DDL on 2/2/2015 at 10:57
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
A lack of "the perfect storm of factors" doesn't explain that.
Well, if "slow news cycle" and "cheap outrage bait" are part of your perfect storm, it kinda does.
faetal on 2/2/2015 at 12:28
In this thread, Tony just flat doesn't understand the principle of how heterogeneity affects rare events.
To go back to the analogy, it's like saying "why don't all smokers get cancer?".
Tony_Tarantula on 2/2/2015 at 17:26
You don't seem to grasp the concept of "not a rare event".
There's multiple other instances. What I'm asking is why, in the early 2000's, were blunt discussions and often times making fun of Muslims perfectly acceptable.....but now it causes media outrage, death threats, and killings?
And yes, these are both patterns as already established in this thread.
We're talking about patterns of behavior and not "rare", isolated events. Can you explain the change?
faetal on 2/2/2015 at 17:45
I'd say that the ongoing tension over the West's meddling in the middle east has hit a kind of crisis point, with 9/11 as a nucleation event. There's a tension feedback between East & West (Middle East meddling x Islamophobia) and this is one of the many factors which feed into the probability of something like this occurring. What's your hypothesis?
DDL on 2/2/2015 at 19:04
Plus let's be honest: telling people they should be outraged, filming them being outraged, writing endless screeds about how terrible it is that they're outraged and OH GOD LOOK MOAR OUTRAGE GOTO 10 is a beautiful, cheap, self-sustaining media cycle.
South park got away with it because nobody considered it newsworthy back then. If they'd realised how many cheap column inches "depiction of the prophet" could accrue? That stuff would've been all over the place.
Tony_Tarantula on 3/2/2015 at 02:15
Yeah, I think DDL's onto it. I doubt that most people in the Middle East would even know these things happen were it not for extensive media coverage.
clickbait: it gets people killed.
faetal on 3/2/2015 at 08:50
Well yes, it's all part of the factors which lead to 2 people planning and carrying out a mass killing. It wasn't impulsive. These kinds of things are thankfully very rare because there needs to be just the right set of factors. You can't isolate any one thing. The media didn't do it alone: there needed to also be years of amassed antipathy towards not just Western interference in the Middle East but also Western anti-Muslim sentiment after 9/11. There needed to be disaffected / disenfranchised people who were easily influenced and probably violent / belligerent to begin with. There needed to be some kind of higher purpose attributed to the killings to necessitate them in the eyes of the killers - why bother going into a guarded office if you can just kill randomly? Charlie Hebdo had also received death threats and had their office fire-bombed previously due to extremist Muslims taking offence to depictions of Mohammed.
You need all of the factors to come together. Removing the religious factor because you don't like the idea that religion can drive, focus or amplify violence isn't intellectually sound.
I'd argue that the single biggest factor is polarisation. This narrative being created and strengthened that it's The West vs. Islam. If you can identify a specific piece of "The West" which seems to be targeted against Islam, then it becomes a far more viable target than say, civilians on public transport (a la 7/7). I have no doubt that the killers thought they were attacking a viable target rather than a random one.
DDL on 3/2/2015 at 10:27
Bear in mind, tony, that it's also self-perpetuating to an extent: your average fucktard demagogue* who wants to drum up angry people for...reasons, now only needs to keep an eye on western media. If you set your bar low enough, you can get outraged about virtually anything.
I don't necessarily think the "crowd of morons burning stuff" phenomenon is particularly new, either: it's been going on for years and years, it's just that now it sometimes happens "here", rather than "somewhere far away". They're small crowds, though, and they're still morons.
Neither are angry, disaffected, stupid people a new phenomenon: it's just that now people are learning that young stupid angry people can be weaponised. Hell, you don't even need to train them or order them directly: they can be weaponised by proxy.
I hate the term "social media", but it IS handy for shit like this: shout out "all true warriors of {insert magical sky monster here} should rise up and attack the unbelievers!" often enough, and you'll get a few fuckwits to listen eventually.
Humanity has loads of fuckwits.
Modern terrorism seems to be largely a low-hanging fruit strategy, resulting in fairly stochastic (but high profile) attacks by those few 'radicalised' people that were dumb enough to follow it through to completion. It's quite clever in that you're setting the playing field so wide and so randomly distributed that it's almost impossible to track everyone who COULD go over the edge, yet security services still look stupid when they miss those who do.
I think it'd get less traction if we actually gave less of a shit, though.
Less "THIS IS OUR 9/11!!!!!11one" and more "bunch of morons feel so threatened by cartoonists they shoot them".
I mean, this is a bunch of people so hopelessly edgy that they think gunfire is an appropriate response to satirical cartoons. This shouldn't be viewed as a threat, it should be viewed as an embarrassment.
*not you, dema, obvs.
Le MAlin 76 on 3/2/2015 at 10:51
Quote Posted by faetal
Communism is an ideology, but not religious, no. Capitalism doesn't target people for death, it just doesn't care if people die in a way which won't impact on profits.
As for the rest, if you're having to reach far back into history to find secular assassinations, what does that say?
Politic ideology is secular. The society can be religious or secular, but there is no third ways, people are alltime manipulâtes by ideologies. The democracy is good, but the criticals are relevants. The majority who broke the minority, who felt wounded and want revange: the muslims of France, but many other people, for religious or secular reasons are in this case. The "mariage pour tous" when all religious became fascist for the miss Taubira, but who less all gangster in the Streets (it had been began under Sarkozy, but now we reach top).... Or all workers who are insulted by this liberal-socialist governments ! For many "petite gens" the desire to removal Francois Hollande is not a religious wish. The angry against the taxes are not religious. For me the taxes are very importants, but when it's exagerrate it is not efficient, and it's provoke the reinforcement of the violence in the society.
faetal on 3/2/2015 at 10:54
There is no way to stop things like this from happening. I was in Paris last weekend and there are heavily armed guys everywhere, particularly in the Jewish quarter. I doubt anyone will try anything right now, but it'll happen again elsewhere with a different set of factors contributing.
Like DDL says, this stuff happens all over the place and has since the beginning of history. We're still in the middle of the most peaceful era in human history, but blips will appear. While it's all "hundreds of Muslims slaughtered by radical Christians in Nigeria" or "Ethnic cleansing in Rwanda" we can pause over our morning coffee and shake our head at the sadness of it all. When it's nice upstanding Anglo-Saxons being killed in the name of a religion we find foreign and weird though, suddenly the whole fabric of humanity is falling around our ears.
That said, in the case of the CH shooting, the religion of the gunmen and those who influenced them was the factor which led to the choosing of the targets. This wasn't a secular assassination of some cartoonists who were offensive to someone else's prophet. Just like there are no secular fire-bombings of abortion clinics, because you need the belief in the idea that god puts a soul into a cluster of dividing cells shortly after conception to find abortion objectionable to that degree.
