World is Falling Apart Thread (Locked forever)

[Pulsar_t]

Wahabism that originated in Saudi Arabia and Egypt's Brotherhood is what turned things so nasty over the past several decades. The assassination of president Anwar Sadat in 1981 was a foreshadowing of what was to come. Later there was Afghanistan and massive recruitment of Arabs to fight the "infidel" Soviets. Today it's just the culmination of all that into ISIS and a noticeable portion of muslim populations especially concentrated in the middle east with belligerent attitudes towards the rest of the world.



Perhaps just like Germany/France/Britiain duking it out for centuries in Europe before finally coming to terms for peaceful coexistence, this chaos among muslims will result in coefficients for integration into the modern world. How much bloodshed between now and that moment remains a big question mark.

[BoringSupreez]

Let's see if this wakes some people up. Islam is a religion of violence and has no place in civilized society. Let's stop pretending otherwise.

Don't be a butthead. ISIS might have Islam in their name but no rational Muslim condones these attacks and others like them.

It's just like how the Westboro Baptist Church proves that Christianity is a religion of intolerance and hatred.

Westboro is like literally 15 people. ISIS has 40,000-90,000 troops, plus there's Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, the Chechen militants, the Taliban, the Pakistani government, the Iranian government, the Saudi government, and many others. Plus Westboro just pickets funerals and gays, they've never killed a single person. That's an absolutely ridiculous comparison.

I'm sure the people who were killed are quite comforted by the fact that there are Muslims who aren't terrorists. That doesn't excuse the reality that the majority of the world's terrorism comes from a single religion, and that most of the world's recent active conflicts occur either in Islamic countries, or countries bordering Islamic countries. It's like the Pacific "ring of fire," except that it correlates to the territory held by a religion, instead of continental plates.

As long as we're going to make fast and loose comparisons, how about this: roughly 2/3rds of smokers end up dying from non-smoking related conditions. That doesn't mean smoking is a good thing. Why are we going to pretend like Islam is different?

[Flake]

Here's the thing that I think ISIS is not taking into consideration as they attempt to move from regional terrorism to global terrorism:

Russia is involved.

I am not a supporter of Russia or Putin but I am also very pragmatic so I can see the advantage of having a player on the court who A) Does not play by the rules B) Does not care about the rules C) Is not aware of the rules.

Whereas the US is incapable of overwhelming retaliation due to many factors (many of them self-imposed), Russia has proven over the last year that they can do pretty much whatever they want. If Russia is able to annex Crimea with the rest of the world doing nothing more than saying "not fair, dude!" then what is to stop them from expanding their regional interest in protecting their military facilities in Syria to steam rolling across the entire region?

[Pulsar_t]

Here's the thing that I think ISIS is not taking into consideration as they attempt to move from regional terrorism to global terrorism:

Russia is involved.

I am not a supporter of Russia or Putin but I am also very pragmatic so I can see the advantage of having a player on the court who A) Does not play by the rules B) Does not care about the rules C) Is not aware of the rules.

Whereas the US is incapable of overwhelming retaliation due to many factors (many of them self-imposed), Russia has proven over the last year that they can do pretty much whatever they want. If Russia is able to annex Crimea with the rest of the world doing nothing more than saying "not fair, dude!" then what is to stop them from expanding their regional interest in protecting their military facilities in Syria to steam rolling across the entire region?

From reading a bit about Russian doctrine yes they do not play by western codes of combat. They flattened Grozny, they scorched their own land TWICE in face of western imperial armies, and now in Syria they drop 'em like there's no tomorrow. For the record I don't care about all this dick fighting, my concern is humanitarian.. People being killed or maimed or orphaned has a toll that carries into the genetic code itself.

[Flake]

From reading a bit about Russian doctrine yes they do not play by western codes of combat. They flattened Grozny, they scorched their own land TWICE in face of western imperial armies, and now in Syria they drop 'em like there's no tomorrow. For the record I don't care about all this dick fighting, my concern is humanitarian.. People being killed or maimed or orphaned has a toll that carries into the genetic code itself.

I think that actions like this (if not this very action) is going to make the humanitarian factor fall by the way side. I am trying to be rational myself, trying to reconcile the double standard I know I am displaying and yet after tonight, even I want revenge for the people of France.

[Pulsar_t]

The campaign against ISIS has been ongoing for quite a while, but it is of very dubious efficacy. They still sell oil for example.. and sixty thousand Toyota technicals that they managed to acquire. It's like free market terror

[nullPointer]

I'm on a car trip right now so I'll have to rely on the words of others to convey my feelings on this topic.

It would be facile, even exculpatory, to call the problem of the Islamic State “a problem with Islam.” The religion allows many interpretations, and Islamic State supporters are morally on the hook for the one they choose. And yet simply denouncing the Islamic State as un-Islamic can be counterproductive, especially if those who hear the message have read the holy texts and seen the endorsement of many of the caliphate’s practices written plainly within them.

Muslims can say that slavery is not legitimate now, and that crucifixion is wrong at this historical juncture. Many say precisely this. But they cannot condemn slavery or crucifixion outright without contradicting the Koran and the example of the Prophet. “The only principled ground that the Islamic State’s opponents could take is to say that certain core texts and traditional teachings of Islam are no longer valid,” Bernard Haykel says. That really would be an act of apostasy.

"Religion of peace" my foot. The quote itself is from an article in the Atlantic detailing the history and details of ISIS and Bernard Haykel is a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton. It's from a few months ago, but it's still a very enlightening piece.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc ... ts/384980/

Bottom line though is that my heart goes out to the people of Paris in the wake of this terrible tragedy.

[marurun]

From reading a bit about Russian doctrine yes they do not play by western codes of combat. They flattened Grozny, they scorched their own land TWICE in face of western imperial armies, and now in Syria they drop 'em like there's no tomorrow. For the record I don't care about all this dick fighting, my concern is humanitarian.. People being killed or maimed or orphaned has a toll that carries into the genetic code itself.

I think that actions like this (if not this very action) is going to make the humanitarian factor fall by the way side. I am trying to be rational myself, trying to reconcile the double standard I know I am displaying and yet after tonight, even I want revenge for the people of France.

And if enough innocents in the middle east die as part of a mission to avenge ~150 lives in France, how many of their relatives, friends, and progeny will want revenge on the west for taking hundreds, possible thousands of civilian lives as collateral in a war on ISIS? That is why the US tries so hard to be careful (and even as we make critical mistakes, like the Drs w/out borders hospital). The Israel Palestine conflict is evidence enough of how an extended tit-for-tat causes those involved to lose track of its origins and any sense of perspective or scale.

Let us take the core facts: many innocents were killed in and around Paris and ISIS took responsibility. ISIS is already a target and has demonstrated yet again that they must be stopped. But they have to be stopped in a way that doesn't recreate the circumstances that allowed them to flourish in the beginning. We went into Iraq and left a big hole in the power structure for ISIS to move into. Whatever the world does to crush ISIS needs to include proper follow-up so that another, similar movement doesn't just take root so that a decade down the road we have to do this all over again.

I worry about Russian involvement not only because their distaste for rules of conflict create opportunities for cyclic revenge, but also because they have spent just as much time combating Assad's rivals as ISIS. On the other hand, Assad did have control of the country. Sometimes these petty dictators, like Assad and Hussein, are effective at stabilizing their countries, if at the cost of their own citizens. And that's why I have so much trouble with situations like this. There isn't a magic bullet. Even with modern military might, the solutions are social, political, and economic, and those issues are messier and not necessarily improved by technology. We can stomp around and kill terrorists and say we crushed ISIS, but actually fixing the problem is so much messier and complicated, and for all our power here in the US, we are actually quite powerless at times in the face of these quandaries.

[marurun]

"Religion of peace" my foot.

Some of what your quote points to applies to Christianity, and to many other religions, as well. In that sense, the discussion is moot. There are words of peace and conciliation in the koran alongside words of violence and oppression. This is true of the bible and the torah also. This is the nature of religion.

[Pulsar_t]

--snip--

That's what you get when you have asymmetrical warfare, an increasing phenomenon in the post-WWII world. Nazism and imperial Japan were defeated by brute force, both regimes had their populations backing them. ISIS has lots of sympathisers and real estate but they're still a rogue element, and everybody does business with them it seems.