I find it amazing the danger that these journalists in Mosul are putting themselves in just to get half a dozen photos, or a couple of minutes of video footage, or a few paragraphs.
I was following Quentin Sommerville as he was livetweeting the battle for Mosul a couple of months ago, and it was amazing to see him there right on the front line getting shot at.
I have nothing but the utmost respect for people who put themselves in harm's way for the good of the people while unarmed. Whether it's observers, journalists, or medics/doctors. It's a thankless task.
That was a gripping read. I was going to say that it might shed some light into the mental processes that these boys go through before they are indoctrinated into IS, but I think that is already quite well a well known and researched subject, so I will prevail from exploring it further here.
What saddens me is that I regularly see similar snippets of declared fervent worshippers of a particular deity calling for outright murder, persecution and mass extermination of entire groups of people. Only it isn't written on slips of paper in a bunker in Mosul, but on the Twitter threads of supporters a certain recently elected Western politician.
> What saddens me is that I regularly see similar snippets of declared fervent worshippers of a particular deity calling for outright murder, persecution and mass extermination of entire groups of people.
My family is from a country (Bangladesh) that has, like many others, slid backwards in the last 40 years thanks to the same fundamentalism that drives ISIS. When my family and I lived there, Bangladesh was poor, but there were no violent attacks on secularists and atheists, women walked freely in the streets with their heads uncovered, etc. That's all changed. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., Trump is President, but the country is more or less the same as its always been (notwithstanding the bluster of some of his supporters on the Internet). So, frankly, your casual drawing of false equivalences and "whataboutism" is not well taken.
I strongly recommend that "whatabouters" watch this video from the Egyptian President in the 1960s and then read about what happened in the country subsequently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX4RK8bj2W0. This is a thing that is happening to hundreds of millions of people all over the world, and bringing up Trump in the same breath is a disservice to all those who continue to fight against this force. Especially since, for the last several decades, that force has been winning.
I grew up in a Muslim majority country too, but now live in a Western country. AFAIK, the country I grew up in has so far managed to avoid the creeping fundamentalism that has overtaken others.
Emphasis here on 'creeping'. I am sure the situation in your own homeland or in Egypt etc. didn't begin overnight with a rush of armed people in the streets. It probably started with small groups of people saying "Well, situation 'x' goes against my beliefs and I believe it will be solved by removing/changing/killing the perpetrators of it".
It may start in small, isolated groups, but get enough people in the same echo chamber and that sentiment slowly becomes normalised and over time becomes supported by ever growing actions.
Egypt took 40+ years to get from where they were to where they are now? Well, its only been about a year since this other group of people have felt they have been allowed to air their grievances and fundamentalist policies blatantly in the open because they perceive they won't be held to account for doing so.
There is a difference between a nutjob and the harbinger of something really dangerous. I'm sure there are Trump supporters who says stuff like "we should execute anyone caught sneaking into the country illegally a second time!" But do they have a sympathetic ear among any substantial portion of the population? No. Meanwhile, when a jihadi says "we should execute people who leave Islam!" In Bangladesh, over a third of people agree with that nutjob, and in Egypt it's almost two thirds of people: http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religi.... There is no equivalence. And from the point of view of someone like me (who 1/3 of my fellow Bangladeshis think should be put to death), it's pretty outrageous to even draw the comparison.
You might hypothesize that after 40 years of Trump we might well be in a position where lots of people think illegal immigrants should be put to death. But that misunderstands the evolution of American society. The nutjobs who happen to support Trump have always been there: http://www.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-wh... (even in 2013, more than 10% of Americans disapproved of interracial marriages). But there's been a monotonically decreasing number of those nutjobs every year (down from over 50% in the mid 1990s). Trump isn't a sign of some sort of reversal in that trend. He's just the result of a perfect storm of a particularly unpopular Democratic candidate and an unusual clusterf--k of a Republican slate.
You're making things up. You're not writing clearly about it and need to perform some more research. What persecution or mass extermination of which groups of people for example are you talking about?
Uh -- the west has been killing large numbers of people in countries throughout the Middle East for decades. What research is needed to demonstrate that?
Airwars reports that us forces killed 432 civilians in Syria last month alone. That's a lot of people -- and they are being killed for imaginary reasons.
That is a characterization of the right wing base of the counter terrorism movement. There is a huge group of people in the West who believe that Christianity/West and Islam are in a holy war -- these play a large role in defining the actions of the counterterrorism movement. Many many western soldiers will profess that they believe the problem with terrorism is about Islam - and many of those just happen to be Christian's themselves. They might cloak their words but they have slowly over time cemented their positions. Given their actions and the deaths they have caused what reason do you have to claim they are not pursuing a goal of murdering groups of people to extermination? The west has actually started using the word "exterminate" to characterize their goals with regard to ISIS -- the reality is that this goal can be spoken in a narrow term as targeted toward some small specific thing like ISIS -- but it cannot (and does not and has not for a long time) exist as such a narrow specific thing when put into action. Large numbers of innocents are killed as this objective is chased -- and the targeting process only ever expands to include more targets.
If we are generous, we at best could describe western fundamentalists as having the goal of murdering mass groups of people to marginalization -- is that really that different than quoted passage?
There are also differences through. No one in West is thrown out of roof for being gay, people can speak against Christianity and holy war without being executed. While wearing too revealing cloth may disadvantage me in workplace due to assumptions, I won't be stoned or whatever. 14 years old boys are not radicalised to by preachers to become martyrs. Those are rather important differences.
Conservative Christian journal I read may whine about men not being head of the families anymore and women not being women anymore, but even they don't dispute voting and property rights.
I'm not sure how this is related to what I wrote? Are you saying that "exterminate ISIS" should expand to "exterminate Saudi Arabia" because Saudi Arabia currently mistreats homosexuals and women?
Western fundamentalism and isis are fundamentally different. They are not nearly equivalent. They can be made to sound similar, as your comment did, if you ignore important differences between them.
I'm not sure where I argued an equivalence between these forces. Western fundamentalism doesn't have to be equivalent to Isis to be damaging in nature. It's my position that the counterterrorism movement is off the rails -- a negative, objectiveless, and misguided force on the world that is more damaging (because of scale) than terrorism. There are many different groups of people who support and feed the counter-terrorism movement -- among them are many people who are happy to advocate for extreme levels of violence against unknown or imagined enemies. If you ask, many people in the us support "turning the deserts to glass" -- they have perceived enemies in the deserts and don't particularly care for who else they kill in pursuit.
People in the west want to pretend that terrorists are unique in their lack of regard for civilian lives -- but there is an objective question we can ask to determine the truth of this. Who's actions result in the deaths of more innocent civilians? These numbers reveal that western hands are not so innocent as they pretend. Semantic quibbling (and often misdirection) about the relationship of "intent" to these deaths is the manipulation tactic -- a frequently biased mechanism for the whitewashing of responsibility and guilt off the hands of the chosen marked as noble without regard to evidence.
People in the west want to pretend that terrorists are unique in their lack of regard for civilian lives
This is a problem.
However in this thread you seem to go from this to "attempted genocide".
Also: there is a really huge difference between
- being careless as a soldier
and
- actively trying to harm civilians as a terrorist
Western soldiers should be held to a higher standard but as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread: if they have been trying to kill (or in your words exterminate) civilians then they have failed pretty spectacularly.
You fall back on this notion that because genocide has not succeeded, there are therefore not voices pushing to target and marginalize large numbers of people. By your logic I should be able to say that because jihadists have not overthrown America there are therefore no terrorists with harmful plots.
The op mentioned the western voices that call for mass killing (via various mechanisms) of muslims and other perceived enemies -- those voices exist and their prevalence and political power definitely moves the goal post with regard to notions of acceptable collateral loss in pursuit of the perceived objectives of the counterterrorism movement. The western fundamentalist notion of the "Muslim holy enemy" bleeds into policy decisions that absolutely affect far more people who have nothing to do with terrorism than they do terrorism. The mistaken idea of holy war is the reasoning flaw that causes insane numbers of metric tons of bombs to be dropped on real life humans - everytime reproposing the assumption that _this time_ they are targeting the holy enemy.
Countries ravaged by war for decades yield innumerable stories of savagery -- not necessarily related to terrorism at all but easily confused into becoming part of the holy enemy story by opportunist politicians -- and thusly the expansion of the targeting mechanism grows and grows.
You want to pretend that you can trace the motivations, details, circumstances of all the western killings case by case -- and from this perspective of true information, inform a model that supports the morality of the objective of counterterrorism and its associated callous killing process which has been going on for decades. You can't -- you do not have those details. What we have are the we are the aggregate results of this movements pursuit of its objectives -- these soldiers have been killing for decades -- sometimes killing innocents by mistake, sometimes killing innocents with a deliberate calculus that does not value the lives of those innocents as they kill them. The sustained killing in this context is simply a decision -- the west keeps doing it knowing the outcome with a misguided belief about what their objectives are and how they can achieve them.
It's a kind of western blood lust that keeps this going. Counter-terrorism is a giant wheel rolling down hill with an evil momentum that creates the enemies with which to satisfy its own insanity.
First: I'm not defending what the west (including the country I feel I belong to) has done in e.g. Afghanistan and Iraq.
Then again your logic breaks down easily:
You fall back on this notion that because genocide has not succeeded, there are therefore not voices pushing to target and marginalize large numbers of people. By your logic I should be able to say that because jihadists have not overthrown America there are therefore no terrorists with harmful plots.
There is one major difference here: Western military forces has the capability to flatten whole cities without warning inhabitants first. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden for an example of what they were capable of as early as 1945.
To make this painfully clear: If people who decides were at all trying to indiscriminately kill citizens of any of these countries thats what they should have done.
Instead for some reason they waste their bombs and their troops trying to take out smaller groups of people.
My conclusion stands: either they are really dumb or they have a different goal. I'll let each reader make his own conclusion here though...
As for why jihadists doesn't kill more people I think it is because they don't have the capability. Looking at the Manchester bomb for instance that looks more like what someone who wants to indiscriminately kill as many as pissible would do. Again I'll still leave it up to the readers to make their own conclusions.
Then again: you and OP again and again mention things like "voices that call for mass killing (via various mechanisms)". I have yet to see one link in this thread.
My conclusion: yes, I think the west has been horrible in a lot of cases. I think some people are profiting from it. But you need to document these "voices that call for mass killing" because last time I heard someone talking about killing civilians from other countries was one weird guy 15 or 20 years ago.
And I know quite a lot of people who belive very strongly in a certain deity that many westerns tend to worship or (sadly IMO) often just pretend to worship.
The goal post of what constitues "mass killing" has moved since 1945. Maybe we can at least agree that not slipping that post backwards is a good thing?
I don't keep a catalogue of these kinds of tweets/media reports etc -- going back for 20 seconds to find examples I come across new types of media/messaging in similar vein (not vetted)
And how about the #killallmuslims hashtag -- search it and follow along with some of the verified accounts/accounts that seem to be legitimate humans.
Nowhere did I try to claim that this was majority view, but similar voices have a lot of influence now. The public dialogue around terrorism and Islam which has been in a sad and misguided state for decades, has diverged even further from reality in terms of what issues are important, what/who is dangerous and to whom, and why. We have real policy and public discourse aimed at satisfying people who believed that Barack Obama was a Muslim that wanted to impose Sharia law on the West. Search for Islam on Breitbart and you will quickly find innumerable topics discussing the holy war nature of the Wests conflict with Islam.
You are trying to "leave up to readers" a decision about what exactly?
My position: counterterrorism movement is off the rails, dangerously unfocused, subject to evil political games, causing massive harm to the world and in fact more harmful than the amorphous "terrorist" movements it claims to oppose.
Your claim: counterterrorism movement makes mistakes but is restrained compared to the firebombing of Dresden in WW2, long term western wars fueled by counterterrorism movement haven't necessarily accomplished many useful goals but are not immoral because the long term intent remains moral despite the actual numbers and dispositions of people killed
Actually my position is close to yours as stated directly above.
Just stop trying to tar my people or my religion with another genocide.
Another difference is I see law enforcement and armed forces as basically good forces that have sadly been misused as tools for greedy powerful people. In fact I have served and would maybe even have attempted a career (edit: in the army) if it wasn't for the fear that I would be sent to some war halfway around the globe to fight people who never harmed us instead of just doing the thing that I believe in: defending the our country at our borders and the borders of our allies.
As for any hashtag that suggests groups of humans should be killed that should be covered by the definition of hate speech and around here I'd halfway expect people to get a visit from law enforcement or child protection if they do that.
> It's a kind of western blood lust that keeps this going
This sort of political/ideological/religious rhetoric is toxic for this site. Please don't post like this to Hacker News, and please just avoid political flamewars. They're incompatible with the purpose of the site, which is the gratification of intellectual curiosity.
Given their actions and the deaths they have caused what reason do you have to claim they are not pursuing a goal of murdering groups of people to extermination?
Re-reading this a few hours later and this stands out.
If western soldiers goal was to exterminate other groups of people I'll say they have failed quite spectacularily.
I'm all for asking tough questions about the need ti spend ou tax money in Iraq and Afghanistan.
However as I mentioned above: either they have failed spectacularly or they haven't tried to exterminate those people.
I'm re-reading some comments and it seems some people are disagreeing about the nature of the twitter supporters referenced in the parent post.
Maybe it's possible commenters have never trawled through the twitter mass? I've done so and occasionally tweeted to try and find if the people were real -- many are. I'm not sure how people can disagree that there is merit to the parents characterization if they perform this exercise themselves ...
What saddens me is that I regularly see similar snippets of declared fervent worshippers of a particular deity calling for outright murder, persecution and mass extermination of entire groups of people.
Sorry, not buying it. You're drawing parallels between two wildly different demographics for cheap political point scoring, I find it rather distasteful given the subject matter. What similarities exist are tenuous and coincidental, and serve more to confuse any proper analysis than provide insight.
Can you convince me that isn't the case? Over and above vague descriptions of some tweets you read that you didn't like?
The politics of these two groups are very related -- enemies are incredibly joined in politics. If Group A gains power by being against group B, then I _must_ be allowed to talk about the failings of group A -- your attempt to portray that as not allowed is incredibly damaging.
Reactions like yours about "distastefulness" has been the problem with the counterterrorism movement from the very beginning. Counterterrorism is a movement that works like this: there exists a group B of pure evil, they must be fought and opposed, group B is shadowy, includes small numbers of people, and the people who are in it are very similar to much larger groups not in B. This is a priori accepted -- any attempt to disagree with any of the above comments is working against counterterrorism.
What this environment causes is a very real perceived expansion of group B in the eyes of members of group A. It becomes a simple mechanism for leaders of group A to use their relationship to group B to remove any legitimate political voice from other groups C,D...
It is completely fair (and needed) to talk about the flaws of group A's behavior with regard to the concept of group B because the accepted concept of group B includes primarily people who are not in group B! Not doing this has already killed huge numbers of innocent people not in group B. It's sick and it's wrong. It was sick under Obama and it's still sick and wrong.
I think you misspelled "supporters of recently failed to be elected Western politician". And like you said, which I totally agree with, I've seen not only calls for assassination, cars set on fire, windows smashed, ambulances blocked on the way to the hospitals, but also out right murder attempts, up to actual assassinations.
35 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 75.8 ms ] threadI was following Quentin Sommerville as he was livetweeting the battle for Mosul a couple of months ago, and it was amazing to see him there right on the front line getting shot at.
I have nothing but the utmost respect for people who put themselves in harm's way for the good of the people while unarmed. Whether it's observers, journalists, or medics/doctors. It's a thankless task.
I just wonder what badass admins are keeping the internet connection up in such situations.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/24/veronique-robe...
What saddens me is that I regularly see similar snippets of declared fervent worshippers of a particular deity calling for outright murder, persecution and mass extermination of entire groups of people. Only it isn't written on slips of paper in a bunker in Mosul, but on the Twitter threads of supporters a certain recently elected Western politician.
My family is from a country (Bangladesh) that has, like many others, slid backwards in the last 40 years thanks to the same fundamentalism that drives ISIS. When my family and I lived there, Bangladesh was poor, but there were no violent attacks on secularists and atheists, women walked freely in the streets with their heads uncovered, etc. That's all changed. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., Trump is President, but the country is more or less the same as its always been (notwithstanding the bluster of some of his supporters on the Internet). So, frankly, your casual drawing of false equivalences and "whataboutism" is not well taken.
I strongly recommend that "whatabouters" watch this video from the Egyptian President in the 1960s and then read about what happened in the country subsequently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX4RK8bj2W0. This is a thing that is happening to hundreds of millions of people all over the world, and bringing up Trump in the same breath is a disservice to all those who continue to fight against this force. Especially since, for the last several decades, that force has been winning.
Emphasis here on 'creeping'. I am sure the situation in your own homeland or in Egypt etc. didn't begin overnight with a rush of armed people in the streets. It probably started with small groups of people saying "Well, situation 'x' goes against my beliefs and I believe it will be solved by removing/changing/killing the perpetrators of it".
It may start in small, isolated groups, but get enough people in the same echo chamber and that sentiment slowly becomes normalised and over time becomes supported by ever growing actions.
Egypt took 40+ years to get from where they were to where they are now? Well, its only been about a year since this other group of people have felt they have been allowed to air their grievances and fundamentalist policies blatantly in the open because they perceive they won't be held to account for doing so.
You might hypothesize that after 40 years of Trump we might well be in a position where lots of people think illegal immigrants should be put to death. But that misunderstands the evolution of American society. The nutjobs who happen to support Trump have always been there: http://www.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-wh... (even in 2013, more than 10% of Americans disapproved of interracial marriages). But there's been a monotonically decreasing number of those nutjobs every year (down from over 50% in the mid 1990s). Trump isn't a sign of some sort of reversal in that trend. He's just the result of a perfect storm of a particularly unpopular Democratic candidate and an unusual clusterf--k of a Republican slate.
I might hang in the "wrong" circles though.
Airwars reports that us forces killed 432 civilians in Syria last month alone. That's a lot of people -- and they are being killed for imaginary reasons.
This is what threadstarter wrote:
declared fervent worshippers of a particular deity calling for outright murder, persecution and mass extermination of entire groups of people
If we are generous, we at best could describe western fundamentalists as having the goal of murdering mass groups of people to marginalization -- is that really that different than quoted passage?
Conservative Christian journal I read may whine about men not being head of the families anymore and women not being women anymore, but even they don't dispute voting and property rights.
It's like you are discussing with someone who isn't here.
That is however, imo, just manipulation tractic.
People in the west want to pretend that terrorists are unique in their lack of regard for civilian lives -- but there is an objective question we can ask to determine the truth of this. Who's actions result in the deaths of more innocent civilians? These numbers reveal that western hands are not so innocent as they pretend. Semantic quibbling (and often misdirection) about the relationship of "intent" to these deaths is the manipulation tactic -- a frequently biased mechanism for the whitewashing of responsibility and guilt off the hands of the chosen marked as noble without regard to evidence.
This is a problem.
However in this thread you seem to go from this to "attempted genocide".
Also: there is a really huge difference between
- being careless as a soldier
and
- actively trying to harm civilians as a terrorist
Western soldiers should be held to a higher standard but as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread: if they have been trying to kill (or in your words exterminate) civilians then they have failed pretty spectacularly.
The op mentioned the western voices that call for mass killing (via various mechanisms) of muslims and other perceived enemies -- those voices exist and their prevalence and political power definitely moves the goal post with regard to notions of acceptable collateral loss in pursuit of the perceived objectives of the counterterrorism movement. The western fundamentalist notion of the "Muslim holy enemy" bleeds into policy decisions that absolutely affect far more people who have nothing to do with terrorism than they do terrorism. The mistaken idea of holy war is the reasoning flaw that causes insane numbers of metric tons of bombs to be dropped on real life humans - everytime reproposing the assumption that _this time_ they are targeting the holy enemy.
Countries ravaged by war for decades yield innumerable stories of savagery -- not necessarily related to terrorism at all but easily confused into becoming part of the holy enemy story by opportunist politicians -- and thusly the expansion of the targeting mechanism grows and grows.
You want to pretend that you can trace the motivations, details, circumstances of all the western killings case by case -- and from this perspective of true information, inform a model that supports the morality of the objective of counterterrorism and its associated callous killing process which has been going on for decades. You can't -- you do not have those details. What we have are the we are the aggregate results of this movements pursuit of its objectives -- these soldiers have been killing for decades -- sometimes killing innocents by mistake, sometimes killing innocents with a deliberate calculus that does not value the lives of those innocents as they kill them. The sustained killing in this context is simply a decision -- the west keeps doing it knowing the outcome with a misguided belief about what their objectives are and how they can achieve them.
It's a kind of western blood lust that keeps this going. Counter-terrorism is a giant wheel rolling down hill with an evil momentum that creates the enemies with which to satisfy its own insanity.
Then again your logic breaks down easily:
You fall back on this notion that because genocide has not succeeded, there are therefore not voices pushing to target and marginalize large numbers of people. By your logic I should be able to say that because jihadists have not overthrown America there are therefore no terrorists with harmful plots.
There is one major difference here: Western military forces has the capability to flatten whole cities without warning inhabitants first. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden for an example of what they were capable of as early as 1945.
To make this painfully clear: If people who decides were at all trying to indiscriminately kill citizens of any of these countries thats what they should have done.
Instead for some reason they waste their bombs and their troops trying to take out smaller groups of people.
My conclusion stands: either they are really dumb or they have a different goal. I'll let each reader make his own conclusion here though...
As for why jihadists doesn't kill more people I think it is because they don't have the capability. Looking at the Manchester bomb for instance that looks more like what someone who wants to indiscriminately kill as many as pissible would do. Again I'll still leave it up to the readers to make their own conclusions.
Then again: you and OP again and again mention things like "voices that call for mass killing (via various mechanisms)". I have yet to see one link in this thread.
My conclusion: yes, I think the west has been horrible in a lot of cases. I think some people are profiting from it. But you need to document these "voices that call for mass killing" because last time I heard someone talking about killing civilians from other countries was one weird guy 15 or 20 years ago.
And I know quite a lot of people who belive very strongly in a certain deity that many westerns tend to worship or (sadly IMO) often just pretend to worship.
I don't keep a catalogue of these kinds of tweets/media reports etc -- going back for 20 seconds to find examples I come across new types of media/messaging in similar vein (not vetted)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/muslims-are...
And how about the #killallmuslims hashtag -- search it and follow along with some of the verified accounts/accounts that seem to be legitimate humans.
Nowhere did I try to claim that this was majority view, but similar voices have a lot of influence now. The public dialogue around terrorism and Islam which has been in a sad and misguided state for decades, has diverged even further from reality in terms of what issues are important, what/who is dangerous and to whom, and why. We have real policy and public discourse aimed at satisfying people who believed that Barack Obama was a Muslim that wanted to impose Sharia law on the West. Search for Islam on Breitbart and you will quickly find innumerable topics discussing the holy war nature of the Wests conflict with Islam.
You are trying to "leave up to readers" a decision about what exactly?
My position: counterterrorism movement is off the rails, dangerously unfocused, subject to evil political games, causing massive harm to the world and in fact more harmful than the amorphous "terrorist" movements it claims to oppose.
Your claim: counterterrorism movement makes mistakes but is restrained compared to the firebombing of Dresden in WW2, long term western wars fueled by counterterrorism movement haven't necessarily accomplished many useful goals but are not immoral because the long term intent remains moral despite the actual numbers and dispositions of people killed
Just stop trying to tar my people or my religion with another genocide.
Another difference is I see law enforcement and armed forces as basically good forces that have sadly been misused as tools for greedy powerful people. In fact I have served and would maybe even have attempted a career (edit: in the army) if it wasn't for the fear that I would be sent to some war halfway around the globe to fight people who never harmed us instead of just doing the thing that I believe in: defending the our country at our borders and the borders of our allies.
As for any hashtag that suggests groups of humans should be killed that should be covered by the definition of hate speech and around here I'd halfway expect people to get a visit from law enforcement or child protection if they do that.
HN does not exist for this kind of flamewar. Please don't post like this here, even when someone else is deeply wrong.
I'm going to kill this thread outright because it's so emblematic of what has no place on this site.
This sort of political/ideological/religious rhetoric is toxic for this site. Please don't post like this to Hacker News, and please just avoid political flamewars. They're incompatible with the purpose of the site, which is the gratification of intellectual curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
Re-reading this a few hours later and this stands out.
If western soldiers goal was to exterminate other groups of people I'll say they have failed quite spectacularily.
I'm all for asking tough questions about the need ti spend ou tax money in Iraq and Afghanistan.
However as I mentioned above: either they have failed spectacularly or they haven't tried to exterminate those people.
Maybe it's possible commenters have never trawled through the twitter mass? I've done so and occasionally tweeted to try and find if the people were real -- many are. I'm not sure how people can disagree that there is merit to the parents characterization if they perform this exercise themselves ...
?
Can you convince me that isn't the case? Over and above vague descriptions of some tweets you read that you didn't like?
Reactions like yours about "distastefulness" has been the problem with the counterterrorism movement from the very beginning. Counterterrorism is a movement that works like this: there exists a group B of pure evil, they must be fought and opposed, group B is shadowy, includes small numbers of people, and the people who are in it are very similar to much larger groups not in B. This is a priori accepted -- any attempt to disagree with any of the above comments is working against counterterrorism.
What this environment causes is a very real perceived expansion of group B in the eyes of members of group A. It becomes a simple mechanism for leaders of group A to use their relationship to group B to remove any legitimate political voice from other groups C,D...
It is completely fair (and needed) to talk about the flaws of group A's behavior with regard to the concept of group B because the accepted concept of group B includes primarily people who are not in group B! Not doing this has already killed huge numbers of innocent people not in group B. It's sick and it's wrong. It was sick under Obama and it's still sick and wrong.