Beepster

SteveStrummerUK
 
(Terror attacks are) "part and parcel of living in a big city"
    ~ London mayor Sadiq Khan (2016)



The enemy whose name we dare not speak.
 
I despair.
 

Soooo... what's up with the parentheses there? Did he actually say that entire sentence or... yanno.
 
Either way, yes. Living in a city is ridiculously dangerous. Out of all the dangerous crap I went through in the city terrorism was at the absolute bottom of my list of things I was worried about. Like of any kind.
 
Seems to me that if every scary moozlim on the planet was out to kill us all a whole lot more of us would be dead now.
 
It's almost as if it's more about psychotic murderous arseholes than anything else.
 
/is totally racist against murderous arseholes

 
To be honest though, if you live in a major city like Paris, London or NY, it's never far from the back of your mind given how desperate the terrorists are to attack such significant targets and given how active they have been over the last few years. I have a friend on the Cape who is always rolling out the "the terrorists have won if you're afraid" line, but he lives on a perfectly delightful little island with quaint wooden houses, not a seething metropolis that is probably part of at least one extremist's terror plans at any given time. Try taking the subway in New York at rush hour when everyone's squeezed in tight. You're looking around, weighing people up, and (yes) profiling like crazy. It doesn't make your life come to a halt, but anyone who finds themselves in large vulnerable crowds at rush hour in locations which are wildly popular with terrorists is lying if they tell you the thought never crosses their minds. 
 
A few years ago Pew did a major study into attitudes across the Islamic world, and what they found was that support for things like suicide bombings is very widespread. It doesn't really matter that a tiny minority are actual terrorists - this support (moral, religious, financial) is every bit as dangerous. A "tiny minority of extremists" in my mind is a fraction of one percent of the population, 1 in 10,000, something like that. According to Pew, support for these attacks across the Islamic world ranges from 5% - 30% depending on the country. That's not a tiny minority of extremists, that's literally hundreds of millions of people. 

eph221
Sharke, Glad you are well.  I know you like to bike alot.

Yes thanks I do! And it didn't help that some of the crumpled bikes I saw in the photos were the blue CitiBike bike share bicycles, which I ride every day. That kind of brought it home. 

Wait... 5-30% of the muslim "world" thinks violent acts are okay?
 
Seems kinda low actually because I'd expect at least 30% of ANY group would be "theoretically" okay with blowing people up for what they believe in.
 
 

Such sad news indeed.  Prayers for the victims, and their families.

Just waking up to this terrible news now... I am glad to hear that you, James, at least, is okay.

Beepster
Wait... 5-30% of the muslim "world" thinks violent acts are okay?
 
Seems kinda low actually because I'd expect at least 30% of ANY group would be "theoretically" okay with blowing people up for what they believe in.
 

Doesn't look like an alarming percentage to me either, especially because the wide span makes it sort of meaningless. 5% and 30% are very far from eachother! Most of them are like the non-muslim American or European bitter dropouts, anyway. " Everything stinks, these and those should be hanged/shot/whatever." 
A religious peasant saying "If the Koran says it's ok, what am I to say it isn't?" is still a long way from active support to terrorism. I still think that often mentally unstable people just glorify their suicidal deeds camouflaging it as terrorism.
I think it was somewhere around 30 %  in that survey among US farmers in the 60's. That's how many of them thought it would be OK to shoot all hippies and long haired radicals.

Glad to hear your ok James. Sadly, staying within their agenda, this sort of thing is going to be more and more common.  

sharke
 
A few years ago Pew did a major study into attitudes across the Islamic world, and what they found was that support for things like suicide bombings is very widespread. It doesn't really matter that a tiny minority are actual terrorists - this support (moral, religious, financial) is every bit as dangerous. A "tiny minority of extremists" in my mind is a fraction of one percent of the population, 1 in 10,000, something like that. According to Pew, support for these attacks across the Islamic world ranges from 5% - 30% depending on the country. That's not a tiny minority of extremists, that's literally hundreds of millions of people. 

 
One of the things I used to love to do on Facebook was re-write a news story swapping races, religions, events, whatever, and see how folks responded.  I learned the obvious...that people decide about something emotionally, and then search intellectually to justify it.  We tend to work backwards.  This Pew study is a cool one. 
 
Change the context from terrorism to simple racism and watch how flippancy changes to earnest.  If Pew researched and found that 5% to 30% of white folks, depending on which state, were prejudiced against black folks while not acting on it, just simply supporting white supremacy events and news, you will get....an interesting reaction...that won't quite match the dismissive tone of religious extremism.  Yet, racism is not murder.  
 
Don't read too much into this.  I used to argue this stuff all the time before I realized that no one is using logic to guide their conclusions, only to argue them.  I find that kind of fascinating, if not depressing.  I really thought what I believed was logical - but I'm just an emotional hack like everybody else.
 
 

Voda La Void

sharke
 
A few years ago Pew did a major study into attitudes across the Islamic world, and what they found was that support for things like suicide bombings is very widespread. It doesn't really matter that a tiny minority are actual terrorists - this support (moral, religious, financial) is every bit as dangerous. A "tiny minority of extremists" in my mind is a fraction of one percent of the population, 1 in 10,000, something like that. According to Pew, support for these attacks across the Islamic world ranges from 5% - 30% depending on the country. That's not a tiny minority of extremists, that's literally hundreds of millions of people. 

 
One of the things I used to love to do on Facebook was re-write a news story swapping races, religions, events, whatever, and see how folks responded.  I learned the obvious...that people decide about something emotionally, and then search intellectually to justify it.  We tend to work backwards.  This Pew study is a cool one. 
 
Change the context from terrorism to simple racism and watch how flippancy changes to earnest.  If Pew researched and found that 5% to 30% of white folks, depending on which state, were prejudiced against black folks while not acting on it, just simply supporting white supremacy events and news, you will get....an interesting reaction...that won't quite match the dismissive tone of religious extremism.  Yet, racism is not murder.  
 
Don't read too much into this.  I used to argue this stuff all the time before I realized that no one is using logic to guide their conclusions, only to argue them.  I find that kind of fascinating, if not depressing.  I really thought what I believed was logical - but I'm just an emotional hack like everybody else.

 
If there was a concerted effort by a group of white supremacist terrorists to massacre black people in terrorist attacks, and it was found that between 5 and 30% of white people supported these attacks, I can guarantee you that would be a very shocking finding indeed that would trigger an avalanche of outrage and soul searching.
 
Similarly, if you did a survey and found that between 5-30% of Americans supported Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma bombing, it would be a complete shocker which would force everyone to reevaluate their perception of the American public. People saying 5% is not significant - that's nonsense, 5% of a billion is a very significant number, and it's even a significant proportion. 30% is huge. The point is that when you have such large numbers expressing support for terrorism, that's an environment in which extremism will find it easy to spread. 
 

How many people in the US supported the various wars in the middle east over the past nearly 20 years?
 
I mean... you do realize you're at war, right?