Japan - A country with well defined borders and identifiable targeted assets that attacked our homeland.

Islam - A religious ideologies with no borders. A belief held by people throughout the globe.

My opponent wants to destroy my country and could succeed.

vs.

My opponent, who can't remotely possibly in any conceivable way destroy my country unless he can somehow goad me into doing something mindbogglingly stupid based on impulsive irrational emotions.


Hmmmm - how could these two things be different? I'm stumped.

If only the Japanese weren't so disaffected and had better jerbs. In the end it's always the same. We get serious and win by digging every last rat out of its hole. hand grenade, flame thrower, large scale fire bombing, glow time, w/e it takes.

The alternative is to do what you are doing and give ISIS billion of dollars worth of free publicity.

You aren't the perpetrator in this scenario but if you and the twitterati get removed from the equation then ISIS would cease to exist in their current form.

True.

It is just possible that someone, someday who is much more persuasive and influential than me might be able to get large numbers of people to voluntarily starve terrorists of the publicity of oxygen. That would deal a body blow to ISIS far more effectively than any military action.

However, even if this happens, you still have the far right trying to piggyback the lethal marketing strategy of ISIS with their "religion of peace" stuff.

JFC you guys are just absolutely terrible at analogies and knowing even the tiniest bit of history. I'm gonna guess you literally know 3 things about Japan in WWII: Pearl Harbor, Kamikaze, Hiroshima.

Again, for the impaired, try to imagine two enemies:

One has an army, a navy, an air force and has already taken over a large chunk of territory that's pretty close to your own. The enemy has already killed 100s of 1000s of people and attacked your country. They've terrorized a neighboring country and committed the worst war atrocities imaginable.

The other has no navy or air force, an army of a few 1000, and owns a tiny patch of land 10k miles from you. But they do manage to inspire and/or train a few random people to occasionally carry out terror attacks that kill from 5-20 ppl, every now and then over 100 and once - 3000. Their stated goal is to drive a wedge between the west and Islam.

Can you see a difference here in terms of how we should react?

Of course Islamophobes are bigots. A priori.

Acting like ISIS is an existential threat to the United States is both completely ridiculous and exactly what ISIS would like for you to do. Japan and the Axis powers posed a serious existential threat to the United States. You couldn't be more off if you tried.

There have been dumber posts, but that one is almost a lock to win dumbest post of June and we're only a few days in.

Edit: It's one of those things where I stare at it trying to figure out whether chyme really thought that was a good analogy or whether he just wanted to score points. I really don't know and probably never will.

I mean for god's sake, the attack on Pearl Harbor was a real military operation, done professionally and with powerful technology. This was a couple of guys with knives in the equivalent of a Chili's, from what I can tell.

Dammit stop stealing the thunder of my hyperbole.

FWIW - I still get so much out of Simi Rahman on FB (we're actual buddies now) and twitter. https://www.facebook.com/simi.rahman I don't post her stuff here because the Love Sosa's and domer's of the world will run with it and twist it into their own fantasies.

She's the one who originally made that post I always quote about Islam stewing in the sauce of midwestern sincerity. She was raised Muslim (in Pakistan I think) and is either agnostic or atheist now, but we've had some chats about how unlikely it probably is for a lot of people to follow that path (my opinion, I think hers too).

Here's our exchange from last week:



And the comment thread:



doxx away lol

Gotta say the response from the police seems to be pretty damn impressive. It kinda shows how thick these people are that they pick the area in the UK with by far the highest concentration of armed police etc rather than some small provincial town.

Yeah, the highlighted passage is what I have spent innumerable posts on here trying to explain.

Meh, was gonna post more but don't want to derail the thread.

Yeh this seems really impressive. Sadly humans are very easy to kill and there are a lot of people in London, so a lot of damage can be done in that handful of minutes.

The history of '-phobia' as an English loanword doesn't bear this out at all. It's true that phobia as a psychological diagnosis entails irrationality, but '-phobia' as a suffix in and of itself doesn't even necessarily denote 'fear', let alone 'irrational fear'. IIRC the first instance was 'hydrophobia' as a medical term for rabies; the idea wasn't that the rabid were afraid of water, but that they found drinking impossibly painful. Similar with eg thermophobic bacteria - nobody thinks certain microbes are afraid of higher temperatures.

tl;dr it's never been true that '-phobia' = 'fear', that's just one common use of it.

Weren't you the one who said Clinton was a lock to become president?

apologism for Islamism taken to another level

Islam is as viable a religion as Christianity and doesn't need anyone to apologise for it.

What he said was just stupid given the different population sizes, not to mention crass and insensitive.

T May0

You should follow her on FB. I tend to agree with a lot of the stuff you post that's critical of Islam and I agree reform is the way to go. After that it comes down to a pragmatic question of how to achieve those ends.

She's specifically talking about Islamic extremism, not mainstream Islam. If you can't see any difference it's time to educate yourself or just spare us your blushes by not posting on the topic.

Which is one thing, for all his failings, that GWB did right after 9/11. Separate the extremists from the vast majority of peaceful Muslims who just want to raise their kids in peace.

Where it gets scary, as we always see in these threads, is people who want to demonize all Muslims as potential enemies. That kind of dehumanizing rhetoric has the historical potential to lead to unthinkably horrible outcomes.

I'm 48. I feel like I'm going to be lucky to die before the worlds sees another Final Solution on a massive scale.

Running around shouting people in an apparent attempt to cause mass panic does not impress me.

Additionally, I cannot understand why armed police were not guarding a major tourist attraction like London Bridge.

Those two events might not be independent.

If they're not of the frothing-at-the-mouth variety then it's very tough to separate mainstream Muslims from those brainwashed into extremism. Some extremists in the UK were known about to neighbours and even the authorities etc before they committed their atrocities, but others kept their extremist views so well hidden it came as a total surprise to everyone who knew them.

As you can guess I'm pretty stumped for a solution or even a way forward, other than to say it has to come from within the Muslim community.

I'm stumped for a solution too. What I do realize however is the West's (or at least I know for sure the US) fear reaction to terrorism will be orders of magnitude outsized compared to the real threat.

I used to work at Quest Diagnostics reference lab, which was about 15 miles from San Juan Capistrano on the Ortega Hwy - the "most dangerous highway in CA". We had about 3k employees at the facility. While I worked there for 5 years we lost 1 employee per year on the highway to either death or paralysis. So your chances of death or paralysis were roughly 1 in 3k every year you worked there. I worked with people who literally quit because they didn't want to make that drive every day.

I not only drove the Ortega, I drove the LA freeways for another 50 miles each way to get there. I saw at least two fatality wrecks on my daily commute.

Yet still the vast majority of my coworkers tolerated similar risk. Now what's my risk of dying in a terrorist attack for a given year? 1 in a million?