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A gunman fired upon thousands of people attending a music festival on the Las Vegas Strip Sunday night, in a brutal attack that is blamed for at least 58 deaths, police say. In the mass shooting and panic that ensued, 515 people were injured. At least one of the dead is an off-duty police officer who was attending the concert.
Editorializing: Interesting how media always emphasize ISLAMIC terrorists, but downplay domestic terrorism as psychologically disturbed individual lone-wolfs.
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Over 50 dead in mass shooting in Las Vegas
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If bankers can count, how come they have eight windows and only four tellers?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday October 02 2017, @05:40PM (18 children)
Did the shooter believe he was committing an "evil" act? Is there such a thing as "evil"?
What if I want to perpetuate the evil I wish to see in the world?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday October 02 2017, @05:45PM (12 children)
If you want to talk moral philosophy, yes, there is such a thing as evil. Morality is relative in that there are no free-floating non-contingent Platonic moral facts out there, but both absolute and inevitable in the sense that any species of social, intelligent beings is *bound* to come up with things like "don't murder each other" if it is to last for any length of time.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday October 02 2017, @06:20PM (11 children)
intelligent beings is *bound* to come up with things like "don't murder each other" if it is to last for any length of time.
I'm certainly not trying to argue for terrorists, but this just isn't true: any functioning society has mechanisms to deal with members of the society who would cause it damage or destruction. We usually call them "the police". Part of their job is to neutralize harmful people, which sometimes means killing them. You might try to argue that that's not murder, but usually it is: when police stormed this nutjob's hotel room, they surely had every intention of killing him. Maybe in the future with more reliable less-lethal weapons this will become a thing of the past, but not yet.
Moreover, there's been plenty of societies throughout human history that have used murder to keep their societies in line, whether it's Nazi Germany, the Romans, or even many modern societies that still use capital punishment. So social, intelligent beings normalizing murder isn't exceptional at all, it's the norm. Then look at what happens in war: that's all about using murder to achieve some sort of social goal (overthrowing an oppressive government, instituting a particular government (perhaps oppressive, but only to the "wrong" people), achieving independence, preventing independence, and usually gaining control over resources).
"Terrorists" are simply doing what normal governments have done for millennia: using violence to force social change. I won't say that their causes are just, but was it just when the Romans invaded various places? The Romans were, after all, the legitimate government in their time. Or was it just when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, beheaded "traitors", etc.? Again, they were the legitimate government, and were democratically elected. None of those groups saw themselves as "evil", and neither do terrorists; they always view their enemies as evil.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday October 02 2017, @06:29PM (10 children)
Heh...I didn't say "kill" but rather "murder" for a very good reason here. All the people you're talking about did this under color of law. It's still wrong, but the illusion of law = good caused those societies to stay more stable at the cost of long-term viability. I believe the law is there to point out the good for those as won't or can't figure it out themselves, and perversions like this strike at the very foundations of a society. That's the double-edged sword of law; when the law goes bad, all those idiots who don't think will go along with it. Law is technology.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @07:30PM (9 children)
Wow, I never thought about it quite like that, but the phrase "law is technology" is really apt. I've always just considered it an artificial construct of society, but that is too nebulous. Technology is a term most people will immediately understand.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Monday October 02 2017, @08:47PM (8 children)
It isn't just law. Civilization and society are also a "technology" but are also like biology in that they are subject to variation and natural selection. Which is why some of us believe in conserving / restoring Western Civilization and only allowing small changes with sufficient time to observe and correct mistakes. We believe that we don't understand WHY our civilization works better than the others, only that it does / did. We believe that our current knowledge of social dynamics is insufficient to allow wholesale planned redesigns and that this explains most of the current ills of the modern world.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday October 02 2017, @09:19PM (2 children)
Define "western society." Specify time period. Hint: we have words like "Senate" for a reason.
And for fuck's sake, take a beta blocker or something. Your overactive amygdala is turning you into a reactionary, not a conservative; you're railing against the reality of the modern world, not "non-Western civilization." Update your firmware or wipe your drive.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @10:09PM (1 child)
What, like with a cloth?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday October 02 2017, @10:53PM
Baby wipes. No lint.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @11:13PM (4 children)
Aww, and you were doing so well for a little bit! Guess you really are just 1 part normal, 3 parts weird, and 10 parts crazy.
Western civilization doesn't work much better than any others, but it sure did get a leg up with the industrial revolution and the takeover of North America. WWII knocked everyone on their ass except the US, and the US had a shockingly huge amount of natural resources.
Basically Western Civilization had some good ideological points and the capitalist economy was well suited for exploitation of natural resources. We are currently seeing the limits of Western society, the primary limit being the unbounded capacity to support human greed.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 03 2017, @12:55AM (2 children)
Sounds like some cognitive dissonance. Somehow unbounded capacity is now a limit. What better sort of society has a larger capacity to support human greed than this "unbounded" one? The societies that can handle human greed are far superior to the ones that can't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @06:06PM (1 child)
Metaphors strain your brain, yeah I get it you have high functioning whateverism. It gives you some pretty incredible focus, but a better analogy is a horse with blinders on.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 03 2017, @08:32PM
Right. The creator of a metaphor is not the only one who can exploit it.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday October 03 2017, @01:47AM
Nah, the primary down side of Western society is that when life becomes too easy people start turning into whiny little bitches who want everything done for them.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday October 02 2017, @10:18PM (4 children)
It's not about what the shooter believes. It's about what the journalists believe. If the reporters think IS is evil, why the hell are they spreading their propaganda?
And because people don't seem to understand the power of ideas, let me make this clear: the power of IS is in their ability to convince people around the world that they are a legitimate threat. They must convince Muslims that they are the caliphate, and they must do that by being more than just another violent mountain tribe. It is their goal to inspire lone wolf copycats by showing people that their tactics are effective and meaningful.
It's why they send us videos of beheadings. They clearly want the world to think of them as barbaric killers. Maybe we shouldn't help them with that.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday October 02 2017, @10:54PM (3 children)
No, I'm fine with that. It doesn't cost me any sleep letting them die for their cause.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @05:17AM (2 children)
It doesn't cost me any sleep letting [Muslim zealots] die for their cause
Has no one among you Militarist Authoritarians ever heard the Jason and the Argonauts story about how when you chop off 1 of the Hydra's heads, 2 grow back?
Have you never stopped to consider that every time USA.mil kills one of theirs in their occupied land that it creates 10 more zealots among the family, neighbors, and friends?
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by rylyeh on Tuesday October 03 2017, @07:43AM (1 child)
"If men are not afraid to die,
It is no avail to threaten them with death."
-Lao Tzu
The US cannot ignore the new threats it created by it's actions in the Middle East and elsewhere.
That's why it should not wage wars (military police actions in most cases) unless ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY FOR DEFENSE.
WWII - required.
Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq - Not!
"a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @07:49PM
The US cannot ignore the new threats it created by it's action
We're largely on the same wavelength.
Note here that a pronoun never requires an apostrophe to make it possessive (its, yours, theirs, hers, ours).
it's == it is; it has
its == belongs to it
Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq - Not [necessary]
Yup. Everything since September 2, 1945 has been about USAian|Western hegemony.
In order to get the full truth, throw in repeated instances of a president's sagging approval numbers.
(Only Carter resisted the temptation to do an overt military aggression--though he did plenty of covert stuff e.g. in Latin America.)
WWII - required
We need to acknowledge that the USAian hegemony thing was going on even back then.
A point that is routinely mentioned in the context of Pearl Harbor [google.com] is USA's naval blockade of Japan's trade in petroleum via the Malaccan Strait. [wikimedia.org]
Antagonism by USA, rather than engaging in proper diplomacy, was a major factor in the outbreak of WWII.
...and, again, Japan's Imperialism has to be compared to USA's Imperialism (The Philippines[1] had been a colonial possession of USA since the Spanish-American War[2]; Hawaii was invaded and occupied by USAian Marines in the same era).
[1] ...the site of much butchery by USA.gov during that occupation.
[2] ...yet another war started on false pretenses. [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]