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Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

nytimes.com

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Re: Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

#301

Post by [deleted] »

jamhan wrote: post #243
usaphp wrote: post #208

I don't understand how can you talk about ISIS, Nazis and Communists in the same sentence? Communism has nothing to do with violence compared to ISIS and Nazis... Edit: Why downvotes? Idea of communism does not propose violence, Nazis and ISIS on the other hand do.

Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung - just to name a couple of famous exponents of communism. Perhaps you are mistaking the ideal of communism with the actual practice of it, which has proven to be just as genocidal as anything else in history.

[deleted]

Re: Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

#302

Post by littletimmy »

rythmshifter wrote: post #272
littletimmy wrote: post #161

The war on terror has been going on for 15 years now - are there more terrorists in 2000 or 2015? Sooner or later, we will have to come to the realization that terrorism cannot be eliminated by force. Stop destabilizing Arab countries, stop imperial interference in Northern Africa, and perhaps we'll see an end to this nonsense.

I'm curious, under what logic would this stop or get any better if we allow the cancer to grow?

By the same logic that a wound heals when you stop poking the scab.

If there's any lesson from the past 15 years, it is this: state engineering does not work. Period. You cannot control it. You don't "allow" anything. You cannot stop anything. The forces are beyond your control.

Americans and Europeans have to step out of the colonial mindset of trying to control the world. Then we'll have peace.

Re: Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

#303

Post by jacquesm »

scrollaway wrote: post #275
iMark wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe Islam is fundamentally different than Christianity. Present day interpretations aside, I believe both share a similar DNA. I believe the solution is to look inward (as I've already, "do no harm"), rather than to condemn outwards. And yes, I'm willing to concede the naiveté of my viewpoint.

I agree, I hope my comment was not misinterpreted. Most muslims believe in "do no harm", and every single one I've talked to thinks those terrorists are the exact opposite of true muslims. Those attacks done "in the name of islam" create islamophobic reactions from people. Media spreads this islamophobia further, to people who just trust whatever they see on TV. The climate grows to marginalize muslims further. The o…

> HN is still a sane place but what % of the population does that really represent?

I think that the level of HN is rare online but offline things are much better (at least, in my experience).

> And it's not like you wouldn't ever get downvoted here. There's a lot of people who believe in the direct "more immigrants = more terrorists" idiocy.

So talk to them and stand your ground. Sure there will always be jerks but don't let that stop you from trying and who cares about the occasional downvote.

> Let it fucking end...

Yes, please. But I fear that won't happen in my lifetime, maybe in yours depending on your age. This took decades to fuck up it will take decades to restore and a completely different approach.

Re: Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

#304

Post by jules »

toyg wrote: post #299
jules wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really think that the sincere belief that you will spend an eternity in heaven and secure a place in heaven for 70 family members of your choosing and earn the love of God has nothing to do with it? It's hard for people who are not religious fundamentalists to understand that some people really believe this with as much certainty as you and I believe that the sun will rise tomorrow. This belief is precisely why s…

> Why blow yourself up when you can make a bomb and then another and another? To avoid having to endure the consequences of your own actions. For people with nothing to lose, suicide attacks are actually the most risk-averse choice: regardless of the possible existence of an afterworld, you're certain to escape punishment in this world. Look at Columbine-style attacks - no religion there, just semi-rational choices.…

This is what many people think, but it is demonstrably false. Most terrorists are highly educated and some are rich. The terrorists involved in 9/11 all had university degrees, for example, and some of them from western universities. These are not people who would be committing suicide anyway out of depression caused by miserable circumstances.

Frankly, I suspect that at least part of this comes from the aversion of highly educated and rich people to the idea that somebody much like them in those respects could do such a thing, and that it must be a poor lowly educated person doing it.

Re: Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

#305

Post by Asbostos »

toyg wrote: post #11
po1nter wrote: post #2

According to iTele there are now 118 dead. Edit: Now it's up to 140. What a sad day :(

Reworded to avoid offence (hopefully): deaths are not irrelevant, but their exact precise number is irrelevant. What matters is the scale of the security failure, compounded by the fact that they suffered a similar one less than a year ago and they were currently on high-alert (because they've only just started bombing Syria). The knowledge that a network could carry out such a widespread and well-coordinated attack…

They already failed to prevent 600 common murders each year. You could call that completely ineffective or you could call it diminishing returns on investment in security. You can't prevent all of them without an unacceptable number of false positives or harsh restrictions on freedom.

Anyone who's upset by this and doesn't have a personal connection to the victims is not being rational. They should be upset by all other killings - the vast majority which don't get into the international news, let along HN. Those are far more prevalent, and perhaps easier to prevent because they're done by amatures.

Re: Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

#306

Post by astronautjones »

gotchange wrote: post #222
tomphoolery wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the time, terrorism is carried out by irrational people, but orchestrated by slightly more rational people. The people willing to risk their lives are not the same people that are convincing others to risk their lives. After all, if people like Sayyid Qutb actually risked his life, he wouldn't be able to convince other idiots to die.

Egyptian here, actually Qutb risked his life and lost it for his "cause" and there's a lot of controversy surrounding this issue and it's a recurrent hot topic in political discussions here that his unlawful detention by the military authorities and the subsequent execution might have resulted in his radicalization and him espousing more extremist views of jihadism and political violence to effect social change in th…

thanks for the insight - is there good further reading on this topic? I'm really only familiar with it from Adam Curtis' docs

Re: Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

#307

Post by [deleted] »

erickhill wrote: post #257
usaphp wrote: post #208

I don't understand how can you talk about ISIS, Nazis and Communists in the same sentence? Communism has nothing to do with violence compared to ISIS and Nazis... Edit: Why downvotes? Idea of communism does not propose violence, Nazis and ISIS on the other hand do.

As horrific and scary as terrorist acts are to civil societies (and impactful to our politics), Stalin's rule was far more devastating. "In February 1989, two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, a research paper by Georgian historian Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev published in the weekly tabloid Argumenti i Fakti estimated that the death toll directly attributable to Stalin’s rule amounted to some 20 million live…

[deleted]

Re: Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

#308

Post by clock_tower »

usaphp wrote: post #290
erickhill wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As horrific and scary as terrorist acts are to civil societies (and impactful to our politics), Stalin's rule was far more devastating. "In February 1989, two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, a research paper by Georgian historian Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev published in the weekly tabloid Argumenti i Fakti estimated that the death toll directly attributable to Stalin’s rule amounted to some 20 million live…

The article you mentioned has no explanation of where he got those figures, as far as I know there is no official data on this and estimates range from 3Mln to 60Mln [1], which as you can see is quite bizarre estimate. According to official documents there were 799,455 people executed in a period from 1921 to 1953 [2] and keep in mind that's a total number of execution, not only those that were executed for political…

It looks like you're not quite as naive as you'd sounded at first...

Remember, Stalin didn't go in for executions; he preferred slave labor. Deaths in the GULAG -- which could be as high as in the non-death-camp Nazi concentration camps, or higher -- should be counted as well as executions. (Remember how part of Stalin's price for peace with Japan was 300,000 Japanese slaves, none of whom ever returned to Japan after the war.)

Also, some deaths in the war should be attributed to Stalin -- at the very least, deaths in the punishment brigades. If you force someone to march through a minefield, and he hits a mine and dies, it's your fault.

Re: Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

#309

Post by jtblin »

Asbostos wrote: post #250
jacquesm wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A way to let others know you're safe even if you can't get through to them personally.

Does that have any value beyond reinforcing people's irrational fear of mass deaths? What if you let your family know you're not one of the 100 killed in this attack then die as one of the 600 murdered in France each year by common crime? I saw this happen with the London bombings. A colleague was almost in tears because her son lived in London and she couldn't contact him on the phone. It turned out he was fine, as…

I found it valuable to know that my friends and family in Paris are safe, so I'm grateful to FB for doing that. OTH It saddens me and make me wonder what kind of world we live in for FB to release such a feature.

Re: Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

#310

Post by coldtea »

andreasvc wrote: post #226
usaphp wrote: post #208

I don't understand how can you talk about ISIS, Nazis and Communists in the same sentence? Communism has nothing to do with violence compared to ISIS and Nazis... Edit: Why downvotes? Idea of communism does not propose violence, Nazis and ISIS on the other hand do.

There has been plenty of communist-inspired violent terrorism. Germany's RAF, Italy's Red Brigade, Japan's United Red Army, Peru's Shining Path, Columbia's FARC, Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers, etc. etc. Saying these are not real communists is just a No True Scotsman. As soon as people start believing in utopias there's a danger that they will cross a line.

>As soon as people start believing in utopias there's a danger that they will cross a line.

More people have been killed in pragmatic endeavours, like colonialism, and land grab/turf wars, than from "utopias".

This includes smaller scale utopias -- far less innocent people have been killed by ...hippies than by policemen.

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