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VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

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

#311

Post by ionised »

iamthepieman wrote: post #37

I work with a Muslim and I'm a Christian. Since we are both very conservative, I actually have more in common with him than with my secular coworkers and friends. Unfortunately we both work remotely and live several hundred miles from each other. I think we could be good friends if we lived closer. One thing I have learned talking with my Muslim coworker is that, just like in Christianity, there are many divisions an…

He's probably more like you than most non-religious people because both of your belief systems are basically the same thing.

They are Abrahamic (along with Judaism) religions and both feature the exact same God and many of the same practices and beliefs.

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

#312

Post by gotchange »

rtpg wrote: post #235
gotchange wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they would like to change society to suit their ends. What would be those means employed by non-Muslim radicals to effect social change? I'm inclined to say that urban warfare and terrorizing an entire population with open aggression tactics are not among them.

Wasn't there that guy in Santa Barbara who shot a bunch of women because he hated them? The Waco seige? No one has a monopoly on violence for attempting social change Though here that's beside the point. The Paris attacks were not because France is a free country, but because France was bombing Daesh. This is more like the Lockerbie bombing than like some sort of "clash of civilizations" that so many are implying

I hate the clash of civilizations narrative and identity politics as much as the next guy but Paris wasn't attacked because France attacked ISIS first. On the contrary and let me refresh your memory, ISIS attacked first and murdered all those hostages held in captivity in Syria or Iraq mercilessly. Even if they hadn't killed western hostages, they'd still have to be taken down as they pose a threat and constitute a major destabilizing force in the region and the world as a whole.

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

#313

Post by nickik »

cmdkeen wrote: post #146
drinchev wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello. I really like your honesty, courage and passion that I can sense from what you wrote. I don't want to sound offending, but you are saying that you are happy to discuss this and I have almost no contact with deep religious persons that are in IT, so I have a couple of questions. 1. Where is the boundary of your beliefs? I'm always trying to be polite with my dev co-workers, but for example if I write a flagged…

Whilst I'm not the OP I'll happily give my thoughts as a not very good Anglican - who embodies the "great Anglican fudge". 1. Offended no. I'll think you're rather rude, the same as if I wrote $manifestDestiny = false. If you know someone you can have banter with them. 2. IT has all sorts of articles of faith. vi versus emacs, I'm weird as I like nano. Religion is a way of living your life, my code is in no way affec…

What I have never understood, is how can you not take the Bible literally and just kind of pick and choice what part to belive or not to believe.

How is this process of picking and choiceing from the Bible and 2000 years of Christian history not the same as making up your own morality (as most secularist do).

Seems to me, that the only thing 'being Christian' is (outside of the institution), is that you take some more of your morality from the Bible compared to all other books.

What is it that keeps you Christian? Why not just go all the way and look at all books and history to make up your own morality?

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

#314

Post by rmc »

crusso wrote: post #151
jacquesm wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a significant number of adherents of Islam hold ideas that are incompatible with an open society. Significant numbers of non-Islam subscribers hold ideas that are incompatible with an open society too. All these people have at least one thing in common: they would like to change society to suit their ends. And a very large number of people in my country would happily throw back those fleeing the carnage to become v…

Significant numbers of non-Islam subscribers hold ideas that are incompatible with an open society too If that's your contention then you'd need to account for the high terrorist attack output of Islamists vs other non-Islam subscribers.

There are many many nationalist terrorist groups (e.g. IRA) or communist terrorist groups (e.g. Red Army Faction). The IRA almost killed the British Prime Minister. There actually aren't that much Muslim terrorist attacks

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

#315

Post by 1_player »

gotchange wrote: post #247
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, Maybe you should join the counter-terrorism forces or intelligence community instead to help your country, if that what you're actually after, not just blind revenge because you have to admit that these attacks were a big SNAFUS on the French security apparatus part and some heads got to roll over this but I was amazed to see th…

> I find it really amusing that the general sentiment in France towards guns and a 2nd amendment style right is negative when it is not a stretch to say that some lives could have been saved if armed persons of the populace came to the rescue

Please, no. Liberalization of guns (that is, a tool for hurting and killing living beings) doesn't solve terrorism. It doesn't make people safe. It doesn't help.

People in USA don't understand why guns aren't sold freely in Europe just as we do not understand how guns are available to everybody in the States. Unfortunately I can't express that other than "it just feels wrong."

Don't be naive and think that making everybody a vigilante is going to solve terrorism and Middle East crisis. It goes much deeper than that.

EDIT: don't you have crazy people shooting around over there? I would argue that it's much easier given how available guns are to the populace, but the point is: gun liberalization has nothing to do with keeping citizens safe.

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

#316

Post by johnchristopher »

jacquesm wrote: post #256
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And a very large number of people in my country would happily throw back those fleeing the carnage to become victims of that 40% That statement really doesn't make much sense at all. People are fleeing a war, among them people from the 40% and the 60% group alike. And no one in Europe is advocating throwing anyone back into a war zone. Many want the refugees stay somewhere in the region instead of letting them come…

> And no one in Europe is advocating throwing anyone back into a war zone. Ah, you must be a bit out of touch with recent developments in NL. We're soon to have elections and it looks like we'll have Geert Wilders for prime minister, his main motto is 'close the borders', the secondary one is 'the problem is the foreigners' and the third is 'let's throw all those refugees out'. And whether it is exactly 40% or not is…

I don't understand how living in Belgium I missed that (nitpick: s/president/prime-minister).

But then again these are just polls. And then there needs to be a majority coalition.

But it's a far cry from the Netherlands I knew in the 90's.

Back on the topic: there are some really disturbing messages on social networks and in politician mouths regarding the refugees (who are called migrants here).

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

#317

Post by cableshaft »

rmc wrote: post #157
drinchev wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello. I really like your honesty, courage and passion that I can sense from what you wrote. I don't want to sound offending, but you are saying that you are happy to discuss this and I have almost no contact with deep religious persons that are in IT, so I have a couple of questions. 1. Where is the boundary of your beliefs? I'm always trying to be polite with my dev co-workers, but for example if I write a flagged…

I'm not religious, but I should point out that IT isn't the most 'scientific accepting' as some might think it is. For example: Is IT/open source/tech/programming a meritocracy? If so, how do you explain the massive gender skew? How do you explain how there are scientific studies showing people can be sexist in science (which should be as 'science-based' as IT)? Many people in tech, confronted with this, will double…

It's not 100% a meritocracy, no, although it seems to be more of a meritocracy than other industries.

And a lot of the gender skew starts real, real early. Anyone who took Computer Science in college could see the gender skew in action. I regularly had between 0 and 1 women in my 30+ student classes. They just weren't signing up for Computer Science classes.

And there used to be quite a few female computer scientists, but that trend changed in the 70s. There was probably a cultural aspect to this (i.e. parents or peers influencing their decisions away from computers because computers are for asocial nerds, and you don't want to be a nerd!).

It does appear that the cultural influence is shifting at least slightly in favor of women being programmers again, with nerd/geek culture becoming more fashionable and so many people using computers/smartphones all day long, so hopefully we will see more women pursuing computer science, but the root of the problem is mostly right at high school/college age, not nearly as much in the workforce.

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

#318

Post by rmc »

lars wrote: post #288
crusso wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Significant numbers of non-Islam subscribers hold ideas that are incompatible with an open society too If that's your contention then you'd need to account for the high terrorist attack output of Islamists vs other non-Islam subscribers.

> the high terrorist attack output of Islamists vs other non-Islam subscribers I wonder if this is really true though. Some statistics: https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terrorism-20... While Anders Breivik was shooting kids on the island in Norway, the Norwegian media were speculating that it was most likely perpetrated by muslim extremists. Even though we've historically had way more examples of terro…

Breivik wrote a manifesto claiming he was doing it to support Christianity. And yet people don't call him a Christian terrorist.

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

#319

Post by steveklabnik »

crusso wrote: post #305
steveklabnik wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not Jacques, but from a few months back: "White Supremacists More Dangerous To America Than Foreign Terrorists, Study Says" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/24/domestic-terrorism-... > At least 48 people have been killed stateside by right-wing > extremists in the 14 years since since the September 11 > attacks -- almost twice as many as were killed by > self-identified jihadists in that time. As Jacques says, "…

Are you actually going to put some lone nut jobs here and there on the same level as organized and determined jihadists? If so, you need to include the tens of thousands of murdered people that ISIS has been responsible for. You'll need to include the Russian jet that was blown up, the attack in Paris, and all those killed by al-qaeda on 9/11, etc. You'll also need to explain why the FBI terrorist list doesn't show t…

The FBI is concerned about white supremacists: http://thegrio.com/2015/05/12/fbi-white-supremacists-law-enf... (this particular domain isn't the best, but it's a story that was repeated all over the place) And stuff like https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2012/may/extremism_052212/e... , etc.

And they were in fact doing more, but a lot of it (along with funding) has gone by the wayside since 9/11.

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

#320

Post by jazzyk »

DanBC wrote: post #81
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…

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.

True. But for the most part, it is just talk. They don't throw you off a building for being gay as a rule (there are hate crimes committed, but they are unfortunate exceptions, not a rule).
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