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posted by janrinok on Wednesday January 04 2017, @09:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the dilemma dept.

Germany finds itself in a dilemma. After WW2, laws were put in place to ensure that the Federal Government could never again subvert the security apparatus to create something similar to that which enabled the Nazis to seize power. A quite laudable aim, at least at the time. As a result the German States, of which there are currently 16, are each responsible for their own security and intelligence organizations. The Federal Security organization has only limited responsibility for the security at such places as borders and railway station etc.

In a speech reported here the Federal Minister of the Interior Thomas de Maiziere has suggested that this split of responsibilities needs to be rethought to enable acts of terrorism which are targeting at the country rather than the individual states to be effectively combated:

De Maiziere examines national as well as European security structures in the article, and concludes: reforms are "required." The core of his analysis calls for expanded federal responsibilities, which will demand that states relinquish some of theirs. Formulations such as "centrally operative crisis management" or "control competence over all security agencies" appear throughout the article.

However, the recent terror attack, the most serious in Germany in over 35 years, did not prompt de Maiziere's considerations, it simply gave him a reason to group them together into a kind of list of demands. The interior minister writes that he himself had proposed most of the changes "prior to the attack." The demands affect all authorities and areas of government concerned with defense against the threat of terror: Namely, the police and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany's domestic intelligence agency - but also, as the minister sees it, the army. The international scope of the problem, he says, touches on the need to secure Europe's external borders, as well as the global dimensions of the right to asylum.

This suggestion has not gone down well, particularly with those who were living in fear of a state controlled secret intelligence organisation (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS), commonly known as the Stasi) until relatively recently.

[Continues...]

For example, this report contains the following:

Anis Amri, believed to have carried out the [recent Berlin] attack, was allowed to remain in the country because he did not have a valid travel document and his home country, Tunisia, initially refused to produce one.

To handle such cases, Mr. de Maizière suggested setting up federally controlled "departure centers," which could be placed "close to German airports" to aid the process.

He argued that such measures were already possible within existing German law and suggested extending the period for which a person can be detained pending deportation beyond the current maximum of four days.

Opposition lawmakers sharply rejected that suggestion, insisting that the government had a responsibility to respect the human rights of each individual, even those who are to be deported.

"In a country governed by the rule of law, the end does not justify every means," said Ulla Jelpke, an interior affairs expert with the left-wing Left Party.

She further criticized the plans as a "frontal assault" on the decentralization of powers that were set up to prevent another takeover like that of the Nazis.

What initially appeared as a problem with a relatively simple solution has become a lot more complex.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anal Pumpernickel on Wednesday January 04 2017, @11:28PM

    by Anal Pumpernickel (776) on Wednesday January 04 2017, @11:28PM (#449584)

    If you don't like those options feel free to attempt to propose an option #3, but you will fail since it will be obviously silly.

    Is accepting risks really that silly?

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Thursday January 05 2017, @02:32AM

    by jmorris (4844) on Thursday January 05 2017, @02:32AM (#449618)

    The FBI admits to ongoing investigations of potential terror suspects in all fifty states. Muslims are currently about 0.9% of the population and already account for essentially all domestic terror type attacks. The only reason they aren't killing more is the intelligence services are already well on the road to making us a police state in their attempts to keep the body count down. Which brings us back to my assertion we have to choose, police state with Muslims or no Muslims and no police state.

    Google will give you the brutal numbers. Go look up what percentage of Muslims in various countries believe in things like suicide bombings against infidels, imposing the Sharia, etc. Note the double digit support among Muslims holding U.S. citizenship who will ADMIT to supporting suicide bombings. Now we want import people from regions where support for suicide bombings crosses the 50% mark. Why?

    Accepting risks is not always silly; if the reward exceeds the risk it is rational. What is the benefit from importing semi-literate unskilled labor who want to kill us? Explain that one, but I'll go ahead and tell ya that if we are proposing that we do just so you can avoid sadz that it isn't a good enough reason.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @03:01AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @03:01AM (#449623)

      Right, Dylann Roof & Dylan Kiebold are known muslims attacking churches & schools... Damn mohammedans. What? WASP kids? Nah, they are muslims I tell you

      Dylan [wikipedia.org]

      Dylann [foxnews.com]

      Count the dead and see who's killing who, white killing black; white killing white.

      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday January 05 2017, @03:53AM

        by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday January 05 2017, @03:53AM (#449641) Journal

        He's not entirely wrong, though. Yes, I modded him up; hell has frozen over.

        It's been a long-standing personal rule of mine that "when someone shows you who s/he is, believe him/her the first time." I don't understand this bizarre love affair so many leftists seem to have with Islam; the religion is basically everything they hate about Christianity without the 300-year-long humiliation conga of Enlightenment thought to defang it.

        In this case, when a whole bunch of people say they are going to kill you and conquer your country in the name of their ideology, fucking believe them, okay? Don't pat them on the head and go "Aww, the poor angry oppressed brown people, they don't reeeeeally mean it." If the left is racist *anywhere,* it is racist here, with this insane, inverted Orientalism left over from the 19th century.

        Now where's that one weird AC who keeps stalking me and calling me "Islamofoe" (gaah! you wound me to the quick!) every time I say something like this? :)

        --
        I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @04:24AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @04:24AM (#449652)

          I have yet to see all these angry Muslims out to kill people, though I have seen the clerics of hate spout their nonsense. Sure there are major pickets of nasty Islam and it currently ranks as the most oppressive religion I know of (on the extreme end). However, most of the people are just people trying to get by. Kill em' with kindness, show them we aren't monsters and soon enough you'll have some more pro-western Muslims! Keep bombing/invading their countries and things will get worse. Its a pretty simple progression and we have ourselves to blame for a lot of the aggression.

          I realize there are a lot of nasty Islamic guys who do deserve the title of savage, but lumping them all together is just as bad as them wanting to kill any westerner. For fucks sake our president elect makes jokes about nuking them off the planet, that should be worth something in this little debate.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by q.kontinuum on Thursday January 05 2017, @09:00AM

          by q.kontinuum (532) on Thursday January 05 2017, @09:00AM (#449705) Journal

          We have now already millions of Muslims in Germany [wikipedia.org]. I fail to see the havoc they were supposed to cause. Yes, we did have an attack in Berlin (I live not far from Berlin and pass that general area nearly every day by train). We also had a Syrian wannabe-terrorist (who was captured and delivered to the police by other Syrians). But having millions of religious fanatic fighters, I would have believed the IS doesn't need years to organize/find a single attack in Germany they could claim responsibility for. And even this attack was only possible due to severe incompetence [wsws.org] (or desperation to finally get new competences) by our state authorities:

          Between February and March of 2016, Amri was driven from Dortmund to Berlin by a “secret informant for the Intelligence Service” to whom he related his plans. The note in the file adds: “He was driven by VP and stated that his mission was to kill on behalf of Allah.”
          ...
          Amri was subsequently supervised and monitored by the Berlin security authorities until September. Then the surveillance was reportedly stopped, supposedly because there was no evidence pointing to an imminent offence. The authorities in Berlin refrained from arresting him, although they had ample legal authority given the fact that Amri was an asylum-seeker whose application had been rejected and who was suspected of terrorism.

          I'm not saying the IS doesn't want to harm us, and I'm not saying Islam, taken seriously to the letter, is a good religion. (Neither is Catholicism or any of the other Abrahamic religions, as you also emphasized often enough.) But just like Catholics, for many supposed Muslims religion is not really that important. For some of them it is, but they see it as a living religion where the rules have to be seen in context and must be interpreted accordingly. I met Muslims happily eating bacon (we had a Muslim Au-Pair). I met Muslims explaining that polygamy was once the lesser of two evils, because due to lack of social system a woman was better of as a second wife than living on the street, and that a good social system with abandoned polygamy is a good extrapolation of the same idea. The same Muslim explained to me that Mohammeds issues with alcohol stems from an abusive drunkard uncle, and should therefore be interpreted as rule not to abuse any drugs to the point of losing self-control. He is living for decades already with his Catholic German girlfriend, raising their 5 children in Catholic tradition as to her decision. At work, I have a couple of Muslim colleagues (I assume; we are not discussing religion much here at work). Obviously there is some selection-bias, and I'm not claiming my experience is statistically relevant. But there is some place between "Islamists are just misunderstood sweet puppies in human disguise" and "All Muslims are incarnations of pure evil".

          --
          Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @07:36PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @07:36PM (#449883)

            > I'm not saying Islam, taken seriously to the letter, is a good religion. (Neither is Catholicism or any of the other Abrahamic religions,

            that applies to any ideology. You can easily say the same thing about capitalism.

            the thing about fundies is that they don't follow their religion to the letter, they pick and choose what parts to follow to the letter. which makes them no different from anyone else, just more self-righteous.

            My current favorite example of just how easily fundies pick and choose are american evangelicals.
            By far the largest organization of evangelicals is the southern baptist convention. They've got like 15 million members.
            These are the people who are so rabidly anti-abortion that they voted for Trump at level higher than they have for any previous presidential candidate despite him embodying all of the things they claim are ruining america for the simple reason is that he promised to pack the scotus with anti-abortion judges.

            And yet up until at least 1976 the SBC officially supported full abortion rights. [sbc.net]

            So these fundies have completely flipped on the "letter" of their religion.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @09:45AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @09:45AM (#449714)

          > I don't understand this bizarre love affair so many leftists seem to have with Islam

          There is none - this is your (media source's) hyperbole to create insta-hate. The 21st century equivalent of calling people n***ger-lovers if they aren't as bigoted as you.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @05:14PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @05:14PM (#449815)

          Even assuming everything you said is true, the problem is that it paints people with an overwide brush and has a ton of collateral damage. For a more obvious example of why this is wrong, let's use the same argument in another situation.

          "Look at statistics. Something like 95% of rapists are men. I don't understand why we continue to let them roam free. We should just lock up all the men to be safe."

          I'll accept that this may not be a fair analogy if you can show why the above farcical statement isn't equivalent.

          Likewise, what do we do with the people who are muslim but do not subscribe to the extremist portions of the idology. I've met countless people who are Jewish but have no qualms to eat a cheeseburger (and probably even a bacon cheeseburgers). I'm sure there are countless muslims who are equally non-traditional. Do we just say to them, "well, sucks to be you, you had best convert religions if you want a chance to associate with the Western world (and if you can't get in and end up needing to stay in your home country... good luck with that)." Is that the kind of world you want to live in?

          • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday January 05 2017, @05:40PM

            by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday January 05 2017, @05:40PM (#449826) Journal

            No, it's not, and I've been racking my brains over what to do about this :/ You're of course entirely correct. Probably the most rational thing to do is slow or stop immigration from obvious hot zones, monitor mosques and madrassas up to the point allowed by the Constitution, and take a polite but very firm stance against attempts to erode the rule of law because "muh veil" or "muh culture."

            Incidentally, we should also be smacking down the Christian Taliban we've got on the rise, and for much the same reason. Extremism is extremism and I'd lump the average Theonomist in with the average Wahhabi in terms of their danger to the republic.

            --
            I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @07:01PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @07:01PM (#449867)

              (Replying as much as anything to know that your response was read.)

              This seems like a problem with no easy answer. One thing I did want to add, though, is that "monitor mosques and madrassas up to the point allowed by the Constitution" is itself a punishment. Just think of all those "Constitutional" watch lists, like the no-fly lists. Think what would happen if you had a set of policemen whose job it was to monitor everything you did every moment you were in a public space.

              The counter-argument is the very valid, realist, real-politick one of "we don't understand why, but the substantial majority of terrorist attacks are from Muslims (although I'll note that the majority of victims are Muslim too)... until we can figure it out it would be dumb to treat them as identical."

              But then you end up with literally creating your own enemies (they have nothing left to lose so moderates will be driven to extremism), as well as the moral repugnancy of the actions. I really wonder how much of this is the demonization of the "different but generally okay" (e.g. how in the past homosexuals were considered a security threat because they could be blackmailed... and they could only be blackmailed because the stigma from the aforementioned policy), and how much is really "baked-in to the religion."

            • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @07:26PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @07:26PM (#449878)

              You've got it exactly backwards.
              The narrative of the extremists is that the west is fundamentally incompatible with islam.
              The more muslims happily living in the west the more that narrative is demolished.

              The more we block muslims from the west, the more the extremists' message is proven true. That is the best recruiting tool they have.

              And monitoring mosques is literally the worst thing you can do. The reason all the talk about "home grown" terrorists refers to "self-radicalization" is precisely because it happens outside of the mosques and away from the community. It happens online where there is no one to tell them that they are being lied to by people with an agenda.

              Counter to the popular narrative, mosques are a moderating influences. They are a place where community applies social pressure to its members. The community of muslims in america is extremely anti-terrorist, more so than any other religious community including athiests. [gallup.com] You start intimidating the people at mosques and you make it into an us-versus-them mentality. After 9/11 the priest at my marionite friend's church told the congregation not to cooperate with the FBI because their motives were untrustworthy. And, in case you didn't know, maronites are middle-eastern christians. Of all christians groups they know muslims best because so many of them had muslim neighbors back in the old country and even have muslim neighbors in the US because they tend to live in neighborhoods of shared language and culture aka "little lebanon."

              Terrorist attacks by jihadis in the US have killed about 150 people in 15 years. One third of that was in a single attack. And that's ignoring the mental health issues of the perpetrators, issues that would be at the forefront of the list of explanations if they weren't muslim.
              Nearly 10x more people died of bee stings in those 15 years. [govexec.com]
              Hell, in 2015 more people were killed by toddlers with guns than by terrorists. [snopes.com]

              Your hysteria isn't just counter-productive, its completely disproportionate to the threat.

              • (Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Thursday January 05 2017, @07:56PM

                by Zz9zZ (1348) on Thursday January 05 2017, @07:56PM (#449893)

                This is what we should really be talking about. Logic can help quell our emotional reactions, which in this case are very high. The very word terrorist gets some people upset and irrational, but once you look at the statistics it becomes a simple logical step to realize the problem is not worth the effort we're throwing at it. If the "powers that be" really wanted to help the citizens they would downplay all these events to reduce the actual "terror" component.

                --
                ~Tilting at windmills~
                • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @08:14PM

                  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @08:14PM (#449905)

                  > Logic can help quell our emotional reactions, which in this case are very high.

                  I wish that were true. But it isn't. Azumi will not change her mind in response to these facts, this isn't the first time I've presented them to her.

                  Beliefs, especially strongly held ones, are not changed by facts. Contrary facts are simply "filtered" out, deprioritized and eventually forgotten. Confirming facts are preserved.

                  Beliefs are changed by community - that includes individual contact and what leaders in the community say. One striking example was Obama's official support for gay marriage. Before that the black community was extremely opposed to gay marriage, like 85% opposed. Surveys just a week or two after he came out for gay marriage showed that among blacks opposition had dropped just under 50%. That's a huge change caused simply by someone who is greatly respected in a community making it OK for people to change their minds. That's why community leaders are called leaders.

                  Azumi won't be changing her mind about muslims until she actually spends time with a few. Or somebody she looks up to tells her that muslims really are people too and deserve equal rights as the rest of us. Even then her emotional investment in demonizing them may be too strong. Everybody likes to believe they are a good person and that their beliefs are justified and pure. Facing down one's own iniquity is a hard journey. Most would rather turn away rather than acknowledge their culpability in harming others.

              • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday January 05 2017, @08:06PM

                by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday January 05 2017, @08:06PM (#449899) Journal

                I'm willing to learn. You're posting good, solid sources and there are no obvious inconsistencies in them, so this is worth listening to. I will freely admit much of the fear comes from actually having read the Koran in some depth, though in fairness I'm just as leery of Christians for the same reasons.

                That said...if we want to break this cycle it's still going to take what amounts to causing slow apostasy in an entire generation. Islam isn't just a religion, it's a polity, which makes this a hell of a difficult and brittle task. Islam also never had the three-centuries-long drubbing known as the Enlightenment....or rather, it almost did several hundred years beforehand, and then Al-Ghazali fucked it all up. You're definitely right that framing this as us-vs-them isn't going to, aha, win any "hearts and minds."

                But what do we do?

                --
                I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @08:23PM

                  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @08:23PM (#449912)

                  > I will freely admit much of the fear comes from actually having read the Koran in some depth, though in fairness I'm just as leery of Christians for the same reasons.

                  The jesuits have a saying - when you read the bible, the bible reads you.

                  It means that you can find whatever you are looking for in the bible, if you are an asshole you will find all the justification you need to be an asshole, if you are fearful you will find all the justification you need to be afraid. If you want to do good in the world and help your fellow man, you will find more than enough justification for that too.

                  That applies to the quran, the gita, and the books of basically any religion that has survived past the stage of being a cult.

                  > That said...if we want to break this cycle

                  What cycle?
                  The cycle of blaming all muslims for the actions of the worst people to call themselves muslim?
                  If you want to reduce regressive beliefs among backwards people the only way to do that is to give them positive exposure to modern beliefs.

                  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday January 05 2017, @11:22PM

                    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday January 05 2017, @11:22PM (#449993) Journal

                    The Jesuits are going to find that that saying backfires on them rather badly; they're right, just in the precise opposite of the way they think they are. That is, anyone who can actually sit down with the Bible and read it, especially if you can do it in the original languages as I can, and come away with anything but "This YHWH guy is some kind of devil if he's even real" is demonstrating *lack* of morals.

                    The core message of the Bible is not humanist, sunny Jim. Oh no. Not even close. It's "Get yer shit together, YHVH's coming and he's PISSED." Jesus and Paul both taught that the end was close, and the Koine mss we have use unambiguous language saying as much.

                    Abrahamic religious followers, in particular, are good people in spite of their religion, not because of it. Observations along the lines of "anyone who lived substantially by the OT would be imprisoned, and by the NT would be committed" are at least 100 years old in the popular literature; I believe that one is one of Ingersoll's.

                    Primatologists from Goodall to de Waal have observed what is unmistakably sentient and moral behavior in many great ape species. Morality predates religion, and indeed humanity itself. It's an emergent phenomenon, one you get when you have enough intelligent, social beings in one place who survive better when they work as a team. Furthermore, divine command theory cannot and does not ground morals; the best thing that can be said for that trash is it's the literal Platonic ideal of subjectivism.

                    --
                    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
                    • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @12:18AM

                      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @12:18AM (#450010)

                      Looks like you found exactly what you wanted to find.

                      “We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

                      ― Anaïs Nin

                      • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday January 06 2017, @01:38AM

                        by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday January 06 2017, @01:38AM (#450036) Journal

                        Cut the postmodern horseshit. Do you need me to pull up the relevant verses for you and paste them into a comment here? You fucking act like I wrote the things.

                        --
                        I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
                        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @02:54AM

                          by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @02:54AM (#450066)

                          > Do you need me to pull up the relevant verses for you and paste them into a comment here?

                          Nope. They are in there. The point is that you chose to make those verses the most important ones, just like the crazies do.

                          The fact is that the dark verses are a minority. The positive, hopeful, constructive and tolerant verses not only vastly outnumber the dark verses, but they are the verses that people who are not assholes pay attention to.

                          People are not computers. We don't blindly execute scripture like it is software. Everybody picks and chooses from their religion to focus on what best suits who they are. We don't have to crash just because some scripture is badly written.

                          Its funny you think jesuits are post-modernist. Nin was saying exactly the same thin as the jesuits.

                          • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday January 06 2017, @08:05AM

                            by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday January 06 2017, @08:05AM (#450139) Journal

                            You're completely missing the point here. As usual. Have you had ANY exposure to apologetics and counter-apologetics at all? Can you understand that the "dark verses" are not all equally bad, that some are far worse than others, and that in fact a few are quite literally infinitely bad?

                            Besides which, even a single "dark verse" would disprove the idea of this Yahweh character being all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful. Asimov was right; there is no faster way to make nonbelievers than plain, honest reading of the Bible, especially if you can do any of it in the original languages.

                            Furthermore, as I've said at least once in this thread, religion does not have a monopoly on morality, and indeed the Abrahamic religions' followers, when they are moral people, are so in spite of their religion, not because of it.

                            --
                            I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
                            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @01:39PM

                              by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @01:39PM (#450202)

                              Infinitely bad

                              So what? If you ignore them then they do not matter. What part of scripture is not software do you fail to understand?

                              Besides which, even a single "dark verse" would disprove the idea of this Yahweh character being all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful

                              Again. If you pick and choose the parts of the religion that fit you personally then that doesn't matter.

                              Besides. the question of whether god exists or not is really a very minor question in relation to how theists actually practice their religion. God is an abstract concept infinitely far away who doesn't get involved in day to day events. God's literal existence is mostly irrelevant.

                              Your understanding of religion is exactly the same as the crazies - you think its all meant to be taken as literally true. The crazies use that as an excuse to be assholes. You use it as an excuse to dismiss the way everybody else actually practices their religion.

                              • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday January 06 2017, @05:32PM

                                by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday January 06 2017, @05:32PM (#450301) Journal

                                Quit the disingenuous smears. Do you really think after more than a decade of studying everything from apologia to Koine to comparative religion to church history I'm one of those naive morons who thinks, as you so eloquently put it, that "Scripture is software?"

                                Fucking hell. I KNOW it's not, because I know just about everyone who claims to be a member of $RELIGION is some degree of terrible at it thanks to plain old human nature...and thank whichever God for that! If people were really good at their religion...well, we'd all be the Taliban.

                                Having said that, though, I'm going to call you out on ignoring two things: 1) regardless of how much Scripture is or is not software, there is a small but persistent, hard-core minority of people who will act as if it is, even if they cherry-pick as much as any "cafeteria Catholic does." They exert influence all out of proportion to their size and irrationality, because a fanatic is always going to have more stamina than a non-fanatic when his or her pet cause is concerned. And 2) It only takes a few of these people in the wrong place at the wrong time to have disastrous, potentially nation- or civilization-ending consequences.

                                Let's not stick our heads in the sand here, PLEASE? The US just elected a bunch of said fanatics to govern it, and they've got all three branches of the federal government under their control.

                                --
                                I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
                                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @05:43PM

                                  by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @05:43PM (#450309)

                                  Do you really think after more than a decade of studying everything from apologia to Koine to comparative religion to church history I'm one of those naive morons who thinks, as you so eloquently put it, that "Scripture is software?"

                                  Well, you haven't articulated anything more sophisticated than that.

                                  there is a small but persistent, hard-core minority of people who will act as if it is, even if they cherry-pick as much as any "cafeteria Catholic does."

                                  So you accept that they are choosing to cherry-pick. Good. So why are they doing that? What makes them pick the dark verses? I say it comes from within, who they are and that absent 'religion' they would just come up with some other rationalization because haters are going to hate. What explanation do you have?

                                  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday January 06 2017, @07:44PM

                                    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday January 06 2017, @07:44PM (#450371) Journal

                                    Your explanation is far too simplistic. You can't pin this down entirely to nature or nurture, as elements of both are involved.

                                    I remember seeing at least one study showing "conservative" types are disproportionately controlled by reactions of fear and disgust, i.e., the amygdala has a large bearing on their actions and beliefs and it is rather powerful. This is a testable hypothesis: what correlates, if any, are there between people who show high amygdala activity and an affinity for the "dark" verses? And, even after we find this out, what confounds are there, e.g., among this high-amygdala cohort, what trends does stratifying by income or age or history of abuse/trauma/etc reveal? Social sciences are always messy as hell, to the point I'm not even sure they deserve the label science.

                                    Further: there is the issue that even the "haters" as you refer to them might not be *as* extreme if their concerns were purely secular. The threat of endless, eternal torture could motivate people to do things they otherwise wouldn't, for the simple reason that there is no comparable downside in ANY other possible scenario. This is how, for example, you would get people during the Inquisition(s) who genuinely believed they were doing their victims a favor by forcing them to recant or convert, because NOTHING, no matter how horrible, that they did to them would even come close to their God burning them alive for all eternity.

                                    Maybe the term I'm looking for here is "force multiplier," or maybe "catalyst." What I'm getting at is that, while you are (trivially and vacuously...) correct that any extremist ideology will produce evil behavior in susceptible people, history has shown that certain religious ideas are both extremely radicalizing and extremely wide-ranging in who they affect.

                                    Does any of this help? Am I just not expressing this precisely or articulately enough?

                                    --
                                    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
                                    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @08:44PM

                                      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @08:44PM (#450409)

                                      > Your explanation is far too simplistic. You can't pin this down entirely to nature or nurture, as elements of both are involved.

                                      I'm not pinning it on either. I'm saying that religion is no more special of a form of "nurture" than any other ideology or even simply just culture in general.

                                      > the threat of endless, eternal torture could motivate people to do things they otherwise wouldn't,

                                      that hypothesis does not explain all the haters who believe in reincarnation
                                      there are plenty of horrible hindus, they are ascendant in India right now. there are even horrible buddhists who are in the process of cleansing Burma.

                                      > history has shown that certain religious ideas are both extremely radicalizing and extremely wide-ranging in who they affect.

                                      The same can be said about ideologies in general. Religion isn't special. Religion is a human construct like any other ideology. They all can be bent for evil or good by the people who construct them. You seem to think religion is more easily bent for evil. And to prove it you seem to have a list of examples of when religion was used for evil. But have you even tried to look for the cases of religion being used for good?

                                      If you want to say that religion is more prone to abuse then you have to at least weigh both sides of the scale. And that's why I keep accusing you of finding what you are looking for. I don't think you've given equal effort to cataloging all the positive uses of religion. Furthermore, I think that its self-evident that religion has more positives than negatives for the simple reason that religion is widespread. If it were a net negative not only would the religious impulse have evolved out of human DNA, there wouldn't be resurgences of religion in formerly atheist societies like china and russia.

                                      You are obviously concerned over the ascendance of the religious right. But your attitude about religion excludes your best ally against them - the religious left. The most humane president in recent history happens to also be the only evangelical president the country has ever had. The religious right hijacked Jimmy Carter's church and the hijackers handed that captive laity to the reagan and the republicans based on picking new sections of scripture. The SBC laity voted overwhelming for Trump despite their top ethicist denouncing him. And while the SBC isn't going to qualify as the religious left anytime soon my point is that by condemning religion out of principle you are enabling the worst among the religious right to claim religion for themselves. That ethicist may be getting the boot now that Trump won. Denouncing religion as inherently bad makes it harder for people who see themselves as religious to say that all the bad stuff is not part of their identity because the people who claim to stand for the good stuff reject them out of hand.

                                      • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday January 06 2017, @10:43PM

                                        by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday January 06 2017, @10:43PM (#450489) Journal

                                        Maybe I just don't have enough faith (hurr hurr) in the average person? For entirely non-religious reasons, I don't like most people very much, and it seems like no matter how low I set my expectations they're continually underwhelmed.

                                        It sounds like your post mostly boils down to "don't offend the ones who are only partly delusional, since we need them to stand up to the ones who are dangerously batshit." It sounds like what you want to do is essentially play the good ones off against the bad ones. Are there enough good ones? Are they passionate enough? Do they control enough resources, media, etc? SO FAR we've been able to sort of coast along on accumulated humanist and "good religionist" capital, as it were, but this seems to be running out. And we just got dealt a very, very bad hand indeed in this regard in terms of the US government.

                                        And, sorry, but your point about horrible Hindus and bastard Buddhists notwithstanding (no, I'm not one of those "free Tibet!" idiots, I know plenty of Dharmic religions' horror stories...), that still doesn't change the fact that the threat of endless torture has motivated people to do all kinds of evil they never would have otherwise. Nevermind many of the early church fathers were Universalist (Origen, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Gregory Nazianzen, etc), most believers can't even SPELL "Koine." Let's not pretend, as self-righteous Christians do, that "all sins are the same." That sort of mush-headed thinking doesn't even deserve to be dignified with term "moral relativism."

                                        Also...the argument from popularity really doesn't work. Plenty of bad systems stick around because of popularity, or more likely, because people can't think of anything better. Religion, for all its faults, is EASY. Actually studying moral philosophy, history, ethics, logic, comparative religious culture, etc. is hard, and too time consuming for most, and most people in the world don't have any free time at all to do it in because they're trying not to starve or otherwise die.

                                        You can't argue that something is good just because it's stuck around a long time...and saying that "the religious impulse" is coded into DNA is evo-psych claptrap of the worst kind. No, the "intentional stance" is what's coded into DNA, and that is an old, old, old set of instincts. Religion would be two or three degrees of emergence removed from that.

                                        --
                                        I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @06:53PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @06:53PM (#449861)

          > He's not entirely wrong, though. Yes, I modded him up; hell has frozen over.

          He's just wrong in the every way that matters.
          You, like him suck at math.

          You focus on the vanishingly small minority says and use that justify stereotyping the majority.
          Why don't you focus on the what the majority say about themselves?

          > In this case, when a whole bunch of people say they are going to kill you and conquer your country in the name of their ideology, fucking believe them, okay?

          Why won't you believe all the rest of them who not only don't say that. they say the opposite of that?
          Like these 1.5 million muslims who signed a declaration saying they denounce muslim terrorists. [indiatimes.com]
          Why do you collaborate with the minority of extremists in their fight against conventional muslims?

          You give voice to the worst among muslims and deny the voices of the best of them simply because you agree with the worst of them. That's the kind of thing that Trump does.
          You are no different from all those right-wing assholes spouting off about that torture video in chicago - saying it proves that BLM are terrorists because four black people talked shit about trump while torturing a disabled white man.

          • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday January 05 2017, @08:15PM

            by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday January 05 2017, @08:15PM (#449906) Journal

            Nice try, but the "moderates" in any fringe group do nothing but legitimize the crazies. Also, how do we know these people mean what they say? How are we defining "moderate" here? We can't see into any person's skull and verify any of this.

            This may perhaps not be obvious, but I have nearly identical problems with Christians and Christianity, and am actually MORE afraid of extremist Christians than extremist Muslims at this point seeing as how they basically just swept all three branches of the US government. Pence, for example, is in precisely the same mental bucket as Ayatollah Khameini as far as I'm concerned and for much the same reason.

            Geopolitically we're at much more risk from our own home-grown Christian Taliban than any given Islamic extremist. I know this. I know we're bringing this on ourselves with over 100 years of Anglo-American meddling in the middle east; this is a type of national karma. I know that too. It's a shit situation all around.

            --
            I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
            • (Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @08:44PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @08:44PM (#449923)

              > the "moderates" in any fringe group do nothing but legitimize the crazies.

              That's a convenient rationalization which is completely counterfactual.
              Its about as well thought out as saying that accepting lesbian moms legitimizes milo yiannopoulos.

              1.8 billion muslims are not a fringe group. Nor do they legitimize the extremists. The extremists consider the mainstream to be the enemy and vice versa. In fact, most of those extremists think conventional muslims aren't actually muslim.

              > am actually MORE afraid of extremist Christians than extremist Muslims at this point

              You sure love to hide behind the "I hate all religions equally" fig leaf.
              That's like saying, "I hate all people equally. I punch babies and adults!"

              The problem isn't religion. Its the use of ideology to excuse the mistreatment of people who have done nothing wrong. Stalin, Khmer Rouge and Mao Tse-tung all killed millions to promote an official atheist agenda.

              • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday January 05 2017, @11:14PM

                by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday January 05 2017, @11:14PM (#449991) Journal

                That last line of yours is idiocy. The 20th century communist dictators ran cults of personality, religions in all but name. You're gonna tell me "don't look at Dear Leader's portrait lest it blind you" is atheist thinking?! Good grief I'm not even an atheist and that pisses me off.

                Actually the rest of that post is idiotic too. You don't seem to understand what is meant by "moderates legitimize the extremists." This is twofold: first, "moderate" is always defined relative to two extremes, and second, those two extremes of a given worldview may themselves be far to one extreme in another one.

                Consider the US political spectrum. "Moderate" is somewhere between Democrat and GOP party lines. Thing is, to the rest of the civilized world, our "moderates" are their "batfucking nuts conservatives." See how that works? The "moderate" center of Islam as a whole is much further into extremist territory, from a humanist PoV, than the "moderate" center of most forms of Christianity, the Theonomists being an obvious exception.

                Regarding Milo, I am fairly sure I remember him saying he wants to separate the G out of LGBT and leave lesbians, bisexuals, and trans* folks of all descriptions twisting in the wind, sort of a "gay men going their own way" thing if you will. And no, I do NOT hate all religions equally; I'm mostly neutral about most forms of Buddhism, for example, and completely down on "Reformed" Christianity.

                Try again?

                --
                I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @12:29AM

                  by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @12:29AM (#450012)

                  Actually the rest of that post is idiotic too. You don't seem to understand what is meant by "moderates legitimize the extremists." This is twofold: first, "moderate" is always defined relative to two extremes, and second, those two extremes of a given worldview may themselves be far to one extreme in another one.

                  You confuse centrist with moderate.

                  Furthermore you are trying to use dictionary pedantry to deny acknowledging the lived experiences of real people.

                  completely down on "Reformed" Christianity.

                  I assume you mean :"with," not "down on."
                  All those christians do is legitimize the extremists christians.
                  See how vacuous your logic is?

                  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday January 06 2017, @01:37AM

                    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday January 06 2017, @01:37AM (#450035) Journal

                    I mean "completely opposed to" the Reformed groups. I cut my counter-apologetic teeth on Cornelius van Til, and oh jeez, if you thought people like William Lane Craig were awful...

                    And yes, I do believe "moderate" Christians, including my own submarine Catholic mother, legitimize the extremists, and have told her this to her face. It's a distraction. It makes people waste their time going "well they're not ALL bad," which keeps them distracted from the ones that ARE bad.

                    I don't give a flying fuck that some people have good morals in spite of their religion; that does not validate the religion, and people who DON'T have good morals find plenty of justification for their assholery if they believe the flying Canaanite genocide fairy tells them to act that way, *which he does if you actually fucking read the source material.* It takes a lot more theological gymnastics to get anything even approaching a humanistic worldview out of the Abrahamic religions than it does to get something like Daesh out of them.

                    --
                    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
                    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @02:43AM

                      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @02:43AM (#450061)

                      I mean "completely opposed to" the Reformed groups.

                      So you cited your opposition to "reform christianity" as proof that you are not opposed to all religions.

                      That's the kind of cognitive dissonance I would expect to see from someone trying really hard to avoid admitting the illogic of their arguments.

                      Its also telling you completely skipped past the central point the your definition of moderate is just flat out wrong. Instead you used your arguments with your mother as a means of deflection. That's sure looks like cognitive dissonance manifesting too.

                      Its also revealing that you are so down on religion that you had to recast the officially atheist khmer rouge, and the cultural revolution as being effectively religions in order to explain their atrocities instead of acknowledging that the problem is ideology, any ideology, being used as an excuse for what is already in people's hearts. There are plenty of other agnostic examples on a smaller scale that are clearly not cults of personality. Manifest Destiny, Trail of Tears and Death, South African apartheid, the stolen generations [wikipedia.org] the internment of japanese americans, etc. The list of human cruelties is essentially endless and religion is not a predictive factor - people latch onto whatever rationale is convenient to justify themselves. Not unlike your use of religion to justify mistreatment of theists who you've never even met, much less who have done nothing to harm anyone because their mere existence 'legitimizes' people who have done harm. In your fight against zealotry, you've become a zealot.

                      I don't give a flying fuck that some people have good morals in spite of their religion

                      Your first argument was that the small fraction of crazies, a fraction not significantly greater than similar fractions in all groups, religious or not, defines the majority,
                      That was obvious bullshit.
                      So then you switched to an argument that the "moderates" (your word, not mine) somehow legitimizes the crazies based on a false definition of what it means to be moderate.
                      That was obvious bullshit.
                      So now you are on to the circular argument that religion is bad because religion is bad.
                      And that kind of circular logic is obvious bullshit that you would never accept from someone arguing for a position you disagreed with.

                      I know I will never convince you, you are just far too emotionally invested in this belief to ever make a rational examination of your motivations. But I am starting to understand why you are so emotionally committed to hating on theists. Your choice to bring up your mother out of the blue really brought it all into focus. You've transferred your issues with your mother on to the concept of religion. In order to reconcile the fact that the one person in this world who is supposed to love you unconditionally chose not to, you've decided to make 'religion' responsible for her failure in the abstract instead of accepting that she has personal agency. What she did is not so bad, she did not judge you as undeserving of her love for being gay, she was brainwashed by religion. You weren't really rejected by her, you were rejected by this abstract concept of religion that just tricked her into being a bad mother. Damn you religion!!!! If only she were free of that mental yoke, she would never have hurt you.

                      • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday January 06 2017, @08:22AM

                        by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday January 06 2017, @08:22AM (#450142) Journal

                        What the actual fuck--my mother is the person i get along best with after my girlfriend, and has been my role model since the beginning. She was nothing but supportive--actually, she said she was somewhat relieved--when I came out to her at 16, and her initial response was to break out laughing and then turn to my father and go "I told you, Mark, I've been saying since she was 4 she's gonna be into girls. You lost that bet." Actually, my father was the one who was upset, but since I've got a straight brother and a straight sister, his worries about lack of grandchildren were quickly put to rest.

                        If you're planning to switch jobs and become a psychologist...do the entire world a favor, PLEASE, and don't quit your day job. I have never been this badly misread by ANYONE before over the internet, and the only reason I'm not laughing myself hoarse is because the sheer ridiculousness of this is overriding it. You have no idea what the hell you're talking about, and neither does whatever armchair Freudian who modded you insightful.

                        I was actually the one who got her more interested in studying her religion and beliefs, and she became both better-educated and FAR less religious as a result of our discussions. She was, in fact, the one who encouraged me to start studying the more liberal traditions of Christianity around age 12 when I started asking her questions about why verse X conflicted with verse Y, which in turn led directly to my interest in Koine, comparative religion, logic, philosophy, etc. The term "submarine Catholic" roughly means "she surfaces in Church for Easter and Christmas and that's about it," which is to say even at her most religious she was never particularly zealous.

                        If you're looking for someone in my family who has an irrational anti-theist bent (note that I am *not* an atheist, *please!*) you want my sister. She tends to get into long-winded Facebook pissing matches with people, and I very often have to step in and correct the conspiracy-theorist bullshit she throws out. It is beyond embarrassing to see one of your own family members hawking debunked, ill-researched crap like Zeitgeist and the idea of Jesus mythicism when you've put in over a decade of study on this stuff; it's the theological equivalent of watching someone point at your desktop tower and refer to it as "the internet."

                        On a less personal note: your observation that "[t]he list of human cruelties is essentially endless and religion is not a predictive factor - people latch onto whatever rationale is convenient to justify themselves" is true but vacuous. It's the same kind of empty tautology as "guns don't kill people, people do." This is also true, but...the gun helps a little, you know? Like Eddie Izzard said, you're not going to dispatch someone by walking up to them with a cocked finger and shouting "BANG!" unless they have a particularly weak heart. OF COURSE religion isn't the sole or often even the major reason people do evil, but you must admit it's been one of the readiest and most ubiquitous.

                        Are you done with this incredible parade of condescension and strawman burning yet? I almost feel sorry for you with how badly you stepped on your own crank with this one, wow...

                        --
                        I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
                        • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @01:26PM

                          by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @01:26PM (#450200)

                          Hhhm. Four defensive paragraphs about your family and just one about the topic. There is definitely something there connected to your issues. Not that you could be honest about it. That's not how denial works. The evidence just leaks out around the edges.

                          On a less personal note: your observation that "[t]he list of human cruelties is essentially endless and religion is not a predictive factor - people latch onto whatever rationale is convenient to justify themselves" is true but vacuous. It's the same kind of empty tautology as "guns don't kill people, people do." This is also true, but...the gun helps a little, you know?

                          And more cognitive dissonance. You squirm and squirm to deny that the problem is ideological extremism. Yes religion is an ideology but its not the only kind of ideology. Any ideology becomes a "gun" when taken to an extreme. Religion is no different from any other ideology in that way.

                          • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday January 06 2017, @05:34PM

                            by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday January 06 2017, @05:34PM (#450304) Journal

                            *siiiiigh* Okay, we're done. I've dealt with enough dishonest ACs with axes to grind. Here, take your -1 Flamebait and piss off. There's no having an honest discussion with you.

                            --
                            I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
                            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @05:48PM

                              by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @05:48PM (#450310)

                              As if being logged in makes you any more honest. And you clearly have a HUGE axe to grind when it comes to religion.
                              I say "it isn't religion its people being people" you say "it damn well fucking is religion!!!"

                              Unable to support the obvious contradictions in your arguments you throw a fit and slam the door.

                              • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday January 06 2017, @07:31PM

                                by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday January 06 2017, @07:31PM (#450363) Journal

                                You're not reading a fucking thing I post are you? I said at least once it's not always religion, just that for most of history (absent the post-Enlightenment era, and even then/now it still very often is) it has been.

                                You're being dishonest as hell and reading selectively. Cut it out. Everyone can see it. I know I write a lot, but at least read it and understand it all before you reply.

                                --
                                I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
                                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @08:02PM

                                  by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @08:02PM (#450381)

                                  > I said at least once it's not always religion,

                                  So what's stopping you from connecting the dots and accepting that if religion is not the common denominator then the problem must lie elsewhere?

                                  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday January 06 2017, @10:47PM

                                    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday January 06 2017, @10:47PM (#450492) Journal

                                    You know, there's going to be a forehead-shaped indent in my desk if this keeps up...

                                    Okay, let me turn it at this angle and see if it gets through your skull: no, religion qua religion is not the single source of human evil. But it is one of the most common, powerful, and far-ranging excuses for people who are susceptible to evildoing to do evil, and certain aspects of it are "penetrating" and "sticky" enough to succeed where other, more secular incitements to evil will fail. It's a potent meme complex, if you want to put it that way, with some unique mechanisms of bypassing what amounts to peoples' mental immune systems.

                                    Is that better?

                                    --
                                    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @04:37AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @04:37AM (#449654)

      The middle-east is being depopulated to make way for the greater israel state. That is the reason. Israel goes, so do the refugees.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @06:36PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @06:36PM (#449854)

      > Muslims are currently about 0.9% of the population and already account for essentially all domestic terror type attacks.

      That's False

      Since 9/11 white supremacist and christian fanatics have accounted for the majority of domestic terror attacks. [nytimes.com] More than double the number of completed attacks than jihadis.
      For example - the guy who killed all those people at the planned parenthood clinic in colorado.
      And Dylan Roof
      And that couple who shot up the walmart in vegas [wikipedia.org]
      That white woman who mailed ricin to Obama and others in 2013 [cnn.com]
      That white guy who shot up a Sikh temple in 2012 [wikipedia.org]
      Those three whites guys in kansas who were plotting to attack an apartment complex because most residents were somali. [usatoday.com]
      The three white people in oregon who went on murdering spree in 2011 [splcenter.org] - killing someone because they thought he was a jew and trying to kill a disabled black man

      The list is just too long to fully account.

      You are just suckered in by sensationalist news coverage.

    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday January 05 2017, @09:15PM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday January 05 2017, @09:15PM (#449935) Journal

      This line of thinking is tedious. Before this, communists were the big baddies who were going to undermine our great nation and impurify our precious bodily fluids.

      Is there some kind of cowardice-recovery program we can sign all of you into? All the quavering, frothing you do is so severe no support animal in the world or safe space could bring you back. Truly, go look in a mirror. You PERSONIFY the precious snowflakes you and a couple of your confederates are always mocking, "OH NOES THE BIG BAD MOSLEMZ ARE COMING TO GET US!!! OH NOES!!!"

      You mean they might open a deli on your corner so you won't have to drag your ass to the Piggly Wiggly to get your next six-pack? They might drive cabs to take you to the airport? They might, HORROR, turn out to be the doctor who will take your crappy insurance? No, that DOES sound like the end of the world. You're totally right. Burn them.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.