee don't have children yet. However, you may kinda want us in society's gene pool. After all, I've got a damned resilient immune system, she's wonderfully empathetic, and we're both ferociously clever and hardworking individuals who valued our educations and actually want to contribute to society. Hell, we're even proud of paying our taxes, we both volunteer for things in our spare time, and we consider time spent on civic or community affairs to be well-spent.
I'd be fine paying the "opportunity cost" myself, but you see, I'm not the one with the uterus. Really, if we could get by and support a kid on one income per couple, we could easily just make some sacrifices of Nice Things, but we can't. Yes, we actually are stuck between living as fiscally responsible adults in the Dual Income No Kids class, and the precarity of the so-called "middle class" nowadays, in which one layoff or unexpected medical emergency can throw the whole family into poverty.
It's become: housing, children (with the entailed college funds, housing cost of good public schools, etc.), responsible preparation for a rainy day -- pick any two.
> There seems something profoundly suciidally nihilistic in the idea that Europe should simply do nothing different and simply be more and more welcoming as attacks happen in an attempt to appease extremists until at last Europe is no longer populated by Europeans.
>The article appears to be implying that Western nations should not make war against Daesh because "that's what they want."...
I agree the article spends a lot of time implying what we shouldn't do and not much time at all saying what might make for effective policies, but it's hardly advocating Islamising Europe either.
I took two things away from the article. One is that the kind of pretty much deliberate social and economic marginalization of Muslim minorities in France is a terrible mistake. You can have a pluralistic egalitarian society without insisting that everyone has to dress, talk and behave exactly like white western Europeans all the time. Having an Imperial legacy and historic connections with extensive regions of the wider world isn't compatible with being culturally allergic to anyone who looks or acts foreign. We in Europe need to build strong cultural bridges connecting us to the Muslim minorities in our midst that are now also Europeans and deserve respect and support. I may take flak for this, because it turns my stomach to imply that France has any responsibility for the recent attacks, but frankly the French state is not doing it's job.
The second lesson is regarding our foreign policy in the Middle East. Keeping out of Syria and letting whatever happens just happen hasn't worked. The result has been a breeding ground for radicalization and chaos that has exacerbated the situation in Iraq, and lead to the biggest Refugee crisis Europe has seen since WW2. The Iraq war was awful and the political pressure to withdraw and 'bring the troops home' intense, but doing so was a horrible mistake. Once you're in, you're in for better or worse. We can't wash our hands of these conflicts and expect that the resulting mess will stay put and not affect us.
As a corollary, I think that our consistent policy that none of the borders in the Middle east are up for negotiation is a mistake. If the Sunni, Shia and Kurd regions of Iraq want to be separate states, they should have the freedom to do so. Trying to insist that the Sunni minority had to stay welded to a larger hostile Shia population was just asking for unending trouble. Partition isn't always the right answer, but in some situations it needs to be an option.
The only reason that Daesh exists is the idiotic and pointless wars that have been waged by the US and Europe in the Middle East. Destroying governments and airlifting in weapons is handing them victories and arming them. Their existence is the result of 15 years of a "war on terror". And your conflation of low birth rates in Europe with the topic of war is a symptom of very confused thinking.
>Indeed. And there seems, to me, to be something nihilistic in the idea that Europeans should simply let immigrants replace them. Maybe instead, European nations should look into instituting domestic policies that encourage the population to maintain a healthy replacement rate.
That would require blaspheming against the Austerity Gods.
> The fact that the EU’s replacement rate is 1.59 children per couple and the continent needs substantial levels of immigration to maintain a productive workforce
> The idea here is that all people are the same, and all you need to do is shoehorn enough to keep the economy going.
Maybe it's time to start thinking why people who end up living in the West are unwilling to reproduce, despite having the highest standard of living ever available to humans.
Solving the underpopulation problem by constant import of uneducated masses from all over the world is going to cost more and more, both in terms of the peta-man-hours needed to teach them functioning in new reality (language barrier for a start) and in terms of things going wrong when the former fails.
I mean, what are these guys supposed to do here? Join the rat race, stop reproducing and replace themselves with who-knows-whom 100 years down the line? Despise this culcure and blow stuff up? Something else?
> Maybe it's time to start thinking why people who end up living in the West are unwilling to reproduce, despite having the highest standard of living ever available to humans.
We know why, it's just an inconvenient truth. More women are choosing careers over having more children.
To maintain a stable population, each woman has to have an average of two children. But that's the average; many will be infertile or homosexual or never find a mate or choose to never have children or only have one. So a great many would have to have more than two children to balance the average; many of our parents had five, six, seven, eight siblings because their mother's entire life consisted of raising children.
It's not easy for a family to raise five or more children while both parents work full time, so hardly anybody does that and the average falls below the population replacement rate. That's the why.
How to fix that without going back to the Old Ways is not a trivial problem.
You can pretty trivially expand the question as to why woman are choosing their careers over children.
Anecdotally, my other half would love to have children but I want to delay it right now because of finances. We live in the south-east of England so this is how things look:-
We have a nice 2 bedroom terrace that costs £500,000. I earn a good living but we're hardly living in luxury. The bank of mum and dad aren't rich, thus I struggle to pay that down. This could perhaps be attributed to woman joining the workforce, a lack of building, and a political lanscape that setup property as invesments.
She wants children to go to private school that may cost £9000-£30000 per year, with an oppertunity cost of upto £2,000,000 per child. This can probably be attributed to the nigh on impossibility to get your kids into a good performing state school and grammer schools being given the shaft after our parents had their turn.
She wants them to have a dad, but Men are afraid of commitment due to the litigious nature of break-ups which screw them over. I'm not saying Dads shouldn't pay for their kids, just they shouldn't be paying £4,000,000 for an ex-wife to keep the advantages of marriage whilst the man no longer gets anything in return
There's probably many more problems because the birthrate is fairly low right around Europe but these are some pretty big negatives for middle class men to commit to having children, at least not until they have their lot in life, which means there's less time to have more than 1-2.
> You can pretty trivially expand the question as to why woman are choosing their careers over children.
The problem is that it's not just one problem. Almost everything is set up to economically discourage two-income families from having more children. After everything you've mentioned, the second income financially disqualifies you from many childcare and other benefits available to single-income families while progressive taxation, sold as targeting the wealthy, instead swallows the money a middle income family could have used to pay for those things out of pocket.
And after the government has laid claim to most of the second income, what's left becomes the baseline for the cost of living. More families now have two incomes so it takes two incomes to afford a home in a good school district.
It seems what is needed but not present is a strong lobby for middle class families. Everyone pays lip service because they're a large voting block, but where is the equivalent of the AARP or NRA for families with children?
> It seems what is needed but not present is a strong lobby for middle class families. Everyone pays lip service because they're a large voting block, but where is the equivalent of the AARP or NRA for families with children.
NRA is a narrow, single-issue lobby, not a general lobby for interests of a broad demographic (which even "middle-class families with children" is.)
And, really, everyone pays sort of vague lip service because its a large demographic, but no more than that because its not a large voting bloc. Particularly, its not a group that has a common set of policy preferences and consistently votes predominantly based on that shared set of preferences.
Its not like there aren't lobbying organizations that promote themselves as promoting the interests of "families with children"; but none of them really represents the majority of that demographic, because there is no clear voting bloc to represent.
There are many reasons why I do not personally want children.
Some are political or philsophical that would take too long to explain here but I suppose one big reason is that I just flat-out do not like being around children.
There are no economic or personal incentives that would change my mind on this matter and from what I understand, the number of people thinking this way (the not wanting kids in general part, not the not liking them part) has gradually increased over the years as living standards have improved and more people are able to fulfill other goals and personal ambitions.
> Maybe it's time to start thinking why people who end up living in the West are unwilling to reproduce, despite having the highest standard of living ever available to humans.
Not "despite", but "because".
In an agricultural society, you need lots of children because you need a lot of hands working the farm. If you're dirt-poor in an industrial society, you need lots of children so they can all work in factories to earn money for the family. In any society with a high infant mortality rate, you need to have even more children because you can expect a lot of them to die young.
In the modern West, we're not subsistence farmers or dirt-poor factory workers, and almost all of our kids survive to adulthood. We don't have lots of children because we don't need to have lots of children.
There's also the fact that in many poor nations, there simply isn't enough of a social safety net to take care of you in your old age. The surest form of insurance is to have as many kids as you can and count on some or all of them to support you when you're no longer able to work.
With SS, Medicare (in the US), etc. even though you won't live in luxury, you at least have some kind of income coming in in your retirement years.
The lack of humanity will emerge soon enough if the practical problems of servicing massive government debt and supporting a European-style welfare system are not solved by having sufficient taxpayers on the ground to fund these outgoings.
Have you read George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf? I think it gets to the heart of why ISIS is so popular.
"Also [Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain... Hitler, because in his joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense, they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades... Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet."
Replace Hitler with ISIS, and the point still stands. In fact, it is made even emotionally stronger now that it is religious. Is there an alternative? Can capitalist democracy provide any greater meaning in life?
The missing context of Orwell's review is what Hitler had on offer isn't what he sold. Hitler sold the promise of a better life for a then-struggling, repressed Germany. There is irony in that.
Hitler was one of the greatest public speakers of his time. He didn't advertise how horrible things would be to the people of Germany, he promised them that he was going to perfect their country with a master race. The way he presented things and the outlook he gave are why people followed him, not because he promised them destruction.
My girlfriend taught in the Parisian banlieue for a year. In her experience most of what is said in this article is very much true. In this areas (which would correspond pretty much to inner cities in the US) the draw of radical Islam is very strong, starting with high school kids. After all what else is there to do? Deal drugs?
On the other hand I would like to see this study that shows that increase in the level of education and occupation doesn't do much. I suspect the issue is more subtle: in that many immigrants coming from the former colonies of France don't really identify as French (even after a couple generations) and don't fully accept the so-called 'republican values'.
The fact that many of Portuguese origin are converting to radical Islam seems to me as a further symptom that the power of Jihadism actually stems from socio-economical marginalization.
Jihadism provides these youth a sense of purpose. We failed at this. Now they fight for what is sold to them as (and they firmly believe to be) a high spiritual purpose instead of doing the jobs nobody wants to do and living a dull life in poor suburbs being treated like shit while watching rich white people enjoy loads of money on TV. In essence.
Many of the extremists have come from affluent homes, e.g. second generation Pakistanis with secular, professional parents living in comfortable London suburbs. Converts come from across the socio-economic spectrum.
So are you saying that because some have made it marginalization is not a thing? Of course its causes are also cultural, that is exactly my point: we need to find cultural answers to this.
Your argument smells a lot like the self-made-man American myth. Just because some have made it out of poverty, often in different conditions than these, doesn't mean we don't have to fight poverty because everyone who is smart enough will pull herself out of it by her bootstraps (and I'm not talking just about material poverty).
What numbers are we talking about here? It seems that an extremely tiny percentage are radicalized, and they don't seem to come from a specific social class. In other words, is it not a gathering of nutjobs?
But that's the problem: yes there are a few really crazy ones that are ready to kill, but there are a lot of kids that are fascinated by the killers, that say they understand them, that won't do a minute of silence for the Charlie Hébdo victims, because "they were looking for it".
Imagine if 25% of American kids said they could relate to the Sandy Hook shooter, wouldn't that be worrying? Regardless of whether they'd be out to kill as well.
i'm strongly agree with your girlfriend.
there were many upsets in many Muslims countries i thinks since 4 years ago. among others it was a sign of "yeah, we surly don't care about stuff was done 50 years ago" and importer a sign about change in the demographic "balance".
in some places it was used to overthrow a dictator, in some places it was already done.
It's not that I disagree with the points brought up by this article (how could I! We've known these things to be true for years!), but I'm worried about the leap that people make, namely that military action isn't necessary.
It's hard to imagine any effective strategy that doesn't involve killing people in Syria. It's disgusting, necessary, and -- I willingly admit -- not sufficient.
> It's hard to imagine any effective strategy that doesn't involve killing people
I disagree, one is actually described in the article:
"[For] the youth of the nation are closer to the innate nature [of humans] on account of the rebelliousness within them."
Do you think capitalism/democracy/whatever mix we have in the West does a good job of preventing these people fighting for "Jihad"?
We don't really give young people (say ages 15-25, before males are fully emotionally developed) a chance to "rebel safely". We don't even have a definition of what it could be! I'll just leave it here, there are many options where to go from there, I think.
It actually reminds of "drug education" we had in high school. The guy was a social worker who worked with people on drugs, gave them clean syringes, put them on methadone, etc. His idea basically was, it's perfectly cool if you want to try it, but it's better to understand the risks and wait a little bit, until you grow older. I think it was very sane approach (and very counter-intuitive to people who support war on drugs and "say no" and similar things). Maybe the same should be done with weapons and war, and if someone still wants to try the war, send him as a journalist to war zone.
Recently I had another related weird idea: Someone should write a sci-fi story about a society which puts its youths through a very strict, military like institution. It would then be revealed that the whole purpose of the institution is to make young people rebel against authority, in a safe environment. That would be akin to a successful graduation exam, because the society would believe that those people who do that are going to be the best citizens.
Well, Robert A. Heinlein took the problem by the other end in Starship Troopers, military service is not mandatory, but required to be able to vote. So the only people that might be capable to rebel are eventually the only ones that won't.
That sci-fi book was already written, "This Perfect Day" by Ira Levin. A computer is in control of a nearly global utopian socialist society, but critical thinking, emotions, and familial attachment is strictly discouraged via regular drug-aided "therapy", propaganda, surveillance, etc. A softer, peace-loving, technocratic version of 1984. The protagonist rebels, relapses, and rebels again, eventually in spectacular fashion. It's revealed that the computer is used by an elite class who do all the planning, and who grow their ranks by taking in those who are the most successful and clever in their rebellion. It may not be quite what you're looking for, because some members of this hidden leadership are quite cynical, but many are also sincere and think that their work is good citizenry.
I dunno, I'd say the social norm involves kids that wish to rebel do so by smoking, drinking, doing drugs, the odd bit of petty crime and having underage sex. If anything, Muslim kids are the exception to this standard rule (but given the reported behaviour of some prominent terrorists, that's probably too much of a simplification too)
I quite like your story concept but I think the realistic plotline would have many of the most successful kids at defying the rules doing so because they have no scruples whatsoever about throwing their classmates under the bus to get their way, whilst even the relatively sane rebels might feel inclined to celebrate their graduation by continuing to altogether reject the system.
what you said its all true but there are out there already some fanatics who wants to kill you, they can.
and they did, and i don't know how many more life should be letting to "statistic danger", in the various places of the world.
its really hard to calculate, really.. i don't know.
This might be hard to understand for us, but I am sure there are Sunni civilians who would rather be under ISIS rule that Assad or Iraki rules. Isis found a fertile ground because Sunnis area were oppressed or neglected by their central government.
At any sign of serious ground military actions, all that ISIS fighter have to do is to hide in their civilian population. And that will be Fallujah all over again.
This is the reason why currently no one consider seriously to send ground troops.
It's also hard to imagine how not killing doesn't facilitate the vile activities of daesh.
I swear this is the late 1930's all over again. "Surely Herr Hitler will get tired of invading countries before he gets to France. Surely military action will only anger him more..."
Csallen is right: the point of the metaphor is that we're currently engaged in a knee-jerk pacifist reduction, and that it's not the first time we (the French) have done that in recent history.
You can tell me we learned our lesson during WWII, but that's just a proclamation of faith.
You're still missing the point. An analogy is not meant to show that two things are similar. Therefore responding by saying that they are, in fact, different doesn't refute anything.
couple of thousands pinpointed (and larger) airstrikes, comprehensive wipeout of terror cells in Europe.
maybe it sound extreme, but its a clear action to-face the situation.
ofcurse the first witch should come to mind is to save as many lifes and dignity etc. .
and i think solving it without killing will only make it a dragging problem.
"Comprehensive wipeout of terror cells in europe" is difficult because the whole point of a terror cell is that they blend perfectly with the general population.
So, it seems that the only way to fight this was is to change their minds by asking assistance from the peaceful Muslim groups.
We can discriminate Daesh and Muslims, and that only shows the monsters they say we are. We can bomb Daesh, which only encourages more to join their cause. Worst case, we can nuke the whole area of Iraq and Syria where Daesh has power, and that would only show every Muslim in the world that we are intolerant of Islam.
This is a war of ideology, and that war cannot be fought with guns and bombs. It has to start from the ground, with 'militant moderate Muslims' willing to show people another way; one that does not involve in slavery, beheadings, suicide bombings, and crucifixion. Weaponry has its place to keep the borders of that state in its place, given that we know their religious orders are of limitless expansion and no regard for state boundaries.
I disagree. The last time we tried that went horribly wrong; we watched and negotiated and "waged the war of ideology" too patiently while Hitler grew in power, until ultimately the Nazis had to be fought and slaughtered and condemned without mercy.
If history repeated itself, we would be wise to intervene faster instead of twiddling our thumbs on the sidelines. And we'd know that waging any kind of ideological war would be futile. It's almost certainly too late to solve the problem with anything other than military action.
Let's keep things in perspective here. Yes, the rest of the world was too complacent about the rise of the Nazis and Hitler, but that's not the last time we've had to deal with this sort of thing.
Red Army Faction (and Baader-Meinhof), Action Directe, the PIRA, the Corleonesi faction of the Sicilian Mafia, the FSLN, and the Basque ETA are all terrorist groups that essentially no longer exist or have mutated into legitimate political parties.
Still more recently than Hitler was neo-Nazism, which, while it still exists in pockets, has lost almost all of the coordinated criminal/terrorist organizations which existed in post-war Europe.
Suggesting that the narrative of ideological warfare went from the Crusades to WWII to ISIS with no breaks in between and meriting only a single response (military action) is historically naive.
But how long did it take for the whole of Europe to mend the damage of WWII, both physical and political? Germany has been left effectively occupied and divided for 45 years after the end of the war. We're talking about an industrialized country, which shared a very similar culture for the most part with the occupying powers. How do you think the post-WWIII would go in the Middle East? Do you think Syria will meekly accept foreign occupation, write a new constitution and rebuild itself in just 45 years?
West Germany had a similar culture to their occupant, the east not so much. Germany also became the centrepiece for a US vs. Russia proxy war, Syria would likely become the same and is arguably already in that state.
In any case it would depend on whether a post WWIII and independent(ish) Syria, much like the post WWII Germany, makes the prudent decision to outlaw and taboo the fanaticism that got it into that situation in the first place.
> West Germany had a similar culture to their occupant, the east not so much. Germany also became the centrepiece for a US vs. Russia proxy war, Syria would likely become the same and is arguably already in that state.
That why I said mostly. However I still think Russia/East Germany is way closer than France or US/Syria or Iraq.
Other than that Germany was not the only European power that kept suffering the consequences of WWII well into the '80s.
You underestimate the degree to which people of violence listen to the language of violence.
The article suggests the military conquest is the key of Daesh attractiveness. But similarly, its military loss will be its demise. Lost territory and decimated ranks will make it a lot less exciting to the recruits.
I agree. The Taliban and Al Qaeda were routed in Afghanistan, and the only thing that saved them was a sympathetic government next door in Pakistan, allowing them to regroup and rearm. The Americans, had they stayed, could have protected the democratic government until it was strong enough to stand on its own, but war weariness and impatience caused them to withdraw prematurely. This was not a sign of jihadist strength and resilience, just good luck. Interviews with some of the fighters suggested actually that they were tired of war as well.
Unfortunately it has courts, police, and a military. It has nearly 10 million citizens, and in articles about its territorial gains, it even appears on maps. It even collects taxes, repairs roads and runs electric utilities.
The sad reality is that it is both quintessentially Islamic, and a state. If we refuse to acknowledge the reality of the situation today, we have no chance of destroying it in the future.
It's court, police and military are not independent structures but the same bunch of armed militants. If controlling a territory with sword and fire is the criterion of statehood, we have a bunch of states right now on our hands, including Taliban State, Boko Haram State and 18th Street State.
I concur it's advantageous they are positioning themselves as a state though. It immediately translates their military defeats into social and political ones.
> It has to start from the ground, with 'militant moderate Muslims' willing to show people another way; one that does not involve in slavery, beheadings, suicide bombings, and crucifixion.
Problem with this is that the most prominent moderate Islamist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, was utterly smashed by the military counter-coup in Egypt. To many Islamists, it seemed to prove that a political route to power was untenable.
Though I agree that we have to bridge the gap. The us vs. them rhetoric is toxic.
> Though I agree that we have to bridge the gap. The us vs. them rhetoric is toxic.
Indeed. However, it is "Western culture vs ISIS". The other part is that it's also "Other Muslims vs ISIS" along with "Muslim countries vs ISIS". ISIS dictates that they are indeed bent for world domination, as much absurd as that seems.
But ISIS acts like Anonymous with a country. Yeah, you can nuke the land and kill millions of people. But they're still going to be in Europe, North America, Asia, and everywhere else... and the extreme tactics will only encourage more to join the cause.
Not totally true. They need training camps, and food for their army, they need money (what also implies oil), and they need some infrastructure for their propaganda.
>We can bomb Daesh, which only encourages more to join their cause.
I disagree. If they have a unfettered region to recruit from, they can and will recruit. For one thing, recruits have a place to go. More than that, they also have a place to trade and traffic weapons, drugs and oil from. They have a place to plan global attacks from.
Taking away a safe heaven makes it harder for them to do business. Right?
Unless you have the right connections, go to the right schools, have the right French names, it's very difficult to get a good job. Even more so if you come from banlieues. With no job prospects and isolation from mainstream society, some Muslim youths retreat to religion and out of those, some discover and/or led to radical ideologies.
If you read the article, you'll see that there are some Muslims who are trying to rescue these youths. I feel this could be part of an actually solution. Since Muslim youth won't trust outsiders at all, the government can provide Muslim community leaders some resources to intervene in the lives of youths that are going down the wrong paths from crime to radicalization.
Also, they can consider setting up programs for parents to identify the signs of radicalization and educate them about how to intervene and de-escalate. Apparently, a father of one of the Paris attackers even went all the way to Syria to persuade his son to come home. Even after offering him a plan where he didn't have to go to prison but could resettle in Algeria and try to rebuild his life, the son refused. After a certain point in the radicalization process, there seems to be a point of no return.
Clearly, just bombing ISIS is not going to work when the majority of these terrorists lived in Europe.
... and they hope that this war results in the outcome they envision - which is some utopia that the Muslim world unites against the crusading threat and a caliphate is established? But they are human and they are perfectly fallible. And maybe force is necessary. In an ideal world, this is when a multi-national force under the UN banner is actually warranted.
By the way this is the exact situation that American after 9/11 swore would never happen again - a safe haven for global terrorism to be planned and launched from. That one is on Obama, though with Iraq Bush made that option incredibly difficult.
Well, no. Bush had a glorious, golden opportunity in the wake of 9/11 to turn this huge wave of international goodwill into something that could have actually made the world a safer place.
Instead, he did precisely what the terrorists hoped he would do - Bush not only invaded Afghanistan, he lied the country into a breathtakingly stupid and pointless war with Iraq, single-handedly destabilizing the entire region and creating the ideal climate for terrorism to flourish.
The fact that Obama hasn't been able to put the toothpaste back in the tube doesn't mean that it's all his fault - it just means he was unable to clean up the global catastrophe that Bush created in eight years.
So, are you saying that what Bush started is incorrigible?
Perhaps not. If only the politicians have a will to take the right path. Obama clearly doesn't have it.
See also: The Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency. [1]
This is not a get out of jail free card for inaction, but a reminder that just pushing an issue does not create positive action by itself. At this point any action that Obama takes will be resisted by US politicians, perhaps leading to a worse outcome than the status quo.
You haven't actually addressed what I was saying. Let's say all that about Bush is true. It doesn't change the reality that today a terrorist organization, ISIS, operates with impunity in a large swath of land, from which they plan and carry-out global terrorist attacks. I just remarked that this is the exact situation that America after 9/11 swore would never be tolerated. And I guess now it is.
> This is a strategy that has enabled it to confound far superior international forces
Are superior entities typically confounded by inferior entities in high-stakes games? I ask this having been humbled myself thinking myself superior once upon a time.
Or is it that the superior entities are pretending to be confounded to achieve domestic goals? If I were a megalomaniac, I know what I'd do.
TL;DR "ISIS" (or merely the concept of ISIS because it will be replaced by something worse when it is "defeated") wants to make the west attack muslims and islam itself so that muslims take their side and go to war for them, because they are only 30k right now and would love 300k or 3M
Conclusively, most religion is moronic and extreme religion is extremely moronic. It's going to get much worse before it gets better and probably not better in our lifetimes or at least this decade.
If Paris was horrible, imagine what they could do in the USA where guns are super easy to collect. They could wipe out entire malls in an afternoon.
It depends on the mall, but the nearest 80s-style enclosed mall to me has quite a few vacancies in it. The parking lot has tumbleweeds blowing across it, and they don't even grow here.
And on the other side of the equation, American cops are trigger happy, their SWAT-team-equivalents are swimming in drug war forfeiture slush, combined with military surplus purchase programs, and the citizenry itself has a decent quantity of concealed pistol carriers.
Shooters on foot could kill a lot of people in that first 30 minutes, but after that, the easy targets are all gone, and the retaliation force is on its way to "arrest" your shooters. It doesn't take all afternoon to [opportunistically grab some unpaid merchandise and] scramble for the exits.
Making Americans fear shopping malls is a tactical wrong move. We have already turned against them, mostly. You have to know the culture better. You have to make us fear our own cars and roads. If we stop driving on a daily basis, the whole country collapses.
But with over 30k highway deaths per year occurring already, in the absence of any malice, that's a steep uphill battle. It'd be like putting additional poisons in a carton of tobacco cigarettes.
Anders Behring Breivik had a long manifesto that was meant to provide conceptual landscape behind his killing of 77 people. Unsurprising is the appearance of Geert Wilders, Pamela Geller, Daniel Pipes et al. in there, but its remarkably instructive that the likes of the respected George Orwell are also cited.
Part of his worldview (and not necessarily his course of action) is shared by a substantive part of the people coming from ethnic-European origin. Much of the less-than-graceful themes in the manifesto were from the doctrinal elements that contributed to the unprecedented carnage across Europe during the WWII, particularly symbolized by the horrific sufferings of the hapless humans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (There are similar aspects pertaining to the thoughts of Dylann Roof et.al). I wonder whether these affairs and the associated ideological terrains have been examined as widely and with as much interests.
The recent horrific criminal acts in Paris have connections with France's colonial past with Algeria (https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/reflections-on-the-recent-pari...). And Daesh, the brutal group implicated, has its genesis in other brutalities, not unlike other similar affairs in the past (http://johnpilger.com/articles/from-pol-pot-to-isis-anything...). In different settings with reduced level of invasions and imposed/incited sufferings, such as in Malaysia, things have remained at least as decent as any other.
How could it be that there are people in the world who, on the one hand, post videos on YouTube, and on the other, believe things about the universe that are manifestly and self-evidently false? (Yes, I'm referring to all religions here.)
Religion -- all religion -- is so obviously nonsense, and yet the human race goes on and on and on, having endless tortured discussions about the earthly consequences of religious tenets, with a straight face.
How can we even begin to address these problems when all religious viewpoints are considered with an air of seriousness and profundity? On what ground do we (non-"holy warriors") stand when we say their viewpoint is wrong? None, so long as any religious viewpoint is taken seriously.
There is only one proper response to this and that is to make damn sure that I laugh religious people out of the room whenever possible.
Let us stop playing games and acknowledge that so long as grownups are considering religious viewpoints alongside secular ones when making important decisions, we will get absolutely nowhere.
"There is only one proper response to this and that is to make damn sure that I laugh religious people out of the room whenever possible."
That approach has proven to not work. Didn't you realize that the "religious people" would do the same to you? Their reality is different from yours.
So you have ferreted all the gods out of all the gaps in human knowledge? That is an amazing accomplishment!
Bases for belief are weird, even when they are not based on religion. Many mentalities are based on absolutes, it seems you have replaced god with no-god.
I don't think the anti-theist mindset is particularly useful. You cannot use facts to change someone's mind, especially where facts were not used in the first place.
Religion is a largely emotional experience to most people; denying them that experience is just hurtful, not constructive.
Supernatural claims made by religions are not among those. Those are just self-evidently false.
I'm not denying anyone anything. I'm just saying that the supernatural claims made by religions are obviously false. I don't really care if anyone's feelings are hurt by that.
I agree. But how can you realistically solve this?
The majority of adults will never give up their beliefs. Even if we convinced every single child that religion is bullocks, it would still take ~60 years to flush out the adults. Maybe we should just hop on the rocket with Musk and start over on Mars.
ISIS recruiting seems to live from making things black and white.
I think the best course of actin would be to leave ISIS alone from military perspective.
Then airdrop food, water and medical supplies to the area. Not discriminating between fighters and civilians. Smother them.
Then give the civilians living in that area a way to voice their grievances. So that Muslim people in Egypt and France could feel sympathy for ordinary human beings trapped in that area. "How can you treat our fellow Muslims so bad?"
Now ISIS should be busy stopping people from messaging the outer world. And stopping people from drinking filthy crusader water. They would have to spend their energy enforcing a totalitarian state. It's difficult for them to explain how there is holy war when the enemy is being so nice.
>To be effective, attacks should be launched against soft targets that cannot possibly be defended to any appreciable degree, leading to a debilitating security state:
> "If a tourist resort that the Crusaders patronize…is hit, all of the tourist resorts in all of the states of the world will have to be secured by the work of additional forces, which are double the ordinary amount, and a huge increase in spending."
That is huge misunderstanding by the author. That is absolutely standard military tactic at least as old as Sun Tzu art of war. The idea is to force enemy to spend more money than you are spending. Security state is just meaningless side effect for ISIS point of view.
I am a regular HN user and sometimes commentator. I am Muslim, both by background and choice. I am glad that HN is having a conversation a 100 times more serious and intellectual than I am seeing on popular Western and Muslim media.
First of all Daesh are a bunch of psychopaths and a far greater threat and problem to people like me. Their every move has been against not just non-Muslims or moderate Muslims but also and even more so against mainstream and all major currents of Sunni Islam. If people are interested, I can provide specific sources to support this assertion.
From the Muslim world side, we have a huge mess. I wanted to put in my two cents for Westerners trying to understand WTH is going on with the Muslim world. Basically, the Assad regime, nominally "secular, progressive" tyrants such as the Egyptian and Algerian militaries or Kurdish marxist armies, numerous "radical" Sunni and Shia groups have all been at fault since they could not agree on a set of principles on which disagreeing parties could come to peace. The long Iraqi civil war brutalised already damaged societies. This produced the sort of psychopaths such as Zarqawi and Baghdadi and numerous others. Also, even otherwise somewhat moderate Sunnis have been driven into ISIS's arms and somewhat moderate Nusayrites and Shi'ites have been driven into Ass'ads arms because they don't see another option. The biggest problem now is that while many people are disgusted by all this, there is so much blame to go around that one can be completely justified in blaming everyone else. So the problem is that people sympathetic to Assad (old-style socialists, Shi'ites etc.) sit there blaming the Saudis, Turks and the "West" for the supporting rebels who they say are all Daesh. On the other hand, Assad has killed and driven out many times more refugees than Daesh, and many Syrians and Sunnis find it hypocritical and self-serving to support Assad like Putin is doing while neglecting the plight of the Syrian population being hammered both from Assad and Daesh. The conspiracy theorist streak finds it easy to blame the US, without trying to eliminate the local actors who are instruments of said conspiracy, if they really believe there is one.
Unless all sides are brave enough to not only fight for their principles but more importantly admit their own mistakes it is hard to fix this. But this requires some trust, which only gets harder to find the more precarious your own situation becomes.
Adding to this, has anybody else noticed just how much encryption is being mentioned in news articles and talk shows about Paris? In articles and discussions on TV it's always in a fear-mongering tone: "They communicated with encrypted messages!"
I mean yes, that poses a problem. But the solution isn't to antagonize encryption. Should we all send our letters without envelopes? Why are people ready and willing to do that online and not offline when the same information is FAR more likely to be intercepted by crazy criminals? How much potential exposure does your data get via snail mail versus Internet transmission?
Ignoring any sort of conspiracy theories I think despite the subtlety it is still blatantly obvious that politicians are immediately taking advantage of the situation, associating negativity (terrorism) with encryption.
It is a VERY dangerous time because emotions of people can be swayed in any direction now. It is the same phenomenon observed when the Patriot Act was enacted.
Discussions and discourse are discouraged because it isn't considered moral to talk about these things less than a week after these horrifying attacks. NOW is the time to stab the pro-encryption arguments right in the heart, charged with emotion, in a subtle and covert way.
A deliberate part of the Al Qaeda/ISIS strategy is to turn our security apparatus against our population and push us into becoming police states. They know that this is the natural, automatic response of governments on the one hand, and that it will make minimal difference to our ability to protect ourselves on the other, while manipulating us into a state of continual fear and paranoia.
These people are looking for something that the western civilization is not giving them. For some, it's just to be treated like human beings rather than something less.
But others are looking for something else. They look at the materialist view (where all we are is a collection of atoms created by random chance, obeying the laws of physics and biochemistry and neurology, and where it's very difficult to find any real (non-arbitrary) meaning in life), and they find it empty - empty in a way that more material prosperity won't fix.
And they look at Christianity in Europe, and too often they find it to be dead - full of unreality and dust.
Their cry is in essence the same as the hippies in the 1960s: "Your society isn't giving us adequate answers. It's not enough to satisfy our hearts."
It's an old strategy. I was reading Grimm's Fairy tales to my wife this morning and the brave little tailor used the same clever approach.
* * *
Leaping into the woods, he looked to the left and to the right. He soon saw the two giants. They were lying asleep under a tree, snoring until the branches bent up and down. The little tailor, not lazy, filled both pockets with stones and climbed the tree. Once in the middle of the tree, he slid out on a branch until he was seated right above the sleepers. Then he dropped one stone after another onto one of the giant's chest. For a long time the giant did not feel anything, but finally he woke up, shoved his companion, and said, "Why are you hitting me?"
"You are dreaming," said the other one. "I am not hitting you."
They fell asleep again, and the tailor threw a stone at the second one.
"What is this?" said the other one. "Why are you throwing things at me?"
"I am not throwing anything at you," answered the first one, grumbling.
They quarreled for a while, but because they were tired, they made peace, and they both closed their eyes again. Then the little tailor began his game again. Choosing his largest stone, he threw it at the first giant with all his strength, hitting him in the chest.
"That is too mean!" shouted the giant, then jumped up like a madman and pushed his companion against the tree, until it shook. The other one paid him back in kind, and they became so angry that they pulled up trees and struck at each other until finally, at the same time, they both fell to the ground dead.
Then the little tailor jumped down. "It is fortunate," he said, "that they did not pull up the tree where I was sitting, or I would have had to jump into another one like a squirrel. But people like me are nimble."
Drawing his sword, he gave each one a few good blows to the chest, then went back to the horsemen and said, "The work is done. I finished off both of them, but it was hard.
* * *
From The Brave Little Tailor by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
No. Recognize that the terrorists were from Europe. Recognize that integration, investing in suburbs, and improvement of basic living conditions has failed for decades. Then start solving these problems.
People don't spray random other people with automatic weapons because of the marginal level of welfare benefits. The fact that you can even entertain that opinion is mind boggling.
"A July 2014 poll by ICM Research suggested that more than one in four French youth of all creeds between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four have a favorable or very favorable opinion of ISIS. Even if these estimates are high, in our own interviews with young people in the vast and soulless housing projects of the Paris banlieues we found surprisingly wide tolerance or support for ISIS among young people"
Despite these astonishing numbers, it still has nothing to do with religion, right? Downvote me to hell, but if a quarter of certain group openly supports mass-killers, I have a very serious reason to be afraid of them and avoid at all cost.
Basically the question used two denomination for Daesh, none of which being widely used by the media... Add to that people too proud to admit their ignorance, and you have the recipe for a totally worthless poll...
Bearing in mind the number of young French people who supposedly had a "favourable or very favourable" opinion of ISIS vastly exceeded the number of young French people who were Muslim, I suspect it had little to do with religion and everything to do with a particularly poorly phrased French version of the question....
I had the chance to talk with a ISIS supported a few months ago. He was a young Muslim but not specially religious and he was not involved with the movement directly but agree with them.
In his view, even if the citizens of western countries can enjoy freedom and a good life, the actions of their governments in other countries are not so wonderful. The word "hypocrite" was mentioned. I had some problems to refute this reasoning.
I think that we can condemn terrorism and be against the instauration of caliphates without give up critical thinking. After all, that should be one of the most important Western values.
As you quoted yourself, this is among all creeds, not among muslims. France has larger muslim population than germany or GB that were in the same survey, yet this still does not explain the huge difference in youths actually supporting daesh. So, its fair to say that french youth in general is disillusioned. Also note that this was before charlie hebdo and the recent attack, not sure how the non-muslim french would respond now.
The banlieues are often referenced , but were the terrorists from the banlieues? the whole thing seems to be orchestrated from belgium.
> So, its fair to say that french youth in general is disillusioned.
The French economy is moribund, growth is nil, youth unemployment rates are over 25%, and lots of them are sitting around unemployed or in dead-end jobs - while their parents hold much cushier jobs with some of the world's best labor protections (or most-notorious, depending on your perspective). It's not shocking.
To be fair, the same youths in Germany or the UK that are technically-not-unemployed aren't faring much better, working below minimum wage or ridiculously precarious jobs (like the infamous 1€/hr jobs in Germany or the 0-hour contracts in the UK).
I'd argue this "French economy" argument is pretty weak under scrutiny.
General disillusionment is a characteristic of the entire European south (or EE) in general. I don't think it has more to do with islamic radicalization than other kinds of radicalization though.
With 25% youth unemployment, wanting to get a job doesn't mean getting a job. People give up after a while, and the resulting desperation is dangerous.
Makes different people do different things in response. Idle hands, etc. Throw in unwelcoming locals, radical preachers in the community, stories of oppressive foreign governments on your home turf, etc and I can see how idle youths find a call to arms appealing.
Some 50% of Russians have favorable opinions about Stalin. Such statistics are not in of themselves worrying, unless you have reason to believe they can't compartmentalize.
For Russian neighbors (I live in one of them) such statistics, along with actions in Ukraine is very much worrying and we do everything we can to prepare for possible (even likely) Russian aggression -- increased military spending, re-introduction of conscription, lobbying for NATO high alert forces and stationary units.
This is what you get following link in the article:
An ICM poll on behalf of the Russian news agency Rossiya Segodnya tested the awareness of the group ISIS (previously known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant), in three European nations; Great Britain, France and Germany. The poll revealed that overall 2% and 7% say they are very favourable and somewhat favourable towards ISIS but a greater 26% and 43% are somewhat unfavourable and very unfavourable towards ISIS.
Not only they didn't break it down betwene religions, but I'm not even sure how NYT themselves extracted their "1/4 youths support ISIS" claim from this data.
OTOH, have a look at this link originally posted by imaginenore in some other thread:
The exact French wording they used isn't mentioned sadly. IIRC is was astonishingly bad, as they used the ISIS word, that isn't used by French media, which went from EIIL (Etat Islamique en Irak et au Levant) to Daesh.
It's very likely that most people that answered misidentified the faction that was talked about.
Here's why the ISIS plans won't work as the article describes how ISIS is planning:
ISIS has basically five things
going for them:
(1) A lot of oil money, (2) a lot of desert no one wants to try to live in, (3) a lot of young men without much to do except live off the oil money, (4) a totally, world-class, grand-champion, one of a kind wacko leader -- calling that guy a wacko is an insult to all the ordinary wackos there have ever been, and (5) by far the most important of the 5, the humanitarian desire of the Western countries to avoid civilian casualties.
But ISIS doesn't "avoid civilian casualties", and the Western countries have a very long and/or significant history of not avoiding civilian casualties. That is, still, now, if the West wants, then it can also quit avoiding civilian casualties.
E.g., the US military fought hard and brilliantly, and took casualties and deaths, fighting in Fallujah, but there was a much faster, safer, cheaper, and easier way -- just level Fallujah from the air. The US could easily have done that in time from a day, an afternoon, an hour, or a millisecond -- literally. Why not? Avoid civilian casualties.
Mean? ISIS mean? In the list of world class mean countries, if want to call ISIS a country, ISIS isn't mean. ISIS is crude, medieval, stupid.
For world class mean, the all time, unique, unchallenged grand champion, and may I have the envelope, please, yes, here it is, the US. Way, way back in honorable mention is a four way tie -- Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Stalinist Russia, and Mao's China.
Why US #1 on mean? The bomb, the atom bomb, used over Japan. Setting that aside, the B-29 and the fire bombing of Japanese cities. Setting that aside, the B-17 and the bombing of German cities including the fire storms where much of the civilian population was converted into burning torches -- shortest way to put it. Horror that can only be tolerated from 20,000 feet up or higher. The best thing those German people had going for them was that they could die only once and, on a night of a fire storm, hopefully, likely quickly. One of the worst horrors in the history of the planet.
For more, and more recently, in a 6 week air campaign and a 100 hour ground campaign, General Schwarzkopf brought to unconditional surrender Saddam's army, the fourth largest army in the world, with 7 million men under arms. Mean? IIRC the US had more casualties (but not deaths) from recreation, e.g., softball, than from enemy action. Soon the Iraqi air force got the message that it was not smart to fly at all (US AWACS could see them and send in F-15s) so would fly just to get away, low, slow, and to ditch in Iran.
Mean? General Schwarzkopf was asked what happened to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers in the desert next to Saudi Arabia. The answer: "They are still there."
Mean? When a US A-10 flew over the Iraqi troops, they rushed out with white flags.
What one or a few A-10s did to
the escaping Iraqi troops on the road from Kuwait City back to Iraq -- turned the whole crowded road into teeth, hair, eyes, blood, guts, big pieces made into small ones, and fires, all in just a few A-10 passes -- so shocked the world that Bush 41 rushed to stop such actions. The A-10 is one mean machine -- reduce really big pieces of metal to small ones in a few seconds. And the A-10 is long out of date -- the US has much meaner machines now.
In Gulf War I,
it went on this way, our tanks against theirs, our planes against theirs, and especially our F-117 stealth bomber against their radar and anti-aircraft artillery and missiles -- the F-117 flew through Saddam's exploding defenses, bright enough to light up the night sky, and literally never got even a single scratch. Why? The sky is a really big place; shooting blind gives really small chance of hitting anything; and against the F-117 Iraq was shooting blind. The F-117? From the Lockheed Skunk Works -- bright guys out there.
We, here in the US, have GPS, surveillance satellites, smart bombs, cruise missiles, drones, the B-2, the F-22, the M1-A1 tank, aircraft carriers (so difficult to do well the US has about all there are in the world), submarines, both attack and missile firing, etc.
Mean? The US is mean, unique, world-class mean.
Net, without (5), that is, the determination of the US to avoid civilian casualties, the US could "wipe the desert clean" (from an Indiana Jones movie?) of ISIS in a day, much faster if we were in a hurry. E.g., all within about 30 minutes of the ISIS areas, several US SSBNs, each with about 16 missiles, each missile with several warheads, each warhead with, IIRC, ballpark 330 KT of exploding fusion energy.
The US has been willing to kill enemy civilians in the past and can be again in the future. So far, the US is still being a nice guy -- we just blew up some ISIS oil trucks, but first we dropped leaflets telling the civilians to get out of the way.
France? "They are a funny race", but they are no joke: Great wine, cheese, bread, food, really pretty, world class feminine young women, great art, and more. And, in pure and applied mathematics, both physical and medical science, philosophy, etc. France has a very long history of world-class excellence. Since WWII, some of the best mathematicians have been French -- e.g., Bourbaki.
My favorite is J. Neveu.
In technical excellence, the French are no joke. They are darned good at making both airplanes and working with nuclear materials, both the electricity generating kind and the exploding kind.
Net, anytime France wants to be "merciless" to ISIS, France can wipe the desert clean of ISIS in an hour.
France is a member of NATO. Maybe that old organization looks like a comedy act, but without firing a single serious shot it's kept the peace in Europe since 1945 or so. Other members include Germany and England and, of course, the US.
Basically, ISIS attacked NATO; definitely a Darwin award on the way. As from Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping tiger and fill him with a terrible resolve." Yup.
If NATO were a country, then it would be by a wide margin the meanest in the solar system.
ISIS can't make glass or matches but attacked NATO? Did I mention wacko?
As soon as, as in no more than a day, the West is willing to kill ISIS civilians, there will be no more ISIS -- in the ISIS areas no more buildings, oil infrastructure, vehicles, tents, camels, flocks, or people. None. The desert wiped clean. The West has killed plenty of civilians before and can do it again, especially against an enemy eager to kill civilians.
For me, IIRC ISIS has said that they intend to get a nuke bomb and explode it against the US. They would likely aim for Wall Street, and I'm just 70 miles north of there. They could hurt me. 'Nuff for me -- wipe the desert clean.
How do you respond to openly barbaric group that wants to commit genocide against you in a civilized fashion?
You can try to negotiate and they will kill your ambassadors.
You can try to ignore them and they will slaughter your innocent civilians.
You can try to attack them and they will hide amongst their civilians.
What do you do.
When they openly tell you they want to nuke you out of existence, it is a matter of survival for not just you but for your civilization what do you do?
You have a button to kill the threat now or you can wait for them to get the button to kill you and you know they will have no hesitation to press it.
It's important to note that ISIS, al Qaeda, al nusra etc. are Sunni movements and are bitterly opposed to Shi'ism. The rise of Shi'a political power, led by Iran since 1980, poses a huge ideological threat.
What we're seeing today is a tiny group of very clever, highly motivated people, patiently watching for opportunities to sow chaos because they believe it will tip the scales eventually toward a Caliphate. They are hugely aided by technology and by the West's earnest desire to integrate the East.
However, I believe the ISIS is doomed to failure. There are only so many young people willing to sacrifice everything for fanatic dreams of afterlife fulfillment as payment for promises of improving the here-now. Most youth, in other words, aren't that stupid. ISIS is siphoning off a certain kind of malcontents who make good fodder for the cannons, but history has shown that this approach is not sustainable. The Muslim world is already showing signs of backlash against the constant images of extreme violence, and reformists continue to call for tolerance and dialogue as the only true solution to territorial and ideological differences.
Whether the Levant succumbs to unending civil war for the next few decades, or is ultimately dominated by a set of secular dictatorships that suppress the jihadists, or can they achieve peaceful multiplayer democracy--these are questions to which no one has the answers.