Events in Paris...

[Rip]

Okay sweet; while you guys are on that, I'll handle reaching the hearts and minds of radical extremists!

[Despanan]

It's not rocket-science. If you raise the quality of life in the regioin it will have a moderating effect. People subscribe to belief systems like that out of rage and despair, if they have better alternatives they'll lose their support pretty damn quickly.

Yes, there will be a die-hard core that will never change, but that's a tiny group when you get right down to it and they can be handled by our security forces.

[Rip]

ISIS has been completely unsuccessful recruiting from anywhere in the civilized world too, right?

[dexeron]

It's obviously not so simple as "raise the quality of life," but while no one is ever going to completely eliminate extremism and violence, we certainly can reduce its incidence. Refraining from stirring the pot, doing things that actually increase education and prosperity - these have measurable benefits in terms of the reduction of the appeal of radicalism. Make people comfortable, and they aren't as likely to see the "need" to get up and fight.

I mean, there will still be dudes wanting to kill each other over whose book is a better book, but they'll have a much harder time finding people to do their killing for them. There's no perfect solution, but there are things that can be done - the first of which is to refuse to give in to fear, and refuse to agree with the terrorists that all of Islam (or refugees) is the enemy.

[Rip]

Obviously, Islam isn't the enemy. And, obviously, since ISIS has been VERY successful at drawing in people from all over the world with a shared murder-boner, this is not about quality of life.

Making people comfortable is one thing. But it seems to me a separate thing when a guy has a sword at your neck. And that's what this is REALLY about, and it can't be stressed enough: the ideology of a human being who has decided that other innocent human beings must die is of zero consequence. That person could be a white redneck who thinks Walmart has betrayed America by refusing to stock the Confederate flag. That person could be a Chinese lady with a grudge against Japan over the Senkaku Islands. In this case, the person is someone who believes in a radicalized version of a semitic desert cult. Doesn't matter in the slightest because they are all fucking murderers.

Murder is something that you can't really reason with. I'll steal from something I watched about the death penalty that holds true: you can't deter a murderer. Whether a murder of passion (can't reason with blind murder-rage), premeditation (if you thought it through, you plan on not being caught), or compulsion (your sick meat brain likes to watch things die), if someone has decided to take a human life, they have already gone over the edge. Some dogs just need to be put down.

yes, this has the potential to spiral out of control, so I'm going to reign it back in and point it back toward ISIS real quick. You have a group that has dedicated itself to murder. Whatever their reasons, whatever their plight, doesn't matter anymore. They chose to be murderers and they must be dealt with like murderers.

EDIT: not that I should have to, but being a Texan I feel I must comment on the refugees thing: people who wanna hurt us are gonna get in anyway. if we start turning away those who need us, we need to take down the Statue of Liberty first.

[dexeron]

Well, I probably wasn't clear. I agree. As for ISIS, we actually should deal with them like we deal with murderers.

(So long as we don't forget that meanwhile we should also be addressing conditions that allow such ideologies to breed more easily.)

Basically: we'll never get rid of murderers, but we can reduce the number in proven ways... and then we can address the actual murderers more effectively because there are fewer of them.

[Despanan]

The mistake that's being made here is you're assuming people are static, that a murderer is a murderer in all or most contexts - that the desire and ability to take a life is an inherent characteristic of certain people, rather than something happens when a series of specific conditions are brought together.

That's fallacious. ISIS can recruit worldwide because people still suffer worldwide. There's violence and hopelessness everywhere - just less of it here than other places that have been subjected to worse conditions.

You could probably get any one of us to a point to where we killed someone else, if you put us under just the right circumstances. Does that mean we're murderers, fated to murder? No, of course not.

I think it's important in the fallout here to remember this article:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-ways-to-k ... ing-world/

It makes some really good points and oddly enough, inadvertently does a pretty good job of illustrating the Buddhist concept of wrong-view.

[Rip]

I think the mistake that's being made here is yours.

If you were going to be driven to kill, Desp, what do you think would make you do it?

If your answer is anything other than "my life or another's is in immediate danger", then there is something wrong with you.

If your answer is "well, if I were poor or downtrodden enough, I might think it's okay to kill another innocent human being" then there is something wrong with you.

If your answer is "well the socio-economic blah blah blah" it's MURDER. We're not talking about "being driven to kill". We're talking about thinking "if I end this person's life whom I've never met, it will accomplish something grand".

You are literally trying to justify murder and blame "society" for it. No bueno.

[Agent]

You don't think that people who answer one way now might not answer another way later?

[Rip]

ALSO

Just read the article. I'm sure Despanan will be convinced I didn't understand it, but I don't agree with it. Not fully anyway.

Oh sure, a huge part of my brain that really and truly DOES want humanity to come together and love one another really enjoyed it, and agreed with large pieces of it. It's a good feeling and one that I hope humanity never does away with.

I even agree to an extent that you can go ahead and separate us all into Team Violence and Team Get Along. The goal is to make everyone a part of Team Get Along. The article even said that sometimes, doing the "right" thing means living the rest of your life with a fly buzzing around your head. Which is why David Wong went with "fly buzzing" and not "bloodied innocent children". It's a lot easier to suck it up and deal with a fly.

I'll even go ahead and be entirely honest, I don't know WHAT I want out of this. I'm not exactly a bloodthirsty hawk; you don't often find me out there saying let's go to fucking war. But the idea that us all being civil to each other and bravely carrying on in the face of terror, that that's going to be any better at stopping murderers than physically stopping them...I mean, I get it, we don't want to martyr people and give another generation a symbol to kill behind. But we're dealing with goddamn murderers, and anyone who wants to carry on in their name is a goddamn murderer.

Sure, it feels "good", in a reptilian way, to deliver punishment. But if a person is beating innocent kids around you with a 2x4, and your reaction is to tell them to sit there and take it because violence is never justified, then aren't you just saying that to make yourself feel "good" in a different way? Meantime you've got a bloody pulp where a child used to be.

No easy answers here. This is most likely because we're dealing with broken meat brains here, that decided ending the lives of strangers was the best thing to do.