Is it really any wonder we are seeing a growing nationalism? It looks like the logical consequence of what is being crammed down our throats.
You could turn that argument around and ask is it any wonder we are seeing more terrorism given the growing nationalism?
Terrorism is not a huge threat to Western society unless we choose to make it so. In the USA incidents classed as terrorism (all forms, the majority of which are not islamic) have resulted in 200-300 deaths a year in recent history. Contrast that with the 15,000 or so murders annually and the 10,000+ gun deaths not classed as murder. Or how about the 30,000+ deaths in road traffic accidents every year?
I'm not suggesting that terrorism is not a significant issue, but the threat shouldn't be blown out of proportion. Nor should we effectively (and actually in some cases) wage war on islamic populations - that will just continue to provide willing recruits (and most terrorist incidents are perpetrated by citizens of the countries targeted rather than immigrants).
We should be targeting terrorist behavior, but not by suggesting that everyone in particular countries is a potential terrorist. That makes about as much sense as if other countries refused Americans the right to travel on the grounds that, because 1% of the adult population are in prison, everyone is a potential criminal.
I wonder if those numbers are counting this guy This guy who just last week was attacking muslims and killed a couple of people protecting them with a knife and was yelling 'I call it patriotism!' in court.
terrorism (n) "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of a political, religious or ideological aim."
Idealogical violence and intimidation against civilians - check. In pursuit of political, ideological and religious goals - check. It's TERRORISM.
But hey this guys presumably Christian right? So it's not counted as terrorism. Especially by Trump.
Look at the caption there they are wondering if they "might" call it a hate crime - not terrorism. There's a question there.
So what has tiny hands Trump done to keep us safe from terrorism like this? NOT A DAMN THING. He encourages this type of stuff honestly. He had like 20 opportunities to mention this before his staff got around to sending out 1 tweet saying it's unacceptable. That's it. Almost did nothing. So here in this case we get to see what 'doing nothing about terrorism' does.
The real thing to be concerned about are extremists of any religion or ideology. Leaders are getting it wrong and scapegoating only one group.
The public and the media treat the Portland killer no differently than any other crime. And it is VIEWED as a crime, and a matter of law enforcement. When it involves Muslims, suddenly it becomes something more than a crime and an existential threat to civilization itself, and we decide we need to be at war with it. That the act is somehow worse and more dangerous even though the victims are just as dead either way. And again, for the dozenth time, when terrorism is applied to the situations in UK the last few weeks, but is explicitly NOT applied to the Portland killer (even though he made his political views clear at his own court appearance), then we have three choices:
1.) That we start applying the word terrorism to everyone who commits an act of violence with political aims.
2.) We change the definition of the word to mean ONLY violent acts committed by Muslims or
3.) We retire the word altogether because it has now become meaningless because most of society ACTS and USES the word like option number two has already happened even though that isn't the case.
As recently as the mid-90s, we still had our heads on straight about this. Both Timothy McVeigh who blew up a Federal Building in Oklahoma City (how soon we forget) and the people who were responsible for the first bombing of the World Trade Center were both referred to as terrorists in equal measure. A short decade or two later, we have allowed fear to completely subvert our own language and regulated the term to only a certain group of people, based on their skin color and religion, rather than the act itself.
Political opportunists such as Trump ("see we need my ban and wall!" and "stop being nice to muslims!") and PM May ("omg we need to regulate the hell out of the internet!") will chose a 4th option. May wants to use this to further her own personal ideological quest to ban pornography and anything else she sees as evil, and anything she can't control. She wants to use this as an excuse to infringe on privacy under the guise of counter-terror procedures.
So they are determined to make things worse in order to score political victories to control their own people.
And of course this just happens to line up with upcoming elections. They did the same thing in France. We can expect the same thing in the USA in 2018. Why are people committing terror attacks to try to get people to vote for nationalists such as LePen and May and Trump?
May wanted to introduce similar legislation regulating the expression of 'extremism' before but ran into the stumbling block of defining extremism in legal terms. People commit violence in the name of innumerable causes of course.
May wanted to introduce similar legislation regulating the expression of 'extremism' before but ran into the stumbling block of defining extremism in legal terms. People commit violence in the name of innumerable causes of course.
I'm just not convinced that ramping up what we call it matters an ounce. I mean, that was the argument against Obama for the entire 8 years from the right. That he won't say "radical Islamic extremism". These words, in my opinion, are nothing more than giving someone who thinks they have asthma an inhaler with a placebo in it, and then they immediately feel better, despite nothing physically actually happening. The US and Britain, and France already take terrorism very, very seriously. I just think it's a fallacy to think that they don't. I have no problem bombing terrorists. I have no problem killing terrorists. The problem is that when we kill them, we end up bombing weddings, killing a couple children. And we call it "collateral damage".
And I've always asked this: are the bombs that we drop, our drones strikes, any less of a form of terrorism than what we see so frequently now in Western countries?? We treat the innocent people we kill in the name of fighting terrorism as little more than statistics. Just because we do it in the formal capacity as a country doesn't make it any better. To the population of Iraq, to the hundreds of thousands of people killed because of our illegal war, WE are the terrorists. We waltzed in, destroyed their country, killed scores of people they know who were just as innocent as anyone at the Ariana Grande concert. And we wonder why there is blowback from that?? The whole Muslim world saw us lie about Iraq, ushered in what eventually ended up to be wanton slaughter of the civilian population (through our own bombs and the repercussions of the botched occupation) and we guaranteed the radicalization of 2 or 3 generations of disillusioned young, Muslim men. Iraq will eventually eclipse even Vietnam as the greatest foreign policy blunder of all-time, mostly because it doesn't just effect us. We condemned Europe to this as well.
It's hard to overstate how much of a disaster BOTH Iraq Wars were, despite how wonderfully everyone thinks Desert Storm played on TV (and that is all it was, a show). The rallying cry of Osama Bin Laden was the staging of American troops in Saudi Arabia. The Bush family ties to the oil industry, and the fact that father and son held the power of the Presidency to bring the military might of the US Army crashing onto the Arab world twice in a the span of 12 years, built this. We waltzed in like we owned the place, killed thousands, and expected there would be no consequences. Well, there are consequences. And we'll be living with them for the rest of the lives of everyone on this forum.
Admittedly, I'm not middle east scholar or anything but Qatar has been one of the most westernized of the gulf states. This is surprising and possibly a prelude to war. Perhaps Qatar is not radical enough for those other countries?
Admittedly, I'm not middle east scholar or anything but Qatar has been one of the most westernized of the gulf states. This is surprising and possibly a prelude to war. Perhaps Qatar is not radical enough for those other countries?
Not so surprising after last week statements of their emir (which they claim is fake) supporting Iran..
The Syria/Iraq region is a battleground between the Sunni Islam (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE and the majority of Syria populace) and Shia Islam axis Iran/Hizbollah/Afghanistan Shia militia/Alawia minority (Assad). Iran is trying the establish the "Half Shia Crescent", meaning a territorial continuity from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea (i.e through Iraq, Syria, Lebanon (Hezbollah) hence the "Crescent").
This is done by displacing Sunni populated cities/villages and populating them with Shia families brought from Iran/Iraq/Afghanistan.
Iran is also having a proxy war against Saudi Arabia via the "Houthi rebels" in Yemen (which also cuts off relations with Qatar). So it is but natural to cut off the relations with a country which is openly support your direct enemy.
Also Qatar is supporting the "Muslim Brotherhood", the same "Muslim Brotherhood" which the current Egypt president - Al Sisi - has overthrown, hence the enmity between Egypt and Qatar.
Admittedly, I'm not middle east scholar or anything but Qatar has been one of the most westernized of the gulf states. This is surprising and possibly a prelude to war. Perhaps Qatar is not radical enough for those other countries?
qatar is plenty radical in it's own way. it's about an old rivalry between the saudis and qatar. because qatar is a small country, they project influence through regional groups...without saying anything about the other states involved qatar is a really bad actor because they are the main sponsor of muslim brotherhood which is (apart from being terrible) foundationally an arab-nationalist, anti-imperialist and anti-feudalist organisation and that's something that annoys the saudis a lot. their relationship with the MB has always been complicated. also current egypt is anti-MB so there you have it, an alignment of interests and imbalance of powers. qatar also supports hamas (also anti-imperialist, arab-nationalist...) which saudis also don't have a great relationship with. obviously israel is not a fan. US has a fantastic relationship with qatar and sells looooooads of weapons to them ("State Dept. approves sale of 72 F-15 fighters to Qatar"). the contradiction in US foreign policy has made it impossible for the US to do anything because the accusations levied against qatar are essentially true and it's politically impossible for trump to defend a muslim brotherhood- and hamas- enabling country now.
i think that this has 0 chance to escalate into a war, but it can do lasting damage to qatar. i think this was an opportunist gutsy move by the arab countries because they see the current US administration as weak.
You know that secret letter that allegedly gets passed down from one president to the next as they leave/enter office that contains all these highly classified materials?
Despite not being religious at all, Trump while generally a fool, knows his main/only support are hardline Christian evangelicals. So he's playing up the religious angle for all it's worth.
So he might not tell us about the aliens because of that because aliens while not totally incompatible with religion definitely make it a bit harder for the believers to keep on believing and stay in line. Aliens would, if nothing else, raise questions that perhaps The Church doesn't want to deal with. It doesn't help them to control their people when questions like this get raised.
Trump is desperately trying to start a feud with the Mayor of London for reasons beyond understanding, until you realize he is psychotic. He wants panic, he is selling nothing but fear and loathing.
And I've always asked this: are the bombs that we drop, our drones strikes, any less of a form of terrorism than what we see so frequently now in Western countries?? We treat the innocent people we kill in the name of fighting terrorism as little more than statistics. Just because we do it in the formal capacity as a country doesn't make it any better. To the population of Iraq, to the hundreds of thousands of people killed because of our illegal war, WE are the terrorists. We waltzed in, destroyed their country, killed scores of people they know who were just as innocent as anyone at the Ariana Grande concert. And we wonder why there is blowback from that?? The whole Muslim world saw us lie about Iraq, ushered in what eventually ended up to be wanton slaughter of the civilian population (through our own bombs and the repercussions of the botched occupation) and we guaranteed the radicalization of 2 or 3 generations of disillusioned young, Muslim men. Iraq will eventually eclipse even Vietnam as the greatest foreign policy blunder of all-time, mostly because it doesn't just effect us. We condemned Europe to this as well.
Just like children in the United States in the 1950s lived under the specter of nuclear annihilation at any moment--the age of Duck and Cover--children in Pakistan fear sunny and clear or lightly-cloudy days because that makes it easier for the drones to track people.
Unlike most people, I do know the answer to the question "how do we defeat terrorism?". The answer is, in fact, very simple: you can't. Even if we stopped all military activity in that area of the world immediately then revenge attacks will still occur. There has always been terrorism and there will always be terrorism because Michael Caine as Alfred from The Dark Knight is correct--some men just want to watch the world burn. It doesn't matter whether some Islamic extremist is blowing himself up in a crowded market, or has driven a truck into a crowd of people, or if a Christian extremist murders a doctor outside an abortion clinic, or if some Hindus gun down some Muslims over in Kashmir, or if some guy pilots his personal Cessna into the IRS building in Austin (that happened about 10 years ago), those are all acts of terrorism because of their clear religious and/or political motivations. JFK in Dealey Plaza was terrorism, as was MLK's assassination. Spray-painting something on the side of a synagogue or mosque is not terrorism because no one was assaulted or killed during the act. On a side note I don't consider that a hate crime, either, because all crime is hate crime--no one commits a crime against someone out of love.
Neither travel bans nor monitoring Internet activity will deter terrorism. Once you announce that you will start monitoring Internet activity the people you are trying to monitor will change tactics to make it more difficult to track them--blind e-mail accounts where they write only draft messages to each other without sending them, dark web sites where they can post anonymously in code to each other, etc. As far as travel bans...well, the probability of a random person being a terrorist is so low that even if you combine it into the number of people coming from a country where you suspect terror organizations are rampant the overall probability of a random person walking off a plane into your country being a terrorist is similarly low. For example, if p(a random person is a terrorist) = 1/100,000 and you let 250,000 people in then p(you let a terrorist in) = 1 - p(none of them are terrorists) = 1 - .99999^250000 = 8.2%. The probability of 1/100,000 is probably too high but if my odds of winning are 91.8% I will take that bet.
Spray-painting something on the side of a synagogue or mosque is not terrorism because no one was assaulted or killed during the act. On a side note I don't consider that a hate crime, either, because all crime is hate crime--no one commits a crime against someone out of love.
I agree with a lot of what you said, but I think the example you quote clearly is a hate crime. The vast majority of crime is not motivated by hate, with economic motives being the most common reason - a burglar normally targets a home that he thinks is worth stealing from for instance. There is a potential argument to be had though about whether hate crimes should be punished more severely than comparable non-hate ones (as is currently the case).
yeah I guess hate crimes are crimes with an extra dose of personal attack to them. A crime of stealing from the tip jar, for example, is just a regular old crime. That's the distinction.
Corbyn not playing around with the effects of Theresa May's policy positions. This is how you attack your opponent. Labour was dead in the water a few weeks ago. He is still going to lose, but her honeymoon is over.
It appears that ABC and CBS will preempt daytime programming this coming Thursday so that they may air James Comey's Senate testimony live. I know they are probably hoping for bombshells or smoking guns but I suspect they will wind up with Al Capone's Secret Vault.
It appears that ABC and CBS will preempt daytime programming this coming Thursday so that they may air James Comey's Senate testimony live. I know they are probably hoping for bombshells or smoking guns but I suspect they will wind up with Al Capone's Secret Vault.
Comey is going to be under oath and directly contradict Trump's account of his firing, at risk of perjury if he lies. If you are of the opinion that Trump has ALREADY committed obstruction of justice (and I am) it's a big deal indeed.
i know they are probably hoping for bombshells or smoking guns but I suspect they will wind up with Al Capone's Secret Vault.
That exactly describes Al Capone's vault.
I'm not expecting great things from Comey. They're had weeks to pressure him and plan their attacks against him and overall counter anything he might say. I don't think there will be any surprises.
Of course approximately 50% of folks will see him one way or the other regardless of what he says. My guess is there will be approximately the same number of unanswered questions when he's done testifying as there were before. Welcome to 21st century politics...
It appears that ABC and CBS will preempt daytime programming this coming Thursday so that they may air James Comey's Senate testimony live. I know they are probably hoping for bombshells or smoking guns but I suspect they will wind up with Al Capone's Secret Vault.
@Mathsorcerer Hehheh, maybe they need Geraldo Rivera as a commentator again for this as well ( I remember watching that way back when).
Bobby Mac mentioned the same thing on his talk radio today as well. Guess we will see.
I am glad you mentioned that all terrorism can't be stopped, esp. with SO many ppl, ideologies, economic problems, etc.,etc. in the world today, combined with internet. Seems like I hear many in govt., esp hardliners, thinking it can ALL be eliminated.
Democracy is in general a nice idea, but I have thought for a long time, that it also makes terrorism, esp. from the lone wolf, and even more so from the lone actor, easier. Just goes along with it in part. Unfortunately the bad comes along with the good.
Trump is desperately trying to start a feud with the Mayor of London for reasons beyond understanding, until you realize he is psychotic. He wants panic, he is selling nothing but fear and loathing.
That's not psychosis, and psychosis isn't another word for "terrible" or "evil." Instead of using "psychotic" as a catch-all like this, it might be better to pick another word that isn't a symptom of a particular kind of mental illness that should not carry any moral judgment.
If Trump were literally psychotic he wouldn't be able to function as much as he does.
Trump is desperately trying to start a feud with the Mayor of London for reasons beyond understanding, until you realize he is psychotic. He wants panic, he is selling nothing but fear and loathing.
That's not psychosis, and psychosis isn't another word for "terrible" or "evil." Instead of using "psychotic" as a catch-all like this, it might be better to pick another word that isn't a symptom of a particular kind of mental illness that should not carry any moral judgment.
If Trump were literally psychotic he wouldn't be able to function as much as he does.
I could buy narcissisistic for sure, but not psychotic. I do think he lives in his own little world. Still hasn't made me wish I'd voted for Hillary though. That could change if they start wasting my tax money on a stupid wall however. I don't think will happen but you never know...
Trump is desperately trying to start a feud with the Mayor of London for reasons beyond understanding, until you realize he is psychotic. He wants panic, he is selling nothing but fear and loathing.
That's not psychosis, and psychosis isn't another word for "terrible" or "evil." Instead of using "psychotic" as a catch-all like this, it might be better to pick another word that isn't a symptom of a particular kind of mental illness that should not carry any moral judgment.
If Trump were literally psychotic he wouldn't be able to function as much as he does.
I could buy narcissisistic for sure, but not psychotic. I do think he lives in his own little world. Still hasn't made me wish I'd voted for Hillary though. That could change if they start wasting my tax money on a stupid wall however. I don't think will happen but you never know...
Yeah, I think he shows a lot of narcissistic traits, but then there's the Goldwater rule.
So he wants to privatize the FAA. He's got the worst ideas about anything. Pick a topic, he'll come down on the wrong side of it.
Seen this comment on FB: "So not only does he want to close VA hospitals, take away VA benefits, decimate Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, destroy food stamps, financially support terrorism (he sold arms to the Saudi's and anyone who doesn't think the Saudi's support terrorism is a complete asshole), betray our country, and turn the oval office into a private profit making enterprise, now he wants to knowingly, intentionally and deliberately put the lives of millions of people every day at risk by letting for profit corporate scumbags run the ATC System."
You know people would say things about Obama that he never said anything close to wanting to do. But trump has actually put forward plans to do these things in his budget. With him it's not hyperbole.
There was a work-related shooting in Orlando yesterday that killed 5, receiving pretty scant coverage, but the real issue we are dealing with is revealed in this CNN story highlight:
What difference does it make if it was terrorist related or not?? This attack killed 2 less people than the situation in London, but it is not treated like anything remotely earth-shattering. The takeaway from this headline is "nothing to worry about, it wasn't a Muslim". And this ties in to a study I saw yesterday that acts of violence committed by Muslims receive 450% more media attention than those that aren't.
Comments
This guy who just last week was attacking muslims and killed a couple of people protecting them with a knife and was yelling 'I call it patriotism!' in court.
terrorism (n)
"the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of a political, religious or ideological aim."
Idealogical violence and intimidation against civilians - check. In pursuit of political, ideological and religious goals - check. It's TERRORISM.
But hey this guys presumably Christian right? So it's not counted as terrorism. Especially by Trump.
Look at the caption there they are wondering if they "might" call it a hate crime - not terrorism. There's a question there.
So what has tiny hands Trump done to keep us safe from terrorism like this? NOT A DAMN THING. He encourages this type of stuff honestly. He had like 20 opportunities to mention this before his staff got around to sending out 1 tweet saying it's unacceptable. That's it. Almost did nothing. So here in this case we get to see what 'doing nothing about terrorism' does.
The real thing to be concerned about are extremists of any religion or ideology. Leaders are getting it wrong and scapegoating only one group.
1.) That we start applying the word terrorism to everyone who commits an act of violence with political aims.
2.) We change the definition of the word to mean ONLY violent acts committed by Muslims or
3.) We retire the word altogether because it has now become meaningless because most of society ACTS and USES the word like option number two has already happened even though that isn't the case.
As recently as the mid-90s, we still had our heads on straight about this. Both Timothy McVeigh who blew up a Federal Building in Oklahoma City (how soon we forget) and the people who were responsible for the first bombing of the World Trade Center were both referred to as terrorists in equal measure. A short decade or two later, we have allowed fear to completely subvert our own language and regulated the term to only a certain group of people, based on their skin color and religion, rather than the act itself.
Political opportunists such as Trump ("see we need my ban and wall!" and "stop being nice to muslims!") and PM May ("omg we need to regulate the hell out of the internet!") will chose a 4th option. May wants to use this to further her own personal ideological quest to ban pornography and anything else she sees as evil, and anything she can't control. She wants to use this as an excuse to infringe on privacy under the guise of counter-terror procedures.
So they are determined to make things worse in order to score political victories to control their own people.
And of course this just happens to line up with upcoming elections. They did the same thing in France. We can expect the same thing in the USA in 2018. Why are people committing terror attacks to try to get people to vote for nationalists such as LePen and May and Trump?
And I've always asked this: are the bombs that we drop, our drones strikes, any less of a form of terrorism than what we see so frequently now in Western countries?? We treat the innocent people we kill in the name of fighting terrorism as little more than statistics. Just because we do it in the formal capacity as a country doesn't make it any better. To the population of Iraq, to the hundreds of thousands of people killed because of our illegal war, WE are the terrorists. We waltzed in, destroyed their country, killed scores of people they know who were just as innocent as anyone at the Ariana Grande concert. And we wonder why there is blowback from that?? The whole Muslim world saw us lie about Iraq, ushered in what eventually ended up to be wanton slaughter of the civilian population (through our own bombs and the repercussions of the botched occupation) and we guaranteed the radicalization of 2 or 3 generations of disillusioned young, Muslim men. Iraq will eventually eclipse even Vietnam as the greatest foreign policy blunder of all-time, mostly because it doesn't just effect us. We condemned Europe to this as well.
It's hard to overstate how much of a disaster BOTH Iraq Wars were, despite how wonderfully everyone thinks Desert Storm played on TV (and that is all it was, a show). The rallying cry of Osama Bin Laden was the staging of American troops in Saudi Arabia. The Bush family ties to the oil industry, and the fact that father and son held the power of the Presidency to bring the military might of the US Army crashing onto the Arab world twice in a the span of 12 years, built this. We waltzed in like we owned the place, killed thousands, and expected there would be no consequences. Well, there are consequences. And we'll be living with them for the rest of the lives of everyone on this forum.
UAE, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain cut off relations with fellow Gulf state Qatar.
Admittedly, I'm not middle east scholar or anything but Qatar has been one of the most westernized of the gulf states. This is surprising and possibly a prelude to war. Perhaps Qatar is not radical enough for those other countries?
God knows it'd be hard to take Saudi Arabia seriously as they complain about another Gulf state "sponsoring terrorism".
The Syria/Iraq region is a battleground between the Sunni Islam (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE and the majority of Syria populace) and Shia Islam axis Iran/Hizbollah/Afghanistan Shia militia/Alawia minority (Assad). Iran is trying the establish the "Half Shia Crescent", meaning a territorial continuity from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea (i.e through Iraq, Syria, Lebanon (Hezbollah) hence the "Crescent").
This is done by displacing Sunni populated cities/villages and populating them with Shia families brought from Iran/Iraq/Afghanistan.
Iran is also having a proxy war against Saudi Arabia via the "Houthi rebels" in Yemen (which also cuts off relations with Qatar). So it is but natural to cut off the relations with a country which is openly support your direct enemy.
Also Qatar is supporting the "Muslim Brotherhood", the same "Muslim Brotherhood" which the current Egypt president - Al Sisi - has overthrown, hence the enmity between Egypt and Qatar.
Source: The Least I Could Do
qatar also supports hamas (also anti-imperialist, arab-nationalist...) which saudis also don't have a great relationship with. obviously israel is not a fan.
US has a fantastic relationship with qatar and sells looooooads of weapons to them ("State Dept. approves sale of 72 F-15 fighters to Qatar"). the contradiction in US foreign policy has made it impossible for the US to do anything because the accusations levied against qatar are essentially true and it's politically impossible for trump to defend a muslim brotherhood- and hamas- enabling country now.
i think that this has 0 chance to escalate into a war, but it can do lasting damage to qatar. i think this was an opportunist gutsy move by the arab countries because they see the current US administration as weak.
Trump saw it was from Obama and just torched it.
So he might not tell us about the aliens because of that because aliens while not totally incompatible with religion definitely make it a bit harder for the believers to keep on believing and stay in line. Aliens would, if nothing else, raise questions that perhaps The Church doesn't want to deal with. It doesn't help them to control their people when questions like this get raised.
/2c
Unlike most people, I do know the answer to the question "how do we defeat terrorism?". The answer is, in fact, very simple: you can't. Even if we stopped all military activity in that area of the world immediately then revenge attacks will still occur. There has always been terrorism and there will always be terrorism because Michael Caine as Alfred from The Dark Knight is correct--some men just want to watch the world burn. It doesn't matter whether some Islamic extremist is blowing himself up in a crowded market, or has driven a truck into a crowd of people, or if a Christian extremist murders a doctor outside an abortion clinic, or if some Hindus gun down some Muslims over in Kashmir, or if some guy pilots his personal Cessna into the IRS building in Austin (that happened about 10 years ago), those are all acts of terrorism because of their clear religious and/or political motivations. JFK in Dealey Plaza was terrorism, as was MLK's assassination. Spray-painting something on the side of a synagogue or mosque is not terrorism because no one was assaulted or killed during the act. On a side note I don't consider that a hate crime, either, because all crime is hate crime--no one commits a crime against someone out of love.
Neither travel bans nor monitoring Internet activity will deter terrorism. Once you announce that you will start monitoring Internet activity the people you are trying to monitor will change tactics to make it more difficult to track them--blind e-mail accounts where they write only draft messages to each other without sending them, dark web sites where they can post anonymously in code to each other, etc. As far as travel bans...well, the probability of a random person being a terrorist is so low that even if you combine it into the number of people coming from a country where you suspect terror organizations are rampant the overall probability of a random person walking off a plane into your country being a terrorist is similarly low. For example, if p(a random person is a terrorist) = 1/100,000 and you let 250,000 people in then p(you let a terrorist in) = 1 - p(none of them are terrorists) = 1 - .99999^250000 = 8.2%. The probability of 1/100,000 is probably too high but if my odds of winning are 91.8% I will take that bet.
Someone had quite the moment of inspiration when they put this together.
I'm not expecting great things from Comey. They're had weeks to pressure him and plan their attacks against him and overall counter anything he might say. I don't think there will be any surprises.
Stay tuned on Thursday.
Of course approximately 50% of folks will see him one way or the other regardless of what he says. My guess is there will be approximately the same number of unanswered questions when he's done testifying as there were before. Welcome to 21st century politics...
Bobby Mac mentioned the same thing on his talk radio today as well. Guess we will see.
I am glad you mentioned that all terrorism can't be stopped, esp. with SO many ppl, ideologies, economic problems, etc.,etc. in the world today, combined with internet.
Seems like I hear many in govt., esp hardliners, thinking it can ALL be eliminated.
Democracy is in general a nice idea, but I have thought for a long time, that it also makes terrorism, esp. from the lone wolf, and even more so from the lone actor, easier. Just goes along with it in part. Unfortunately the bad comes along with the good.
If Trump were literally psychotic he wouldn't be able to function as much as he does.
Unfortunately, I don't quite think he realizes the worldwide ramifications all the way through. Maybe I'm wrong though.
Seen this comment on FB:
"So not only does he want to close VA hospitals, take away VA benefits, decimate Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, destroy food stamps, financially support terrorism (he sold arms to the Saudi's and anyone who doesn't think the Saudi's support terrorism is a complete asshole), betray our country, and turn the oval office into a private profit making enterprise, now he wants to knowingly, intentionally and deliberately put the lives of millions of people every day at risk by letting for profit corporate scumbags run the ATC System."
You know people would say things about Obama that he never said anything close to wanting to do. But trump has actually put forward plans to do these things in his budget. With him it's not hyperbole.
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rWfB5wk2pFo/WTWu7gEDMsI/AAAAAAAAvJY/qr7wQIpzDOwLFh4DkTpGG7LUIc8Sq6BBQCLcB/s1600/Screenshot+2017-06-05+at+12.17.40+PM.png
What difference does it make if it was terrorist related or not?? This attack
killed 2 less people than the situation in London, but it is not treated like anything remotely earth-shattering. The takeaway from this headline is "nothing to worry about, it wasn't a Muslim". And this ties in to a study I saw yesterday that acts of violence committed by Muslims receive 450% more media attention than those that aren't.