Topic: News for your Blues

[Inkling]

I haven't looked into it, but it may be like the boycott Star Wars thing or any number of other twitter incidents.  These are often just a handful of accounts that may or may not be trolls, but get treated as representative of a much larger group.  Washington Times is iffy and prone to hit pieces, too.

[Kaizer]

I wouldn't put it past BLM, they have the combined intelligence of a wet noodle.

[Krakow Sam]

I haven't looked into it, but it may be like the boycott Star Wars thing or any number of other twitter incidents.  These are often just a handful of accounts that may or may not be trolls, but get treated as representative of a much larger group.  Washington Times is iffy and prone to hit pieces, too.

[emmet]

[PatMan33]

[PatMan33]

CGR Undertow is shutting down.

Best reviews on the net.

[Inkling]

I had never heard of them, I don't think.  I guess that's part of the problem.

[PatMan33]

Nah. The owner of the site is pulling a "I need to work on my art and writing so I'm shutting down this successful thing I have because reasons."

[Legodragonxp]

Sorry I am late to the the French flag color thing on Facebook, but I decided to share mine:



Bottom line (warning, my opinions are mine and mine alone) is that the world has become to ****ing soft. People are saying that we should not attack Daesh (sorry ISIS is giving them legal status as a ruling sovereign power)\. Modern media and social media has this broom stick up their rectums that we should not hurt anybody anymore. Somehow we can al sit down together and sing folks songs and smoke pot or something. It does not work that way.

But we can't bomb Daesh because they have hostages. Yep, you are right they do, sucks to be them. Once they realize they can no longer hide behind human shields they have nowhere to go. Fight or run.

Wait, the people cry, that isn't the solution!... OK... what is?

waiting?

Come on, tell me your master plan of stopping the contemporary 21st century barbarian from doing his will? Yell stop!?!

Disarm the public and hope they (terrorists) can't arm themselves somehow? Pause now and Google tm 31-210 pdf, isn't the internet an awesome thing?

Taking in refugees and have them drain our civilizations because they wouldn't fight for their own homeland is a good thing? Use economic sanctions that will drive them in to the ground over time while they rape and pillage the landscape? Guess what, it doesn't work.

Nope.

You kill them. You destroy where they hide. You give them no place or time to rest.

The modern world (aka 1st world) does not have it in them to stop this, so we might as well get used to it. Most of the world blames the USA, but lets be honest here (DAXX?) the UK, France, Russia/USSR, Belgium, Germany, etc... have working on this for centuries.

I will now sit back and let you explain to me how I am wrong and how singing kumbaya is going to make the world better. Explain to me how taking in refugees while refusing to engage in the activities needed to stop the refugee flood is a good thing. Explain to me how long we can run from the fight before it will stop?

There is this philosophy I call 'Star Trek Thinking' . Everybody just gets along and there is harmony in the world. The internet makes that almost impossible right now. Too much free information and disinformation (spelled LIES). If they want to target Daesh, the need to kill those involved (yes, kill) then they need to engage in direct cyberwarfare (yes, scream censorship all you want), and they need to accept that they are going to have to kill civilians until they stop using them for shields.

-Lego

[PatMan33]

I agree with Lego on this. The document he asked us to Google is an important bit. Check it out.

I can remember when I was 12 or 13 and the "fun" thing me and my friends would download was "the anarchist's cookbook". It was a file full of all kinds of goofy and incredibly dangerous things that you could make in your garage with ten bucks and an hour and a half of spare time. This stuff isn't going away and I wholeheartedly agree that social media is making people soft to unrealistic/unsustainable proportions. Just because the West has modernized and invented all kinds of great tools and distractions doesn't mean we're above the problems we've been trying to get away from.

One or two people with dedication and a 56k modem can shut down a city if they wanted to. You don't need a huge network of agents and you don't need to buy anything terribly exotic. We have to stop these people and I'm sick of hearing people say "but that's what they want us to do!!!"

Maybe they want us to think "that's what they want us to do" so we don't do anything and/or become confused and unable to use our incredible power against them. That fact of the matter is that these guys need to be eliminated. They /are/ barbarians and barbarians do nothing to advance our species. Yeah, they are people and individuals. And they as individuals have decided to wage war against the entirety of the West and the modern world. They're sitting there laughing while we fight among ourselves about how to reach a perfect outcome that will never happen. And all the while they whittle away at our unity, our numbers, and our advantage.

A war is what a war is. There are no rules and no solutions. Only casualties.

We are lucky that these terrorist types have been holding their dicks for as long as they have. Any one of us in the darker parts of our mind can probably theorize ways to wreak havoc on our local community without much effort. We are lucky that these murderers haven't been able to figure this stuff out. But that time is coming to an end and it will get worse if we don't stem the tide now. This new breed of terrorist is getting wise to the game. Large, complex plans aren't the way forward for them. Train fifty thousand nobodies in basic chemistry or electronics and provide them with a cellphone that gets internet and set them loose. That's what they have been doing. What are we going to do and what can we do when all of those chickens come home to roost?

I'm not looking forward to the next couple weeks because I doubt the Paris attacks are going to be the last of this. Christmas is coming up soon. We should send them a gift of our own and maybe send it early this year.

[Inkling]

I understand the hesitance by other countries to get involved in another conflict in that part of the world, and I know that we're taking some action already, but it doesn't seem to be doing much.  And whether it's met the technical definition or not, what isis/daesh is doing is genocide.  If the international community isn't willing to act in these kinds of circumstances, then what's the point of the damn thing?

[PatMan33]

Indeed. They aren't going to wait around for us to come to a decision. In fact they're probably hoping our indecision persists.

[dndfreak]

The reason we have rules of war is so that we protect our side, not limit ourselves. We face an enemy today which breaks the rules of war, but what happens if we do the same in kind? Other nations, other first world nations, will perceive us as cold, cruel, and inhumane. It will ruin diplomatic ties, as politicians sever relations due to pressure from their home nations. We lose important avenues of trade, for much the same reasons. We give justification for future enemies to break the rules against us. We provoke invasion.

Moral stances, from purely a wartime perspective, inhibit victory. Yet it's these universal moral standards, however arbitrary they seem at times, which help maintain peace and prosperity, however fleeting. The Geneva Conventions exist for a reason.

[PatMan33]

(in response to dnd)

<_<

That wasn't really what I was saying.

What I am saying is that there is a seemingly legitimate reason to use military force against terrorists in the Middle East. They are claiming they want to dismantle our way of life and replace it with theirs, and they are attacking our cities and killing our people. We can go on for days about who started what and who did what. The fact of the matter is that we have the power to stop this and we should. People need to pull their heads out of the sand because every day we continue arguing among ourselves is another day that these monsters can plan and execute their ideas. That is what they are counting on. It's not a coincidence. They know how are culture works and they are taking advantage of it. Whatever prowess they lack in terms of military force they make up for with skills in social engineering. They've become savvy to how to game social media and manipulate those communities into creating distractions and bogging down our governments in meaningless debates.

We aren't dealing with idiots here. They're good at manipulating social media and large groups because at the core of their ideology is the manipulation and weaponization of religion. Their whole game is social manipulation. Islam has been perverted and a specific, radical branch of Islam needs to be stopped. We need to stop crying foul when people say that an aspect of Islam is bad and needs to be dealt with. Let's be adults and recognize that rational people are not making blanket statements when they say we need to stop radical Islam. Because an aspect of Islam is bad, refuses to live in the modern world, and insists on wiping out anyone that believes anything other than what they preach. That is a cancer. It needs to be removed.

War is not fair, but once it starts it has to be finished. This is an enemy that does not care and will massacre people to prove a point. It's us or them and if we keep waiting around and worrying about stepping on eggshells it will be us.

[Krakow Sam]

I think maybe the point you're all conveniently ignoring when you call for the West to just destroy ISIS and kill everyone is that it's not actually that easy.

I don't mean that people think its morally wrong to kill people or that all our governments are too bleeding heart (seriously, they're happy to let cops shoot unarmed civilians and beat innocent protesters, phonetap everyone, funnel money to drug cartels for whatever reason, but they're apparently just too soft to carpet bomb some terrorists?)

No, it's not that easy because ISIS are few in number and scattered around the world. Just the middle east alone is huge. Based on the stories of friendly fire that crop up how are you supposed to know who you're pointing your drones at?

Lego, you say ISIS are using civilians as shields like they're the guys who bust into a bank and grabbed some old lady and once they realise swat are just going to let the old biddy die they'll stop going to the trouble. If you recall ISIS are an apocalypse cult, they think the world is going to end *really soon*, they're not going to stop throwing people in front of bullets, it's not a matter of them just getting bored of people on their own side dying.


Also, have some ****ing respect for human life. 200 innocent people die and your kneejerk reaction is something which is guaranteed to kill or displace thousands more.