bombings, terror & religious extremism

[Obviousman]

I think that if this is gonna be the wordcount, I'm going to lurk on Currently Listening.

Sorry, that's about as short as I can go

I just can't put arguments into short sentences, but in Dutch it's even worse, I tend to make sentences of one page (which is near impossible in Dutch)... Anyway, I'll do my best to keep it readable

[eastmidswhizzkid]

'nuff said.

[Dark]

I think that if this is gonna be the wordcount, I'm going to lurk on Currently Listening.

Sorry, that's about as short as I can go

I just can't put arguments into short sentences, but in Dutch it's even worse, I tend to make sentences of one page (which is near impossible in Dutch)... Anyway, I'll do my best to keep it readable

Well, there's no worry about it on the industrial people's forum, there every post is a few lines max. Just another post or two until you reach the magical 20 posts needed to go up a rank to "Dead Nettle", eh?

(and to think, here you need hundreds and thousands of posts, whereas the highest rank made so far on Tierkreis' is at 250 )

[eastmidswhizzkid]

"Dead Nettle"

no,korin,it's "Death Metal".have you got a cold?

[RicheyJames]

and you know richard, your insistance on continually playing devils advocate, regardless of your own personal beliefs, doesn't half grow tiresome

trying to goad me into disappearing again barry?

not at all, i just wonder why you nit pick at arguments you dont actually disagree with?

the problem with heartland (and it's one shared by many web-based communities) is that there tends to be very little diversity of opinion on a range of issues. this is entirely natural. but i see nothing wrong with challenging those opinions. it's good to make people think about why they believe what they believe from time to time. i'm not necessarily trying to change people's opinions but surely it's better to hold an opinion because you've given it some thought?

surely your energies, intelligence, wit and time would be better spent fighting the stuff you dont agree on, or find offensive?

well thanks for the compliment but the last time i checked i was averaging well under a post a day here so it's not taking up a huge amount of my energy or time.

join the bbc bradford message board and rip the s**t out of their resident white supremacist for example. they have reoccurring trouble there a chap there who keeps coming back and wont take "f**k off" for an answer

but why should he "take 'f**k off' for an answer"? the man's as entitled to his opinion as you are. you wanted to know about my personal beliefs?

i disapprove of what you say but i will defend to the death your right to say it

that'll do for a start.

[markfiend]

I agree that having opinions challenged is the best (possibly only) way to refine, research and rationalise them. Hey, who knows, maybe even change them!

But I know from experience though that online communities revolving around discussion of a "controversy", there is a tendency for the "sides" to retreat to entrenched positions, to go over the same ground again and again, even to descend (on less well-moderated fora) into name-calling and flamewar. It gets tedious after a while.

but why should he "take 'f**k off' for an answer"? the man's as entitled to his opinion as you are. you wanted to know about my personal beliefs?

i disapprove of what you say but i will defend to the death your right to say it

that'll do for a start.

All fine and dandy; everyone's entitled to their own opinion. But what people are not entitled to is their own facts.

Some people seem incapable of realising that their viewpoint has no factual basis; indeed seem quite insulted that facts are being used against them. If the facts don't fit your explanation, you should junk the explanation. Unfortunately, people tend instead to junk the facts.

To take this white supremacist as an example, I don't know what he's saying, but I'd be willing to bet that his modus operandi goes something like this:

1. Start a thread with a copy-and-paste of some text like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and claim it proves that The Jews want to take over the world.
2. Be bombarded with several hundred posts explaining that The Protocols are well known to be a forgery, etc.
3. Pick nits with a few minor points in these several hundred posts.
4. Claim victory and disappear for a few days.
5. Return to (1)

OK, this isn't necessarily how he works, but I've seen enough of it on other fora when someone who is wrong tries to convince the rest of the world that he's right.

And white supremacism isn't just "another opinion" in a moral relativist continuum, it's wrong. Wrong as in contrary to the facts.

[Candover Premiere]

Wot rj says is right.

One of the things which reeeeeally annoys be about this forum is that whilst almost all will slag off tories, the mail, capitalism and the like,

(a) it's generally done with the sophistication of the muslim who was on the news yesterday arguing that the uk asked for the london bombings because the uk was blowing up citizens in iraq;

(b) the reaction is about as predictable and knee jerk as the daily mail readers which are slagged off; and

(c) it's all a bit too self righteous.

I like the fact that rj challenges some of that, and I don't really care how honestly held his views are, as they are usually well informed and expressed with a bit of wit.

When I come back to this forum, I look for four things:

1. What has CP been up to (because I fancy her sometimes)

2. Are the sisters playing at the shepherds bush empire (which, being a five minute walk away, is about the distance I am prepared to go to see them play)

3. Has rj posted anything amusing (since mugabe left, the only really clever poster left)

4. Is anyone making a complete dipstick of themselves

Given that the sisters are unlikely to end up at the empire, and that black biscuit chap seems to have has disappeared, 2 and 4 are out. Rj goes, and that just leaves cp. And she has been a bit of a (virtual) flutterby of late, so that just leaves rj.

Yeuch. What a thought.

[Dark]

"Dead Nettle"

no,korin,it's "Death Metal".have you got a cold?

You want Death Metal, then our forum isn't really the right place. Except for Lilleh who loves pretty much any sort of metal.

(And I weaned her onto the Sisters by sending her Bury Me Deep, and she then got TC and ToL, so maybe... )

[MrChris]

That's the point though, an awful lot of people swallow this stuff.

yeah, cos everyone with (far) right-wing views is dead thick aren't they kids?

It is interesting, though, that in what is supposed to be the 'intelligent' version of political debate - i.e. the massive body of work in contemporary political philosophy - it is very hard to find any 'serious' philosophers with right wing views. Hayek was pretty extreme but is long since dead. Nozick was extreme but repudiated his ideas and is also now dead. The right-wing press often wheel out supposed 'philosophers' like Roger Scruton, but no-one in academia takes them seriously at all. When setting up a course in contemporary political theory, it's VERY difficult to come up with anything decent to fill in the 'right' half of the philosophical spectrum.

This could be taken to mean all sorts of things. It could mean that academia is dominated by a liberal lefty elite, and the genuinely talented right-wing philosophers don't get published . There could be SOMETHING in that, but it wouldn't explain the sheer size of the vacuum. Or, it could mean that right-wingers are thick . Again, this can't stand in for a total explanation though. It's odd in practice, because in my experience quite a decent proportion of my students have right-ish views, and obviously a big chunk of the population as a whole have. But there is no really sophisticated philosophical expression of their ideas.

Go figure

[Eva]

Could it be that the phenomenon has more to do with (lack of) education than with intelligence? That if you have little or no resources you're more in need (and likely to buy) easy answers to difficult questions?

And I guess that leaders of extremist groups often have quite a high education, but then again they're not looking for easy answers, they want power.

[Obviousman]

Could it be that the phenomenon has more to do with (lack of) education than with intelligence? That if you have little or no resources you're more in need (and likely to buy) easy answers to difficult questions?

And I guess that leaders of extremist groups often have quite a high education, but then again they're not looking for easy answers, they want power.

Very much agree with both of your points!

It is a sad thing very few parents give their children something like 'political education', and all they do is nagging about how bad everything is going... Which does, of course, not solve anything at all...

[aims]

Wot rj says is right.

One of the things which reeeeeally annoys be about this forum is that whilst almost all will slag off ... the mail.

Somehow I think you'll be hard pressed to find intellectual discussion where anyone agrees with the Mail as a whole. If you do, it's probably faux-intellectual anyway.

[ruffers]

I won't have it in the house!

[boudicca]

This is what my old mum thinks of bombings, terror, and religious extremism...



She'd kill me if she knew I'd just done that!

[Ocean Moves]

terrible though the London bombings may have
been, I find this shocking statistic gives it
abit more context...

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050719/140/fnnt4.html

[eastmidswhizzkid]

that is a truly appalling loss of life.i dread to think what the final total will be;especially as the western coalition seems to have no discernible exit strategy,and every day sees more actions of guerilla warfare from "insurgents".

[Ocean Moves]

there was a terrorism expert on tv last night in Australia
(American man) who made a direct connection between the
bombings by British muslims in London, and their sentiments
towards western actions in the middle East.
He pointed out that in studying 430 suicide bombers over
10 years, typically they were well eduated, succesful people
who did not hate western society or the western countries they
reside in, but felt deeply troubled by western government actions.
That is to say, they feel powerless to prevent
governments acting in this way.
Likewise, the Israeli/Palestine situation.
Likewise, US policy in middle east : 9/11

Of course, Bush/Blaire/Howard will insist that they were all nutters,
and there is NO link to actions in Iraq whatsoever.

[Obviousman]

Some interesting stuff about it in yesterdays newspaper over here too (as it's our national holiday today: no paper heute)

There was this chap (some professor IIRC) with a complete theory about those guys not actually wanted to be kamikaze terrorists but that they most lightly had planned to get back home alive

His arguments:
They payed a ticket where they parked their car
They bought a return ticket rather than a one way ticket
Instead of the explosives being around their stomachs, they had put them in backpacks
And instead of sitting on the ground floor of the bus, the one guy was sitting on top

Because of this, he concludes someone might've told them there was a timer on the bombs and so when they pushed the button they though they activated the timer rather than igniting the bomb...
The guy on the bus must most lightly have thought to activate the timer and leave his backpack downstairs when getting of the bus...

Interesting stuff, no?

[markfiend]

I've heard something about this too but one objection is; by the time the guy on the bus had set his bomb off, the bombs on the underground had already gone off almost an hour earlier. And he must have at least suspected that the other bombers had died in their blasts as there wasn't enough time for a timer to work. Maybe he was expecting them to come out of the Underground, then they didn't and he panicked/delayed/whatever.

But then he set his bomb off anyway.

[Obviousman]

Mhh, yes, that is indeed strange, did not think of that really...

Perhaps he could've just been doubting about actually doing it and all that and in order not to make as much victims as intended ignite the bomb on top of the bus, or something...

[markfiend]

I don't know. I think it's unlikely we'll ever know for sure.

I think it's fairly obvious that something "went wrong" with the guy on the bus; he was probably meant to set his bomb off on the tube at the same time as the other three. (I've heard speculation that it was meant to go off somewhere on the Covent Garden - Leicester Square - Piccadilly Circus section of the Piccadilly line so that the four explosions would form "a burning cross in the heart of London".)

Maybe he chickened out but later decided that he'd probably be caught so what the f*ck and blew himself up anyway.

[boudicca]

I heard something about the explosives they used being very unstable (in that they are liable to go off if someone sneezes or something), so maybe the guy on the bus had thought against it but... well, when he was on the bus, someone sneezed...

But personally I think the bus bomb could have been an entirely deliberate action. Planned with the chaos that they knew would be caused at King's Cross in mind.

[Obviousman]

Don't know if they're very unstable, but I do know you need a to be a graduate in chemics to build them... The article I was talking about said if they'd just tried to build this themselves, most probably a couple of houses in West-Yorkshire would've been blown up... So perhaps they're only unstable while being built?

My interpretation about the bus bombing is more inclined towards mf's than your theory really, boudicca... Sitting on the top floor of the bus is the thing I least understand about it, so sneaking out and then all of a sudden getting to think you'll be caught anyway does make one do such things in such situations, I think... (still it's all theories of course, since they are dead)

Anyone more familiar with that specific bus, where does it go to? Perhaps to the station or carpark where they came from?

[boudicca]

My interpretation about the bus bombing is more inclined towards mf's than your theory really, boudicca... Sitting on the top floor of the bus is the thing I least understand about it

That is very true. I could well be talking out my arse, it wouldn't be the first time.

Possibly he needed to be somewhere he could fiddle with the explosives without anyone seeing?

[Obviousman]

Quite possible indeed, especially if he was stressy, which is another quite possible thing...