That’s what I said. Or meant at least.
The victims in all these cases are exactly the same innocent people as you say. The rationale of the perpetrators is the point of distinction. The 3 have completely different reactions from us. Unfortunately our reaction for terrorists is the goal they want.
My basic point was just to say that what the government does isn’t anything special. It’s predictable, because our society is predictable. There are no tricks.
If you were a lunatic that might on a whim drive the car into a brick wall, then yeah, I’d be reluctant to hop in the car.
Intent is just as important as the results. It’s scary as fuck to think there are mysterious people in your world that want to do horrible things. You can claim its irrational, but it works just dandy.
People aren’t stupid, no matter what elitists say. You are asking them to make a distinction between these strange people, some vicitms and some victimisers, whose defining features or religion and culture are the same.
Is that guy escaping the horrors of Syria or importing them here? It’s a big ask to expect people to err on the side of generosity in this case.
“You might be fleeing a war where millions of people have been killed, but another person from the country you’re trying to escape from killed a hundred people from a culture I care about. So I don’t think we can help.”
And in this petty and cowardly way we not only allow far greater misery, but make sure Muslims know we aren’t on their side no matter what they do, and in so doing help promote our enemy’s cause instead of working to defuse it. No, sorry, telling people not to be self-defeating racists is not a big ask.
What do they see on TV every day? Muslims killing people. They’ve seen it for 15 years. You are expecting people to separate that from the humanitarian side.
I think doing the “They are just racist” line is simplistic. It’s throwing labels.
That’s up to like 15 or so now. Gov. Deal here in GA just signed an executive order on this issue. Fuckers.
Did the last one of the RAF end up becoming a right winger post-Wende?
Paris has had maybe some 150 casualties; the Syrian civil war has killed four times as many as the 9/11 attacks, if you only count the children. People like the US governors quoted above belong to neither country, but plainly have a great deal of sympathy for the one and all but indifference to the other.
You’ve more or less said the difference is because they treat the former as the same kind of people as us, and the latter as the same kind of people as their murderers, based on their culture and religion. If it’s simplistic to consider that racism, I have no idea what the word is supposed to mean. Suffice to say I can and do demand more than that, and I think the only reason the world is as nice as it is, is because of others who have done the same.
Maybe not as murderers, after all there are plenty of neutral countries portrayed on the nightly news befalling death and destruction. But perhaps an element of normalcy to the whole affair of 24 hour news. There are tragedies every day, everywhere but it doesn’t affect us in the first world.
So when it does we take notice and make hay of far smaller numbers, because it affects us more.
(Racist, classist? Probably, have at it…)
There seems to be a lot of overlap between “states that want nothing to do with refugees” and “states with lots of self-described ‘Christian’ folks.” You know, the kind who think there should be a Nativity scene on every corner but don’t want to actually help people in need.
They don’t see people killing Muslims. For a reason.
I like to call this the Calculus of Small Lives. 200,000 dead in an earthquake in SE Asia ~= 150 dead in France from terrorism ~= a dozen dead schoolchildren in the US from a school shooting ~= one beloved Hollywood celebrity.
One day I figure I can crunch the numbers and come up with an exact figure for measuring the worth of anyone in the world relative to an American.
There’s an element of local news to it as well.
I was in Japan for 9/11, and the local news’ priority was listing all the Japanese citizens who may have been in the towers.
Not unlike the recent news from France.
[quote=“gregmcph, post:42, topic:69316”]
If you were a lunatic that might on a whim drive the car into a brick wall, then yeah, I’d be reluctant to hop in the car.
[/quote]Poor analogy that completely misses the point.
That’s your world, not mine. In my world, very few people do horrible things and I’m not going to hide shivering in a closet with a loaded gun due to the fact a small minority of people are dangerous.
Also, what’s so “mysterious”? Is that code for something else?
[quote=“gregmcph, post:42, topic:69316”]
You can claim its irrational, but it works just dandy.
[/quote]Irrational, overblown fear has helped to create, foster and embolden ISIS. It’s not working.
At all…
You can live in fear, terror and cowardice all you want. You can fear the “other”. And, you can continue to play right into the hands of terrorists and corporatist authoritarians while ironically helping to make this “strange”, “mysterious” world you fear so much all the more dangerous.
By the way, right wing terrorism is a huge problem in the United States. Should we stop conservatives from moving from state to state in the name of public safety? Perhaps all right wing conservatives should start wearing ankle bracelets that keep them in a specific area so we can track them for our safety?
How about we keep all right wing conservatives at a 10 mile perimeter from every black church and have SWAT teams round up conservatives whenever their ankle bracelets are detected breaching that electronic border? That’ll surely save some lives, no doubt.
Why or why not?
After all, it’s a big ask to expect people to err on the side of generosity. RIGHT?
This is fairly relevant:
The films compare the rise of the American Neo-Conservative movement and the radical Islamist movement, making comparisons on their origins and noting strong similarities between the two. More controversially, it argues that the threat of radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organised force of destruction, specifically in the form of al-Qaeda, is in fact a myth perpetrated by politicians in many countries—and particularly American Neo-Conservatives—in an attempt to unite and inspire their people following the failure of earlier, more utopian ideologies.
Yup, Adam Curtis is the man.
First time I saw one of his films, I had to see them all.
(I even started to read the quoted text in his voice (subvocally) before I realised I knew the doc. Very singular voice. LOL)
For the FOX “News” and/or fright wing radio crowd to ignore yet again…
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/11/14/3722277/muslims-condemn-paris-attacks-pope-francis/
Time to vote for Bernie Sanders and truly live by the creed of:
They gradually splintered and wore down into nothing, officially disbanding in the late 90s and nobody really noticed as they had completely fallen off the radar.
I did read that one of the significant figures in RAF became a well known neo-nazi. Which, considering so much of their appeal was the disgust of the “fatherless generation” for the Nazis still in power in the German state, is… ironic. Some people are just extremists I guess. Mussolini didn’t care much for left or right so long as it was revolutionary. The neocons sometimes claimed to have been SDS leaders who found the left too conservative for them. They wanted something more radical.
And US “conservatism” is nothing if not radical. In fact some of the tactics of US conservatism seem to me to be very Bolshevik in inspiration, just with huge capital funding. So not that dissimilar to the Nazis in Germany then when you think about it. The Nazis took some of the populist anti-establishment rhetoric of the left, without a real economic theory underpinning it, and secured the backing of capital as a bulwark against workers’ movements in order to seize power.
I think you mean Horst Mahler, never a member of RAF’s core team, but he was lawyer for some of the activists.
A fairly significant figure though. I mean, obviously not the full schilling, but not the only one of them that went off the deep end…
