I cut and pasted this so it could have its own thread instead of stomping further on those well intentioned Bored members who didn't want to get involved in a political discussion.BackInTex wrote:
silverscreenselect wrote:
Is there really a reason to turn this into a political thread today?This wasn't an act of God or an accident. Politics created the environment that caused and allowed this to happen. Delaying the discussion delays any actions that might prevent a future massacre, if preventing future massacres is something we might want to do.
Mark Steyn has a long column out today.
https://www.steynonline.com/7841/danger ... gerous-man
Closing paragraph
>>>"As I asked around Europe all last year: What's the happy ending here? In a decade it will be worse, and in two decades worse still, and then in three decades people will barely recall how it used to be, when all that warmth and vibrancy of urban life that Owen Jones hymns in today's Guardian is but a memory, and the music has died away, and Manchester is as dull and listless as today's Alexandria. If Mrs May or Frau Merkel has a happier ending, I'd be interested to hear it. If not, it is necessary not to carry on, but to change, and soon - before it's too late.<<<<
Do we have such short memories that we forgot the last time that we got "angry" with terrorists? It happened after 9/11 and we got angry and we went after "them" without a whole lot of thought and we invaded Iraq, and what's the end result?
Thousands of dead Americans, tens of thousands of maimed Americans, billions of dollars down the drain. We got Saddam and Osama bin Laden, but the Taliban is still there, Al Qaeda is still there, and now we've got a new organization, ISIS that was created from the rubble we left in Iraq and is more powerful than the other two.
So, let's call them Islamic terrorists or losers or whatever and shake our fists and get angry. That will make Mark Steyn, Donald Trump, Spock, and a few others happy but what will that accomplish? Look through Mark Steyn's article and eliminate all the bloviating and what's left... build a wall, literally or figuratively. That strategy dates from the Great Wall of China. It didn't work then and it especially won't work now.
The enemy doesn't have to go over or around the wall. They can go right through it by means of the Internet, and that's what they're doing to radicalize new recruits. And the more we demonize them haphazardly and try to paint this as us vs. them, which we do with these harsh anti-immigration laws, far too many people will choose them over us.
Try reading things that real terrorism experts, not Steyn and Spock, write. Terrorists are not soldiers, they are criminals, and you catch them like criminals. And that requires building up a network of informants in the communities where they live, which you don't do by alienating that community.
As far as Mark Steyn's snide putdowns of carrying on, there's a very good reason the British have that attitude. Unlike Mark Steyn, who I'm guessing has never heard a shot fired in anger his entire life, the British lived through four years of terror attacks every night courtesy of the Luftwaffe. It was their determination to carry on that kept the war going long enough for the Allies to counterattack.