Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

mailman.videolan.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 737 posts

Re: VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

#121

Post by cygx »

Vivtek wrote: post #117
cygx wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's not "all Muslisms". But those who claim "it's only the terrorists" or "it's all politics" do not grasp the scope of the problem, ie that globally speaking, a significant number of adherents of Islam hold ideas that are incompatible with an open society. If you naively extrapolate from the 2013 Pew Poll The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society (which in principle represents nations with a tot…

You obviously have a blind spot towards American-brand Christianity. Speaking of scary numbers and scary access to nuclear weapons perfectly capable of killing you, me, and the other seven billion of us.

You seem to think I'm giving Christianity a pass. I'm not.

Re: VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

#122

Post by lmm »

cygx wrote: post #85
DanBC wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bunch of Americans think US free speech doesn't apply to hate speech. (Although I accept that they don't want to kill you for it). A bunch of Americans think you should be killed for being black; or gay; or trans. A bunch of Americans don't think rape is actually rape - "s/he didn't fight back!", "s/he had a beer!" Lots of people have wrong ideas.

Exactly. And you tell them in no unertain terms that they are wrong, instead of making excuses because "it's their culture" or because of freedom of religion. Harmful ideologies do not get a free pass in my book just because they claim divine backing.

Agreed but it works both ways - non-religious harmful ideologies can be almost as bad.

What proportion of people - even of western college-educated liberals - genuinely, in their heart of hearts, supports free speech even when it's speech they disagree with, freedom of religion even when it's a religion they disagree with, and all the other enlightenment values? I fear it's pretty low.

Re: VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

#123

Post by Amezarak »

vog wrote: post #76
cygx wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's not "all Muslisms". But those who claim "it's only the terrorists" or "it's all politics" do not grasp the scope of the problem, ie that globally speaking, a significant number of adherents of Islam hold ideas that are incompatible with an open society. If you naively extrapolate from the 2013 Pew Poll The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society (which in principle represents nations with a tot…

> 40% of these think you should be killed for leaving Islam. How do these numbers compare to other religions? For example, there is an unconfortable number of Christians who do have a fundamentalist mindset, too (although I didn't find any exact numbers). Probably similar issue for other religions and possibly also among non-religious people.

> For example, there is an unconfortable number of Christians who do have a fundamentalist mindset, too (although I didn't find any exact numbers).

Even fundamentalist Christians don't have divine commandments to kill apostates. Nor do atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, or Jews (well, they do, but it hasn't been in force since the Exile.)

This is a false equivalency.

Re: VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

#124

Post by rihegher »

sbarre wrote: post #20
rihegher wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see media speaking much about these countries that allows financing of ISIS. But if we want to eradicate ISIS, I too think we should deal with its financial sources first. Maybe because these countries are the same countries that western companies want to sell weapons to.

Isn't it naive to think of these countries as one entity? Is the US, or any Western country, one unified allied voice where everyone has the same policies or supports the same causes? It's very likely that these "rich oil-producing countries" are made up of fragmented power centres and viewpoints, just like everywhere else in the world. Painting these countries all with one brush is about as foolish as painting Chris…

Correct me if I am wrong but money transfers are controlled at state scale or even at higher scale.

Banks are liable to states about where money goes or come from, so yes I think you can brush some countries with a level of control on money flow. Some with really strict control and some less strict or even tolerant in some cases.

Re: VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

#125

Post by johnsea »

utku_karatas2 wrote: post #91
omginternets wrote: post #41

I'm living in Paris. I heard gunfire from my apartment. My heart goes out to Salah-Eddin, and all people living in the shadow of unspeakable abominations. It saddens me to imagine that simply hearing gunfire in the distance is nothing compared to what my fellow man has witnessed elsewhere. Salah-Eddin's condolences mean a lot to me and I wish him all the best. It's my sincerest hope that French troops will be deploye…

> It's my sincerest hope that French troops will be deployed to Syria in the near future This kind of thinking is exactly why Mid-east is in its current state and that is exactly the reason why ISIS was born. ISIS high command mainly consists of Iraqi ex-officers, who were rendered jobless and aimless by USA's 'liberation' attempt. Al-Qaida was a result of a 'liberation' attempt by Soviets and then consequently anoth…

There are a lot of jobless people in the world. If all of them became militants we had the full chaos. Bye bye open society, here comes the surveillance society.

If you read e.g. what happened in Palmyra, the (sometimes foreign) radical muslim terrorists attacked/killed the citizians and a liberation is very much needed.

'Only' maybe the 'state-building' has to be done longer than before in Afghanistan, Irak... And a UN administratered government is needed for some time. I don't talk about 'the west' but also about the 'moderate muslim community'.

It's no good now to stand on the side and watch the atrocities. If I read correctly also countries like the Lebanon suffer from the influx of radical maslims foreigners.

Re: VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

#126

Post by ifdefdebug »

kushti wrote: post #72

It is time to stop terrorist states: ISIS, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and USA.

I can't downvote, so here you got my -1 personally.

edit: ok, let me explain: putting the USA and ISIS into the same bucket "terrorist states" is just moronic, that's why. happy downvoting.

Re: VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

#127

Post by omginternets »

hk__2 wrote: post #120
omginternets wrote: post #41

I'm living in Paris. I heard gunfire from my apartment. My heart goes out to Salah-Eddin, and all people living in the shadow of unspeakable abominations. It saddens me to imagine that simply hearing gunfire in the distance is nothing compared to what my fellow man has witnessed elsewhere. Salah-Eddin's condolences mean a lot to me and I wish him all the best. It's my sincerest hope that French troops will be deploye…

> the Parisian battlefield (yes... that's sadly what it has become) Could you expand on that? I live in Paris too and I don’t feel it has anything different from another city like London or New-York regarding security.

Well, for starters, a group of trained soldiers from a wannabe state slaughtered innocent civilians in our streets, detonated a bomb in a stadium (where, I remind you, our President was located) ... I would also remind you that there's really nothing to prevent this from happening again and again. Our security forces do not have a handle on this, and our president is declaring war.

We've had two gunfights in the middle of Paris in two years. If you don't see how this is different from previous terrorism, then respectfully, there's really no point in discussing any of this with you.

The point isn't that things are different from a security-state point of view. The point is instead that we're facing something whose scope and scale we underestimated.

Re: VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

#128

Post by 7Z7 »

slowmotiony wrote: post #21
StavrosK wrote: post #2

Isn't it sad that this has to be said at all? "Hey, not every adherent of a religion supports killing innocent people of a different religion". It'd be like us having to apologize for the Crusades. Besides, the hits were driven by politics, religion is just a facade.

Yes, suicide bombers shouting "Allah akhbar" is definitely political, nothing to do with religion at all.

You could say the same thing about Northern Ireland (and the media regularly framed it that way), when "Catholics" retaliated against "Protestants" for some action, or the reverse.

The Troubles in Northern Ireland were never about religion. They were about power, territory and self-governance - it just happened that the two main "sides" in the conflict were also traditionally of different Christian sects - and the easiest way to spoon feed it to the uninvolved masses was under the guise of religious/sectarian animosity because it made it slightly irrational, rather than motivated by oppression.

Re: VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

#129

Post by thaway9837 »

brohee wrote: post #104
thaway9837 wrote: post #71

With all the respect for his contributions and good demeanor, sadly, this guy has no clue on what islam is and playin moslem like most of the 1.5 billion so called moslems. Which causes islam to be seen as a peaceful religion. No. Islam is the thing that creates these lunatics. I'm from Turkey, and I've been surrounded with islam for all my life. Problem with this kind of people is: they have created their own religi…

You can find pretty horrific stuff in the Bible too (I don't have time to look for much more but http://biblehub.com/deuteronomy/22-21.htm is a good example). http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/ is a good tool to go to the juicy parts quickly. Both the Qoran and the Bible (and some other sacred books) are full of stuff that is horrific, yet discarded as obviously outdated by 99.9999% of their practitionners. In my boo…

Literal interpretation is the argument moslems use too. Problem with that argument is, these apologetics also mean that, they believe in some god, that is unable to say anything directly and has no idea how messed up the people that god itself has created, that most would not even be able to understand its words.

Sorry. No. This argument does not work here. For, the translations are almost the same in english, turkish, german and any other language that book is translated to. And it says that, all should either convert to islam or be killed. There's no other interpretation here.

Re: VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

#130

Post by hk__2 »

slowmotiony wrote: post #21
StavrosK wrote: post #2

Isn't it sad that this has to be said at all? "Hey, not every adherent of a religion supports killing innocent people of a different religion". It'd be like us having to apologize for the Crusades. Besides, the hits were driven by politics, religion is just a facade.

Yes, suicide bombers shouting "Allah akhbar" is definitely political, nothing to do with religion at all.

The suicide bombers in Paris explicitely said they were here because the French military is in Syria; this is political. ISIS did wrote these attacks were to punish the French for messing with them.
Post reply on HN