Nice and ongoing terror attacks in W Europe

Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
droid said:
There's a study from about a decade ago wrt terror in the middle east which found a large cohort of well educated upper/middle class participants... motivated primarily by ideology and political grievances.
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Bin Laden himself being surely the most obvious example - son of a billionaire building tycoon, degree in civil engineering.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
owengriffiths said:
As for "why France and not elsewhere"... would the French army's involvement in Mali a few years ago be a good reason.
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Does France have a more extensive recent history of military intervention in majority-Muslim parts of the world than the UK, though? Surely not, if you include Kosovo and Iraq. So why are so many more attacks happening there than here? Is it just that our spy agencies have got it together better than theirs?
 
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Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
luka said:
That plus the sort of French secularism that led the the Hebdo cartoons and which is so incompatible with Islamic extremism.
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Also, this sounds a bit naive. France's tradition of what you might call robust secularism is clearly extremely compatible with Islamic extremism - to the extent that the two tendencies feed off each other symbiotically.

It's also worth quoting this from the Guardian piece:

In recent years, as elsewhere in Europe and the Islamic world, rigorous and intolerant strands of Islamic observance have made inroads, as well as, more recently, a new, debased, ultra-violent “gangsta Jihad” culture attractive to a young and often marginalised constituency.
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Which is basically true, isn't it? Whenever details about the personal lives of the guys who commit these atrocities comes out, they're very often not exactly paragons of Islamic observance. If they weren't going on jihad they'd be sticking up off-licences and selling smack on street corners. The Guardian bit above says the truck driver was known to local cops as a thug and a thief, but they had no indication he might fancy himself as a sacred warrior of Allah. Religion clearly has something to do with it, but it's all horribly mixed up in a matrix of race issues, ghettoisation, social exclusion and poverty, and probably also mental illness.

Edit: as the article points out, this is quite a recent development and is mainly a French and Belgian thing, quite distinct from the figure of the erudite scholar-bomber.
 
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Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I think you've missed the point. If France's culture was incompatible with Islamic extremism then they wouldn't keep having attacks by Islamic extremists, would they?
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
The problem is you have no principles, no point of view, no centre of gravity. Just a grab bag of prerehearsed speeches which you shoehorn into every conversation regardless of context. It's quite frustrating.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Come on, that's somewhat unfair. I don't claim to have answers to everything - anyone who purports to do so is talking bollocks, obviously - but that's hardly the same as having no opinions.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Europeans find themselves in an intellectual milieu dominated by the dogmas of very disputable conceptions of universalism and cosmopolitanism, based on alleged “European values”, which are unfortunately, as it should be now clear to everybody, open to mass abuse and exploitation... The ubiquitous and immediate rhetoric of “unity” (nous sommes unis), ironically suggests that such unity also encompasses, if not the terrorists themselves, practically all other elements which have allowed the emergence of a home-grown Islamism and terrorism on European soil, thus indirectly suggesting that things will continue exactly on the very same trajectory that brought the situation to the current point.
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Roberto Oris, "Islamic Terrorism: Blood or Tomato Sauce?": https://www.academia.edu/19719494/Islamic_Terrorism_Blood_or_Tomato_Sauce
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Hollande's popularity went up by 7/8 points following the November attacks in Paris (and his handling of them), but seems like the opposite is happening now. As much as I dislike Hollande, seems like his potential downfall will be nothing but a windfall for the far right
 
D

droid

Well-known member
Mr. Tea said:
Come on, that's somewhat unfair. I don't claim to have answers to everything - anyone who purports to do so is talking bollocks, obviously - but that's hardly the same as having no opinions.
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I dont think he's saying you have no opinions, just the same opinions, regardless of subject, which is a little harsh but I think also partly true - not that me saying it will help things. :cool:
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
baboon2004 said:
Hollande's popularity went up by 7/8 points following the November attacks in Paris (and his handling of them), but seems like the opposite is happening now. As much as I dislike Hollande, seems like his potential downfall will be nothing but a windfall for the far right
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spending $11,000 a month for haircuts doesn't help.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Yeah maybe a bit harsh? I don't know. I was expressing frustration. You know that I'm Mr middle England the arbiter of common sense shtick does my head in
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
droid said:
I dont think he's saying you have no opinions, just the same opinions, regardless of subject, which is a little harsh but I think also partly true - not that me saying it will help things. :cool:
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Well why formulate a new opinion for every situation when you've got one already that'll do perfectly well? It's inefficient.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
luka said:
Yeah maybe a bit harsh? I don't know. I was expressing frustration. You know that I'm Mr middle England the arbiter of common sense shtick does my head in
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Oh come on, you love it! And you're Luka, the lysergic poet-warrior-mystic. That's how our double-act works.
 
D

droid

Well-known member
lol. Yeah, Luka, thats how you are to be known from now to eternity. The funny man in a double act with tea.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
You've got a rhetorical strategy you always lean on. Every interjection goes like this
'steady on chap, that's a bit rich for my gullet"
'hey, go easy there friend, you'll frighten the horses'
'woah nelly'
'calm down dear, Mr common sense is here'
 
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