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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: 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.

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  • (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...