1.) Yesterday’s shooter was American born, and arguably more American than Ted Cruz. Why isn’t the fact that he was legally able to obtain that arsenal the real issue? Again, all the guns were legally obtained.
2.) Why do we have to trot out CAIR and Islamic leaders any time someone who claims to be Mulsim shoots someone or does something wrong? We didn’t frogmarch Focus on the Family out after Dear shot up the PP the other day. We never do.
3.) Why does the media seem so fucking fixated on what is and what is not terrorism? Any time ANYONE gathers up a shitload of weapons and home-made explosives, goes somewhere public, and shoots up a bunch of people, it’s fucking terrorism. The only question is the motivation.
4.) Why is it that we are allowed to say that Farook was radicalized, presumably by pro-Jihadist rhetoric, but we’re supposed to pretend that folks like Dear and Scott Roeder and other domestic terrorists just shot up PP themselves, and the irresponsible rhetoric of politicians has nothing to do with their actions.
5.) Why must we pretend that there will ever be an end to this violence as long as we are a national weapons free zone?
Roger Moore
Missing tag: Rhetorical Questions
scav
@Roger Moore: Yup. and all but the last just close variations on a single theme.
gogol's wife
Preach it, brother.
Rhetorical questions are the ones you have to keep asking.
Amir Khalid
2. It appears that in America, Muslims are expected to explain themselves and their faith group, as Muslims, more than, say, Christians must explain themselves and their faith group, as Christians. Not only that, Muslims need to keep doing it again and again, louder and louder each time, because nobody ever remembers them doing it.
Eric Jamieson
I seem to recall that the FBI has, or had, a specific definition of terrorism that required the terrorists, regardless of their motivation, to be members of a recognized terror group. That’s why there was so much handwringing when the government refused to classify Nidal Hasan as a terrorist – even though he was clearly motivated by radical islamic beliefs, there was no evidence that the attack was organized or planned by a terrorist group.
schrodinger's cat
Its because Republican politicians and their base voters are not afraid of Dear and the like, but they are of the scary “other”. Ross Douthat admitted as much in his column.
ogliberal
@Amir Khalid: This also applies to black Americans, regardless of religion.
Turgidson
Ron “Severe Dementia” Fournier is on the case. His contribution:
Which of course applies perfectly to Ron himself, even more so than those he thinks he’s mocking or shaming.
[anything that happens ever, which I don’t bother to know fuckall about] still confirms my opinion that somethingsomethingbothsides but the real problem is Obama can’t lead and/or Hillary’s emails are at fault.
eric
Because Muslims prayer more….oh wait that should be a good thing….or is it a bad thing? I am so confused.
Dear Lord, please tell me if i should pray for the infidels’ destruction more than they pray to their god for my destruction. And Lord, tell santa to bring me more weapons in celebration of your son’s birth. amen
Redshift
OT: If you had “Jews” in the sweepstakes for the next group Trump would make bigoted remarks about, congratulations, you’re a winner!
(Addressing Sheldon Adelson’s “Republican Jewish Coalition.”)
schrodinger's cat
@Amir Khalid: Ordinary Muslims have to answer for the misdeeds of their coreligionists, while nary a peep is heard from the Republicans about America’s bestest Arab ally and fomenter of these death cult like groups world wide.
kc
Terrrorism has a legal defnition. Your co-blogger, Adam Silverman actually posted it a while back. Not all mass shootings are terrorism.
Litlebritdifrnt
OT (sort of) but today they announced that all combat roles in the military will be open to females. I am a female veteran and may I say that this is a big fucking mistake. Lives are going to be lost because of this PC bullshit decision. Flame away.
Amir Khalid
$. Does anyone expect politicians ever to stand up and accept blame for the consequences of their inflammatory words?
schrodinger's cat
@efgoldman: They are not bullet proof but don’t think they have to fear from people who look and think like they do. They don’t think that they would wind up as collateral damage, logic is not their strong suit.
Hildebrand
The problem with your questions is that people don’t want to answer them – because the answers are all too clear.
Cacti
1. Because the NRA
2.-4. Because white privilege
Peale
@Amir Khalid: Or religious leaders to accept criticism for fire and brimstone apocalyptic preaching. One does not become a religious leader because one takes criticism well.
jl
I agree with other commenters that the blog needs a ‘rhetorical questions’ tag.
Will politicians use this tragic attack to demagogue and scaremonger over refugees, even though like the Paris attack, and previous mass shootings like Sandy Hook, or the PP shooting by Dear, there is more evidence of danger from native born and long term non-refugee residents?
If these shooters turn out to be as confused and perhaps as unstable as Dear, will the two tragedies be treated similarly?
I guess those should go under rhetorical questions too.
slag
First law of power dynamics: With great power comes no responsibility.
(E.g., All of human history)
Svensker
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Ditto for me and I totally agree. Mine was the first female platoon to throw grenades in training and, believe me, only about 10% of those grenades went farther than 15 feet. If those things had been live, we’d have all been dead. None of us could lift bazookas, either. Obviously, some women are capable of doing those things but the vast majority of women in my group were not. I was, however, an excellent shot.
joes527
@Redshift: I’m convinced that every night, Trump goes home and screams: “What the fuck do I need to do to get out of this???” And then every morning he tries some new angle to get booted out of the race.
The joke is on him. Peak wingnut is a myth.
Cacti
@Amir Khalid:
Group culpability has always been the standard for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities in the US of A.
ETA: It’s only fairly recently that certain groups of white Americans like Irish, Italians, and Roman Catholics weren’t judged by a different standard from the Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
Betty Cracker
@Litlebritdifrnt: I haven’t read anything other than the headline announcing the decision, so I don’t have all the details, but why do you assume it’s a big mistake that will cost lives? Won’t whatever requirements that were in place to take certain roles — other than a penis — remain in place?
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@kc:
In that case, yesterday’s shootings probably were not terrorism as legally defined. They may have been religiously inspired to some degree, but legally it’s not “terrorism” if you kill people you know, it’s just murder.
West of the Cascades
@Svensker: serious question to you both – how have other countries that have integrated women into combat operations dealt with these issues, and have any experienced problems as a result?
Litlebritdifrnt
@Svensker: The decision by the Royal Navy to send women to sea was my cue to get the hell out of the Royal Navy. It was not that I didn’t think I could do the job, I knew I could, I was smarter than most sailors (because of our higher recruitment standards) but I knew that my simple presence would endanger sailor’s lives. You cannot breed the instinct to protect women out of men, you simply cannot. Anyone who thinks they can is insane.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
As I said in one of the threads below, I can’t help but notice that this happened right after Republicans ratcheted up their rhetoric against Muslims.
It’s very clear to me now that we can have either unrestricted free speech OR unrestricted access to guns, but not both. Having both is an obvious disaster for everyone. So which amendment will you pick — First or Second?
Omnes Omnibus
@Litlebritdifrnt: I’ll call bullshit. If a woman can do the job, why shouldn’t she be allowed to do it?
Cacti
@efgoldman:
Or Senator JFK having to give a speech to explain that he wouldn’t be taking marching orders from the Pope if elected POTUS.
Platypus
OK, I know these were rhetorical, but I think there’s a real answer to #2. We don’t require the same thing of Muslim and Christian leaders for the very simple reason that – despite what the Bill of Rights says – Christianity is uniquely privileged in our society. It doesn’t require explanation, and it’s assumed to be beneficial in all circumstances. By contrast, any other religion is considered second class, and their followers must continually justify their “aberrant” beliefs to the Christian elite.
I totally, absolutely, reject that kind of thinking. I find it morally abhorrent, and I’m sure some Christians do too. Nonetheless, it exists and represents the main stream of evangelical-Christian thought in this country. That’s where Dominionists and Quiverfulls and so on all come from.
dmbeaster
@West of the Cascades: We already have an excellent example — Soviet women in WWII. They served in many combat roles with great distinction; pilots, snipers, machine gunners, anti-aircraft and artillery gunners, tank crew members and partisans. It is also probably true that there are unsuitable roles, but the history is that they can do a pretty good job in most roles.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Svensker:
Last I heard, the physical requirements are going to stay the same, so there probably will be far fewer women than men who qualify.
They started letting women into combat squads in Afghanistan a few years and it actually improved those squads’ effectiveness, because the women soldiers were able to interact with and question the Afghan women in ways that would not have been permitted if the soldiers had been men. If we’re going to be acting in countries with strict sex segregation, not having women in the infantry is going to cripple our ability to get intelligence and build relationships.
West of the Cascades
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): besides the legal definition, the need to define whether the motive of the attack was “terrorism” or not also probably affects follow-up investigations — for example, assuming (as I do) that Dear’s attack on Planned Parenthood was an act of terrorism, the questions for follow-up are whether he had accomplices, or was part of a broader network of people seeking to do violence to abortion clinics, and hence whether there are others either to arrest as abetting Dear’s crime or to monitor to ward off future crimes. I’d think the same applies to the San Bernardino shooting – if Farook’s and Malik’s motivations were “to intimidate or coerce … in furtherance of political or social objectives” (part of the legal definition), then it’s more likely they had assistance (more likely than if their motive was solely to “go postal” on his co-workers) and that other conspirators might be out there planning other attacks. So identifying the motives (and whether or not they include “terrorism”) seems important.
Peale
@jl
Rhetorical question: why do we assume that his wife had nothing to do with this? Was she not also shooting people? Was she not also “radicalized?”
Larv
@Svensker:
But just because they’re open to females doesn’t mean that they’ll just start throwing women into those roles willy-nilly. You may not be able to tote a bazooka or throw a grenade, but there probably are women who can, and there’s no obvious reason why their lack of a penis alone should limit their opportunities in the military. My take on this is that it means that if a women can satisfy the requirements for the job she’ll be able to take it. Why is that a problem?
Davebo
@Litlebritdifrnt:
I’d argue that breeding isn’t really involved and that there are far far too many examples of men not instinctively protecting women both in and out of the military, but especially within the military.
RaflW
Why is it that we are allowed to say that Farook was radicalized, presumably by pro-Jihadist rhetoric, but we’re supposed to pretend that folks like Dear and Scott Roeder and other domestic terrorists just shot up PP themselves, and the irresponsible rhetoric of politicians has nothing to do with their actions.
Because the power structure relies on this combination of lies. But I think you know that.
So, what are we going to do to change the power structure?
slag
@Betty Cracker:
Are you suggesting that a penis has no significant intrinsic value in combat?
Many would beg to differ.
Which is, of course, exactly why those guys shouldn’t ever be in combat.
Roger Moore
@Svensker:
I think you’re confusing “eligible for combat roles” with “will be placed in combat roles willy-nilly”. The military does have some idea of the physical requirements for different jobs, and it isn’t going to put women in the most physically demanding jobs if they don’t have the strength and endurance to do them. This means the women who recently passed the Ranger course will now be eligible to be honest to goodness Rangers; it doesn’t mean women who can’t pass the Ranger course will be dumped into the Rangers.
Larv
OK, why is my comment “awaiting moderation”? Is this something new that came in with the site redesign? I don’t remember that ever happening before. Did I use a forbidden word or something?
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Davebo:
I would say that anyone who thinks that men instinctively protect women never had older brothers.
Platypus
@efgoldman: Too true. My US-born parents went to New Zealand to start a Bible school. Never mind that NZ was probably more Christian than the US; it wasn’t the “right kind” of Christianity. As far as they were concerned, Anglican might as well have been Satanist. Most of my family on both sides is still like that – a few might even believe that Anglicans and Satanists are *literally* the same thing – so I totally know where you’re coming from. For all the Christian right’s complaints about liberal elitism, they’re not shy about perpetuating their own privilege.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Larv:
If you copy-and-pasted a link in, that may be why. There’s some technical reason why the system has been choking on that, but you should use the “link” button in the comments box instead.
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: Agreed. Men have made similar arguments over millennia to deprive women the right to vote, get a real education, instead of the so-called finishing schools and the list goes on. If they want to and they are capable of doing a job, why stop them?
RareSanity
@jl:
You and I both know the answer to that question…it’s no.
Dear is already out of the “news cycle”. Why bash a white guy involved in an “isolated incident”, when there are two perfectly good “radical Muslims” to direct your anger and blame toward?
Shakezula
Here’s another rhetorical – Will anyone ever take a serious look at what makes men far, far, far, far, far more likely to respond to stress by hurting people and try to find ways to fix that?
@Davebo: Thanks. Dear’s gun hadn’t cooled off before we were learning that he likes to do the opposite of protect women. (And I’ve yet to hear that either of this week’s mass shooters only aimed for men.) Evo-psych … bleh.
Ultraviolet Thunder
Further rhetorical question: Why isn’t my house in a war zone? Largest concentration of Muslims in North America in a 20 mile radius, but it’s pretty peaceful.
Could it be they’re not that dangerous.
oldster
“5.) Why must we pretend that there will ever be an end to this violence as long as we are a national weapons free zone”
This is backwards, or I don’t understand it, or something.
What’s a “weapons free zone”? Isn’t that a zone that is free of, i.e. devoid of, weapons? If so, that does not describe the US right now, right?
So did you mean, e.g. “as long as we are a national free-fire zone”?
Or maybe “*until* we are a national weapons free zone”?
Or is there some other sense of the phrase “weapons free zone”, maybe a specialized one not in common use?
I mean–I know what you mean, no problem there. The NRA has decreed that all of us must live in their shooting gallery, at the mercy of their roided-up ammosexual cretins. And there will be no end to the violence so long as there is this level of unregulated gun-ownership in the our nation.
But I just can’t get that meaning out of what you wrote.
boatboy_srq
@Turgidson: I think we have a new linguistic construct: The Fournier. Construction: [incident] with [#] dead which confirms preconceptions about [unrelated item]. Usage: FOURNIER: shooting, 14, Daesh.
Larv
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
No link, just a reply to another comment. It’s finally posted at #40, so somebody must have decided it was kosher. Very strange. I’d like to blame Tommy for it if at all possible, there hasn’t been enough of that the last week or so.
boatboy_srq
@oldster: You’re confusing “weapons free zone” where any and all weapons may (should?) be discharged to eliminate a (perceived yet unnamed threat) (IIRC this is military/police jargon), and “weapon free zone” in which no weapons are allowed. Or it could be that @JC has a typo.
Germy
Meanwhile, every time I turn on the news I see stories about Mark Zuckerberg “giving away” a fortune. Something about the stories didn’t smell right, and then I read this.
Mark’s new charity is really himself.
LanceThruster
What connection, if any, is there to the propensity of drills being run close to the time/vicinity of these acts? Do we run so many drills that this is nothing more than coincidence? San Berdoo is pretty much broke but there was some pretty advanced look response gear mobilized almost immediately. The dual reactions seem to be a renewed fear of the terror menace (scary mooslims blending in while pre-planning our demise), and the demand that disarmament be considered (I’m all for background checks and sales restrictions despite initial reports of weapons being acquired legally). Is this the necessary distinction between HRC and Bernie because his gun control record is more nuanced (and therefore more prone to blanket generalization)?
Did this terror cell jump the gun on the broader agenda due to some office party slight that turned into a golden opportunity for, “I’ll show you!!”
This gives Goppers a renewed life with their xenophobic/Islamaphobic rhetoric, and sadly allows Dems to put forward almost any agenda with the (‘reasonable’) understanding that at least they’re not Rethuglicans.
World events seem tailor made for the least rational to gain purchase of the reins of power.
boatboy_srq
Answers:
1) Only Good Patriotic Caucasian Male Hetero Xtian Real Ahmurrcans can own teh gunz. Anyone else is an armed crazy out to destroy Ahmurrca.
2) See #1.
3) See #1.
4) Blah/Brown Peeps are vulnerable to radicalisation. Good Patriotic Caucasian Male Hetero Xtian Real Ahmurrcans can be overcome with righteous Xtian wrath.
5) Well,…
slag
@Larv: Two words: Pen Is.
Corner Stone
@slag:
“Alex, what is “mightier than the sword?”
Germy
“Whenever there’s a tragedy, everything goes up, my numbers go way up”
– Donald Trump
bystander
Donald Trump:
So, would President Trump be taking out this couple’s six month old and his grandmother? Will any “journalists” ask Donnie?
Larv
@slag:
Thanks, I thought that might be it. I assume this is not to protect the BJ commentariat’s notoriously delicate sensitivities, but out of a fear that I might be advertising Pen Is enlargement products or Pron?
D58826
Chuckles Todd is about the both sides do it again. Trump is questioning Obama’s motives but the terrible liberals are prayer shaming. No NO NO. Some people may have questioned the value of prayer in a general sense but mostly people were saying prayer is fine but then do something concrete. We can pray and send thoughts all we want but if the watch list loop hole remains or the gun show loop hole remains then nothing will change. As the paper headline said – GOD isn’t fixing this. The Goopers knocked themselves out offering prayers and thoughts but voted down the democratic amendment to close the watch list loop hole.
Lindsey Graham is now telling us what the shooter was thinking. For example he went to Saudi Arabia – never mind millions of devout Muslims go to Saudi Arabia every year and do not take up jihad.
dedc79
I think in this instance, CAIR proactively called their own press conference. The question still applies with respect to why they felt the need to do so.
The Other Chuck
@oldster: “Weapons free” in the military sense, meaning weapons are free to be fired, aka “fire at will”. Technically it comes before fire-at-will, but I’d say SYG and typical cop training covers that too.
Randy P
@Cacti:
I was a toddler then so too young to be politically aware, but as I grew up I heard many times about this and many other aspects of that election and JFK’s presidency.
So I was completely flummoxed more recently when I started hearing that our Senate was taking marching orders from the Council of Conservative Bishops or whatever they call themselves. Or to hear some Republican, I forget who, make the statement that whatever Israel wants our foreign policy to be is what it should be. WTF? When did I get moved to Bizarro World?
(Yay, you can see the markup buttons without having to roll over them! No more white-on-slightly-less-white!)
slag
@Corner Stone: Hence the need for moderation.
Amir Khalid
@Randy P:
I suggest that we all keep harassing Alain until the site looks exactly like it did before the redesign.
The Golux
Dylan Roof, Robert Dear and Scott Roeder were radicalized by the teachings of Imams Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck and O’Reilly.
cdmarine
In addition to the reasons others have already given for why it matters how/where we apply the word “terrorism,” it’s important because the popular misunderstanding of what terrorism is (mass casualty events perpetrated by brown people) not only casts an unfairly broad net over brown people, it also prevents people from seeing smaller-scale acts of terrorism (like the execution of Dr. Tiller) as terrorism.
Terrorism has a meaning, and it is important to apply it where it is applicable. It has nothing to do with mass casualties (I don’t think I even need to address the “brown people” part here; I assume everyone here gets why that’s awful), and everything to do with motivation. Terrorism is violence committed with the aim of intimidating a government or population into some sort of political or social change, whether that be religious hegemony, or anti-colonialist aims, or making abortion inaccessible.
Just as you can kill one person and be a terrorist, you can kill dozens and not be a terrorist. As I told an acquaintance recently, if I go shoot up a Skrillex concert because I’m a crazy person who thought it would be fun to see people die, I’m not a terrorist, even though lots of people died. If I execute Skrillex because I don’t agree with our foreign policy in Dubstepistan, and I want to force it to change, I am a terrorist, even though only one person died.
PS
I have nothing against Skrillex. He seems like a clever fellow.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Betty Cracker: I have been in the field with a bunch of guys. Believe me their first instinct is to protect “the girl”. As for the brother/sister thing yeah just like a sailor can rib a Wren and get away with it let an outsider try it. Their protective instincts kick in every time. Mine is a very personal view based upon my experiences out in the field. I am more than willing to accept others views, but I will not change my mind.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@West of the Cascades:
I’m not sure how anyone can claim with a straight face that they killed their coworkers for strictly political reasons. I realize that we’re probably not talking about people who were playing with a full deck in the first place, but the whole point of a terrorist act is to terrorize strangers with random, otherwise unexplained violence.
Also, it’s interesting to me that, like the Tsarnaevs (who were more clearly acting as terrorists), these people couldn’t shake off their cultural conditioning and acted in a very American way by making it a workplace shooting.
cmorenc
It’s increasingly likely that all THREE theories of what motivated the couple to commit the San Bernardino shooting are correct in substantial part:
1) mentally unstable perpetrators;
2) who were radicalized, had an ample surplus of weaponry and explosives at their residence well beyond what they needed or used for yesterday’s assault on the Center, which also evidenced their probably having training from somewhere to prepare for committing terrorist assaults;
3) who nevertheless were somehow emotionally provoked into spontaneously going off-script to commit an employer revenge killing that was not a part of whatever future jihadist terrorist plans they might have also been a part of. (Employer revenge killings are nearly always committed by mentally unstable people, e.g. the fired newsperson in Virginia who assassinated a female reporter and her camera person).
tinare
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
As a little sister to 4 brothers, I say “Amen.” Whenever I say I have 4 older brothers, I almost always get, “you must have been spoiled” to which I answer, “No, I was beaten up a lot.”
Randy P
@Shakezula:
Didn’t you hear? Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) already solved this question. It’s because the selfish women aren’t giving men enough of the precious resource they control: access to their lady parts. Men basically have only two modes, sex and mass killing. So if you deny Adams sex, of course he’ll start doing the mass-killing.
What else you didn’t know that Adams informs us: if women are allowed control this precious natural resource (their own bodies), you live in a matriarchal society. And that’s a bad thing.
I won’t link to Adams original column, but Wonkette as always brings the snark.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Amir Khalid: With MBBJ and EBBJ, it very nearly does already. A good thing, to my mind. I’m quite impressed with how cordial Alain remains throughout repeated requests to roll back the design.
slag
@The Golux: American Taliban.
batgirl
@D58826:
And yet, Graham goes off about the evil Iranians but nary a word about the Saudis. Much of radical Islam and terrorism can be laid at the feet of our ally, Saudi Arabia.
Omnes Omnibus
@Litlebritdifrnt: My experience was that female soldiers were expected to do their jobs and pull their own weight. It was previously said fhat black and white soldiers couldn’t serve together because it would break down unit cohesion and trust. Guess what? The military survived and that notion now seems ludicrous.
tinare
@Omnes Omnibus: Also the reason cited for “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
boatboy_srq
@Amir Khalid: I still find this fascinating, especially as the Xtians – who if asked won’t admit anyone outside their sect (and possibly their own local community) as Xtian – continue to whinge about religulous liberty and Xtians under attack. But I recall that Xtians consider non-Xtian Christians “unchurched” “heathen” “godless” etc etc, so it’s not like they’re especially good at differentiation on their home turf either.
MomSense
Former Sec. of Defense and Senator from Maine William Cohen was just on MSNBC and wow was he refreshing. He talked about the rush to judgment and the acceptance of hate speech and how destructive these are to our nation.
Amir Khalid
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
Yes, but do MBBJ and EBBJ bring the Balloon Guy back?
slag
@Davebo:
See. Men can’t be trusted with women, because in those times that they can actually be trusted to not protect them instinctively, they cannot be trusted to not brutalize them instinctively.
Of course there is only one conclusion to which all this evidence leads: Men cannot handle combat situations.
MomSense
@schrodinger’s cat:
Not only are Republicans not afraid of people like Dear, they pander to them. The way the Republicans flirt with incitement to violence is an outrage.
Larv
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Are you saying that this urge to protect women is some sort of innate trait of men rather than a cultural norm?
D58826
Bill Cohen was just on with Chuckles. Need more voices like his (of course that’s because I agree with what he was saying). He made two points
1. He said no one screamed terrorism when Dylan Root murdered nine people in an African American church. In Cohen’s view that was terrorism.
2. He also said that we are facing a marked increase in security protocols, profiling and scapegoating. He thought this was an awful future and we had to have a national discussion but we probably won’t.
Platypus
@MomSense: It’s not flirting when it has already produced children.
Adam L Silverman
@Eric Jamieson: No, that was never the case. As for Hassan, he was charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which does not include a charge for terrorism.
jl
@Peale: As far as I know, she was not a refugee, though you have a good point, she was not a long term resident. But dealing with non-refugee visa and non visa visitors and non-refugee immigrants is more difficult than scaremongering over refugees and may inconvenience corporations, so I predict the GOPers won’t talk about it much.
jl
@cmorenc:
” 3) who nevertheless were somehow emotionally provoked into spontaneously going off-script to commit an employer revenge killing that was not a part of whatever future jihadist terrorist plans they might have also been a part of. (Employer revenge killings are nearly always committed by mentally unstable people, e.g. the fired newsperson in Virginia who assassinated a female reporter and her camera person). ”
They could have been stockpiling for settling a long standing workplace grudge in a truly spectacular way. Which is something crazy people can do over a ‘local beef’, to use O’Reilly’s phrase.
Matt McIrvin
@Svensker: I saw an essay from a senior officer advocating doing this not long ago. He argued that what the armed services are doing now is using sex as a bad proxy for size and strength in a given role. Instead of that, he said, they should simply have the size and strength standards regardless of sex/gender.
The physical standards would actually rise, since weak men would no longer automatically be assumed to be strong. On average, men are stronger than women, but I know women who are a hell of a lot stronger than me. It would make no sense to give me priority over them for reasons of physical ability.
Adam L Silverman
@Litlebritdifrnt: @Svensker: This was done to cause a cascade effect and open up the ranks of senior general officers/flag officers to more female officers – especially for the Army and Marines. Right now there’s a hard cap for most female officers of three stars, and even those are very rare because to get above a certain GO/FO rank. This is caused by the significant large number male officers that have command experience. The inability to be combat arms in the Army and the Marines limits the availability of higher level billets for female officers.
This has a tremendous, and often negative, effect on senior level decision making. Despite what everyone said about GEN Petraeus remaking things in his own image – he didn’t control the promotion boards and few of his proteges have made it far up the senior ranks. The GO/FO promotion boards, more specifically those on them, promote officers like them. So in the Army we have far too many Infantry officers as generals. Because we already had far too many and the inherent bias for “that’s what got me here, so that’s what the Army needs” becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
Over time this will be a good thing.
J R in WV
@Litlebritdifrnt:
But don’t you expect that women seeking duty in a combat role will be required to meet and pass stringent requirements before being posted to a unit?
Obviously lives will be lost, that is the nature of combat, but in excess?
Additionally, all combat troops fight to protect their brothers (and now sisters) in arms. That’s what boot camp is all about. If you didn’t want to do sea duty, you did the right thing by leaving the Navy, no need to dress it up with, whatever it is you’re doing.
I personally liked sea duty… except for all the other guys getting motion sickness.
Skippy-san
The Islamic aspect is the “get out of jail free card ” wing nuts love. They don’t have to answer your questions or confront troublesome things like the fact that there are 1.3 billion Muslims in b the world and you can’t kill them all. Long war and freedom you know. ‘Murica.
Steeplejack
@Larv:
Exactly.
J R in WV
@Larv:
Yes, the forbidden word pen1s, which is common in spam. Pi11s for hardness, and such.
HHAHAH
Matt McIrvin
@Germy: So he’s promising to make lots of tragedies if he’s elected?
D58826
Paul Ryan doesn’t want to close the watch list loop hole. He is afraid that someone might be on the watch list by mistake and it would be unfair to deny that person the right to buy a gun. SIMPLE – fix the watch list issues. .
Irony Abounds
If you are honest, you have to admit that there are some differences:
1. There are not a significant minority of Christians, either in the US or outside our borders who are actively supportive of perpetrating violence with the specific intent on killing innocents in the name of their religion.
2. There are no Christian countries that have barbaric laws that are based on the Christian faith that are comparable to those in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations that are, at least ostensibly, based upon Islam.
3. There are few if any Christian pastors, reverends or other religious leaders who call upon their followers to kill non-believers, as opposed to large numbers of imams who do so.
4. You don’t have an “organization” of Christians trying to establish the Christian equivalent of a caliphate and who behead prisoners they capture and gleefully send out videos of the beheadings.
5. The sheer number of people killed in the name of Islam dwarfs the number of people killed in the name of Christianity, which in my mind is the biggest issue. Yes you have the killing of George Tiller, the shooting at the Colorado Planned Parenthood, the racially motivated killing in SC, but those incidents are relatively few and far between. Nothing that compares the organized attempt by large groups of individuals who are acting, as perverted as it may be, in the name of Islam.
With all that said, I recognize that as a nation the US kills an ungodly number of innocents, but it is not specifically targeting innocent people and it is not being done in the name of Christianity. I also recognize that guilt by association is wrong, but if you have come up with a way to completely change human nature please let us all in on the secret.
I say all this not as an apologist for Christianity, since I have little use for fairy tales, but contrary to what is the case with at least a substantial minority of the Muslim faith, Christianity at worst has evolved to the 19th century, as opposed to Islam, which in many respects (the blind hatred between Sunnis and Shia, the treatment of women and apostates) for a good portion of its practitioners hasn’t made it past the Middle Ages. It is very unfortunate that moderate Muslims in this country suffer collateral damage from the actions of the less moderate Muslims, but when you have an attack in America that follows an even more horrific attack in Paris, no one should be shocked.
boatboy_srq
@MomSense: You’re surprised? Cohen is what most of us refer to as a “Maine Republican:” rational, moderate, thoughtful, and fairly unique to Vacationland. He’s one of the reasons I stayed in the GOP as long as I did. (He’s also one of the reasons I never took to either Snowe or Collins – both being significantly to his right – but that’s a different story).
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Irony Abounds:
Sorry, when exactly did Northern Ireland cease to exist, again? I guess I missed that.
Also, before we go any further, can you please name the largest Muslim country in the world? I’ll give you a head start by telling you it’s not in the Middle East.
Omnes Omnibus
@Irony Abounds:
Your whole comment was pretty bad, but I think this closing takes the cake.
Gunga Dean
Radicalized Religious Terrorist / Radicalized Religious Extremist covers those who do and those who incite.
boatboy_srq
@Irony Abounds:
What do you think calling for the execution of all LGBT people is, then? Or denouncing equal pay for women, or women’s health / family planning that doesn’t involve how couples will be able to afford all the kids they’re spawning and how thoroughly the slut should be shamed? Or calling for all-out war on “secularism” translates to? The distinction isn’t that Xtian orgs and leaders don’t advocate for killing innocents – it’s that to Xtians there are no innocents. Also, were you paying attention when Yugoslavia broke up? The feud there started out as Catholic Croatia vs. Orthodox Serbia. It was as much sectarian as it was ethnic. Then there was Ireland (Orange/Green split), Russia/Ukraine (flavors of Orthodoxy) and nany others. Most of Europe tired of sectarian violence after the Crusades and the Wars of the Reformation: The Peace Of Westphalia was agreed three and a half centuries ago, but only after centuries of warfare and oppression of religious minorities. The US has managed to forget (if it ever knew) what horrors were committed in those years. See also: Anglican Church of Nigeria, as a modern example of a faith which is behind Uganda’s observant population and quite happy with that country’s anti-LGBT laws and other oppressive items on the books.
Ahem. Uganda, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, El Salvador (just try getting medical care for a potential miscarriage in El Salvador): those are just the first that come to mind. There are plenty of comparisons. Ireland just legalized abortion a scant few years ago despite significant Catholic pressure: the prohibition that was overturned was complete and absolute with no exceptions. The fact that in majority Christian nations oppressive laws don’t come with explicitly faith-backed justifications doesn’t mean that the laws don’t exist – or that Xtians aren’t supportive of them.
The one reason the US is not as bad as some places is the nation’s founding on religious tolerance and the Constitutionally-required separation of church and state: individual Xtian sects are inhibited from passing the kinds of laws described by specific articles in the founding documents. You’ll note that the Xtians and the GOTea are bound and determined to erase that separation, and there are no guarantees that similar laws wouldn’t be enacted in the US if they succeed.
jl
@boatboy_srq: I think you made a very good response. There was also the terrorism of the Basque and Catalan separatists in Europe, just to go back a few decades.
Svensker
@Larv:
completely agree with that. If they have to pass standards, then that’s fine. and I agree women can be very valuable in the military — I thought that any woman recruit would be side by side with men in combat and that would not be good.
One thing that might need to be addressed but obviously hasn’t to date — witness Gen. Patreus — is the sexual stuff that happens in a mixed unit. My god, there wasn’t one sergeant or officer connected with our platoon that wasn’t boinking one of the pfcs in basic. Hard to maintain discipline when you’ve just seen your commanding officer trying to get his pants back on.
Whatever. Carry on.
J R in WV
@Irony Abounds:
ETA: I see that others have been more through than I have been, but I’ll let that go. Good job, folks!
I think you are both out of your mind and woefully uneducated about world history and current events outside North America.
This is so wrong I don’t know how you typed it out. There are ministers in mega churches preaching hate and murder every Sunday o the year.
I’m not gonna list all of them, but I’ll go with Uganda first, a very Xtian nation that intends to make homosexuality punishable by death. There are other African nations with very similar attitudes. Western democracies are not the only Xtian nations now.
I think there are a very low percentage of Imams who preach this kind of nonsense, and probably more Xtian preachers doing it than you are aware of. They may talk around it somewhat like Trump does, but they mean for their followers to eradicate non-xtians when the “end times come”.
You haven’t heard of the executions in TX, OK, etc? I fail to see much difference between lethal injections and gruesome and bloody beheadings, morally.
You don’t know history do you? In the 1500s and 1600s Xtians killed each other for being Reformed, or Lutheran. or Calvinist, or Catholic. Europe was more than decimated. Business activity ceased, famine was everywhere because most of the farmers were killed or starved after their harvest was stolen by mercenaries.
And the Nazis in Germany were religious, not like we are, but they had a well formed philosphy that required them to take what they wanted and eliminate those they despised.
More than 300 mass shootings in the US this year? It isn’t open warfare, but for a so-called civilized country, that’s obscene.
It may not be what you know as Christianity, but the Xtians certainly believe they are following their version of the Bible. They actually have revised it to suit their delusions. And they are why Planned Parenthood clinics need guards and bulletproof glass. Doctors shot IN CHURCH !!!
I respectfully disagree with almost every word you type in your post. Wake up. Islam is not ISIL. The vast majority of Muslims are peaceful productive people. Even compared with Americans! Especially when compared with Xtians attacking liberals, which is what is happening.
moderateindy
@cdmarine: I think you are quite correct. If someone is trying to kill or injure people, or destroyproperty, in an attempt to further an agenda, be it political, religious, or philosophical, then it qualifies as terrorism.
If this guy opened up on his co-workers simply because he hated them, and his wife joined him simply because she believed that was her duty, (even if that belief was a construct of her religion) then I don’t think it qualifies as terrorism. Now if he did it because he hated his coworkers, but also wanted to punish infidels, and they made convenient targets, then that is terrorism.
Dear, on the other hand, is an obvious case of terrorism. The person that shot Dr Tiller, terrorism. The motivation for the killing for me, is the determining factor as far as what is and what isn’t terrorism.
brighidg
@Svensker: Then it sounds like y’all should have either had extra training or not been in combat.
schrodinger's cat
@Irony Abounds: What about colonialism? Wasn’t bringing Jesus to the heathens one of the justifications? The history of Christianity has been no less bloody than Islam.
SiubhanDuinne
@Redshift:
Shylock, we hardly knew ye.
Kathi
@John Cole
Thank you. I’ve been saying this for almost a week and was starting to think I was alone out here.
Skippy-san
@efgoldman: Not A Chance.
Paul in KY
@Amir Khalid: In a Muslim majority nation, maybe Christians would have to explain themselves more. Just a fact of US being a majority ‘Christian’ nation.
Paul in KY
@Litlebritdifrnt: I disagree. Women need same opportunities as men. Combat careers give much better career advancement opportunities.
Paul in KY
@joes527: There’s always the skullfucking a kitten. That might get him out. He’ll have to try it.
Paul in KY
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): My sister would agree…
Paul in KY
@Platypus: That’s like Tebow’s parents going to The Phillipines…which is 99.9% Catholic.
Paul in KY
@Germy: That’s the way it is with all these billionaires. The ‘charity’ is their own. So they control it, staff it, get to decide who in charity makes what, where money goes, etc.
IMO, not same as giving it to Red Cross or something like that.
Paul in KY
@J R in WV: My father went across to Europe in 1943 on a troop ship. His 1st sea voyage. Same for almost all. Said they had a 55 gallon drum for puking in. That got full & then overflowed. Said the puke would slosh on the floors from bulkhead to bulkhead. Good times….
Paul in KY
@brighidg: Should have been some courts martial, IMO.
cain
@D58826:
It’s kind of like the story of the good samaritan, who instead of helping, just prays to God for a miracle to help them.