So, I’m waiting for all the governors to come out against christians moving to their states. Any minute now…
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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.
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What if I accidentally (but negligently) kill a random stranger?
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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!
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Except perhaps, enemy nation-states…
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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.
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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
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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.
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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).
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…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.
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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).
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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).
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I know a lot of people like to play the “let’s not ‘see’ race lest we perpetuate racism” card, but c’mon. A guy who grew up in the South looking like this clearly would have had a different experience than a dark-skinned guy growing up in the South.
Yes, race is a largely arbitrary social construct. But let’s not deny the very real phenomenon of racism, or pretend this guy isn’t getting different treatment because society perceives him as “white.”
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Since you’re not asking, I won’t try and explain it. You seem content.
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Wow. WOW.
Did you see the lineup of who is on the Sunday Talk Shows today?
Not a liberal, or even a Democrat, to be seen. Not. One.
Suuuuuuuuuuure it’s the liberals failure. Suuuuuuuuuure it is. Sigh.
ABC's "This Week" - Republican presidential candidates Ben Carson and John Kasich. ---
NBC's "Meet the Press" - Carson; Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. ---
CBS' "Face the Nation" - Carson; Republican presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham; Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. ---
CNN's "State of the Union" - Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee; Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas. ---
"Fox News Sunday" - Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina; Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C.
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If one shows up one one of these shows and makes them listen without having been invited, they get my vote.
Leftists don’t want a militant left, they prefer to roll over and die.
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So are you saying that the Left isn’t engaging at all? Or that ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN are icing out the Left? I’d expect that liberal politicians have similar levels of access to those networks as the conservatives do. I’m not going to humor your inclusion of FOX. We all know they only allow straw liberals on, so they can make their hyperconservative pandering look like hard hitting news coverage.
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I really want to object to your statement, but I don’t want to spend 5 hours arguing about what the left is.
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saying they’re not failingto do what was claimed they were failing to do, with their time on the air.
They don’t get any.
“Stop hitting yourself” comes to mind.
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I would expect that too, if I hadn’t been paying attention.
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