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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @06:53PM
> 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
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
> 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
*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
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
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
> 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
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...