Don’t get the humor in this at all. Seriously.
Hey, kids! Let's play White Terrorism Bingo
Ambiguity
#14
Seems unlikely. All the news I’m seeing about him is both calling him a terrorist (not gunman) and they’re all saying he was a strange, reclusive loner. None of the squares match.
popobawa4u
#15
Well, he was certainly a gunman, just the same.
I imagine that most people aren’t eager to line up to say that he was the star pupil, or president of their club. They somehow never interview the person who says that they used to joke about murder every weekend.
Sqarr
#17
And, as we all know, no matter what the terrorist says and no matter who hears him say it, the “facts” will never be “in.”
Falcor
split this topic
#18
6 posts were split to a new topic: Islamic Terroism
Salafist Terrorism
Salafist Terrorism
Salafist Terrorism
caze
#20
The problem is that, far too often, the two are conflated. All Islam becomes associated with terrorism and only those connected to Islam can be considered true terrorists.
Well that’s just stupid, so call it out when you see it, but that doesn’t invalidate the justified criticism (of which there is plenty). The failure of the left to properly engage in this leaves it to the right to frame the debate, which is part of what leads to that bigotry in the first place.
Space_Monkey
#23
So, I’m waiting for all the governors to come out against christians moving to their states. Any minute now…
hungryjoe
#24
If you kill a random stranger for her shoes, that’s murder.
If you kill a random stranger because he’s gay, that’s a hate crime.
If you kill a random stranger because she’s hindu, that’s terrorism.
It’s all just murder. Acknowledging the motive lends validity to a fundamentally invalid act. One motive is not better or worse than another. A human that is inclined toward murder will adopt a justification for it.
smulder
#26
Fortunately, the leaders of our nation-states have helpfully informed us that, by definition, no one acting on behalf of a nation-state is a terrorist. Glad that’s all sorted out!
caze
#28
the labeling that I’m using here is justified because it informs us about the motivations of the people carrying out these actions, and motivations are important. certain attributes may be entirely contingent, sex, hair colour, skin colour, what they had for breakfast that day, etc. - they have no bearing on the reasons those actions were carried out. other attributes are important in a causal sense though; and when it comes to terrorism, ideological attributes are chief among these causal attributes. as I explained before, for an IRA terrorist religious doctrine was not a causal attribute, that was stuff like anti-colonialism, Marxism, etc., but for an Islamist terrorist religious doctrine is extremely important (along with anti-colonialism and other political factors - I’m not claiming it’s the sole justification), failure to recognise this is just willful ignorance at this point.
the semantic point you’re making is invalid as well. a religion cannot do anything, and there is no “leader” of Islam. it is only that people base their actions on religious teachings that is important, and however rightly or wrongly they interpret their religions according to others is irrelevant, it is enough that a reasonable link can be established between a set of teachings/principles/texts/etc. if somebody draws an inference about all Muslims from my categorisation of an individual terrorist who happens to be a Muslim then they’re a bigot, and an illogical one at that, but that’s their problem.
tl;dr: I am talking about terrorism in support of ideology X, not terrorism by person with contingent property X. such a sentence makes no logical claims about all people who follow X, or all possible interpretations of X - that’s just projection on your part.
Salafist Terrorism
Salafist Terrorism
gregmcph
#29
I actually like the idea of calling “terrorists” murderers.
The word terrorist makes the act a bit abstract and political. It weirdly legitimatises the act. Same with a “Mass Shooting”.
If it was intentional, call it murder. You murdered people. You are a murderer. It’s a good personal word, full of feeling for the sin committed upon another human being
anon37332521
#30
I support any and all language that put’s the act in a framing that allows people to treat it as criminal, and not something you can fight a “war” against.
caze
#31
Acknowledging the motive does nothing of the sort, and one motive is not the same as another. This is because intentions are important, if one motive will lead to a far greater number of murders occurring than another, then that motive is obviously worse than the other. The point of acknowledging this fact is that understanding any problem is vital for solving it, sticking your head in the sand and pretending there’s no problem to begin with will just make matters worse.
A human that is inclined toward murder will adopt a justification for it.
This is nonsense. Terrorist’s ranks aren’t made up from roving bands of pre-existing psychopaths who get their jollies from murdering people. Terrorists are well educated and come from stable and relatively wealthy backgrounds for the most part (those guys also take advantage of less intelligent and less well off people as well, but if those were the only people we had to worry about they wouldn’t be able to organise wide scale mayhem in the first place). These people have well thought out justifications for what they do (however fundamentally misguided they may be).
shaddack
#32
…ummm… “war on crime”, didn’t we have it? There is nothing our wise politicos couldn’t wage a “war” against.
Absolutely. All the “terrorism” word-waving is just making the threat appear bigger than the fairly negligible size it is.
I guess “another clown who lost it” doesn’t have the proper ring in the media, though.
caze
#33
Fortunately, the leaders of our nation-states have helpfully informed us that, by definition, no one acting on behalf of a nation-state is a terrorist.
No they haven’t, they even have a handy name for it - state sponsored terrorism (it usually only applies to your enemies of course, but that’s to be expected).
some_guy
#34
Well, no, or ‘not necessarily’ anyway (more information needed in that situation, it could just be “hate crime” again.)
I’ve heard terrorism described as “the privatization of war”-- it’s using violence to achieve or promote some political end. So yes, attacking a Planned Parenthood office (assuming the office wasn’t just a random choice) is terrorism. It doesn’t even have to have any connection to religion (see: Maoist guerrillas, the Weather Underground, Tamil Tigers).
